Since the collapse of the housing bubble at the beginning of 2007 economists and government representatives have been betting on the odds of a recession in the US economy. Currently we are mid-way through 2008 and still the ‘experts' have not made up their minds about its likelihood. Meanwhile the signs of crisis are everywhere: the mortgage debacle continues unabated, driving down house prices and leaving in its wake a wave of foreclosure, company bankruptcies and shaking to its core the entire financial system, where profits have been going up in smoke as fast as they were created in the boom days of the real estate market. Furthermore, the economic troubles are not limited solely to the industries related to the housing market. The same devastating picture can be seen in the airlines and automobile industries for example, which in fact collapsed well before the bursting of the real estate bubble.

The US government's response to the unfolding crisis has been yet again more of the same monetary tricks that it's used to manage its chronically sick economy every time it has shown signs of a sudden decline: in essence pumping huge amounts of cheap money into the economy in the hope that this will stimulate demand and keep the consumers partying on. For instance, since last September the Federal Reserve has lowered its basic interest rate 7 times and has kept a semblance of order in the financial system through a constant flow of cheap money. However, even though government policies in the short term have saved the economy from a total collapse there seems to be a very high price to pay in store (no pun intended!) One of the main consequences of the Fed's policy of cheap money is to have driven down the value of the dollar, which has set record lows against the Euro and other major currencies, thus pushing up the price of commodities in the world market, which are priced in dollars. In other words, the Fed's policy has sharply increased inflationary pressures around the world.

Faced with the obvious fact of rising prices, the US government has acknowledged in recent weeks that inflation is escalating. The latest government data shows that in May inflation in the US is running at a yearly rate of 4.2%.  In one of his latest public speeches Mr. Bernanke, the Fed chairman, has hinted that - given present inflationary trends - the Fed will not lower interest rates any more in the immediate future. Therefore the Fed seems to be changing gears and making the fight against inflation its main priority, putting the attempts to jump start the economy on the backburner.

To be sure, inflation has surged in the US recently and no worker would need bourgeois economic ‘specialists' to tell them this, as the working class has been feeling the pinch of higher prices in everything from food to shelter, heating fuels and gasoline. If the government inflation estimate seems suspiciously low it's because it has a conscious policy of underestimating inflation, just as the bourgeoisie has a conscious policy of understating the rate of unemployment. For the last three decades, using statistical gimmicks on the way the CPI (consumer price index) is calculated, the US bourgeoisie has managed to showcase a relatively low rate of inflation compared with the double digits hyper-inflation of the 1970's. Some of these statistical tricks deserve to be mentioned. Until 1983, the Bureau of Labor Statistics measured housing inflation by looking at what it cost to buy and own homes, considering factors like house prices, mortgage interest costs and property taxes. Based on some dubious reasoning, this component of the CPI disappeared and was replaced by a so-called "owner's equivalent rent" instead of the real cost of home ownership. It has been calculated that this manipulation alone has served to understate inflation during the recent housing boom by 3 to 4 percentage points.  In the 1990's the CPI was subject to three other downward adjustments. Firstly, ‘product substitution': very conveniently, if a product (say high quality meat) gets too expensive, it is moved out of the CPI, because people are assumed to shift to a cheaper substitute, say hamburger. Secondly, ‘geometric weighting': goods and services for which costs are rising most rapidly get a lower weighting because of a presumed reduction in consumption. Thirdly, something called ‘hedonic adjustment', which pretends to measure consumer satisfaction due to improvements to products and services.

In August 1971, when inflation in the US reached 4%, it was considered a national crisis and the Nixon administration imposed price and wage controls. Today a 4.2 % inflation rate is merely sounding some alarm bells. What's worse, according to non-government calculations, this supposed 4% inflation rate seems to be in reality much closer to a 7 to 10 percent yearly rate, as it has been on average since 1980 if one ignores the government manipulation of CPI statistics.

