People Before Profit blog

Frances homeless step up their struggle

Fri, 26 Jan 2007 07:47:00 +0000

NewsAnalysis

PARIS — The new year in France has opened with bold and coordinated protests by the nation’s homeless.

The protests are taking place against the backdrop of two years of intensified struggle by the country’s working people against big capital’s efforts to drive down their living standards. These struggles included the successful fight to reject the neoliberal European Constitution, the rebellion of the poor in the suburbs of Paris and other cities, and the successful movement to defeat the so-called CPE law, which aimed at making labor, particularly youth labor, more “flexible” and exploitable.

Homelessness in France has deep roots in the socio-economic system. Today, after nearly three decades of neoliberalism (government privatization and “free trade”), 7.5 million people are unemployed or underemployed out of a population of 63.4 million. The unemployment rate is particularly high among young people.

Unemployment is the leading cause of what the French call “the SDF” (“sans domicile fixe,” or without fixed housing), or the homeless.

According to Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, “There are approximately 20,000 homeless in France, and around 100,000 people are living in unacceptable housing.” The French Institute of Statistics reports that the number of people without fixed housing is 86,000, of which 8 percent, or about 7,000, are living on the streets.

The reality is certainly worse, according to nongovernmental organizations defending the rights of the SDF. For example, the Abbé Pierre Foundation says 3.2 million people are either homeless or living in very bad conditions. Among the homeless are whole families, including many women living with their children.

The problem is aggravated by a large amount of vacant housing. In Paris alone there are at least 400,000 empty houses or apartments belonging to pension funds, banks, insurance companies, the state, the city or the Catholic Church. These vacancies have driven up real estate prices (with an average rise of 85 percent between 2000 and 2006) and have contributed to high rents. Under these conditions, it is virtually impossible for the poor to find decent housing at a fair price.

The current struggle really began at the end of October 2006 with the decision of some housing activists to sleep outdoors in solidarity with the homeless, and to create a new aid association, the “Children of Don Quixote.” Other organizations sprang up as well, including the Right to Housing (DAL), the Committee of the Homeless and the Call of the Without.

Using the Internet and working effectively with the press, the groups announced at the end of November their plans to set up a camp of 400 homeless on Concorde Square in Paris on Dec. 2. They did so and were quickly (and repeatedly) driven off the square by the police.

Undeterred, in mid-December they pitched 3,000 red nylon tents in the French capital, mostly along the Saint-Martin Canal, and hundreds of tents in other cities: Lyon (520), Toulouse (465), Bordeaux (400), Lille (365), Marseille (360), Strasbourg (320) and Grenoble (200). The tents have raised the public profile of the homeless in a dramatic way.

The movement wrote a manifesto declaring that all residents of France should have access to adequate housing. Popular support for this demand was so strong that after only two weeks the government (keep in mind that the presidential elections are at hand) announced an increase of up to 27,000 beds in shelters for the homeless and declared its willingness to consider implementing a more far-reaching plan to address the problem in … 2008!

Obviously, these answers are insufficient. France needs bold government measures like the requisition of vacant housing owned by speculators, the massive construction of public housing, rent control, the official recognition of housing as a right (as is the case with health care and education), a social plan to combat poverty and a plan to redistribute the wealth, and the creation of public jobs.

Rémy Herrera (herrera1 @ univ-paris1.fr) is a researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris.

Bush maneuvers on wiretaps

Fri, 26 Jan 2007 07:29:00 +0000

NewsAnalysis

The Bush administration, in a letter last week from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to Congress, seemed to back away from its assertion that it has the right to spy on phone conversations of anybody in the U.S. without a warrant if the conversation is with someone in a foreign country. Gonzales said the administration had come up with a secret deal to get judicial OK for its wiretapping. But civil liberties advocates expressed skepticism.

Bill Goodman, legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights, one of the groups that filed suit against the warrantless wiretapping, said in a statement, “We won. The president backed down from an illegal program, but there is now a clear need for legislation that makes such illegal forays impossible in the future.” But until the administration’s order is made public, Goodman said, “we have no way of knowing if it meets with the constitutional requirements that a court determine whether there is enough evidence (probable cause) to justify instituting surveillance.”

The New York Times editorialized Jan. 21, “We don’t know exactly what agreement the White House made with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court about eavesdropping. But there is evidence that Mr. Bush got some broad approval for a wiretapping ‘program’ rather than the individual warrants required by law. Because the court works in secret, the public may never know whether Mr. Bush really is complying with the law.” The Times called for congressional investigation of Bush’s “secret deal.”

In December 2005 it was revealed that the National Security Agency, with the connivance of some telephone companies, had intercepted millions of U.S. phone calls without legally required authorization.

The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act set up a special court to issue secret warrants for surveillance of possible espionage activities in the U.S. The 2001 USA Patriot Act gave the FISA court extra power in terrorism investigations. Members of the FISA court were reported to have been shocked by Bush’s assertion of wiretapping power, which bypassed even this secret court.

In August 2006, U.S. District Court Judge Anna Diggs Taylor, ruling on a suit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Constitutional Rights and others, declared the NSA program illegal and unconstitutional (a violation of the First and Fourth Amendments), and blocked the government from continuing it. The Bush administration appealed, and a decision is expected within weeks.

Gonzales’ apparent retreat may reflect worry that the administration’s appeal might fail. His statement was short on details. It says that “a judge” from the FISA court has issued orders “authorizing the government to target for collection international communications into or out of the United States where there is probable cause to believe that one of the communicants is a member of Al Qaeda or an associated terrorist organization.”

