“All my life I had struggled to rid the earth of the rich man’s crimes.”

— “Two Good Arms” by PL singers
Revolution Disc 2

The graphic novel Lives of Sacco and Vanzetti by Rick Geary dramatically presents the case of two Italian immigrants who were arrested for a 1920 murder and robbery. Nicola Sacco, a shoemaker, and Bartolemo Vanzetti, a fish peddler, both pleaded innocent and after seven agonizing years of controversy were finally executed. The trial attracted international attention because the real reasons for it was to carry on racist attacks on immigrants. The two men were anarchists who fought for workers rights and supported socialism.

The 1917 Russian Revolution had caused panic among capitalist rulers all around the world.  A Seattle general strike in February 1919 showed U.S. capitalists the strength of the working class with radical leadership.

In November 1919, a fire bomb went off at the house of Attorney General Palmer in Washington, D.C.and bombs also exploded in Philadelphia, Cleveland and  New York. Palmer used the bombs planted by a small group of anarchists to conduct raids to deport immigrants who were political radicals and socialists. About 10,000 immigrant workers were deported as a result of the Palmer Raids.  These “Red Scare” attacks were led by a 24-year-old Department of Justice official, J Edgar Hoover!

Vanzetti learned that a friend, the editor of an anarchist newspaper, had been arrested and detained by the Justice Department.  Two months later, his friend, still in custody of the Justice Department, mysteriously fell out of a 14th floor window and died. After hearing the news, Sacco and Vanzetti decided to warn their comrades to get rid of any anarchist literature and stay out of sight. 

The police learned that they were meeting with two anarchist friends, but the cops arrived too late to arrest all four anarchists. Only after seeing Sacco and Vanzetti on a street car, were they arrested on the flimsiest excuses because of the Red Scare.  Their trial was a thinly disguised frame-up that relied more on racist and political attacks on Sacco and Vanzetti as immigrant radicals than on any direct evidence.

Widespread hatred for capitalism and substantial support for revolutionary responses around the world led to many demonstrations and rebellions in support of Sacco and Vanzetti by workers in Germany, France, Switzerland, Portugal, South Africa, Mexico,  Argentina, Japan and Australia. There were fewer worker demonstrations demanding the release of Sacco and Vanzetti in the United States, possibly due to the intimidation of Atty. Gen. Palmer and the Red Scare raids deporting immigrant workers.

In March, 1927, Felix Frankfurter, a Harvard Law Professor and later a Supreme Court Justice, wrote an article in the Atlantic Monthly discussing the blatant prejudice of  the trial including:

1) The suspects were identified without a lineup;

2) The jurors were rounded up late at night;

3) The prosecution concealed an exonerating witness;

4) Atmosphere around the Red Scare and armed guards in the courthouse caused bias; 

5) Trial Judge Thayer made comments that Sacco was not patriotic;

6) The jury foreman made a statement before the trial that he already thought Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty; and

7) The stolen money was never recovered.

Sacco and Vanzetti’s case was appealed to the Supreme Court. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes refused to hear the case, replying, “We practice law and not justice.” The ruling class did not care about railroaded workers — they only cared about keeping workers from rebelling.

It was not until August 26, 1977, fifty years after their executions, that Governor Michael Dukakis stated the Sacco and Vanzetti were unfairly tried and convicted and “any stigma or disgrace should forever be removed from the names of Nicola Sacco and Bartolemo Vanzetti,” but Dukakis also never proclaimed their innocence.

Anarchists, leftists, socialists and communists all around the world have held up Sacco and Vanzetti as martyrs to the cause of fighting for workers’ rights and against capitalism. This graphic novel is easy to read and will be interesting to many middle school and high school students. It is well worth reading and discussing, especially about the racist and anti-working class nature of the laws and courts of the capitalist rulers.

Fighting against capitalism and racism and fighting for workers’ rights frightens the ruling class. This case shows the ruling class will use all of its state power to crush workers’ rebellions. Only a communist working-class revolution will smash the bosses’ injustice system and bring a real, if belated, recognition of the brave workers who have given their lives in the fight against capitalism.