Obviously the bourgeoisie doesn't go to all this trouble to manipulate the real rate of inflation just for the sake of it. In addition to its value as an ideological mystification - presenting capitalism as being in much better shape than it really is - there is a very practical reason behind it. Since CPI calculations are used to measure social security benefits (and other state entitlement programs) as well as pension, salary and benefit increases, its downward estimation means that the worse effects of the chronic crisis of the system are passed on directly to the working class. In fact, inflation and especially its official underestimation have contributed greatly to the pauperization of the working class in the last forty years of open economic crisis. For instance, by some calculations if one were to roll back changes made to the CPI calculations since the Carter years, Social Security checks would be 70% greater than they currently are!

The specter of inflation haunts the world

Evidently the recent spike on inflation is not just a US phenomenon. Raw material prices have been on an upward spiral for most of this decade, and since 2007 global food and energy prices have been rapidly increasing. The international market price of wheat doubled from February 2007 to February 2008. Rice prices also reached ten years high, while in some parts of the world milk and meat prices have more than doubled. Also, soy and corn prices have increased dramatically. Finally, the price of oil has skyrocketed, doubling in the last year.

Here are some examples of the developing inflation around the world. In May of this year, the Euro zone inflation rate was reported at 3.7%, up from 3.3% and the highest since modern records began in the mid-1990s. Now the UK has reported its own record-breaking 3.3%, up from 3% the previous month, when just last January the annual rate was as low as 2.2%. Not even China, often cited as a showcase of capitalist dynamism and health, has been spared. The jump in China's inflation rate to a 12-year high of 8.7% last February sent chills around the world. In the last year food prices jumped in China by 23%, with vegetable prices 46% higher and pork a dramatic 63%.

Moreover, what has cause increased worry in capitalist circles is the fact that this acceleration of inflation is happening at the same time that the system is suffering a generalized slowdown spearheaded by the developing convulsions of the US economy.  The word "stagflation" is more and more on the lips of the economic ‘specialists.' What they are not saying is that in the last 40 years of growing capitalist economic crisis, through cycles of bubbles and busts, inflation has been a permanent phenomenon of world-wide capitalism.  In fact one of the main goals of the economic policies of the government central banks in every nation is to keep inflation pressures in check. However, government policies not withstanding, inflation has spiked out of control quite often. During the ‘70s, following on the collapse of the Breton Woods Accord in 1971, inflation broke loose internationally, reaching double digits in the central countries of capitalism. In the ‘80s the so-called ‘third world' went through a round of hyperinflation that brought down the economies of many Latin American countries.

Bourgeois economists have debated to no end the causes for these inflationary spikes, but what they never say is that the reasons for inflation are contained in the capitalist system itself and the policies of the dominant class:

The anarchic nature of capitalist production.  Capitalist production is social production only in the sense that what is produced is not produced for individual consumption but for the use of others.  Production is bound to produce excesses (over supply) in one sector of production and shortages (over demand) in another. In a system based on the law of value prices changes reflect a lack of conscious, social planning.

Capitalism's drive for maximum profits without regard for social need. The recent rush for the diversion of staple foods like corn and soybeans from human and animal feed to the ‘feeding' of the  fashionable ethanol bio-fuel industry is a point in case. There is no doubt that the bourgeoisie's present obsession with bio-fuels has driven up the price of commodities as much as it has filled up the coffers of big farmers and driven millions to the point of starvation around the world, who have long been dependent on cheap food products coming from the dominant world food producers.

Capitalism's lack of foresight. The consequence of an economic system that is basically geared to the present is well illustrated by capitalism's historic dependence on fossil fuels for its energy needs. This dependence has on the one hand created a nightmare scenario of increasing climate change that is affecting worldwide food production. On the other hand, by putting oil at the center of production and circulation of commodities (and the running of its military machine) it has created a permanent shortage of this commodity. Except for very short intervals, there is never too much oil in the world market -- hence the oil price volatility.