It is not known whether this particular FISA judge is extra-friendly to the Bush administration, or exactly what the authorization covers.

When the FISA court was created, it was not given the power to deal with issues like terrorism, and investigations it authorized could not be used to build criminal cases. One of the complaints about the USA Patriot Act is that it gave the FISA court more power to authorize secret surveillance without making sure that this would not be used to persecute legitimate dissent.

Commentators say that an administration that lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is capable of finding “probable cause” for just about anything, and that its wiretapping practices need a completely independent judicial review.

The State of the Union changing direction: Imperial presidency under fire

Fri, 26 Jan 2007 06:49:00 +0000

News Analysis

The concerns of most Americans who find it harder and harder to make ends meet, and who want to bring our troops home from Iraq, were ignored by George W. Bush in his State of the Union address. As if the 2006 elections to change the country’s direction had never happened, Bush’s proposals only represented the interests of his narrow base, “the haves and the have mores.”

When he acknowledged Nancy Pelosi, first woman speaker of the House, Bush omitted her leadership in the 100-hour economic response to working people’s needs. The bills passed in 42 hours after a flood of calls, e-mails, grassroots rallies and local events around the country.

This grassroots pressure to realize the election’s mandate for peace and economic security was reflected in the unusually strong responses to the State of the Union by Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) and by Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.), who delivered the first Spanish-language Democratic response.

In his address, Bush celebrated a strong economy. In their responses, Webb and Becerra asked, “Strong for whom?” They argued it is strong for the CEOs whose worth skyrocketed in the past six years, but not for the 37 million in poverty, the 47 million with no health care or the millions of industrial workers whose companies have left town for higher profits elsewhere.

Bush made no mention of the victims of Katrina, or of any program to rebuild the Gulf Coast or eliminate poverty.

In his address, Bush rationalized the war in Iraq, and raised the specter of terrorist attacks to justify sending more troops. In their responses, Webb and Becerra cited generals, officials and the public who disagree.

Bush’s saber-rattling and his arguments for more troops and a permanent war policy ignored the many legislative solutions introduced this month by members of the congressional Out of Iraq Caucus and their colleagues, including some Republicans, who are responding to the anger of the voters.

It is very significant that some members of Congress will defy Bush’s State of the Union appeal and march with the thousands of people converging on Washington Jan. 27 to call for an end to the war, and welcome antiwar lobbyists Jan. 29.

Bush’s domestic program also fails the majority of Americans. By calling for a balanced budget with no tax increases and higher military spending, Bush is protecting his ultra-rich base while insuring that fewer resources will be available for health care, education or alternative energy.

Bush’s tax proposal for health care would boost private insurers, but provide little for those without coverage. His proposal to reform — meaning privatize — Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security would permanently escalate the crisis. The national movement for health care as a basic human right was left out of the State of the Union, including HR 676 to expand and improve Medicare for universal coverage.

Bush’s support for school vouchers would give public monies to private education corporations and undermine the public education system. His support for guest worker programs would create an unequal, second-class group of immigrant workers forced to live apart from their families. Only the corporations would gain.

A State of the Union in the interests of working people would be far different. It would highlight the Employee Free Choice Act, with 225 co-sponsors, which restores workers’ right to organize into unions free from employer intimidation and coercion.

It would encompass the broad civil rights agenda including full funding and improvement of No Child Left Behind before re-authorization. It would include ending and rolling back repressive measures against immigrants, and legalization with full labor and civil rights and a rapid path to permanent residency and citizenship. It would call for a new foreign and military policy based on international cooperation and nuclear disarmament.

Bush’s leverage on Congress is greatly diminished since the elections. Some moderate and conservative Democrats may respond to the President on some issues. But overall, the majority of committees and subcommittees are chaired by members of the Congressional Progressive, Black, Hispanic, Asian Pacific and Women’s Caucuses.

The success of the 110th Congress in standing up to George W. Bush will depend largely on the amount of pressure and support from below.

Union members, African American, Latino, women and youth voters were at the core of mobilizing the historic vote that defeated the right-wing stranglehold on Congress in 2006. In 2007 these forces, joined by many others, hold in their hands the State of the Union, for a new direction looking toward 2008, that puts people’s needs first.

Joelle Fishman (joelle.fishman @ pobox.com) is chair of the Communist Party USA political action commission.

Groups oppose Bushs anti-immigrant drive

Fri, 19 Jan 2007 07:43:00 +0000

NewsAnalysis

Now that the Democratic majority 110th Congress is seated, the immigrant rights movement has an opportunity to move forward on several fronts.

In the first half of 2006, millions of undocumented immigrants and their allies marched for justice, serving notice that immigrant workers will not acquiesce to oppression.

The results of the Nov. 7 elections have put the immigrant rights movement in a better position legislatively. Although not all Democrats are good on immigration, Democratic majorities in the House and Senate and the shift of key committee chairmanships to progressive Democrats like John Conyers will allow for a more rational discussion.

For example, it will not be possible for the Republican right to ram through horrors like the Sensenbrenner bill, HR 4437. There is also greater opportunity for congressional oversight, including hearings on the Bush administration’s heavy-handed immigration enforcement actions.

Bush, who supported HR 4437, struck back hard against the protests, starting with a multistate raid on the IFCO pallet company in April. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced that from now on, the receipt of multiple “no-match” letters by employees of the same company would be the basis for investigations and raids.

Major firms like Smithfield Foods and the Cintas industrial laundry corporation began to fire workers for whom such letters were received. On Dec. 12, more than 1,000 immigration cops swooped down on factories of the Swift meat company, arresting and processing for deportation more than 1,200 people.

