WORKERS, OPPRESSED NATIONS AND PEOPLE OF THE WORLD, UNITE!
Volume 5, Number 1 December 15, 1974 10¢
NEWSPAPER OF THE CENTRAL ORGANIZATION OF U.S. MARXIST-LENINISTS
P. O. BOX 11942, CHICAGO, ILL. 60611
[Front page:
ECONOMIC CRISIS IS CAUSED BY ANARCHY OF CAPITALIST PRODUCTION;
COAL MINERS WIN VICTORY IN NATIONAL STRIKE;
ENVER HOXHA, LEADER OF THE ALBANIAN PARTY OF LABOR, WARNS OF WORLD WAR BETWEEN SUPERPOWERS;
Photo of Enver Hoxha;
Banner at bottom: COMBAT THE MONOPOLY CAPITALISTS' FASCIST ANTI-BUSING MOVEMENT!]
ECONOMIC CRISIS IS CAUSED BY ANARCHY OF CAPITALIST PRODUCTION
COAL MINERS WIN VICTORY IN NATIONAL STRIKE
ENVER HOXHA, LEADER OF THE ALBANIAN PARTY OF LABOR, WARNS OF WORLD WAR BETWEEN SUPERPOWERS
SPEECH BY COMRADE ENVER HOXHA, LEADER OF THE PARTY OF LABOUR OF ALBANIA
PALESTINIAN PEOPLE WIN NEW VICTORIES IN NATIONAL LIBERATION STRUGGLE
LENIN ON THE ATTITUDE OF THE WORKING CLASS TO SCHOOL INTEGRATION
During the past twelve months, the United States has plunged deeper and deeper into an economic crisis. This crisis is characterized by the over-production of commodities resulting in an increasing collapse of industrial production. At the same time as the economic crisis deepens, the U.S. economy is also suffering from a severe financial crisis and a new monetary crisis threatens to break out at any time. This has resulted in galloping inflation at the same time that industrial production is collapsing, worsening the economic crisis and putting the working people in the situation of being "caught between the Devil and the deep blue sea." -- between the jaws of spiraling prices and growing unemployment. On the one hand, there are plenty of goods; on the other hand, fewer and fewer people can buy them.
In recent weeks, large parts of the auto industry have dramatically shut down, while the housing construction industry has remained in a state of depression. These two important sectors of the production of consumer goods only represent the tip of the iceberg. For close to a year now the Gross National Product has been falling. Industrial production has been declining, wholesale and retail sales are declining and not only are future factory orders down, but there is a growing trend of cancellation of present orders as many types of inventories of goods lie stagnant and unsaleable. Most significant, the decline in production of consumer goods is spreading to the production of means of production, such as factory construction, production of heavy trucks, etc., and becoming general. The over-production crisis is resulting in large numbers of firings and lay-offs of workers and in numerous bankruptcies of businesses and failures of small and large banks.
The present economic crisis, the sixth since the Great Depression, is rapidly becoming the worst since them. It shows no signs of letting up, but in fact gives every indication of deepening still further. At the same time, inflation and soaring prices have sent the cost of the necessities of life for the working masses spiraling out of reach, rising by more than 10 per cent annually. This, too, is aggravating the economic crisis by causing the domestic market to shrink.
The economic and financial crises in the U.S. are taking place simultaneously with crises in many other developed capitalist countries in Western Europe and Japan, and are part of an economic crisis gripping the world capitalist system. Ever since the first imperialist World War, when the October Revolution in Russia resulted in one-fifth of the world's people leaving the sphere of capitalist exploitation, the capitalist-imperialist system has faced a situation of stagnant or shrinking markets and has entered into a prolonged decline or general crisis, which is the backdrop for the present economic crisis. The founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the building of socialism in China, Albania and other countries and especially the upsurge of the national liberation movements in Asia, Africa and Latin America, including the struggle of the Third World countries for political and economic independence, have resulted in shrinking markets for imperialism. Economic rivalry among the developed capitalist countries has also cut the markets available for U.S. imperialism. At the same time, the Soviet Union has restored capitalism and has embarked on the road of imperialist expansion, contending with U.S. imperialism for the shrinking world markets. Both U.S. imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism are now having economic troubles, and this is further sharpening their contention against each other for world hegemony and causing them to threaten the world with a new world war more devastating than the previous two.
U.S. MONOPOLY CAPITALISTS SHIFT THE BURDEN OF THE CRISIS ONTO OTHERS
The U.S. monopoly capitalist class, imprisoned by the laws of capitalism cannot staveoff the economic crisis, which hurts the capitalists' profits, throws many of them out of business and endangers their rule. For this reason, the monopoly capitalists contend frantically with each other and with the non-monopoly capitalists in an effort to keep their profits intact or to minimize their losses. Their main method is to shift the burden of their crisis onto the shoulders of the working class in the U.S., and onto the nations oppressed by U.S. imperialism in Asia, Africa and Latin America and other countries abroad. In this way the capitalists try to make others pay for their own crimes. But this increased exploitation and oppression gives rise to resistance and revolutionary movements among the masses, which shake the foundations of capitalism and imperialism.
In the United States the capitalist employers shift the burden of the crisis onto the workers first of all by large-scale firings and lay-offs. Nearly 500,000 workers were fired or laid off in October, raising the percentage of the labor force unemployed to 6. 5 by November 16 (under-estimated, since government figures ignore the millions of permanently unemployed who have given up looking for work). Hundreds of thousands more workers have been dismissed in the month since then. Since capitalist production is only possible when wage-labor can be exploited in order to expand capital, these firings and lay-offs-show the seriousness of the growing breakdown of capitalist production. They also show that when the workers cannot be exploited for a profit, the capitalists toss them aside like waste, to bear the brunt of the crisis. Thus the man-eating exploitation and the miserable insecurity of life the workers face under capitalism (which the bourgeois economists claimed had been eliminated by the "American way of life") stands starkly revealed by the economic crisis.
While firing or laying off large numbers of workers, the capitalists try to grab higher profits from the remaining employed workers by increasing the intensity of labor (speedup) under the slogan of "more productivity" and by increasing the length of the working day under the policy of compulsory overtime, totally disregarding the health and safety of the workers. Thus the capitalists increase the exploitation of the employed workers in order to shift part of the burden of the crisis onto them.
In addition, galloping inflation and soaring prices are a further method used by the monopoly capitalists to shift the burden of their crisis onto others. The unprecedented rise in prices in the U.S. is due, in part to:
1. the fantastic growth of finance capital which controls most industrial production but grows relative independently of the growth of production. One way the monopoly financiers do this is to use their control of the state machine (including the federal government) to print more dollars than are needed to circulate the goods produced in industry and agriculture, thereby depreciating (inflating) the currency and reducing the buying power of the dollar; and
2. the monopoly capitalists taking advantage of shortages due to the unplanned, anarchic nature of production (for example, the 400 per cent rise in sugar prices, resulting from the monopoly capitalists using shortages to wildly speculate and raise prices) or taking advantage of their monopolist control of markets to jack up prices in the temporary absence of competition (for example, the raising of auto prices even in the face of plummeting auto sales).
For the workers the effect of these price increases is to increase the cost of all the necessities of life by an immense amount, while at the same time wages -- the price of the worker's labor-power which he sells as a commodity to the capitalist -- are not raised equally. This means that the capitalists' profits increase while the worker's real wages decline. The worker works a shorter part of the day for himself and a longer part for the capitalist than before. Hence, he is exploited at a greater rate, and the capitalist makes a greater profit from employing the same amount of the worker's labor-power.
To combat this increased exploitation, the workers wage struggles for higher wages. The monopoly capitalists then blame the workers for "causing" inflation, in order to "justify" their increased prices. But this is a fallacy. Wages and prices are not connected, as the capitalists claim. On the average, commodities are sold at their values, which are determined by the average amount of labor it takes to produce the commodities. However, the worker is not paid for his whole day's work, but generally only for that part during which he produces enough value to equal a subsistence wage. The workers and the capitalists struggle against each other over how much of the workers labor-time will be paid to the worker in wages and how much will be unpaid and go the capitalist in profits. But this has nothing to do with the total value created during that day, which determines the price of the goods. To claim, as the capitalists do, that wage raises cause prices to rise, is to claim that profits are sacred and eternal and cannot be cut by wage raises, while at the same time the workers are expected to peacefully accept wage cuts without a struggle. In fact, in the present conditions of crisis and spiraling prices, the workers must struggle first to counter the previous actions of capital and recover their losses caused by the increased exploitation. Thus, the present clamor by the capitalists (especially in the wake of the coal strike) that the workers cause inflation is doubly hypocritical and only serve to cover their drive for maximum profits.
The U.S. monopoly capitalists also attempt to shift the burden of their crisis onto the nations oppressed and exploited by them in Asia, Africa and Latin America and elsewhere. Here, too, high monopoly prices are an important method in increasing their plunder and their imperialist profits. The prices of manufactured goods which the U.S. monopolies sell to these countries increase more rapidly than the prices which the U.S. pays to these countries for their raw materials. This is the case with the Arab and other oil-producing countries, where the rises in oil prices have actually fallen behind the rices of goods like steel which the U.S. sells to them. This unequal exchange is enforced by U.S. imperialism onto the oppressed nations by every kind of monopolistic practice and, in the last analysis, by the U.S. imperialist military machine, which maintains bases throughout the world to threaten, attack and occupy the oppressed nations. A case in point is the recent threat by President Ford to seize the Middle East oil fields (a threat backed up by the sailing of a U.S. aircraft carrier into the Persian Gulf) in retaliation for the raising of crude oil prices by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
But while shifting the burden of the crisis onto others, by their own actions the U.S. monopoly capitalists unavoidably intensify their immediate difficulties in the economic crisis. Unemployment and inflation shrink the purchasing power of the masses at home, making it still more difficult for the capitalists to sell off their amassed commodities. Also, inflation throws the market for money capital into chaos, since the depreciated dollar cuts the value of the interest on loans re-paid to finance capital. The only way out for the bourgeoisie under capitalism is the destruction of productive forces to draw off the over-produced commodities, the conquest of new markets and the more thorough exploitation of the old. Under present conditions these are a powerful driving force pushing the bourgeoisie toward war and fascism.
THE CAUSE OF ECONOMIC CRISIS
The economic crisis is caused by capitalism itself. The anarchy inherent in capitalist production is the cause of economic crisis. This anarchy arises from the basic contradiction of capitalism -- between the organized, social character of production (large-scale production, advanced machinery, highly developed division of labor, etc.) and the private appropriation by a handful of capitalists of the abundant products produced by the workers. Each capitalist lives only to make profits and expand his capital through the exploitation of the workers, so he is forced to revolutionize and develop production through new techniques, more advanced machinery, increased scale of production, etc. Because commodities are produced for unknown buyers, each capitalist sets his machinery of production into motion madly and blindly, producing for a market without knowing whether or not it will be able to absorb the commodities produced. Since the means of production are owned by individual capitalists or by monopoly capitalist groups, each capitalist or monopoly group is forced into savage competition with the others under threat of being wiped out himself. Each is thus forced to develop the productivity of his means of production at a greater rate than the others, assuring overproduction. Thus production by modern capitalist industry and agriculture far outstrips the ability of the market to absorb its products, especially since the private ownership of the means of production by the capitalists keeps the working class and broad masses in a state of poverty, unable to consume all the goods offered on the consumer market.
The development of competitive capitalism into monopoly capitalism in the late 19th century only sharpened this contradiction by intensifying the anarchy of production. Now most of U.S. production is controlled by a handful of finance capitalists, contending violently with each other and with non-monopoly capitalists for the markets. At the same time, to save itself from collapse due to overproduction at home, monopoly capitalism exports capital abroad and the monopoly capitalists of each country contend with those of other countries to divide and re-divide the world between them, in search of maximum profits. This forces the monopoly capitalists to build up a tremendous military machine in order to maintain their control over spheres of influence and seize new ones, further impoverishing the masses at home, who are called on to pay for it through taxes and inflation. Thus the present crisis starkly illustrates the operation of the basic law of modern capitalism, as expounded by Stalin in 1952: "The securing of the maximum capitalist profit through the exploitation, ruin and impoverishment of the majority of the population of the given country, through the enslavement and systematic robbery of the peoples of other countries, especially backward countries, and, lastly, through wars and militarization of the national economy, which are utilized for the obtaining of the highest profits."
Further, the greater concentration of capital under monopoly forces the finance capitalists into ever-riskier speculation, thus intensifying the anarchy of production (for example, Franklin National Bank speculated heavily in foreign currencies, leading to its collapse and the disruption of the market). The growth of the armaments industry and the huge hand-outs given to the armaments monopolies by the government also increases the anarchy, due to the over-development of this sector of the economy at the expense of others.
Thus the development of monopoly intensifies anarchy of production under capitalism and leads to still more immense crises than before, as in the case of the Great Depression of the 1930's.
The airlines industry is a good example of anarchy of production. The two monopoly capitalist airlines, Pan Am and TWA, which dominate American international air travel, have been plagued with over-capacity. That is, the number of passenger-spaces far exceeds the number of people flying. Nevertheless each of these firms has gone deep into debt to buy jumbo jets in order to edge out each other and other domestic and international competition. This has aggravated their over-capacity. The recent sharp drop in air travel caused by the crisis has squeezed both airlines, threatening their ability to repay their debts to the financiers. In this way, their drive for maximum profits has forced them to develop the means of production anarchically in order to contend with each other.
Since anarchy of production, which causes economic crises, is inherent to capitalism, capitalism can never eliminate its periodic crises, which ever increasingly threaten its very existence. In Socialist China and Albania however, the working class exercises its dictatorship and the means of production are social property owned by the working masses, and not by a handful of capitalists. There exploitation, anarchy of production and crises have been eliminated and replaced with planned socialist production. As a result, prices are stable, markets are thriving and the working people's living standards are rising year after year.
THE CAPITALIST POLITICAL PROGRAMS CANNOT ELIMINATE CRISES BUT CAN ONLY SHIFT THEIR BURDEN ONTO OTHERS
Since crises are caused by the basic contradiction of capitalism, the capitalists and their political parties and politicians cannot eliminate them. They can only carry out programs, dressed up in different disguises, aimed at shifting the burden onto the shoulders of the masses at home and abroad, and at throttling their capitalist rivals in order to take over the whole field for themselves.
Since World War II, bourgeois economists have been declaring that the Keynesian economics of the Roosevelt brand and other capitalist programs had eliminated crises forever. But the present severe crisis has forcefully reasserted the laws of capitalism discovered by Marx a hundred years ago, so the old gibberish about "eliminating" crises is now being replaced by new gibberish about "solving" them.
Currently there are two main "solutions" offered for the crisis by the U.S. monopoly capitalists through their politicians and political parties.
The "solution" offered by the Ford Administration and the Republican Party is cloaked with rhetoric that "inflation is the main problem". They aim to "solve" inflation and crisis by a "tightening of belts", that is, by demanding that the workers accept wage losses and greater exploitation at the hands of the capitalists for the "national interest", that is, for the capitalists' interest. At the same time, the taxes of the workers, according to the Republican program, are to be increased and government services reduced or scrapped. While the Republicans will bestow these "benefits" on the workers, they offer tax breaks for the biggest monopoly capitalists, especially those in heavy industry and production of means of production. In his October WIN speech, Ford also guaranteed that the government will back up the wheelings and dealings of the finance capitalists, promising to "restore capital markets' vitality". At the same time, Ford continually hands the monopoly capitalists windfall profits through the increased military spending that goes with the stepped-up arms race.
In order to enforce the increased exploitation of the workers, the Republicans are carrying out rapid fascization of U.S. society, increasingly preparing and carrying out terroristic suppression of the workers and oppressed masses. Nelson Rockefeller's statement in the Senate confirmation hearings that his only mistake at Attica Prison was that he didn't act fast enough is indicative of the trend. Furthermore, in order to contend with the other superpower and shift the burden of the crisis onto other countries, the Ford Administration is stepping up the arms race (the new SALT agreement will require a vast re-equipping of the U.S. nuclear arsenal with heavier weapons) and preparing for war, either a war to suppress the just struggles of the oppressed nations or a war for world supremacy with the Soviet social-imperialists. To justify the development of fascism and the preparations for imperialist war, Ford and the Republicans spread the rabid lies that the workers and their unions, or various foreign countries, especially the Arab oil-producing countries, are the cause of the present crisis.
Thus the program of Ford and the Republicans directly serves the monopoly capitalists, especially the biggest finance capitalists who own armaments industries and industries which produce means of production (oil, coal, steel, machinery, etc.)
At the same time, the so-called "alternative" presented by the Democratic Party, which controls Congress, is to increase the exploitation of the working class, develop fascism and prepare for imperialist war by slightly different means. The Democrat hypocritically pose as "friends of the minorities" and as "the party of the working man." They propose programs to artificially stimulate the production and distribution of consumer goods by taking the tax dollars of the employed workers and channeling them through welfare programs into the hands of the poorest sections of the working class. In this way these wolves put on sheeps' clothing while at the same time increasing consumption of the goods produced and distributed by capitalists in the consumer goods industries. Also by increasing social welfare programs, the Democrats increase the pork-barrel from which many of them live, and hire paid agents (such as poverty program administrators) to undermine the working people's struggles with promises that the capitalists (Democrats) can solve the workers' problems. Crying crocodile tears for the workers and oppressed nationalities, the Democrats reveal their own capitalist class nature by calling for wage controls even more loudly than the Republicans, while trying to hide this program behind phrases about "price controls" and "controls" "on excess profits". They talk about increasing labor's "productivity" (speeding up the workers). They launch American national-chauvinist movements like "Buy American" in order to carry on trade wars and blame the working people of other countries for the misery brought onto the U.S. workers by the U.S. capitalists. They launch attack after attack on the oppressed nationalities and immigrant workers (like the Kennedy-Rodino Bill, which will escalate state attacks, terrorization, and deportations of oppressed nationalities and immigrants). At the same time, the Democrats are just as warlike as the Republicans -- for example, they oppose the Palestinian people and the Arab oil-producing countries just as rabidly as the Republicans.