The bourgeoisie's own economic policies in face of the chronic state of crisis of its system are also inflation inducers. The abuse of the money printing machine, the permanent monetary manipulations, the abuse of the mechanism of credit, the ballooning budget deficits -- all contribute to keep inflation going.

Imperialist policies drive also up energy and food prices. The instability in the Middle East and in Nigeria have contributed greatly to driving up the price of oil. In fact the war in Iraq has had a double impact on the recent spike in inflation. On the one hand the war has totally devastated the oil production in that country, cutting down the supply in the world market; and on the other hand, the fact that the US has been running this war ‘off budget' has contributed to the dollar devaluation and the concomitant rise in commodity prices.

To rising inflation workers have to oppose the class struggle

Often enough the bourgeoisie tries to blame workers for rising inflation. The so-called wage/prices spiral is often blamed for the hyperinflation of the 70's in the central countries of capitalism. However in reality wages have never been able to keep up with the pace of inflation. Today rising food and energy prices are squeezing workers' living standards around the world. Workers are facing vanishing real salaries in a time in which lay-offs are everywhere on the agenda. No wonder that food riots and protest against skyrocketing energy prices are multiplying around the world (see article in this issue of Internationalism). Only the working class has the power to stop this madness. Capitalism has no future to offer humanity other than wars and growing pauperization.

Eduardo Smith June 23, 2008.

In capitalist democracy, the corporate news media reportage, commentary, and "debates" faithfully reflect the dominant class's ideas regarding which imperialist and domestic strategy best suits its interests. This means that the media is the mouthpiece of the ruling class.  When capitalism entered into its phase of decadence, the links between the state and the media were strengthened to the point where the mass media became part of the state apparatus of state capitalism. The media now plays a dual role for the bourgeoisie: strengthening the democratic mystification and serving as the propaganda arm of the state.

The myth of the free press is a fundamental cornerstone of democratic society.  The lie peddled is that "freedom of the press" is at the heart of every bourgeois definition of democracy, supposedly guaranteeing the right to criticize the state and the status quo.   This mystification constantly contrasts the "freedom" of the media and press in the "democratic" West with evidence that in "non-democratic" and "totalitarian" nations, the press is under the thumb of the state. Those of us lucky enough to live in "democratic" society supposedly enjoy the advantage and luxury of a media that is the watchdog of the public interest -- the fourth estate, which safeguards the public against wrongdoing by government and corporate officials. This mystification can be successful only if the media is presented as "independent" and free from influence and control

At the same time that it supposedly operates as the independent watchdog of the public interest against the government and against powerful individuals, the media also serves as the propaganda arm of the bourgeois state.  The present electoral campaign offers an illustration of how the media and the capitalist state work cooperatively to provide news coverage that supports the political priorities of the dominant fractions of the ruling class.  As we wrote in Internationalism 145, what is at stake in the 2008 presidential election is the distancing of the new administration from the Bush regime, especially with regard to its tactics and stance
vis-a-vis American imperialist policy.  Just as importantly, the disillusionment in "democracy" following the 2006 elections, coupled with disgust with the war in Iraq, requires that this election bring back into the fold of democratic mystifications an electorate that has grown more and more skeptical of "democracy."  This requires, above all, that the ruling class stage a credible campaign to attract the vote of the young generation, the ones who have never voted and who may otherwise be influenced by their parents' skepticism. Barack Obama fits the bill. To the high echelons of the American bourgeoisie -- who conduct the real debates behind closed doors, away from the public ear -- it has become clear that Barack Obama could be used to rejuvenate the democratic mystification, overcome widespread political disenchantment, and readjust imperialist policy. The media have simply fallen in line. 

From the start, Barack Obama has been elevated to the status of a prophet.  In the words of superdelegate Rober Byrd, Democratic Senator from West Virginia, who's supporting Obama, this candidate offers a "transformative national vision, a commitment to a new and unifying politics, and to a long-needed truth in governance and international relations."  This is the same line that the media has peddled.