In total, 186,600 immigrants were deported in 2006, a 12 percent increase over 2005’s 165,000. This is less than 2 percent of the 12 million undocumented, but it has sent a wave of anxiety through working-class immigrant communities.

The motives are obvious:

• Repression is a “logical” response to the massive marches for immigrant rights.

• A crackdown appeases the most racist right-wing elements like Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) who have been denouncing Bush as being soft on “illegal immigration,” and encourages the ultra-right base.

• Raids serve to pressure business and others into supporting a guest worker program. Threatened with loss of their cheap labor, companies will be eager to get Congress to replace it with guest workers who can be controlled and exploited “legally.” Meanwhile, the terrorization of immigrants by means of repression is part of a long-term trend to prevent them from fighting for better wages, and thus helps to amass profits through super-exploitation.

So, by means of stepped up repression, Bush aims to keep the upper hand.

This must be contested. We can not allow the 12 million undocumented immigrants in this country and their millions of citizen and documented spouses and children to be used as policy hostages by Bush.

The first step is to build a united front of opposition to anti-immigrant repression. The way is shown by workers at Smithfield in Tar Heel, N.C., who walked off the job to demand reinstatement of workers fired for no-match letters, and won. Key was the fact that immigrant and Latino workers were joined by U.S. citizen workers of all races in this action, in spite of the efforts of the right to demonize immigrants and blame them for poverty and unemployment among U.S.-born workers.

The League of United Latin American Citizens, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, and the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials have united in calling for a moratorium on immigration raids and deportations. At Christmas, the American Friends Service Committee, along with the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, the National Council of Latin American and Caribbean Communities and others, circulated a sign-on letter demanding such a moratorium, and dozens of national and local organizations added their names.

At the local and regional level, Centro Sin Fronteras and others in Chicago and the Midwest organized a 30,000-strong demonstration demanding a moratorium last July 19, and there have been a number of such protests in communities where raids have taken place.

This is a good beginning, but it needs to expand fast. Last year, organized labor was divided over legislative issues, but all people who believe in justice for workers can unite behind the moratorium call. So can all immigrant rights, faith-based, civil rights, African American, Latino, Asian, women’s, youth and GLBT organizations and many others, who can build a moratorium coalition as broad as that which backed up the 2003 Immigrant Workers’ Freedom Ride, and broader.

Such a coalition can not only defeat the repression, but set the stage for more worker-friendly comprehensive immigration legislation.

Yugoslavia past, present and future

Wed, 17 Jan 2007 09:36:00 +0000

When the term “balkanization” is used, it has long meant to break a territory or a region up into hostile, unmanageable parts. The Balkans have long been portrayed in imperialist ideology as a region filled with colorful, violent, backward people, the “hillbillies” of Europe.

The region has a long history of struggle against powerful empires, both in feudal and capitalist times. The Ottoman Turkish Empire, using Islam as a rationale for its rule but tolerating other faiths, controlled much of the region, including Greece, Serbia, Albania and Bulgaria, until the 19th century.

The Hapsburg Austrian Empire, using Catholicism as a rationale for its rule but tolerating other faiths, came eventually to control Hungary, Croatia and Slovenia. Although far smaller than the Ottoman Empire, the Austrian Empire, through its development of commercial capitalism, was more advanced than the Ottomans by the 18th century and able, with support from other European empires, to advance its position in the Balkans.

As is true throughout history, religious institutions and ideology served as forms of ruling-class domination and social division among oppressed peoples. Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christianity and Islam divided Croatians and Serbians (including Muslim Serbians in Bosnia, called “Muslim Slavs”), who were essentially the same people, similar to Indians and Pakistanis — divided by religion and a subsequent political partition — but are the same people.

I teach a course on the history of imperialism and try to give students a framework for understanding that there different kinds of empires have existed throughout history. Empires have existed throughout history but what we called imperialism in the 20th century or “globalization” in the 21st is a new system, not simply a continuation of old empires like Egypt, Rome, the Byzantine Empire or the Ottoman Empire.

In the late 19th century and early 20th century, this new world system was seen as rapidly establishing colonies through the world. It came to be called imperialism by many figures, most importantly, Vladimir Lenin, who saw this development as representing the rise of monopoly capitalism and leading inevitably to great wars. Today this system is usually referred to euphemistically as “globalization” or “corporate globalization.”

Lenin argued that as industrial capitalism developed productive capacities limited only by the earth’s resources and labor pools, industrial powers established rival empires who fought each other to turn into colonies areas of the world which had escaped earlier colonization (Africa, Asia and other regions), and take colonies and spheres of influence away from “less advanced” empires like Spain, Portugal and Ottoman Turkey, using various nationalist movements as pawns in their manipulations.

In Africa, for example, the British formed alliances with various nationalities as they expanded their rule and often claimed to be protecting “minorities” from attack as they established colonial control. In Cuba in 1898, the U.S. launched a war against Spain, ostensibly to liberate Cuba, which it then turned into a protectorate, demanding that Cuba put into its constitution a provision that permitted U.S. intervention when the U.S. saw fit. The Philippines, which had nothing to do with Cuba, was conquered and turned into a formal colony by the U.S. as part of this war to “liberate” Cuba.

The Balkans were divided up between the Muslim Ottoman Turkish Empire and the Roman Catholic Austrian Empire, who had fought wars with each other over the regions and instilled hatreds among its subject peoples for centuries. Ottoman power in the Balkans grew from the 14th to the 17th centuries. The Turkish victory over the Serbians in the battle of Kosovo in 1389 became for many Serbians what the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in the first century of the Christian era became for many Jews, a world-historic symbol of their defeat (for Jews their dispersal, for Serbians their subjugation).

