Date: Mon, 19 Dec 94 20:36 CST
Subject: Rally Comrades 10/94 (Online Edition)
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October, 1994 Electronic Edition Vol. 13, No. 6
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INDEX TO Volume 13, Number 6
1. THE FUTURE OF AMERICA IS IN DANGER
2. UNEMPLOYMENT GOING UP, BUT PLENTY OF WORK TO BE DONE
3. CAPITALISM FAILS AFRICA; SOCIAL DESTRUCTION DEEPENS
4. RAISE FUNDS TO CIRCULATE OUR PAPERS FAR AND WIDE
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1. THE FUTURE OF AMERICA IS IN DANGER
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>From the Editorial Board
Who could not be alarmed at what is happening in our country?
Politicians are demanding that 12-year-old children be put on
Death Row; Arkansas stages a triple execution; and the debate and
passage of the federal crime bill makes it clear that the poor
will be the target of a massive police crackdown. In California,
the "Save Our State" ballot initiative is attempting to eliminate
the human and civil rights of immigrants, threatening the
existence of these rights for all of us. What do all these things
mean? What is at stake?
Nothing less than the future of America.
The ruling class is moving to change the way it rules this
country. Step by step, the elements of a police state are being
put in place. Force and coercion have always been integral to how
our country is ruled. Democracy under capitalism has never meant
that workers have a real voice in how the country is governed.
When people fight for their rights and the necessities of life,
they face the violence of the government and its police forces.
>From the period of economic expansion following World War II,
however, the ruling class has sought to control the American
people through offering limited political rights and a modicum of
economic security in exchange for political and social support of
its policies. The conditions which allowed for this method of rule
are now gone.
The economic revolution and the resulting social destruction is
creating a new class. This class is no longer needed by the
capitalists to work because of labor-replacing technology. They
have been shoved outside of the social contract and the social
institutions of the past. The members of this emerging class are
moving to, or will eventually have to move to, fight for their
very survival. Their problems cannot be resolved unless society is
re-organized.
The rulers will not provide for those they do not need. For them
the only option is to turn to violence, terror and new forms of
government to preserve their rule. As a result, we see an
accelerating motion of Supreme Court rulings and new laws which
undermine constitutional protections and expand the state's power
to control personal behavior and family life, to censor
information and ideas, and to restrict dissent, among others.
It is the police who represent the cutting edge of this move
toward new forms of control, toward fascism. It is on the street
level, where club meets skull, where bullet rips flesh, that the
lines are being drawn. In our communities, the police act as
judge, jury and executioner. They are conducting a lawless reign
of terror. They are heavily armed, highly organized and
increasingly centralized. Behind them stands an entire apparatus
of the government, the courts and the military.
However, this is not the fascism of the 1930s. Then, the drive
toward fascism expressed the struggle between two sections of the
ruling class. They fought over the best method to dominate the
world market which, if temporarily depressed, was ripe for
expansion and exploitation. The strategy of the anti- fascist
forces at that time was to ally with that sector of the ruling
class which was fighting for bourgeois democracy and against
fascism.
The situation today is very different. The motion toward fascism
is taking place in a world market and society which is undergoing
absolute polarization between wealth and poverty. The new class
can only resolve its problems through the re-organization of
society based on need. While sections of the ruling class may
struggle among themselves over markets, trade blocs and tariffs,
they are absolutely united on what must be done to protect their
power and privilege from the challenge of this emerging new class.
In short, no section of the ruling class is going to come to our
rescue. The stage is being set for class struggle.
We must put forward the program of our class, our vision of what
the future can be.
Broad sections of society are confused, disoriented and scared.
They are alienated and disillusioned by existing social
institutions. The ruling class propaganda campaign has been
largely successful in convincing a section of the American people
that the sacrifice of their rights is the only solution to
poverty, crime and violence. The ruling class is using each of
these questions to assert alliances along color lines,
particularly among whites.
The resistance is scattered, largely fighting defensive battles,
and, as such, vulnerable to the power and violence of the state's
increasingly repressive measures.
The people are suffering. They are losing their loved ones to
lifetimes in prison, to brutal murdering cops, to drugs. They are
eking out an existence on two, three jobs -- lying awake at night,
wondering how they can hang on one more week, one more day. The
people are dying, alone in trashed-out buildings, by the roadside,
of cold and hunger. There is no need for revolutionaries to tell
them about their daily life. The pain is all too real and obvious.