Every time so far that an opponent unearthed an Achilles' heel in Obama's positions or affiliations -- as in the case of his controversial pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright -- the candidate seemed momentarily at a disadvantage only to make an even stronger comeback, thanks to the support of the media.  This is not a matter of how skilled and well prepared Obama's campaign strategists are in responding to  criticisms and accusations or how "objectively" the media report the various scandals and allegations, but rather how the media covers the controversy and what they emphasize. This doesn't depend simply on the shims of media correspondents and executives, but rather on the strength of the support a candidate gets from key elements and groups within the ruling class, including in its permanent state bureaucracy.  Again, the media just follows suit. 

However, we should point out that the fact that the media do their job of propaganda for the state is not a guarantee that the ruling class will obtain the desired results.  In fact, the risk of failing is heightened by the tendency toward a lack of discipline and an "each for themselves" characteristic of decomposition.

We can also see how the ruling class uses the media for state propaganda with regard to imperialist policy.  In every imperialist war, from the Mexican War of 1845-48, to the Spanish-American war of 1898, to WW I, WW II, Korea, Vietnam, even the invasion of Grenada, the Gulf War, and, obviously, the war in Iraq, the media supported the foreign policy initiative of the war, until and unless divergences developed within the bourgeoisie on war policy.  In fact, when parts of the media oppose the official policy of the state, this reflects either a political division of labor intended to legitimize the claims of a free, independent press, or the existence of real divergences within the ruling class.  This was seen clearly in the Vietnam war, where the criticism of the official policy did not reflect a critical section of the media, so much as it reflected which parts of the media were linked to the factions of the bourgeoisie that were critical of the imperialist policy.

It requires a high degree of sophistication for the ruling class to present the media as the ambassadors of "free speech" when in reality they are pawns in the hands of the state.  How do the dominant fractions of the bourgeoisie exert control over the media?

Control is not exerted overtly or directly as in Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany, where the media was directly owned or controlled by the state.  This was a sign of the weakness of the local state capitalism.  The state's inability to mask its control and manipulation of the media weakened its ability to legitimize its domination over society.   By contrast, in the more advanced democracies, control is exerted indirectly through interlocking networks formed by various connections, such as corporate links, whereby major corporations control the media organizations.  A good example of this can be found in the national security industry - for example, GE, which controls NBC news. 

During the ‘80s, the Reagan administration would routinely complain to GE if they didn't like what NBC was doing.  Despite avowals that the corporate parent would never interfere with editorial integrity, they did all the time.  Sometimes  the mere fear that the corporate parent's links to the government might jeopardize  a journalist's career would lead to toeing of the line, suppressing or canceling negative stories about the government's policies.

Prominent journalists and news executives shift back and forth between government, politics and the news media.  ABC's George Stefanopolous was Clinton's press secretary; Tim Russert of NBC was Mario Cuomo's. In the 1980's, Tom Rogers was an RCA executive who became a public affairs official at the Pentagon during the Reagan administration, who then became an executive vice president of NBC News. Roger Ailes, was a media consultant to Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush and then became head of CNBC (NBC's business channel on cable TV), and now serves as Rupert Murdoch's chief executive at Fox News. There's no need for clumsy, heavy handed bossing around of the media when the people in charge are part and parcel of the same ruling elites. They know what to do without being told.

There are other examples of interlocking networks forming the backbone of the ruling class's control of the media.  There are institutional links.  Journalists are trained to think that part of their job is to support the prevailing system (rather than questioning or subverting it).  For example, when the Reagan administration restricted reporters' access to covering the Grenada invasion, media spokesmen complained that they wanted to support the administration, but to do so effectively, they needed to be free to the cover the story in full. "Please let us do our job," said one of the prominent TV commentators.

Neither should we overlook social links - journalists and media executives are part of the same class, they have the same educational backgrounds, went to school together, belong to the same social clubs and groups, and share the same tendency to move back and forth between the government and media organizations. This independence of the media is an illusion that helps to make it much stronger in its true role as an arm of the state.

