WfllillEliS ,,1N'IJl1lI'

25
No. 388 4 October 1985
For a Fighting Workers Party]
owe 00 ar em:
Raja/Cambia 1 AP
Botha's COPS smash march of Cape Town residents demanding freedom for Nelson Mandela, August 1985. Koch's cops smash blacks protesting
closure of west Harlem's only hospital, September 1980.
errorl

aelS mas
SEE PAGES SIX AND SEVEN
Mary Bumpurs, Veronica Perry
Victims of Racist Terror
Speak Out at Spartacist Forum
South African Revolution
Awaits Its Lenin
Double-Barreled
Imperialist Hypocrisy
The struggle against white supremacy
in South Africa has shaken up black
America like nothing since the civil
rights movement. The reason is clear.
because black people here see in
apartheid slavery a magnified mirror of
their own oppression. I don't need to tell
the people in this room about the racist
police terror in New York City. Mary
Bumpurs is in this room tonight. Oh no.
there's no apartheid in this country. like
in the Crossroads township where they
send the army in to evict black township
dwellers. No. in this country they just
send in the police emergency squad with
a double-barreled shotgun. hoth har-
rels, to evict a black grandmother
continued on page 6
bitter truth is that as long as the struggle
continues along purely national lines.
just white vs. black, with justice on
one side. and the guns on-the other, it is
not going to be apartheid that is buried,
but the oppressed black. "coloured"
[mixed-race] and Indian masses. Be-
cause, brothers and sisters, those town-
ships were built so they can be easily
sealed off; the whole structure of
apartheid is designed to perpetuate
massacres and they are preparing to
carry them out. But without black labor.
which created South Africa's golden
riches, the apartheid system cannot
function. That is the key.
township near Cape Town said recently.
So the bourgeoisie from here to South
Africa is asking despairingly, like this
issue of Newsweek did, "What can be
done?" But South African blacks are
asking another question. they're asking
"What Is to Be DoneT'-echoing the
title of Lenin's book that laid the
foundations for the Bolshevik party in
Russia. They're asking what is to be
done because they're looking for the
road to revolution. The Newsweek
article went on to say of the young anti-
apartheid fighters in South Africa:
"Their revolution awaits its Lenin." And
in fact, building a revolutionary workers
party is the burning question of the
South African revolution today.
As Leninists and Trotskyists. one of
our cardinal principles is to face reality
squarely. to speak the truth to the
masses no matter how bitter. And if the
bourgeoisie is trying to delude itself that
it can get by with a couple of reforms.
most of the left in this country is also
trying to delude itself that revolution is
just around the corner in South Africa.
that the ANC [African National Con-
gress] has got Botha on the run. But the
apartheid slavery. But for there to be a
progressive outcome. for the hour of
liberation of all the oppressed to strike.
this must be a class war. It's the black
proletariat in that country which has the
power to bring the gold mine owners.
the industrialists. the bankers. their
politicians and their army. the whole
apartheid system to its knees. From
South Africa to the U.S" we're fighting
for that workers revolution. and that is
what the Spartacist Party campaign
here in New York is all about.
In this country. the bourgeois
politicians from the Teddy Kennedy
liberals to the Reagan Republicans are
scrambling around looking for their
Bishop Tutus. looking for "moderates"
in order to save South African capital-
ism for the "free world." They've
deluded themselves into thinking it's
just a simple question of reforms-
maybe a South Africa-style civil rights
movement. But formal elimination of
.J im Crow in this country still did not
free blacks from their oppression which
is rooted in the racist capitalist econo-
my. And particularly in South Africa.
where there's a four-fifths black majori-
ty, it's crystal clear that the question is
power. It's something Botha under-
stands-and that is why they're digging
in. In that society, "one man. one
vote." a simple democratic principle,
means the end of white domination, and
the Afrikaners are prepared to fight to
the death to defend their privileges.
For a full year now. intense apartheid
repression has been unable to suppress
the black revolt. which continues. "We
are slaves now and we cannot be slaves
any longer," a leader of the Crossroads
Campbell/Sygma
South Africa's 600,000 black miners
are the powerhouse for workers
revolution.
Marjorie Stamberg: From Soweto to
Harlem. it's a system of racist terror.
The harassment. intimidation. terrori-
zation. and now the bombing of black
America goes back to the system of
chattel slavery in this country. It took
the Civil War. the second American
revolution. to topple slavery in the
South. and it will take a third American
revolution. a socialist revolution to
emancipate black people from their
double oppression. as wage slaves
segregated at the bottom of American
society.
In South Africa today. a civil war is
looming-and it will take nothing less
than that to do away with the system of
On September 24. a Spartacistforum
titled "From Sowet o to Harlem: Smash
Racist Terror!" was held at Memorial
Baptist Church In Harlem. The speakers
were Spartacist Party candidates Mar-
jorie Stamberg, for New York City
mayor. and tel Kartsen.for Manhattan
borough president. We print below their
edited presentations.
build up for the race a mighty nation of
our own in Africa" (Philosophy and
Opinions of Marcus Garvey).
The end of the war brought recession
and mass unemployment, compounded
by the return of millions of soldiers,
black as well as white, to civilian life.
Organized labor, with a few honorable
exceptions like the Wobblies, was
hostile to the black worker. The Jim
Crow labor movement increased em-
ployers' ability to set white against black
and to exploit blacks as scab labor.
However, black participation in indus-
try and the armed forces generated
enhanced self-confidence, and for the
first time since Reconstruction there
was mass black resistance to racist
terror.
The defeat of the militant postwar
strike wave and the 1919 race riots
paved the way for government reaction
and the rise of Ku Klux Klan terror. But
in a period of defeat and reaction,
Garvey's nationalist perspective ap-
pealed to tens of thousands of American
blacks precisely because it caught the
disillusionment and demoralization that
leads to both anger and escapism. It was
no coincidence that the height of
Garvey's influence in the reactionary
1920s corresponded to the peak of Ku
Klux Klan activity.
Garvey's "Back to Africa" fantasy
embodied a defeatist acceptance of
segregation and his emphasis on "racial
purity" led to his notorious 1922
meeting with leaders of the KKK.
However, the profoundly racist Ameri-
can government saw any mass black
protest movement as a threat. The feds
framed up Garvey for "mail fraud," put
him behind bars and deported him from
the country in 1927. It was the labor
movement's duty to defend Garvey
against government victimization.
Would PL have come down on the side
of U.S. imperialism on this one?
We do not claim to know exactly
what was bothering this presumed PL
supporter when he vandalized our office
(Trotskyism? oral sex? homosexuality?
miscegenation? Jews"). We do not know
the real source of this vandalism or in
whose service it was committed. But the
racist slur about Garvey and Trotsky
amidst the PL stickers brands the
perpetrator.
mingham outrage. London cops in-
vaded the home of Cherry Groce. 38-
year-old black mother ofsix, and shot
her in the back while she was sleep-
ing! Now integrated crowds of angry
protesters in Brixton have taken to
the streets again against Prime Min-
ister Thatcher's murderous thugs.
The StlB is fighting for integrated
trade union-centered defense guards
to smash racist cop terror.
. ................ >. ...( ... ... .. .... ... i
t
..... ..... . ..
..>5RRE RRCIST STRIKEBRERK
WSK THE PDlItE t\\\'\'CDUNTRBIUTY' BUT
.
CllPJAIS[I5T
... SPAITACIST LEACUE J
British Ghettos Explode
Weird racist vandalism de-
faces front of Spartaclst
campaign office In lower
Manhattan.
"Workers Must Defend
Brixton, Handsworth"
...
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Black Yorkshire miner speaks at

emergency Spartacist League of Brit-
ain meeting held September 18 in
police-occupied Handsworth ghetto
of Birmingham, Blacks. Asians and
whites defied siege conditions to
attend "Racist Cops Out Now"
meeting, the 'Iie to the bour-
geoisie's attempt to alibi cop provo-
cation as black vs, Asian communal-
ism. Within three weeks of the Bir-
protest their..miserably oppressed posi-
tion in the world the imperialists created
out of the carnage of World War I. He
had millions of followers around the
globe then, and many still revere him as
the leader of the first mass black
nationalist movement in America and as
the father of modern black nationalism.
For example, Malcolm X's father was a
Garveyite preacher. Whatever the van-
dal's intended purpose, the content of
his calling card is an anti-gay and anti-
communist racist slur.
Marcus Garvey was born in Jamaica
in 1887. Moved by the grinding exploi-
tation and miserable living conditions of
Caribbean black workers, particularly
on the vast sugar and banana planta-
tions, Garvey tried in vain to organize
unions and to appeal to the Jamaican
government to ameliorate black labor's
misery. In 1914 Garvey founded the
Universal Negro Improvement Associa-
tion (UNIA). The UNIA was motivated
by a vision of worldwide racial pride and
unity. According to Garvey, "The only
wise thing for us ambitious Negroes to
do is to organize the world over and
LENIN
4 October 1985
Who Was
Marcus Garvey?
When we found the repulsive remark
"Trotsky sucks Garveys dick" scrawled
on our New York public office door
among a plastering of Progressive
Labor Party (PL) stickers, we naturally
gave the political significance of the act
some thought. While the political gulf
between Marcus Garvey's "back to
Africa" nationalism and revolutionary
Marxism is very wide, we must recog-
nize that in a period of social reaction
Garvey gave black people a platform to
30 September
Letter to PL
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: Noah Wilner
EDITOR: Jan Norden
PRODUCTION MANAGER: Noah Wilner
CIRCULATION MANAGER: Linda Jarreau
EDITORIAL BOARD: Jon Brule. George Foster. Liz Gordon, James Robertson. Reuben Samuels,
Joseph Seymour, Marjorie Stamberg (Closing editor for No. 388: Liz Gordon)
Workers Vanguard (USPS 098-770) publisneo o,We6KlY, except 2nd issue August and with a-weeKinterval December,
by lhe Spartac;st Publishing Co., 41 Warren Street, New York, NY 10007. Telephone: 732-7862 (Editorial), 732-7861
(Business). Address all correspondence to: Box 1377, GPO. New York, NY 10116. Domestic subscriptions: $5.00/24
issues. Second-class postage paid at New York, NY. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Workers Vanguard,
Box 1377. GPO, New York, NY 10116.
Opinionsexpreued in signed articles or lelters do not necessarily express the editorial viewpoint.
No. 388
TROTSKY
Closer to the Proletarians of
the "Colored" Races
Writing of a letter from black South
African supporters, Trotsky underlined
the danger of Stalin's policy of class col-
laboration which led to the beheading of
the 1927 Chinese Revolution by Kuomin-
tang strongman Chiang Kai-shek. Trotsky
stressed that for the enslaved toilers the
achievement of genuine democracy and
national emancipation requires the prole-
tarian conquest of power.
I have received a copy of the letter dated April 26, 1932, sent by an organization of
Negro comrades from Johannesburg. This letter, it seems to me, is of great
symptomatic significance. The Left Opposition (Bolshevik-Leninists) can and must
become the banner for the most oppressed sections of the world proletariat, and,
consequently, first and foremost; for the Negro workers....
In their letter, to which 24 signatures are appended (with the notation "and
others"), the South African comrades expressed particular interest in the questions of
the Chinese revolution. This interest, it ought to be acknowledged, is whollyjustified.
The working masses of the oppressed peoples who have to carryon the struggle for
elementary national rights and for human dignity, are precisely those who incur the
greatest risk of suffering the penalties for the muddled teachings of the Stalinist
bureaucracy on the subject of the "democratic dictatorship." Under this false banner,
the policy ala Kuomintang, that is, the vile deception and the unpunished crushing of
the toiling masses by their own "national" bourgeoisie, may still do the greatest harm
to the liberating cause of the toilers. The program of the permanent revolution based
on the incontestable historic experience of a number of countries can and must
assume primary significance for the liberation movement of the Negro proletariat.
-Leon Trotsky, "Closer to the Proletarians of the 'Colored' Races!" (1932)
Milt Rosen, Chairman
Progressive Labor Party
Dear Comrade Rosen:
We enclose photographs of vandal-
ism against our New York public office
on September 21, which show obscene
slogans and a number of Progressive
Labor stickers over the entrance (glue
was also poured into the locks and other
damage was done). On the face of it, we
must assume that some deranged
supporter of your organization did this
to our office, although of course this is
utterly not proven. It could conceivably
be the work of a deranged racist anti-
communist driven into a frenzy by our
election campaign opposing racist cop
terror, if such an element had a way to
get a large supply of PL stickers. In the
event this act arose in or around your
organization, we are certain you will
want to look into it and we are confident
you will deal with the parties involved in
a way you deem proper.
We enclose the brochure published
for our working-class communist cam-
paign for Mayor and Manhattan Bor-
ough President. As a self-declared
working-class communist organization,
you might wish to consider critically
supporting our candidates.
Fraternally,
Spartacist League
Racists Pretending to Be PLers?
Hard to Tell the Difference
2
WORKERS VANGUARD
NYC Campaign Notebook
DEMONSTRATEI
Michael Stewart, Eleanor Bumpurs,
Edmund Perry-We Will Not Forget!