There is a need for revolutionaries to teach about the
significance of that suffering, to explain the bigger picture and
point the way forward out of the misery. It is important to
counter the claims of the ruling class that these problems can be
solved by blaming and persecuting other groups in society. The
attempts to deny basic civil and human rights to certain groups,
like those who live in public housing or immigrant workers, is
just a prelude to the elimination of these rights for all people.
All the victims of this economic system must stand shoulder to
shoulder when any group is denied their rights. In whose interest
is it to deny the child of an immigrant worker health care or to
allow the police to terrorize a community, beating and killing at
will?
Revolutionaries must tell the truth throughout the country: for
the first time in human history the wherewithal exists for every
man, woman and child to have everything they need for a secure and
comfortable life. The potential of this abundance and economic
equality is the basis for the creation of a truly democratic
society.
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2. UNEMPLOYMENT GOING UP, BUT PLENTY OF WORK TO BE DONE
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Unemployment and the loss of job security are at the base of every
problem this country faces -- from worsening labor contracts to
homelessness to the health care crisis.
Everyone has a right to a job, a right to contribute to the well-
being of society. And with the wealth and technology available
today, everyone is entitled to share in the economic paradise
which is possible.
In palaces, parliaments, legislatures and think tanks all over the
"industrialized world," our rulers are debating the causes of
unemployment and what they are going to do about it. They have
deep disagreements with one another. But they are united on one
point: finding a solution that will protect their interests, the
interests of private property and the owning class.
It's time to challenge their solutions and programs.
What are their solutions? "Increased worker flexibility,"
government-
sponsored job retraining programs, lower interest rates to
stimulate growth, etc. They all add up to the same thing: finding
ways to make it easier for the capitalists to make profits. None
of these programs or any of the others the capitalists propose
solves the problem for the millions and millions who need jobs --
jobs that allow them to feed, house and care for their families.
What is the real problem?
People don't have jobs because there's no way for human labor to
compete with robots and computers. The capitalists can't
profitably employ everyone because robots produce more and cost
less. These new labor-replacing means of production have triggered
a process which is ripping apart the fabric of a society based on
the exploitation of labor. This technology could satisfy the needs
of everyone. But in the hands of the capitalists, this technology
instead has forced millions worldwide into a struggle for their
very existence.
What is our program to solve the jobs problem?
Our program to solve the jobs problem is for the government to put
people to work producing what this society needs to guarantee the
health and safety and education of its people.
There's plenty of work to be done. "Work" need not be defined by
the profits of the exploiters; it can be defined by what it takes
to care for and educate our children, to provide for the health
and culture of our society.
We need more schools and teachers, hospitals and health
professionals. We need parks and youth programs so our children
know that society treasures them as its future. We need to get
food to hungry families and to our senior citizens who have built
this country and are now eating from trash cans. We need
supervised child care so poor mothers can work or go to school
without worrying about their babies' safety. We need to fix the
roads and clean up the neighborhoods that industry has ravished
and now abandoned.
This year alone, the government will give $51 billion in direct
subsidies to business. Another $53.3 billion will go to tax
breaks for corporations. Instead of giving subsidies and tax
breaks to businesses to guarantee their maximum profits, the
government could implement a real jobs program.
A real jobs program would:
* create new jobs, not take jobs from the employed to give them to
the unemployed;
* guarantee jobs at a livable wage, not force people to work for
slave-labor or below-poverty wages;
* create jobs that benefit society, not jobs that just help
businesses maximize their profits.
As part of such a program, the government could penalize companies
that have taken tax abatements and then closed down. It could
impose a moratorium on layoffs by any company that receives a
handout from the government.
What are we going to do to fight for this?
The government has the power to solve the problem. But only the
unified fight of millions of people can force the government to do
something. The conditions are different from one city to another
and from one industry to another. In using this program, the
fighters must work out their specific demands, proposals and
tactics.
Certain general guidelines point us in the right direction:
* Unity is our most important weapon. Unity on the basis of the
need for jobs will make for the broadest possible unity in this
fight.
* Make the government assume responsibility for solving the
problem. Don't let the ruling class shift that responsibility back
onto the very people the system is discarding and attacking.