Instead of falling into the trap of believing in the democratic mystifications surrounding the trumpeted "freedom of speech and the press," we would like to reaffirm a few fundamental lessons learned by the working class in its long struggle against the bourgeoisie, this most sophisticated and shrewdest of all exploiting classes.  "Democracy" can only be a sham in a society divided in classes, where one class holds the monopoly of wealth and weapons.  Here, the media can only be in the hands of the exploiting class and its political organization, the state.  It is clear that under these circumstances the media-sponsored political "debates" are an exclusive privilege of the ruling class, in which the working class does not take part.   The electoral "debates," culminating in the election of the president and vice-president, are nothing but a smokescreen to hide the fact that the choice of the team responsible for carrying out the bourgeois state's policies is something that occurs in the corridors of the permanent bureaucracy.  The media helps the ruling class to attain the desired results through a campaign of mass ideological manipulation.

In contrast to this, we would also reaffirm the method the working class has historically created to secure the most open expression of ideas and divergences aimed at the clarification necessary to decide on what course of action to take. This method is the widest possible, collective debate, which finds expression in the massive assemblies the workers create in heightened moments of struggle, not in any media coverage, TV ad, reportage, or news commentary. Ana 6/11/08

In confronting the existence of ethnic, racial, and linguistic differences between workers, the workers' movement has historically been guided by the principle that "workers have no country."  Any compromise on this principle represents a capitulation to bourgeois ideology.

A hundred years ago at the Stuttgart Congress of the Second International in 1907, an attempt by the opportunists to support the restriction of Chinese and Japanese immigration by bourgeois governments was overwhelmingly defeated. Opposition was so great that the opportunists were actually forced to withdraw the resolution. Instead the Congress adopted an anti-exclusionist position for the workers movement in all countries. In reporting on this Congress, Lenin wrote, "(T)here was an attempt to defend narrow, craft interests, to ban the immigration of workers from backward countries (coolies from China, etc.). This is the same spirit of aristocratism that one finds among workers in some of the "civilized" countries, who derive certain advantages from their privileged position, and are therefore inclined to forget the need for international solidarity. But no one at the Congress defended this craft and petty-bourgeois narrow-mindedness. The resolution fully meets the needs of revolutionary Social Democracy."[1] In the US, the opportunists attempted at the 1908, 1910 and 1912 Socialist Party congresses to push through resolutions to evade the decision of the Stuttgart Congress and voiced support for the American Federation of Labor's opposition to immigrants. But they were beaten back every time by comrades advocating international solidarity for all workers. One delegate admonished the opportunists that for the working class "there are no foreigners." Others insisted that the workers' movement must not join with capitalists against groups of workers. In a 1915 letter to the Socialist Propaganda League (the predecessor of the leftwing of the Socialist Party that went on to found the  Communist and Communist Labor parties in the US) Lenin wrote, "In our struggle for true internationalism and against ‘jingo-socialism' we always quote in our press the example of the opportunist leaders of the S.P. in America who are in favor of restrictions of Chinese and Japanese workers (especially after the Congress of Stuttgart, 1907 and against the decisions of Stuttgart). We think that one cannot be internationalist and at the same time in favor of such restrictions."[2]

