U.S. rulers’ worries over the Pentagon’s ability to field a reliable military harkens back to the mass GI rebellion during the Vietnam War. Writing in the June 1971 Armed Forces Journal, Col. Robert Heinl, a Marine historian, described it as “The Collapse of the Armed Forces.” And it was a massive collapse:
• Heinl reported that sedition “infests the Armed Services….There appear to be some 144 underground newspapers…at U.S. military bases in this country and overseas.”
• “Fragging” — the hurling of fragmentation grenades at officers — was common. GI’s raised bounties of up to $1,000 for leaders they wanted to rub out. Requests were published in the GIs’ underground papers. GI Says publicly offered a $10,000 bounty on the lieutenant colonel who led the costly assault on Hamburger Hill in 1969. In 1970 alone, the Pentagon reported 209 fraggings.
• In October, when the USS Kitty Hawk was ordered to return to the Philippines’ Subic Bay, black sailors led a major rebellion, including hand-to-hand battle with Marines sent to break up a meeting on board. The ship was forced to retire to San Francisco for a “6-month re-fitting job” and was removed from the war altogether.
• By November 1972, five giant aircraft carriers were tied up in San Diego, forced out of combat in the Gulf of Tonkin by crews involved in anti-war activities. When the USS Ranger was ordered into action in June 1972, 20 acts of sabotage culminated in the destruction of the main reduction gear, delaying its sailing for more than four months. When the ship made it back to the Gulf of Tonkin, sailors disabled it once again by deliberately setting it on fire, the sixth major disaster in the Seventh Fleet in a five-week period.
• Sailors on the USS Coral Sea organized a “Stop Our Ship” (SOS) movement, forcing its return to San Francisco. SOS then spread to the USS Enterprise through its underground paper.
• By the end of 1971, resistance was intensifying to the point that U.S. commanders ran short of reliable ground troops to send into battle. When President Richard Nixon resorted to massive air power, launching a 12-day, all-out bombardment of much of North Vietnam, individual pilots refused to participate. The super-secret 6990th Air Force Security Service unit staged a work stoppage bordering on open mutiny. During the stoppage, according to Seymour Hersh’s The Price of Power, there were cheers whenever a B-52 was shot down by the Vietnamese.
• In March 1972, when the USS Midway was ordered to leave San Francisco for Vietnam, protests and sabotage swept the ship. Crewmen spilled 3,000 gallons of oil into San Francisco Bay (San Francisco Chronicle, 5/24/72).
• “Search and evade” — avoidance of combat by units in the field — became a virtual principle of the war.
• Between July 1, 1966 and December 31, 1973, there were 503,926 “incidents of desertion” (NY Times, 8/20/74). In 1970 alone, the Army recorded 65,643 deserters, the rough equivalent of four infantry divisions.
These incidents are only a sampling of the massive resistance and rebellion by GIs during the Vietnam War. Books have since described what was largely kept from the U.S. population. As Colonel Heinl reported in his “Collapse” article, these “widespread conditions among American forces in Vietnam…have only been exceeded in this century…by the collapse of the Tsarist armies in 1916 and 1917” in the Russian Revolution.
What GIs did in the past can be done again.
LOS ANGELES, CA, July 11 — Progressive Labor Party joined together with workers from a university campus here to rally and march into the office of the assistant vice chancellor. These workers have been fighting for four years in order to be hired by the university itself — not by an outsourcing company that had fired workers on a whim and forced the remaining workers to do twice the work. Recently, the workers won that battle, but the fight continues.
In the last three months about 30 workers, almost a third of the staff, have received “counseling memos.” This is a fancy way of saying they were written up. Many of these write-ups were based on the fact that the supervisors didn’t understand what was necessary in order to get the work done. For example, one worker was written up for being “out of area.” The worker wasn’t working in the building they were supposed to be because the workload they had been given in another building was too much and they could not finish on time. Three workers have been fired recently because of these attacks.
Latina Women Won’t Back Down
The supervisors have also been harassing the workers in other ways, such as giving them their checks late. This is a blatant attempt to intimidate these militant, mainly Latina women workers. The bosses and supervisors are scared of these workers because they have refused to back down.
Today was no exception. The workers chanted and refused to wait as they walked into the building and into the assistant vice chancellor’s office. They presented him with a petition. They demanded that the harassments stop, that workers be rehired, that all “counseling memos” be rescinded, and that the workloads be reduced to a reasonable size for each worker.
