LETTERS of March 2

U.S. Rulers Pulled Strings of Puppet Egyptian Regime

There is one more lesson that we can learn from the rebellion in Egypt. The role of the U.S. ruling class in Egypt reveals that the U.S. remains the most reactionary, oppressive force on the planet.

The U.S. military at the JFK Special Warfare School and Center at Fort Bragg trained Hosni Mubarak and his planned successor Omar Suleiman. The Egyptian secret police, who for decades have tortured and murdered dissidents, were trained by the FBI at their facility in Quantico, VA. The weapons that were used by police forces to kill 300 Egyptian protesters and injure thousands more were manufactured in the U.S. And Boeing subsidiary Narus was kind enough to sell the Mubarak regime software that monitors Internet and cell phone communications and singles out dissidents for retaliation.

The people in Egypt have forced Mubarak to step down. As the U.S. ruling class tries to install a new puppet government under the false guise of democracy, they are going to try to spin their role in the Mubarak dictatorship. Obama & Co. are pretending to be innocent bystanders in this whole affair who just “wish the best for the Egyptian people.” Workers in the U.S. should stand in solidarity with workers in Egypt and oppose the racist U.S. imperialists who torment workers all over the world.

Red Beard

The Bosses’ State: A Machine Oppressing the Working Class

With all the media focus on democracy in the Egyptian mass movement, we should keep clear what the state is. In 1919 Lenin gave a lecture to workers which is one of the best short treatments of the state (V.I. Lenin, “The State,” in Marx, Engels, Marxism, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1951). What he wrote about the state in slave societies helps us grasp that the form of the capitalist state is not the key thing; the key thing is the essence of the capitalist state:

“The state is a machine for the oppression of one class by another, a machine for holding in obedience to one class other, subordinated classes.  There are various forms of this machine. In the slave-owning state we had a monarchy, an aristocratic republic or even a democratic republic.  In fact the forms of government varied extremely, but their essence was always the same: the slaves enjoyed no rights and constituted an oppressed class; they were not regarded as human beings.”

Similarly, if the form of the state in Egypt changes from a semi-monarchical, fascistic, rigged democracy to an open democracy like Denmark’s, what has changed?  The form of the state.  But you would still have the essence of a capitalist state, as you do in Denmark: “a machine for the oppression of one class by another,” guaranteeing capitalists the freedom to exploit workers and coercing workers to accept their exploitation.

But that’s not the way the bourgeoisie writes history.  Lenin again: “In every course on the history of ancient times…you will hear about the struggle which was waged between the monarchical and republican states…But whether a monarchy was instituted or a republic, it was a monarchy of the slaveowners or a republic of the slaveowners.”  Similarly, if capitalist Egypt were to be run as the most free and open democratic republic ever, it would still be a democracy of the capitalist class.

The media follow bourgeois historians in emphasizing the struggle over the form of the state in Egypt.  It’s the role of Marxists and especially revolutionary communists to point out that the essence of every political struggle of our day is over capitalist exploitation of the working class, in Egypt as everywhere else.  That struggle means smashing the capitalist state as a “machine for the oppression of one class by another” and instituting the state-form called the dictatorship of the proletariat, a machine for violently uprooting capitalism and suppressing the capitalist class out of existence.

 A reader

 Capitalism Destroys Health; Racism Pulls Trigger

In the excellent Feb. 16 CHALLENGE article “Building PLP Means Choosing Life – Racist Healthcare Murdering Kids,” the next-to-last sentence correctly says: “We are forced to sit and watch as our children are killed before our eyes by treatable diseases like asthma.” 

It should be added, with perhaps more force, that “...our children are killed before our eyes by preventable diseases like asthma.” Asthma is certainly easily treatable if one has access to medical care. But we should never forget that medical care is mainly for the purpose of patching people up after damage is already done. It’s the initial damage that is the problem, and capitalism, not nature, is the cause. 

Medical care, as the article suggests, is kept at the minimum level necessary to keep workers healthy enough to produce profits for the bosses. It’s purpose is not keeping us healthy enough to enjoy a long and productive life for the benefit of our own class, as it would be under a communist, working-class-run system.

Children and their parents who live in fear of the next asthma attack do not deserve this life-distorting outrage. Asthma is mainly caused by polluted air. Pollution comes from both public and private sources, and even the private sources, such as cigarette smoke, are ultimately public under capitalism. Parents who smoke around their children are unwittingly contributing to their children’s development of asthma. But it’s the cigarette company executives who smile all the way to the bank.

Indeed, a recent international study estimated that cigarettes cause an extra 600,000 deaths a year from second-hand smoke. There is good reason to believe that this is a gross underestimate.

Added to this scourge, and more than doubling it, are the tons of poisons that smokestacks from fossil fuel-based industry and power plants spew every second of every day. It is estimated that coal emissions alone cause two million unnecessary deaths around the world annually from asthma and other respiratory and heart disease, and up to 50,000 per year in the U.S. alone. That’s mass murder with a vengeance. And the people who are forced to live the closest to such deadly fumes are more often black, Latino, or Native American, making it racist mass murder.

And still worse, particularly for our children and grandchildren, is the global warming that fossil-fuel emissions cause. The increasingly deadly weather extremes emerging this winter in Europe and the Northeast U.S. are only one of the results. (See the Winter 2010 article in The Communist magazine on global warming for a more complete discussion, available on the PLP website.) As the healthcare article said, building PLP for working-class communist revolution means choosing life over capitalism’s mass murder.

Saguaro Rojo

Fascist Afghan Gov’t Ravages Women

The Afghan government just announced plans to bring shelters for women running away from family violence and forced marriages — now operated by international and local NGO’s — under control of the Women’s Affairs Ministry.

Two years in the making, the new rules have been initiated by fundamentalists in the Karzai administration, who view the dozen or so shelters for abused women (opened in the past eight years), as encouraging women and girls to abandon their traditional roles and “dishonor their families.” At worst the shelters are said to operate as brothels.

If passed into law, runaways would go before an eight-person panel to decide their fate: jail, be returned to their family, or allowed to live in a government-controlled shelter. They would undergo a physical exam for virginity.

Shelter supporters claim domestic violence is cultural (not criminal!) and their struggle is to change the culture and the laws that support it. During this admittedly slow process they need to provide victims with a safe place. But corruption is a fact of life today in Afghanistan and laws are meaningless when government officials arbitrarily make decisions based on bribes or family connections.

Friends of PLP in Afghanistan know that the fight has to be for more than a change of law or so called “traditional customs.” Culture masks the source of the oppression of women: the capitalist system and the patriarchy that is its mainstay. Women’s role is as the lowest-paid (often unpaid) laborers in that hierarchy.

Control of women by husbands and brothers mirrors the control over the whole society by the wealthy few and hides the fact that the capitalists who control Afghan society use the subjugation of women to divide men and women, whose class interests are the same.

The struggle for emancipation of women is inseparably bound up in the entire struggle of all workers, men and women, against capitalist exploitation and for a communist society. In the 1980’s, when “culture” included equal rights for women, and a Marxist government with communist ideas was in power (with all the faults and errors of its leaders), Afghan women — and men — made tremendous steps forward along that road.

A reader