Spartacist supporters have been
regularly coming down to III Centre
Street, where the trial of six transit cops
in the killing of black artist Michael
Stewart has been going on for the last
several months. The whole sham proce-
dure exposes the nature of racist
capitalist "justice." Dozens of witnesses
saw the cops bludgeon the young black
man, surrounding him as he lay hand-
cuffed face down on the pavement,
repeatedly kicking and choking him
with their nightsticks. But D.A. Mor-
genthau torpedoed the first grand jury
investigation, and now only six of the
eleven cops in the racist lynch mob are
on trial. Even they are not charged with
murder, but slap-on-the-wrist counts
going from reckless endangerment to
perjury.
Each day Mr. and Mrs. Stewart are
there in court, in the first row, as the
cops' battery of lawyers beat down the
witnesses. There are no objections from
the "prosecution," which would rather
have no trial at all. And the cops and
their buddies sit across the aisle smirk-
ing. On September 14, Marjorie Starn-
berg and Ed Kartsen attended a memo-
rial for Michael Stewart at Underwood
Park in the Clinton Hill section of
Brooklyn, where he grew up. Mrs.
Carrie Stewart spoke of her painful
continued on page 11
* * * * *
and comrades are developing into pretty
good street orators. SYLer Cindy
Beckum told the crowd in front of
Woolworth's, on 125th Street: "I go to
Borough of Manhattan Community
College. That's the school Michael
Stewart used to go to before his life was
snuffed out by the racist cops in this
city.... If you're black in this city, it's a
green light to be murdered. The only
organization that has been addressing
the issue of cop terror in this city is the
Spartacist League."
At the Fulton Mall in downtown
Brooklyn, transit worker Victor Cora
stressed that the fight against Koch and
Reagan must be an internationalist
fight. "Reagan has declared war against
Nicaragua, an economic blockade and
aid to the 'contras.' This is the first step
towards war with the Soviet Union. And
the reflection of this at home is rep res- .
sion against working people, against
blacks and other minorities. PATCO, a
union of about 15,000 members-they
all got fired because they dared to strike
against the U.S. government. We all
have to pay for that war drive-our
social services are being cut, black
people are being murdered on the street
with impunity.... We have to build a
workers party."
Paul Labrador, president. Student Government
Association. Borough of Manhattan Community
College'
Conrad Lynn, civil rights attorney
Carl Offord, publisher. Black American"
Partisan Defense Commillee
James Small, adjunct lecturer, Black Studies. City
College of New York"
Marjorie Stamberg, Spartacist candidate for mayor of
New York
Tenants Organizers Create Safe, Inhabited
Neighborhoods (TOCSIN)
Welfare Action Coalition, Bronx
'Orqaruzation listed for purposes of identification only.
Spartacist
candidate
Marjorie
Stamberg
soapboxing
on Lower East
Side (left);
at CWA rally
protesting
layoffs
(below left);
Ed Kartsen
campaigning
at Labor Day
parade
. (below).
Initiated by Spartaclst League
Partial list of endorsers:
Mary Bumpura, Eleanor Bumpurs Justice Committee'
54 West 174 Street Tenant Association, Bronx
Benny Foster, chairman, Track & Power Division,
Transport Workers Union Local 100'
Ramona Hernandez, professor. Borough of Manhattan
Community College'
Ray Isner, chairman, Clifton-Morenci Labor Unity
Oouncil", striking Arizona copper worker
Ed Kartsen, Spartacist candidate for Manhattan
borough president
Richard King, writer. The Caribbean"
Gross the Ghoul Has Got to Go!
Stop Racist Cop Terror!
StopNewYork's Racist Mayor andHisDr. Mengele! Be There!
Thursday, October 3, 9:30-11:00 a.m.
2 World Trade Center
-----NEWYORK CITY-----
* * * *. *
WV Photo!'l
the people of this city against cop
terror. ... The only people who are going
to talk about that are people who have
the program of revolution. That is the
Spartacist League."
There are eight million stories in this
city, and we're a small party. So the
Spartacist campaign has concentrated
on Harlem/Upper West Side, the Lower
East Side and downtownBrooklyn as
our centers of activity. Each Saturday
you'll find Spartacist teams out soap-
boxing in one or more of these areas,
made this an issue because they didn't
want anyone independent of the racist
cops to have guns. They will talk about
sanctions against South Africa, but they
will not talk about jailing the killer cops,
about abolishing the anti-gun laws,
about the right of armed self-defense of
On September 19, Ed Kartsen and
Reuben Shiffman of the Partisan
Defense Committee gave a forum at
Columbia University on "South Africa.
Razor's Edge." At Columbia, 'opposi-
tion came from the social-democratic
League for a Revolutionary Party, who
attacked the SL for our position on the
subway shootist, Bernhard Goetz.
Kartsen replied that "the liberals in this
city made Goetz the issue, not the killer
cops" because their target was gun
control: "It was the issue of someone
who wasn't a cop, and defended
themselves. "
Saying, "We don't think there's a
clear issue in the case of Goetz; thisguy
has to take responsibility for his own
actions." Ed pointed out: "The liberals
* * * * *
class on the politics of the Harlem
community. Kartsen pointed to the
wave of police killings in NYC, indicting
Koch's administration for "political
lynching."
There was a pervasive sense among
the students that liberal integrationism
has failed. A debate ensued over the
perspective of black nationalism versus
the SL's Marxist strategy of revolution-
ary integrationism. A number of stu-
dents equated nationalism with militan-
cy. The discussion ranged over the
history of the civil rights movement and
the fight against slavery, coming to a
head over the American Civil War.
When one student argued that emanci-
pation from chattel slavery did nothing
for black people, Ed raised the heroic
role of black troops. in the Civil War,
adding: "Probably one' of your ances-
tors picked up a gun and shot a
Confederate soldier."
Kartsen summarized the outcome of
that bloody conflict as a historic, though
incomplete victory for American blacks.
The task today is to "Finish the Civil
War!"
recently, and a candidate for president
of Transport Workers Union (TWU)
Local 100 in 1983. Ed also attended City
College, and on September 28 he went
back to CCNY, at the invitation of black
lecturer James Small who invited the
Spartacists to make a presentation to his
Spartacist League/
Spartacus YOuth League
Public Offices
-MARXIST LlTERATURE-
Bay Area
Fri.: 5:00-8:00 p.m. Sat.: 3:00-6:00 p.m.
1634 Telegraph. 3rd Floor (near 17th Street)
Oakland. California Phone: (415) 835-1535
Chicago
Tues.: 5:00-9:00 p.m.. Sat.: 11:00a.m.-2:00 p.m.
161 W Harrison si., 10th Floor
Chicago. Illinois Phone: (312) 663-0715
New York City
Mon.-Thurs.. 5:00-8:00 p.m.,
Sat.: 1:00-5:00 p.m
41 Warren St. (one block below
Chambers St. near Church St.)
New York. NY. Phone: (212) 267-1025
* * * * *
Ed Kartsen was a signal maintainer in
the New York City subways until
* * * * *
Marjorie. Starnberg was a telephone
operator and member of the Communi-
cations Workers of America (CWA) for
nine years. On September 17, she was
invited back to' speak at a union meeting
of Local 1150, where president Jimmy
Pratt announced, "I want to introduce
someone that's a candidate for mayor of
New York. We don't have Ed Koch here
or Carol Bellamy. We have a former
member of our local that is on the
ballot."
Marjorie said she had just been down
on the picket lines of striking CWA
Western Union workers: "I pass by their
strike lines on the way to my office every
day. You see maybe a handful of
picketers there, and then five security
guards, and then five or ten city police
who are supposedly there to protect the
security guards.... This gives you an
idea of the nature of this government."
We need a workers party, she said, to
fight for racial equality and defend
minorities against racist attack. Marjo-
rie denounced the recent incident where
a Confederate flag was carried in the
Labor Day parade, right here in New
York City:
"Brothers and sisters, that flag is a
provocation and a threat, it is historical-
ly the flag of slavery, it is the flag of the
Ku Klux Klan, a threat to all working
people, the Jewish people, the black
people, and has no place in the workers
movement in this country.... It is no
accident that there are Confederate
flags turning up in New York in an
atmosphere where Ed Koch and his
police are running-rampant in a wave of
racist police brutality."
A number of black CWAers nodded
in agreement. Marjorie emphasized,
"That's one of the reasons we're running
in this campaign-to mobilize labor and
minorities to stop this racist police'
terror. "
"We're building a revolutionary
workers party, a party like the Bolshe-
viks of Lenin and Trotsky. That's what
this campaign is all about," say the
Spartacist Party candidates, Marjorie
Stamberg for New York City mayor and
Ed Kartsen for Manhattan borough
president.
In 1920 the Communist International
declared that a truly Bolshevik election
campaign "must be conducted not as a
drive for the maximum number of
parliamentary seats, but as a mobiliza-
tion of the masses around slogans of
proletarian revolution."
Today, whether it's soapboxing at
Woolworth's at 125th and Adam Clay-
ton Powell Boulevard, speaking to
union meetings and college classes, or
mobilizing for demonstrations against
racist cop terror, the Spartacist election
campaign in New York City 1985 is in
the Bolshevik spirit.
4 OCTOBER 1985
3
FBI "Anti-Terrorist" Dragnet in Puerto Rico
Free the Macheteros!
Fargo job) worth of toys to children in
Hartford and San Juan last January on
Three Kings Day. Indeed, even the
liberal bourgeois daily 1 Diario/ La
Prensa (2 September) has described
.Gerena as a modern-day Robin Hood.
While the Macheteros militantly oppose
colonial rule, their nationalist guerrilla-
ism offers no way forward for the
Puerto Rican workers. They stand in the
tradition of the 1950 Nationalist Party
revolt at Jayuya and similar forlorn
gestures. The Trotskyists of the Sparta-
cist League seek to unite Puerto Rican
and American workers in common
struggle against Yankee imperialism.
from Central America to the Caribbean
and the U.S.
As we noted in' our article. "Mili-
tarism and Repression in Puerto Rico"
(WV No. 373, 22 February), "the FBI
has chosen Puerto Rico as the testing
ground for its 'anti-terrorist' guidelines
of infiltration, disruption and provoca-
tion." The Spartaeist League has fought
the FBI's sinister "terrorism guidelines."
and won a small but significant victory
in our suit which forced the FBI to drop
their terrorist-baiting "definition" of the
SL and recognize us for what we are, a
Marxist political organization. This
attack on the Puerto Rican indepen-
dentistas is a threat to all opponents of
U.S. imperialism. Defenders of demo-
cratic rights demand: Free the Mache-
teros! FBI, CIA out of Puerto Rico!
Immediate. unconditional independ-
ence for Puerto Rico!.
From the book:
"The Russians were, moreover, given to mating quickly with the women
of lands they penetrated. Always the children were baptized."
"The first of the promyshlenniki [trappers and traders] to come to the
Aleutians, where the Tsar was indeed far away, illustrate the view that
ultimate frontiers draw the psychopaths."
"Yet [Catherine the Great] took real if spasmodic interest in Russian America
and did more about it than her predecessors.... [She sought to] 'impress
upon the hunters the necessity of treating their new brethren and
countrymen, the inhabitants of our neWly acquired islands, with greatest
kindness... .' Though at the time of Catherine's accession the advance on
America had been in progress nearly twenty years, no word of it had reached
the governments of the West. ... Catherine... let out the truth.... Spain had
the sharpest reaction, ordering her viceroy in Mexico to prepare forthwith for
defense and to occupy more of the western coast. Upper California came
quickly into being, as Franciscan missions and military presidios were built,
beginning with San Diego in 1769."
"[Baranov, the new manager of the colony] was old for this kind of life,
forty-four. As he was Showing, he had been unable to take even six weeks in
an open boat, eating only raw fish and sleeping on wet beaches at night."
"...a beginning at a relationship was made when a leading Kenaitze chief
pledged himself to support a i; 't, giving hostages, as was the custom. On his
part, Baranov had had to promise to take the chief's daughter to wife. He
may not have thought the price too high. Though not yet a full-grown
woman, she was darkly beautiful of eye eatures, and carriage."
"By means he had often had to devise himself, [Baranov] had put
Russian America on the political map, formally enlarging the empire by
nearly a third."
"The Aleuts were now to be classed as civilized, though they still lived by
many of their old primitive ways. As was symbolized by the samovar that
stood in each of their half-buried dwellings, they were Russian subjects, so
defined in the second charter."
"A nation [Russia] having small desire to sell did so to a nation [the U.S.]
that was not eager to buy, their motives the belief they would please each
other. History does not invariably make sense."
Published by Binford & Mort,
Portland, Oregon
Printed in U.S. 1979
Order from:
Spartacist Publishing Co.
P.O. Box 1377 GPO,
New York, NY 10116
Price: $9.00 postpaid
The
Russians
Did Come!
Rican National Guard has played a
prominent role in the numerous U.S.
military maneuvers in Honduras and
Panama, part of Washington's counter-
revolutionary war in Central America.
The Macheteroshave also scored
some publicity coups, such as distribut-
ing thousands of dollars (from the Wells
Norfolk
Box 1972, Main PO
Norfolk, VA 23501
Oakland
Box 32552
Oakland, CA 94604
(415) 835-1535
San Francisco
Box 5712
San Francisco, CA 94101
(415) 863-6963
Washington, D.C.