The bogus debate between the two main capitalist parties, Republicans and Democrats, over whether to fight inflation or recession is a smokescreen to hide their contention over who will get the use of the bourgeois state (government at all levels, military, etc.) to maximize their profits. It also hides their practical actions to shift the burden of the crisis onto the workers at home and the oppressed nations abroad, increase the fascization of U.S. society and prepare for imperialist war. These "solutions" to the crisis offered by the capitalists will only intensify the effects of the crisis while covering up its cause.
THE WORKING CLASS'S SOLUTION TO THE CRISIS
Since the capitalist political parties do not attack the cause of the economic crisis, but instead shift its burden onto the working people, the working class must rely on itself to combat the effects of the crisis and struggle to eliminate its cause -- the capitalist system itself.
The workers must fight against increased capitalist exploitation by fighting for higher wages, for job security, against speed-up and compulsory overtime, and for better working conditions. To achieve this requires strengthening the trade unions, fighting for trade-union democracy, organizing the unorganized workers and resisting all attempts of the capitalists and their agents, the labor lieutenants of the capitalist class, to weaken the unions and suppress the workers. It calls for defending the democratic rights of the Black people and other oppressed nationalities, against whom the monopoly capitalists are directing especially savage attacks, and supporting the national liberation struggle of the people of Puerto Rico. It calls for opposing growing fascism, opposing imperialist war threats, aggression and plunder against the nations and peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America and other countries and supporting their struggles for national independence and against the bullying and interference of the superpowers. It means opposing the superpower politics of U.S. imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism who are contending for world hegemony and threatening the world with a new world war.
To eliminate economic crises once and for all, the workers must eliminate their cause -- the capitalist system. Only the proletarian socialist revolution can accomplish this. This means that the workers must mobilize all the oppressed people, rise in revolution and seize political power, overthrow the monopoly capitalist class, establish the working class as the ruling class (the dictatorship of the proletariat), suppress the capitalist class and transform the means of production from private property into properly of the working masses, doing away with the exploitation of man by man and with the anarchy of production that plagues the American people under the present dictatorship of the capitalist class. Once capitalism is overthrown and the dictatorship of the proletariat and socialism are established in the U.S., then an end will be put to the exploitation and oppression by U.S. imperialism of the oppressed nations and peoples of the world and the American people will be able to live in peace with the people of other countries. The United States will then join China, Albania and other socialist countries that have already solved the problem of economic crisis by replacing capitalist anarchy of production with planned socialist production and advance towards Communism.
To fight against the effects of the present crisis and-to eliminate its cause by overthrowing the monopoly capitalist class, the working class needs its own revolutionary party -- a Marxist-Leninist Communist Party like the Bolshevik Party in the time of Lenin and Stalin and like the Communist Party of China led by Chairman Mao Tsetung today. Today the "Communist" Party U.S.A. is no longer the workers' revolutionary party it was in the 1920's, '30's, '40's and '50's. It has been destroyed from within by agents of the capitalists nestling in the workers' ranks (revisionists) and turned into a reformist capitalist party. This places the urgent task before the genuine Marxist-Leninists of uniting to build a new Marxist-Leninist Communist Party to lead the working class in revolution. The deepening of the economic crisis, the rapidly growing fascization of U.S. society and the looming threat of world war between the superpowers makes the task of uniting the U.S. Marxist-Leninists and building a revolutionary Communist Party ten times as urgent.
WORKERS AND OPPRESSED PEOPLE OF ALL NATIONALITIES IN THE U.S., UNITE TO STRUGGLE AGAINST THE MONOPOLY CAPITALIST CLASS AND ITS SHIFTING OF THE BURDEN OF THE ECONOMIC CRISIS ONTO THE WORKING MASSES!
COMBAT THIS GROWING FASCISM!
SUPPORT THE STRUGGLE OF THE OPPRESSED NATIONS AND THE PEOPLE OF THE WORLD AGAINST IMPERIALISM AND IN PARTICULAR THE SUPERPOWERS!
OPPOSE THE WORLD WAR PLOTTED BY U.S. IMPERIALISM AND SOVIET SOCIAL-IMPERIALISM!
MARXIST-LENINISTS, UNITE TO BUILD A GENUINE COMMUNIST PARTY AND PREPARE FOR PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION!
WORKERS, OPPRESSED NATIONS AND PEOPLE OF THE WORLD, UNITE!
On Dec. 5, the 120,000 striking bituminous coal miners, members of the United Mine Workers union, ratified a new contract with the coal-mine owners after a united four-week national strike. The strike ended in a victory for the miners against the increasing exploitation at the hands of the coal capitalists, who are shifting the burden of the present economic crisis onto the backs of the workers.
Through their union, the miners presented their demands to the monopoly capitalists who own the mines. To enforce their demands on Nov. 15 the miners began a powerful national strike, the first major national strike since the economic crisis began a year ago. All told, 120,000 bituminous coal miners in 22 states struck and shut down 70 per cent of all U.S. coal production, along with a number of unorganized mines which struck in solidarity. A strike of this size, especially in the coal industry upon which a large part of the U.S. heavy industry depends for energy, is a devastating blow to the monopoly capitalists. This is doubly true since the U.S. monopolies are no longer able to obtain oil at dirt-cheap prices from the Arab and other oil-producing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, who have united to demand a higher price for their oil. 25,000 workers in industries dependent on coal were laid off during the strike and steel production and railroad operations were curtailed considerably. The entire capitalist class, represented by the federal government, was in a fury, threatening to invoke the Taft-Hartley Act and suppress the strike, but was only restrained by its fear that the miners would not obey a back-to-work order. The strike demonstrated forcefully just who it is upon which the whole of capitalist society in the U.S. depends -- the workers.
On December 15 the miners ratified a new three-year contract by a vote of 44,754 to 34,741. The contract contains a solid pay increase, a cost-of-living escalator, increased pensions, sick pay, the right to individually leave unsafe areas of work, increased protection for the miners' safety committees, etc. (see below for details).
WORKING CONDITIONS OF THE COAL MINERS
Except for a brief period around World War II, the U.S. coal industry has been in a state of depression since the 1920's. This results from the over-development of the industry during the previous period, when coal was the most important energy resource, from mechanization of the mines and from the increasing dependency of the U.S. imperialist economy on oil plundered from the Arab and other oil-producing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America as the main source of energy for U.S. industry. Thus, despite the fact that the U.S. has some of the richest coal deposits in the world, the coal industry has been depressed and the working and living conditions of the coal miners has fearfully deteriorated.
During this time, the mine owners deprived the miners of their "hazard pay" -- the small lead the miners held in wages over other industrial workers, which they had fought so hard for as a compensation for the extremely dangerous conditions in the mines. At the same time, the coal mines in "advanced" United States remained the most dangerous in the entire world, while the capitalist bosses drove the miners relentlessly, maintaining the U.S. mines not only as the most dangerous but also the most productive in the world. The accompanying mechanization of the mines intensified the deterioration of the miners' situation. From 1948 to present the number of bituminous coal miners plummeted from 441,631 in 1948 down to 150,000 in 1972, and chronic mass unemployment in the coal fields resulted, forcing many workers to migrate from the mountains to mid-western cities in search of jobs. Under these depression-like conditions, the coal capitalists were able to break the United Mine Workers union in many places and replace it with either open shops or company, scab unions. A prominent example of this is Eastern Kentucky, site of hard-fought organizing battles in the 1920's and '30's, which went from almost totally organized to an almost totally unorganized state during the last 25 years.
These deteriorating conditions of the coal miners during the past decades are now being further worsened by the deepening economic crisis and the intensified exploitation the capitalists are enforcing so as to place the burden of the crisis onto the workers. Under the 1971 contract (expired November 15, 1974), the miners' wages increased 17.5 per cent over three years, but at the same time the cost of living (underestimated by the government's Consumer Price Index which rises more slowly than the price of necessities bought by the workers) has increased 21 per cent, completely wiping out the wage increase and leaving the miners with 4 per cent lower real wages than in 1971. Nor are the coal capitalists willing to spend money on safety improvements. Every working day, on the average, one miner dies in the coal mines of the United States, and 2-3,000 miners die each year from black lung disease alone. The coal mines are 10 times as dangerous as steel mills and more than 20 times as dangerous as the auto plants -- a direct result of this man-eating capitalist exploitation.
Now that the Arab and other oil-producing countries are seizing control of their own oil resources, the U. S. monopoly capitalists are desperately returning to the development of coal in hopes of recouping their losses and regaining their strength. For this, they desire to redouble the exploitation of the U.S. miners. Government spokesmen have said that coal production is planned to double or triple by 1985 while the workforce will at least double, inevitably leading to increased exploitation of the miners who will be expected to increase their productivity. This proposed tremendous expansion has hardly started and already the coal companies have increased their profits considerably. Returns on each dollar invested by the capitalists have increased from 9 per cent last year to 23 per cent this year. These increased profits come directly from the increased exploitation of the miners, since due to inflation and soaring prices the miners receive a smaller real wage than three years ago and work a shorter part of the day producing their own real wages and a larger part of the day producing profits for the capitalists. As for safety, the miners point out that the coal sells for a high monopoly price whether or not it has miners' blood on it.
WHAT THE MINERS WON
To combat this increased exploitation the miners put forward many militant demands. After a four-week struggle, they forced the capitalists to meet a number of them. To combat inflation and soaring prices, the miners forced the capitalists to give up a solid pay raise and a cost-of-living escalator, the first one ever in the coal industry. The direct wage raise amounts to 17 per cent over three years -- 10 per cent the first year, four the second and three the third. The cost-of-living escalator raises the miners' wages by 1¢ for every.4 per cent rise in the Consumer Price Index. The lowest job grade was eliminated and those in it were raised to the next higher level, thus raising their pay. Roof bolters, an especially dangerous job, were placed in the top job grade. The miners' achieved a considerable increase in pensions. The pensions of workers already retired are raised immediately from $150 a month to $200 and will reach $250 by the third year of the contract. Pensions will increase in size according to years of seniority, making it possible for a miner to receive a pension of over $500 a month. Pension rights will be vested after 10 years of seniority (meaning that if a worker loses his job after ten years' seniority he will not lose his pension). Pension credit will be given for work in non-UMW mines. Finally, pension coverage will be extended for the first time to disabled, non-retired miners and to miners' widows, retroactive to 1946. For the first time, the miners have five sick days off per year, without any proof of sickness required, thus also providing for personal leave. The contract provides $100 a week for disabled or sick miners up to 52 weeks (none was paid before). On questions of safety, the miners are permitted for the first time to individually leave unsafe areas and must be given work elsewhere at the same or better pay. At the same time, 7-8,000 helpers will be hired to spell miners working in dangerous places and to watch the roof of the mine for danger. Also, the miners' union safety committees will have wider rights of inspection of the mines and cannot be disciplined or fined by the capitalists for doing their duties, as they could be be before (these duties continue to include the right to call out all miners in a mine working under unsafe conditions).
The significance of these demands is that they directly combat the effects of the present economic crisis, opposing the wage and pension cuts the miners are experiencing due to inflation and soaring prices and providing increased protection against the extremely unsafe working conditions which prevail as the coal operators drive for greater and greater profits while expanding the coal industry to replace oil as an energy resource. Standing face to face with capital, the miners through their militant strike have deal a powerful blow to the capitalists' program of shifting the burden onto the shoulders of the workers.
THE HISTORY OF THE MINERS' STRUGGLES
The coal miners have a long history of over a century of militant struggle against the capitalist exploiters. They formed their first national union in 1861 but it was destroyed as a result of an economic crisis in 1868. The coal miners succeeded in forming an industrial union in 1890, when the United Mine Workers of America was founded. It united the miners into one national, industrial union to present a united front against the coal capitalists. By 1899 the bituminous coal fields were organized, and after a long struggle including the Great Anthracite Organizing Strike of 1902 in Pennsylvania, the anthracite miners were also organized. The coal miners' union was one of the leading sections of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, formed in 1935, which organized millions of workers into industrial unions. With their militant tradition, the coal miners produced many staunch communist leaders of the workers, and the Communist Party, when it was still a revolutionary party, was very strong among them. One of the finest examples of communist leadership of the miners' struggles was the great coal strike of the late 1920's including the Save the Union Movement of 1928.
Since World War II the miners have militantly resisted the depression-like conditions in the coal industry and fought against the stepped-up exploitation. Recently, they have escalated their struggles. During the late '60's and early '70's they have waged frequent wildcat strikes against unsafe working conditions and for political and economic demands to improve the conditions of the retired and disabled miners. They have averaged over 100 strikes a month since 1968. Waging a militant struggle for trade union democracy, the miners overthrew the reactionary Boyle leadership and reorganized their union along more democratic lines, establishing such procedures as membership ratification of contracts. This strengthened the workers' organization in the face of the capitalists. In February-March of this year, they waged a strike against the denial of gas supplies to areas of West Virginia by the oil monopolists and the state government; later, the miners in Alabama waged a struggle against the importation of coal from South Africa, where it was mined under conditions of savage racial discrimination by the white racist capitalists against the African workers. Most recently, the miners won a hard-fought struggle to organize the Brookside and Highsplint mines in Harlan County, in Eastern Kentucky, which the coal operators are attempting to keep as a non-union district. Taking up arms to defend themselves against the machine guns and other weaponry wielded by the company thugs, the miners carried out a long struggle to win complete victory. The victory in Harlan County was the first important recent victory in organizing the growing number of non-union mines.
THE RECENT STRIKE
Since a strike in the coal mines always has a profound effect on the heavy industry belonging to the monopoly capitalists, the capitalists are always thrown into a panic by a national coal strike. In the past the capitalists have frequently used their state machine (government, army, police, courts, etc.) to attempt to break the miners' struggles, but the miners have upheld their militant tradition of "No contract, no work!" and replied to threats of intervention by federal troops with the militant slogan "You can't mine coal with bayonets.'" In the recent struggle, the capitalists also worked through their state machine to suppress the miners. A "secret" report to the White House by Wilfred Usery, head of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, said that in the past these injunctions have just made the miners angry, but the "leaking" of the report was itself meant to threaten the miners. Throughout the recent struggle, the government continuously made threats to invoke the Taft-Hartley Act to suppress the strike. On top of this the capitalist governmental so had plans to ration coal if the strike went on very long. These plans entailed forcing the electrical utilities to sell coal to the steel mills to maintain production in heavy industry regardless of what happened to the electrical supply for hospitals, schools and homes. On top of government threats, the capitalist class mobilized its news media in every form to broadcast lies blaming the growing economic crisis on the miners' strike.
This united front presented by capital against the coal miners, and the use of the state machine by the capitalists, teach the workers important lessons. They show that workers of all industries and trades must support each other and form a united front of the working class through its trade unions to oppose the united front of the capitalist. They also teach that the capitalist state machine is the capitalists' instrument for the suppression of the workers and will never serve the interests of the working class.
Finally, they show that in the present deepening economic crisis, the workers must struggle militantly against the capitalists if they are to resist the shifting of the burden of the capitalist crisis onto their shoulders.
Since the miners brought production to a halt and won demands for higher wages, established a cost-of-living escalator and made other advances directed against the effects of the present crisis, their example is bound to inspire the other sections of the workers whose contracts are coming up in the coming months. Among these are the railroad workers, the Oil, Atomic and Chemical Workers, construction workers, airline mechanics, postal workers, etc. In their shaky economic condition, the monopoly capitalists desperately want to suppress these struggles. Thus they are stepping up their propaganda that wage raises, such as the coal miners' wage raise, cause inflation and thus contribute to the crisis. But this is turning truth on its head. A rise in wages for the workers merely means a decline in profits for the capitalists, nothing else. The price of the commodities produced has nothing to do with the proportion in which the workers and the capitalists divide up the fruits of the workers' labor. The capitalists claim that their rate of profit is sacred and that they have the divine right to maintain and increase it by driving down the real wages of the workers through inflation and soaring prices. The workers, on the other hand, are expected to accept wages which are flexible -- in a downward direction -- so as not to "cause" inflation! In fact, the capitalists issue such lies on a continuous basis solely in order to "justify" their own actions to increase prices and cause inflation, exploiting the working class still more viciously, in order to increase their ill-gotten wealth. This way they hope to put the blame, as well as the burden, of the crisis on the workers. The workers must answer such lies and escalate their struggles.
The coal miners' struggle shows the truth of the old German workers' song: "All wheels stand still, if your mighty arm wills it." As the crisis deepens and the contradiction between the working class and the capitalist class becomes still more intense, more and more sections of the workers will follow the path of militant struggle.
[Photo: At Brookside Mines and Highsplint mines in Harlan County, Kentucky, the miners won a prolonged struggle to organize into the United Mine Workers.]
[Photo: Comrade Enver Hoxha, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Party of Labor of Albania and leader of the Albanian people.]
The establishment of the People's Republic of Albania took place 30 years ago, on November 29th, 1974, as a result of the revolutionary armed struggle of the Albanian people against the Italian fascists, German nazis, and internal traitors and reactionaries. Under the leadership of the Albanian Party of Labor (then named the Communist Party of Albania) the Albanian working class and people steadfastly followed the guidance of Marxism-Leninism, seized political power, smashed the reactionary state and established the dictatorship of the proletariat over the fascists, capitalists and other bad elements, and proceeded to build socialism.
Since its birth, Socialist Albania has won continuous victories on the domestic and international fronts under the wise guidance of the Party and its leader, Comrade Enver Hoxha. A strong, balanced and modern economy which meets the needs of the people and provides for uninterrupted growth has been established through planned socialist construction. Socialist culture flourishes, and the cultural revolution is ensuring that it serves the needs of the working masses and help prevent the restoration of capitalism. Daily the Party's Marxist-Leninist line penetrates deeper into the people's life and the people joyously take up the, tasks of continuing the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat. On November 29 the Albanian people celebrated the 30th anniversary of the People's Republic of Albania. On October 3, 1974, Enver Hoxha gave an important speech (reprinted in this issue) in which he warned: "Look out! U.S. imperialism and Russian imperialism are leading the world into another world war, more terrible than the two previous world wars."