Although the Ottomans laid siege to Vienna, the Hapsburg Empire’s capital, twice in the 17th century, they were compelled to cede Hungarian and other territories to the Austrians by the end of the 17th century. The Austrian Empire, now firmly part of a commercial capitalist Europe, engaged in colonial development and wars, expanded its control of the Balkans in a series of wars against the Ottomans in the 18th century. The Ottomans also fought and lost wars to the feudal Russian Empire, similar in many respects to the Ottomans in its backwardness, which took territories in the Caucasus region.

The colonial wars of the 18th century eventually spawned the American anti-colonial revolution and the French bourgeois revolution, which inspired and aided revolutionary movements for national independence and bourgeois institutions in Europe and Latin America.

Revolutionary nationalist movements in Serbia and Greece ended Ottoman rule and by the middle-19th century, the powerful global British and French empires were seeking to prop up the Ottomans, whom they referred to derisively as “the sick man of Europe,” against the Czarist Russian Empire, whom they feared might develop into a major capitalist rival if they gained access to ports trade routes under Ottoman control.

The desires of the peoples of the Balkans had nothing to do with the manipulations of the various empires or the wars they fought in the Balkans, the Crimea and other places. However, the peoples of the Balkans could not be so easily controlled. Having won their independence from the Ottomans, many Serbians, imbued with the bourgeois democratic ideals of the French revolution, championed the establishment of a larger inclusive state of southern Slavic peoples, or Yugoslavia.

This dream of a Yugoslavia was motivated primarily by 19th-century liberal humanistic revolutionary principles (the principles which led to the national revolutions in Hungary, Germany, Italy and other countries in 1848 which Marx and Engels supported), not by the drive to create a “Greater Serbia” that would be a powerful empire in itself.

While there were and certainly are right-wing Serbian national chauvinists, the contentions made by supporters Yugoslavia’s dismemberment in the 1990s that Serbians who fought for Yugoslavia were merely fighting for a “Greater Serbia” is as absurd as saying that Northerners who fought to preserve the Union during the Civil War in the U.S. were fighting for New England Yankee domination of North America (a view that might be popular with Confederates but no one else).

The rise of an industrial capitalist German Empire in the last decades of the 19th century challenged the hegemony of the British Empire, threatened the French and Russian empires, and created a new situation in Europe. The German Empire came into existence through a successful war against the French, and soon threatened the domination of the British Empire.

After the German and Italian states were unified at the beginning of the 1870s and sought empires themselves, and before the European empires met to carve up Africa among themselves at the Berlin Conference of 1885, they worked out in the 1878 Congress of Berlin a Balkan “settlement” centered on the accession of Bosnia-Herzegovina from Ottoman Empire to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the former Austrian Empire which had transformed itself into a so-called dual monarchy, sharing power substantially with the Hungarians over its subject Slavic nationalities.

Keeping a war from breaking out in Europe was essential for the imperialist powers if they were to complete and consolidate their carving up of Africa and other regions of the world, preventing anti-colonial revolutions from threatening all of them as they fought with each other in the colonial regions.

A big war in Europe, as against the “little wars” they were fighting against the peoples of Africa and Asia (and the pawns and surrogates they were using to fight each other), would threaten the whole system of imperialism, as Lenin later understood when he saw World War I as an imperialist war that would produce revolutions in the main imperialist centers and anti-imperialist uprisings in the colonial regions.

But the violent, unstable nature of imperialism dashed these aspirations. Two “Balkan wars” largely removing the remnants of the Ottoman Empire from the region were fought in the region and resolved by the imperialist powers just before a young Serbian in 1914 assassinated the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne in Sarajevo, the capital of the Bosnian province of the Austro Hungarian Empire and World War I, the greatest war in human history to that time, ensued.

Serbian casualties in the war were enormous, but Yugoslavia was finally established with the Allied victory. The new state was a liberal constitutional monarchy under the former King of Serbia with a strong labor movement and left on the political scene. The victorious allied powers (Britain, France and the U.S.) supported Yugoslavia largely to prevent a revival of German imperialist power in the region.

The Yugoslav League of Communists became a significant force by the 1930s. At the same time, Croatian rightists funded first by fascist Italy (which had its own designs on the region) used terrorist violence in a campaign to create and independent Croatia, including an armed uprising in 1932 and the murder of the Yugoslav King, Alexander, in 1935.

In the 1930s, a new more powerful European fascist state, Nazi Germany, embarked upon a policy of military annexations to regain all of the lost territories of German imperialism and its allies in Europe. This meant annexing Austria and Czechoslovakia, aiding Croatian chauvinists against Yugoslavia, and annexing Polish territory, along with using reactionary and fascist groups in Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria and the Baltic states to transform those regions into “satellites” of a German-dominated Eurasian Axis.

In 1941, after the Nazi conquest of Western Europe and before Hitler’s invasion of the USSR, Nazi Germany and fascist Italy demanded that the Yugoslav government join their broad alliance against “international Communism,” which the Nazis made into a centerpiece of their “New Order” in Europe to get recruits from occupied and collaborator regions to fight their wars.

Although the Yugoslav government was initially ready to do this rather than face massive invasion and certain conquest, a popular movement in the streets of Belgrade, led initially by schoolchildren and joined by anti-fascists of all backgrounds, led to anti-Nazi military elements of the military to lead the government to resist the fascist powers.