Abridged and reprinted from a special issue of LE DÉFI , the local CHALLENGE in Haiti.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, October 28 — After the devastating 2010 earthquake a fragile Haiti was struck by a devastating cholera epidemic, brought in by the UN’s “peacekeeping” force MINUSTAH.

The UN did not vaccinate these troops coming in from an area where cholera is endemic. The so-called “international community” (which gave us cholera) wants us to believe the earthquake caused this genocidal epidemic when in fact the earthquake had nothing to do with it. There is a deathly silence about cholera here.  To this day, against all the scientific evidence, they refused to acknowledge their responsibility. Thousands among the oppressed class are dead, with many traumatized and in tears. If it is not eradicated soon, another wave of deaths will ensue because cholera is with us still and spreading.

It is a crime against the workers, peasants and students in Haiti, a small black population under the harsh, direct domination of U.S. imperialism. This is racism! The society in such countries is always under the imperialists’ control. They are our real enemies.

Poverty and its Diseases:
A Consequence of Capitalism

Poverty, hunger, and diseases like cholera stem from the domination and exploitation of the blood-sucking capitalist system. No capitalist state can ever stop driving people into extreme poverty, unemployment — and worse, death — under whatever form of rule the ruling class erects over the working class.

Once cholera established its rule here, it slaughtered many a family, and dumped into poverty many others who lost the relatives who could have helped them combat it. The authors of this evil are MINUSTAH, the UN and U.S. imperialism, joined to a capitalist state which is the tool of, and always defends, the bosses’ interests. These merchants of death could produce no other result. It’s a white sheet hiding a gaping wound. People will die by the thousands if we don’t understand that the state does not function in workers’ interests. We can’t look for hope where there is none to be found.

The Cholera Campaign: Direct Action and International Solidarity

In mid-September, some comrades brought our revolutionary politics to a teachers’ assembly just outside the capital, to connect cholera to the problems teachers are facing everywhere, and show how capitalism has created both. We wanted to prepare people for the revolutionary battle against the system itself if they lacked that perspective.

One comrade spoke about cholera awareness and then moved from a political analysis to mobilizing for the cholera campaign, linking problems of education to those of health. He noted that vaccination and ending cholera was right up there among the teachers’ demands; that teachers belonged to the same class as the workers who were victims of cholera; and that capitalism was the root cause of all these problems.

While he spoke other comrades distributed cholera campaign flyers to the 100 teachers in the crowd, to a few journalists and others who came to listen. “What can you give us to do?” asked several teachers, showing their desire to join the campaign. Many quickly grabbed the flyers and everyone was reading them.

The comrade leading the meeting addressed the journalists about why ending cholera was one of the teachers’ strike demands, how the epidemic was tied to the teacher’ problems. “If the government does nothing, strike!” shouted those distributing the flyers, and the whole crowd chanted it loudly for the press to hear.

As some went to additional meetings, others stayed to continue the discussion. The campaign is moving ahead and all comrades must commit themselves to its success.

During the third week of October, there were many demonstrations against MINUSTAH and against cholera, organized by a coalition to drive out MINUSTAH and obtain reparations for cholera victims. Union and student activists participated and distributed cholera campaign flyers. Such direct action will continue.

We call on the solidarity of all our international friends engaged in popular struggles to force the Haitian state, the UN and all the criminals guilty of this genocide to be forced to root out cholera in every corner of the country. The Ministry of Public Health must establish: universal vaccination of all people in Haiti; well-equipped nation-wide treatment centers with well-trained health workers; and clean water and modern sanitation systems.

Fighting Cholera Means
Fighting MINUSTAH

We demand that MINUSTAH leave Haiti, that they pay reparations to ALL their victims, and that they be punished under so-called human rights law. We must liberate the whole working class from this vicious occupation force, bandits with heavy weapons here to break our spirit and aid the reactionary ruling class and its government servants.