Internationally, Albania is the bright beacon of socialism in Europe and resolutely defends its political and economic independence and the independence of all countries. People's Albania has gloriously continued along the path of the October Revolution blazed by Lenin and Stalin and has spurned the counter-revolutionary path of Soviet revisionism, which leads to the restoration of capitalism, as has taken place in the Soviet Union. Albania has valiantly stood up to the bluster and war threats of Soviet revisionist social-imperialism, headed by Brezhnev and his traitorous clique. Firmly grasping proletarian internationalism, Albania stands solidly with the People's Republic of China and Chairman Mao Tsetung, vigorously supports the national liberation struggles of the oppressed nations, and supports the struggles of the proletariat in the capitalist counties.
Though small, Albania looms large in the eyes of the revolutionary people of the world, who are inspired by her achievements. Thus it is with respect and eagerness that we read Enver Hoxha's important speech of October 3, 1974 to the electors of number 299 precinct in Tirana. With insight and clarity, Comrade Hoxha analyzes the present international situation, especially revealing the danger of world war created by the contention for world hegemony between the two superpowers, U.S. imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism. THE WORKERS' ADVOCATE reprints this important speech in honor of the 30th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of Albania and so that the Marxist-Leninists and revolutionary workers and people in the U.S. will have the opportunity to study it and be armed with Comrade Hoxha's warning:
"Look out! U.S. imperialism and Russian imperialism are leading the world into another world war, more terrible than the two previous world wars. These two superpowers are responsible for the present great crises, they are vying with one another for world hegemony, they are fighting to occupy markets, that is, to oppress and enslave peoples. It is precisely the two superpowers that arm anti-popular cliques and governments to use them as watchdogs - and their people as cannon-fodder - for the inevitable shambles they are preparing, if they are given a free hand."
Comrade Enver Hoxha's speech is reprinted from PEOPLE'S CANADA DAILY NEWS, Vol. 4, No. 32, Oct. 19, 1974.
SPEECH delivered by the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Party of Labour of Albania, Enver Hoxha, on October 3, 1974, at the meeting with his electors of the No. 299 precinct in Tirana.
Dear Comrades, brothers and sisters,
Thank you for having assigned me, the soldier of the Party, your son and brother, for deputy to the People's Assembly, and I assure you that I will serve the Party and the people as long as I live. Everything we do in common, we owe it all to the Party, to its correct Marxist-Leninist line which constitutes the basis of all the victories and the guarantee for the socialist future of our country. Glories and hymns should be sung to nobody else but the Party and the people.
With us the Party, the class, the masses and the leadership make up an inseparable whole. Therefore, it is only natural that elections in our country have always been and are indicative of the steel party-people unity, of the unbreakable unity of the working masses in the ranks of the Democratic Front, of the compactness of the working class, labouring peasantry, and our people's intelligentsia.
The elections to this legislature of the People's Assembly are taking place on the threshold of a significant event, the 30th anniversary of the liberation of the homeland and the triumph of the people's revolution. On this occasion, the Party, the people's power, and our entire people can draw with pride the balance-sheet of the victories achieved so far, and view the future optimistically. The years that have elapsed have all been glorious, each leaving indelible imprints on our land, each constituting a memorial in itself.
On the marked jubilee of the 30th anniversary of the liberation of the homeland, we can observe with great satisfaction that the program of the Party for the industrialization of the country, for the collectivization of agriculture, for the promotion of the cultural revolution, and for the education of the new man, has been carried out with successes through all stages and links. Today, from a 30 years' distance, we can view in its full glory and clarity the correct course steered by the Party from the very beginning in connection with these questions, the correctness of the economic policy it mapped out and implemented, the vitality of the principle of self-reliance.
Within a relatively short period of time, our people have set up a multi-branched economy which grows stronger continually and extends uninterruptedly through new sectors of modern production. A complex extracting and processing, heavy and light industry, an advanced and all-round developed agriculture have been set up.
As a result of the colossal self-sacrificing work of our people in these thirty years, it has been possible to satisfy entirely or to a great extent the planned needs of the national economy and of the people for electric power, fuels and carburants, raw and auxiliary material, spare parts, and for various equipment. Our needs for home-made consumer goods are being ever better satisfied; likewise, exports have assumed greater proportions not only for raw material, but also for finished and half-processed products.
Great development has been made especially in the mining of chromium, iron, copper and other ores. The utilization of these treasures of our soil opens up new prospects for the future of our economy. We boast an advanced oil industry, with numerous and modern oil refineries. These constitute the basis for the setting up of petrochemistry in the not-too-distant future. Almost all local raw materials are processed at home and transformed into material goods, into fabrics, footwear, various ready-made items, alimentary products and so on.
Outstanding achievements have been made also in the development of agriculture -- this very important branch of the people's economy. Its development has been channeled along a correct line, beginning with the land reform, land improvement schemes, mechanization of work, the creation of the chemical fertilizers industry, the utilization of selected seeds, improvement of livestock breeding, and, above all the collectivization of agriculture up to the setting up of the high-type cooperatives. This road led to the strengthening of of the alliance of the working class with the peasantry, which were bound to each other not only spiritually, but also economically and materially along the line of the Party, along socialist lines. Nowadays, our cooperativist countryside is making progress with each passing day, and the gap between city and country is growing ever narrower.
All this development and progress has conditioned and enabled the extension of a broad highway network which links now all the corners of the country, down to the remotest villages. Along with the motor and railway transport, there has also been created the sea transport which links us to numerous countries of the world.
From a country in which people used to live in darkness, today Albania is a completely electrified country. Gigantic hydro-electric and thermo-electric power-plants are being added to our country from one five-year plan period to another. These plans which utilize the internal water resources, etc., now set in motion factories and mills, and tomorrow will set the big metallurgic mill which is being built in Elbasan with the fraternal aid of the People's Republic of China.
Culture and education, which have assumed a great unprecedented impetus, have been developed on Marxist-Leninist scientific bases. From our schools have already graduated an entire army of cadres emerging from the midst of the people. We boast many distinguished personalities in science, technique and arts.
The line of our Party has been and is directed towards having the entire superstructure of the society, set up in keeping with its economic base, serve in full the all-round development of the country towards socialism.
Of course, we cannot say that we have reached perfection in everything, but is a fact that all our people of arts, culture, and science are closely bound with the real concrete development of socialism in our country, with the line of the Party. Not a single germ of evil experiences has found breeding ground in this sound body and whenever some evil person and enemy have endeavoured to envenom our pure atmosphere, the prevailing lofty revolutionary spirit has exposed and done short work of them.
All these are the fruit of the labour, thinking, and sweat of the people, who are the creators, guides, and consumers of all these blessings. This is what socialism is, which the people are building and enjoying for themselves.
A clear reflection of this impetuous socialist development of the country is found in Tirana, the capital of our glorious country, which is growing and being embellished with each passing day. You are all eye-witnesses of the great transformations and realizations which have been and are being made in Tirana. The workers of our capital are coming to these new elections greatly respected and holding their heads high for the results they have achieved in all walks of life. This is a source of joy for us all and a guarantee that in the future too the workers of Tirana will certainly uphold the revolutionary spirit characteristic of them and their impetus at work.
Brilliant successes have been achieved by all workers of socialist Albania. Now we can gladly declare that the objectives set under the fifth five-year plan are being achieved in general lines. Ours is a stable economy which experiences no crisis, inflation, unemployment, etc. This is the result of the superiority of socialism, of the correct line of the Party and of the self-denying work of the people.
See what is happening in the world at present. A grave economic and financial crisis has swept over all the capitalist countries. Inflation is working havoc everywhere, and assuming threatening proportions. The treasuries of major banks are being exhausted, they are head over ears in debts, and the currency exchange speculations have multiplied extraordinarily. Similarly, unemployment is growing and prices have been incessantly rising. The cost of living has been raised, and the working masses are in a state of continual deterioration. The so-called consumer society, so much trumpeted and praised to the skies by the bourgeoisie as "the society of the future" is nothing but a rotten declining society which is revealing with each passing day the old permanent wounds of capitalism which the bourgeoisie seeks to dissimulate.
Such things will never happen to us. However, in these turbulent situations, we must go all out and exert our efforts to be ready to cope with any surprise: it is up to us to defend every day and in every sector the economic and political stability we nave created for ourselves. This calls on us to carry out every single task of the state plan in time, and to the letter, because any failure to do this breeds difficulties which weigh heavy on the economy and the life of the people.
The present situation in the world is such that the interests of our country and of its defence call for putting sacrifices and savings on the order of the day. The Party and the government will do their utmost to preserve intact the supply of the people with the necessary goods, and to keep prices from rising. However, at a time when the purchase prices of various steels and equipment we import have been considerably raised, we are faced with the imperative task of carefully maintaining the machineries, and of utilizing them to the most rational manner. Another sector in which we are to make great savings is that of fuel an electric power. The work begun in this direction should be kept up, and new ways and resources should be found in order to save as much as possible.
Our people want more sugar, meat, oil, etc.... You are aware that we are as yet incapable of satisfying all needs for such items with the present availabilities of the country. Similarly, you know that the prices of these items in the world market have been greatly raised and tend to rise still higher. Therefore, great tasks emerge for our agriculture, which should provide more to fulfill these requirements, and overfulfill the planned targets In the first place, we have to increase yields of bread grains and of all other agricultural and livestock products. In order to be able to get more meat and dairy products, we should increase the heads of cattle, sheep and goats, improve the fodder basis for the livestock, improve the state of the pasture grounds, increase the productivity of the livestock.
In the present developments, we should fight ruthlessly, especially against the tendency of waiting for everything to come from abroad. Therefore, we are faced with the task of putting to good use all our availabilities and resources, relying on our capacities and efforts, so as to produce at home as many equipment, spare parts, machineries as possible, and thus cut down their import. Besides this, we should take all-sided measures to increase exports, to extend their range, and to improve the quality of the goods we sell abroad. It should be clear to all that in order to import, it is necessary to export.
We will have to overcome fresh difficulties and obstacles, originating from the savage imperialist-revisionist encirclement, from the financial and monetary crisis which has gripped the capitalist-revisionist world. Therefore, let us exert all our efforts and go all out with all our energies, wisdom, and creative spirit so as to make a success of the tasks lying ahead of us.
At present, the Party and the government are working out the principal indices of the economic development of our country under the sixth five-year plan period 1976-1980. New prospects are opened before our people, greater victories and successes are in store for their future. Our economy will develop at rapid rates: it will be lifted to a new higher level. Our industry will assume a greater development: new branches and enterprises will be set up, the structure of the industrial production will be further improved by giving priority, as always, to the development of the heavy and processing industries, without neglecting the light and food industries, to the end of ensuring a better and more rational utilization of the resources and wealth of the country.
Our socialist agriculture will develop and make further progress. Its material and technical base will be still more consolidated; up-to-date agricultural technology will be put into extensive use; its organization and management will be further strengthened and improved and, on these bases, a more rapid growth of agricultural and livestock production will be ensured.
New railways and motor-ways, schools and hospitals, centres of culture and dwelling houses will embellish our towns and villages. The achievements of science and technology will be extensively introduced into all the branches of the economy and culture. The socialist relations will be incessantly improved towards perfection; the material and cultural well being of the working masses of the town and countryside will be further raised; the gap between town and countryside, between the lowland and highland areas, will tend to grow more narrow. The life of our people will be more prosperous and more cultured. The defence of the homeland and of the victories achieved so far will be further consolidated.
Comrades,
Our system of socialist democracy, which comprises also elections to the supreme organ of the state power, has been born from the people's revolution and rests strongly on the teachings of Marxism-Leninism. It has grown and developed through a severe, internal and external class struggle, and has been tempered and raised towards perfection thanks to the great practice of our socialist construction.
Only the revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat enable the masses to have a share in the direction of social life, to have their say regarding the internal and external policy of the state, to really enjoy democratic freedom and rights.
Democracy is spoken of also in bourgeois and revisionist countries. Their theoreticians and propagandists, make a great noise, attributing it almost "celestial" merits, presenting it as the acme and supreme form of the social organization. But, as Marxism-Leninism teaches us, democracy has had and will always have a class character. The system of bourgeois democracy and its entire apparatus are employed by the capitalist class to rule over the working people, they exist to preserve the exploitation by and the egoistic interests of this class.
Chile is a quite fresh example. The bourgeoisie of this country was not in the least refrained by the morale of bourgeois democracy and by its traditions to bring fascism to power, when it saw that its class positions were being endangered. It crushed with iron and fire not only the workers and peasants, but did short work of all those who believed in the "unshakable foundations" of bourgeois democracy.
Another clear example of the falsity of bourgeois democracy and of that internal degeneration which the bourgeoisie seeks to dissimulate behind misleading and demagogic slogans, is also the so-called Watergate scandal in the United States of America. The revelation of the manipulations on the part of various groups in power regarding the presidential elections, the interference of powerful financial groups, the corruption of the state apparatus, and so on, indicated also that the so-called American democracy is rotten from head to toe. It is a gilt facade deliberately built to hide the real aspect of a savage dictatorship of the capitalist class, to impede the workers from seeing and realizing their real situation.
The revisionists also speak of democracy, and a "socialist" one at that. But what democracy is it when the workers and peasants are oppressed and exploited by the bureaucratic caste in power, when tanks are ordered out against the workers, as in the case of Poland, or when the government and the parliament are disbanded and reformed by the foreign invader, as in the case of Czechoslovakia, when nations and nationalities in the Soviet Union are suffocating under the great Russian chauvinism?
Our system of socialist democracy is quite different from that of the bourgeois countries. With us, the deputy is not a professional politician, imposed upon the masses, and beyond the reach of their influence. Our representative to the People's Assembly fills at the same time the functions of the deputy and works directly in production, in his office, or in some other sector of social activity. He takes part not only in drafting and passing bills but also in putting them concretely into practice. Therefore, he is situated in objective material and spiritual conditions to carry over to the Assembly the opinions and wishes of the masses, the voice of the people, as well as in conditions to carry to the masses, and to work for the fulfillment of the will of the people which is expressed in the activity of the People's Assembly. The deputy in our country enjoys no material privilege. Though, according to the constitution, he cannot be arrested or prosecuted without the consent of the People's Assembly or its Presidium. People are entitled to revoke him at any moment if he fails to live up to the confidence placed in him.
In our country, not only the deputies but also all cadres and functionaries, of whatever rank, are under the daily control of the masses, under their severe and just supervision. This is neither an expression of a situation of dread and mistrust, nor a formal practice. Cadres are loyal sons of the people, the blood of their blood; therefore their interests are not opposed. In line with the instructions of the Party, they exert all their efforts to listen attentively to the voice of the masses and to see to the prompt and correct application of their just suggestions and proposals. They fight against arrogance and overbearing, as well as against servility and conformism. However, the masses call them to give regular account of their activity, so that those steel links binding the cadres with the masses are maintained strong, the popular spirit in them is never extinguished, their pulse beats at the same rhythm as that of the people, their mind works along the same lines as that of the people.
The Party has educated and educates the masses in the spirit that the cadres, functionaries, or any person of whatever responsibility, should be highly thought of and respected as long as they work and act in keeping with the line and the directives of the Party, the laws of the state and the norms of socialist ethics. The Party was the first to set the example so that no one should lack courage to criticize anyone who deviates from the correct line of the Party and of our people.
We have succeeded in coping with various hostile pressures and in overcoming the innumerable difficulties raised on our road because we have waged the class struggle in an uninterrupted, principled and consistent manner in all fields, both against hostile activities and against alien manifestations, whether in the society, in the ranks of the Party or in the conscience of people. But the Party instructs us to hold always in view and never forget the great Marxist-Leninist teaching that the class struggle, as a motor of history, is a great driving power which leads onward the work for the construction of socialism, guarantees the independence of the homeland, safeguards the well-being of the people. It is a powerful weapon which purges us from evil, tempers us and makes us revolutionaries, which safeguards the Party, the state and the whole country from degeneration and the re-establishment of capitalism. In the present conditions, the development of class struggle assumes special importance and significance, for it is the surest shield to beat back the ideological aggression of the enemies, to stamp out all endeavors for the revival of alien ideological leftovers, and to deactivate the impact of the confounding bourgeois-revisionist propaganda.
The principal objective of the activity of our enemies has been and is the disruption of the unity of the ranks of the Party, the wrecking of the unerring leadership of our people, the disruption of the unity and compactness of the people which constitute that granite rock against which all sinister endeavors of various enemies have been smashed to pieces.
Their aims have failed and will fail ignominiously because the unity of the Party, people, and people's power in Albania is erected on unshakable groundwork. On the basis of this unity rest our major revolutionary transformations: the socialist ownership of the means of production; the common fundamental interests of all workers; the correct Marxist-Leninist line of the Party; the proletarian ideology which is irreconcilable with everything alien to our socialist order.
In the future too, we should counter the numerous pressures of the enemies, encirclement and blockades, their diabolic propaganda, with our monolithic unity, the unity of the entire people around the Party. Just as we have done so far, we shall cope with difficulties by tempering ourselves politically and ideologically, promoting our economy uninterruptedly, consolidating and steeling the defence of the country, conserving and cultivating our socialist national culture.
The construction of socialism in Albania, which is being carried on under the conditions of imperialist-revisionist encirclement, has always been viewed by the Party in close relationship with the strengthening and invigoration of the defence of the homeland. Loyal and abiding by the letter to its Marxist-Leninist line, it has educated its members, the working masses, the entire people and army, in the spirit that they consider the defence of the homeland as a fundamental, all-time, and continuous duty. It has spared nothing for the consolidation of the defence potential of the country, for the ever better training of the army and of the entire people of soldiers. Our army and people are equipped with up-to-date means, they are trained and continue to be trained in handling them in any situation and to the highest efficiency.
The imperialist and social-imperialist enemies endeavour to put us to fright with their numerous and powerful weapons. But real strength does not lie either in the number of soldiers or in the amount or kind of weapons. History has proved the invincibility of countries and peoples, however small in numbers and inferior in armaments, who fight for a just cause and who are determined to defend it to the end. There is no stronger army than an armed and militarily trained nation, and there is no such powerful weapon that can have the better of the people's warfare, in which all aggressors are burned and done (away) with.