The assistant vice chancellor said that he would “look into it.” These workers have heard that before. So they told him they need action within a week or they would continue to fight.
These university bosses and their pet bureaucrats should be scared. These workers have the will to fight and communists are on their side. We must transform this reform fight for reasonable working conditions. A reform maintains the system that keeps the working class fighting the same fights over and over again for the bare minimum. It essentially builds capitalism, and fools workers into thinking that capitalism can be reformed for workers’ interests. We need to put forth revolution. We need a system that works for all workers: communism.
- Information
Mexico: Building International Unity and Communist Solidarity
- Information
- 15 August 2012 71 hits
Fifty members and friends of Progressive Labor Party from around the U.S. and Mexico, across borders, are participating in a Summer Project in Mexico. The PLP has planted the seeds of communism in Mexico, the U.S., and many other areas worldwide. We’re cultivating these seeds, a long-term process with many ups and downs, which will prepare the international working class for its role in making communist revolution.
This process involves many inter-connected elements, all of which are evident at the Project in Mexico:
The working class requires international unity, which we put into practice by building ties between comrades and friends across borders and by supporting workers’ and students’ struggles in all areas of the world. In building an international Party, we are overcoming capitalist divisions caused by racism, nationalism and sexism, as well as obstacles like different languages and cultural backgrounds.
Communists organize the working class and give leadership in the class struggle while introducing and fighting for PLP’s communist ideas in the struggle.
We understand the importance of raising the political consciousness of the working class and making communist ideas mass ideas. In the process of revolution for communism and consolidation of the new communist society this ideology is a powerful weapon.
We learn how to answer workers’ questions about the strengths and weaknesses of the old communist movement, how communism works in practice and overcoming capitalist individualism and anti-communist lies.
We are building a base among workers and students in order to organize Party study-action groups and Party clubs (collectives of members).
We are developing new leadership, especially among youth and women.
Spread PLP Literature
In all areas, the PLP in Mexico is advancing. During the Summer Project, we organized study groups to understand the Party’s line: “What We Fight For.” Workers and youth in Party concentrations in factories, communities and schools agreed to join the study groups. One dynamic young woman, active at her university, joined PLP.
In the first week of the Project, we distributed hundreds of CHALLENGES written and printed in Mexico. We also distributed 3,000 flyers about a community fighting back against government plans to cause flooding. They want to form reservoirs where water will be sent to purification plants and sold at prices working-class families can’t afford. Whole neighborhoods risk losing their homes so the government can continue to provide abundant water to wealthy citizens and irrigate large farms owned by capitalists inside and outside Mexico. Meanwhile, water is turned off in poor workers’ homes for many hours at a time.
Anger and fear are mixed as neighbors in this community organize to fight back with communist leadership and growing consciousness about the necessity to organize for communist revolution.
Capitalism offers scarcity, poverty and exploitation to the working class, from Mexico to India! The Party will organize international support for this struggle. (More details in an upcoming article.)
The Project so far has been well-organized and strongly led by a team of workers and students, including five women leaders from Mexico and the U.S. Capitalism uses sexism, like racism and nationalism, to divide workers and keep our class weak. Communists reject the idea that women and men should have separate roles in society. We need to pay more attention to winning and developing women in order to build unity and strengthen the Party and the working class.
Workers and youth from Mexico and the U.S. are organizing together, cooking and cleaning collectively, and overcoming the language barrier. Onward to week two!
(More articles and letters will follow about communist organizing among workers and youth and in the communities, among teachers and students, and evaluation and experiences of Project volunteers.)
- Information
Tel-Aviv Workers: Burn Down Capitalism, Not Yourselves!
- Information
- 15 August 2012 77 hits
TELL-AVIV, ISRAEL-PALESTINE, July 20 — Moshe Silman, died from his wounds after setting himself on fire during last week’s rally against the government’s economic policy. This act of desperation served as an example to several other workers, pushed to the brink of suicide by the inhuman capitalist system, who began setting themselves on fire to protest their poverty.
One hundred sixy years ago, Marx and Engels wrote how the capitalist system, in its dog-eat-dog competition between businesses, drives many petit-bourgeois (the self-employed and the small businessmen) into the proletariat (working class). Silman’s tale is a clear example of this. At one time he owned a tiny transport company with four trucks, but due to debts to the National Insurance (Israel’s “Social Security”), one of his trucks was repossessed, starting a downward spiral for him.
