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SOeNo. 694 .... 0623 31 July 1998

Binding Arbitration: Strikebreaking Trapapila isl Diersalleo DJ

For International Labor Solidarity,Not Chauvinist Protectionism!JULY 28-As we go to press, a tentativeagreement has been announced in theFlint, Michigan United Auto Workers(UAW) strike against General Motors.Workers will be voting on the proposedsettlement beginning tomorrow. Forseven weeks, 9,200 UAW members havevirtually shut down the largest corporation in the world, which alone accountsfor 1 percent of America's entire economic output. Yet on July 16, the treacherous UAW misleaders agreed to submitthe question of the "legality" of the striketo binding arbitration, placing the fate ofthis crucial class battle in the hands of theclass enemy-the capitalist courts.GM, backed by Wall Street and all theagencies of the capitalist government,has long wanted to take the ax to a workforce that one bourgeois press agencycalled "the last bastion of the closedshop in America." Amid the intensifiedimperialist competition that has followedthe restoration of capitalism in the SovietUnion in 1991-92, American bosses seekto restore the spectacular profit rates ofcapitalism's freebooting, non-union days.Standing in their way is the legacy of the1937 Flint sit-down strikes, which morethan six decades ago ignited an explo-

sion of labor organizing that created theUAW and other mass industrial unions.The current Flint strike has been bothsolid and popular, particularly with otherauto workers who, like the strikers, havebeen worked half to death throughspeedup and forced overtime but whoalso labor in fear that their jobs will disappear tomorrow. As Flint workerswalked the picket lines, GM parts workers in Indianapolis and Dayton alsovoted to strike, as did UAW members atthe GM-Toyota NUMMI assembly plantin Fremont, California, whose contractexpires on July 31. But most significantof all was the 96 percent strike authorization vote on July 19 at the Saturnassembly plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee.Saturn was the only GM assemblyplant in the U.S. to continue productionduring the Flint strike. Just four monthsbefore, workers had voted to maintainthe Saturn contract, which has beenlauded as a model of union-management"cooperation" by supposedly givingworkers a say in production procedures.But management threats to slash jobsby vastly expanding the number of partsmade outside the- plant spurred workerscontinued on page 6

IriKe

APFlint UAW Local 659 members walk off the job, June 5, beginning strikeaction which led to almost complete shutdown of GM factories inNorth America.

Death Row SpeedupTargets M i n ~ r i t i e s

Mississippi-which has become knownas "the capital of capital punishment."Home to only 14 percent of Pennsylvania's population, Philadelphia accountsfor the bulk of the state's death rowinmates-and 83 percent of them areblack. In the period examined by thestudy, 1983-93, black defendants in Philadelphia were sentenced to death nearlyfour times more often than whites. Inthe years since, blacks received eightof the ten death sentences handed downin 1994, ten of ten in 1995, three of fourin 1996.On July 13, the state of Florida agreedto give $500,000 each to Freddie Pittsand Wilbert Lee to settle a wrongful conviction claim. The two black men weresentenced to die by an all-white jury forthe killing of two white gas station attendants in 1963. Pitts and Lee were tried a

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second time after a white man confessedto the murders-and again convicted byan all-white jury. After nine years ondeath row, they were finally pardoned in1975. And it was not until 35 years aftertheir frame-up that they won some tokencompensation for the racist horror towhich they had been subjected.What is unusual about this case is simply that Freddie Pitts and Wilbert Leelived to see their vindication. As a newstudy by the Death Penalty InformationCenter documents-certainly not for thefirst time-the death penalty is racist to

the core. It is legal lynching, pure andsimple. Blacks make up 42 percent of thecountry's nearly 3 ,400 death row inmates,well over three times their proportion ofthe population. And the states of the oldSouthern slavocracy account for an overwhelming percentage of those executed.The focus of The Death Penalty inBlack and White: Who Lives, Who Dies,Who Decides is far removed geographically from the Florida backwoods wherePitts and Lee had their near-fatal encounter with lynch law "justice." It is Philadelphia, Pennsylvania-not Philadelphia,

Notably, the study omits the Philadelphia case which has come to exemplifythe racist death penalty in this country:the frame-up of black death row politicalprisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. In the 16years since he was falsely convicted forthe December 1981 killing of a Philadelphia policeman, Mumia's fight for freedom has become the focus of oppositionto the death penalty. The pro-death forcesmade this clear in their own chilling waycontinued on page 10

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JULY 26-Manning picket lines for 40days without strike benefits, 5,500 members of Philadelphia's Transport WorkersUnion (TWU) Local 234 held strongagainst a full-scale union-busting offensive by the Southeastern PennsylvaniaTransportation Authority (SEPTA), onlyto be sold down the Delaware River bythe union leadership. Although the strikewas solid, shutting down public transitin the city, on July 10 the union topsreached an agreement that was likeChristmas in July for the SEPTA bosses.Despite the "victory" claims of Local234 president Steve Brookens, the unionleadership largely capitulated to SEPTA,agreeing to solidify the union-bustingtwo-tier system already in existence andgive up union control over a whole range

of work rules. Under the agreement, newworkers are to be hired at 60 percent ofthe top rate and can only reach top payafter four years. As the PhiladelphiaInquirer (14 July) smugly noted:"SEPTA got much of what it demandedback in March in terms of work rules,workers' comp reform, health-care savings, attendance and disciplinary policy,and a near-zero-tolerance drug and alcohol policy."Saddled by a leadership which wasincapable of leading this fight to victory,on July 24 union members voted 3 to 1 toaccept the contract, even though key contract terms have yet to be agreed upon.Brookens & Co. never wanted this fightto begin with, and all along looked to theracist, anti-labor government to effect a"fair" settlement. Throughout the strike,

The Anti-Colonial Struggle andSocialist RevolutionChampioning the emancipation of peoplessubjugated under the yoke of imperialism iscritical in developing revolutionary socialistconsciousness among workers in the U.S.and other capitalist powers. Writing on theeve of World War II , Bolshevik leader LeonTrotsky underlined the crucial importance offorging a revolutionary international party

TROTSKY to link the struggles of the oppressed colo- LENINnial and semicolonial masses to the fight forsocialist revolution, particularly in the imperialist centers. Pointing to the role ofprocapitalist labor "leaders" like the AFL's William Green and John L. Lewis of the CIO,Trotsky stressed that in the U.S. such a party can only be built through sharp politicalstruggle against the chauvinist trade-union bureaucracy.A year sooner or later, the question will be presented in a very acute form: Who ismaster on this continent? The imperialists of the United States or the working masses

who people all the nations of America?This question, by its very essence, can only be resolved by an open conflict offorces, that is to say by revolution, or more exactly, a series of revolutions. In thosestruggles against imperialism will participate, on the one hand, the American proletariat, in the interests of its own defense; and on the other hand, the Latin Americanpeoples, who are struggling for their emancipation, and who precisely for that reasonwill support the struggle of the American proletariat.It can be clearly deduced from what has been said that we far from recommend to theLatin American people that they passively await the revolution in the United States orthat the North American workers fold their arms until the Latin American peoples'moment of victory arrives. He who waits passively gets nothing. It is necessary to continue the struggle without interruption, to extend and deepen it, in harmony with theactually existing historical conditions. But at the same time, one must comprehend thereciprocal relation between the two principal currents of the contemporary struggleagainst imperialism. By merging at a certain stage, definite triumph can be assured.Naturally, this doesn't mean to say that Lewis and Green will become outstandingadvocates of the Socialist Federation of the American continent. No, they will remain inthe camp of imperialism until the very end. It also will not mean that the whole proletariat will learn to see that in the liberation of the Latin American peoples lies its ownemancipation. Nor will the entire Latin American people comprehend that a communityof interests exists between them and the American working class. But the very fact thata parallel struggle goes on will signify that an objective alliance exists between them;perhaps not a formal alliance, but, indeed, a very active one. The sooner the Americanproletarian vanguard in North, Central, and South America understands the necessityfor a closer revolutionary collaboration in the struggle against the common enemy, themore tangible and fruitful that alliance will be. To clarify, illustrate, and organize thatstruggle-herein lies one of the most important tasks of the Fourth International.