Yugoslavia was then invaded and dismembered. A Croatian fascist puppet state led by the Ustasha, the Croatian fascist movement, calling itself “The Independent State of Croatia,” with control over Bosnia, was then created by Hitler and Mussolini. Unlike the secular German and Italian fascists who had long backed them, the Ustasha was deeply connected with the Roman Catholic Church and promoted an ideology which mixed extreme nationalism and a chauvinistic definition of Catholicism, which scholars have usually termed “clerical” (or religious-based) fascism.

Similar movements existed in many European countries, both Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox, and allied themselves with the Axis, as did the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al Husseini, a clerical fascist Palestinian leader, who directly aided the fascist war effort in the Middle East by issuing a “Fatwah” that called for an uprising against the British in Iraq in 1941. Fleeing to Iran (still under the pro-Nazi Shah) and then to Berlin after the British suppressed the uprising, Husseini was hailed by the Nazi regime, met with Hitler on a number of occasions and became a major propagandist and organizer for the Fascist Axis, broadcasting vicious pro-fascist and rabidly anti-Jewish propaganda in Arabic on Axis radio and helping to recruit Muslims in the Balkans and elsewhere to the Axis cause. These included Muslim clerical elements that played a role similar to the Ustasha in organizing the Muslim population in Bosnia and Albania to join Waffen SS military units and participate in the fascist oppression and racist atrocities against Serbians, Jews and Roma people (Gypsies) in Axis-dismembered Yugoslavia. This history is central to understanding the response of Serbian people in Bosnia and the Kosovo conflict in the Yugoslav Civil War of the 1990s.

Following the German invasion and the dismemberment of Yugoslavia, Serbia became a German-occupied province. With Hitler’s approval, the fascist dictator Ante Pavelic turned the Serbian minorities in Ustasha controlled Croatia and Bosnia into targets of genocidal racist persecution. In Croatia, the Jasenovac death camp was established by Croatian fascists who carried out genocide against hundreds of thousands of Serbian people and tens of thousands of Jewish and Roma people.

Jasenovac, where an estimated 700,000 perished, became the third largest death camp in Europe, surpassed only by Auschwitz and Treblinka.

The Yugoslav partisan movement, led by the Yugoslav League of Communists, fought the Nazis, their Ustasha and other fascist allies, and established a socialist Yugoslavia at the end of the war. Although U.S. and British imperialists were very hostile to Yugoslavia at first, the development of the Cold War changed that.

The Yugoslav leadership broke with the Soviets by 1948 and took a nonaligned position in the Cold War and general world affairs. Because of its conflict with the Soviets and their allies, Yugoslavia became in the 1950s and 1960s the only country in the world led by Communists with whom the U.S. had fairly amicable relations.

Socialist Yugoslavia was the most advanced state that had ever existed in the region in regard to the quality of life its people enjoyed. It was also a state which played a very positive role in both the nonaligned movement in the world and in the United Nations from the 1950s on. However, Yugoslavia, like the Soviet Union, made serious errors in dealing with questions connected to the traumas of the Second World War, errors that ultimately strengthened its internal and external enemies.

Just as the Soviets defined the conflict as a struggle between fascists and anti-fascists and refused to address in official accounts and education the specific genocide directed against Jewish people, particularly, or the role of anti-Soviet nationalist groups in Soviet Republics that had allied themselves with the Nazis, the Yugoslavs also defined the conflict as one between fascists and anti-fascists and failed to deal with the decimation of Serbian people and the genocide carried out by the Croatian fascist Ustasha against Serbian minorities at Jasenovac and at other places in the territories they controlled.

In both cases national tensions were denied rather than addressed and broader ideals of internationalism and friendship of peoples were asserted rather than effectively implemented.

However, these errors should not be exaggerated or, as Marxists used to say, over-determined (made to explain subsequent events exclusively). As many Yugoslavs contend, intermarriage between people of Muslim and Christian backgrounds in Bosnia, and of course between Serbians and Croatians, along with friendly relations between the various peoples of Yugoslavia, did exist at a much higher level than in the prewar era or at any time in the history of the region.

In less than 60 years under Communist leadership, the peoples of Yugoslavia made substantial progress in living, working, and advancing together after six centuries of political, religious, and ethno-cultural division and separation at the hands of empires seeking to dominate and exploit them.

Yugoslavia also faced attacks by relatively powerful émigré Croatian rightists, including Ustasha elements centered in West Germany, Canada and the U.S., who funded anti-Yugoslav elements in the country and attacked Yugoslav officials and installations abroad with terrorist assassinations, bombings and plane hijackings. Even Ante Pavelic, the Ustasha fascist dictator (often called by anti-fascists the “Hitler of the Balkans”), after barely surviving an assassination attempt in Argentina, was given refuge in Franco’s Spain, then receiving U.S. aid, where he died. In present-day Croatia, Pavelic remains a “hero” to the secular and clerical right.

Following the death of Joseph Tito (leader of the Yugoslav Communists, the WWII partisans, and founder of the Yugoslav Socialist Federation) in 1980, the Yugoslav leadership established a complicated rotating presidency of the federated socialist state, which undermined central authority.

Meanwhile, the global inflation of the 1970s and 1980s, which negatively affected both capitalist and socialist countries, also hurt Yugoslavia, as it did the Soviet Union. Unlike capitalist countries, which could “export capital” to less developed regions without having to worry about the financial overhead of maintaining employment and other expensive social guarantees at home, socialist countries had no captive markets and “enterprise zones” abroad and were much less likely to receive investment from the capitalist IMF-World Bank system because of their restrictions on capital.

