BALLOTINAt Opinion—'84 elections "Twin parties won't get my vote"

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By KWAME M. A. SOMBURU Real and continued progress toward the goal of Black liberation is impossible without the development of a movement, leadership, and program cognizant of the present circumstances and needs of the Black masses.

The founding of the National Black Independent Political Party (NBIPP) in November 1980 heralded the promise that this need might be fulfilled. However, NBIPP has fulfilled this promise only in the written words of its charter.

That charter stated the necessity "to liberate the masses of Black people from genocide and the dehumanizing conditions of racism, imperialism, sexual oppression and capitalist exploitation."

The preface to its Principles of Unity stated: "The Party must have an historical analysis that examines the present condition of Black people as it derives from the African experience through the European slave trade and development of imperialism and the capitalist system."

The charter then argues that we must develop a strategy and tactic that include as one of its main tenets the incompatibility of support to capitalist parties and reformist candidates like Jesse Jackson with the goal of Black liberation.

Many people joined NBIPP without having either read, understood, or agreed with the charter. If the majority of the founding members and elected leadership of NBIPP fully understood or agreed with the basic text of the charter, and knew how to implement it, NBIPP would not now be subject to an internal crisis of such serious proportions over the issue of support to Black Democratic office seekers.

I have been politically active against capitalism and its twin parties since 1960. It does not matter to me what the color, sex, or nationality of a candidate is. If that candidate belongs to the Democratic or Republican parties they will not get my vote. I've had this position for years and that is why I joined NBIPP.

The current political leaders of the United States are clearly aware of which class they represent. The ruling class of ..Zionism (continued from page 14: “[The prisoners were to be transported in them…]”)

German Reich, offers to actively take part in the war on Germany's side." ("Proposal of the National Military Organisation-Irgun Zvai Leumi—Concerning the Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe and the Participation of the NMO in the War on the side of Germany," printed in Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, by Lenni Brenner, p. 267, Lawrence and Hill, 1983.)

And this proposal wasn't made by some sort of fanatic fringe as the Irgun has sometimes been portrayed. When Begin became prime-minister in 1977 and then appointed Yitzhak Shamir (one of the signers of the Ankara document) as his foreign minister, it was evident that the Irgun was just simply part of the mainstream Zionist movement. Their motto had been "The Historical Jewish State on a National and Totalitarian Basis," and they intended to carry out these policies once in Palestine. And as I have shown, this they have done faith. fully.

So there is therefore nothing new about the plans for the liquidation of the Palestinian people. Nothing new about the open declaration to reduce the Palestinians in Lebanon by 90 percent. Nothing new about Sabra and Shatila because it was not an excess of the Israeli occupation of Lebanon but indeed the very purpose of that occupation. The very focus of the war, the very intent of the Zionist leadership was the elimination of the Palestinian existence. this country has never, in fact, supported a candidate who opposed capitalism. The time is long overdue for the Black liberation movement to be just as clear thinking about who are our real friends. We must be just as dedicated in our committment to creating a new society as the ruling class is in maintaining its old system of oppression.

It came in the mail last week: an "Official 1984 Democratic Presidential Survey"

The survey wanted my answer within ten days. The big question: Which of the following eight "wonderful" men would I choose for president? The choices given by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee ran from Askew to Mondale. Minnie Mouse was left out because she was obviously the wrong sex.

Before I had time to answer this "urgent" survey, three of the "Mr. Wonderfuls" had dropped out of the race. Left with the "choice" of Glenn, Hart, Jackson, McGovern and Mondale, I searched my mind for anything these five "leftovers" had done to improve the lot of women, and came up with nothing.

The survey letter made the amazing argument that the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives had blocked Reagan's cutbacks in social programs. Well, with friends like these, who needs enemies.

According to data compiled by the Children's Defense Fund in Washington, D.C., the Black infant mortality rate in the nation's capital is greater than in Jamaica. The United States ranked 12th in 1980 in infant mortality rates, behind Great Britain and East Germany. Nationally, infant mortality is rising.

There is one last thing that must also be clear: The Zionist state is nothing but the extension of American imperialist power in the region. Its extermination plans, its occupations, its extensions of territory are on behalf of the principal imperialist power of the region. Whatever may be the tactical divergences which emerge from time to time, there is no Zionist campaign that can sustain itself without the backing of its principal sponsor. The U.S. government in 1983 provided $65 billion in military aid, economic aid, loans and grants to the state of Israel. As Joseph C. Harsch put it in the Aug. 5, 1982, issue of the Christian Science Monitor:

"Few countries in history have ever been as dependent on another as Israel is in the United States. Israel's major weapons come from the United States-either as gifts or on long term, low interest loans which few seriously expect to be repaid (in full). Israel's survival is underwritten and subsidized from Washington. Without American arms Israel would soon lose the quantitative and qualitative advantage which President Reagan has promised to maintain for them. Without the economic subsidy Israel's credit would vanish and its economy would collapse.