Soon he found himself penniless, forced to work for his living as a taxi-cab driver. Eventually he suffered a series of strokes, forcing him off his job. He then had to live on about $550 a month in disability benefits, hardly enough to pay for food, medications and rent. Finally, he found himself living on the mean streets. As an act of protest, he committed suicide by setting himself on fire.
Capitalism is an economic system with no mercy. The bosses (much less than “1%” of the population) own great wealth produced by the labor of workers. The workers (more than “99%”) own nothing substantial and are forced to sell their labor power — essentially, the best part of one’s life and livelihood — in order to earn an often meager existence. There is no real middle ground between these two classes. Competition between businesses leads to the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few big capitalists at the expense of their smaller and less vicious competitors, who end up, in many cases, driven into the working class. Even the so-called “middle class,” workers who were given a few more crumbs than usual from the bosses’ table, find themselves more and more thrown back to the bottom of the working class by the crisis of the capitalist system.
The only real way out of this hell on earth is to get rid of the root of the problem, the capitalist system itself. Instead of harming themselves out of desperation, workers should organize, fight back and eventually lead a communist revolution under the banners of the Progressive Labor Party to overthrow the profit system once and for all. Only together, led by a Party of millions of workers, will we be able to build a real future — a communist future where workers will run the world for the interest of the working class!
Local working-class people in Iraq and Afghanistan, mainly civilians, have bore the brunt of suffering in the U.S. imperialist wars, with casualties, both deaths and injuries, numbering in the millions. This carnage has also damaged working-class U.S. troops — who’ve survived physically uninjured — by what they’ve seen and done. For every U.S. soldier killed in the war zone, about 25 vets die by suicide.
The racist lies the Pentagon uses to direct U.S. working-class troops’ anger towards local workers, especially anger over a battle buddy’s death, underlie these skyrocketing suicide rates. These racist lies lead many troops to kill, beat or harass innocent local workers or at least passively support those troops that do.
Since the U.S. military defines the troops’ mission as only to “carry out good intentions,” it’s easy for troops to get angry at civilians who refuse to turn in insurgents and view these civilians as “ungrateful savages.”
Individualism A Loser
But once troops learn more about the profit motive behind the mission and are separated from the chain of command that reinforces racist lies, it becomes difficult to live with what happened.
Unlike Vietnam War veterans who had the option of joining a massive GI and veterans’ movement against racism and war (see box, page 2), today many veterans individually tear themselves up with guilt, shame, depression and rage. Many feel no one knows what they’re experiencing except maybe those who were there with them.
For thousands of veterans who wonder why they survived, the burden of carrying the memories of dead friends and civilians haunts their minds and becomes too much to bear.
Additionally, troops have been driven to suicide because of racist harassment. Army Private Danny Chen killed himself in Afghanistan after repeated anti-Chinese harassment from two Officers, four NCOs (Non-Commissioned Officers) and two fellow lower enlisted soldiers.
After public outrage from Danny’s family and the Chinese working-class community in New York City, the Army pressed charges on the eight soldiers who hazed Danny for weeks before his death. But the first soldier to stand court martial only received a 30-day sentence, a fine and demotion out of a possible 30-month sentence!
A Veterans Affairs hotline on suicide exists but capitalism has little to offer veterans dealing with suicidal thoughts. Addressing the racist lies of profit wars on a mass scale would undermine the bosses’ imperialist mission.
According to a pair of liberal mental health pundits, the mental damage imperialism does to working-class troops is a “moral wound” that can only be treated socially by a non-judgmental community that has the moral courage to “examine its own responsibility for the war.”
But it is not this “community” that is responsible for the U.S. bosses’ wars, it is capitalism. The VA suicide hotline may help some individuals but it cannot own up to exploiting the good intentions of working-class troops without risking rebellion within the ranks.
The most positive, lasting and significant way to address profit wars, racism and the intense feeling to make amends is to become part of a communist movement to smash the capitalist system that spawns these oil wars and racism. Getting vets involved in anti-racist fight-backs for jobs, education and more veterans’ services can be an important part of healing for many troops.
But ultimately, taking anti-racist and anti-imperialist actions in the barracks, on the battlefields and in the neighborhoods as part of the Progressive Labor Party is the most important way to undercut the imperialist mission that drives troops to suicide.