* Bring the leaders together. Millions all over this country are
already fighting for jobs and job security. But the fight is
scattered and one battle is isolated from another. The most
important step is for these fighters to come together around a
common strategy for carrying out a program to solve the problem.
There's plenty to be done and there are plenty of people ready to
do it. The millionaires and billionaires of the world won't make
maximum profits off this plan, but they've already made a mess of
this world in the name of "free enterprise." They don't give a
damn about any of us. It's up to those of us this system is
discarding to save society.
[This statement was issued by the Steering Committee of the
National Organizing Committee.]
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3. CAPITALISM FAILS AFRICA; SOCIAL DESTRUCTION DEEPENS
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By Abdul Alkalimat
[This is Part I of a two-part article.]
Capitalism required African blood to fuel the Industrial
Revolution (based on profits from the slave trade). Capitalism
now bares its fangs and gives its blessing to the destruction of
African societies in order to search for new forms of accumulation
without resistance.
After the slave trade, European powers tried to "legalize" their
colonial rule over the total African continent by a treaty of
domination signed amongst themselves in Berlin (1885). For over
75 years, European flags flew over most of Africa and each African
society was forced to adapt to the requirements of this foreign
domination. The first stage of formally ending colonialism
(beginning in the early 1960s) was only what one African leader
called "flag independence," for while the countries were
politically independent, a new insidious neocolonialism kept
imperialist hands around the neck of Africa by controlling its
economies. In this context Africa was a pawn in the competition
between imperialist powers and the struggles between these
imperialists and the Soviet Union for spheres of influence.
Now, Africa is part of a world crisis in which industrial
capitalism itself is being transformed. However, today world
economic development is being led by new products of biological
science and the new computer-based technology that uses robots to
replace human labor in material production and increases the
importance of "knowledge in production."
In light of these new developments, critical areas of African
economic activity continue to be rendered useless, particularly
all forms of production that are labor intensive. Recent examples
include laboratory-produced substitutes for key cash crops,
including vanilla beans from Madagascar and coffee from Angola,
Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, etc. Further, auto assembly plants in
Senegal, Nigeria, and South Africa will soon be threatened by the
expanded use of robots. More workers will be permanently
unemployed and many more young people will have no hope of ever
having a job.
The world's population consists mainly of families of workers and
farmers. Whether they are in Africa or Europe or the USA, they
all face the challenge of this new world being transformed by
science and technology. It looks like hell for most of us now,
and yet it has the promise of heaven on earth for everybody
tomorrow! But we can't get there without a fight.
Imperialism says: To hell with Africa.
Hell is the degeneration of social life in which the lives of
working and poor people are increasingly placed at risk, and lots
of people are catching hell in Africa! There is inadequate
education in Africa (e.g., one-third of all children get no
primary school education). Africans face a health crisis (e.g.,
65 percent of HIV-positive cases in the world are in Africa!), and
they live in poverty (e.g., the World Bank estimates that 220
million Africans live in "absolute poverty"). Only a thin layer
of government officials and military officers, corporate managers
and African capitalists avoid this crisis by stashing their wealth
in Europe and the USA (bank accounts and real estate investments),
and consuming through world travel as a matter of lifestyle.
Africa accounts for only two percent of world trade, while being
over $180 billion in debt. On this basis, the World Bank (WB) and
the International Monetary Fund (IMF) directly control the
economies of 30 African countries. Even the New York Times has
taken to calling these two institutions "the overlords of Africa
in the 1990s."
At present about $150 million leaves Africa every day in payment
on IMF/WB debt. This debt payment each year is four times the
amount spent on health and education put together. The African
continent with a population of over 600 million has a gross
national product about that of Belgium with a population of 10
million. Thirty of the world's 40 poorest countries are in
Africa! These are genocidal conditions, not because of
environmental conditions (like drought, etc.), but because of
economic and political relations of exploitation.
There is a new class in Africa, a proletariat that owns no
property and is permanently unemployed. This new class is the
product of a qualitative transformation in the productive forces
of the advanced industrial economies, even though this is
happening outside Africa.