Our Party and our people have never been intimidated by threats, just as they have never been waylaid by flatteries and pacifist demagogies. The enemy will never catch our people unaware. They are prepared in an all-sided way, politically and militarily, economically and organizationally, to cope with any surprise and to deal telling blows to everyone who would dare touch in the slightest the sacred border of our homeland, the achievements of revolution and socialism.
The Party, people and army in our country constitute an indivisible whole. Our army is strong and invincible, because it is bound like flesh to bone with the Party and the people, because it defends and carries out faithfully the line of the Party, because it is always ready to make the supreme sacrifice for the cause of the Party, people, and homeland.
Comrades,
The foreign policy of the People's Republic of Albania is the policy of a socialist country where the proletarian dictatorship is in power, and which is led by the Party of Labour which inspires itself from and remains loyal to the teachings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin.
The People's Republic of Albania maintains its own opinions on different matters and implements its constructive policy in an open way, in the light of the sun. It does not feel itself unconcerned by any problem and does not allow anyone to shut its mouth. Any state, any nation has a right to express its opinion freely, to oppose the opinion of others it does not agree with, just as the others have the same right to oppose the views they do not approve of. It is utterly erroneous to sit with crossed arms and keep mum when the others act to the detriment of people and nations, or to nod approval to such actions, as some people would like us to do, pretending that it is sheer arrogance for small nations to try to have their say, to defend their or their friends' rights and come out with the opinions before the "big ones". False modesty and the slavish opportunist spirit are alien to the policy of the Albanian state and proletarian dictatorship.
The two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union are aggressive imperialist powers. They are dividing the world into spheres of influence and proceeding to the division and occupation of world markets. Their ultimate aim is to dominate over the whole world, to rule over all nations and states. Hence, their irreconcilable contradictions which may lead them to another world war. Their hegemonism, their reckless arms race do not take place in a quiet atmosphere, but through great upheavals that our world is seething with.
The two superpowers face today a great economic, cultural and spiritual crisis. Their regimes and ideologies are ridden by corruption. No one holds them in trust any longer, but by means of demagogy they impose themselves on the other capitalists who have got desperately entangled in the snares of the two imperialist superpowers and who, but for a general uprising of the people, will never be able to shake off their yoke. Quite understandably, the two imperialist superpowers, and those caught in their snares, try to make the people of their countries pay for the terrible consequences of those crises. Here lie the roots of the conflicts among states and between rulers and peoples. But the people who have to put up with all suffering cannot expect salvation from the others. It is only through their own efforts that they can save themselves, for the capitalist-revisionist rulers, when it comes to defend themselves against the people's revolution, are always at one with each other.
When they see that they have lost their game, the capitalists throw their masks into the gutter and establish their fascist dictatorship. This is what some states are doing now, whereas some others have done it long ago. There are plenty of slogans and demagogical tricks, but one must judge people according to their deeds, not by appearance.
The two superpowers have armed themselves up to their teeth while trying through their propaganda, to convince the others into disarmament. On the other hand, they have become the biggest arms dealers. This seems sort of contradictory, but it is not. True, they sell weapons to others, but they keep modern weapons for themselves, always preserving due proportions so as not to affect their supremacy. The more so as they give weapons only to those whom they trust and consider as their clients. They use arms deliveries, on the one hand, to suck the blood and plunder the wealth of the other nations, posing as their friends so as to intrude themselves into and rule over those countries, while, on the other, inciting them to fight against their neighbours.
The United States and the Soviet Union stir up quarrels everywhere, resuscitate centuries-old feuds, try to relax all possible resistance to their plots. In the meanwhile they stir up conflicts to their own interests over which they take this or that side, beating their chests and swearing themselves hoarse to make themselves more credible, demanding with great noise the convening of the Security Council until eventually everything ends up like a soap bubble.
"Peace" was allegedly restored in Vietnam, but war still goes on in that country. The Vietnam question was supposedly solved when war flared up in the Middle East. There, too, peace is claimed to be re-established, but war continues in many other ways. The Arab-Israeli war was allegedly ended, only for the Cyprus question to flare up. This process we mentioned above goes on further. Who arouses all these conflicts? The two imperialist superpowers, the Soviets and Americans, which play with the fate of the peoples of the world.
The Soviet Union and the United States of America go into outer space and launch innumerable earth satellites. There are people and states who proclaim that those inventions "belong to mankind, are made for the good of mankind". In themselves, they are inventions of colossal importance, but one cannot help asking: "In whose hands are they? Who enjoys them and to what purposes does he use them? Are they employed for the good of mankind, or as a means for the superpowers to spy on the peoples and states? Is the danger of aggressive wars ever being diminished?" Not in the least. Is the state of hunger and misery in the world being wiped out? On the contrary, it is becoming worse. Is the living of the poor being improved or the power of the rich liquidated? The contrary is happening. To sing praises to the "successes of mankind" means to become the mouthpiece of the capitalist and revisionist superpowers.
Where does the security of the peoples of Europe or of the peoples of the world lie? Does it lie in the public or mysterious travels of a certain Kissinger, of a certain Gromyko, or in the tricks of a certain Brezhnev who is bleeding the Soviet and other peoples white, in the travels of a certain Nixon who drowned the world in blood and guided the American Mafia to the bugging and cover-up, a most shameful scandal which shook the whole of America? And the future of the world should be entrusted to this kind of people? A fine future, indeed.
Of course, those who have placed their trust in those tragic illusionists are free to attend the meetings in Vienna, Helsinki and anywhere they like. Let them have their powwows. But, on our part, we too are free not to go to those meetings, and we will not go there. And it is not only we, but also the people who are absent at those meetings. This is significant for us. But someone will say: "What do the Albanians propose, what shall we do?" The Albanians state everyday their views, all those who wished to listen to them have a clear idea of them. The Albanians say: "Poisoned food should not be eaten, for it would spell death, it should be rejected and thrown away." There are people who say: "How should we treat the Americans and the Soviets? They are strong. Should we leave them outside the door?" The Albanians say: "We should not only leave them outside, but also isolate them and put the straight jacket on them." "This is a pious wish," they say, "but reality looks different". However, we Albanians say that this wish should be turned into reality. If you submit to the Soviet-American dictate, then you cannot escape their yoke. We Albanians admit neither their dictate nor their yoke. We are determined to fight on till victory.
When listening to us some people grin or cackle and say: "How arrogant these Albanians are. They pretend to set the world right." But who are those who speak in this way. They are the sort of people who wish to rule over the world and the peoples, they do not want the peoples to raise their voice against them, they are wont to look down on the people and order them around with bullets and whips. And it is they who pose as the most unpretentious people on earth.
We tell them that we are not arrogant but the soldiers of that big and powerful army which carries out the revolution, which strikes terror into their hearts and which eventually will spell their death. This is not a revolution of yes-men and slaves, of people bending their backs and wallowing in the mud, but a powerful strike, the continuation of the Great October Revolution, it is the Great Chinese Proletarian Cultural Revolution, it is the liberation struggle of the peoples. They call all this "pretension and arrogance", they hate it, for it saps the foundations and demolishes the building they have set up on the corpses of people.
In the grip of internal contradictions and grave all-round crises, under the relentless blows of the forces of revolution, of national liberation, of democracy and social progress, the capitalist-revisionist world is staggering towards its ever greater degeneration and decomposition.
The bourgeoisie tries to stop the present crises and to save itself from catastrophe by throwing the burden onto the working class and masses and preserve its profits intact. This line is bound to bring about the revolt of the proletariat and of all those oppressed and exploited by the capital.
The working masses, their more conscious section, will most certainly rise to their feet to defend their vital interests, and turn this critical situation to the advantage of furthering the cause of the revolution.
Revolution, the struggle for political and economic independence, make up a non-stop historical process. The present conditions of the social development in the world urge them ahead with ever greater force and make them indispensable. This also constitutes a guarantee for their triumph.
The Albanian people and all the peoples of the world nurture an ardent love and place deep trust in great socialist China, in her glorious Party and in Mao Tsetung, the great and beloved leader not only of the Chinese people and communists, but also the dear and respected leader of all the peoples and communists of the world. This infuriates modern revisionism which, with the Moscow renegades at its head, and in collusion with U.S. imperialism, is waging a fierce and diabolical struggle to oppose the peoples and China. This comes to us as no surprise; this is in conformity with their logic. The greatest enemy of U.S. imperialism and of Soviet social-imperialism are the peoples of the world, with great Mao Tsetung's China at the head. The struggle is being waged between freedom and socialism, on the one hand, and slavery and aggressive imperialism of the two superpowers, on the other. All the peoples of the world have pinned their hopes of liberation, independence and well-being, on their efforts and on Mao's China. They are not mistaken, and their conviction is not based on propaganda, but on a great reality, which shines like the light of the sun on the construction of socialism in China, which is being carried on in a correct way; according to the doctrine of Marx and Lenin and the teachings of Mao Tsetung, it is based on the determined stand of the People's Republic of China in the international arena, on the concrete moral, political and economic help it gives the peoples of the world.
This reality wrecks and exposes the bandit-like and fascist propaganda of Moscow and Washington. The peoples of the world who feel and suffer on their back the oppression of the two superpowers, see and feel that Mao Tsetung, the great Marxist-Leninist, is on their side, they see socialist China stand them in good stead with sincerity and fraternal love. The unity with People's China is a great achievement for the cause of mankind. Old and young should feel and realize that socialism, revolution, the liberation of the peoples make headway because great socialist China marches unswervingly along this road. This is to the liking neither of the Soviet and American imperialists nor of world reaction. They have declared war on us, but we are stronger than they are and will defeat them. The wheel of the revolution cannot turn backwards.
In these days, the People's Republic of China celebrated the 25th anniversary of its founding. It has come to this glorious jubilee with a series of colossal achievements in all fields. Great China, relying on its own efforts, has made continual progress towards the development of socialist economy, and today has set up a modern industry, an advanced socialist agriculture, and is forging ahead with each passing day towards ever-higher peaks. This unprecedented progress ever recorded in the life of the Chinese people has not been achieved without overcoming innumerable difficulties and obstacles. To achieve these successes, the fraternal Chinese people have had to make heroic efforts and wage a severe class struggle at home and on the international arena. An unparalleled revolutionary situation has been created in the People's Republic of China following the Great Cultural Proletarian Revolution initiated and led by Comrade Mao Tsetung in person. In the course of this revolution, The hundred-million-strong masses exposed and turned to dust the traitorous band of Liu Shao-chi; they did short work of the counter-revolutionary traitor, careerist and agent of the Soviet revisionists, Lin Piao; they defended the victories of the revolution, consolidated the dictatorship of the proletariat, and have now gone down to the implementation of the historic decisions of the 10th Congress of their Party and the non-stop development of the struggle against the reactionary ideas of Confucius and Lin Piao. Under the leadership of the Communist Party of China and Chairman Mao Tsetung, People's China has been transformed into a powerful socialist state, with a great economic and military potential and a high international prestige and authority. Our people and Party wholeheartedly greet these brilliant achievements, and wish to see them increase and multiply for the good of the fraternal Chinese people and the revolution in the world.
The People's Republic of Albania, our people, our Party of Labour are loyal friends, close friends and comrades, faithful allies of the People's Republic of China, of the fraternal Chinese people and of the glorious Communist Party of Mao Tsetung 's China. We are united by our common ideals, we are united forever by Marxism-Leninism, we are united by the common road of the socialist construction, we are united by the struggle against the common enemy, by the common tasks in the spirit of proletarian internationalism.
Our socialist collaboration is being developed as it should be between good comrades, with sincerity and understanding of Marxist-Leninists. We mutually help one another in all fields, by all manner of means. This help and collaboration bears good fruit for our people and our country. China helps unsparingly and disinterestedly develop our industry, intensify our socialist agriculture, all-round strengthen our country and raise the well-being of our people. Every day we are witnessing this reality at our hydro-electric and thermo-electric power-stations, our factories and workshops, in the tractors and railways; we see it in the harmonious and mutually beneficial development of our cultural, commercial and other exchanges. The situation in our country is such as every one, young and old, holds dear in their hearts the Chinese people and the beloved Chairman Mao. The same can also be said of China: Everywhere you go, you have only to tell people that you are Albanian, and you will find all hearts and doors open, will feel everywhere their warm love for the Albanian people and the Party of Labour of Albania. We are charged with the great and vital task of preserving and tempering this friendship more and more with each passing day on the Marxist-Leninist road.
The Soviet revisionists see with a jaundiced eye our unbreakable friendship with China. They resort to every means to harm it, but they will never be able to attain their goal. The Moscow renegades keep trumpeting in their broadcasts that we allegedly are China's satellites, that we depend on her, that the Albanian people are detached from their leaders, etc. This is the stand taken by all and every imperialist. The Albanian people tell the Moscow renegades: "However you keep barking at the moon, eagles are not afraid of your barkings. The Albanian people hate you, and their hatred is an important factor of strength for the construction of socialism and anvil on which the Albanian-Chinese friendship is forged."
The People's Republic of Albania pursues a foreign policy in defence of the interests of our country on the international arena, defends and struggles together with socialist and progressive democratic countries for freedom, progress and genuine democracy all over the world, for the freedom of workers and intellectuals.
The People's Republic of Albania opposes U.S. imperialism, Soviet social-imperialism, all other imperialists and reactionaries in the world who are responsible for the miseries of mankind, for the wars of plunder and oppression; for the quarrels and dissensions, diversions and plots hatched up all over the world, for famine and poverty on a world scale. Socialist Albania makes its modest contribution to this struggle and these relentless efforts of mankind, a modest help, true, but rendered openly, undauntedly, and fearing nobody. And these "nobodies" may be great and powerful, but the strength of the policy of our People's Republic consists in the fact that it defends its just cause, the sacred and dear cause of all the peoples. You should know how to seek this cause, how to find it, how to make it your own and to defend it with all your forces. But to defend it with all your forces means, first of all to accept all sacrifices. The People's Republic of Albania has chosen this road thanks to its glorious leadership, the Party of Labour, and no storm was or will ever be able to make it swerve from this road.
The policy of the Party of Labour and the People's Republic of Albania is an open and above-board policy; it states its truth to all and everybody's face however harsh and unpalatable it may be to some. Our policy complies with the interest of the peoples, not with those of the cliques and ideologies that oppress the peoples. It seeks friendship with the peoples, not with their oppressors. It is not a conjunctural policy, but a principled proletarian policy. It does not stem from behind-the-scenes secret diplomacy, from mysterious talks, from putting its own and other countries' interests up for auction.
The policy of our country is not the policy of those states with a hundred flags in their pockets. Our People's Republic does not lower its flag either before blackmail and terror, or before the ruble and dollar. Should we follow this just, principled and bold policy or go down on our knees, lick the boots of the Americans and Soviets, become a state-prostitute? It is the first course that we must follow while mercilessly exposing the second.
Such is the policy of our Party and Government. Therefore, hundreds of millions are at one with us, and Albania stands on the side of those hundreds and hundreds of millions in close unity of thought and action.
We, the people of the People's Republic of Albania, of a small country in the Balkans, which has suffered much at the hands of the various barbarous imperialist occupiers through the centuries and which has won its freedom and everything it enjoys today arms in hand, call on all common people of the world: "Look out! U.S. imperialism and Russian imperialism are leading the world into another world war, more terrible than the two previous world wars. These two superpowers are responsible for the present great crises, they are vying with one another for world hegemony, they are fighting to occupy markets, that is, to oppress and enslave peoples. It is precisely the two superpowers that arm anti-popular cliques and governments to use them as watchdogs and their people as cannon fodder for the inevitable shambles they are preparing, if they are given a free hand."
See what is happening in the world. The people of the Soviet Union are being oppressed and nursed in an aggressive nationalist spirit, the peoples of the pseudo-socialist countries of Europe also are being oppressed and their ruling cliques submit the interests of their peoples to those of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Treaty. The Kremlin oppresses and threatens them: "Either you act the way I want and order you, or I will invade and suppress you as I have done with Czechoslovakia." This was the way of Hitler. He began with Austria, then went on to Czechoslovakia and the other countries. It was in the same way that Soviet social-imperialism began, and it is in the same way that it will end. Like Hasha began and ended, in the same way have begun and will end Husak, Beck-Gierek, Zhivkov-Filov and others.
U.S. imperialism is crushing the peoples under its "bloody heel" It has trodden down on its "allies" trying by every manner of means to keep them under the constant menace of the economic crisis, the atomic bomb, the Soviet threat, intrigues and diversion. It tries to preserve the Atlantic Alliance by stirring up rivalries in its midst, always in its favour, and creating a climate of uncertainty in the countries and governments of its so-called allies.
The United States attacks Vietnam and Cambodia. In complete solidarity with one another the Americans and Soviets intervene in Pakistan and Afghanistan, provoke wars in the Middle East, manipulate the Chilean and Cyprus tragedy.
Everyone waits in anguish. Where will they strike next? The world is now full of noise and rumours spread by agents provocateurs, sold-out scribblers, parlour and club diplomats, all of them people in the service of the two superpowers who try to fish in troubled waters through blackmail and intimidation: "Tomorrow," they say, "it will be Yugoslavia's turn. What will happen after Tito? Yugoslavia will be annexed either to the Soviet or the American sphere or influence, Rumania will be gobbled up by the Soviets, Albania will not go unscathed. Which side will Greece take now that it withdrew from NATO," etc., etc.
All these rumours express the wishes and plans of the two superpowers; they are not only a psychological campaign to demoralize the people of those countries, but also a real military preparation to weaken their resistance, and drown them afterwards in blood.
The psychosis of fear and war is fostered by the two superpowers. This psychosis of threat is used to proclaim the two umbrellas, one Soviet the other American, as the sole way of salvation. According to them, there is no other choice, if you want to be saved. "Don't think with your head, your freedom and fate are dependent on these two monsters." Over all this psychosis of blackmail, intimidation and terror hovers a thick smoke of meetings, contacts, talks, bilateral and multilateral commissions. Everything is put under discussion, but no question is solved; or, when allegedly settled, nothing is certain. Even the implicit bourgeois "moral obligations" of the diplomatic acts of former times have today been affected, by a horrible corruption and rottenness. The policy of the superpowers and their allies is ridden by degeneration, falsity, deceit.