- Leon Trotsky, "Ignorance Is Not a Revolutionary Instrument" (30 January 1939)

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! ~ ~ ! ! . . ~ o ' ! . ~ ! ' ! ! ! ~ . r ! . ! . EDITOR: Len MeyersEDITOR, YOUNG SPARTACUS PAGES: Jacob ZornPRODUCTION MANAGER: Susan FullerCIRCULATION MANAGER: Jane PattersonEDITORIAL BOARD: Ray Bishop (managing editor), Bruce Andre. Helene Brosius, George Foster.Liz Gordon. Frank Hunter. Jane Kerrigan. James Robertson. Joseph Seymour, Alison SpencerThe Spartacist League is the U.S. Section of the International Communist League (FourthInternationalist).Workers Vanguard (ISSN 0276-0746) published biweekly. except skippi ng three alternate issues in June. July andAugust (begi nning with omit ting the second issue in June) and with a 3-week interval in December. by the SpartacistPublishing Co . 299 Broadway. Suite 318. New York. NY 10007. Telephone: (212) 732-7862 (Editorial). (212) 732-7861(Business). Address all correspondence to: Box 1377. GPO. New York. NY 10116. E-mail address:vanguard@li ac.nel.Domestic subscriptions: $10.00/22 issues. Periodicals postage paid at New York. NY. POSTMASTER: Send addresschanges to Workers vanguard. Box 1377. GPO. New York. NY 10116.Opinions expressed in signed arlicles or etters do not necessarily express the editorial viewpoint.The closing date for news in this issue is July 28.No. 694 31 July 1998

union leaders announced they would callit off if SEPTA agreed to binding arbitration. Brookens got what he asked for, andon July 11 the picket lines came down.Key issues such as the hiring of part-timeworkers will be submitted to arbitration,i.e., placed in the hands of agents ofthe capitalist state charged with forcingthrough anti-union settlements. So beholden are the union misleaders to thebosses' government that the union doesn'teven know what the terms submitted toarbitration will be, only that its memberswill be bound hand and foot.Against this sell-out policy, we calledfor a class-struggle fight to win thestrike, including extending the strike bypicketing regional rail and bus lineswhich transport suburbanites to theiroffice jobs in Center City. It also wouldhave meant mobilizing the city's blackand Hispanic poor, who are ready allies

of labor in this city of grinding poverty,vicious segregation and brutal cop terror.To do so would have required defyingthe anti-union court injunctions and thenotoriously racist Philly cops who weremobilized to enforce them.But this is just what the TWUtops would not do, because they arethoroughly tied to the capitalist systemand its anti-labor laws. Giving new meaning to the term "toothless leadership,"Brookens boasted to the PhiladelphiaInquirer (19 July) about his ploy of sitting at the negotiating table in a unionT-shirt (leaving his $500 suits at home)and appearing on TV with his teethmissing in order to win "sympathy."While denouncing Democratic mayor andunion-buster Ed Rendell, TWU officialspreached reliance on "good" local Dem-

APPhiladelphia TWU rally. Strike shutdown city transit fo r nearly sixweeks before sellout by union tops.ocrats and the Clinton administration.This was made clear through the role of"friend Of labor" Democratic Congressman Robert Brady, whom the Inquirer(12 July) called the "pivotal intermediary" in reaching the rotten agreement.

As we wrote in WVNo. 693 (3 July):"There must be a political fight insidethe labor movement against its misleaders, whose strategy of reliance on capitalist politicians and the capitalist courtsis a sure road to defeat. To mobilizelabor's social power, not only in its owninterests but on behalf of all thoseoppressed, requires the forging of a multiracial revolutionary workers party committed to ending racist capitalist rulethrough socialist revolution." _

Drop All Charges Against Ann ArborAnti-Klan Protesters!The following protest letter wassent by the Partisan Defense Committee to Washtenaw County, Michiganprosecutor Brian Mackie on July 28.The PDC has sent a contribution of$200 for the legal defense of the antiKlan protesters and encourages WVreaders to send contributions earmarked "Anti-Klan Defendants" toUnited fo r Equality and AffirmativeAction, P.O. Box 24462, KensingtonStation, Detroit, MI 48224.The Partisan Defense Committeecondemns the arr\!sts and sinisterwitchhunt of participants in an antiKKK protest on May 9, organizedby the National Women's RightsOrganizing Coalition (NWROC) andAnti-Racist Action. Many of themface up to ten years in prison for the"crime" of protesting racist genocide.We demand that all charges againstthe anti-Klan protesters be dropped!Two months after some 500 outraged demonstrators turned out toprotest the KKK on May 9, youroffice has unleashed a chilling dragnet, attempting to round up all thosetargeted from photos and videotapes

of the demonstration. More ominousis your threat to post the pictures on

the city's Web page and print them inlaw enforcement journals, a setup forrandom cop harassment and worse.The State of Michigan has beencarrying out a crusade against thosewho protest race terror. Being the firststate to end welfare, Michigan hassimultaneously devoted tremendousresources to protect those who wish tomurder the black population as theyare driven further into immiseration.The horrifying lynching of JamesByrd in Jasper, Texas illustrates theKlan's program for blacks.Part and parcel of the state's campaign against those who "step out ofline" is their determination to exactrevenge on all who dare to protest thefascist scum. We recall how AnnArbor's racist city cops rioted againstanti-Klan demonstrators in 1996.Among those facing frame-upcharges today are NWROC leadersShanta Driver and Jessica Curtin. Thisblatant political witchhunt is clearlyaimed at squelching the right to protestracist genocide. Hands off NWROCand Anti-Racist Action!

Sincerely,Cheri Mitchell, for thePartisan Defense Committee

Spartacistpamphlet, 1984$.75 (24 pages)Spartacist(English-Edition) ,No. 38-39Summer 1986

$1 (56 pages)

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WORKERS VANGUARD

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In Memory of Frank LovellFrank Lovell, a leading trade unionist of the revolutionary Socialist Workers Party (SWP) of the late 1930s,'40s and '50s, died of a heart attack in New York onMay 1. He was 84 years old. A member of the SWP at itsfounding in 1938, longtime member of the party'sNational Committee and leader of its Detroit branch inthe 1950s, Frank remained active in the SWP after itabandoned a revolutionary perspective in the early 1960s.

Frank and his wife ofmany years, Sarah, were among theveteran party members expelled by the Jack Barnes leadership in 1983 after Barnes renounced Trotsky's theoryof permanent revolution, bringing the SWP's theoreticalviews into consonance with its (by then) thoroughly reformist practice.At the time of his death, Frank was an active memberof the editorial board of the Bulletin in Defense of Marxism (BIDOM ) , the journal which he initiated for the"Fourth Internationalist Tendency" after his expulsionfrom the SWP. BIDOM continues the political orientation of the SWP of the 1970s, combining a nostalgicclaim to Trotskyist heritage with uncritical enthusing forFidel Castro, support to black nationalism, and an abjecttailing of "progressive" labor fakers like Ron Carey ofthe Teamsters. Throughout Lovell's trade-union work, inthe SWP and afterward in BIDOM, he defended a strategy of blocs and maneuvers with elements of the tradeunion bureaucracy as more effective than the SpartacistLeague's programmatic intransigence, which he considered "sectarian."Frank provided periodic assistance to archival projectsof the Prometheus Research Library (PRL), library andarchive of the Central Committee of the SUU.S. We publish below a letter of condolence sent by the PRL's archivist to Frank' s family, comrades and friends. Accompanying the letter is a historical document from the PRLcollection pertaining to Frank's history as a revolutionist: a 1938 letter by then-SWP leader Max Shachtmanasking Frank to move to New York City. Lovell hadjoined the Workers Party (as the Trotskyists were thencalled) in 1935 in California; shortly afterward, he beganto sail as a member of the Sailors Union of the Pacific(SUP). He was among the first of the younger partymembers sent into the union movement during theworking-class upsurge that built the industrial unions ofthe Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). TheTrotskyists concentrated their maritime forces in the SUPand the Marine Firemen's union on the West Coast and,on the East Coast in their affiliate, the Seafarers' International Union-all non-CIO unions wqich engaged inoften bitter struggle with the CIO-affiliated NationalMaritime Union (NMU). Centered on the Eastern seaboard, the NMU was founded in 1937 and had a membership which was heavily black and influenced by theStalinist Communist Party (CP).Shachtman's letter asks Lovell to lead the party's fledgling work in the NMU, noting that the Trotskyist paper,then called the Socialist Appeal, was covering the internal situation in the union but that the Political Committee (PC) was unhappy with the personnel in the fraction.Frank did spend substantial time in New York in 1938-39, as he recounted in his memoir of SWP leader JamesP. Cannon (see James P. Cannon As We Knew Him, Pathfinder Press [1976]). But Trotskyist work in the NMU didnot then get off the ground. Lovell himself remained amember of the SUP, returning to California by 1940.The SWP's bloc with the SUP leadership led by HarryLundberg, a militant syndicalist but virulent racist andanti-Communist, undercut the Trotskyists' ability toappeal to the Stalinist-influenced workers in the NMU,as Dick Fraser, another veteran of the SWP's maritimework, later detailed in "A Letter to American Trotskyists: Too Little, Too Late" (originally published inRevolutionary Age in 1974, reprinted in "In Memoriam:Richard S. Fraser-An Appreciation and Selection ofHis Work," Prometheus Research Series No. 3 [August1990]). The intense battle between the Trotskyists andStalinists for influence in the maritime unions wasreflected in a 1946-47 exchange of pamphlets-the SWPreplied to Herb Tank's Communists on the Waterfrontwith Art Preis's Stalinists on the Waterfront. Tank, aparticularly vicious Stalinist hack, wrote Inside Job!The Story of Trotskyite Intrigue in the Labor Movementaround the same time.Frank Lovell's cothinkers in the Bulletin in Defenseof Marxism are planriing a September 20 memorialmeeting at New York University's Tamiment Library.