In the Serbian Republic province of Kosovo, Albanian nationalists in the 1980s attacked the Serbian minority and demanded virtual autonomy. In Croatia, rightists supported by both nationalist émigré groups and the Vatican, grew more brazen in their attacks on Serbians and their advocacy of an “independent” Croatia. The Vatican, which has never acknowledged either its support for the wartime Ustasha regime or its well documented assistance to various fascist war criminals to escape capture after WWII, played a major role in providing assistance to anti-socialist and nationalist elements in the region as it did in Poland and other Soviet-allied countries.

Following the destruction of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia too was dismembered. In the Soviet Union, the dismemberment was carried out through the Soviet Communist Party, first by its leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, and then by a former Gorbachev ally, Boris Yeltsin, whom Gorbachev had taken from obscurity in 1985 and made leader of the powerful Moscow party in 1985. Yeltsin eventually broke with both Gorbachev and the Soviet Communist Party, became president of the Russian Federation, and the center of anti-Soviet and anti-Communist forces in the country.

In Yugoslavia, Franjo Tudgman, also a former member of the Yugoslav League of Communists, played a role similar to Yeltsin and formed a nationalist so-called “democratic movement” that defeated Communists in elections in Croatia in 1990 and then embarked upon a separatist path, openly identifying with right-wing Croatian nationalists of the past and eventually embarrassing his German and U.S. supporters by denying the scope of the WWII Holocaust.

Together, people of Serbian and Croatian background constitute the overwhelming majority of Yugoslavians, and without Croatia, Yugoslavia cannot exist except on paper. A bloody and complicated civil war then developed, with Croatians leaving the Yugoslav army to join the Croatian separatist army; the Serbian Milosevic-led government fighting to sustain Yugoslavia; the Tudgman-led Croatian government fighting for a separatist state; and anti-Communist forces in Bosnia appealing to the Muslim majority population launching their own separatist war of independence, which led the Serbian minority in Bosnia, who were the primary victims of the mass murder carried out against Serbians by the Ustasha in WWII, to form their own state as ethnic massacres and atrocities escalated on all sides in the region.

Far-reaching economic sanctions against Yugoslavia (which now in reality consisted of Serbia-Montenegro) were then established by the major capitalist states, which supported the dismemberment as both a victory against any state that identified itself with socialism and a carving up of the region in ways that would permit the capitalist states to more efficiently exploit its resources and peoples.

These policies were implemented also with bombing and intervention with ground troops in Bosnia and Kosovo by the NATO states which produced the greatest fighting and loss of life in Europe since WWII.

Scholars have long observed that civil wars are among histories bloodiest, as the American Civil War certainly was. Whatever crimes and atrocities were committed in Yugoslavia during the civil war, it should be remembered that the NATO states did nothing to aid or sustain Yugoslavia and everything to aid and abet its dismemberment, whatever hypocritical pieties they may utter about their “humanitarian intervention.” The Serbians displaced from their communities and/or massacred by Croatians, Muslim Bosnians and Kosovo Albanians were usually ignored while the crimes committed by various Serbian forces were given enormous coverage and often taken out of the context in which they occurred.

As was true earlier in Afghanistan, many foreign fighters who came to Bosnia and Kosovo to aid the forces that the U.S.-NATO bloc supported were subsequently implicated in terrorist attacks in Spain, Britain, and other countries.

As the 21st century began, the imperialist states had once more “balkanized” the Balkans and agreed among themselves to keep it weak, divided and dependent. In Bosnia, for example, which the defenders of imperialism hail as an example of “nation building,” the Christian Science Monitor reported an unemployment rate of 49 percent in 2003. In Croatia, which was a rich republic in Yugoslavia, youth unemployment today is 34 percent, according to the United Nations Development program. Travelers in both Croatia and Serbia mention huge increases in unemployment, and neglect of basic infrastructure, along with the failure to repair the devastation of the civil war.

All of this has produced great cynicism along with deepening ethno-cultural hostilities. Unlike the Yugoslavia led by the League of Communists, which stressed fraternal relations and mutual respect among the constituent republics, including the minority nationalities within the republics, the “post-Communist” states of Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, etc., define themselves on nationalist grounds and in effect make sections of the populations “foreigners” on land where their families have lived for centuries.

The dismemberment of Yugoslavia was an imperialist victory on many levels. Large sections of the broad left in Europe and especially the United States lost perspective and focused most of their energies in attacking Slobodan Milosevic and the Serbians, forgetting about the role of Germany and the United States in supporting the separatists and the historical and political context in which the tragic events took place.

Incredibly, the fascist revivals in Croatia and Bosnia were and are still largely ignored.

One must ask without having any clear answer these questions: why were they ignored by liberals, progressives and the left?

For the peoples of dismembered Yugoslavia, it will be a long and difficult road back from the disaster that has befallen them and forward to some form of economic and social cooperation and reconstruction, just as it will a long and difficult road back and forward for the people of the United States to overcome the social-economic stagnation and infrastructure decline, and parasitic militarization of recent decades.

Both peoples have been victimized, although in different ways, by the advance of reactionary imperialist forces over the last generation. And both, along with the working people, Communist and left forces through the world, have a common interest in fighting imperialism and moving both back and forward to the positive policies of social reconstruction, internationalism, and peace that appeared to be on the horizon at the end of WWII.

Norman Markowitz is a professor of history at Rutgers University.