Should the peoples sit idle in face of the catastrophe these criminal bands are preparing for-mankind? Certainly not. What should be done, then? We say that we must fight. But how should this fight be waged? Through messages, telegrams of congratulation to those who try to dig our grave? Should we publicly praise the Soviet revisionists who resort to all means to bury and gobble us up; should we throw flowers to the U.S. imperialist butchers, seek and accept enslaving loans from the two superpowers, and afterwards pretend to fight against them? No, there is no one to be taken in by such deceit, such demagogy. In order to conduct a just and realistic policy towards your country and the other countries, you should rid yourself of the complexes the two imperialist superpowers and their agents have created and continue to create.
These powers of darkness accuse us Albanians of having isolated ourselves. But whom do we isolate ourselves from, and what is the meaning they attach to our isolation? And then, what do they advise us to do? They counsel us not to isolate ourselves from the imperialists and revisionists, to accept their loans, and to make partners in our country of those who used to oppress our people and suck their blood. The advise us to turn our country into an inn with doors flung wide open to pigs and sows, to people with pants on or without pants at all, to the hirsute and long-haired hippies to supplant with their wild orgies the beautiful dances of our people. They try to corrupt our people, poke their spy's noses into our affairs, organize putsches and plots, occupy the strategic spots of the country, establish military bases, turn our country into a colony of the foreigners and our people into slaves. If you do not accept all this, they say, then you will have isolated yourselves from "this magnificent world, this astonishing civilization". If you make such concessions to those monsters, they will allow you even to insult them, call yourselves communists, even pose as adherents of Marx, Lenin and Mao Tsetung. But all this is bluff, for they have gripped you by the throat and you cannot budge: you have become their slave, their agent, have sold out your country and people.
This is the sort of slaves they want us to become, for otherwise we would not be called "civilized", would not be regarded "fashionable". We reject with contempt this mode of living and thinking, and there should be no hope that we would act differently. A sure guarantee to that are our glorious people and the heroic Party of Labour of Albania, both acting in absolute unity of thought and action.
Rascals, enemies, agents of the foreigners have emerged now and then with the aim of impeding the construction of socialism, of sabotaging the brilliant and steel-like defence of our country, but they have been exposed and eliminated as soon as they have raised the tips of their ears. The class struggle that is being so successfully, determinedly and vigilantly carried on by our Party and people uncovers and mercilessly roots this rottenness out of our society.
When the iron broom sweeps our ranks clean of them, the foreign and internal enemies prick their ears, spread such rumours as: "They are down and out, they are split and gnawed at by the worm of dissension", etc. But what does our Party and people say? "Let us do short work of them, for it is in this way that we'll wax a hundred thousand times stronger." The rumours spread by the enemy are but wailings of their defeat. Our people and Party are neither astonished, puzzled, nor frightened by such rumours, for they have become used to them. Our people and Government know only too well those who spit poison when the enemy has been dealt smashing blows, they know also to administer to such individuals the appropriate remedy. And this goes a long way towards strengthening our situation, because the diabolical plots of the enemy, both external and internal, are failing, and those who carry them out are being caught red-handed. It is here that the strength of the proletarian dictatorship lies, the strength of our socialist country, the power of the Marxist-Leninist ideas of our Party.
The revisionist Kremlin and its stooges are crying themselves hoarse, saying: "We want to establish links, diplomatic relations; we want friendship with the Albanian people, with a people we love so much." The wolves in lamb's skin swear to god that they wish to hug us. But their hug is meant to stifle us. They want to kiss us thrice, according to the usage of the Russian church, to send us to Christ in Heaven. But we tell these enemies of socialism and Leninism, these avowed enemies of our people and of the Party of Labour of Albania, that we will never reconcile with them, will never make friends with them, we will always be their enemies. And they should not think that this is the opinion of some Albanian leaders who today are alive but will be dead tomorrow. No. The Albanian people and the Party of Labour of Albania will never die. We are their soldiers, there are millions of us with a sole thought, with a common unshaken stand. Neither your cannons, nor your rockets nor your planes, nor your atomic bomb will make us change our stand either today or tomorrow.
Our Party and people are not deceived by the demagogy of Radio Moscow which every night weeps nostalgical crocodile tears over the old Albanian-Soviet friendship. What we cherish is our friendship at the time of great
Stalin. We have never hidden and will never hide that friendship, but it was violated precisely by those who betrayed the cause of Marxism-Leninism, of Bolshevism, who betrayed the ideas of Lenin and Stalin, who betrayed proletarian internationalism and the friendship with the Albanian people. The Party of Labour of Albania and the Albanian people will never be at peace with them, but at war, and we are prepared to win this war without fail, if not today, tomorrow.
They should realize yet another thing, and if I say so I speak on behalf of the Albanian people and of the Party of Labour of Albania. We are intimidated neither by them nor by their weapons. We tell the Kremlin traitors and their stooges that we know how to differentiate between the Soviet people and the revisionist leaders but we will not differentiate between those leaders and their running dogs. To our opinion all traitors are in the same boat. They will not be able to treat socialist Albania and the Party of Labour of Albania the way they treated Prague and the party of Dubchek.
With the megalomania and the overbearing of a great fascist state, the Kremlin rulers, knitting their histrionic bushy brows, may say: "Where do those lilliputs find the force to oppose the Soviet Union?" Do you want our answer? Take up Marx, Engels and Lenin (for you have discarded Stalin), read them a-right for a minute (for you read them the wrong way round), and there you will find where our strength lies. Do you agree, dear electors, with the answer we give those treacherous enemies?
The Soviet revisionists, just like in Khruschev's lifetime, now too with Brezhnev, pursue the same ends, adopt the same tactics, and maintain the same propaganda position. In pursuit of Khruschevite traitorous line, the revisionist CPSU is now organizing a meeting of the revisionist parties of Europe with the end of imposing on them its own views, of holding them in check, and of showing that allegedly it is not isolated, that it is the "centre of world communism". The other parties which will attend this meeting are bound to prove that they are on the road of treason, 1974 they will become complices of the malevolent and counter-revolutionary activity of the Soviet revisionist leaders. The Party of Labour of Albania condemns with severity such a plotters' meeting; however, this meeting will be a success insofar as the peoples and communists in the world will have occasion to see once again the true face of these parties which are meeting to plot.
The Kremlin chiefs and their running dogs pretend that they stand for Marxism-Leninism, that their countries stand for socialism. Whoever joins their course receives the communion as such, whoever is against them, far from being Marxist-Leninist, is labeled as linked with, sold out, and in the service of U.S. imperialism. In other words, they say: "Either with us, or with them." But to be both against U. S. imperialism and against Soviet social-imperialism is unacceptable for them.
Khruschev accused us Albanians of having sold (ourselves) to imperialism. But who was sold, we or he? Seeing that we did not subdue to him, Brezhnev accuses us of playing in the hands of the Americans, whereas he himself and his followers are friends and close collaborators of the Americans; they are kissing, and sleeping-partners of the Americans, whereas we who lock daggers with them, are being accused by them. Nobody believes these lies of traitors, since honest and wise people are able to see through the policy and the attitude of our People's Republic and of the Party of Labour of Albania, to see the implementation and development of this policy. We rely on these people and we thank them for their correct assessment of our policy. These constitute the overwhelming majority, whether communists and non-communists, people holding different political opinions, among whom also those who may differ with our course.
But there are also some who believe the calumnies of the Kremlin imperialist renegades. What can we do? Such people are bound to exist. Hitler too had such people, both inside and outside Germany. Through demagogy and terror, he regimented the German people. You can see this happening today in the Soviet Union.
But, is Albania an isolated country as our enemies are trumpeting? Not in the least. Socialist Albania is known throughout the world, it is visited by numerous people, friends from all countries. We maintain diplomatic, trade, cultural relations with 65 countries. The frank and loyal policy of the People's Republic of Albania towards its friends and well-wishers is respected, just as our people's arts and culture are respected, just as our country's all-round achievements are justly and positively assessed.
Are we ever isolated because we do not maintain diplomatic relations with the United States of America? It is true that neither Truman, Nixon, nor Ford have spoken in the U.S. Senate about establishing diplomatic relations with Albania or about their "ardent love" for Albania, as the Moscow hypocrites are doing. But now and again the State Department flies a test "balloon" and waits for an answer. We are responding everyday to U.S. imperialism.
Following the second world war, when we fought together against Hitler, Albania expressed its wish to establish diplomatic relations with the United States of America. But they did not condescend to establish relations with a Government born in the mountains; they wanted a parlour and coca-cola Government to be established in Albania. However, the Albanian people did not bother for this, they shared their place under the sun and prospered, no matter whether the United States of America agreed with this.
They refused then to establish diplomatic relations with us; it is us today who refuse to establish such relations with them.
Many people may say that the United States of America doesn't care a farthing if we do not want to establish diplomatic relations with them. It is true. But it is also true to the same degree that we also do not care a farthing for that.
The British Government, too, which maintains towards us the same stand as the U.S. Government, fly now and then a "balloon"for diplomatic relations, but we say to them: before you fly such balloons, you should release the gold which you robbed the Albanians of, and return it together with its interest to Albania. We address these words also to the Bonn Government which carries on a revanchist policy and which owes Albania billions of marks for war reparations.
Perhaps, they are waiting for us to bow to them and kneel down to their governments that have been the cause of so many misfortunes, so many injustices to us? No, never. They are wrong, together with all those accusing us of being obstinate.
We sympathise with the American, British and German labouring people, but not with those treading on people's rights, freedom and sovereignty. We fight against those governments and people who harbour enslaving ideas. We have many friends and good-wishers in France, Belgium, in the Nordic and Scandinavian countries and in many other countries throughout the world. We respect them and they respect us, despite differences of regime and ideology.
We respect those peoples and governments that do not kneel to the dictates and wishes of the two superpowers, and make an independent and sovereign policy. The well-wishers of the People's Republic of Albania respect our policy, in spite of the fact that they may not agree with us in all matters, but they understand that, just as they themselves have a right to conduct their own policy, we also have the same right to conduct ours. Distinguished persons had been born in the past from the bosom of these peoples, they have spoken and written with sympathy about the Albanian people. Now, in the present time also, workers, professors, physicians, philosophers, diplomats and journalists speak and write with sympathy about our small and brave valiant people, who have never harmed anybody.
We are friends with the Yugoslav and Greek neighboring peoples. The imperialist powers and their espionage agencies have made all preparations to undermine us and set us at loggerheads against each other. But we, the Balkan peoples, have drawn lessons from these things and, in face of the common danger, even if we may not agree with each other in many respects, we have found and we may find a common language. Historical facts cannot be forgotten. After attacking the one, the same enemy has afterwards attacked also the other. The same enemies have supported the one and the other to make the third one weaker. Our peoples' enemies and the cliques sold out to them held the fuse of the powder barrel.
The foreign enemy has never succeeded in subduing the Albania, Yugoslav and Greek people. These peoples have no slavish spirit, and they have shown this continually during their centuries-long history. The Albanians, the Yugoslavs and the Greeks are the kind of people who make a point of keeping their pistol at the ready in case the Americans, the Soviets or any other tries to deprive them of their freedom and sovereignty. Therefore, however the two superpowers or the aircraft-carrier states in their grip may dream in broad daylight, neither the Yugoslav nor the Greek and the Albanian people will ever allow to be trodden underfoot by the Soviet, the American, the Italian or German fascists. In case they engage themselves in such adventures they will find their grave in our countries.
We have already told and we tell again the Yugoslav and Greek peoples that Albania's borders with them will always be quiet. The enemy will first have to face us Albanians; it will be routed here and hardly will it manage to reach their borders. We believe that they will take the same stand towards us.
We want to live a free life in our countries.
Let the enemies not think that they would deal with us easily. We Albanians wish the Yugoslav and Greek people well. Let us promote friendship in the most appropriate way to each other, without intervening into each other's internal affairs and without allowing within our territories anything which, for one reason or the other, may violate or threaten the interests of good neighbourliness. Albania, Yugoslavia and Greece are not only living without the Warsaw and NATO Treaties, but their life is also free and independent. We congratulate Greece on its withdrawal from NATO. The Greek people did not allow themselves to be trodden underfoot and anyone thinking that Washington Department Secretaries and Moscow Foreign Ministers may strike bargain and plot at the expense of the Greek people, is grievously wrong. The world will never forget how Greece shed its blood for liberation at a time when some others were hanging about.
We tell our neighbours: in our country there are and will be no foreign military bases, but we wish that they too will close the foreign military bases in their countries. No reason can be produced for the fleets of the two superpowers to be permitted not only to maintain permanent bases, but also to have the right to ride on anchor, to be repaired and supplied there. This is very dangerous, both for the country which extends such facilities and for its neighbours. We cannot agree with anyone carrying out such actions. We have declared our stand towards the aggressive U.S. and Soviet fleets in the Mediterranean, and we remain loyal and consistent to this policy.
We wish the Bulgarian people well; we have been and are friends together, but this friendship is being darkened, and this not to our fault. The Bulgarian people should wake up, because their rulers are turning Bulgaria into a real colony of the Soviet social-imperialists. The Moscow chiefs and their Bulgarian espionage agency, with Theodor Zhivkov in the lead, have turned Bulgaria into a military base against our countries. The Soviets want to use the Bulgarian people as cannon fodder against our peoples. In the hand of the Soviets, Theodor Zhivkov and his clique have become dangerous provocateurs in their activities against Yugoslavia, Albania, Greece, Turkey and other countries. The dreams of the ancient tzars coincide with the wishes of the new Russian-Bulgarian tzars, and Theodor Zhivkov, dreaming of great Bulgaria, does not launch the slogan: "Through the centuries with Russia" in vain. We say to the Bulgarian people that friendship is friendship, and we remain loyal to the friendship with the Bulgarian people of great Dimitrov, but this friendship has its laws. If the Bulgarian people shelter bandits in their country and allow them to attack us from there, then that sincere and pure friendship will cease to exist.
We want to have good and friendly relations with Italy. But we are observing that the fascists there are raising up their heads, conducting a broad campaign of crimes and threats and seeking to revive the old spirit of Mussolini adventures. Fascist terrorist acts have been carried out in Rome against the embassy of the People's Republic of Albania, which is inviolable. All those actions hindering the normal development of relations of good neighborliness between our two countries should be condemned and thwarted.
A close fraternal friendship binds our people with the heroic people of Vietnam. Our country continues to support with determination the just struggle of the Vietnamese people for the liberation of South Vietnam, the defence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the reunification of the homeland. The Party, the Government and the entire Albanian people forcefully condemn the aggressive Vietnamese policy of the United States of America which is going on with its military engagement, urging the administration of Saigon to violate the Paris Agreements and inciting it to grave provocations against the Vietnamese people. We express our unshaken confidence that the fraternal Vietnamese people, through their resolute struggle, will fulfill all their national aspirations, and carry on their just struggle to final victory.
We congratulate the valiant Cambodian people on the historical victories achieved under the leadership of the National United Front, with Samdech Norodom Sihanouk at the head, in their struggle against the U.S. aggressive imperialists and the puppet regime of Lon Nol. The Royal Government of National Union of Cambodia is the sole legitimate government of the Cambodian people. It enjoys all the necessary attribute and is fully entitled to represent Cambodia on the international arena. We are convinced that the ultimate victory of the Cambodian people against the foreign aggressors and the Phnom Penh traitors is inevitable.
Friendly relations of close collaboration exist between our country and the People's Democratic Republic of Korea, which keep on strengthening and developing. We deeply rejoice at the successes the fraternal Korean people are achieving in the construction of socialism. We have sympathised and sympathise with the just struggle of the Party of Labour and the people of the People's Democratic Republic of Korea, with Comrade Kim II Sung at the head, against U.S. imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism for the defence of the victories of socialism and the great cause of people's liberation. Our people approve of the just stand of the Party and the Government of the People's Democratic Republic of Korea on the withdrawal of foreign troops from Korea and the country's reunification.
At present, the Middle East constitutes one of the problems preoccupying not only peoples of this area, but the entire world public opinion. As a result of the interference of the superpowers, the establishment of genuine peace there is far away. There is no rapid solution in view which would fit in with the genuine sovereign interests of the Arab peoples, that would totally return to them the land they have been robbed of and restore the negated rights of the Palestinians.
The so-called peace plans fabricated in the chancelleries of Moscow and Washington, aim at burying the genuine Arab cause. Any initiative the United States of America and the Soviet Union take in the Middle East aims at strengthening the positions of the imperialists and enhancing their influence there.
But a curtailed and anti-Arab peace, like that which the United States of America and the Soviet Union seek to impose, cannot be long lived. The four Arab-Israeli wars waged so far have proven this.
We are convinced that the Arab peoples, with their ancient traditions and their freedom-loving and progressive spirit, will foil all the intrigues and anti-Arab plots of Israel and the two superpowers and, through their united forces, will attain all their lofty national objectives.
Recently, Cyprus too was gripped in the flames of war. A fresh threat to peace and security in the east Mediterranean and in the Balkans emerged. The development of events so far showed that the new Cyprus tragedy took place in the background of Soviet-U.S. rivalry, in the atmosphere of intrigues and plots that the two superpowers, individually or jointly, hatch up against the peoples. The U.S. imperialists seek to settle themselves politically and militarily on the island, while the social-imperialists try to fish in troubled waters. They are availing themselves of this issue to revive the old Turkish-Greek feuds and create such a situation which would make their expansion easier or would justify their intrusion.
The problems of Cyprus are numerous and, certainly, not easily soluble. But we are of the opinion that the Cypriot, Greek or Turkish peoples have the possibility and capability to settle their own destiny by themselves, free of external pressure and according to their sovereign interests. Cyprus is an independent and sovereign state, recognized by the majority of the states of the world, a member of the United Nations. It should remain so, and and nobody has the right to attack it, whatever the pretext, to interfere in its internal affairs and impose on it such solutions as do not comply with the freely expressed will of the Cypriot people.