Box 75073
Washington, D.C. 20013
(202) 636-3537
Toronto
Box 7198, Station A
Toronto, Ontario M5W 1X8
(416) 593-4138
Puerto Rican
demonstrators
-proclaim:
"FBI, the Real
Terrorists."
fighters inside the courtroom. The
raucous scene was punctuated by cries
of "Long live free Puerto Rico!" from
the chained prisoners, echoed by their
supporters in the gallery. After the
hearings the independentistas were
whisked away in Navy helicopters to the
huge Roosevelt Roads base and flown
to the mainland.
In ironic contrast to this huge
government "anti-terrorist" operation,
the day before the FBI terror raids, 42
counts of perjury were dropped against
ten Puerto Rican police officers respon-
sible for the cold-blooded 1978 murder
of two independentistas at Cerro Mara-
villa. Claiming that perjury wasn't
defined in Puerto Rico's penal code, the
district judge ruled that the state could
not prosecute (1 Mundo, 30 August).
Earlier. kidnapping charges against the
cop spy who set up this assassination
were dropped by a district court on the
grounds that he was only following
orders (the case is now under appeal,
before a Superior Court). Thus these
state terrorists, already whitewashed by
two Puerto Rican and two federal
Department of Justice investigations.
still go unpunished seven years later.
The Puerto Rican Revolutionary
Workers Party (Macheteros) has been
active since the late '70s, mainly on the
island. Unlike the' FALN, which has
engaged in indiscriminate terror such as
the 1975 bombing of the Fraunces
Tavern restaurant in New York City, the
Macheteros- have carefully targeted the
imperialist government apparatus. They
have landed some effective blows, such
as the 1981 attack on the Mufiiz air base
in San Juan, which destroyed nine jet
fighters, the bulk of the Puerto Rican
Air National Guard fleet. The Puerto
Detroit
Box 32717
Detroit, MI 48232
Los Angeles
Box 29574, Los Feliz Sta.
Los Angeles, CA 90029
(213) 384-9716
Madison
clo SYL, Box 2074
Madison, WI 53701
(608) 257-8625
New York
Box 444, Canal S1. Sta.
New York, NY 10013
(212) 267-1025
TROTSKYIST LEAGUE
OF CANADA
SPARTACIST LEAGUE/U.S. LOCAL DIRECTORY
National Office: Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116 (212) 732-7860
Atlanta
Box 4012
Atlanta, GA 30302
Boston
Box 840, Central Sta.
Cambridge, MA 02139
(617) 492-3928
Chicago
Box 6441, Main PO
Chicago, IL60680
(312) 663-0715
Cleveland
Box 91037
Cleveland, OH 44101
(216) 621-5138
In a series of dawn raids in San Juan,
Puerto Rico August 30, more than 200
FBI agents, backed up by local police,
rounded, up eleven alleged members of
the pro-independence group "Los
Macheteros." Two others were seized on
the mainland. Dressed in camouflage
fatigues, faces painted and carrying
automatic rifles, the colonial political
police burst into the victims' homes,
holding families at gunpoint, then
hauling off "suspects" who were chained
hand and foot. Arrest warrants were not
presented until hours after the fact,
while the FBI stormtroopers searched
the homes for "evidence."
The arrested Puerto Rican national-
ists were accused of involvement in the
1983 heist of $7 million from a Wells
Fargo depot in West Hartford, Con-
necticut, an operation for which the
Machetejos proudly took credit. Using
the Wells Fargo case as a pretext, the
FBI dragnet went after the pro-
independence movement in general.
SWAT teams raided more than 30
homes on the island for which they had
no warrant, including that of Puerto
Rican chess champion Manuel Moraza
and others. The offices of the leftist
journal Pensamiento Critico were ran-
sacked and one of its editors, Jorge
Farinacci, was among those arrested.
In a Washington press release, U.S.
attorney general Edwin Meese and FBI
director William Webster hailed the
Gestapo-style sweep as part of an "anti-
terrorist" campaign. The Reaganite cold
warriors used the opportunity to fuel
their anti-Soviet drive, declaring "Cu-
ba's aggressive support of terrorism has
not gone unnoticed" ( Washington Post,
31 August). Webster claimed to have
information placing the FBI's primary
target in the case, former Wells Fargo
employee Victor Gerena, in Cuba. But
at court hearings in Hartford, where the
13 suspected .Macheteros are being held
under RICO "conspiracy" charges. the
government is using hearsay "evidence"
to justify keeping them in "preventive"
detention without bailor under bails of
up to $1 million.
Hasty extradition hearings were
staged on Sunday, September I, after
the arrested independentistas had been
denied habeas corpus. The government
tried to discourage protests by holding
the hearings at 7 a.m. under heavy police
guard, including sharpshooters on top
of the federal building at Hato Rey.
Nonetheless, hundreds of protesters
demonstrated outside and others soli-
darized with the pro-independence
4
WORKERS VANGUARD
Sinister Farrakhan and
Racist Pig Koch Whip Up Race War
Farrakhan-The Man Who
Wanted MalcolmXDead
defended the anti-Semite Farrakhan.
But not the Spartacist League. We said
at the time that Jackson's role was to
hustle the black vote for Walter "Big
Loser" Mondale. And that's exactly
what happened. Farrakhan was the shill
of the shill for Mondale. And he's still
shilling for the Democratic Party of
racist American capitalism. In L.A.
Farrakhan declared, "I think we need a
change of governor. Maybe we would
do better with Mr. Bradley."
For the last dozen years, ex-cop, pro-
cop "Uncle Tom" Bradley has been the
Democratic mayor of Los Angeles.
Twenty years after the Watts "riots,"
conditions in the L.A. ghettos are worse
than ever. For young blacks, a job is
like Halley's comet-something you've
heard about but never seen. Cop terror
against black people in Southern Cali-
fornia is notorious even in this violently
racist country. Among the victims was
five-year-old Patrick Mason, the black
child who was killed while watching TV
in his own home. Killer cop Anthony
Sperl was awarded a $30,000 bounty
pension for this racist murder. Bradley
also helped keep the Russians out of the
'84 Olympics, using a "terrorist" scare to
justify unleashing the LAPD with their
Blue Thunder high-tech weaponry on
the population. .
Farrakhan's "anti-establishment" rhet-
oric is a ploy for the black Demo-
cratic mayors. who have been loyal
front men, hatchet men and fire-
men for Reaganite austerity. And now
they're running scared. The black re-
volt against apartheid in South Africa
has electrified black America and
awakened a desire to struggle against
Reagan racism and reaction at home.
The BEOs (black elected officials) are
naturally anxious to keep the heat off
themselves. Farrakhan's "black capital-
ist" and anti-Semitic demagogy is useful
in deflecting black struggle against the
real enemy.
Significantly. Bradley resisted pres-
sure from Jewish groups to denounce
Farrakhan before his L.A. speech.
Commenting on the relationship be-
tween the local black establishment and
the nationalist demagogue, the Los
Angeles Herald Examiner (22 Septem-
bed wrote:
"Local black leaders have a problem.
They have committed themselves to
conventional politics as the primary
means for improving the lot of black
constituents and they' have raised
continued on page 11
-
-
Muhammad
-4 December 1964
- - -
"TO .'OLLOW MALCOLM
IS TO BE bOOMED"
If any Muslim-whe-the-r he-
be an Imam or just a rich
man-backed a fool like Mal
.colm In bundlna a Mosqut>.
he would be a fool hrmself
Only those who wish to be
led to hell, or to their doom.
will tollow Malcolm. The die
is set, and shall not
escape, especially after such
evtl. foolish talk about his
benefactor (El1jah Muham-
mad) In trying to rob him of
the divine glory which Allah
has be s towed upon him.
Such a man as Malcolm Is
worthy of de-ath, and would
have met with death If It had
not been for Muhammad's
confidence in Allah for vlc-
tory over the enemies.
""---
By Minister Louis X
(Boston, Man.)
:........ -
Farrakhan is no more a champion of
black liberation than Johnson Publica-
tions, owners of Jet and Ebony, who
presently have a big chunk of the
segregated ghetto market the Black
Muslim demagogue is trying to get his
hands on. To be sure, there are some
militant blacks who take Farrakhan's
blowhard talk of "independence" from
the white capitalist masters as good
coin. Don't be fooled. Remember, when
Farrakhan gained national attention
last year it was as a supporter of Jesse
Jackson's campaign in the Democratic
Party presidential primaries. It was on
Jackson's behalf that he made his
notorious "Hitler was a great man"
speech.
Phony leftists in this country rallied
to Mr. Black Capitalism and even
Don Charles
Death threat (right) by Farrakhan
(Louis X) against Malcolm X(below).
Black Muslims whipped up frenzy
against Malcolm when he came out
for militant anti-racist struggle.
UPI
Black demagogue "Hitler was agreat man" Farrakhan, above.
Koch hails Israeli would-be fUhrer Sharon, architect of Shatila
butchery. Koch and Farrakhan want to turn New York into
Beirut West.
mad's people actually killed Malcolm-
which they may have-they wanted him
dead. And Louis Farrakhan was the
No. I fingerman.
Where Malcolm appealed to militant
black youth, Farrakhan appeals to
would-be black capitalists. In Los
Angeles he announced that next year his
organization "POWER" (People Or-
ganized and Working for Economic
Rebirth) would begin producing and
marketing a line of soaps, toothpastes,
detergents and other toilet and house-
hold goods aimed at capturing $200
billion in black spending. A retired civil
servant who attended the L.A. talk said
that what appealed to him and those like
him about Farrakhan was "the promise
of financial stability for blacks" (New
York Times, 16 September).
Farrakhan: Shill for
Black Democrats
Elements of the white bourgeois
establishment as well as his supporters
portray Farrakhan as a present-day
version of Malcolm X. Nothing could be
further from the truth. Malcolm was a
courageous fighter against the Ameri-
can ruling class, who attacked its black
front men like Martin Luther King as
harshly as he did the white racists. A
year before he was killed, Malcolm X
broke with Elijah Muhammad's Na-
tion of Islam and denounced all forms
of racism. For example, he repudiated
his earlier opposition to interracial
marriage.
Elijah Muhammad's sect wanted to
destroy Malcolm, and one ofthe leading
hatchet men in their hate-Malcolm'
campaign was Louis X, better known
today as Louis Farrakhan. Farrakhan
wrote in Muhammad Speaks (4 Decem-
ber 1964): "Only those who wish to be
led to hell, or to their doom, will follow
Malcolm. The die is set, and Malcolm
shall not escape.... Such a man as
Malcolm is worthy of death." Two
months later Malcolm X was, in fact, -
killed. Whether or not Elijah Muharn-
LOS ANGELES-When black nation-
alist demagogue Louis Farrakhan spoke
at the Inglewood Forum here Septem-
ber 14, he created a political storm. The
frequently cheering audience of almost
15,000 mainly middle-class blacks heard
him say, "I have a problem with Jewish
people ... because I am declaring to the
world that they are not the chosen
people of God. I am declaring to the
world that you, the Black people of
America and the western hemisphere,
are ... God's people" (Los Angeles Sen-
tinel, 19 September). Pushing his latest
"black capitalist" scheme, Farrakhan
called blacks who patronize businesses
owned by Arabs, Koreans and Viet-
namese "the mammies of America." He
concluded that "40 million blacks can be
as wise and manipulative as the Jews in
America are today."
The sinister anti-Semite Farrakhan
declared last year that Adolf Hitler, the
bloodiest racist murderer in history, was
a "great man." His admiration for
fascist killers is not just historical. In the
audience at the Forum, as a personally
invited guest, was none other than KKK
Grand Dragon Tom Metzger. Farra-
khan's obscene overture to the Ku Klux
Klan, whose burning crosses and lynch
ropes have spread racist terror in this
country for the last century, is suicidal
for black people. Even as Farrakhan
was spewing his anti-Semitic filth inside,
outside the Forum, the Jewish Defense
League, Guardian Angels and a small
group of Nazis in full regalia were
screaming for blood.
When Farrakhan takes his Jew-
baiting big mouth to New York October
7, the situation threatens to be even
more explosive than in L.A. The rabid
Zionist mayor, racist pig Ed Koch, is
inciting people to "speak out" against
the man he characterizes as a "Nazi in a
clerical collar." While piously saying he
hopes there would be no protests, Koch
gives the green light for racist violence,
saying "there will be people ... who in
justifiable anger-indeed, fury-will do
that." In New York City, with its huge
Jewish and black populations, Koch is
setting the stage for murderous race
riots.
4 OCTOBER 1985 5
For a South African
Bolshevik Party!
The New York Times has a perceptive
reporter in South Africa these days by
the name of Alan Cowell. There was a
story in the paper about a week ago
where Mr. Cowell had met several
young anti-apartheid fighters in a black
township near Cradock, in the Eastern
Cape province, where a huge Soviet
banner was unfurled at a funeral
attended by tens of thousands last July.