Venezuelans contemplate unitary party of the left

Fri, 12 Jan 2007 08:02:00 +0000

NewsAnalysis

After a resounding re-election victory on Dec. 3, in which leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez Frias defeated his right-wing opponent by 63 percent to 37 percent, Chavez has called for the consolidation of all political forces on the left into a “unitary party” to work for a transition to socialism.

Chavez stressed the need for a coherent, united and focused approach to the difficult tasks that the socialist project entails, and emphasized that the organizational form needed for this is a unitary party for socialism.

He is not talking about converting Venezuela into a one-party state or repressing opposition parties, but of persuading the parties of the left that have supported him to merge for greater effectiveness against the still powerful and U.S-backed right, which dominates the mass media and many sectors of the economy.

The Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV) has fully supported Chavez. Its assessment of Chavez is that his stated commitment to socialism is genuine and that the mass “Bolivarian” movement he heads can achieve it.

On Dec. 3, the PCV was the fourth largest vote-getter among the many parties on whose ticket Chavez ran, receiving about 3 percent of the “chavista” vote, increasing its vote total fourfold over six years ago. But Chavez’s own Fifth Republic Movement got 42 percent of the chavista vote, and two other pro-Chavez parties got 6.5 percent and 5 percent. While vote tallies are an imperfect measure of a party’s strength, and while the PCV’s political and organizational capabilities are formidable, it is possible that in a merger its forces would be outnumbered.

The leadership of the PCV has, while endorsing the general idea of a unitary party, called for intensive internal discussion of the specifics.

For communist parties everywhere, the question of merging organically with other forces of the left is difficult. Lenin, the leader of Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, argued that to achieve socialism a party of a “new type” was needed, one that was much more disciplined and focused on the socialist goal than was the case with most socialist parties of that era.

Since that time, while communist parties have generally had no problem forming alliances with other parties of the left and even center, the idea of dissolving their own structure and actually merging with such groups has been another matter entirely. There is always a fear that genuine fighters for socialism will be swamped in such a merger by people who do not share the goal of socialism or who conceptualize it very differently.

Thus, while Chavez wants a unitary party so the left can work in a more focused way toward socialism, the experience of communist parties elsewhere has been that merging with too broad a set of forces could have the opposite effect.

For example, in 1981 the Mexican Communist Party (PCM) merged with other parties to form the Unified Socialist Party of Mexico (PSUM), which in turn merged with yet other parties to form the Mexican Socialist Party (PMS) in 1987. Finally, in 1989, the PMS merged with other, mostly centrist forces to form the Revolutionary Democratic Party (PRD).

Many in Mexico feel that what happened to the PCM was more self-liquidation than creative merger, since socialism is not a prominent goal of the frankly social-democratic, reform-oriented PRD. Other parties have now emerged which claim to be the true heirs to the communist tradition.

Writing in Tribuna Popular, a publication of the Venezuelan Communist Party, Jesus German Faria recognizes that such a merger will very likely run into the problem of internal ideological sub-tendencies, especially at the earlier stages. Nevertheless, he writes, democratic centralism should be the organizational principle of the unitary party.

Further, Faria writes: “Will it be a party of cadres or of masses? This party should consist of the best revolutionary cadres ... the most ideologically clear, the most honest and the most selfless, who meet the highest standards of revolutionary consciousness, discipline and ethics ... it does not have to have big numbers to accomplish its mission. Better fewer but better.”

The author goes on to state that he sees this idea of a unitary party as a way of purging chavismo of corrupt and careerist elements, who would not be allowed in the new party.

Time will tell whether this markedly traditional Marxist-Leninist stance toward party organization wins out both within the Venezuelan CP and especially among the larger non-communist formations that contributed to the Dec. 3 victory.

Time to unite against Bush administrations anti-immigrant surge

Thu, 11 Jan 2007 15:14:00 +0000

News Analysis

Now that the Democratic majority 110th Congress is seated, the immigrant rights movement has an opportunity to move forward on several fronts.

In the first half of 2006, millions of undocumented immigrants and their allies marched for justice. In many places, these marches broke all historical records, and served notice that immigrant workers will not lie down to oppression.

The results of the Nov. 7 elections have put the immigrant rights movement in a better position legislatively. Although not all Democrats are good on immigration, Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, and the shift of key committee chairmanships to progressive Democrats like John Conyers, will allow for a more rational discussion. It will not be possible for the Republican right to ram through horrors like the Sensenbrenner bill, HR 4437. Furthermore, there is a greatly enhanced opportunity for congressional oversight, including hearings about of the Bush administration’s heavy-handed immigration enforcement actions.

Bush, who supported HR 4437, struck back hard against the protests, starting with a multistate raid on the IFCO pallet company in April. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced that from now on, the receipt of multiple “No-Match” letters by employees of the same company would be the basis for investigations and raids. Major firms, like Smithfield Meats and the Cintas industrial laundry corporation, began to fire workers for whom such letters were received. On Dec. 12, more than 1,000 immigration cops swooped down on factories of the Swift meat company, arresting and processing for deportation more than 1,200 people.

In total, 186,600 immigrants were deported in 2006, a 12 percent increase over 2005’s 165,000. This is less than 2 percent of the 12 million undocumented, but it has sent a wave of anxiety through working-class immigrant communities.

The motives are obvious:

• Repression is a “logical” response to the massive marches for immigrant rights.

• A crackdown appeases the most racist right-wing elements like Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) who have been denouncing Bush as being soft on “illegal immigration,” and encourages the ultra-right base.