These events, which do not take place far from us, impose on us the necessity of still more intensifying the revolutionary vigilance, of a broader mobilization for a firmer all-round struggle against all the enemies on all fronts.
The People's, Republic of Albania will stand on the forefront of the struggle against imperialism, revisionism and reaction, and will back up all those peoples and countries that fight for national freedom and independence, for emancipation and social advancement.
In the future, too, we will follow the same foreign policy that has so far ensured our country international sound positions, its numerous and powerful friends and well-wishers, that has won it a name and a lofty prestige.
Comrades,
Concluding, allow me to express the conviction that our labouring masses will always keep aloft the revolutionary spirit that has continually characterized our people, will mobilize all their forces to completely fulfill the planned targets, will fight with determination against alien influences and ideologies, and carry forward, as always, the great cause of the construction of socialism in Albania.
Participation of everyone in voting and voting of all for the candidates of the Democratic Front will be another brilliant victory of our people on their triumphant socialist road, another significant proof of political maturity and deep ideological convictions, a brilliant contribution to the strengthening and further consolidation of the steel-like foundations of the People's Republic of Albania.
LONG LIVE OUR HEROIC PEOPLE.
LONG LIVE THE DEMOCRATIC FRONT OF ALBANIA.
LONG LIVE AND MAY OUR PEOPLE'S POWER BE STRENGTHENED.
LONG LIVE OUR PARTY OF LABOUR, THE OUTSTANDING LEADER OF ALL OUR VICTORIES, THE GUARANTOR OF OUR SURE FUTURE.
GLORY TO MARXISM-LENINISM.
[Painting: Nov. 29, 1944: Triumphant entry into Tirana headed by Enver Hoxha.]
[Photo: Albanian youth take part in productive labor, tempering themselves for carrying on the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat.]
[Photo: Before Liberation, Albania had virtually no modem industry. This, the Mao Tsetung Textile Combine of Berati is an example the achievements of the Albanian working class and people in socialist construction under the dictatorship of the proletariat.]
[A revolutionary oil painting "The Printing of the Leaflets" by Myzafer Dika depicting the Albanian people's revolutionary struggle against Italian and German fascism and internal reactionaries.]
In recent weeks the national liberation struggle of the Palestinian people against imperialism and Zionism has won several important diplomatic victories, reflecting the support it receives from the overwhelming majority of the world' s people. On November 13, 1974 Yassar Arafat, Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, addressed the United Nations General Assembly as part of the general debate on the question of Palestine. Following the general debate, the U.N. General Assembly passed two resolutions supporting the national rights of the Palestinian people and granting the PLO observer status at the U.N. These events are sweeping victories for the four million Palestinian people, who have been waging a protracted people's war to liberate their homeland from Israeli Zionism, which is openly backed by U.S. imperialism and covertly supported by Soviet social-imperialism.
The 103-5 vote inviting Mr. Arafat and the enthusiastic reception given him by the vast majority of the delegates, along with the overwhelming votes in favor of the pro-Palestinian resolutions, attest to the firm support the people of the world give to the Palestinian people and to the near-complete isolation of Zionism and its imperialist backers. These are big steps toward the formal recognition of the organization), member nations voted 75 to 14 to Palestinian nation and of the right of the Palestinian people to sovereignty over all Palestinian land, as well as a step towards rectifying past unjust U.N. resolutions, such as Security Council Resolution 242, which halted the October 1973 Middle East War without recognizing the rights of the Palestinians.
The first resolution passed by the General Assembly after the week's debate on Palestine (adopted by a vote of 89 to 8) directly affirmed the right of the Palestinian people to exercise self-determination over their homeland and defend its independence and sovereignty. It supported the Palestinians' right to return to their homeland and property from which they were displaced and uprooted by the Zionists. It affirmed that the restoration the Palestinian national rights is indispensable to the settlement of the Middle East question, that the Palestinians are the principal party in the such a settlement, and that the Palestinian people have the right to use whatever means within the U.N. Charter --- including armed struggle -- to attain their national rights. The resolution appealed to all states to support the Palestinian people's struggle.
The second resolution granted the Palestine Liberation Organization observer status in the U.N. by a vote of 95 to 17. Meanwhile, in Paris at a meeting of UNESCO (United Na-Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) member nations voted 75 to 14 to give aid to the PLO and the African national liberation movements.
These events are great victories for the people of the whole world who are struggling against the aggression, plunder and hegemonism of the two superpowers, U.S. imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism. They have thrown the superpowers into a frenzy, with the U.S. moaning about the defeat of "Kissinger's Diplomacy", and the Soviet Union hastily changing its tune to give sham "support" to the Palestinians.
In his address to the U.N. Yassar Arafat pointed out that the Palestinian problem was created by imperialism and its handmaiden, Zionism. By force of arms, the Zionists, acting as a tool of British imperialism, uprooted the Palestinian people from their ancestral home and drove them from their land. Mr. Arafat also pointed out that today the United States supplies Israeli Zionism freely with planes, bombs, and with every variety of murderous weapon. This heavily-armed Zionist State carried out aggressive wars in 1958 and 1967 subjugating territory belonging to Egypt, Syria, Jordan and the remaining part of Palestine. Since those wars the Zionists have ignored every U.N. Resolution and every protest of world public opinion calling for them to withdraw from the occupied Arab lands and to restore the Palestinian national rights. Thus, he said, Zionism "establish(ed) a beachhead for world imperialism's thrust against our Arab nation." Mr. Arafat pointed out that in the past 10 years of their struggle thousands of Palestinian martyrs and twice as many wounded were offered in sacrifice in an armed struggle to liberate their homeland. He pointed out that in the October War in 1973, the Egyptian, Syrian, and Palestinian people struck a heavy blow to Zionism. He further pointed out that far from learning from this experience the Zionists are now again making preparations for a 5th war in the Middle East. He warned that such signs of war should be watched closely since they bear the threat of nuclear war.
Mr. Arafat exposed the imperialist and Zionist slanders of the Palestinian revolution and the Palestinian people. He pointed out that the Palestinian problem is not a conflict between between two religions or between two nationalisms, nor is it a dispute between two neighboring states, nor is it merely a refugee problem. He pointed out that the root of the Palestinian problem is the colonization of the Palestinian nation by Zionism backed by imperialism and the uprooting of the Palestinian people from their native land. He pointed out that the objectives of the Palestinian revolution prove that it is not a conflict between Arab and Jew, but a struggle for national liberation. He declared that the Palestinian revolution is directed only against racist, aggressive Zionism and its backers, and that the Palestine Liberation Organization stands for defeating Zionism and establishing a democratic, secular, anti-Zionist state in which Moslems, Christians and Jews can live in peace.
Mr. Arafat pointed out that while Zionism claims that the Palestinians are anti-semitic, in fact it is the Zionists who are the real anti-semites, for their solution to the problems of the Jewish people is the same as that of the anti-semites -- that the Jews should not live on an equal footing with the people of their native lands, but should be up rooted and made to go and live in a special racist state. He pointed out that Jews and Arabs had lived side by side in peace in Palestine for thousands of years before the coming of Zionism and would do so again.
Answering the charge of "terrorism", Yassar Arafat pointed out that it is a question of what purpose armed force is turned to. If the Palestinians are "terrorists", then "the American people in their struggle for liberation from the British colonialists would have been terrorists, the European resistance against the Nazis would have been terrorism." By that standard, he said, many of the representatives of the newly independent countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America attending the U.N. General Assembly session would also be "terrorists." He pointed out that it is necessary for an oppressed nation to take up the gun to liberate itself from foreign domination.
In conclusion, Yassar Arafat called upon the United Nations to make every effort to stay the hand of the Zionist aggressors, and declared that the Palestinian people would continue to wage armed struggle for their liberation.
Following Yassar Arafat's speech, the U.N. General Assembly voted to refuse permission to the Israeli Zionists to answer every speech of other delegates in favor of the Palestinian cause, giving Zionism still another rebuff.
The stage for these victories at the United Nations was set by the new level of Arab unity forged at the Arab Summit Conference in Rabat, Morocco, in October. At the Rabat Conference, for the first time, the Arab heads of state recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, including the 640,000 on the West Bank of the Jordan River and those in Gaza. The conference resolved that the PLO should head an "independent national authority" to be set up on "any Palestinian land that is liberated" from Zionist control.
The new diplomatic victories of the Palestinian and Arab people have upset the counterrevolutionary diplomatic tactics of U.S. imperialism represented by U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's "shuttle diplomacy". Since the October War, U.S. imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism have stepped up their contention for hegemony over the Middle East, and U.S. imperialism has gained the upper hand of the two. Kissinger's "shuttle diplomacy" was intended, with great fanfare, to trick the Arab people into recognizing the existence of Israel (which means recognizing its right to the Palestinian homeland) and making a "permanent peace" with the Zionist state Kissinger's intricate pattern of plots and bilateral negotiations throughout the Middle East, designed to exclude the other superpower, the USSR, and to establish U.S. hegemony step-by-step, was called "gradualism". It actually meant permanent subjugation for the Palestinian people. But the victories of the Palestinian and Arab people at the Rabat conference and later at the United Nations, which force the"superpowers and Zionists to deal directly with the representatives of the Palestinian people themselves, and which forcefully raise the question of the elimination of the Zionist state and the full realization of the Palestinian national rights, make the task of U.S. imperialism far more difficult.
Gnashing his teeth at defeat, in a November 12 news conference Kissinger declared that the United States should adopt "hard-headed, cold-blooded" foreign policy. The meaning of his statement became clear when the U.S. imperialists rushed to step up the war preparations of their client state of Israel. U.S. President Ford hurriedly sent the Zionists large quantities of arms aid. At the same time, the U.S. imperialists stepped up their propaganda for war, especially activating the Zionist movement in the United States to mount reactionary demonstrations at the U.N. while Mr. Arafat was there. In a desperate position, the Zionists in Israel launched several terrorist raids on southern Lebanon and made warlike declarations.
The difficult position of Zionism was evident in the internal situation in Israel. Defying the reactionary Israeli authorities, on the very day that Yassar Arafat spoke at the U.N. and many times since, the Palestinian people on the West Bank of the Jordan River demonstrated in large numbers and fought against the Zionist police. When the difficult position of the Zionist regime led it to devalue the Israeli pound by 40 per cent, the Sephardic Jews (Eastern Jews, who are racially discriminated against by the Zionists) in Tel Aviv rioted several nights in a row. Israeli workers in many trades carried out strikes and held protest meetings against the extreme rise in the cost of living brought about by the devaluation.
U.S. imperialism's serious economic situation, too, is partly a result of its military preparations and supplying of the Zionist regime. As Mr. Arafat pointed out in an interview with an American newsman: "But if you continue this unlimited support year after year, your balance of payments will remain forever in deficit. Last year you officially gave Israel $2.2 billion; but my information is that the figure is closer to $5 billion. Does the American citizen and taxpayer know he is paying such a bill at a time when he is in such difficulties with inflation and economic crisis?" These economic difficulties are a consequence of U.S. imperialism's inherent policies of aggression and war, exemplified by the support for Zionism, in pursuit of the high profits to be gained from the plunder and exploitation of the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Soviet social-imperialism for its part, has changed its tune as a result of the new advances in the Arab people's struggles. Where it once denounced the Palestinian liberation struggle as "irresponsible adventurous riots", now it calls for satisfaction of the Palestinian people's "right to their national home." But this is the same Soviet social-imperialism which strongly but covertly supports Zionism by sending thousands of Jewish emigrants to Israel to act as laborers and cannon-fodder for Zionism. It is the same Soviet social-imperialism which last October rammed the cease-fire through the U.N. liquidating the victorious advance of the Arab people's struggle in the October War. This is the same Soviet social-imperialism which sold 50 million tons of oil to U.S. imperialism during the Arab oil embargo. It claims to be a "friend of the Arab people" but is merely trying to take advantage of U.S. imperialism's difficult position at present to improve its own position in competition with the U.S. imperialists for hegemony over the area.
The new diplomatic victories of the Palestinian people show that the people of the world are becoming more united in their struggle against the two imperialist superpowers and their lackeys. The Palestinian people have shown that the revolutionary people can, by relying on their own efforts, mobilizing the masses and never giving up, grow from being weak to becoming stronger and stronger and advance toward victory. On Dec. 5, in Tripoli, Libya, Yassar Arafat declared: "We shall escalate military struggle against the enemy because there is no alternative left for us to recover our national rights but through the gun muzzle." The American people should support the Palestinian people's struggle against the common enemies of the world's people, U.S. imperialism, Soviet social-imperialism and their lackeys.
VICTORY TO THE NATIONAL LIBERATION STRUGGLE OF THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE!
[Photo: A young Palestinian guerrilla]
[Photo: Yassar Arafat, Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, addresses the United Nations General Assembly debate on Palestine November 13, 1974.]
Since last April, a large-scale fascist mass movement has been organized by the monopoly capitalists in Boston to violently attack the democratic rights of the Black people and other oppressed nationalities. This movement has focused on mobilizing white people including white workers to attack the right of Blacks to attend integrated public schools. The movement has arisen under the transparent guise of opposition to busing, the form which school integration presently takes in the big cities. Especially since the Boston busing program began in September, violent lynch-mob attacks have been organized against Black students attending formerly all-white schools and Black passers-by have been seized and beaten. Whites organized by the fascists have boycotted the integrated schools. Police called in to protect the Blacks have either stood idly by or attacked the Blacks. While the anti-busing movement has adopted anti-government rhetoric (against "dictatorship", and "forced busing", etc.) to hide its fascist nature and gain the support of white workers, it has had the open blessings of the biggest monopoly capitalists in the U.S., speaking through their chief political representative, Gerald Ford (following in the footsteps of Richard Nixon before him). The anti-busing movement has gained the open or covert support or the acquiescence of nearly the entire bourgeoisie, including the liberal bourgeoisie which generally has taken a stand of "neutrality" towards the Black people's democratic rights or has cravenly failed in practice to defend its much-advertised ideals of "freedom" and "civil rights". The leaders of the anti-busing movement have even declared their aim to pass a Constitutional Amendment abolishing the limited school integration the Black people wrenched out of the hands of the bourgeoisie in the 1960's. Thus anti-busing is part of a fascist offensive by the monopoly capitalists aimed at stripping the Black people of all their meager existing democratic rights and driving them back into semi-slavery. This attempt by the bourgeoisie to re-enslave the Black people and split the working class by turning some white workers into servants of the bourgeoisie and hangmen of the Blacks is part of the monopoly capitalists' drive to develop fascism in the U.S. It is a matter of grave concern for the entire working class.
A struggle has developed against the fascists in Boston. The Black students have dared to defend themselves against the racist attacks and attend the integrated schools. Blacks have defended themselves against the police and civilian attacks. Several demonstrations of Black people along with white supporters have been held to denounce the fascist attacks and defend the democratic rights of the Afro-American people. Trade unions have passed resolutions in support on integration. On Saturday, Dec. 14, thousands of people will demonstrate in Boston to defend the Black people's democratic rights. Only resolute struggle against the monopoly capitalists' fascist anti-busing movement and for democratic rights will be able to defend the right of the Black people and other oppressed and racially-discriminated-against nationalities to attend integrated public schools.
THE ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE SITUATION IN BOSTON
The working class of Boston has a long history of fighting for the emancipation of the Black people. In 1841, 70,000 Irishmen headed by the Irish patriot Daniel O'Connell addressed an appeal to the Irish workers in America, calling upon them to take part in the struggle against slavery. It said: "Irishmen and Irishwomen, treat the colored people as your equals, as brethren. By all your memories of Ireland, continue to love Liberty -- hate Slavery -- Cling by the Abolitionists -- and in America you will do honor to the name of Ireland." At a meeting at Faneuil Hall in Boston, Wendell Phillips, the Abolitionist leader, read the appeal to a crowd of several thousand Irish workers, who enthusiastically applauded every paragraph and shouted answers to his questions: "Will you ever return to his master the slave who once sets foot on the soil of Massachusetts? (No! No! No !) Will you ever raise to office or power the man who will not pledge his effort against slavery ? (No! No! No!)" And despite the attempts of the copperhead agents of the slave owners to turn the workers against the anti-slavery struggle, the Irish and other white northern workers contributed their quota of blood to the good cause.
Such are the revolutionary traditions of the Irish and other white workers of Boston. But on the very spot where such deeds were done, one hundred years later the monopoly capitalists, acting through their instruments the Boston School Committee, the Boston City Council and other organizations, had segregated the Boston schools. And when this segregation was threatened they mobilized a fascist movement among the white people to suppress the Blacks, appealing to the descendents of the Irish workers of 1841 and other white workers to side with the capitalists, oppose the interests of the working class, and attack the Black people.
In 1965, under the mass pressure of the Civil Rights Movement, the Massachusetts state legislature passed the Racial Imbalance Act, making school segregation based on housing patterns ("de facto" segregation) illegal. Although the Act had a strong racist side (a school was only considered "imbalanced" if it contained too few whites), the fascist agents of monopoly capital in Boston, headed by Louise Day Hicks, a real estate capitalist and chairwoman of the Boston School Committee, actively began to organize a fascist movement against it. In that year they opposed Operation Exodus, an attempt by the Black people of Roxbury to organize their own busing program, which involved 1500 or so students at its peak. For the next nine years the Boston School Committee worked feverishly to increase the segregation of the schools and block the implementation of the 1965 law. In this, they met the opposition of certain sections of the bourgeoisie which wanted to give concessions to the Blacks only in order to ease the pressure of the Afro-American movement, which became especially strong with the great Black Rebellions in 1965-1968. The Massachusetts Board of Education and the Massachusetts state courts made half-hearted attempts to force the BSC to give up its segregationist practices; federal agencies withheld close to twenty million dollars, and in 1973 and '74 two federal judges connected with the Departments of Health, Education and Welfare and Housing and Urban Development found the BSC guilty of "de jure" segregation (deliberate segregation, not based on housing patterns) --but to no avail. However, by April 1974, the B.S.C.'s evasions had run their course and they had failed to overturn the Racial Imbalance Act as unconstitutional. The state Supreme Court was forced to order what is known as the "state plan" to go into effect in September. (The "state plan' had been drawn up in April 1973, after many years of refusal by the B.S.C., and after vacillation on the part of the Massachusetts Board of Education and Boston Mayor White had failed to force them to do so.) It was the state Supreme Court's order in April 1974 to implement the "state plan" which was seized upon by Hicks, Kerrigan and other B.S.C. and City Council members to escalate their anti-busing movement.