Their death squads massacred students and workers during the 2009 fight for the minimum wage. They don’t just have their jackboots on the necks of the poor and on workers in the factories. Everyone knows how they’ve sexually assaulted young girls, women and men; stolen peasants’ livestock; made innocent blood flow in the capital’s slums until the earth became mud. Their atrocities in Cap Haïtien remind us of slavery days, hanging people as the colonialists did. In Ti Goave they fired on demonstrators and in Port Salut grossly assaulted a pregnant teenager and a young boy.

In Port-au-Prince they’ve fired on demonstrators as they did to the hunger protestors in 2008; entered university campuses — Social Sciences, the Ecole Normale and the School of the Arts — to kidnap students and smash or steal equipment. And then they brought cholera, leaving more than 7,500 dead and hospitalizing 300,000, besides killing us with bullets and tear gas.

The workers worldwide have been facing huge problems of health, unemployment and hunger. National and international rulers do nothing to end this epidemic. We call on everyone suffering these problems to take to the streets and force them to act. Students and teachers, workers, professionals, unemployed: let’s rise up and march against cholera, against racism, against imperialist occupation. People everywhere have the right to live like human beings.

The fight against cholera is an international fight because it kills the working class internationally. That’s why the petition of ECHO (End Cholera in Haiti Organization) is for all the world’s workers. It’s being circulated in Haiti, the U.S. and all over. One single international working class is signing it, against capitalism and all its diseases.

Oppressed of the world, wherever you are, join us to fight this bloody, devastating capitalism. Surely our future cannot be built on racism, sexism and disease. We have to abolish this profit-driven view of “difference” we call racism, invented by capitalists to justify their exploitation.

Our class must defend our own destiny and our very lives, now in danger of being snuffed out. Our just demands must be satisfied. Neither MINUSTAH, the UN nor the capitalist state can resolve the problems of the working class or bring peace to the world. The solution is once and for all to destroy this system that eats our class alive! It is only communism, rule by and for the working class, that can liberate us.

Storms don’t know skin color or class, but capitalism is built on inequalities rooted in both.  An event like Hurricane Sandy that seems to affect “everyone” the same turns out to strike hardest at those who have the fewest resources, the fewest choices, the fewest places to go.   

Like Katrina in 2005, or the earthquake in Haiti in 2010 this system’s response to disaster shows that what is natural under capitalism is RACISM.   Footage of ruined yachts and vacation homes dominated the early images of the bosses’ media coverage. More recently news coverage has centered around devastated white communities of the region to the exclusion of areas like Red Hook, the Lower East Side, Coney Island and Canarsie.  But there is nothing “natural” about who pays the highest price in these disasters.  Meanwhile the ruling class gets to practice fascist police state tactics of population transfer, curfew, military direction of civilian affairs under the name of “emergency management.”

• ·       Undocumented workers live in fear of deportation and so many will not come forward to seek the help they need (in the aftermath of 9/11 families of undocumented restaurant workers in the Twin Towers received nothing!)
• ·       Mostly black DC 37 city workers were forced back to the job while mostly white UFT members got paid days off.  On the whole salaried workers have much more income protection than hourly wage workers.  
• ·       Red Hook supermarkets with no power take no electronic food stamps: no cash, no food.

Yet workers all over New York have worked collectively to help each other out.  While Obama and Bloomberg cruise around in helicopters giving orders, it will be workers who rebuild the homes, roads, rails, ports and more destroyed in this storm.  Some put their lives on the line to rescue people stuck on roofs of their homes, others have turned their front yards into collection centers for food, water and clothes that they then hand out to their neighbors. Still others have pooled what little resources they have to help the elderly, disabled and children get meals. This is human nature! The bosses push the idea that everyone is “naturally” greedy and selfish, but in real times of need, those lies are uncovered.

There is nothing natural about this disaster.   And as a global system capitalism had doomed countless millions to conditions like those we endure in Sandy-ravaged areas and much worse.   Sandy gathered strength over an ocean five degrees warmer than normal and hit a New York harbor where water levels have already risen a foot due to climate change.  As the Arctic Ocean melts oil companies race to drill the floor of the sea for more oil.  The wasteful nature of the profit system is driving our biosphere off a cliff. 