Unfurling that Soviet banner was a sign
of defiance against the apartheid re-
gime. Now that hammer and sickle tells
a lot about the present radicalization of
South African black youth. One young
man Cowell interviewed, "Comrade
Memory," told him that victory meant
release of African National Congress
leader Nelson Mandela. Mandela was
jailed under the Suppression of Com-
munism Act, and for more than three
decades South Africa's rulers have been
saying the only alternative to apartheid
is communism. That's okay by us, black
youths in the townships are saying.
Manhattan's bottom line. Right now,
with the South African economy in
trouble, divestment is good business.
The United States is certainly
propping up its anti-Soviet ally. They
don't want that key naval base at
Simonstown to fall into the "wrong
hands." The U.S. needs a regional
gendarme to police southern Africa.
And there is a strategic consensus on
South Africa in the American ruling
class, Democrats and Republicans
alike, based on the anti-Soviet war
drive. They both demand withdrawal of
Cuban troops from Angola. Well we
hail the Cuban troops in Angola as the
main line of defense against apartheid
imperialism. Real solidarity with our
South African brothers and sisters
heroically struggling against apartheid
means class struggle at home. We say:
from Detroit to Durban, workers to
power!
atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasa-
ki. The American ruling class extermi-
nated the people who were here before
they came. And don't forget the many
millions killed by slavery and the slave
trade. Don't forget how the American
ruling class mowed down the black
power militants in this country, to wipe
out that movement. "Divesting" them-
selves from South African stocks won't
wipe the blood from their hands. It is a
monstrous lie to tell black people that
they have a friend in Chase Manhattan,
or Edward Koch, or Ronald Reagan.
Moreover, the whole liberal strategy
of pressuring Washington and Wall
Street to pressure their junior partners
in Pretoria and Johannesburg will not
help the struggle for the South African
revolution one whit. In the last month
we have seen "divestment" on a billion-
dollar scale. Reagan has decreed sanc-
tions, which was the program of the
Democrats. You have seen just about as
much imperialist pressure on the apart-
heid regime as you're going to get, and
the regime has dug in. And while
divestment hasn't helped South African
blacks one whit, it has helped Chase
chiasson amma
Black youth defiant. Anti-apartheid revolt needs proletarian leadership.
come down to that.
So over South Africa, we see the
staggering, consummate hypocrisy of
the American ruling class. Today Ed
Koch was on the radio calling on
Reagan to get him to ban all South
African planes from landing in this
country, and to ban all South African
ships. Ed Koch is the bosom buddy of
General Sharon; Koch walked in a
parade in Queens with this general who
organized the massacre at Sabra and
Shatila. The hypocrisy of him condemn-
ing South African apartheid is really
beyond belief. And besides the hypocri-
sy, we are not for a standing ban on all
things South African. It is not as if the
revolution is about to seize power and a
little shove would push it over. In these
conditions, who would be hurt most
from such a standing ban? It would be
the black workers.
And yet these people-Reagan,
Koch-are the people the liberals and
reformists today are appealing to for
"sanctions" against South Africa. It is
their government that was responsible
for My Lai, that turned South Vietnam
into a moonscape, that dropped the
(continued from page 1)
behind on her rent in the Bronx. And by
the way, that triggerman cop Sullivan is
back on the job-we saw him August 13
at the big anti-apartheid demonstration
at the UN. The triggerman has turned
fingerrnan, and he was up there on the
police surveillance unit shooting video-
tape of the demonstrators. Of you and
of me.
And we don't need to tell the people in
this congregation about police terror.
This was Edmund Perry's church. And
of course, there's no apartheid here-
but Edmund Perry had the misfortune
of being on the "wrong side," the
Columbia side of Morningside Drive
without a pass. And there may be some
Haitian brothers here, who were there at
that demonstration August 3 when
Koch, to back up his pal Duvalier in
Port-au-Prince, sent a cop horseback
charge wading into a crowd of peaceful-
ly demonstrating people in midtown
Manhattan. And you know also about
the system of police cover-ups in this
city. There is a blue wall of silence all
right, and it extends right up to the
mayor, and into the district attorney's
office, and to Koch's coroner, Dr. Gross
the ghoul, the one who gouged the eyes
out of Michael Stewart.
Right now, that cover-up is continu-
ing into the so-called trial of the transit
cop lynch mob who murdered Michael
Stewart, which is going on down at
Centre Street. To date, a hearing
scheduled for October 3 on state charges
against Elliot Gross is still supposed to
take place. We say Gross is not just
incompetent or negligent-we say he's a
criminal and he ought to be in Attica
along with those cops who murdered
Michael Stewart. And we're calling a
demonstration outside the hearing, and
we would hope everybody here would
Soweto to
Harlem...
Veronica Perry: "We Will Not Stand for KKK in Blue Uniforms"
Veronica Perry is the mother of
Edmund Perry, the t Z-year-old black
scholarship student, graduate of Exeter
Academy, who on June 12 was shot to
death by a plainclothes cop on Morn-
ingside Drive near Columbia Universi-
ty. Mrs. Perry addressed the following
remarks to the audience at the Sparta-
cist forum, September 24, at Memorial
Baptist Church in Harlem.
I'd like to say good evening to
everyone and giving honor to God
because He is the forerunner of all
struggles and all battles. And I would
like to thank each and everyone of you
for supporting me and my family on
behalf of my son Edmund Perry. As you
all know and are fully aware, it is a
Edmund
Perry
The Perry Family
struggle, and it is the system that I and
others out there have to fight against.
Because I am black and poor and live
in Harlem they thought my son was just
another "nigger," no one to be cared
about or thought about. They found out
that he was not only not just another
black boy, that he was a very special and
unique individual, that he had earned
scholarships that sent him to the best
places that this world has to offer. He
had touched so many people in such a
positive manner to let them know that
we must all stand together as sisters and
brothers, that there is no such thing
because the color of my skin is different
than yours that I should be superior or
inferior to you, He let them know at
Phillips Exeter Academy that he was a
strong young black man who was
determined to come back to his commu-
nity and to let others from his communi-
ty share some of the advantages that he
had. .
It was very hard for me back in July to
even think about him being gone. But
now time does make it easier. He is in
Heaven so I am rejoicing because I had
the privilege of having a son like
Edmund Perry who, most mothers can't
say, but I can say. never gave me a
moment's problem. He never had
problems at home, in school or in the
street. And here where I stand he was
baptized at 13 and gave his life over to
Christ. So I am sure that when he went
on his way, the way that the Lord would
have him, he spoke up strong and

I was told just recently that Exeter
will be a different place because of
Edmund Perry. He made the young
people up there with all of their money
stand back and respect him as a black
man. Because he could intellectually be
right on target with them, athletically be
superb to them, and socially have all of
the women that they would like to have.
So he didn't leave lacking for any-
thing. As one of his schoolmates said,
Veronica Perry, mother of Edmund, .
at Spartacist forum.
"Ed won't miss us, but we will definitely
miss him." Because he touched so many.
I've had people from all races contact
me for condolences and lend me their
support in anything that they could do
to help.
There is one thing that all of you in
this room could do to help. Make sure
that this never ever happens again, that
a young black, Hispanic or white
youth-s-wl we haven't heard of yet-
gets shot and have the officer told by the
system that he works for "you did
nothing wrong." Anv irne anyone takes
a life, you've done something wrong. So
keep on with your struggle. And
remember that it does not take a lot of
money, it takes a lot of people saying the
same thing on one accord, knowing that
we will not stand for the KKK in blue
uniforms, we will not stand forthe KKK
as our mayor or as our president, that
we will not stand for our sisters and
brothers in South Africa being ruled by
a few. We will not stand for it.
Only by standing up and saying "No
more, Mr. Reagan. No more, Mr.
Koch," and Governor Cuomo, you have
to stand up and say also that I'm with
the people of New York who say no
more of this police brutality. We don't
want those middle-of-the-road people.
because if you're middle-of-the-road
you may split and not know what you're
doing and we don't need any more of
that. We have enough splits and
polarizations in this New York City.
So I thank you for being here, for
allowing me to speak, and I do apolo-
gize for having to run out on you, but as
I am chairperson of District 3 School
Board, I do have other obligations. It's
real important that you know that not
only in the struggle against police
brutality, but in our schools we have a
lot of things that arc needed. We need
people like yourselves who are interest-
ed iri making a system change; you have
to change the ideals and the thoughts of
those people who teach your children.
So the young man who's sitting here,
take in what you hear tonight. Because
in your later years, when you become
their age, you will need to know all there
is about politics, about the Democratic
system, about the Republican system,
about the socialist system. about the
Right to Life. You have tons of political
people, and in the United States of
America, the only thing that counts is
the power to vote. So make sure that
when you reach 18 you have a voter
registration card in your hand. And
when it comes time to go to the ballot,
even ifyou don't know who you want to
vote for, go and vote against who you
don't want. Then you'll more than likely
make the right choice.
6 WORKERS VANGUARD
Mary Bumpurs: "They're
Not Going to Get Away with
What They Did"
NE\JYORK
WV Photo
Eleanor Bumpurs' daughter Mary.
the Ku Klux Klan to me is, in disguise in
my city, which is New York City, in the
blue uniforms. I don't hate them either
at this point. But there's a big dislike,
because they did take something from
me that they or no one else can replace.
I've been fighting, I'm going to
continue on fighting, because there was
an injustice done to me. And all I'm
asking for is justice. She left seven
children. she left ten grandchildren, two
on the way, which she won't see, but
somehow or another, I believe she will.
My two brothers were in the service for
this United States here. Once they heard
what had happened to my mother. they
immediately had no reason to serve the
USA again. because why are you
fighting over there when you can't get
justice here? They got out of the service.
they're now home, and we're all pulling
together, hoping that we'll get some
kind of justice out of this. The appeal
came through for the 26th. this coming
Thursday. If it gets thrown out again, all
I can do is try to put it back in there
again.
Because I'm determined that they're
not going to get away with what they
did. They hurt a lot of us. And it's not
fair. There's no way they can ever justify
it and give us anything, because there's
nothing they could give us back in the
place of what we lost. And speaking for
my family that couldn't show up,
because everybody has those different
hours of working, I thank you for letting
me just speak those few words to you,
and as long as you keep the strength, I'll
keep the strength. Because I believe as a
people we will overcome whatever this
is the system has become today.
Thank you. Now there was a point
here that two people are dying to hear.
This is what "our" mayor did. Thanks-
giving Day, last year, when this hap-
pened in October to my mother, he came
to my house, with his condolences as he
says. He came in with a box, a white box.
He offered it to me. What was in there?
Two dozen chocolate chip cookies. I'm
supposed to be a fool, I don't under-
stand that he's sweetening up my mouth
so I won't talk, or I won't fight this
thing! You know, what the hell you
bring me two dozen chocolate chip
cookies for? He really thinks I'm a
dummy. Listen, God gave me this, I
didn't ask Him. No one can sit here and
say well, listen, I'd rather be yellow than
to be this color, or whatever. He didn't
give me a choice, He said Mary, here it
is, either you live with it, or whatever.
So, old Koch brings me two dozen
chocolate chip cookies, to let me know
that I'm what, a chocolate chip little
"nigger"? He didn't sweeten my tongue
up enough to stop me from fighting for
what was mine .
Eleanor
Bumpurs
Mary Bumpurs is the daughter of
Eleanor Bumpurs, the 67-year-old hlack
grandmother who was shot to death bv
an NYPD "Emergency Service Unit" in
her Bronx apartment last October 29.
We print below her remarks at the
recent Spartacist forum in Harlem.
Good evening to everyone. I'm
surprised. I am. You know, it's not easy
standing before you or anyone else,
since what happened to my mother
almost a year ago. But through the grace
of God, and I have to say that-if it
wasn't for Him, I wouldn't be standing
here or anyplace else. Because that was
an experience that I've never experi-
enced before. death. For 39 years I
didn't know what death was about, and
to lose your mother in that kind of a
way, that's pretty painful.
I would like to just clear up a couple
of things. In the papers they used this,
she being psychotic or something or
other. This woman had seven children,
she raised them without my father being
in the house. She raised us to the best of
her ability, she made us go to school. We
went to school, acknowledged the 12
years that the system gives you. We
accepted that, we started our own
families. She was of age that she didn't
need us to live with her, she lived bv
herself, she could take care of herself. A's
I heard, as you read. she was supposed
to be behind in rent. Well. if you're
behind in rent one month or two
months, they're going to take your lives
for it. Whoever's been behind in rent
better catch up quick. because they're
going to get you next! Believe me.
Other than that, they did not try to
locate some of the family. Their first
point was. I believe, and it couldn't have
been anything else, they thought this
woman had no one but herself. They
thought there was no one to stand
behind her whatsoever. But they got a
big surprise when they went in on her,
and I believe this to the bottom of my
heart-my mother was a very aggressive
woman. ~
My mother told me a story, when I
was about 13 years of age, about the
experience that she had with the Ku
Klux Klan. This was in North Carolina.
I know nothing about North Carolina.
She saw homes burnt down by these
men in white sheets. When we use
sheets, we put them on the bed, we don't
put them on our bodies. She saw these
homes being burnt, she saw black
people being taken in the woods and
beaten to death. This is something she
told us. I've never experienced, so all I
can say is, I felt the pain, I was not there.
She sat and she told us all the dreadful
things that happened to her in her
lifetime. She did not instill hatred in us.