* * * 8 June 1998To the family, friends and comrades of Frank Lovell,

I share your sorrow at Frank's passing. He was a warmman, a good-hearted man who stood out among theremaining veterans of the American Trotskyist movement of the 1930s-1950s in the value he put on docu-

31 JULY 1998

1913-1998WVPhoto

menting the history of American communism. Despitethe wide political gulf that separates the SpartacistLeague from the veteran SWPers expelled by JackBarnes in the early 1980s, Frank never let sectarian political concerns stand in the way of archival collaboration.He was always ready to answer an historical question orlend me some assistance in my work for the PrometheusResearch Library. I will miss his resonant voice and hisdirect participant's knowledge of the history of the revo-lutionary Socialist Workers Party. ,I first got to know Frank when we began working withGeorge Breitman in 1984, compiling the material thatbecame our book, James P. Cannon and the Early YearsofAmerican Communism, Selected Writings and Speeches, 1920-28. Frank brought George to the library on oneoccasion, and was present at a few of our working meetings. After George's death, when we put aside work onthe book for a period in order to concentrate on our Prometheus Research Series, Frank was not happy. Everytime I saw him at a political event in the city he woulddemand, "Where's that Cannon book? Why aren't youworking on it?" He was overjoyed when I told him we hadresumed work on the project in the early 1990s. He provided biographical details for some of the early American Trotskyists listed in the book glossary. In his reviewof the book for Bulletin in Defense of Marxism, Franknoted (with a predictable peevish nod to our considerable .political differences), "The editors have produced athoroughly professional work and deserve to be congratulated and forgiven their political lapses."I had some sharp political fights withFrank, but he always remained ready to exchange information and the occasional political document. After I moved to Californiamost of our contact was by phone, but Iwould visit him when in New York. He wasalways willing to plumb his memory bankswhen we had questions; occasionally thePRL could reciprocate when Frank calledfor a fact or date. He identified for us anumber of the party names used in SWPPolitical Committee minutes of the 1950s;most recently he assisted when I had a fewfactual questions for the Workers Vanguardobituary for Myra Tanner Weiss. He wascareful to underline to me that he had hadbig political disagreements with Myra too.I found in the PRL collection the attached letter from Max Shachtman to Frank,written 2 August 1938, on the eve of thefounding of the Socialist Workers Party.The letter urgently requests that Frankcome to New York to take charge of the

lives in WWII (some of them on the deadly Murmanskrun, attempting to carry Trotskyist propaganda to theworkers of Stalin's Russia). Frank's contributions to thethen-revolutionary Socialist Workers Party will be builtupon by future g e ~ e r a t i o n s of revolutionary Trotskyists.Fraternally,Emily TurnbullFor the Prometheus Research Library

* * *Los Angeles, CaliforniaDear Frank,

August 2, 1938

I don't know just what your plans are at the presenttime, but I consider it of urgent importance that youorient immediately to coming to New York to establish abase here.I will not go into great detail at the present momenton the general situation in the union on the east coast,you have probably read about it in the press, and willread even more in the current issue of the Appeal. Suffice it to say that the Stalinists have never been so hardpressed in the NMU as at the present time.The danger at the present time is not so much the Stalinists as the weakness and confusion of the generallyinchoate rank and file movement which has, no doubt,some excellent elements and, as you probably know,some very reactionary elements. I f ever the indispensability of clear headed Bolshevik leadership in a unionfight stood out, it is now in the NMU fight.Unfortunately, the fraction in New York is ratherweak and doesn't have experienced comrades at itshead, and that is precisely what I am very much worriedabout. The situation is somewhat aggravated qy thepresence of Comrades DeLong and Potter who, with alltheir good qualities combine what I fear are such badqualities as effectively nullify any contribution whichthey can make to our work. By, what seems to me, a bitof clique work, DeLong has been elected secretary ofthe fraction. The situation is not only unpleasant butmay even dissipate all the great possibilities that wehave before us now on the east coast.While the P.C. expressed itself against the replacement of O'Brien as temporary secretary by DeLong, itnevertheless decided not to over-rule the fraction inwhat appears to be a minor organizational question.However, we do not want the situation to rest on itspresent basis. It is therefore imperative, in my opinion,that you come here as quickly as possible to take holdand take a leading and decisive part in the maritimefraction and in the maritime work generally.I do not write you at great length because I take it forgranted that you will understand the importance of thesituation and the necessity for your presence here at theearliest possible date.With best personal wishes, Fraternally,Max Shachtman

IN MBMO.IAMMURRAY GREENFIELDHOWARD MANGUMEDWARD PARKERs.a- Ullia of 1M Pod,.

CARL PALMER"__ ou.,., , ,_ ..... ipenEDWIN JAFFEERONALD TEARSEDAVID UDELL

s . . , - . t - - . . Ulliota

To Mae memben oj 1M SoeiaIiR "0'.' tny. llllio I0Illi N "_ II _ ill 1M Second "or'" ".,. -.. 1M _, .party's fraction in the National MaritimeUnion. I sent a copy of this letter to Frankin 1996, and thought you might appreciateseeing a copy now. It was as a leader ofTrotskyist work in the maritime unionsthat Frank won his spurs as a leader of theSWP. In the collection of the PrometheusResearch Library you can find Frank'sbook Maritime: A Historical Sketch, AWorkers' Program, published in 1943 under

1943 book byFrank Lovellunder the nameFrederick J.

"-7 . . , . NT e Iorpedoetl ., Asil tAU 600i UTAae IIIIIl comratla _n ....n ILm .lrilletl __ fIIIIl IlIOn ILm to,.l anioll rniIitMu. T1w, -..-.cioru 111M fInotetl IAeir erwr(iia 10 1M

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the name of Frederick J. Lang and dedi-cated to the party seamen who lost their

Lang, dedicatedto SWP seamenkilled dOinginternationalistduty.IItiI prtIftfIIII, IAeir inaruI _ 10___ 0 1M--, 1 ~ " . " , 1M ..u.m 4eJ_e .,.,wt 1M J N ~ _. M IJwj,. ...." . , _" , . frIiliIMI .-.l oIkr. . . . , _ I I " " ; " .,."zyn. oj 1M lIIlIriIiIM iIuIrwry.

I, U lio,.4 ,. . IItiI 6001: will W, 10 _ 1M _ I :for IMicA IAey ".". IJwj,. "flU.

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For Workers Revolution-For a Socialist Asia!Japan Economic Crisis ShakesWe conclude below the articlebegun in WVNo. 693 (3 July). Sincethis article was written, elections tothe upper house of the Japanese parliament in mid-July saw a massivepro,test vote against the long-rulingLiberal Democratic Party (LDP). Inthe aftermath, Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto resigned and LDPbarons are jockeying to determine hissuccessor. The London Economist(18 July), house organ of international financiers, worries that thepolitical disarray in Tokyo "makes itless likely that Japan's economy isgoing to recover quickly, and lesslikely that radical reforms will beattempted." What the Economistmeans by "radical reforms" are masslayoffs and the all-round intensifica

tion in the exploitation of labor.

Imperialist Order porations continued to borrow hugesums to finance investment projectson which the returns were marginalor even negative. Hence Japanesebanks are now saddled with hundreds of billions of dollars of "nonperforming" loans.Part Two

The big winners in the electionwere the bourgeois-liberal Democratic Party-which adopted a "prolabor" posture by including amongits candidates officials of the

KyodoDepositors making a run on Osaka bank. Economic crisis has caused widespreadinsecurity among Japanese working people.

A key institution of keiritsu capit a ~ i s m in its "golden age" was thetight control exercised by the Ministry of Finance over foreign exchangetransactions, which was not substantially relaxed until 1980. This provedto be a highly effective mechanismfor protecting industries favored bythe government against foreignimports. Foreign exchange restrictions also prevented the export ofmoney-capital from Japan, compelling Japanese bankers to financeJapanese firms only. Such policiesled Western journalists to speak of"Japan, Inc."-a term first coined bya Japanese businessman. But thenotion that Japanese bankers, industrialists and government officialsfunctioned like an efficient hierarchyof a single large corporation wassuperficial and impressionistic, as

country's main trade-union federation,Rengo-and the reformist CommunistParty (JCP). With 15 percent of the vote,the JCP emerged as the third largest partyin the upper house after the LDP and theDemocrats. With the working class facingfalling real wages and the end of socalled "lifetime employment," the increased vote for the JCP was a clearexpression of discontent over the currentstate of Japanese capitalism. But the exStalinists turned social democrats of theJCP seek to demonstrate that they wouldbe reliable political agents for Mitsui,Mitsubishi & Co. Thus the JCP's postelection statement denounced the LDP innationalist terms as a "yes man for America" and offered to join any coalition thatwould work to overcome the LDP'smajority in the lower house of parliament.The JCP's role in such a coalition wouldbe to police the working class on behalfof Japanese capital.The economic crisis has shaken Japanese working people out of politicalcomplacency. What is needed is a genuine communist party to fight for a workers government to expropriate die capitalist exploiters-the only road to abetter future for the toiling masses inJapan and throughout East Asia.* * *Japanese capitalism, as it was recon-structed during and immediately after the

4

American occupation, had a financialstructure very different from the UnitedStates and also significantly differentfrom Japan in the prewar era. Mostimportant was the absolute predominance of banks in providing corporatefinance and the corresponding insignificance of the stock and bond market.The breakup of the zaibatsu which had

the financial system was thereforegreatly strengthened. Over the next fewyears, the zaibatsu would be reconstructed around their respective "mainbanks" under the new label of keiritsu.Between the mid-1950s and late 1970s,bank loans accounted for 83 percent oflong-term external finance of Japanesecorporations, the issue of stocks and

u.s. Escalates Japan-BashingThe Main Enemy Is at Home!controlled 70 percent of Japanese industrial output directly and over 90 percentindirectly was one of the supposed liberal reforms of the American occupationauthorities. Family members and manytop managers of the zaibatsu were barredfrom executive positions, and the keyholding companies (honsha) aroundwhich they-were organized dissolved,their stock holdings sold to the generalpublic. However, zaibatsu dissolutionturned out to be illusory, as the top man-'agers of Mitsubishi, Mitsui, et al. continued to meet informally and semi-legallythroughout the occupation period. Moreimportantly, American "trust-busting"exempted the major banks whose role in

o'"3CD

Homeless,living in Tokyotrain station.Looming massunemploymentthreatens tocondemn moreJapanese todesperatepoverty.