Under communism, natural disasters will continue to occur, but a global communist planned economy is the only hope for reversing human-induced climate change.  Under communism society will be organized with the needs of people in mind, not profit like under capitalism.  The infrastructure to make our neighborhoods safe will be built. People will be sent to safe evacuation centers without the worry that their belongings will get stolen, since everyone will have what they need.

Obama’s victory will not change what drives the attacks on our class.  Both candidates served this racist system of inequality that drops bombs on innocent children in Pakistan and at the same time allows hurricane victims to go hungry and cold.  Elections only build loyalty to this broken social order.  People’s response to this latest disaster shows that our class, the working class, has the need and the desire to help each other in times of need. Let’s build on those actions and fight for a world built on equality for all, a communist world!

An imperialist war-maker will occupy the White House no matter who wins the presidential election. Imperialism inevitably breeds war to settle conflicts among capitalist nations. In the United States, both the Democrats and Republicans organize for war to maintain U.S. domination worldwide. They differ only on how to wage it, on how the war machine can best protect and project U.S. capitalists’ global interests. 

Recent endorsements of Barack Obama or Mitt Romney by various retired military brass reflect a real difference in the kind of warfare the victor will pursue. In an October 21 appearance on CBS, Colin Powell, point man for the first genocidal Gulf War against Iraq in 1991, backed Obama. Three days earlier, Romney announced formation of a “military advisory council” of more than three hundred blood-soaked ex-generals and admirals. One of its more prominent members is Tommy Franks, the commander of the second genocidal Gulf War against Iraq, launched by George W. Bush in 2003. The two beribboned butchers hold competing views that mirror different capitalists’ interests. 

The Powell Doctrine: Mass Support for Massive War

Colin Powell’s military doctrine demands overwhelming force, a clear objective, hosts of allies and mass popular support. The 1991 Iraq War, as waged by Powell as chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reflected the need of ExxonMobil, Chevron and British BP and Shell for oil-field security and government stability. Powell led 956,600 troops (73 percent from the U.S.) in ousting Saddam Hussein’s 120,000 soldiers after George H.W. Bush complained they “had poured into Kuwait and moved south to threaten Saudi Arabia.”

In 1991, Powell and the elder Bush took firm control of Kuwait’s oil wells and shored up Saudi defenses, a move that angered aspiring oil baron Osama bin Laden. But they deliberately refrained from marching on Baghdad. Instead, they left Bill Clinton the task of containing Hussein with airstrikes and sanctions that killed a half-million children.

Shock and Awe: War on the Cheap

Romneyite Tommy Franks was top ground commander for the post-9/11 U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and later Iraq. In neither case did U.S. forces amount to more than 200,000, even though both were aimed to defeat and replace the existing regimes. In 2003, as Secretary of State, Powell also pushed for invading Iraq. But he called for tens of thousands of troops more than Franks and his neo-conservative bosses — War Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Richard Cheney — had agreed upon. Outmaneuvered, Powell quit the next year.

Rumsfeld and his cohorts proceeded to opt for a swift, high-tech, “shock-and-awe” invasion, saying the war should be run “with the troops we have.” They predicted that Iraqis would greet U.S. troops with flowers. The reality was a trillion-dollar disaster that massacred more masses of workers.

The current state of Iraq and Afghanistan, largely the work of both Bushes, Franks, Rumsfeld & Co., troubles the oil-driven capitalists served by Powell. Because of the Gulf Wars, Exxon now has major operations in both the north and south of oil-rich Iraq. But violence and a rickety government keep the country’s production under three million barrels a day, far below the six million barrels promised by war planners. In Afghanistan, meanwhile, Taliban attacks have prevented the surveying — let alone the building — of the Exxon- and Chevron-backed Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline. It now languishes on the drawing board. 

Powell in the Rockefeller Camp

As a self-styled “Rockefeller Republican,” Powell aligns with Rockefeller-dominated firms including Exxon, Chevron and JPMorgan Chase. It’s not just a phrase. In 2003, with Iraq and Afghanistan both under siege but far less productive than he wished, David Rockefeller presented troop-booster Powell with the Gen. George C. Marshall Award for service to U.S. imperialism. And Powell sits on the board of the Rockefeller-led Council on Foreign Relations, U.S. imperialists’ top think tank.