It was for us to come to that conclusion
by ourselves, which I am standing here
to say, no, I can't, I won't find time to
hate anyone. Because that's a big word.
When you start hating people, to me you
end up killing people. Now this is how
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with the emergence of a modern
industrial economy. So the ANC and
United Democratic Front are based on
the Xhosa, and include the Indian
Congress, while [Zulu] chief Buthelezi
and his Inkatha goon squads do the
dirty work for Botha. Last year Botha's
scheme for phony Indian and coloured
"parliaments" backfired, and instead
there was a massive boycott that united
them with the black population. So
what happened in August of this year
was Buthelezi's Zulu Inkatha launched
pogroms against the Indian community
in Durban, including tearing down
Gandhi's house which had been a
museum.
So when this happened what did the
UDF do, what did the ANC do, what
did AZAPO do? They wrung their
hands. Nationalism cannot overcome
communalism and tribalism because it
does not attack capitalism at its roots.
The meeting place for the proletariat is
the mines and. the factories, where
Xhosa and Zulu, the Mozambicans and
Botswanans and coloured are thrown
together, and there's even been the
occasional basis for episodic unity with
the white skilled workers in some of the
plants. What should have happened
during the Natal pogroms is the forma-
tion of racially integrated workers
defense guards to protect the Indian
community. But approaching the work-
ing class would have required aproletar-
ian perspective.
That is the program of a revolution-
ary workers party. In tsarist Russia
every time there was mass unrest, they
would try to make the Jews the
scapegoats and they unleashed the
Black Hundred pogroms against the
Jewish ghettos. But during the 1905
revolution the workers' soviets from
Moscow to Petersburg and Warsaw
organized proletarian defense guards to
protect the Jewish community. There is
a book. Memoirs of a Jewish Revolu-
tionarv, which talks about how in
Warsaw in 1905. Jewish and Polish
workers stood guard together 24 hours a
day. block by block, house by house.
defending the ghetto. They waited for
those race-terrorists to come, and when
they did they gave them a lesson they
would never forget. A Bolshevik party,
as Lenin said. must be the tribune of the
people. And this defense of the most
oppressed by the class-conscious prole-
tariat was key to breaking open the
tsarist prison house of peoples, laying
the basis for the 1917 October
Revolution.
The Question Is Power
So Reagan calls for "constructive
engagement" with Botha. The Demo-
crats want constructive disengagement.
But both of them are trying to reform
apartheid. So last week the U.S.
embassy in Pretoria came up with a new
proposal to solve South Africa's prob-
lems: they said Borha ought to establish
a civilian review board! You know, after
the army busts down your door, drags
you off to prison, tortures you, murders
you and dumps your body on the
roadside, then you'll have some place
to appeal to! What's next. residency
requirements for the SS?
Of course you laugh, because you see
the absurdity of such a proposal in a
situation where it's clear that police
brutality is not the acts of a few "rotten
apples" but of a system. But let's apply
that lesson to the United States. One of
our opponents in this election is the
Communist Party, which is running on
the "People Before Profits" ticket, and
they're calling for the "democratization
of the police" ... through a civilian
review board. But it's ludicrous to think
that you can "democratize" the cops. As
Marxists we understand that they are
the armed fist of the capitalist class.
They exist to keep the ghettos down and
to crush strikes.
We do not look to the capitalist state,
but to building the power of our own
forces. The Spartacist League calls for
continued on page 8
Brooklyn courthouse, July 1983:
Kartsen rallies transit workers
against whitewash of lynch mob
murderers of black TWUer Willie
Turks.
"South Africa is a capitalist country,
and that has oppressed us," 14-year-old
Lucas told the Times reporter. "So now,
all of us, in Cradock, are Communists."
They may not know much about
communism; however the most con-
scious elements are clearly groping for a
road to revolution. A banner at a recent
funeral called on the ANC, "We are
ready, give us AKs." But it will take
more than a few thousand Soviet assault
rifles to bring down apartheid capital-
ism. Business Week. an organ of
American capitalism. recently ran an
editorial on "What Pretoria Fears More
than Rioting in the Streets"-namely,
the power of black labor. Marx said
of capitalism that it created its own
gravedigger in the proletariat. And the
six-million-strong black working class
of South Africa, which extracts the
diamonds and gold, which runs the
industry, will be the gravedigger of
apartheid.
A two-day general strike last Novern-
bcr brought the Transvaal to a grinding
stop. And last month the threat of a gold
mine strike was met by an army
mobilization as ifforwar. Yet in the past
12 months of rolling revolt in South
Africa the black working class has been
limited to isolated skirmishes. Both the
ANC and AZAPO, the leading black
nationalist organizations. talk a lot
about how the workers are the "princi-
pal force," the "fundamental force," and
so on. But then the ANC sits down in
Zambia to talk with Anglo American
Mining Corporation. And just to make
sure the talks are' not snagged, Anglo'
American was exempted from the
aborted gold strike. So the proletariat is
still pulling the cart of nationalism.
Even if the Afrikaners were to crack
this time around, what would you get?
Some kind of Zimbabwe solution.
where Nelson Mandela's picture would
be on the currency, they'd cut a deal with
Anglo American and supposedly it's
"non-racial" capitalism. Meanwhile
you've set the stage for all-sided geno-
cide between the Afrikaners, the Eng-
lish. the coloureds, the Indians, the
Xhosa, the Zulus, just as Mugabe sets
the Shona against Nkorno's Mata-
beles in Zimbabwe. But the differ-
ence is, comrades, that South Africa
doesn't have to go the nationalist road.
A racially integrated internationalist
workers party, forged in struggle against
all forms of nationalism, could create a
black-centered workers republic in
which there would be a place for whites
as well, which could marshal South
Africa's tremendous resources on behalf
of the entire starving continent.
The hallmark of British imperialism
was the policy of "divide and rule," and
the apartheid rulers have sought ttl
recreate tribalism which was weakening
4 OCTOBER 1985
7
Spartacist'''l Forums
Der Spiegel
Apartheid state of siege. But South.
African black workers have power to
bury apartheid and establish their
own rule.
America's imperialist domination after
the Vietnamese successfully drove out
the French.
Reagan is at this very moment
preparing the groundwork to carry out
in Nicaragua the same type of war that
was carried out in Vietnam. While
Reagan is trying to curb his image as an
open supporter of apartheid in South
Africa, he is meanwhile planning to kill
Nicaraguans at _the same rate that
Vietnamese were murdered by the U.S.
in Vietnam. In South Africa about 1,000
have been slaughtered in the last year. In
Vietnam, nearly 1,000 were killed every
day, which also involved some of the
most sadistic forms of murder.
Despite the tremendous power of
American imperialism, the Vietnamese
Communist Party prevailed. It suc-
ceeded in driving out the U.S. army and
its Vietnamese collaborators. And
unlike Nicaragua today, the Vietnamese
Communists in Hanoi didn't have the
indigenous capitalist ruling class in their
country to promote rightist generals and
form a fifth column and sabotage the
ability of the Vietnamese to fight
successfully against the V.S. army.
The middle-class lawyers and
teachers who presently run the govern-
ment in Nicaragua have a choice. And
that choice is either to carry forward the
revolution to its conclusion, to expro-
priate the bourgeoisie and consolidate
the armed peasants and workers in the
form of a non-capitalist government; or
allowing the pro-capitalist elements to
successfully sabotage and destroy that
country in the light of an inevitable
invasion by the "contras" and the U.S.
army.
Genocidal Bloodbath or
Workers Revolution
It's revolution or death there. And in
South Africa the choices are very
similar. That's why I raised this example
first tonight. Over the next 30 years
there will be three critical possibilities
that South Africa will face. In the short
term, the Boer-centered government
may succeed in its campaign of terror
and prevail again and consolidate a
Boer-centered apartheid dictatorship
after a bloodbath which makes the
present rate of killing look minor. In the
long term, there's another possibility
and that is the crushing of the Boer
dictatorship throughout most of the
regions of South Africa by a Zulu
dictatorship which will repress black
workers' unions and all non-Zulu tribal
and racial groups.
There is a third alternative, the
alternative that we want to see in South
Africa. And that is the establishment of
workers rule in South Africa that will
destroy the apartheid system, expropri-
ate the mines, the industries of South
Africa, and unite ethnic groups includ-
ing anti-apartheid whites and establish a
planned economy that will raise South
Africa's productive power to the height
needed not only to liberate South
Africa, but also to be a center of
that revolution in South Africa could
spark revolutionary struggle here at
home. And how right they are. They fear
it, we're for it.
From its very inception, the Commu-
nist International of Lenin and Trotsky
closely linked the struggle for black
liberation in America and Africa. "The
history of the American blacks has
prepared them to playa major role in
the liberation struggle of the entire
African race," proclaimed the Comin-
tern's Fourth Congress in 1922. We of
the international Spartacist tendency
seek to continue the struggle of Lenin
and Trotsky, fighting to reforge the
Fourth International as a world party of
socialist revolution. We'd like you to
join us. From Soweto to Harlem-
Smash racist terror!
Ed Kartsen: The murder of Edmund
Perry brings the issue of racist terror to
the streets of New York City, the
question of racist terror here. Racist
terror in New York City as related to
racist terror in South Africa is an issue
that has been left out of all the ma-
jor political events of the ruling-class
politicians, in the form of chiefly the
Democratic Party, in the last primary
and around the demonstrations that
they participated in.
And everyone is aware, day in and
day out, of scores of people shot down in
the streets. In New York City Koch
carries out a policy to terrorize poor
minorities and unions. That police
terror is designed to keep unions
passive, to keep the poor and minorities
of 'this city passive in the face of
exorbitant rents, of joblessness, of decay
of all of the public services and condi-
tions of life in the city.
The South African regime props itself
up through the type of terror that you
see in the newspapers every day, in order
to maintain a high level of exploitation
against the South African working
class. Not only are demonstrators being
shot down in the streets. If you look at
the response on the part of the South
African police and army to the threat of
miners going out on strike-which was
massive repression and massive terror-
it's a clear indication of what that state
apparatus exists to do. And that is to
oppress, to pacify the unionized workers
of South Africa, as well as the popula-
tion at large.
Capitalism's decline is marked by
heightened violence. That goes for this
country as well as South Africa. On
Osage Avenue in West Philly that was
demonstrated very clearly in one of the
most gruesome cases of legal lynching
that has ever occurred in this country,
where eleven members of MOVE and
their children were consciously-and
planned well in advance-burned to
death in their home.
America no longer has the ability to
dictate to every country in the world
what government it can or cannot have.
This was the direct result of the victory
of the Vietnamese workers and farmers,
who smashed the American govern-
ment's attempt to subjugate Vietnam to
SAN FRANCISCO
FROM SOWETO. TOHARLE .
SMASH RACIST TERRORr
Saturday, October 12, 7:30 p.m.
Unitarian Church
1187 Franklin (at Geary)
For more information: (415) 863-6963
00
Mary Bumpurs addresses Spartacist forum in Harlem. Spartacist ca-ndidates
Ed Kartsen, left; Marjorie Stamberg, right.
Airborne. Just like the British Econo-
mist said of the recent gold strike, they
called it "The strike- nobody dares to
win," because it was clear that a strike at
that time required revolutionary leader-
ship and posed the question of power.
That is why the South African army was
ready to go in and smash that strike.
Any serious class struggle poses the
question of power. What the Spartacists
are about is building a party to lead the
working class and the oppressed, on the
streets, in the factories, on the picket
lines, the battle lines of the class
struggle. Building a party that will be the
tribune of the people, the memory of the
working class, incorporating the lessons
of past struggles into the strategy for
socialist revolution.
The courageous struggle of South
African blacks against apartheid has
inspired a fight against racist oppression
worldwide. Recently West Indian youth
in Birmingham, England who are up
against Maggie Thatcher's racist cops
repeated over and over, "Soweto and
Handsworth, Same Fight." And our
comrades in the Spartacist League of
Britain agitated for mobilizing the
muscle of organized labor to defend
Handsworth against Thatcher's police
terror, appealing especially to the
miners who had experienced plenty of
the same during their year-long strike.
Our comrades in the Trotskyist League
of France held a demonstration in
Rouen calling on port workers to "hot
cargo" South African coal. Here in New
York, following the imposition of a state
of emergency in August in South Africa,
we were calling for a one-day political
strike against police brutality from New
York City to South Africa.
So the struggle against white
supremacy in-South Africa inspired
revolutionary fighters all over the
world. And the bourgeoisie has noticed.
You know Leon Sullivan, the black
minister who sits on the board of
General Motors and who designed the
"Sullivan Guidelines" for good behavior
by American capitalist corporations in
South Africa. He recently warned the
United States Congress that if South
Africa explodes, "Riots would occur in
Harlem and other cities all over this
country." The rulers of this country fear
BERKELEY
Speaker: Don Alexander, SL Central Committee
Guest Speaker: Stan Gow, ILWU Local 10 Executive Board
Editor, Longshore Militant
South Africa: Razor's Edge
Smash Apartheid-
For Workers Revolution!
Friday, October 11, 7:30 p.m.
145 Dwinelle Hall
UC Berkeley
For more information: (415) 835-1535
Soweto to
Harlem..