bonds only 17 percent. The comparablefigures for U.S. corporations in the sameperiod are 32 percent for bank loans and68 percent through the issuance of newsecurities. Furthermore, the allocation ofmoney-capital by the banks was governedby keiritsu loyalties, not SImply profitmaximization. Thus the Fuji Bank mightlend at 5 percent interest to a Fuji familyfirm like Hitachi but refuse a loan to anunrelated firm willing to pay 7 percent. Inturn, the Bank of Japan discriminated inhow it rationed money among the keiritsubanks. Those keiritsu with better connections to central bank bureaucrats got moremoney. This system, which was lateradopted by East Asian "tigers" like SouthKorea an d Indonesia, is now describedand denounced as "crony capitalism."The financial glue binding togetherthe firms of a given keiritsu was themutual holding of each other's corporatestock. Until the late 1980s, such sharecross-holdings amounted to 70 percentof the total value of the Tokyo stockexchange. These financial arrangementsrendered impossible either hostile corporate takeovers or successful stockholder revolts against the incumbentmanagement.The keiritsulmain bank system underlay both Japan's past success and itspresent economic distress. The top management of the big industrial corporations have had sufficient freedom ofaction and access to money-capital viatheir main banks to expand productionand marketing at rates of profits whichwould have been unacceptably low toAmerican, British or German stockholders. Even after profit rates declinedsharply in the late 1970s, Japanese cor-

the speculative mania of the bubbleeconomy was to show.End of the Japanese"Economic Miracle"

During the 1960s and '70s both Western and Japanese bourgeois ideologuesregarded Japanese capitalism as unique,and uniquely successful. But by theend of that period, the average rate ofprofit in Japan had declined from 23 percent to 15 percent. Why? Conditions ofrelatively full employment pushed upwage rates. Additionally, during the1970s the Japanese economy was hitwith the oil shokku, the tenfold increasein the price of petroleum manipulated bythe American-dominated Seven Sisterscartel and its main client, the Saudi monarchy. Japanese exports were also facingrising trade barriers in North Americaand West Europe, as Washington strongarmed Tokyo into accepting "voluntaryexport restraints" first on steel and thenautos. However, the most fundamentalfactor was that analyzed by Marx inCapital: the tendency of the rate of profitto fall, resulting from the fact that therapid accumulation of capital stock (e.g.,new machinery, advanced technology) isnot offset by a corresponding increase insurplus value, i.e., profit.Keiritsu capitalism responded to falling rates of profit in Japan by shiftingmanufacturing operations abroad, aimingto secure lower labor costs in SoutheastAsia or to get under import barriers inthe U.S. Direct Japanese investment inEast Asia rose from $400 million a yearin the early 1970s to $2.7 billion a yearin the late 1980s. And in the decade following 1980, Japanese banks increasedtheir share of international lending from4 percent to 40 percent! In short, anincreasing portion of the surplus valueappropriated by Japanese capital wasbeing generated outside Japan.This development could not but have aprofound effect on the internal structureand dynamics of Japanese capitalism.As Japan became a major exporter of capital, the keiritsu bosses no longer benefited from government control over foreign exchange transactions. MatsushitaElectric and Sony did not want FinanceMinistry bureaucrats interfering withtheir investment strategies in SoutheastAsia. The Sumitomo Bank and NomuraSecurities did not want these bureaucratsobstructing their maneuvers on Wall

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Street and in the City of London. And ifSumitomo and Nomura were going tooperate on a large scale in New York,London and Frankfurt, Morgan Stanleyand the Deutsche Bank demanded thatthey be allowed to operate freely inTokyo. Grudgingly and gradually, theJapanese government acceded to thesedemands. Following the relaxation of foreign exchange controls in 1980 Japanesefinancial markets became increasinglyfreewheeling, not to say anarchic.

..Reuters

ture and only 28 percent in manufacturing, mining and transport. During the1950s, Japanese industrialists were ableto draw millions of poor peasant youthfrom the countryside to work in the newor expanded factories. Wage rates thusremained at Asian levels. As late as 1960the average manufacturing wage in Japanwas 15 percent below that in the Philippines, a country whose industrial production and overall economic productivitywas a small fraction of Japan's.Again, the impetus for major changesin the Japanese economy came from WallStreet and Washington. In the 1980s, theU.S. federal debt mushroomed as theReagan administration undertook a massive war buildup against the SovietUnion. The "strong dollar" had been killing American manufacturing exportswhile generating huge balance-of-tradedeficits, especially with Japan. In the1985 Plaza Agreement, the Reagan gangpressured Tokyo into almost doubling theprice of the yen in terms of the dollar. Thefollowing year Japan suffered the "highyen recession," as it was called, markedby a fall in industrial production.

Above: Protest by Japanese nurses, 1993, during collapse of "bubbleeconomy." Below: September 1997 hospital workers rally in Philippine capitalof Manila. Asian economic crisis has deepened worker unrest in region.

After the surplus rural population wasabsorbed in the 1960s, wages increasedappreciably but still lagged behind increases in productivity. A major factorhere was the proliferation of companyunions, particularly after the leftist-ledunions were broken by the Americanoccupation authorities and Japanese capitalists in the late 1940s and early , 50s.Indeed, Japan is the only advanced capitalist country in which company unionism predominates in the core industrialsector. Independent unions tied to theSocialist Party (now the Social Democratic Party) continued to exist in thepublic sector, for example, among workers in the state-owned (now privatized)railway system. In the private sector,however, such unions were subvertedlargely through the promise of "lifetimeemployment"-permanent job securityand wage increases based on seniority.

Hoping to reduce the cost of production and thereby offset the higher exchange rate of the yen in world markets,the Bank of Japan slashed its discountrate-the interest charged member banks- to encourage large-scale borrowingand investment in new technologies.However, in the "deregulated" Japanesecapital markets of the 1980s the government's ultra-cheap money policy setoff and fueled one of the great speculativemanias in the history of capitalism. Nolonger centrally dependent on their mainbanks, big industrial corporations issueda mass of new stocks and bonds. Thebanks started lending to small businessmen and other individuals, who usedthese low-interest funds to speculate instocks and real estate.By the late 1980s, everyone and hisuncle were playing the Tokyo stock market. The biggest individual player was

rates in 1989, the entire financial house ofcards collapsed. Land prices nose-divedby 70 percent, wiping out much ofthe banking system's capital. The country entered its worst recession in fourdecades, industrial production fallingmore than 10 percent in 1992-93. And itwas not just an accident that the end ofthe Japanese "economic miracle" usheredin by the Korean War coincided with the

Financial TImesJapanese soldiers sent to Cambodia in 1992 UN "peacekeeping" mission, asTokyo reasserts its military presence in Southeast Asia.former bar girl Nui Onoue, known as the"Dark Lady of Osaka." Owning only tworestaurants in that city's red-light district,she nonetheless managed to borrow $1.7billion from the elite Industrial Bank ofJapan: "To further her image as a stockmarket guru Onoue would hold midnightrites at one of the restaurants with theapparent aim of seeking financial advicefrom the divinities" (Christopher Wood,The Bubble Economy).The stock market boom was comparable to those in other countries at othertimes. But what happened to the price ofland was out of this world. At one point,the officially assessed value of metropolitan Tokyo real estate exceeded thatof the United States and Canada combined. While absurd on the face ofit, such hyperinflated land values had abig effect in the real world. Land was themain collateral for hundreds of billionsof dollars in bank loans used by Japanesebusinessmen to buy everything from U.S.Treasury bills to Hawaii hotels and golfcourses and factories in Thailand.When the central bank moved to coolthe speculative fever by raising interest31 JULY 1998

counterrevolutionary destruction of theSoviet Union.The bubble economy did not simplyentail the inflation of corporate stock andreal estate prices. There was also a realboom in capital spending encouraged bysoaring share prices and rock-bottominterest rates. The keiritsu bosses believed that they could sell whatever theyproduced in foreign markets at a rate ofprofit which would at least cover theirgreatly expanded debt service. In the late1980s, Toyota, Nissan and Honda spent$4 billion to build four of the most technologically efficient auto assembly plantsin the world; a few years later, not onewas operating at full capacity. Japan'sindustrial capacity had reached the pointwhere its maximum output could be soldonly by reducing prices so much that itwould wipe out any profit as well asbankrupt Japan's major competitors. AndU.S. imperialism was now pushing amuch tougher line on trade.Japanese industrial firms were thussaddled with productive capacity whichthey could not utilize profitably, financedby loans which they could not repay.