• Raids serve to pressure business and others into supporting a guest worker program. Threatened with loss of their cheap labor, companies will be eager to get Congress to replace it with guest workers who can be controlled and exploited “legally.” Meanwhile, the terrorization of immigrants by means of repression is part of a long-term trend to prevent them fighting for better wages and thus helps to amass profits through super-exploitation.

So, by means of stepped up repression, Bush thinks to keep the upper hand on the immigration issue, staving off attacks from left and right and controlling the direction of legislation.

This must be contested. We can not allow the 12 million undocumented immigrants in this country, and their millions of citizen and documented spouses and children (potential future voters), to be used as policy hostages by Bush.

The first step is to build a united front of opposition to anti-immigrant repression. The way is shown by workers at Smithfield in Tar Heel, N.C., who walked off the job to demand reinstatement of workers fired for No-Match letters, and won. Key was the fact that immigrant and Latino workers were joined by U.S. citizen workers of all races in this action, in spite of the efforts of the right to demonize immigrants and blame them for poverty and unemployment among U.S.-born workers.

The League of United Latin American Citizens, the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund, and the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials have united in calling for a moratorium on immigration raids and deportations. At Christmas, the American Friends Service Committee, along with the Labor Council on Latin American Affairs, the National Council of Latin American and Caribbean Communities and others, circulated a sign-on letter demanding such a moratorium, and dozens of national and local organizations added their names.

At the local and regional level, Centro Sin Fronteras and others in Chicago and the Midwest organized a 30,000-strong demonstration demanding a moratorium last July 19, and there have been a number of such protests in communities where raids have taken place.

This is a good beginning, but it needs to expand fast. Last year, organized labor was divided over legislative issues, but all people who believe in justice for workers can unite behind the moratorium call. So can all immigrant rights, faith-based, civil rights, African American, Latino, Asian, women’s, youth, GLBT organizations and many others who can build a moratorium coalition as broad as that which backed up the 2003 Immigrant Workers’ Freedom Ride, and broader.

Such a coalition can not only defeat the repression, but set the stage for more worker friendly comprehensive immigration legislation.

Emile Schepers is an immigrant rights activist in Virginia.

Another Virginia politician goes ape

Thu, 04 Jan 2007 11:34:00 +0000

Virgil Goode is the congressman for Virginia’s 5th district, a large swatch of inland territory that extends from around Charlottesville to the North Carolina border. It is conservative and mostly rural, unlike the more liberal population centers around Richmond and the D.C. suburbs that have lately elected moderate Democrats for governor and senator.

So one would expect that it would elect conservative representatives to Congress, but there is no law requiring it to elect fools.

Rep. Goode is either a fool or thinks that the voters of his district are such, because of the stunt he has now pulled. In response to the news that newly elected Congressman Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), an African American convert to Islam, was going to be sworn in on the Koran, Goode sent out a constituent letter which denounced this and related it to the issue of “immigration.”

In the first place, neither the Constitution nor federal laws dictate that newly elected congresspeople be sworn in on the Bible. They can be sworn in on the Christian Bible, the Jewish Torah, the Koran, the telephone book, the Communist Manifesto or the Kama Sutra or no book at all. The Constitution clearly states that there is no religious test for any elected or appointed office in the United States. This is not in the First Amendment but in the original text of the Constitution, Article VI Section 3.

This has been a controversial issue in other countries, but never here, until Ellison was elected. In the UK, there was a famous incident when in 1847 Lionel de Rothschild, an observant Jew, was elected to the British House of Commons and asked to be sworn in using the Old Testament but not the New. The Speaker of the House would not let him take his seat. Benjamin Disraeli, a Jewish convert to Christianity, strongly objected to this and eventually the law was changed. But no such law has ever existed in this country.

Another issue is that Goode associated Ellison’s choice of the Quran with “illegal immigration.” Ellison is an African American who can trace his ancestry in this country back to at least the early 1700s, but for the likes of Goode, apparently, he is still a “foreigner.” This is reminiscent of Goode’s fellow Virginian, outgoing Sen. George Allen, who lost his seat after he greeted a Virginia-born man of South Asian origin by calling him a monkey (macaca, in Latin, Italian and Portuguese) and saying to him “welcome to America.” The fact that Mr. Sidarth had a “foreign” sounding name and a dark complexion meant, for Sen. Allen, that he was inherently a foreigner, even if his parents had come here with the Jamestown colonists. Foreigners are foreign-looking people who speak foreign languages and practice “foreign” religions (anything but Protestant Christianity) and, for all we know, eat foreign foods, and all of them can be considered “illegals.” It’s so simple! Them and us, right?

Or rather, this is how Goode, Allen and their ilk pitch to their conservative white electoral base, whether they themselves really believe this or not. They seek to nurture a right-wing vote-generating attitude toward nationality and citizenship that is akin to that espoused by former fascist parties and regimes: being a U.S. citizen is not merely a matter of belief in democracy, justice and the rule of law, but also of blood, language and culture. Even if non-Anglo Americans believe in the values the country professes and play by all the rules, there is still something threatening about them, and if they breed too much or too much of them come in, they are going to swamp “us” and “contaminate our culture” with their own self-evidently inferior practices.

Politicians like Goode and Allen are bolstered by “academics” like Samuel P. Hundington, who warns about cultural contamination from Muslims and Latinos, in a couple of books that are so shockingly ignorant and poorly researched that only an Ivy League professor could have produced them. And of course there are figures like Pat Buchanan who have made political careers out of stoking the fires of xenophobia.

Goode won his last election, but it is in the national interest that he and his kind never win one again.

Emile Schepers is an immigrant rights activist who lives in northern Virginia.