"In other words, Israel can only do what Washington allows it to do. It dares not conduct a single military operation without the tacit consent of Washington: When it does undertake a military offensive the world assumes, correctly, that it has Washington's tacit consent." (PART ONE OF SERIES)

Federal medicaid payments were cut by $1 billion in 1981 (with a Democratic majority in the House) and the projected defense budget of 1984-1988 is $l billion per day. Food stamps, education and housing were cut by Democratic President Carter.

The defense budget was higher under Carter than under any other president except Reagan. Scientific American reports in its September 1983 issue that building 239 MX missiles rather than the projected 240 would save $110 million -enough to fund medicaid benefits for every pregnant woman living below the poverty level.

Just imagine what we could do by cutting the entire defense budget!

On housing, what has the Democratic majority accomplished? Nothing whatsoever! Walk down San Francisco Market Street and (like other American cities) you will see the hundreds of homeless women carrying their entire possessions around on their backs all day.

Here's another shocking lie in this survey concerning the Democratic majority: "We stood firm," it says "against dangerous policies which would escalate the nuclear arms race and give a virtual free hand in wasteful military spending."

Oh really? I remember "HiroshimaNagasaki Truman," "Bay-of-Pigs Kennedy," "Vietnam Johnson," and "Born-again Carter". (The latter was praying for human rights while backing the monstrous dictatorship in El Salvador.) Under Carter, abortion rights were cut back and right-to-lifers were given a big boost. The Equal Rights Amendment died a disgraceful death thanks to this yoohoo's betrayal. Carter and his "boys" didn't lift a finger to save it from defeat.

In San Francisco a women's event has been held every year since 1973 to commemorate International Women's Day. Tens of thousands of women would gather in Golden Gate Park for "Day in The Park for Women's Rights." This year, for the first time in ten years, Golden Gate Park will be silent. Instead, the "official" leaders of the women's movement are planning a fund raiser for Mondale at the Fairmont Hotel.

The so-called "leaders" of the women's movement are trying to pass Mondale, Hart, Jackson, or McGovern off as champions of women's rights. Women will not be fooled. Rather they will be angered by the betrayal of women's rights by whatever Democrat or Republican gets elected. Even more, they will know that their "leaders" lied to them. The interest of women and the interest of the capitalist class have nothing in common.

passed oamas ge for the Demo rat. is stream." The mainstream is not a stream. It is a sewer that women should stay out of. Once again we should affirm our determination: OUT OF THE MAINSTREAM AND INTO THE STREETS! To the Editors, Your article on the Jesse Jackson campaign brought out a much needed discussion of Jackson's role in the electoral process. While I agree with your conclusions, no analysis of Jackson's campaign would be complete without citing his acrobatics on the abortion issue.

The right of all women to chose safe, legal, funded abortion on demand is cen tral to women's liberation. The legalization of abortion during the wave of feminist activism of the 1970s-has been under relentless attack from the right. Of all the charismatic, evangelical orators against abortion, the Rev. Jesse Jackson has been a star. In fact, Jackson was the keynote speaker at annual youth conventions of the National Right to Life Committee during the '70s.

If taking a stance that devalues and endangers all women were not bad enough, Jackson dealt a double blow against minority women by supporting the Hyde Amendment, which outlawed Medicaid funding of abortions.

Black and other minority women are hit hardest by these cut-offs, and some have died at the hands of back-alley abortionists since the Hyde Amendment was passed. According to a spokesperson for the National Right to Life Committee, "We could always count on Jackson to send telegrams against public funding to Congress whenever we needed it."

Upon deciding to enter the presidential race, Jackson has done a 180-degree turn-around on the abortion issue. The only point of agreement between pro-choice and antichoice action committees is that Jackson's flip-flop resulted from political pragmatism. Neither the Rainbow Coalition nor the Democratic Party can afford to alienate women this election year. Yet several questions beg to be answered, or at least asked out loud:

• How could a man be trusted to implement a political policy that contradicts his self-stated "strong personal and religious convictions in oppostion to • How cynical is the assumption that women will believe and support a man who exchanges his position of many years for its opposite on election eve?

• How worthy of followers is a leader who has advocated a law that oppresses his own constituency?

Those who are rushing to jump on the Jackson bandwagon had better kick the tires and check the roadmap!

Kathy Setian San Francisco, Calif.