Gerry del Rosario

Meanwhile, Japan's bankers sought salvation in their still booming East Asianneighbors, as outstanding loans to HongKong tycoons, the South Korean chaebolconglomerates, Indonesia's Suharto clanand the like ballooned from $40 billionin 1994 to at least $265 billion last year.These loans also served as a form ofexport subsidy, as East Asia displacedNorth America as Japan's main foreign"market for manufactured goods.To protect its enormous economicstake in the region, Japanese imperialismhas been reasserting its military presence. During the Cold War, the Japaneseruling class acceded to American military dominance while pursuing its owninterests and ambitions primarily througheconomic means. But in the post-Sovietworld, the defense and furtherance ofJapanese imperialism's economic interests requires its own military power.Thus is the road being paved to an interimperialist World War III,' one whichwould be fought with nuclear 'weaponsfrom the outset.Japanese WorkersUnder the Gun

The present-day image of Japan as anultra-modern, gadget-laden society hasobscured the country's relative backwardness in the period following World War II.In 1947,51 percent of the economicallyactive population was engaged in agricul-

In the 1960s and '70s, when the profitsof corporate Japan were booming, workers in large corporations could look forward to steady increases in income overthe course of their lives. Now most people think "lifetime employment" is athing of the past. Average wage increasesgranted during this year' s annual "springoffensive" of contract negotiations werethe lowest ever, amounting to a drop inreal wages for the first time in fouryears. Official unemployment figureshave climbed to new records from onemonth to the next, with the actual unemployment level much higher even thanthe 4.1 percent rate released for April.Among those aged 15 to 24, unemployment tops 9 percent. The desperationmasked by these cold statistics is reflected in a report in the Asahi EveningNews (12 June) that half of the more than24,400 people who committed suicidelast year were unemployed. In an articleheadlined "Jobless Rate Sparks Anger,Fear," one computer engineer told theJapan Times (30 May): "Japan as a country is fast losing the loyalty of its peopleby throwing them to the dogs."The system of "lifetime employment"has nothing to do with the mythology thatJapan's ruling elite embraces patriarchalattitudes inherited from the country's relatively recent feudal past. Japanese industrialists have historically been just aswilling as their Western counterparts tolayoff workers during economic downturns. In any case, "lifetime employment"benefits probably no more than a quarterof the industrial labor force-permanentworkers in the big corporations, who are

continued on page 9

KyodoBloody police attack on Tokyo May Day demonstration, 1952. U . S . ~ b a c k e d "red purge" laid the basis for docile company unionism in Japanese industry.5

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GM Strike ..(continued from page 1)to look to the very strike weapon thatthe "innovative" work rules there weredesigned to prevent. Fearing that Saturn's institutionalized "labor peace" wasabout to be shattered. UA W vice president Richard Shoemaker announced aday after the strike vote that there wouldbe no walkout for at least 30 days.Binding Arbitration: A DeadlyTrap for Labor

A re'al fight for jobs-the most basicright of the working class-leads directlyto challenging the entire capitalist systemwhich is based on the exploitation oflabor and in which the inherent drive forprofit will always be realized through trying to drive down wages. increase productivity and cut back the workforcethrough layoffs. The main obstacle towaging such a fight is the "SolidarityHouse" bureaucracy which preaches thelie of a "partnership" between labor andcapital. The UAW International's readyagreement to binding arbitration stemsfrom their view that the agencies ofthe capitalist class enemy-the government. the courts. the cops-are potential"allies" of labor.

Wayne State University1937 auto sit-down strikers defy anti-union injunction. Labor upsurge of1930s gave rise to UAW and other CIO industrial unions.

Far from being "neutral." binding arbitration is a crucial weapon of the exploiters. devised to weaken and demobilizethe power of labor. Its whole purpose isto stop strikes from happening or to end

them. In the case of Flint. a ruling favorable to the company could have resultednot only in liquidating the Flint strike butalso outlawing the local strikes that theunion has relied on for several years toresist GM's frenzy of job cuts. It mightalso have meant more than $1 billion inpunitive damages against the union. Anylabor leadership worthy of the namewould be prepared to rip up any suchstrikebreaking order. But such classstruggle methods are the last thing theUAW tops have in'mind. In fact. theUAW bureaucracy clearly used the threatof a negative arbitration ruling as a clubagainst the strikers. to get them to acceptwhatever deal they got from GM.

Arbitration-which was instituted togut the very purpose of unions. i.e thedefense of the workers against thebosses-has become the heart and soulof the labor bureaucracy's pro-capitalistlegalism. This class collaborationism.which ties the interests of labor to theirexploiters. has long been rooted in theallegiance of the trade-union bureaucratsto the Democratic Party. which they

Left: AFL-CIOchief John Sweeneywith Vice PresidentAI Gore at 1996Democraticconvention. Right:GM workers rallyin New Jersey.Pro-capitalistunion topsembrace anti-laborDemocratic Party,foment chauvinistprotectionism.

falsely portray as a "lesser evil." A keyprop of this alliance is the labor tops'chauvinist protectionism. binding unionsto support for American corporationsagainst their rivals overseas. Labor's tiesto the Democrats-which no less thanthe Republicans is a capitalist partyhave retarded American workers' understanding of their class interests and liebehind the string of defeats suffered bythe unions. .Urgently needed today are the classstruggle methods that built the UAW inthe 1930s: defiance of anti-union injunctions. sit-down strikes. refusal to handlestruck products. mass picket lines that noone dares cross. But such weapons will

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(CIO), to intervene to end the strike.Lewis answered, "I did not ask thesemen to sit-down." "This was the literaltruth," wrote Art Preis in Labor's GiantStep (1964):Pegged Production Standards: "This is hell!"

"The GM strike was an uprising of therank and file. Its leadership was mainlylocal young workers with radical socialand political views. A short while latermost of them ...became more and moreadapted to capitalist politics and classcollaboration. But for that one briefperiod of the historic GM sit-down, theywere still close enough to the militantranks, still sufficiently imbued withsocialist ideas and the traditions of theold IWW [Industrial Workers of theWorldl.and socialist fighters, to rise withthe masses."Socialist militants-reds-played aleading role in many of the decisive battles that forged the CIO. Many of them,like Flint sitdown leader Robert Travis,supported the Stalinist Communist Party(CP). But while such organizers stood outas union activists compared to the conservative, racist AFL craft union officialdomwhich openly recognized the capitalists'"right" to make profits, the CP was a bulwark of the CIO's alliance with Democratic president Franklin D. Rooseveltthrough which the CIO bureaucracy congealed. It would further solidify underDemocratic Party stalwart Walter Reutherthrough the purge of Communists andother militants as the anti-Soviet ColdWar unfolded. Since then, the UAW andAFL-CIO tops have acted as loyal guarddogs for the American capitalists, hailingtheir predatory imperialist wars, helping

The centerpiece of the attempts bythe capitalist press to portray the Flintstrikers as overpaid loafers is the issueof "pegged production standards." GMclaims its entire North American operation is being held hostage by selfishMetal Fabrication workers who gohome after five or so hours of work butget paid for eight. This is a blatant campaign to blame Flint workers for theantiquated and decrepit conditions of aplant that Wall Street sees as an albatross around the company's neck.One WV reader who recently retiredfrom the Metal Fab plant told us thatthe issue really concerns only a coupleof dozen workers in the cradle operation. Here, "pods" of up to ten workersdressed in stifling head-to-toe protective gear do the final welds on engine

ests of workers and capitalists are fundamentally counterposed, that the proletariat can only defend its interests by maintaining complete independence from thepolitical agents of the ruling class, firstand foremost the Democratic Party. Thesecond is that the state is not neutral inthis class struggle but is a central executive body of the capitalist class, enforcing its rule through the courts, police,

Archambault/U.S. News & World ReportGM workers in Matamoros, Mexico make poverty-level wages. UAWbureaucracy's "America First" tirades poison the struggle for internationalistlabor solidarity.smash Communist-led unions overseasand policing the unions at home. Thusthe union bureaucracy has contributedmightily to the expansion of U.S. powerabroad, enabling GM and other AmerIcancorporations to savagely exploit workersin the colonial and semicolonial world.The program of revolutionary Marxism was represented by the Trotskyists,who put forward a class-struggle perspective in leading a series of Teamstersstrikes in Minneapolis in 1934 and 1936that briefly put the city's streets underworking-class control. Citywide generalstrikes in Minneapolis, San Franciscoand Toledo in 1934 paved the way forthe big CIO organizing drives of the late, 30s. The victorious Minneapolis s trikesin particular launched the recruitmentcampaign that transformed the International Brotherhood of Teamsters from aninsular craft organization into a powerfulindustrial union.Unlike the Stalinists in the late 1920sand early '30s and the Wobblies (IWW),who put forward the idea of buildingseparate "red" unions, the presence ofthe Trotskyists in the existing unionshowever reactionary they may havebeen-meant they were able to wage aclass-struggle fight for leadership. Theability of a small group of revolutionaries to make such a major impact in thelabor movement was based on two essential ideas drawn from the arsenal ofMarxism. The first is that the class inter-31 JULY 1998

prisons and armed forces. Trotskyists,therefore, oppose all government intervention in the labor movement. As Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon wroteregarding the Minneapolis strikes:"The policy of the class struggle guidedour comrades; they couldn't be deceivedanli outmaneuvered, as so many strikeleaders of that period were, by thismechanism of sabotage and destructionknown as the National Labor Board andall its auxiliary setups. They put no reliance whatever in Roosevelt's LaborBoard; they weren't fooled by any ideathat Roosevelt, the" liberal 'friend oflabor' president, was going to help thetruck drivers in Minneapolis win a fewcents more an hour. ..."Our people didn't believe in anybody oranything but the policy of the classstruggle and the ability of the workersto prevail by their mass strength andsolidarity."-James P. Cannon, The Historyof American Trotskyism (1944)

Yesterday, it was announced that former Teamsters president Ron Carey wasexpelled from the union for life by a"review board" which included the former head of the FBI and the CIA! Careyhimself was installed as the union president through the intervention of the capitalist state. Here is the bitter fruit oflooking to institutions and agencies ofcapital to serve labor's cause.Lessons of PATCO