The new class includes the homeless and their "street children,"
farmers and workers who have been forced into "absolute poverty,"
and the massive numbers of poor people forced into refugee status
without any economic security. The freedom movements of the 1950s
and 60s established a certain government safety net that included
expanded services in the area of education, health, housing, and
agricultural development. However, the IMF/WB program of
"structural adjustment" forced the elimination of these programs
as too costly.
It is this new class that faces the risk of genocide at the hands
of imperialism or its agents, because it is this class that is
being forced toward revolutionary activity as a matter of fighting
to survive.
However, the promise of heaven on earth is expressed in the
capacity of the new technology to provide a wealth of goods and a
high quality of life for everyone. The objective process
underlying social destruction forces society to re-organize, but
the direction it takes -- towards heaven or hell -- is determined
by political action.
Toward this kind of a new world there is a spontaneous movement of
forces fighting to survive, fighting to take control of society
and to re-organize it in the interests of the people and not the
foreign capitalists and their lackeys. Extreme cases raise issues
that warrant close analysis: How is Rwanda an example of
liberating a country from genocide? To what extent is South Africa
an example of proletarian revolution within national liberation?
[Part 2 of this article will address these two questions.]
The tasks of all revolutionary fighters in the USA, especially
forces in the African American liberation movement, include
upholding the rights of all African peoples to determine their own
history. This means that we must fight to oppose all imperialist
intervention, even when the imperialists hide their interests
behind the hollow slogans of humanitarian aid.
But in the final analysis, our main work is to build a more
aggressive and powerful revolutionary movement based on the new
class being formed right here in the USA. Revolutionary struggle
is practical and therefore we have to concentrate on what we can
do. Further, the USA is the main enemy of the world's people, and
only when it is weakened from within will all others struggles in
the world have a better chance of victory. Therefore, not only is
building a powerful revolutionary movement in the USA what we can
do, it is what we must do. Now is the time.
[Abdul Alkalimat is the international secretary of the National
Organizing Committee and the interim chair of the Black Liberation
Committee of the NOC.]
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4. RAISE FUNDS TO CIRCULATE OUR PAPERS FAR AND WIDE
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By Sandra Reid
For the NOC National Office
In 1837, a mob surrounded the Alton, Illinois warehouse of Elijah
P. Lovejoy, editor of an anti-slavery newspaper. They shot Lovejoy
and destroyed his printing press to stop his ideas. But the result
was thousands more were drawn into the fight against slavery.
There are many similarities between today's struggle for a new
society and that of the abolitionists, the people like Lovejoy who
led the fight against slavery. The abolitionists understood that
they had to change people's ideas, and that a movement is a cause
and a press. Their newspapers convinced more and more people that
freedom of the press and all other freedoms were entangled with
the freedom of the slave. They also understood that a newspaper
could not grow and new ideas could not spread without money. This
article will focus on some historical and current experience from
the abolitionists, the Civil Rights or Freedom Movement and from
the National Organizing Committee that point to the necessity of
raising funds for our papers and some hows and whys of doing it.
The Abolitionists
* Abby Kelley, a famous female abolitionist, saw her job as
"scattering light, raising funds, obtaining subscribers." She
made 1,000 calls to convince Ohioans that "money is the sinews of
war" and that a "reform movement, like any business, could not run
without it." She was "first to make the collection speech at
meetings, tugging at people's heartstrings until she had loosened
their purse strings, and setting an example of self-sacrifice by
working without pay and even mortgaging her home when money was
needed." (From "Ahead of Her Time" by Dorothy Sterling)
* Sojourner Truth, the great anti-slavery agitator and ex-slave,
had to raise funds or she couldn't travel. Whether it was selling
pictures of herself or going door to door getting donations for
the Union soldiers, fund raising was a natural part of her daily
work. When Sojourner Truth spoke, people were so moved they handed
her money.
* The famous abolitionist newspaper The Liberator had an impact
far beyond its limited circulation and funding, though it hardly
seemed so at the time. The paper agitated for immediate
emancipation of the slave, and published every week from January
1831 until January 1866, no matter the difficulty. The paper
constituted a milestone in the progress of abolitionism and its
viewpoint was picked up by other newspapers that helped to spread
the ideas even farther.
The Freedom Movement
* "Freedom ain't free" summed up the Freedom Movement's fight for
money. The spirit of sacrifice was strong because people believed
in the cause. When thousands of dollars were needed to pay bail,
poor people mortgaged their homes, raising $30,000 in one
instance.