Through a network of neighborhood Home and School Associations organized to oppose school integration, on April 3d the fascist politicians mobilized a demonstration of 20,000 people to call for the repeal of the 1965 Racial Imbalance Act. To compel attendance, the B.S.C. sent letters home via students announcing the event and requiring the parents' signatures! White students were excused from school to attend. (At the demonstration the Boston motorcycle police flew the colors of their racist neighborhood associations from their handlebars.) In May the anti-busing movement organized a non-binding referendum asking whether or not children should be assigned to schools on the basis of race (that is, whether or not integration should take place, since children already were assigned on this basis). Although only 12 per cent of the eligible voters voted on this sham referendum ("rejecting" integration by 15 to 1) it paved the way for amendments of the state Racial Imbalance Act. In 1973 the state legislature had voted to repeal the Act and the liberal bourgeois Republican, Governor Sargeant, wanted to repeal it, too, but was forced to veto the repeal after a federal judge advised him that it would be ruled unconstitutional. In July, 1974, Sargeant pushed amendments to the Act through the legislature making integration no longer mandatory (essentially repealing the law against de facto segregation) and offering instead a bribe for school districts which would integrate, on the basis of so much money for so many Black students, etc.
On June 21, 1974, after deliberating since 1972, Federal District Court Judge Arthur Garrity issued an opinion on an NAACP suit against the Boston School Committee, Mayor White and the Mass. Board of Education for violations of the 13th and 14th amendments of the Constitution. Garrity found that the Boston school system was not a system of "neighborhood schools", as the fascists claim, nor a de facto-segregated system, but a de jure-segregated, dual-school system essentially no different from the segregated schools which existed so long in the South. The B.S.C., Mayor White and the Mass. Board of Education were found guilty of deliberately segregating students of different nationalities. De jure segregation totally contradicts the 1954 Supreme Court school integration decision and all federal court rulings since and Garrity could not avoid ruling against it.
Garrity rejected the B.S.C. 's defense (argued by James St. Clair, Nixon's Watergate lawyer) that it had simply upheld the "neighborhood school" system and innocently found themselves with segregated schools. Garrity 's opinion outlined six major aspects of de jure segregation in the Boston schools.
1. Facilities, Utilization and New Schools -- white schools were over-crowded while Black schools were under-used. For example, white South Boston High was 676 students over-enrolled, yet it still accepted white transfer students from all over the city, taking in white students leaving integrated schools. Elsewhere, in a 98 per cent white neighborhood, the B.S.C. opened up a school composed of 93 per cent Blacks and other oppressed nationalities, claiming that the reason was "to keep friendships intact." On the question of busing itself, the B.S.C. favored busing to maintain segregation in the city, pushing for years for a plan to bus 8,000 Black students to the suburbs without any busing in the city.
2. Districting and re-districting -- in Boston, only the elementary school students attended schools on the basis of districts, the middle(junior high) schools were partially districted and the high schools were not districted at all. Districting and re-districting were carried on by the B.S.C. to maximize segregation and many children walked past schools to a more distant segregated schools. Integrated housing districts had segregated schools next to them. In 1966 there were 49 "unbalanced" schools; with B.S.C.'s redistricting, by 1969 there were 62 such schools.
3. Feeder patterns -- half of Boston's 18 high schools were "fed" from middle schools all over the city. Students went to middle schools according to where they went to elementary schools and then were assigned to high schools according to where they went to middle school, irrespective of neighborhood or district. This meant that the B.S.C. channeled students freely, assigned them arbitrarily to segregated schools. At the same time, most Black students were put on a system of entering high school after the 8th grade while most white students entered after the 9th grade. Together, these two aspects served to create a segregated, dual school system.
4. Open enrollment -- paraded as a device for integration, this was actually a device for segregation, since it could be used to transfer white students out of schools containing Blacks and since it placed the burden of integrating segregated schools onto the individual Black students. B.S.C. claimed that this method of segregation was "the American way" and fought hard against the "dictatorial" policy of controlled transfer which Boston was forced to adopt in 1971. Even with controlled transfer, B.S.C. continued to send white students from integrated, under-used schools to over-crowded, all-white schools in South and East Boston, citing such racist arguments as "for the student's safety" as justification.
5. Teachers -- in Boston, Black teachers taught in all-Black schools irrespective of where they lived. 81 of Boston's 201 schools never had a Black teacher and 35 more have had only one since 1967. Out of 4,243 permanent teachers, only 231 or 5.4 per cent were Black. Out of more than 500 administrative positions, Blacks held only 18 (33-36 per cent of Boston's students are Black while Blacks constitute 16-20 per cent of the population. 30,000 mostly-white students attend parochial or other private schools).
6. Exam schools -- three exam schools existed, whose students were almost entirely white and traveled from all parts of the city to attend. Boston Technical, then 85 per cent white, was situated in the middle of the Black Roxbury community.
In addition to the above points, Garrity's opinion pointed out that de jure segregation existed to such a degree that 10 per cent of all elementary students, 50 per cent of all middle school students and 85 per cent of all high school students already rode the city buses and subways to go to school. Thus busing is not the issue for the fascists; racism and white chauvinism against the Black people is.
Garrity ordered the implementation of the "state plan" in September and demanded that a further plan be submitted by B.S.C. by December 16. He declared that all the Boston schools would be integrated by 1974. The plan Garrity ordered implemented is a limited democratic concession by the bourgeoisie.
On the question of districting, the state plan ordered elementary school districts to be changed to conform more with geographical boundaries and to increase integration. The number of students in "imbalanced" schools is supposed to be reduced from 20,000 to 7,000 and the number of "imbalanced" schools from 48 to 21. However, the plan does not affect elementary school students in South Boston, East Boston, Charleston, Hyde Park, West Roxbury and other white neighborhoods and leaves their children in segregated schools. The plan also leaves the controlled transfer policy in the hands of the B.S.C., supposedly to deal with further desegregation and over-crowding but still a potent weapon for segregation.
The middle schools have been redistricted and the grade structure throughout the system has been converted to an identical structure for all nationalities. The combination of these policies supposedly reduces the number of middle school students in segregated schools from 4,520 to 1,100, but large white communities are left untouched with the provision that the B.S.C. in charge of controlled transfer of Black students to those districts instead of thoroughly consolidating the school system.
As for the high schools, the state plan districts the high schools (except for the trade and exam schools), reducing travel distance, over-crowding and under-enrollment and desegregating many schools. Three one-sex schools (which were mostly black) are now co-educational. However, the plan leaves the segregated white neighborhoods of East Boston, Charlestown and the North End untouched (which are the very neighborhoods that need integration) and does not deal with the exam and trade school system. The plan singles out South Boston, so that Hicks and the fascists would be able to concentrate their efforts there where they had their strongest base.
The plan and order do not provide for the training and hiring of the 1,400 or so national minority teachers required to make for a proportional teaching staff. The schools are 32% Black and 7% other minorities yet of the 4,243 permanent teachers, 231 or 5.4% were Black. Nor does the plan call for teaching special programs on Black history, etc., or full language programs in Spanish, French, etc., for minority students. (Garrity has since taken some steps in this direction.) The plan leaves the Boston School Committee intact and in power, failing to replace it with a larger body with proportional representation of the national minorities. (A referendum was held on this question on Nov. 5; despite the tense situation and the B.S.C.'s well-organized political machine, the vote against the B.S.C. was strong -- 46,656 to 76,769.) The plan also leaves the white schools intact in Brookline, a suburb geographically surrounded by Boston.
Thus the integration plan in effect in Boston is a democratic concession by the bourgeoisie to the people. It carries out some integration, placing working-class youth of different nationalities in the same schools with each other, where in close contact they can learn to unite against the capitalist authorities. But it is very limited, neither thoroughly integrating the Boston schools nor safeguarding the rights of the oppressed national minorities within the integrated schools. And in fact, it creates maximum conditions for the fascist movement to develop in South Boston against it. This is how the liberal bourgeoisie works with the fascists to sabotage the democratic concessions it gives.
Immediately upon Garrity's order the B.S.C. raised a great hue and cry against the plan. They stepped up their fascist campaign -- mobilizing organizations dedicated solely to opposing integration of the schools -- such as R.O.A.R. (Restore Our Alienated Rights), Mass. Citizens against Forced Busing, etc. In addition, such organizations as the Boston Police Patrolmen's Association have played a role. Almost a year ago the patrolmen's association threatened to refuse to defend Black children if the busing plan were implemented. Also prominent in the fascist alliance is the American Party, a New England version of Wallaceite fascism, which made anti-busing its main plank in the last election. Certain sections of the Catholic Church have played a big role. Finally there are the openly fascist lynchers -- the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazi Party, who are encouraged to provide the fascist alliance with the worst possible venomous propaganda against the Black people and who eagerly organize the lynch-mob attacks. The leading force in this fascist alliance has long been the Boston School Committee which, over the past 15 years, has organized the fascist anti-busing movement in Boston and been its main spokesmen. Due to the corrupt nature of Boston politics, all five of the B.S.C. members are from South Boston, heart of the anti-busing movement. All of these organizations support the reactionary proposed Constitutional amendment.
The basic ideology of the anti-busing movement in Boston is racism and white chauvinism -- a venomous hatred of Blacks as a race and a nationality and advocacy of the supremacy of the white majority. At the same there is a large dose of American national chauvinism (parading the flag and boasting of "American democracy") and also anti-communism (denouncing busing as "socialist" "dictatorship" by the government). This fascist ideology is thinly disguised by anti-government rhetoric about "freedom of choice" and opposition to government "dictatorship" and "forced busing". The white chauvinism and racism are usually expressed under the cover of fear for the white children's "safety" in "crime-infested Roxbury". For example, on September 16, Hicks and other fascist leaders issued a "clarification" of their positions on busing, claiming that the reason South Boston residents were stoning Black students coming into South Boston was that they feared for their children's "safety" in "crime-infested Roxbury", where 100 unconvicted Black murderers of whites supposedly run loose (later proven a Hitler-style big lie). Thus the fascists "feared" to let the Black children in because it was "too dangerous" for the white children to go out. A pretty piece of reactionary logic! At the same time, the most vicious slanders and slurs of the Black people are spread openly among the masses -- resembling nothing more closely in viciousness than the propaganda spread by Hitler's Nazi movement about the Jews -- advocating shipping the Black people "back to Africa", talking of their "raping white women", etc., etc. It is clear that the fascists are not opposed to some "criminals" in Roxbury or elsewhere but consider the Black people themselves to be criminals wherever they go. Otherwise, the white parents would simply join with the Black parents and try to solve the problems of crime, while their children attended integrated schools.
The fascists and racists also give the argument that they are not supporters of segregation but only want "quality education" and call for "money for quality education not buses". This view is most widely expressed by the South Boston Information Center. Black people suffered for nearly 100 years from the kind of "quality education", that results from segregated schools and found that separate schools can never be made to be equal since they are separated for the sole purpose of enforcing inequality of nationalities. It was against the practice of "separate but equal" that the entire Civil Rights Movement of the 1950's and 60's arose.
Most hypocritical of all are the claims of the anti-busing fascists to be champions of "democracy", "freedom of choice" and "constitutional rights" against the "dictatorial" and "socialist" intervention of the government to impose "forced busing" on the poor little "neighborhood schools". The fascists speak of the "inconvenience" of busing when more children were traveling greater distances to school to enforce segregation before the plan than travel to be integrated now. They speak of "wrenching" the little babes out of their mother's arms when the plan does not even bus elementary school children and when just such "wrenching" is needed to bring up self-reliant children. Their talk of "freedom" means nothing more than the freedom of whites as the oppressor nationality to trample on the Blacks and other oppressed national minorities, deny them entrance to the common public schools and violently suppress them -- and be protected by the law. The "democracy" they talk of is the right to spread their chauvinist lies in order to mislead the white working-class youth and turn them against their Black brothers and sisters. The "freedom" and "democracy" demanded by the anti-busing movement is the freedom to stand on the side of the exploiters and oppressors of the Black people --the monopoly capitalist class which also exploits and oppresses the white workers -- and act as its obedient tool in suppressing the Black people. It is the same "freedom" and "democracy" demanded by the slave owners and lynch-mobs of the past.
The true nature of the "freedom" and "democracy" fought for by the anti-busing movement became clear in practice on the first days of school in September. On the first day of school and continuously thereafter, the bus loads of Black youth who came to South Boston High School were met with stones and racist insults from white mobs organized by the fascists. Supposedly to "protect" the Black students, Mayor White ordered a police escort for the buses and Judge Garrity ordered the arrest of all those interfering with the opening of school. Despite these orders the police only arrested a handful of hoodlum's for show and encouraged the racist attacks. Soon attacks on the Black students also took place at Hyde Park High School and the bourgeois news media did its best to promote an atmosphere of racial warfare. The National Director of the KKK came to Boston and held a public rally. Shortly after, Klan terrorists fired shots into the Black Columbia Point Housing Project. The Columbia Point residents, together with white and Puerto Rican friends, immediately organized self-defense to oppose the attacks. The police promptly showed their true nature as the military arm of the monopoly capitalist state machine. Previously they had allowed the KKK to hold rallies, have motorcades in South Boston and provoke Black people; they had allowed the nazis to roam the streets of the working-class communities in search of support and had only escorted some to the Rhode Island state line once when they became too embarrassing. But when the Black people armed themselves in self-defense against the KKK, the bourgeoisie sent 300 riot police armed with automatic weapons to occupy the housing project. Thus the fascist activities of the KKK and the nazis receive the full support of the bourgeois state machine, but when the Black people arm themselves in self-defense the bourgeois state savagely suppresses them. This illustrates the nature of the state under capitalism -- an instrument in the hands of the capitalist ruling class for the oppression of the exploited classes, the working class and oppressed masses, including the Black people.
This was further demonstrated in the events that followed. Early in October, the Black youth in Roxbury rose up against the fascists, turning out on the streets and attacking the police. On October 7 a white lynch-mob attacked a Haitian worker, who happened to be driving through the edge of South Boston, and severely beat him (he was rescued by other whites). On October 8 because of the threat of a Black rebellion, Mayor White called for federal marshals. Garrity turned down his request. Governor Sargeant later readied 450 National Guardsmen but they were never used. Meanwhile, the police ran roughshod over the Black people in many areas, arresting and beating many. They also wildly attacked ordinary white working people, while never justly and firmly defending the Black people from fascist attacks. Thus, while it is just that the Black people should demand that the government should protect their right to attend integrated schools and other democratic rights, experience shows that only the organization of the masses can be relied on to defend the Black people from lynch-mob and police attacks.
The fascist movement held repeated rallies throughout the fall in various white communities and downtown. On October 4, 8,000 rallied on "national boycott day". Then, on October 10, President Ford broadcast the monopoly capitalists' public go-ahead sign for the fascist movement, saying: "The court decision in that case, in my judgment was not the best solution to quality education in Boston. I have consistently opposed forced busing to achieve racial balance as a solution to quality education. And therefore, I respectfully disagree with the judge's order."
Meanwhile the fascists led a school boycott, much publicized by the national news media as a so-called expression of white opposition to busing. Only in South Boston-Roxbury among high school students, did the boycott have any strength. There, on October 14, South Boston High had 50 per cent Black attendance (400 Black students) and 28 per cent white attendance (307 white students), the other Blacks staying away because of the racist attacks. In no other part of the city did the boycott have much significance, city-wide absenteeism by November only reaching a little more than double what it was the year previously. On November 7, giving encouragement to the boycott, Garrity ordered that tutoring be provided for all boycotting students whenever they decide to come back to school.
Throughout this period, organized support for integration came mainly from the bourgeois elements in the Black community: the NAACP, Freedom House and the Mass. Congressional Black Caucus, which is prominent among the sponsors of the December 14 demonstration. On October 13, these forces organized a demonstration of 600-1000 to support busing, and on November 30, joined by Mrs. Coretta King (wife of Martin Luther King), they held a demonstration of about 2000. They rely on the capitalists and their state machine to defend the democratic rights of the Black people and oppose the organization of the masses in self-defense. They also regard the white workers as inherently racist and chauvinist and make no effort to appeal to them to overcome the demagogy of the fascists and unite to support the Black people's democratic rights. In addition, several industrial unions in Boston including the United Steel Workers, International United Electrical Workers, the United Electrical Workers, the United Auto Workers and other unions such as Local 1199 of the Drug and Hospital Workers, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees expressed support for the integration of the schools. The AFL-CIO Building Trades Council, however, came out in opposition to integration as did Teamsters Local 25.
The state and local liberal bourgeois politicians have covertly supported the anti-busing movement and opposed the democratic rights of the Black people, hiding their opposition under many guises and professing to support "freedom" and "civil rights". For several years Mayor White and Governor Sargeant have proposed programs such as Metco (busing Black students only to the white suburbs), a plan also endorsed by Rep. Drinan, well-known liberal, and Michael Dukakis, recently elected Democratic Governor. White and Sargeant also pushed building more ghetto schools, etc., etc., and anything else in order to avoid carrying out the democratic task of integrating the schools. They describe the busing program as imposed from above by the federal government and say the federal government must enforce it. They treat the question as one of "quality education" and not integration, thus giving direct aid to the segregationists and fascists. It was Sargeant who pushed through the legislation in the state legislature to castrate the democratic aspects of the Racial Imbalance Act. As for White, he is a co-defendant in Garrity's decision, cited for continually approving the Boston School Committee's segregationist practices by approving their budget year after year. Both White and Sargeant refused to organize proper protection for the Black school children and have openly collaborated with and expressed sympathy for the anti-busing movement. Dukakis, the recently elected Democratic Governor, advocates segregation under the signboard of "community control", which would sanction the creation of actual de facto-segregated neighborhood white schools in South Boston and elsewhere while claiming to support the "right " of the Black people to remain in the ghettos and administer a few of the inferior school programs that would be offered to them.