(continued from page 7)
labor/black mobilizations, for integrat-
ed armed defense guards based on
responsible union men and women, to
stop the racist terrorists. This is the
strategy that has kept the Ku Klux Klan
off the streets, from San Francisco to
Detroit, culminating in Washington on
November 27, 1982, when a 5,000-
strong black labor-centered mobiliza-
tion initiated by the SL stopped the
Klan from marching in the nation's
capital. And this was what the Sparta-
cist League called for in 1964 in
defending the Harlem ghetto masses
against the police riot.
From Robert Williams in North
Carolina, and the Louisiana-based Dea-
cons for Defense, to Malcolm X and the
Black Panther Party, the right of armed
self-defense against racist terror has
been a touchstone of the struggle for
black liberation in this country. And if
you read the recent book by Mark
Naison, Communists in Harlem During
the Depression, you will see how the
Communist Party during' the '30s
organized mass defense squads against
evictions. So when the police would go
in and bring people's furniture out on
the street, 500 people would be organ-
ized and they would go through the
police. lines and take the furniture back
in. In 1964 we said that tenants councils
and block organizations that already
existed in Harlem could form a natural
basis for the organization of defense
patrols which could become the embryo
of the workers militia which will defend
the coming American revolution.
This holds true today. We're running
in this election as a platform to call for
the forging of a fighting workers party,
that can organize labor/black mobiliza-
tions to stop the racist terrorists in white
sheets and blue uniforms, that can
organize mass defense of workers'
strikes, strikes that win, strikes that will
wipe anti-strike legislation like the
Taylor Law and reduce it to the piece of
toilet paper that it ought to be! I see
some of the brothers from the TWU
[Transport Workers Union] here to-
night, and everybody remembers the
1980 transit strike when all of the
Democratic bigwigs, both Koch and
Bellamy were on the Brooklyn Bridge
organizing union-busting. You remem-
ber Koch down there, hollering "How'm
I doin?"-and Bellamy leading the
joggers across the bridge to work with
big smiles on their healthy faces. Well,
we needed a fighting workers party to
lead a mass march down there and close
the bridge, so those yuppie joggers
would have turned around and high-
tailed it back to their Brooklyn Heights
townhouses and stayed home for the
day!
Now we are not pollyannish about
this. And we know, once we start talking
about strategies that bring the financial
and political capital of U.S. imperial-
ism to a halt, pretty soon we're going to
be going eyeball to eyeball with the 82nd
8 WORKERS VANGUARD
S1.00
tant! And this lie which the black
Democrats let Koch get away with
allowed him to march boldly on Labor
Day, along with contingents which had
"End Apartheid" signs.
The message of Labor Day in this city
was cover-up of race-terror in New York
City. This message was not lost on Ku
Klux Klan and Nazi fascist supporters
and fascist-lovers. A few of them were
actually seen at the Labor Day march
carrying a Confederate flag, in the
IBEW contingent. There'd better be no
room for the Confederate flag anywhere
in the labor movement. It will take a
united struggle of black and white
workers led by a vanguard party to
smash the anti-union campaign that's
going on in this country, and that means
it's necessary to smash those same
creeps with their swastikas and Confed-
erate flags, because they represent anti-
unionism, theideology of race war and
attempts to undercut any ability of the
working class to unite and carry through
a class-struggle victory.
So, in conclusion, I'd like to state that
what we stand for in regard to the
struggle against apartheid is what we
stand for in regard to the struggle
against capitalist oppression every-
where. South African labor can crush
apartheid if it has a revolutionary party,
a party that fights to place the class
power of the working class at the head of
a movement to smash apartheid, and
smash the economic system which
supports apartheid. Such a party would
break through the bloody dead end of
race war.
In New York City, like Chicago,
transit workers must playa chief role to
lead their union out of the dead end of
being tied to the Democratic Party.
Black people in this city can lead the way
by breaking with the Democratic Party.
The ANC's policy of collaboration with
the ruling class in South Africa must be
broken in order for the South African
masses there to be successful. So we
need a revolutionary party. We need a
party that will smash apartheid, and
smash the policies of apartheid, from
Harlem to Soweto. We need to smash
apartheid with workers revolution.
WV Photo
April 1980: Transit strikers march across Brooklyn Bridge. Break with racist
strikebreaking Democratic Partyl Build a workers partyl
Order from:
Spartacist Publishing Co.
Box 1377 GPO
New York, NY 10116
South Africa:
Razor's Edge
Order your packet
featuring a selection of
articles from Workers
Vanguard and Women
and Revolution.
$1.00
when the car cut in front of his bus. He
had no control, it was a tragedy. Racists
in that city wanted to make this an issue
because the bus driver was black and the
people inthe car were white. Even the
families of the people who were killed
did not want to see this issue dragged in
the mud as a black vs. white race issue.
But the cops and the pro-Klan elements
inside the city administration wanted to
make it a race issue, and started a
campaign in the newspaper about how
this bus driver was incompetent and had
intended to murder the people in the
car through sheer incompetence and
through moving at a tremendous speed.
Well, transit workers in that union
got fed up. And they went to their union
leadership asking for action to defend
this bus driver, who had been hand-
cuffed to his hospital bed by the police!
You know, he was also injured in this
accident. Well, the union leadership,
like the union leadership in this city, told
those transit workers that there's noth-
ing that could be done, and this is a non-
union issue. Those transit workers did
not accept that and mobilized independ-
ent of that leadership and in defiance of
it. Five hund red strong, outside of
police headquarters, they faced down
the Chicago police, who are notoriously
violent. They didn't dare attack this
group of transit workers, because they
represented the social force that could
result in that city getting closed down.
And so they won. The' charges were
dropped against the bus driver. The
handcuffs were taken off.
Democratic Party liberals and their
allies in this city have used protests
against apartheid as really a cover-up.
The latest wave of state terror in South
Africa resulted in a demonstration
outside the UN. A demonstration that
was primarily led by black Democrats,
but also contained a lot of militant
workers and black people who consider
apartheid as repulsive as racist terror in
this country. But the leadership of that
demonstration made no attempt to link
up what Koch was doing in this city to
what Botha was doing in South Africa.
Koch got away with demonstrating in
Washington as an anti-apartheid mili-
trying to do internationally-prop
up his anti-communist rightist terror
forces.
Koch is to New York what Reagan is
to the world and America. While
Reagan is preparing to go to war against
Nicaragua, Koch is carrying out a war
against unions and minorities in this
city. Very recently Dr. Elliot Gross's
case has come to the forefront of public
opinion, as one of the primary elements
behind covering up the latest murders
that have occurred. He is the one who
gouged the eyes out of Michael Stewart
in order to prevent the proof that
Michael Stewart had in fact died
because of being beaten and kicked by
eleven cops. Elliot Gross has been
compared by us to Dr. Mengele, who
carried out sadistic experiments against
concentration camp victims.
Michael Stewart was the son of a
retired transit worker. And transit
workers in this city have often been the
targets of racist attack. Willie Turks was
another example-the black transit
worker who was beaten to death just
outside his work shop in Gravesend,
Brooklyn. Very recently there was a
group of Chicago transit workers who
demonstrated what transit workers in
this city could do in defiance of their
union leadership. A bus driver had ac-
cidentally killed seven people in a car,
Koch Is Reaganism in
New York City
What I'd like to do is bring this
question closer to home. Reagan's
support to the government of South
Africa is not really conditional on how
much terror or how much repression
that government is carrying through,
but rather is based on the determination
to consolidate the South African army
and its supporters as a base, for example
against the Cubans defending Angola.
Which is consistent with what he is
on the western side of the Drakensberg
Mountains. This area is called the
Orange Free State. It does not occupy
substantial territory, but it represents
some of the best land on both sides of
those mountains. In fact the Drakens-
berg mountain range has plush areas on
both sides, and the Boers can leave the
rest of South Africa, which is largely
desert, for the Zulus and other tribal
groups, and attempt to survive in that
area.
The ANC's politics of reform through
a compromise with the South African
businessmen is more than completely
utopian. Because South Africa is one of
capitalism's weakest links, its future can
only be more and more despotic and
violent government. The South African
mines are the base of the South African
economy. Without gold and diamonds
there is no South African economy. The
working class if it withheld its produc-
tive force would bring that economy
entirely down. But right now it has a
leadership which is tied to the ANC.
Only a new leadership based on a
revolutionary proletarian perspective,
which can break the workers from their
political support to the ANC, can enable
the working class to succeed in revolu-
tionary struggle against apartheid.
amongst the coloured population. And
they're going to get it from both sides.
They'll get it from theapartheid govern-
ment as well as Zulus who follow chief
Buthelezi, who have recently carried out
pogroms against the Indian population.
What looms in South Africa as one of
the major forces, as I mentioned before,
is the black working class. The critical
question for the South African working
class, in terms of using its social power
to overturn apartheid, is whether or not
it can get the revolutionary leadership
needed in order to lead it out of its
present conditions of oppression. The
coloured population stands as the
primary source for providing this kind
of leadership. The success or failure of
the consolidation of a revolutionary
party that will lead the South African
working class to smash apartheid will
determine whether there is going to be
an eight-sided bloodbath, or whether
there' will be socialist revolution in
South Africa.
Given the overwhelming power of the
Boer nationalists, they are capable of
forcing a bloody settlement, if the
present conflict goes in the direction ofa
race war. In the long run. they could
occupy the only plush area that exists in
South Africa. and enforce that settle-
ment with nuclear arms. The Boers
already occupy much of the plush areas
Laurie Bloomfield
Inkatha, thugs of apartheid's sinister Zulu chief Buthelezi, commit anti-Asian
pogroms in Durban. .
revolution in southern Africa that will
eliminate the chief cause of poverty,
which is imperialist exploitation.
Today South Africa is a stage set for
an eight-sided genocidal bloodbath. The
major ethnic groups are the unarmed
Zulus and the highly armed Boers, who
are of course in the comfortable position
of holding state power. Historically,
there are two groups of English speak-
ers, English nationals and non-English
nationals. There are the Ndebele tribe,
and also the Xhosa. And there are of
course the populations of coloured and
Indians, .
Boer nationalists have no love for the
English and this goes pretty far back in
South African history. British rule at the
time of colonization of South Africa
was based on the model of British rule in
India. which was to integrate some
sections of the population into areas of
government administration. The Boers
were counterposed to that idea and as
the British attempted to expand their
control in southern Africa, a war broke
out between the Boers, who were Dutch
settlers, and the British. The Boer War
lasted from 1899 to 1902, and while the
British were militarily successful, the
Boer population retained a majority
inside the country. As the British
attempted to institute voting for certain
sections of the non-white population,
they ran hard up against the Boers'
conception of white supremacy. So
there was a compromise, the South
African Act of 1909, which instituted
apartheid. The British won the war, but
the Boers won the peace.
The group in South Africa which is
caught right in the middle of this multi-
sided genocide is the coloured popula-
tion. They're highly educated and
skilled. They're culturally Western. The
Trotskyist movement in fact in the past
had a significant number of followers
4 OCTOBER 1985 9
ET: New Name, Same Game?
Make payable/mall 10: Spartacisl Publishing Co., Box 1377 GPO, New York, New York 10116
CORRECTIONS
Our article "The Soccer Wars"
(WV No. 381, 14 June) on the
bloody carnage at the Brussels
European Cup match incorrectly
referred to the Italian team as the
Milano Juventus; the Juventus are
the Torino team.
In WV No. 382 (28 June) our ar-
ticle on the pope plot trial gave the
date of a meeting between assassin
Ali Agca and the deputy chief of
Italian military intelligence as
March 1981; it should have read
March 1982. And the amount of
funds missing from the Vatican-
controlled subsidiaries of Banco
Ambrosiano was not $4 billion. but
. $1.4 billion.
purely organizational terms, i.e., "exter-
nal" to the one organization on the
planet that they conceded had a revolu-
tionary program. During its three years
of posturing as upholders of the banner
of genuine Spartacism, the ET has man-
aged to win not one single recruit from
the SL. Even most of our ex-members
have steered clear of this vicious lash-
up. The ET's German cothinkers have
urged them to seek greener pastures
elsewhere; perhaps the newly incarnat-
ed American BT has had some offers
from somebody seeking used-up anti-
Trotskyists at bargain prices.
Consider the ETs odd behavior at the
SL Central Committee plenum held
over the summer. That meeting was
attended by the vast majority of the SL
membership, ostensibly the target of ET
propaganda and recruitment efforts.
Upon hearing that the ET had some
materials to bring to our members'
attention, and concerned to avoid
screaming fights in the lobby of the
hotel, we urged the ET to get a room and
said we'd direct interested comrades
there between plenum sessions. The ET
got a room, we announced it in our
opening session, but when comrades
headed over during the lunch break ...
the ET had already packed up and left!
They did not return. The explanation
that offers itself is that the ET is utterly
demoralized and/or that their reasons
for turning up at our plenum were other
than to distribute literature and engage
our members in polemics.
Now enter the Bolshevik Tendency.
Tendency of what? Tendency to what?