During the strike, Yokich & Co.'s sacFifice of the simplest measures of tradeunion solidarity on the altar of class

cradles. "This is hell," the retiree toldus. "It looks like hell-and it is- towork in that cradle operation." Fewhigh-seniority workers willingly stay inthis sweltering, toxic and physicallydemanding department.For decades, GM has relied onpegged production rates that set a standard number of engine cradles to bedone in an eight-hour shift, holding outthe possibility for workers to knock offearly once the standard is met. Thisincentive "allows GM to get higher production" out of the workers, said the former Metal Fab worker. He added that itlias imposed a form of self-discipline onemployees, inducing them to work likeslaves while taking unnecessary risks inhandling the red-hot welding wires,which can inflict severe wounds. Essen-

"partnership" was a source of widespread anger among Flint UAW members. Many were furious that work continued in plants like Saturn even after theworkers overwhelmingly voted to strike."The UAW 'has to call everyone outnationwide," one Metal Fab worker toldWV. Over and over again, strikersreferred to the lesson of the 1981 PATCOair traffic controllers strike, when theMachinists, led by social-democrat William Winpisinger, and other AFL-CIOunions sat by with folded arms whileRepublican president Reagan smashedthe union and fired the entire workforce.This defeat paved the way for almost twodecades of union-busting and intensifiedexploitation throughout the UnitedStates, continuing today under Democratic president Clinton.At the time, WV called on the Machinists, Teamsters and other airline industryunions to shut down the airports. Thisbasic act of labor solidarity would havefound enthusiastic support among unionranks eager to deal Reagan a defeat. Butonly a labor leadership willing to confront the bosses' state would have beenable to carry it out. It was the U.S. government that employed the air traffic controllers and declared their strike illegal. Itwas federal agents who dragged awaystrike leaders in shackles. U.S. militarypersonnel manned the country 's air traffictowers until a new worVorce could behired and trained. And this strikebreakingscenario was a bipartisan affair, initiallyworked out under Reagan's Democraticpredecessor, Jimmy Carter. .The lessons of the PATCO strike fullyapply to the battle against GM. At bottom, the question is one of the leadershipof the labor movement. The sellouts atSolidarity House run to the bos ses' courts

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tially, he said, "it's piecework," exceptthat the incentive is increased leisuretime instead of higher pay.As Karl Marx wrote in Capital (Volume 1) in 1867: "Given piece-wage, itis naturally the personal interest of thelabourer to strain his labour-power asintensely as possible; this enables thecapitalist to raise more easily the normal degree of intensity of labour." Theformation of mass industrial unionsin the 1930s by and large drove piecework out of American industry, but ithas survived in modified form here andthere. The real crime in all this is thatthe misleaders of the UAW are complicit in the return to 19th-centurymodes of exploitation, through theiracquiescence to the auto bosses' "productivity" schemes.

and so-called "neutral" arbitrators because their role is to ensure a stable workforce for American capital, to guaranteethat its workings will not be "upset" byclass struggle. These bureaucrats are, inthe words of early American socialistleader Daniel De Leon, the "labor lieutenants ofthe capitalist class," whose purpose is to police the unions for the exploiters. The power of labor is inherent inits numbers, its organization and particularly the fact that it makes the wheels ofprofit turn. But to bring that power to bearin struggle against the capitalists' waron labor, the poor, blacks, immigrantsrequires a revolutionary leadership ofthe labor movement imbued with theunderstanding that for there to be anyfundamental change, ' those who labormust rule.American Chauvinism:Anti-Labor Tool

A key part of the union bureaucracy'swork in disciplining the ranks of laborand squelching social struggle is its function as an ideological champion of U.S.imperialism, diverting the class anger ofAmerican workers into the chauvinistembrace of their own exploiters. TheUAW misleaders in particular have longbeen purveyors of the social-democraticprogram of a tripartite alliance betweenthe government (in its Democratic Partyface), the bosses and labor. The effectof this class-collaborationist "Americandream"-which is premised on strengthening U.S. imperialism against its rivalsis to erect a wall between the American proletariat and its class brothers andsisters abroad, while furthering the political subordination of the American working class to the bourgeoisie.continued on page 8

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GM Strike ...(continued from page 7)

UAW rallies in Flint on July 20 wereused not to organize mass picketing or tospread the strike but to build support forDemocrats like gubernatorial candidateLarry Owen, who railed about Mexicanfactories "taking jobs out of Michigan."Workers at a V-8 engine plant in Romulus, Michigan tried to block the use ofnon-GM parts at the plant when theirstock of Delphi parts ran out, not because they were scab parts but becausethey were Japanese-made. In an addressto the UAW convention in June, AFLCI a chief John Sweeney argued that itwas "wrong for corporations like GM todisinvest in communities like Flint byshipping American jobs overseas andselling American families down theriver" (Today's UAW, 25 June).It is not capitalist investment overseas-an inherent feature of imperialismthat has been going on for as long as therehas been an auto industry-that is thecause of the devastation of Flint, Detroitand other Rust Bowl cities. Scores ofnon-union auto parts plants have sprungup throughout the U.S., especially inthe "right to work" South. UAW leadersdon't complain about those because thatwould focus attention on their unwillingness to launch a struggle to unionize thesefacilities, which would require above alla break with the Democratic Party.The UAW tops' racist campaignagainst Asian and Hispanic workers isalso a dagger aimed at black workers inthe U.S. Ever since the 1898 SpanishAmerican War-whereby the U.S. tookover Spain's colonial empire, includingCuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines,and emerged as a world imperialist power-national-chauvinist hatreds have inevitably been accompanied by anti-blackracism. Black workers, historically the"last hired and first fired," for whomunion-won seniority rights provided apartial shield against discrimination, havebeen hardest hit by the mass layoffs inauto. It's no accident that Ku Klux Klanand militia groups have been particularlyactive in regions where the outcry againstMexicans and Asians supposedly "stealing jobs" has been the most strident.The race-terrorist Klan is a dire threatto integrated industrial unions like theUAW, which must take the lead in mobilizing mass laborlblack action to crushthese vermin!Solidarity House hypocritically intonesthat GM employees in Mexico are paid apittance and face slave-labor conditionson the job. Such conditions are proliferating in the "free trade" factory zoneswhich have been given a tremendousimpetus by the NAFfA agreement, whichwe have called the U.S. "free trade" rapeof Mexico. But Sweeney's AFL-CIOopposes NAFTA on the grounds of"America First" chauvinism, while Yo-

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where the'capitalists do resort to suchmeasures, it is normally to bail outmoney-losing concerns (chiefly throughworking people's tax money).Similarly, the CP twists the crucial callfor a shorter workweek with no cut in payinto a reformist scheme to sol ve unemployment under capitalism. This demand,raised in the 1938 Transitional Programdrafted by Russian revolutionary leaderLeon Trotsky for the Fourth International,was aimed at raising workers' consciousness that the solution to their most pressing needs lay in the fight for socialist revolution. As Trotsky explained:"I f capitalism is incapable of satisfyingthe demands inevitably arising from thecalamities generated by itself, then let itperish. 'Realizability' or 'unrealizability'is in the given instance a question of therelationship of forces, which can bedecided only by the struggle. By meansof this struggle, no matter what itsimmediate practical successes may be,the workers will best come to understandthe necessity of liquidating capitalistslavery."

WV PhotoOutside Flint Metal Center, July 20, as UAW entered seventh week ofGM strike.One fake-left outfit appearing in Flint,the "Socialist Equality Party" (SEP) ofDavid North, claims to oppose the "economic nationalism and American chauvinism" of Solidarity House. But theSEP's posture as opponents of the UAWtops' sellout policies is a complete fraud.

The Northites are opposed to the defenseof the unions as a whole, which theyhave written off as not being any kind ofworking-class organizations. During the1994-95 Caterpillar strike, this view ledthem to defend scabbing with the argument that "the large majority of the4,000 union members who returned towork were not right-wing or anti-union.Most simply recognized the futilityof the policies being pursued by theUAW" (International Workers Bulletin,18 December 1995).

kich calls for GM to invest "at home" andreturn Mexican workers to unemployedimmiseration in the rural hellholes andurban slums. Foreign capital investmenthas created a powerful proletariat incountries like Mexico and Indonesia. Akey to unlocking that power is the fightto organize these workers into unions pursuing class-struggle means to combat thehideous exploitation meted out by corporate giants like GM and Nike.Opposed to such a perspective, as partof their protectionist program the UAWtops call for labor to have a say in howand where GM invests its capital, eitherthrough contractual agreement or government legislation. What a pipe dream!The capitalists are hardly going to allowthe workers to have a say in where theyinvest their profits. For workers to determine where the wealth that is generatedby their labor will be deployed requires afight for a workers government that willexpropriate the bourgeoisie and, on thebasis of an international planned economy, construct an egalitarian socialistsociety. When those who labor rule, thefruits of their labor will be applied toproviding a decent life for working people, the poor, blacks, immigrants, theyoung and the aged.For a RevolutionaryWorkers Party!

Predictably, the bulk of the U.S. reformist left, who act as pressure groupson the pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy, has capitulated to the UAW leaders'pro-imperialist chauvinism. Particularlyegregious have been the CP's People'sWeekly World (PWW) and the fakeTrotskyist Socialist Action, which routinely retail the UAW chiefs' condemnations of GM's "America Last" strategy.