Historically immigrants played an important role in the workers' movement in the US. The first Marxist revolutionaries came to the US after the failure of the 1848 revolution in Germany and later constituted vital links to the European center of the First International. Engels introduced certain problematic conceptions regarding immigrants into the socialist movement in the US which while accurate in certain aspects, were erroneous in others, some of which ultimately led to a negative impact on the organizational activities of American revolutionary movement. Frederich Engels was concerned about the initial slowness of the working class movement to develop in the US. He understood that certain specificities in the American situation were involved, including the lack of a feudal tradition with a strong class system, and the existence of the frontier, which served as a safety valve for the bourgeoisie, allowing discontented workers to escape from a proletarian existence to become a farmer or homesteader in the west. Another was the gulf between native and immigrant workers, in terms of economic opportunities and the inability for radicalized immigrant workers to communicate with native workers. For example, when he criticized the German socialist émigrés in America for not learning English, he wrote that, "they will have to doff every remnant of their foreign garb. They will have to become out-and-out Americans. They cannot expect the Americans to come to them; they the minority, and the immigrants, must go to the Americans, who are the vast majority and the natives. And to do that, they must above all learn English."[3] It was true that the there was a tendency for German immigrant revolutionaries to confine themselves to theoretical work in the 1880s and to disdain mass work with native, English speaking workers. It was also true that the immigrant-led revolutionary movement did indeed have to open outward to English-speaking American workers, but the emphasis on Americanization of the movement  implicit in these remarks proved to have disastrous consequences for the workers' movement, as it eventually pushed the most politically and theoretically developed and experienced workers into secondary roles, and put leadership in the hands of poorly formed militants, whose primary qualification was being an English-speaking native. After the Russian Revolution, this same policy perspective was pursued by the Communist international with even more disastrous consequences for the early CP. Moscow's insistence that native American-born militants be placed in leadership positions catapulted opportunists and careerists like William Z. Foster to leadership positions, cast Eastern European revolutionaries with left communist leanings totally outside the leadership, and accelerated the triumph of Stalinism in the US party.

Similarly, it was also problematic when Engels remarked that the "great obstacle in America, it seems to me, lies in the exceptional position of the native workers...(The native working class)  has developed and has also to a great extent organized itself on trade union lines. But it still takes up an aristocratic attitude and wherever possible leaves the ordinary badly paid occupations to the immigrants, of whom only a small section enter the aristocratic trades."[4] Though it accurately described how native and immigrant workers were divided against each other, it implied wrongly that it was the native workers and not the bourgeoisie that was responsible for the gulf between different segments of the working class. Though this comment described the segmentation in the white immigrant working class, in the 1960's the new leftists interpreted it as a basis for the "white skin privilege theory."[5]

In any case, the history of the class struggle in the US itself disproved Engel's view that Americanization of immigrant workers was a precondition for building a strong socialist movement in the US. Class solidarity and unity across ethnic and linguistic roles was a central characteristic of the workers' movement at the turn of the 20th century. The socialist parties in the US had a foreign language press that published dozens of daily and weekly newspapers in different languages.  In 1912, the Socialist Party published 5 English and 8 foreign language daily newspapers, 262 English and 36 foreign weekly newspapers, and 10 English and two foreign news monthlies in the US, and this does not include the Socialist Labor Party publications. The Socialist Party had 31 foreign language federations within it: Armenian, Bohemian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hispanic, Hungarian,  Irish, Italian, Japanese, Jewish, Latvian, Lettish, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Scandinanvian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, South Slavic, Spanish, Swedish, Ukranian, Yugoslav. These federations comprised a majority of the organization. The communist and communist labor parties founded in 1919 had immigrant majority memberships. Similarly the growth in Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) membership in the period before World War I came disproportionately from immigrants, and even the western IWW, which had a large "native" membership, had thousands of Slavs, Chicanos, and Scandinavians in their ranks.

The most famous IWW struggle, the Lawrence textile workers strike of 1912, demonstrated the capacity for solidarity between immigrant and non-immigrant workers. Lawrence was a mill town in Massachusetts where workers worked under deplorable conditions. Half the workers were teenage girls between 14-18 years of age. Skilled craft workers tended to be English speaking workers of English, Irish, and German ancestry. The unskilled workers included French-Canadian, Italian, Slavic, Hungarian, Portuguese, Syrian and Polish immigrants. A wage cut imposed at one of the mills prompted a strike by Polish women weavers, which quickly spread to 20,000 workers. A strike committee, organized under the leadership of the IWW, included two representatives from each ethnic group and demanded a 15 percent wage increase and no reprisals for strikers. Strike meetings were translated into twenty-five languages. When the authorities responded with violent repression, the strike committee dramatized the situation by sending several hundred children of the striking workers to stay with working class sympathizers in New York City. When a second trainload of 100 children were being sent to  worker sympathizers in New Jersey, the authorities attacked the children and their mothers, beating them and arresting them in front of national press coverage, which resulted in a national outpouring of solidarity.