Presumably we will be informed in due
course. But we suspect it's a change in
the name to better play the ET's game:
get the SL. The ET anti-Spartacists for
hire may have found their original name
a liability with the "left" betrayers they
associate with. It reminds us of a
cartoon from the sixties, which shows
police beating bystanders at an antiwar
demonstration. One cop is beating a
respectable-looking citizen who pro-
tests, "But officer, I'm an anti-
Communist!" The cop replies, "I don't
care what kind of Communist you are"
and continues to club his victim. The
ET's popular-frontist friends' response
to the word "Spartacist" is like the
devil's to holy water.
So what is the ET, rechristened BT,
up to? Rumors abound that they are
playing footsie, at least, with the local
henchmen of one Nahuel Moreno,
Argentine adventurer supreme, whom
we sincerely urge widows and orphans
not to entrust their life savings to. We
use the plural "henchmen" advisedly, as
the two wings of the Morenoites in the
U.S. are at each other's throats. Said ET
persons overwhelmingly quit the SL of
their own will, which they claim was not
free (a couple were expelled for individ-
ual malfeasance, and we would only
wish them on our worst enemies, which
may be coming to pass). To these birds
we say, have a good time in Nahuel
Town, and perhaps the Peace and
Freedom Party. And a word to those
seeking anti-Spartacists for hire: caveat
emptor-let the buyer beware!
the difference between the men in the
field and those who sent them there to
die." Thus during the thoroughly
squalid Falklands/Malvinas war-
where we advocated the defeat of both
the Tory butchers and the Argentine
military junta-we unequivocally de-
nounced Margaret Thatcher's gratui-
tous sinking of the Argentine ship
Genera/ Belgrano, which sent 360
sailors to their deaths. To whom were
we selling out when we deplored this war
crime by the perverse Iron Lady? If the
ET/ BT were to apply Occam's Razor to
this puzzle, they could deduce that
maybe we just don't believe in wanton
killing.
The ETs bloodthirstiness is usually
directly proportional to their physical
distance from the political events in
question. But there is one exception to
this rule: they have shown a real
commitment and appetite to get, to
damage, to destroy the, Spartacist
League, by any means. .
Not surprisingly, this has led them, as
the saying goes, to lie down with dogs
and get up with fleas. The ET has
resorted to COINTELPRO-style prov-
ocation against us, has embraced
fascistic thugs, and has tried-through
lies, insinuation and provocative
behavior-to set us up for state harass-
ment and worse. The flip side is their
studied indifference to the victimization
of our supporters by the bourgeoisie.
Clearly not worried about the possibili-
ty of repression of the tiny ET, these
renegades are marked by a cavalier
disregard for and attempted sabotage of
our struggle against witchhunting and
state terror, exposing their professed
orientation toward our ranks as utterly
fraudulent.
Those who are guided by intense
subjective malice as a political program
are just asking to be sorneone's tool,
witting or unwitting (sometimes both).
Perhaps some ET / BT supporters tell
themselves that their lying allegations of
"violence" against the SL are "merely"
in the service of the reformists and
centrists of the popular-front swamp
who need excuses to seek to exclude us
and suppress our Trotskyist views. But
applying the criterion cui bono (who
benefits) to the ET/ BT suggests answers
ranging from the merelv unsavorv to the
downright sinister. - -
So far, the ET has not made any
public explanation of its name change.
Originally they presented themselves in
indeed have a reverence for human life.
Unlike pacifists of the Gandhiau tradi-
tion, who preach nonviolence only to
the oppressed and offer up martyrs in
the thousands upon this altar, Marxists,
as Isaac Deutscher pointed out, have
"laid bare the roots of violence in our
society, which the others have not
done."
The ET's arguments are antithetical
to a Bolshevik policy toward the armed
forces. As we wrote in "Marxism and
Bloodthirstiness" (WV No. 345, 6
January 1984), "For Marxists there is all
W e ~ k Three
Totals
Local
Quota Week
%
(In points) Three
Atlanta 100 83 83
Boston 350 254 73
Chicago 280 315V, 113
Cleveland 180 265 147
Los Angeles 160 61 38
New York 900 689'h 77
Oakland 470 297 63
San Francisco 230 184 80
Washington, D.C. 150 144 96
National Tolal 2,820 2,293 81
0$2/4 issues of
Women and Revolution
0$2/10 introductory issues of
Workers Vanguard
(includes Spartacist)
WV Photo'
ET wasn't there when thousands of black unionists and youth rallied behind
our leadership to face down KKK provocation in streets of Washington in
1982. ET has plenty of energy for lying attacks on SL, no stomach for
revolutionary struggles in Reagan's America.
even knows who blew up those Marines!
And now that four Russians have been
kidnapped and maybe murdered by one
or another of those shadowy commu-
nalist groups, is the ET going to happily
hail this atrocity as another blow for the
self-determination of the oppressed?
The ET said we'd gone soft on
American imperialism and sneered that
our Lebanon slogan represented our
"latest application of some longstanding
Gandhian-Trotskyist tradition of rever-
ence for life." Here the ET betrays its
philistinism and cynicism- Marxists do
in Lebanon. When Reagan sent Marines
into Beirut in a spectacularly disastrous
move, and a bunch of those Marines got
blown up, WV said "U.S. Marines Out
of Lebanon, Now, Alive!" This was in
deliberate counterposition to our re-
sponse to the U.S. invasion of the tiny
black island of Grenada, where we said
"U.S. Out, Dead or Alive!" Unlike in
Vietnam or Nicaragua, where there is a
just cause to be supported and the U.S.
is the military might on the wrong side,
there is no progressive side in the present
Lebanese quagmire. To this day nobody
WV Photo
Subscribe Now! ----,
388
SPECIAL! A packet of Spartacist literature with one-year subscriptions to both
Workers Vanguard and Young Spartacus.
0$5/24 issues of Workers Vanguard
(includes Spartacist)
o New 0 Renewal
0$2/9 issues of Young Spartacus
Name ~ -
Address ~
____________Phone (
City State Zip ~ ~
SAN FRANCISCO-As we were dem-
onstrating against apartheid here on
September 7, who should show up but
the so-called External Tendency? But
guess what-the ET is now the BT.
Their placards were signed: "Bolshevik
Tendency (formerly the External Ten-
dency of the international Spartacist
tendency)." Well, as Max Shachtman
reportedly quipped: "The smaller the
group, thelonger the name."
Regular readers of WV are familiar
with the ETs, a c1iquist clot of embit-
tered white ex-members who individual-
ly quit the SL after losing their appetite
for class struggle and revolution during
the Reagan years. If the ET / BT had any
claim to political coherence, which they
don't, they might have dubbed them-
selves the MT-Menshevik Tendency.
For insofar as they have a political
profile it is rightist: slavishly conciliato-
ry to the pro-imperialist union bureauc-
racy, worse than "colorblind" on the
black question, recoiling from the
Trotskyist defense of the Soviet Union,
shot through with virulent, whining,
philistine anti-Leninism (see "From
Cream Puffs to Food Poisoning," WV
No. 349, 2 March 1984).
Overlaying the ET / BTs general
Menshevik profile are certain grossly
pathological deformations. Thus, this
grouping evinces blood lust red in tooth
and claw, albeit of a highly vicarious
sort. A grotesque recent example is their
position that the innocent victims of
Reagan's anti-Soviet KAL 007 provoca-
tion got what they deserved. We said the
Russians were right to shoot down what
looked like a military aircraft; like the
Russians, we deplored the loss of life
and laid the responsibility at Reagan's
door. The ET would like to see us
reveling in death, the better to fulfill
the self-justifying fantasies of anti-
communists.
The ET professes to find "social
patriotism" and a "flinch" behind the
SL's refusal to hail pointless bloodshed
r----
. _ - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ~ - - - - - - - - - - -
10 WORKERS VANGUARD
Spartacist Party Campaign Needs $$$
Farrakhan...
(continuedfrom page 5)
expectations with their optimism about
what that politics can accomplish but
they cannot deliver the goods.... In
short, local hlack leaders are ready
targets for black rage."
They might consider the fate of black
collaborators of the apartheid regime.
So these black misleaders alternately
woo and gently "criticize" their brother
Farrakhan-because they need his
demagogy to block integrated working-
class-led struggle for black liberation.
Provoking Race War
Louis Farrakhan is an enemy of black
people not only because he ties them to
the Democratic Party of Mondale, Ed
Koch and George Wallace. As we wrote
during the Jackson campaign, Farra-
khan is dangerous precisely because
"his rhetoric of race war can be
exploited by the KKK-backed Reagan-
ites to incite race-terror. Remember the
1979 Greensboro, North Carolina
massacre in which five anti-racist
militants and leftists were gunned down
by the Klan and Nazis (accompanied by
government agents) in broad daylight!
All-white juries have repeatedly freed
these fascist killers, thereby providing
legal sanction' to racist murder. At
bottom, Farrakhan has only his mouth
while the white Hitler-lovers have the
guns and friends in high places" (WV
No. 355, 25 May 1984).
When Farrakhan spoke in L.A., the
Jewish establishment raised a hue and
cry and were joined by the Nazis backed
up by their friends in high places, like
California governor Deukmejian. When
these "notables" attack Farrakhan for
racism and bigotry, it is revolting
hypocrisy. Where was the outcry when
Orange County cops shot little Patrick
Mason to death in his home? Where was
the outcry when L.A. cops shot preg-
nant Delois Young, a black woman, in
the stomach at her front door, causing
her to lose her baby?
And while these "democratic"
hypocrites were condemning Farra-
khan, the Nazi scum were outside the
Forum spreading their genocidal
Campaign...
(continuedfrom page 3)
two-year struggle to expose the truth
about the murder of her son.
* * * * *
On September 26, Spartacist support-
ers picketed jointly with the Eleanor
Bumpurs Justice Committee outside the
state appellate court at 25th and
Madison. The appeals "Court was hear-
ing a demand for reinstatement of
criminal charges against Stephen Sulli-
van, the Emergency Services Unit cop
who "evicted" the black grandmother
from her Bronx apartment last Novem-
ber by blasting her with a double-
barreled shotgun. The dozen protesters
chanted, "Remember Eleanor Bum-
purs-Stop the Killer Cops!"
The Spartacist Party Election
Campaign Needs $$$! Wall Street,
the slumlords and kill-crazy cops
gave racist mayor Koch a "war chest"
of over $5 million to "finish the job"
on New York's working class and
minorities. The working people's
candidates,' Stamberg and Kartsen,
depend on your contributions to get
out the Spartacist program of mobi-
lizing New York's labor and minori-
ties to "Kick Out Koch! Dump
Trump! Smash Racist Cop Terror!"
Election law requires reporting
names of people who contribute over
$99. So because our party does not
4 OCTOBER 1985
message for blacks, Jews, Latins and all
the oppressed. Powerful integrated
labor/minority mobilizations should
have swept these fascists off the streets!
But the criminal policies of labor fakers,
BEOs and Jewish leaders emboldened
the Nazis to parade at a place where
15,000 blacks were gathered. The
audience in the Inglewood Forum was
being set up for slaughter. While
Farrakhan was peddling toothpaste and
detergent inside, thousands of blacks
were being hog-tied in the face of the
fascist threat on the outside.
Malcolm X-though he never found
the class-struggle road to black libera-
tion, the program of revolutionary
integrationism-recognized the role of
the Nation of Islam in hog-tying the
black masses. In January 1965, Mal-
colm sent a telegram to George Lincoln
Rockwell, head of the American Nazi
Party: "This is to warn you that I am no
longer held in check from fighting white
supremacists by Elijah Muhammad's
separatist Black Muslim movement,
and ... that you and your Ku Klux
Klan friends will be met with maxi-
mum physical retaliation" (Malcolm X
Speaks).
The racist mobilization provoked by
Farrakhan in L.A. is small potatoes
compared to what could happen in New
York City. Los Angeles' black mayor
Bradley is a semi-ally of the nationalist
demagogue. But New York's Ed Koch is
the closest thing to a Jewish fascist in
this country, and he holds a piece of
state power. He is whipping up a frenzy
over Farrakhan's scheduled appearance
at Madison Square Garden. Between
them, the anti-Semitic demagogue and
the Zionist pig are threatening to bring
the murderous bloodletting of Beirut to
the streets of New York.
For Koch to denounce Farrakhan for
"racism and religious bigotry" is like
Adolf Hitler denouncing ultra-Zionist
leader Jabotinsky for the same. Koch's
cops treat black and Hispanic youth like
they were West Bank Palestinians. And
on Koch's right flank stand the fascistic
Jewish Defense League, formed by Meir
Kahane (a.k.a. Michael King) in the late
1960s. The JDL's first targets, before it
started terrorizing Soviet diplomats,
were black nationalist activists and
The D.A.'s office, of course, accepts
the cops' racist lie that an infirm
grandmother was a physical "threat" to
the police who kicked in her door. In
court, the "prosecution" noted Sulli-
van's record as a "hero" cop and
apologized, "Sometimes our heroes
make mistakes." Sullivan, he argued,
should be charged with "reckless
manslaughter"-his "mistake" was only
in firing the second blast which hit Mrs.
Bumpurs in the chest, after the first shot
had blown off her hand. Cop Sullivan's
lawyer said there should be no charges,
since the blast was not "reckless" but
intentional. "This shooting came with-
in police department guidelines," he
emphasized.
