Resolution adopted at the July 2009 Congress of the
International Leninist Trotskyist Fraction (IFLT)
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Heart of the Beast:
Resolution on the USA
1. In response to the structural crisis of capitalism of the 1970s, the US deepened its world wide policy of imperialist dominance to make the world economy its own domestic market. The free trade agreements consolidated this division of labor, opening a world of maquiladoras to the trans-nationals of the first world. Production flew to the source of cheap labor like birds on their winter migration south. Offering nothing to link the struggle of the super exploited of underdeveloped world to the soon-to-be-unemployed workers of the advanced industrial countries the chauvinist trade unionists of North America refused to fight for the demand: “Same work, same contract on both sides of the border.” The mis-leaders of the workers’ movement – renegade Trotskyists, Stalinists and so-called progressive/socialists of the World Social Forum – gave left cover to imperialist politicians like Clinton and Obama by refusing to fight for independent working class political action. A serious fight for the program of class independence would have challenged long term relationships with their class collaborationist friends in the trade union bureaucracy. In turn the renegades have lots of hands to shake, but the working class is disarmed in the face of massive attacks by capital.
2. Concurrent with the deindustrialization of the north we witness the rise of the unregulated, non-unionized, maquiladora sector spreading around the globe. The trans-nationals search for places where the they can ignore environmental consequences and smash the workers with the utmost brutality whenever they try to organize. The consequence was a glut of consumer goods, produced by the latest technology and a super-exploited labor force, on the shelves of Wal-Mart. The newly emerging consumer society was based on a working class destined to labor at low paying service sector jobs filling the lowest two economic quintiles and an over-consumptive top three quintiles of the population made up of the labor aristocracy, a professional managerial “middle class” layer and the top 5%. This layer gathered to itself the riches of the world’s new order as their frenzied “coupon clipping” followed one economic bubble after another, as they sucked fictitious capital out of the market into their personal savings.
3. As wages were driven down, the workers found themselves working longer hours, sending more members of the family into the workforce, with youth living at home or returning home rather than setting out on their own, and the elderly being driven into the homes of their adult children. Savings diminished from an all time high of 20% to a negative 5% as usury in the form of credit cards, check cashing services, and adjustable rate mortgages offered workers a way to float their families’ economies. The consequences of globalization and the bubbles of fictitious capital began to explode in the dot-com collapse, but for big capital the collapse was only a temporary setback, as the war economy and the housing bubble which followed were their next source of surplus value appropriation.
4. The military drive into Iraq, Afghanistan and now Pakistan, and the proxy war between Georgia and Russia were the consolidation of the acquisition of control over vast oil and gas resources. The US military action had the intention and result of driving out other imperialist and independent powers which had contracts for Iraqi oil, as well as consolidating US military bases throughout the Asian subcontinent to further encircle and contain China and Russia and open these vast sources of cheap labor to Wall Street’s minions.
5. In a heroic resistance to the forces of imperialism, thousands of Iraqis died in the battle to save Fallujah, showing the US that the masses of Iraq would not stand by idly and allow their country to be overrun. Heroic fighters from around Africa and Asia flocked to the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan to stop imperialism in its tracks. Tens of thousands were killed and captured; many rot in Guantanamo Bay and in other secret CIA prisons around the world. We say: Free all prisoners of the anti-imperialist war drive! Close Guantanamo and all the secret prisons! The only criminals in this war are those who sat and sit in the White House, the Pentagon, at Langley and on the boards of directors of the war profiteers in the armaments, mercenary and oil industries! Convene an international workers’ tribunal to try these war criminals before the world! No faith in The Hague or the World Court – only an international workers’ tribunal can honestly expose the crimes of these imperialist butchers!
6. But the US working class was slow at getting the message and never launched an anti-war movement equivalent in depth and breadth to the anti-war movement of the Viet Nam period. The Maoists from the earliest days raised the slogan: “Drive out the Bush Regime;” the soft left had their equally treacherous demand, “Anyone but Bush.” combined with the mis-leadership of the fake Trotskyists who contained the anti-war movement with their pacifist slogan of “Support our troops, bring them home.” The movement never sustained its early massive outpouring of millions around the world in February of 2003. Rather, the movement was quickly deflated into the Kerry campaign of 2004, the congressional campaign in 2006 and the Obama campaign of 2007-2008. The pacifist masses closed up the anti-war offices and hit the phone banks for the Democrats. The consequence of limiting the principled “Out Now” slogan to its pacifist content and not turning it into a defeatist demand by demanding the defeat of US military forces on the battlefields of Asia prevented the American working class from launching a conscious anti-imperialist struggle which could link the workers of the world against the imperial war drive.