As for Garrity himself, forced to hand down such an opinion, he has done a lot to weaken its effects. Limiting the busing essentially to only one of the places where it is really needed, he gave the fascist movement a perfect target and chance to organize, allowing them to concentrate their forces where they were best organized -- in South Boston. He limited the busing almost entirely to high school students, who are easier for the fascists to mobilize, since the whites have already been subjected to years of segregation and indoctrination to feel "different" from and hatred for, Black students. Further, his order that tutoring be given to the boycotting students directly encouraged the fascist movement.
As for other liberal bourgeois figures in the area who "support" busing, when it came time to defend the democratic rights they were so vociferous in proclaiming, they were nowhere to be found. Kennedy, a big "champion" of civil rights, made hardly a peep to defend the Black children's right to attend the integrated schools. This is no accident, as it was not long ago that he embraced the arch-segregationist and fascist George Wallace in Alabama, openly revealing the kinship between the liberal bourgeoisie and the fascists.
Thus the claim of the liberal bourgeoisie to support integration and civil rights for the Black people is political deception.
Such is the origin and development of the present situation in Boston, where a fascist mass movement, mobilized by the agents of monopoly capitalist class among the people, has made violent attacks on the Black people's democratic rights, focusing on opposing their right to attend integrated public schools. It uses the guise of anti-busing and spouts anti-government rhetoric while in fact standing for the most bestial racism and white chauvinism. It has the open blessings of the monopoly capitalist class, including the liberal bourgeoisie. The Black people and their friends have risen up on several occasions in unorganized self-defense and there are the beginnings of a movement to defend their rights on an organized basis. The workers of other nationalities have as yet not come to the defense of the Black people in any numbers and a certain section of white workers have allowed themselves to be turned against their class interests and into hangmen for the bourgeoisie, to attack the Black people.
Such a situation must change, and it will change provided the progressive people in Boston organize themselves and the revolutionaries go among the workers of all nationalities and explain to them the importance of defending the democratic rights of their most oppressed brothers and sisters.
THE STRUGGLE OVER BUSING IS A NATIONAL STRUGGLE TO DEFEND THE DEMOCRATIC RIGHTS OF THE BLACK PEOPLE AGAINST GROWING FASCISM
Busing, a form of school integration, is a concession by the bourgeoisie to the struggle of the Afro-American people. During the 1950's and 60's the struggle of the Black people raged for freedom and equal rights and against racial discrimination and violent repression. In the course of this struggle the capitalists were forced to make certain concessions under the pressure of the masses. Even when these were made in words, however, it was not until the masses of the Black people arose in their millions that any of the promises of the bourgeoisie were carried out.
School integration itself was not given by the capitalists through any sort of "benevolence" but the limited degree to which it has been achieved in the South (and integration, like any democratic right, is only achievable under capitalism in the most limited and mutilated form) has only been because of the pressure of the masses.
The Black slaves, white workers and farmers were the main force in the Civil War against Slavery. Yet despite that earth-shaking conflict, the slave owners made every attempt to make a come-back once defeated. Under the domination of the northern bourgeoisie the former slave-owners reversed the revolutionary bourgeois-democratic struggle of the Reconstruction period, denied the Black people land and democratic rights and drove them back into semi-slavery, bound to the semi-feudal plantations under the sharecropper system. This reaction backed by the northern capitalists resulted in forging the Black people into an oppressed nation in the Black Belt area of the South. The reactionary political and social policies of the bourgeoisie were recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Plessy vs. Ferguson decision in 1896 which declared that the Black people would be "separate but equal". Thus the entire segregationist system including schools, was built up on the plantation basis and Black people were deprived of nearly all the rights they had won in the Civil War.
Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, Blacks migrated from the plantation South to become industrial workers in the modem industry of the North and West. There they entered by the millions into the struggles of the workers to organize themselves into industrial unions and the advanced Black workers came forward to join the Communist Party while it was still a revolutionary party. Blacks participated by the millions in World War II against fascism. All through this period, often under communist leadership, the Afro-American people waged militant struggles against racial discrimination while the Black workers participated vigorously in the struggles of the workers against the capitalist class. Struggles were waged against lynching, against the sharecropper system and against the Jim Crow segregation that permeated the life of the Black people, especially in the South. But the Jim Crow system in schools and all aspects of Black people's life was still intact at the end of the 1940's.
After World War II capitalist industry and mechanization of agriculture began to develop rapidly in the Black Belt South. Still more Afro-Americans migrated to the northern and western cities. Internationally, the tremendous upsurge of the national liberation movement in Asia, Latin America, and particularly in Africa, where many countries shook off the chains of colonialism and achieved national independence, aroused great enthusiasm among the Black people. The American bourgeoisie came under the fire of more and more criticism internationally for its racial discrimination against the Black people. At the same time; the socialist camp came into existence with the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, and one-third of the world's people stood outside the capitalist system. Tremendous numbers of Black people were workers by the middle 1950's; the isolation caused by the plantation system in the South was breaking down; and the Black people became more and more aroused to demand an end to racial discrimination and violent repression while the possibility of organizing a large-scale mass movement grew.
In 1950, mass struggles broke out in several southern counties -- Clarendon County, South Carolina, and Prince Edwards County, Virginia, -- demanding integration of the schools as the only means by which to improve the miserable educational conditions forced on the Black people under the segregated system. The NAACP brought suits in the Supreme Court demanding school integration. Under the pressure of a large-scale campaign among the Black people, the Supreme Court passed the Brown vs. Bd. of Education decision, declaring that "separate but equal" was inherently unequal and calling for school integration in the South. True to the anti-democratic nature of the imperialist bourgeoisie, the Supreme Court the next year provided a loophole to its "democratic" order, declaring that it could be implemented "with all deliberate speed". In the following years, virtually no integration took place as President Eisenhower would not act on the question, and as the Southern bourgeoisie drew up its racist Southern Manifesto vowing to resist integration. In fact, it wasn't until after the massive south-wide Civil Rights Movement took place in 1961-4 that the bourgeoisie passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act containing the threat of a cut in federal funds for school districts that did not integrate their schools. To prevent the desegregation of schools the southern authorities pushed through numerous "freedom of choice" plans. By February 1967 the federal government had cut off funds to only 39 out of the thousands of segregated school districts in the South. Then, between 1965 and 1968, the great Black rebellions took place in the northern cities, such a revolutionary upsurge as had never been seen before in the United States. Thrown into a panic, the bourgeoisie hastily pulled together the Kerner Commission and issued a study expressing their fear of the revolutionary potential of the Black youth in the northern cities. In particular, they complained that without an equal education and therefore without hope of getting jobs equal to the white workers, the Black youths would persist in disrupting the entire functioning of the capitalist society.
Only then did any of the bourgeoisie act. Initial integration was forced through against all racist resistance in the South. In 1968, '69 and '71 the U.S. Supreme Court passed decisions striking down the "freedom of choice" plans, striking down the "with all deliberate speed" loophole and, in the most significant decision, in Swann vs. Charlotte-Mecklenburg, ordered busing across city lines to achieve school integration. In the course of these cases, the bourgeoisie admitted that the de jure -- de facto distinction is meaningless, since in all the big cities the schools are segregated both according to housing patterns and deliberately by the school authorities.
Busing programs were put into effect in many cities, including Charlotte, N.C., Little Rock, Tampa, Memphis, Berkeley, Denver, Philadelphia, Jacksonville and others, without especial difficulty. Immediately the monopoly capitalists struck back at this concession through Richard Nixon, who as President worked to mobilize a segregationist movement in the form of anti-busing.
He stacked the Supreme Court to prevent any further democratic decisions, sought and carried out every kind of delay and encouraged the movement to get a Constitutional amendment to ban busing. In 1972 he sent a bill to Congress to stop busing, which was followed by a flood of anti-busing bills and amendments. Supreme Court Justice Burger, a Nixon appointee, said that the Swann case should not be interpreted as approving fixing racial quotas in school districts. Finally, in 1974, the Nixon Supreme Court passed its main blow against school integration, declaring that the proposal to integrate the Detroit schools by busing across the city lines (Metro busing) was unconstitutional.
Thus the big bourgeoisie continued to opposed the integration of schools, only granting a few concessions under the pressure of the peak of the Afro-American struggle. Today, a certain amount of school integration has taken place in the South. But when it came to the question of extending integration to the northern cities, the monopoly capitalists, led by Nixon, went to great lengths to oppose it. Today the monopoly capitalists are on the offensive against school integration, just as they are attacking the democratic rights of the Black people and other oppressed nationalities all along the line.
The denial of Metro busing in the Detroit case means that school integration may not take place in any significant measure in the dozen or so major cities where the Black population is 50 per cent or more, where simply shifting the smaller white population around within the city would have little significance. More and more openly the bourgeoisie are shedding whatever masks they had put on in the '60's as "friends of the Black people" and "civil rights advocates" and openly declaring their plans to drive the Black people back into semi-slavery. The anti-busing Constitutional amendment has passed in 18 states. 90 per cent of the country's mayors have declared that they are "neutral" on busing. President Ford is following in Nixon's footsteps in opposing busing. Sen. Kennedy is making agreements with George Wallace. Senator Sam Ervin, much promoted as a "Constitutional expert" during the Watergate investigations, has declared that busing is "unconstitutional". Finally, the House of Representatives voted recently to prevent the federal government from collecting statistics on the race or sex in education. If passed by the Senate, this bill would effectively prevent the enforcement of any of the civil rights legislation or Court decisions. Thus the monopoly capitalists as a whole are opposing the extension of school integration to the north and in fact are calling for and preparing to carry out its roll-back in the South as well.
Such policies in the educational sphere are part and parcel of the increasing drive for fascism being developed by the monopoly capitalists. Staggering under the economic crisis, the big bourgeoisie is looking for a way out by shifting the burden of the crisis onto the working masses. This means suppressing the working class and in particular the people of the oppressed nationalities in order to carry out increased exploitation. School integration would promote a united struggle by the working class against the capitalists. But to mobilize white working people into a fascist mass movement of attack on the Black people would assist the monopoly capitalists in suppressing the Black people and also in splitting and suppressing the struggles of the entire working class, especially as the deepening crisis is leading to an upsurge in the workers' movement. In 1970, when the U.S. imperialists were hard hit by the struggles of the Indo-Chinese people abroad and by the movement against the imperialist war at home, they attempted to start a fascist mass movement called the "hard-hat" movement, in order to mobilize construction and other workers to attack the progressive people. This attempt failed because it met with militant resistance from the revolutionary people. In 1972, the bourgeoisie sought to develop a fascist mass movement on the question of busing in Pontiac, Michigan, and to spread it to the rest of the country. This also failed. Now the bourgeoisie is trying again, this time with a certain amount of success. This time, too, they must be opposed.
The capitalists' attempt to build a fascist mass movement on the question of busing is a harbinger of their plans for the fascization of U.S. society. The anti-busing movement is not simply a racist and chauvinist movement against the Black people, but it is an attempt to speed-up the process of fascization in the U.S. by developing a fascist movement complete with anti-government rhetoric, flag-waving American national chauvinism, anti-communism, and especially racism and white chauvinism against the Black people. The presence and open and full participation of the Klan and the nazis shows the nature of the movement. Even the fights which have taken place between the anti-busing forces and the police have been immediately followed by attacks on Blacks. Fascism does not come to America bearing swastikas, but instead it comes draped in the American flag, portraying itself as the defender of the Constitution and shouting loud and long about "American democracy". This democracy is only democracy for the capitalist exploiters and their fascist agents; where there is democracy for the bourgeoisie and fascists there can be no democracy for the working class and the Black people. Such is the fascist nature of the anti-busing movement.
THE STAND OF THE MARXIST-LENINISTS AND WORKING CLASS
The anti-busing movement is a fascist movement of attack on the democratic rights of the Black people and other oppressed nationalities by the monopoly capitalist class. It attempts to split the working class by mobilizing some white workers to blindly go against their true class interests, become the hangmen and lynch-mobs of the bourgeoisie and go on a campaign of pogroms against the Black people. In this way the monopoly capitalists hope to consolidate their rule and wipe out opposition among from the national minorities and workers in the heat of the crisis. At the same time that the big bourgeoisie generally openly supports the anti-busing movement, various liberal bourgeois spokesmen claim to support integration. But in fact, this is only political deception. The recent history of the struggle of the Afro-American people shows that the capitalists only claim to be for democratic rights. They act only when a concession is wrenched out of them by the masses. Then they sabotage, limit and mutilate the democratic concession until it becomes nearly meaningless, unless it is enforced by the masses through continued struggle. Finally, the liberal bourgeoisie sends its agents into the democratic mass movement to teach it to rely on the capitalist government, practice non-violence and in other ways to make it defenseless before the fascist onslaught of monopoly capital.
The working class supports school integration because it is a matter of winning what limited democratic rights are possible for the Black people and the workers as a whole under the dictatorship of the monopoly capitalist class. It provides a wider field for the class struggle of the entire working class (for example, school integration opens up contact among the working-class youth of different nationalities and prepares them to unite when they enter the factories). Thus, school integration and other democratic rights of the Black people also serve the interest of the entire working class, since they assist them to unite against their common enemy, the capitalist class, in order to wage revolutionary struggle. But monopoly capitalism will concede only the most limited democratic rights, as the history of the Black people proves. The working class and oppressed masses can only achieve real democracy by overthrowing the dictatorship of the handful of capitalists and replacing it with the dictatorship of the proletariat, of the vast majority.
In addition to integration as a democratic right, the working class should demand full rights for all nationalities in the integrated schools. That is, that the Black and other national minority students should have the right to be taught the history of their people and their culture and language (as in the case of Spanish, etc.), and to have teachers of their nationality hired proportionally to teach them.
In order to oppose the developing fascization of U.S. society, the workers of all nationalities, together with all revolutionary people, should unite and oppose the fascist anti-busing movement in Boston and wherever it appears and defend the democratic rights of the Black people and other oppressed national minorities. White workers, especially, to whom the bourgeoisie is looking to supply the cannon-fodder for the fascist mass movement, should come forward and strike the shackles from the necks of the Black people and thereby unite the entire working class against the capitalist class.
In 1933, the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, organized by the Communist Party, called upon the Black and white workers to unite to defend the democratic rights of the Black people and jointly overthrow the rule of capital. They appealed to the workers:
"Today a new class has arisen to assume command of the march of history. That class is the working class. In its hand lies the fate of the future; it alone possesses the ability to so transform the present foundations of society as to wipe out once and for all the oppression of the vast majority of the people by a small group of exploiters, to eradicate for all time the causes of the present plight of the Negro people. Just as the fate of the Negro people is inextricably bound to that of the working class, the white workers cannot strike the fetters of wage slavery from their neck unless they strike the shackles from the Negro people.... Unless white labor wishes to be dragged down to the oppressed and degraded position of the Negro toilers, unless it wishes heaped upon itself also the thousand and one persecutions which plague labor with black skin, unless it wishes to remain in perpetual wage bondage and misery, let white labor extend its arm of alliance and solidarity on every issue which faces it as well as the Negro people! It devolves upon the white workers to cast to the winds the least stench of the slave market and the lynching post still clinging to them if they are to appear in their full grandeur as the makers of history and the molders of the future. Unless they do this, they cannot claim the Negro people as their allies, they will be be deprived of that powerful black arm in the struggle against the adversary. The only way the white workers can break through the wall of mutual distrust that has been erected by three centuries of the oppression of Negroes in this country is to step forward as the champions of the cause of Negro liberation. They must emblazon on the banner of labor the demands born in the struggle for Negro liberation."
This is the only way for the white workers to remain true to the tradition of the Irish workers of Boston of 1841, when they so vigorously denounced the slave power and vowed to shed their blood in the defense of their Black brothers and sisters. Only in this way can the American working class unite for the proletarian revolution.
COMBAT THE MONOPOLY CAPITALISTS' FASCIST ANTI-BUSING MOVEMENT!
DEFEND THE DEMOCRATIC RIGHTS OF THE BLACK PEOPLE!
UNITE FOR PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION!
The attitude the working class must take on the question of school integration was pointed out by Lenin:
"... efforts should be made to unite the nations in educational matters, so that the schools should be a preparation for what is actually done in real life. At the present time we see that the different nations are unequal in the rights they possess and in their level of development. Under these circumstances, segregating the schools according to nationality would actually and inevitably worsen the conditions of the more backward nations...
"One cannot be a democrat and at the same time advocate the principle of segregating the schools according to nationality. Note: we are arguing at present from the general democratic (i. e., bourgeois-democratic) point of view.
"From the point of view of the proletarian class struggle we must oppose segregating the schools according to nationality far more emphatically. Who does not know that the capitalists, of all the nations in a given state are most closely and intimately united in joint-stock companies, cartels and trusts, in manufacturers' associations, etc., which are directed against the workers irrespective of their nationality ? Who does not know that in any capitalist undertaking -- from huge works, mines and factories and commercial enterprises down to capitalist farms -- we always, without exception, see a larger variety of nationalities among the workers than in remote, peaceful and sleepy villages?
"The urban workers, who are best acquainted with developed capitalism and perceive more profoundly the psychology of the class struggle -- their whole life teaches them or they perhaps imbibe it with their mothers' milk -- such workers instinctively and inevitably realize that segregating the schools according to nationality is not only a harmful scheme, but a downright fraudulent swindle on the part of the capitalists. The workers can be split up, divided and weakened by the advocacy of such an idea, and still more by the segregation of the ordinary peoples' schools according to nationality; whereas while the capitalists, whose children are well provided with rich private schools and specially engaged tutors, cannot in any way be threatened by any division or weakening through 'cultural-national autonomy'".
(Collected Works, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1963, Vol. 19, p. 505.)
[Photo: Afro-Americans march in Boston October 13 to protest racist attacks by the anti-busing fascists.]
[Photo: The Black people, like all oppressed people, have only advanced through struggle. Here they defy the high-pressure water hoses of the police in Birmingham in 1963.]