Socialist Action March 1984 15

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Action Women in the Global Factory, by Annette Fuentes and Barbara Ehrenreich, South End Press, 64 pp., $3.75 "In Malaysia, a woman may suddenly see a 'hantu' or "jin, a hideous mythological spirit, while peering through a microscope. She falls to the floor in convulsions, screaming with 'masuk hantu? spirit possession. Within minutes the hysteria spreads up and down the assembly line. Sometimes factories must be closed for a week or more while the evil spirits are exorcised...In Malaysia, where labor unions are outlawed, women have virtually no other outlets to protest working conditions." (Women in the Global Factory, p.38)

In their pamphlet, Fuentes and Ehrenreich present a succinct and useful portrait of recent industrialization in the Third World, its control by multinational corporations and financial institutions, and its impact on the women workers in these new industries. Drawing their material primarily from Asia (Taiwan, Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines) and from Central America (especially Mexico), they do a fine job of interweaving a sense of the experiences of individual women with an overall description and analysis of the problem.

Women in the Global Factory focuses on women factory workers-especially in the textile, electronics, and micro-processor industries—who are employed in free processing zones as they are also called, are areas set aside in underdeveloped countries where foreign corporations (the majority are U.S.-controlled) can set up shop without paying taxes or customimport duties, and where they are provided with a controlled workforce.

As Fuentes and Ehrenreich say, "Free trade zones-there are now over 100mean more freedom for business and less freedom for people. Inside, behind walls often topped with barbed wire, the zones resemble a huge labor camp where trade unions, strikes and freedom of moveopf involves. They point out that the conditions in the garment and textile industries are "visibly unhealthy, rivaling those of any 19th century sweatshop."

But even more dangerous are the electronic and micro-processor industries. Here women are daily exposed to toxic chemicals, eye-damaging microscope work, and high levels of stress. There are no health benefits; vacation or sick days; unemployment or disability insurance; social security; or adequate services such as daycare centers, health clinics, and decent housing to meet their new needs.

Fuentes and Ehrenreich point out that capitalist corporations are really creating global factories (the title of the pamphlet is not just a metaphor) where work is broken down and farmed out on an international basis. The least skilled and most noxious and tedious work goes to Third World countries-especially to the women. The whole system is of course designed to facilitate increased profit-making.

But Fuentes and Ehrenreich do not fully draw out the implications of this trend. They fail to note that workers in the neo-colonial world are in a les: favorable position to unionize and to c emand basic rights because they control only a small and easily movable part of the total production process.

Forced into "new" economy One of the most serious limitations of Women in the Global Factory is that, in focusing on factory workers, it only touches the surface of the deep transformations occurring in women's lives throughout Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Most women in these regions are not yet assembly-line workers, but their lives are just as surely being changed as a result of capitalist development.

With the expansion of capitalism there is a whole shift of the agricultural economy away from production of basic food crops, often on a semi-communal basis, to cash-cropping and mono-cropping, on a capitalist basis—usually in the form of large plantations or small freeholdings. Many women in the countryside are forced to become agricultural wage-laborers and often are able to find only migratory and seasonal work. Although still involved in food production, rural women-both peasant and proletarian-often go hungry and they and their children experience life-threatening malnutrition.

Other women find themselves pushed out of the agricultural economy and into the cities, with little chance of even finding factory work. The overwhelming majority seek work as domestic servants, where their low pay is combined with a lack of freedom and often with less than humane treatment. Others who are more fortunate, may find work in the low-paid but ever-expanding service, clerical, and sales sectors within the "pink collar ghetto."

Many women, however, can find no regular niche in the "new" economy. If still embedded in a traditional family structure, these women may become "housewives," economically dependent on and increasingly subordinate to husbands and other male family members. But most of these women are on their own and try to create their means of survival in the margins of the economy as day-workers, street vendors, or prostitutes.

Capitalist development does not just affect women economically. It transforms all aspects of their lives. It causes women's self-images and the images others have of them—of their roles, their abilities, their persons, their sexualityto generally become narrowed, negative, and denigrating. This is especially clear with the explosion of personal violence against women, as well as the military terror needed to keep capitalism intact in places like El Salvador and Guatemala.

What can be done?

What are the solutions to these problems facing Third World women? What answers do Fuentes and Ehrenreich offer?

The picture presented in Women in the Global Factory clearly shows the need for a revolutionary solution. Yet the authors' suggestions for what can be done are limited to reforms in the system. But it is capitalist development, itself-the whole system of production based on private property and profit-making for a few-that is at the core of the increase in oppression and suffering

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response to a survey

Letter to the editor

BOOK REVIEW trade zones. Free trade zones, or export