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No. 54, Spring 1998, $2 (48 pages)

Nowhere in its coverage of the UAWstrike does Socialist Action (July 1998)even mention the word protectionism,much less condemn the UAW leaders'flag-waving chauvinism. Rather, theyquote approvingly the UAW's Shoemaker as he rails that "GM's claim thatthey are committed to investing in theirAmerican operations is belied by theiractions .. .. The end result is the same;America and communities like Flintcome last in their strategy."The PWW (27 June) even uncriticallyquoted one UAW official's repulsive antiJapanese comment that GM "pulled' aPearl Harbor on us." This is not surprising, coming from an organization thatexpelled its Japanese American membersduring World War II and enthusiasticallysupported U.S. imperialism's A-bombingof Hiroshima in 1945. An article on theauto strikes' by CP vice chairman SamWebb in PWW (20 June) raises the protectionist call for "controls on outsourcing" while calling for a shorter workweekwith no loss in pay and for "public ownership of the auto industry under democratic control." Such calls for "publicownership" spread the illusion that thissupposedly "democratic" capitalist system can be pressured to serve the interests of working people. In those cases

The struggle against the auto bossescries out for the intervention of a multiracial revolutionary workers party committed not to reforming the capitalistprofit system but to destroying it rootand branch. Such a party can only beforged through breaking the sway overthe workers of the trade-union bureaucracy-capitalism's political police in thelabor movement. As opposed to the classcollaborationism put forward by reformists and labor bureaucrats alike, theSpartacist League advances a Marxistprogram-for a socialist revolution toestablish a planned economy based onproduction for human need.

International Communist League(Fourth Internationalist)International Center: Box 7429 GPO, New York, NY 10116, USASpartacist League of Australia . . . . . . . . . . . . . Spartacist League, GPO Box 3473Sydney, NSW, 2001, Australia

Spartacist League/Britain . . . . . : . . . . . . . . . . . Spartacist Publications, PO Box 1041Trotskyist League of Canada/Ligue trotskyste du Canada . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Spartakist-Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands ....Dublin Spartacist Group . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Ligue trotskyste de France . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

London NW5 3EU, EnglandTrotskyist League, Box 7198, Station AToronto, Ontario, M5W 1X8, CanadaSpAO, Postfach 5 5510127 Berlin, GermanyPO Box 2944, Dublin 1Republic of IrelandLe Bolchevik, B.P. 135-1075463 Paris Cedex 10, France

Spartaclst Group India/Lanka. . . . . . . . . . . . .. write to Spartacist, New YorkLega trotskista d'italia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Walter FidacaroC.P. 1591, 20101 Milano, ItalySpartacist Group Japan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Spartacist Group Japan

PO Box 49, Akabane YubinkyokuKita-ku, Tokyo 115, JapanGrupo Espartaquista de Mexico . . . . . . . . . . . J. Vega, Apdo. Postal 1251Admon. Palacio Postal 1C.P. 06002, Mexico D.F., MexicoSpartacist /Moscow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. write to Le Bolchevik, ParisSpartakusowska Grupa Polski . . . . . . . . . . . . . Platforma SpartakusowcowSkrytka Pocztowa 14802-588 Warszawa 48, PolandSpartacist/South Africa. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. Spartacist, PostNet Suite 248Private Bag X 2 2 ~ 6 Johannesburg 2000, South Africa

Make checks, payable/mail to Spartacist League/U.S. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Spartacist League, Box 1377 GPONew York, NY 10116, USASpartacist Publishing Co., Box 1377 GPO, N ew York, NY 101168 WORKERS VANGUARD

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Japan Crisis...(continued from page 5)overwhelmingly male and ethnic Japanese. Even these workers increasinglyface transfer to subsidiary firms, resultingin loss of seniority and pay cuts.Small subcontractors who service thebig corporations do not offer their employees permanent job security. Yet suchcompanies account for a majority'of thetotal workforce; some 40,000 firms existprimarily as parts suppliers for Toyotaalone. Moreover, big and small firmsalike hire large numbers 0f part-timers,predominantly women, who have no jo bsecurity whatsoever. By the early 1990s,part-time women workers in the corporate sector accounted for 12 percent of thelabor force. The large number of workersof Chinese or Korean descent have littlein the way of ob protection and face rampant discrimination, as do the low-casteBurakumin and indigenous ethnic minorities like the Ainu. The past decade hasalso seen an influx of low-paid immigrantworkers from Southeast Asia, the NearEast and Africa.

While the ruling class still fears thatlaying of f workers en masse could lead tosocial unrest, since 1993 some sections ofthe bourgeoisie have argued for the out-

right elimination of "lifetime employment." The Diet is almost certain to passa series of amendments to the 1947 LaborLaw which would permit overtime without pay and raise the legal limit on forcedovertime, allow for more non-union contract workers and cut holidays. Japan isalready infamous for karoshi (death fromoverwork): at the Hiroshima Dentetsurailway firm, which has increased annualworking hours by 700, five workersrecently died as a result of overworkeither from ill health or suicide-in thespace of seven months.

The impact of the escalating attackson labor is seen in the fact that Rengo,largest of the country's three union federations, organized a May Day marchthrough the streets of Tokyo, joined bysome 100,000 workers, for the first timein seven years. The right-wing SocialDemocratic Party is on the verge of disintegration, particularly after its latest illfated foray into an LDP coalition government, with its electoral base largelyturning to the JCP. But while the JCP-ledZenroren union federation has vowed to

31 JULY 1998

fight against the new labor laws "with allits energy," these reformists abjure theclass struggle in favor of "building publicopinion and collecting signatures againstthe government moves" (Zenroren News-letter, February 1998). Reflecting theracist and chauvinist outlook of the ruling class, neither Zenroren nor the othertwo labor federations has fought to organize workers of Korean and Chinese descent or the super-exploited immigrantworkers from Asia and Africa into common unions with Japanese workers.

As the Spartacist Group Japan stresses,mobilizing the unions to combat unemployment requires a fight to organize theunorganized, to break the ban on minority and immigrant workers in basic industry and to win full citizenship rights forall immigrants: "The fight for a shorterwork week is literally a life and deathquestion and is directly linked to breakingthe racist 'Japanese only' employmentsystem in major industry. Women, minority and immigrant laborers are a key allyin the fight for a shorter work week"(Spartacist [Japan] No. 12, May 1992).Barred from leadership positions in industry, government and education, manywomen thought the "bubble economy" ofthe 1980s would bring real economic andsocial change. Women now make up over40 percent of the workforce, but they earn

Left: Japan'sBurakumin"untouchables"are confined tosegregated, decrepitneighborhoods.Right: FormerKorean "comfortwomen," forced towork in brothels forJapanese troopsduring World War II,protest in Seoulagainst visit ofJapan's primeminister, 1992.

1/)'~ : : , ) J:::a..a..

only 63 percent of what their male coworkers make. And with the economymired in one of the deepest recessionsthis century, many are being driven out ofthe workplace and back to the grindingdrudgery of household slavery. In an article titled "Economic Recession TargetsWomen Workers" (Spartacist [Japan] No.16, April 1994), the SG J wrote:"Liberating women from family servitude and the myriad of feudal traditionstied to the continued existence of thetenno [emperor] system is acentral taskof a Japanese workers republic. We callfor the integration of women into theindustrial work force; for equal pay forequal work; for free, 24-hour child carecenters; for free, safe birth control,

including the pill and abortion."For Workers Revolution!In its whimpering against "capitalismwithout rules," the JCP expresses its com

mitment to maintaining the capitalist system, which is necessarily based on theexploitation of the working class at homeand imperialist domination and expansionabroad. After breaking its ties to Moscowin the 1960s, the JCP openly supported

January 1997:Yokohama ,waterfront workersdemonstratesolidarity withvictimizedLiverpool dockworkers. SpartacistGroup Japansign calls forinternational laboraction in defenseof Liverpooldockers.

Hostesses bowto businessmanat typical Tokyoreception,symbolizinggross malechauvinism andcult of corporateloyalty in Japan.

c:'"'5:J:c:'":::Li:

the revanchist demand of Japanese imperialism for the return of the Kurile Islandswhich had been taken over by the SovietRed Army at the end of World War II.Today, with keiritsu capitalism buffetedby the deepening economic crisis throughout East Asia, the Communist Party hasgained a certain support and credibility asthe main left opposition. But these onetime Stalinists turned social democratswill only utilize that enhanced supportand credibility to betray the interests ofthe working class and all the oppressed.It is necessary to forge an internation-

alist vanguard party based on the Bolshevism of Lenin and Trotsky. The currenteconomic crisis underscores the tiesbinding Japan with the rest of East Asia.From boycotts of imperialist arms shipments during the Vietnam War of the1960s and '70s to recent protests in solidarity with the sacked dockers of liverpool, England, Japanese workers havedemonstrated a capacity fo r internationalist actions. At the same time, capitalistJapan is a deeply racist and chauvinistsociety. A revolutionary workers partycan only be forged through uncompromising political struggle against the reformist misleaders of the labor movement,who push poisonous economic protectionism and nationalism.