7. The anti-war actions at the Oakland docks, where the police fired upon youth and trade unionists with non-lethal weaponry, showed the brutality of the state against workers at home. This attack on anti-war workers advanced the militancy of the workers’ movement, and the ILWU responded by holding a one day strike on the docks to stop the war drive. The militancy of the ILWU Local 10 is an inspiration to anti-imperialist workers around the world. As the anti-war movement lagged, choked by the illusion that Democrats elected to a majority in Congress (in 2006) would end the war, the grieving mother, Cindy Sheehan, stood up for all the victims of the war by camping outside Bush’s Crawford Texas Ranch. Her campaign re-invigorated and consolidated the majority sentiment against the war. But this sentiment was quickly defused, as the “Anyone but Bush” mentality overtook a populace sickened by war, and the energy of the anti-war movement was corralled into the Obama mania. The pacifists and anti-war movement again closed up shop and hit the phone banks and waged a door-to-door massive campaign for Obama. None of them would dare answer the question, “Who will Obama Bomb-ah?” And now we know he is bombing civilians in Pakistan and Afghanistan, while his CIA and State Department allow with a nod and a wink the smashing of the working class in Honduras with death squads (trained at the School of the Assassins in Fort Benning, Georgia).
8. Taking its cue from the capitalist restorationists in the Cuban Communist Party, the North American left has defused the American working class’s struggle against the war on Iraq/Afghanistan/Pakistan and the struggles for immigrant and black workers’ rights. With all the fake Trotskyists subordinated to the counter-revolutionary international policy of the restorationist Castroite bureaucracy and of the “Bolivarian revolution,” which both embrace class collaboration, they have expropriated and strangled the revolutionary anti-imperialists of the exploited Latin American masses, whose only hope of victory is to synchronize with the struggles of the workers in the heart of the imperialist beast. Simultaneously, in the US, the authority of the Cuban workers’ state in the most exploited layers of the working class was put at the service of strengthening the subordination of the working class to the Democratic Party and Obama. The living example of this international policy is the Latin American and Caribbean Workers Gathering (ELAC) where – from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego – the renegades of Trotskyism have tied the hands of the vanguard, impeding the heroic fight of the Oakland dock workers against the US imperialist butchers. From ELAC to the San Francisco Labor Council, under the influence of class traitors like the Lambertist Alan Benjamin, the working class is being disarmed both politically and organizationally in the face of the attacks on the international working class and the impending capitalist restoration in Cuba.
Despite the heroic resistance in the fights of the working class early this year in the Antilles, Greece, and Paris, and today in Peru and Honduras, the fake Trotskyists and Castroists, of all shades, have cleared the way to accelerate and advance the process of capitalist restoration in Cuba, which the forces of the counter-revolution intend to accomplish under the “democratic” mask of Obama.
9. Wall Street’s drive to lower the cost of labor in the United States to a point where profitability is again possible for production at “home” is again changing the world division of labor. The drive to turn the US into an exporting nation and to open markets abroad cannot be accomplished without driving down wages, benefits, social programs, and the other benefits the US workers have become accustomed to since the end of WWII. This is resulting in attacks on the American workers. Official figures show 9.5% have been unemployed, 45 million are without health care or retirement pensions, two million fill the prisons, and 1.6 million are homeless or in shelters or tent encampments. The sacking of millions of workers in the last two years and the cutting of labor hours and wages has resulted in a reverse sliding scale. “Shorter work hours for less pay” is the method being forced on workers in the private and public sectors alike.
10. But the workers are starting to fight back. It is no coincidence that the Republic Window and Door workers of Chicago occupied their factory in December at the same time that the Guadeloupe and Martinique workers commenced their general strikes. It is no surprise that the most exploited sector of the working class, the Latino immigrants, held two one-day strikes for immigrant rights on May Day in 2007 and 2008. Across the nation, small battles are erupting in factories big and small to stop the drive against workers’ living and working conditions. State workers in California finally said “Enough is enough!” when the governor imposed a third furlough day. The bureaucratic SEIU leadership has been pressured by rank and rile sentiment to take a strike vote this week among its 95,000 members. Schools are laying off teachers by the thousands, the education system is collapsing. classrooms are becoming over crowded and higher education is becoming less accessible. Public transport workers, park rangers, home care workers who care for the elderly, poison control workers and those who care for underinsured youth are being given pink slips (being sacked).