Koch said the same when 10,000
armed cops surrounded the Bronx
courthouse last February, demanding
the charges against Sullivan be dropped.
disclose names of individual con-
tributors, we will not accept dona-
tions over $99 from individuals.
Trade unions-and other organiza-
tions, however, are more than wel-
come to donate larger amounts.
If you want to fight Koch/Reagan
reaction, get involved! Send your
contributions to: Spartacist Party
Campaign Committee, c/o Box 444,
Canal St. Sta., New York, NY 10013.
And stop by our campaign headquar-
ters at 41 Warren Street in lower
Manhattan, Monday through Thurs-
_day, 5-8 p.m. or Saturday, 1-5 p.m.,
or call (212) 267-1025.
UPI
Democrats' "Rainbow Coalition":
Jesse Jackson. gladhands George
"Segregation Forever" Wallace in
1983.
white New Left radicals. In a city with
over two million Jews, Farrakhan's
shrill anti-Semitism could provide the
JDL with a mass base for race war. And
in a race war in this country, blacks will
lose. It will be pretty ugly for Jews too.
Black America is under attack, and
Louis Farrakhan is giving aid and
comfort to tlte enemy. Not only did he in
the 1984 Democratic Party primaries
stump for Jesse Jackson, who then
stumped for Mondale; following Mon-
dale's defeat, Farrakhan announced he
was "happy Mr. Reagan won," cheering
the slashing of welfare and social
programs for blacks as an opportunity
to "prove that black people can make it
without a handout" (Chicago Tribune,
12 November 1984). And now the
sinister minister Farrakhan is openly
allying with fascists, namely California
KKK leader (and former Democratic
senatorial candidate) Tom Metzger.
According to the Washington Times
(30 September), mouthpiece of Sun
Myung Moon's ultraright political-
religious cult, Grand Dragon Metzger
was one of ten members of a "White
American Political Association" per-
sonally invited by Farrakhan to attend
the L.A. rally. Metzger's outfit, also
known as the White American Resis-
tance, or WAR, made a cash donation
Of course racist murder is standard
operating procedure in the NYPD. So a
compliant judge threw the charges out
of court. The Spartacist campaign says
that organized labor should be leading
tens of thousands of workers.in action to
smash the racist terror in the streets and
ghettos of New York.
Fascist
Attacks...
(cant inued from page J2)
individual. But as a spokesman of the
Humanist Party pointed out: "It's a
result of the political climate of the
Reagan administration." Racist terror-
ists are emboldened when black babies
are firebombed and murdered in Phila-
delphia, when Reagan puts flowers on
Nazi SS graves. Abortion clinic bomb-
ers are officially certified as not
terrorist by the FBI, and federal agents
serve as Klan/Nazi triggermen, as in
Greensboro, North Carolina.
The SFPD wondered that a small
group of harmless "peace" types like the
Humanist Party would be a target of the
anti-Semitic bomber. Why? The Rea-
ganites have made "secular humanism"
a dirty word. The Senate voted to ban
expending educational funds on it. For
the New Right secular humanism is a
godless conspiracy, a popular front of
bleeding-heart liberals, socialists and
communists who want to subvert the
U.S.A. by opposing bombings, maim-
ings and witch burnings.
But it's not just Reagan who em-
boldens the racist terrorists. The
Democrats won't stop the fascists any
more than the Republicans. They want
to Farrakhan as "a gesture of under-
standing." "They want their own gov-
ernment and their own territory and
that's exactly what we want for them
and for ourselves.... They speak out
against the Jews and the oppressors in
Washington," Metzger was quoted as
saying.
When the Fascists Were
Driven Off the Streets
Since the destruction of the Black
Panther Party in the early 1970s, the
most significant break in the cycle of
defeat, bullshit and run-around for
black people in America was the
powerful Labor/Black Mobilization
against the Klan in Washington, D.C.
on 27 November 1982. Initiated by the
Spartacist League, this mass action
brought out more than 5,000 black
workers and youth, stopping the KKK
lynchers from marching in the nation's
capital. This was one of the few
occasions in recent years where blacks
were not on their knees. And the Marion
Barrys, Jesse Jacksons and Louis
Farrakhans were nowhere to be seen.
Ex-civil rights leader Marion Barry,
now the Democratic mayor of Washing-
ton, had insisted along with Reagan's
Department of Injustice that the racist
terrorists should be allowed to march.
But thousands were lined up at the foot
of Capitol Hill to make sure the cross-
burners would not terrorize D.C. "One,
two, three, four-it's time to finish the
Civil War!" the crowd chanted as they
marched the route the KKKers had
threatened to take. It was a day that
black people could be black and proud.
because with the red leadership of the
SL they fought back and defeated those
who would exterminate them.
The Spartacists are the champions of
black freedom in this country, because
our program for world socialist revolu-
tion is the only road to black liberation.
It's high time for the working people and
oppressed to take up the fight for a
workers government that will put an end
to this rotting, racist system, sweeping
aside its defenders no matter what color
of the rainbow they reflect. For laborI
black defense against racist terror!
Build a multiracial Trotskyist van-
guard party!.
to maintain these crazed, Soviet-hating
shock troops as a reserve to terrorize
blacks and unions when "legal" means
aren't enough. For "Dixie Dianne"
Feinstein it's the chickens coming home
to roost. In April 1980 Feinstein insisted
that the Nazis had the "right" to
celebrate Hitler's birthday at the Civic
Center; only a 1,500-strong labor/black
mobilization initiated by the SL kept the
Nazi vermin off the streets.
Last year the San Francisco mayor
insisted the Confederate flag be flown in
the Civic Center, until we tore down the
banner of slavery for good. And it was
Feinstein who belittled the cop display
of the swastika. If the thugs in blue and
fascists in white sheets think they've got
a green light to terrorize blacks and Jews
it's hardly surprising. Anyone who
thinks Feinstein is going to clean up the
fascist scum is rendering himself de-
fenseless. It will take determined labor-
centered anti-racist defense guards to
crush the racist terror attacks.
South Africa:
Razor's Edge
Reagan/Congress
Sanctions Are a Cover-Up!
Smash Apartheid!
For Workers Revolution!
Speaker: Ed Clarkson
SL Central Committee
Saturday, October 12, 7:30 p.m.
Gold Room, Blackstone Hotel
636 South Michigan Ave.
For more information: (312)663-0715
CHICAGO'
11
W()/iIlE/iS "NfitJ,/iIJ
Fascist Bomb Attacks Against Jews, Secular Humanists in S.F.
For Labor/Minority Defense
Against Nazi Nightriders!
ployed" for 26 years (I), yet had enough
extra cash to print and distribute fascist
literature, manufacture bombs and cart
them around in his van. He had an arrest
record, but was always released. How
did he support himself and stay out of
jail? We are reminded of Gary Rowe,
the killer of civil rights activist
Viola Liuzza, and other informer!
provocateur types used by secret police
agencies of the capitalist state.
The FBI, of course, says they believe
Phelps acted alone. In cases like this,
especially where there is widespread
outrage, the state always tries to prove
that these are the acts of a single sick
continued on page 11
,
Knowland/Oakland Tribune
May 1985: After anti-Nazi rock promoter Bill Graham protested Reagan's
salute to Hitler's SS at Bitburg, fascists firebombed Graham's office.
had used the same kind of pipe bombs
with egg timers as detonators.
Phelps has now been charged for four
of the bombings, including the SF State
attempt. This scum has a track record a
mile long: his arrest in 1980 followed an
investigation of a death-threat tele-
phone service which agitated callers to
"kill niggers and white traitors." He now
claims to be the head of a virulently anti-
Semitic, anti-black, violence-mongering
organization called the "Holy Brother-
hood Church." Publications of the Ku
Klux Klan, Aryan Nations Church and
other racist filth were found in his
garage.
Phelps claims to have been "unern-
labor-centered defense guards drawn
from all those on the fascists' deadly hit
lists are urgently necessary to stop this
murderous anti-Semitic nightriding. In
1976 racists repeatedly firebombed the
home of black International Harvester
worker C.B. Dennis. a memher of the
LJAW, when he attempted to move into
a white suburb of Chicago. The cops did
nothing to stop the terrorists. But SL
supporters and other militants in the
LJ AW initiated a union-sponsored
defense guard outside Dennis' home. It
was not bombed again.
The latest bombings are part of an
escalation of rightist terror attacks in
San Francisco. In November 1984 a
Holocaust memorial in Lincoln Park
was desecrated. Last Maya bomb was
discovered in a classroom in the School
of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State
LJ niversity shortly before a black history
class was to meet in that room. That
same month the offices of rock impre-
sario Bill Graham were destroyed by a
firebomb just after he led a protest
against Reagan's trip to Bitburg to
salute Nazi stormtroopers. In July, a
bomb was left hanging on the door
of the Congregation Adath Israel
synagogue.
Repeated police "investigations" re-
sulted in nothing. But this time Mayor
Feinstein and the cops were embar-
rassed. The firebombing spree got wide
press coverage, following the August
newspaper and television accounts of
the cops' swastika, exposed and publi-
cized by the SL. Suddenly a cop
remembered that all of these attempted
bombings bore a striking resemblance
to a case he had worked on in 1980,
when a rightist thug, Coy Ray Phelps,
SAN FRANCISCO-Less than a
month after cops here brazenly dis-
played a Nazi swastika in a police van
while "patrolling" an anti-apartheid
demonstration, a fascist terrorist placed
bombs at the offices of a small liberal
political organization, a synagogue and
the home of a rabbi.
Shortly after midnight on September
16, a bomb wrapped in anti-Semitic
leaflets exploded at the offices of the
Humanist Party, blowing off the door
and shattering windows in nearby
buildings. Fortunately the two party
workers inside were not injured. The
following morning a pipe bomb was
found fastened to the door of a syna-
gogue school at Congregation Beth
Sholom in the city's Richmond district.
The six-inch long, two-inch diameter
fragmentation grenade was intended to
kill and maim. It was planted on the first
day of Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New
Year, when hundreds of worshippers
were gathered, including a large number
of children. Later that day another
bomb was found and dismantled at the
San Francisco home of Rabbi Jacob
Traub.
After the bombings the fanatic right-
wing Zionist Jewish Defense League
(JDL) offered to provide patrols to
prevent further attacks. The SFPD and
liberal Jewish organizations were
aghast, seeking instead to promote
confidence in the police-the same cops
who only a few weeks before flaunted a
Nazi poster against
the execution of South African militant
Benjamin Moloise. The SF "swastika"
cops are going to protect Jews against
terrorist attack?! .
The Spartacist League says anti-racist
Nassau D.A. Marches with "Right-to-Life" Bigots
Defend Abortion Rights!
The/allowing press release was issued
Septemher 16 bv the Spartacist Part I'
Campaign Committee, .
On Saturday, September 14 "right to
life" bigots targeted the Bill Baird
abortion clinic in Hempstead. Long
Island, intimidating women patients
inside with ghoulish effigies and cries of
"Murder, Inc." and "butchered babies."
Ominously. Nassau County D.A. Den-
nis Dillon was leading the protest, even
as Baird was reporting death threats and
calls that "this building will be fire-
bombed before the day is out." The
Spartacist candidates today denounced
this outrage, saying: "Abortion is sup-
posed to be legal in this country. D.A.
Dillon's presence on the picket line
offers open solidarity of the state with
the anti-abortion terrorists."
Marjorie Starnberg, candidate for
mayor, said: "From D.A. Dillon to the
NYPD 'off duty' cop who attacked and
arrested a woman outside a Brooklyn
abortion clinic last March, this official
state terror against working people and
minorities must be stopped! In scores of
firebombings and hundreds of other
attacks on abortion clinics, it is pure
chance that no one has yet been killed.
But death is written all over the 'right to
life' campaign of terror, as vicious
reactionaries seek to drive working-
class and poor women back to the rusty
coat hangers in the back alleys."
Ed Kartsen, candidate for Manhattan
borough president, noted, "The anti-
abortion terrorists have felt the wind in
their sails and the nod of approval from
the White House. It is no accident that
the fanatics who seek to roll back
women's rights are the same vicious
racists who would d rive blacks back to
slavery, like Ku Klux Klansman John
Burt, convicted bomber of the Pensaco-
la, Florida abortion clinic."
These are no hollow threats against
Bill Baird, pioneering advocate of abor-
tion rights. Six years ago. Baird's clinic
was firebombed with SO women inside.
Yet D.A. Dillon let off the murderous
arsonist with a ludicrous seven months
in a mental hospital! Baird's clinie in
Hempstead was the first in the country.
It was in large part due to his militant
efforts that the right to abortion became
a national issue in the 1970s. Baird has
been shot at. beat up, spat on. arrested
and jailed eight times by his count.
Stamberg pointed out: "Of course, it's
never the wives. daughters and mis-
tresses of the rich men who rule this
country who suffer-they've always
been able to get their abortions, whether
legal not. in plush privacy with every
consideration. No, pOOL young teen-
agers and working-class women are
most hurt bv this violent reactionary
offensive. safe abortion on demand
is a desperately needed fundamental
right."
12 4 OCTOBER 1985