The proletariat of Japan, objectivelythe most powerful in the region, mustreach out to the worker and peasantmasses throughout East Asia. In particular, this means breaking with the virulentanti-Korean chauvinism of the Japanesebourgeoisie and rallying around the callfor unconditional military defense of theNorth Korean deformed workers stateagainst capitalist attack and internalcounterrevolution. This call applies witheven greater force to Stalinist China.Capitalist restoration in China would bea tremendous blow not only to the workers and rural masses of that country butto the proletariat of South Korea andJapan. For its part, the Chinese proletariatmust repudiate the Beijing bureaucracy'santi-Japanese nationalism, which todayserves as a cover for closer ties toU.S. imperialism. The political revolution needed to sweep away the Stalinistbureaucrats driving toward capitalistcounterrevolution must be rooted in proletarian internationalism.Concrete solidarity actions by the Japanese working class can provide key material support to workers in Thailand, Indonesia and elsewhere who go on strikeagainst Japanese and U.S. "multinationals." At the same time, the struggles of

these relatively more combative sectionsof the Asian proletariat can be a powerfulimpetus to class struggle on the Japanesearchipelago. The South Korean proletariat has a history of militant struggleagainst the chaebol bourgeoisie and itspolice state. More recently, the workersof Indonesia and Thailand have engagedin sharp combat against the starvationconditions which have meant fabulousprofits for Japanese, German and U.S. industrialists and financiers and their localhenchmen. And in the Philippines, a strikeagainst Philippine Airlines (PAL) in earlyJune led to a union-busting attack underthe auspices of the U.S.-backed "democratic" regime there, as 600 striking pilotswere fired after defying a back-to-workorder. Now, after layoffs of 5,000 morePAL workers, a strike of ground crewworkers is again crippling the airline.

The fight for a socialist Asia is todayposed with stark urgency. A workers republic in Japan would serve as a motorforce for the socialist development of thesemicolonial peoples of the region and asa beacon for proletarian revolution inother imperialist countries. Only the proletariat, leading all oppressed sections ofsociety-women, Burakumin, Koreansand other non-Japanese workers andtheir families---

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Der Spiegel Gerald DavisDeath penalty is racist legal lynching. Left: 20,000 watch hanging of black man in Kentucky, 1936. Right: Huntsville, Texas death row. Texas machinery of deathslaughtered 37 last year, half the national total of executions.

Death Row...(continued from page 1)barely a week after the new study wasreleased, when the Philadelphia FraternalOrder of Police (F.O.P.) organized a fullpage "advertisement" in the New YorkTimes (14 June) screaming for Jamal'sdeath (see "Racist Cops Escalate Campaign for Jamal's Execution," WV No.693, 3 July).The Death Penalty Information Centerand other liberals seek to pressure Congress to pass a "Racial Justice Act" mandating that the death penalty somehow beapplied in a "non-racial" manner in thisprofoundly racist country-an utterlyutopian proposal. Those liberals, likeJesse Jackson, who oppose the death penalty proffer "alternatives" like life imprisonment without parole-a living death.Tailing the liberals, reformist "socialists"like the Workers World Party, the International Socialist Organization and Socialist Action have variously focused ondemanding a "new trial" for Mumia orargue against the death penalty from thebourgeois standpoint of how much itcosts or whether or not it is "effective" in"fighting crime."As Marxists, the Spartacist League andPartisan Defense Committee oppose thedeath penalty in principle. We do notaccord to the state the right to decide whoshall live and who shall die. This barbariclegacy of medieval torture is today partand parcel of the machinery of repressionwielded by the capitalist rulers againstworkers and minorities. That the U.S.remains one of the few industrialized capitalist countries to retain the death penaltyis directly related to the black oppressionwhich is a bedrock of American capitalism. The origins of capital punishment inthe U.S. are rooted in the Southern slavesystem which was smashed by the CivilWar. But the struggle for black equalitywas soon thereafter betrayed by theNorthern capitalists, leading to a centuryof formal Jim Crow segregation in theSouth and the continuing subjugation ofthe black masses as an oppressed racecolor caste.To fulfill the promise of black freedomand smash the racist apparatus of capitalist injustice requires a proletarian revolution Ied by a multiracial Leninistvanguard party. This is the task to whichthe Spartacist League is committed. Andit is this understanding which hasinformed the campaign waged for morethan ten years by the SL and PDC tomobilize the social power of the integrated labor movement in united-frontactions in Mumia's defense and for abolition of the racist death penalty.No Justice in theCapitalist Courts

Mumia did not and cannot get afair trial under this capitalist "justice"system. His 1982 "trial" was a travesty.The prosecution coerced "witnesses" tolie on the stand and withheld crucial evi-10

dence from the defense. Mumia wasdenied the right to defend himself andsaddled with a court-appointed attorneywho was allowed a total of $150 to interview witnesses and later admitted hisown incompetency. Blacks were systematically excluded from the jury. Thejudge, Albert Sabo, was a member of theF.O.P. who has sentenced more men todie than any other sitting judge in the

Ronald Castille, who was the Philly D.A.at the time of Jamal's first appeal to thePennsylvania Supreme Court in 1985.The D.A. at the time of Mumia's trial, EdRendell, is now mayor. Current chiefprosecutor Lynne Abraham, described asthe "DeadUest D.A." in a New York TimesMagazine (16 July 1995) profile, was themunicipal judge who presided overJamal's December 1981 arraignment.

Der SpiegelMiami cops round up black youth as part of racist "war on drugs."U.S. And when Mumia pursued his PostConviction Relief (PCRA) appeal in1995, it was presided over by the verysame hanging judge, who rejected theappeal out of hand.On the eve of the filing of Mumia's1995 PCRA petition, Republican gov-.ernor Tom Ridge signed a warrant forJamal's execution, which was stayed onlyas a result of a massive international campaign of protest and pUblicity. Ridge, whowas elected in a campaign centered onspeeding up the pace of executions, hasalready vowed to sign another warrant inthe likely event that Jainal's PCRA petition is rejected by the PennsylvaniaSupreme Court, which may be imminent.Among the Supreme Court justices is

1917 march in New York City- protested national wave of lynchings by race-terrorist KKK.

During the 1995 hearing, Sabo orderedthe arrest of one of Mumia's lawyers,PDC counsel Rachel Wolken stein, fordaring to raise the issue of racial disparity now documented by the Death PenaltyInformation Center. Today;Abraham dismisses the new study with the laughableargument that the appeals process "is sufficient to make sure that our death penalties are handed down in a nondiscriminatory fashion" (Philadelphia Inquirer, 4June). Denouncing University of Iowalaw professor David Baldus, one of theauthors of the study, Abraham sneered:"This is no more valid than his other studies, which have been discredited." This isan utter lie.It was an earlier study by Baldus

which showed that black defendantsaccused of killing whites in Georgia aresentenced to death far more frequentlythan those accused of killing blacksand that whites charged with the murderof black people almost never receive adeath sentence. That research was thebasis for a 1987 appeal to the U.S.Supreme Court by Warren McCleskey, ablack man convicted of killing a whitepolice officer in Georgia. In its ruling onMcCleskey v. Kemp, even the right-wingRehnquist Supreme Court acknowledgedthe Baldus findings, only to decide thesefacts were "irrelevant"-i.e., that theywere all too relevant to the workings ofthe capitalist "justice" system.Exactly 130 years after the SupremeCourt pronounced in the 1857 Dred Scottdecision that black people "had norights which the white man was boundto respect," Rehnquist & Co. examinedoverwhelming evidence of the racist application of the death penalty and proclaimed that this was an "inevitable partof our criminal justice system." The Courtrejected McCleskey's claim because itspremise "throws into serious question theprinciples that underlie our entire criminal justice system"-the most sacred"principle" of all being "the validity ofcapital punishment in our multiracialsociety."From Lynch Law to"Legal" Lynching

That sanctified principle is embeddedin the racist history of this country. In thecolonial era, special "Negro courts" wereset up for slaves who, in the words of aSouth Carolina statute, could expect to betried "in the most summary and expeditious manner" and executed by means"most effectual to deter others fromoffending in the like manner" (KennethStampp, The Peculiar Institution [1956]).The early Slave Codes defined the blackslave as chattel-property-to be slaughtered with about the same "safeguards" asmight befit a recalcitrant mule. Amongthe numerous "crimes" deemed capital

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offenses for slaves in every Southernstate before the Civil War were rebellionand attempted rebellion. In Louisiana,death was mandated for a slave whostruck his overseer or any member of theslaveowner's family, or for a third conviction for striking any white person-a precursor to the "three strikes and you'reout" laws being imposed around thecountry today. And in the legal prohibition on slaves learning to read and writecan be seen the motivation behind thecurrent drive to forever silence an articulate spokesman for the oppressed likeMumia Abu-Jamal.It took a. bloody Civil War, in which200,000 black troops helped turn thetide, to smash the slave system. Thatsocial revolution ushered in the mostdemocratic period in American history,Radical Reconstruction. But the promise

of black freedom was betrayed by theNorthern capitalists, who were not aboutto take any action which would threatenthe dominance of private property, Northor South. Even minimal land redistribution was stopped and the large plantations maintained, with the former slavesbecoming impoverished sharecroppersand tenant farmers. Following the defeatof Reconstruction, formalized by theCompromise of 1877, the black freedmen were again disenfranchised underJim Crow laws steeped in the spirit, andat times the letter, of the old SlaveCodes. In the 1896 Plessy case, theSupreme Court codified "separate butequal" segregation as t h ~ law of the land.At the heart of Jim Crow was lynch law

terror. With the withdrawal of the lastUnion troops in 1877, KKK terror stalkedthe South unchallenged. From the late1800s on, some 5,000 or more peoplewere killed by lynch mobs. An ' antilynching campaign initiated by blackjournalist Ida Wells did not even pretendto seek equal justice, but simply to getthose blacks charged with crimes into acourtroom. To the extent this happened,"legal" lynchings largely supplanted theextra-legal ones. More than 1,600 peoplewere executed during the 1930s alone.Between 1930 and 1967, black peopleaccounted for more than two-thirds of allU.S. executions.It was only as a result of social struggle-the civil rights movement and'massprotest agai