In 1913, during the silk workers' strike in Paterson, NJ, the IWW used a similar tactic, sending strikers' children to stay with "strike mothers" in other cities, once again demonstrating class solidarity across ethnic lines.

As World War I unfolded, the role of émigrés and immigrants in the left-wing of the socialist movement was particularly important. For example, a meeting on Jan. 14, 1917 at the Brooklyn, New York home of Ludwig Lore, an immigrant from Germany, to plan a "program of action" for left forces in the American socialist movement included the participation of Trotsky, who just arrived in New York the day before; Bukharin, who was already resident as an émigré working as editor for Novy Mir, the organ of the Russian Socialist Federation; several other Russian émigrés; S.J. Rutgers, a Dutch revolutionary who was a colleague of Pannenkoek; and Sen Katayama, a Japanese émigré. According to eyewitness accounts the discussion was dominated by the Russians, with Bukharin arguing that the left should immediately split from the Socialist Party and Trotsky that the left should remain within the party for the moment but should advance its critique by publishing an independent bi-monthly organ, which was the position adopted by the meeting. Had he not returned to Russia after the February Revolution, Trotsky would likely have served as leader of the left-wing of the American movement.[6]  The co-existence of many languages was not an obstacle to the movement; to the contrary it was a reflection of its strength. At one mass rally in 1917, Trotsky addressed the crowd in Russian, and others in German, Finnish, English, Lettish, Yiddish and Lithuanian.[7]

We must stand for the defense of the international unity of the working class. We cannot   even appear to legitimize irrational fears and distrust of immigrant workers, or the bourgeoisie's attempt to use immigrants as a scapegoat for the problems that are squarely the responsibility of an economic mode of production that has outlived its usefulness. As proletarian internationalists we reject as bourgeois ideology such constructs as "cultural pollution," "linguistic pollution," "national identity,"  "distrust of foreigners," or "defense of the community or neighborhood." Our intervention cannot be that "you are right to be concerned about the threat to American culture, or national identity, or that it is terrible that you feel like a stranger in your own ‘country'," which would give credence to bourgeois ideology on the question of country, nation, culture, national identity, etc. and strengthen the bourgeois attempt to foster division within the class. On the contrary, our intervention must defend the historical acquisitions of the working class movement that workers have no country; that the defense of national culture or language or identity is not a task or concern of the proletariat, that we must reject the efforts of those who try to use these bourgeois conceptions to exacerbate the differences within the working class, to undermine working class unity. We must stress the unity of the proletariat above all else and international proletarian solidarity in the face of attempts to divide us against ourselves. Anything else constitutes an abandonment of revolutionary principle.  - Jerry Grevin, 6/24/08.

[1].- Lenin, V.I. "The International Socialist Congress in Stuttgart," Proletary No.17, Oct. 20, 1907. In Collected Works, vol. 13, p75. (We leave aside in this text controversies concerning the question of "aristocracy of labor" that Lenin implies.)

[2].- Lenin, V.I., Letter to the Secretary of the Socialist Propaganda League, Nov. 9, 1915. In Collected Works, vol. 21, p423.

[3].- Marx and Engels, Letters to Americans, p. 162-3, 290 (cited in Draper's, Roots of American Communism.)

[4].-Engels, Letter to Schluter, op cit. In Collected Works, vol.49, p392.

[5].-White skin privilege theory was an ideological concoction of the 1960s new leftists, which claimed that a supposed deal between the ruling class and the white working class granted white workers a higher standard of living at the expense of black workers who were victimized by racism and discrimination.

[6].- Draper, Theodore. The Roots of American Communism. pp. 80-83

[7].- Ibid. p.79

This article has already been published on this site here:

https://en.internationalism.org/wr/314/may-68 [8]