Tommy Franks’ capitalist loyalties lie elsewhere. Until an Obama-engineered 2009 purge, Franks was a board member of Bank of America, the gigantic bank with a more domestic than imperialist focus. Today the former general sits on the board of Chuck E. Cheese, a string of pizza parlors with relatively little use for the Pentagon.

Romney’s inconsistent foreign policy pronouncements and jumbled cast of counselors mirrors a fragmented Republican Party. His top donor, Sheldon Adelson, promotes Israeli attacks on Iran. Team Romney includes neo-conservatives John Bolton, Dan Senor and Elliott Abrams, who prefer Franks-style war-on-the-cheap. But it also features at least one long-term war supporter: the Rockefellerite Robert Zoellick, a protégé of ex-Secretary of State James Baker, who has strong ties to ExxonMobil and JPMorgan Chase. For a time Zoellic headed the major U.S. imperialists’ beloved World Bank.

Romney’s uncertain allegiances stand in contrast to dyed-in-the-wool imperialist Powell’s jump to Obama. “I’m not sure which Romney we would be getting,” he told CBS. “One day he has a certain strong view about staying in Afghanistan, but then on Monday night he agrees with the withdrawal.”

Anti-Obesity Campaign = Youth As Cannon Fodder

Obama has a more insidious assemblage of generals and admirals in his corner. It promotes the wellbeing of children while not so secretly planning their deployment in all-out war against China or Russia or both. More than a hundred retired flag officers, organized as “Mission: Readiness,” have signed on to Michelle Obama’s anti-obesity campaign. Their aim is to improve young people’s health as they are mobilized for world war. In other words, they want more effective cannon fodder.

As this group laments, “Being overweight or obese has now become the leading medical reason why young adults cannot enlist in the military. The Defense Department estimates that 1 in 4 young adults is too overweight to enlist” (Mission Readiness website, 9/25/12). But as the current depression impels more jobless youth to join the Army, U.S. military recruiters are roughly meeting their targets. So why the worry? It can only be that the Obama/Powell camp has a larger mobilization in mind than Romney and Franks envision.

Under capitalism, a system based on the bosses’ drive for maximum profits, the state apparatus called the government — including the courts, cops and prisons used in racist attacks on millions of black and Latino youth and workers — is an instrument for class rule. To enforce that rule, the capitalists require war to maintain profits and control of resources — especially oil, the heart and soul of industry and the military. 

Racism: Hallmark of Imperialist War

The two Gulf oil wars have an especially racist character. They target workers and their families in the Middle East, a region that imperialist powers have long victimized and mercilessly exploited. Workers in Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and Pakistan have been victimized by bombings, massacres by drones, assassinations and direct invasions. As it trains working-class soldiers, the U.S. military whips up racist hatred against Muslims and Arabs, demonizing them as violent and worthless human beings. To fill their quotas for cannon fodder, the generals are pushing the recruitment of undocumented immigrant Latino youth with empty promises of citizenship — a cynical maneuver endorsed by Obama to shore up his political base. Racist wars have long been the province of the U.S. war machine, going back to the genocide against Native Americans. Racism is the foundation of U.S. capitalism, netting the bosses hundreds of billions in super-profits from wage differentials.

Elections: Capitalists’ Tool to Oppress Working Class

Elections are created to maintain the charade of “democracy,” the dangerous lie that the working class chooses who will run the government and their lives. In reality, the role of all elected officials is to serve the capitalist class and its profit needs. In the U.S., despite tactical differences that reflect the bosses’ factional disagreements, both Democrats and Republicans represent the same interests. Capitalism is the dictatorship of the ruling class.

Our class has no stake in the capitalists’ dispute over how our daughters and sons should kill and die in their profit-driven wars. The goal of the Progressive Labor Party is for the working class — the producers of all value, from which the bosses derive their profits — to dictate the course of our lives. In so doing, we will eliminate what capitalist profits breed: wars, racism, sexism, mass unemployment and poverty. Our alternative  is communism, the dictatorship of the working class, which will free us from the horrors of the profit system. Join us.