11. Workers are just starting to wake up after a long sleep. After being separated from the militant history of the Teamster’s rebellion in 1934 in Minneapolis, the general strikes in San Francisco in 1936 and in Oakland in 1946 and the factory occupations that led to the building of the CIO in the thirties are all experiences that today’s workers need to draw upon and will have to experience in their own actions if they are to turn the crisis back on the bosses and emerge victorious.
12. The American workers have the key to solving the burden of exploitation of the masses of the world. They have been blocked from their historic task by the division of the American workers from the workers of the world by the Stalinist deal with imperialism at Yalta and Potsdam. Again in the late 1980s the restoration of capitalism in the former workers’ states drove a wedge between the American working class and the struggle for socialist revolution. The ruling class must be made to pay for the crisis. The American workers must take upon themselves the task of the expropriation of all financial capital, the banks and major industry. In every struggle of the masses the fight for socialist revolution must be put on the agenda. Standing in the way of these essential tasks of the workers’ movement are all shades of trade union bureaucrats, renegades of Trotskyism, entrenched Stalinists and social democrats, Castroites, World Social Forum adherents, as well as a labor aristocracy materially tied to imperialism and which perpetuates illusions in Obama. To break these chains, workers need to form factory committees extending and generalized across the country, and then to link these with committees of the unemployed. Workers must not wait for the bureaucracy to begin the task of organizing the unorganized. This task is intrinsically linked with the demand for an end to unemployment. Workers need to initiate million man marches across the nation, demanding a sliding scale of hours to share the available work through the implementation of 30 hours’ work for 40 hours’ pay and a sliding scale of wages tied to the rate of inflation.
13. In the fight for socialism, the FLTI and revolutionary workers in the United States call for massive coordinated labor actions up to and including extended general strikes of public and private workers to stop wage cuts, for full employment, universal and free health care, universal and free education, an end to homelessness, hunger and fear of destitution. Only a workers’ government can deliver these demands. To build the solidarity needed to unite the workers in their struggle for a workers’ government we call for: Free Mumia Abu Jamal, Leonard Peltier, all the ICE prisoners, the prisoners at Guantanamo and the secret prisons. Free all political prisoners. Class justice for the murder of Oscar Grant and all other victims of state brutality! Destroy the prison and war economy! For the military defeat of all US military forces abroad and the closing of all US military bases around the world. For a workers’ revolution to dismantle the US nuclear arsenal and destroy all US military satellites! Expose the two faces of the Republicrat Bush-Obama regime, wielding diplomacy and reactionary coups, fascism and Bonapartism as its tools of world subjugation. Stop all funding to the butcher Zionist state which sustains itself on the blood of the Palestinian people! Finish the Civil War; restitution for 250 years of slavery! Honor Native American people’s land and rights. Support self-determination for the colonies of Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guam and all occupied territories to the native peoples. To accomplish the objectively necessary socialist revolution in the United States today, workers need a revolutionary party built on the method and program Trotsky developed for the SWP and the world party of Socialist Revolution as developed in the Transitional Program of 1938.
14. The historical events that are coming as a result of the economic conditions will provoke exceptional crises in the reformist apparatus around the world, mostly in the US. When it becomes apparent to all that the process of capitalist restoration in Cuba has been accomplished, new splits in the American reformist left are to be expected. For decades these reformists have used the authority of the Cuban state to betray the class struggle over and over again. Particularly, new splits among the renegades of Trotskyism are to be expected since for decades they have presented Castro – and all the Castroite bureaucracy – as “anti-imperialist” “unconscious Trotskyist” icons of the world revolution. The restoration of capitalism in Cuba will devastate the fake communist left in a way not seen since the 1989 restorations.
This is why the ILTF Trotskyists raise the program for a political revolution in Cuba, and for a victorious Latin American revolution against the “Bolivarian Revolution” and its counter-revolutionary pacts. The ILTF stands for the US working class uprising to defend the last gains of the revolution and defeat capitalist restoration. This program is also the one that prepares us to intervene decisively in the upcoming splits of the exposed Castroites and the coterie of US fake Trotskyists. Those traitors won’t be able to explain why the “great revolutionary,” Castro, gave away the workers’ state to imperialism and became a bourgeois.
The program raised by the revolutionaries must be that of the political revolution in Cuba, which defeats the restorationist bureaucracy and imposes true workers’ democracy, that of the armed workers’, peasants’ and red soldiers’ councils – the only government able to transform Cuba into a bastion of the fight for the world revolution.
This program must be the flesh and blood of the heart of the American proletarian vanguard – of the Oakland dock workers, of the immigrant working class and the black proletariat – by aiding their class brothers from Cuba, fighting against their own imperialist bourgeoisie led by the butcher Obama, with the war cry: “Down with the Obama-Castro pact which restores capitalism in Cuba!”