* The fighters in the Freedom Movement understood that the more
agitation, the more money. One leaflet, which talked about
another African American woman being jailed and called on people
to not ride the busses, sent all of Montgomery, Alabama into
motion. As the movement's activity increased, so did the external
financial support. Every possible resource was tapped from Martin
Luther King to singers and movie stars who donated funds from huge
benefits to churches, foundations, and individual donors.
* The civil rights movement received large sums of money from the
capitalists, who had a stake in ending segregation in order to
industrialize the South. But today's new class of impoverished
will not be supported in any way by the capitalists; our funding
must come from the class that stands to gain from the movement.
The National Organizing Committee
Like the abolitionists before us, we are in a race for the hearts
and minds of the American people. The economic crisis and decay of
capitalist society is creating conditions where people are rapidly
moving away from the capitalists and their institutions. Yet in
everything ideological, the people are being caught up in a web of
fascist resolutions of the developing crisis. A police state
could become a reality. Our papers -- the People's Tribune,
Tribuno del Pueblo and Rally, Comrades! -- are the key to
convincing America that there is another choice. But to circulate
our papers in the millions, we need money.
This is where the lessons of history come in. Lesson number one is
that funds can be raised from wherever and however, but we must
rely on the sale of our ideas, especially as expressed in our
papers, as our main form of fund raising. Our papers are our best
fund-raising tool. Two, fund raising must be integrated into every
aspect of our daily work of circulating our papers and our
agitational materials. Three, we can't count on the capitalists to
finance this movement. But we know that the American people
throughout history have proven to be a generous people, with the
poor giving proportionately more of their income to charity than
the rich. We must take the attitude that everyone's contribution
is important, no matter how big or small.
These steps will help us prepare today for when the movement is so
huge that we will have to publish a daily paper in various regions
and parts of the country. In fact, the NOC is already taking the
path to resolving our current financial problems. For example:
* The members of the Music Committee of the NOC realized that as
individuals they were limited in how many people they could reach.
They made a plan to get the People's Tribune into the hands of
thousands of people, including people in little towns where the
NOC hadn't been before. They circulated 70,000 copies of a special
"Music and Revolution" issue of the People's Tribune. They raised
funds every step of the way, and are now on their third printing.
They also raise funds to send speakers to these new areas, and new
NOC locals are springing up as a result.
* An NOC committee in Detroit raised over $1,000 from their paper
routes. They visited their readers, explaining that spring is our
main fundraising time and asked for donations. People may not have
had a lot of money, but they gave.
Almost every day the NOC receives a letter from someone who has
seen our newspapers and wants more information on how to subscribe
or join. We keep finding that our message is getting out in
places where we do not have local councils! Keeping the lessons of
history in mind, let's raise our voices and raise the money we
need to build a fighting NOC with our papers leading the way to
victory.
The by-laws of the NOC state that everyone raises funds. Let's
make this a reality!
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RALLY, COMRADES! (Electronic Edition) is the electronic version of
RALLY, COMRADES!, a newspaper published by the Political Committee
of the National Organizing Committee. The name of the paper is
taken from the original chorus of the poem and song, _The
International_, the rallying cry of the international proletariat:
Rally, Comrades
'Tis the last fight we face
The international
Shall be the human race.
Please address all correspondence to: RALLY, COMRADES!, P.O. Box
477113, Chicago, IL 60647, or e-mail jdav@igc.org. (c) 1994 by the
National Organizing Committee.
Hard copy subscriptions are available for $15/year, and donations
are important. We encourage reproduction and use of all articles.
Please credit RALLY COMRADES.
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The mission of RALLY, COMRADES! is to orient, educate and raise
the consciousness of those who are fighting the growing repression
and poverty in our country. We have entered an age where
electronics is replacing human labor and a growing mass of people
is becoming permanently unemployed. No longer requiring our labor,
those who run this country have launched a massive assault on our
living standards and our legal and human rights.
The people are fighting back, but their struggle is scattered and
unfocused. The crying need of the moment is to unite the leaders
of the scattered struggles around a common understanding and a
common strategy. The leaders need a source of information on the
political situation and the tasks of the revolutionaries. We
dedicate the pages of RALLY COMRADES! to this end.
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