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Homework

Dear editor, I found Amanda Chapman's article on the Dept. of Labor's campaign to legalize "homework" in the garment industry very interesting from a personal viewpoint.

I live in a relatively quiet area of Los Angeles and many, if not most, of my neighbors are recently arrived Chinese immigrants. The quiet is penetrated by the ever present hum and buzz of industrial sewing machines. These machines can be heard often as early as 5 a.m. and as late as midnight or beyond I've often noticed that elderly grandparents take a lot of responsibility for infants and toddlers on my street, carrying them for hours at a time on walks. These children are lucky indeed because the buzz heard on the street from their parents' sewing machines is actually a terrible racket in one's apartment or even from an adjoining apartment.

Also, the immigrants who run these machines need to work without the demands that young children make, so in all weather except during heavy rain, they are cared for in the streets by relatives too old to be sewing.

Of course, this all occurs under illegal conditions. But if "homework" is legalized, the problems will only increase. The availability of work will increase and more homes will resonate with machines. The fear of deportation alone will prevent most of these undocumented workers from complaining to any enforcement agency. More tiny, crowded apartments will be turned into factories.

Kathleen ONan, Los Angeles, Calif. Bear Arms Dear editor, I was disappointed to see no mention of attempts in California and nationally to ban importations and sales of semiautomatic weapons. This is a touchy subject among liberals, but among socialists the issue should be clear.

I can point to the usual reasons to oppose any such bans: our Second Amendment rights as well as the advantages of the present affordability offered by the availability of many military-surplus semi-autos for sporting or collecting.

However, as in the case of our American Revolution of the 1770s, the naked truth is that there may be a time when a well-armed citizenry may be required for defense against an oppressive government.

Thus, arms having a firepower equivalent to that of the existing military should always remain available to the people.

Eldo fartz, Atlanta, Ga.

Two recent tragic shootings have been used by several local goverments to ban two types of weapons. Just recently the Stockton, Calif., and Los Angeles city councils banned all semiautomatic rifles. This after a demented racist loner emptied his AK-47 into a schoolyard of Asian children in Stockton.

In Winnetka, Ill., the village council banned possesion of all handguns. This came several months after a crazed woman, Laurie Dann, shot five children in a school. Winnetka joins several other suburbs and the city of Chicago in making hand weapons illegal.

The liberals and moderates who back gun-control measures like these claim that getting rid of guns will get rid of crime. Yet crime is a part of capitalism. The poverty that helps produce crime has an "eternal" place within it. Theft is actually the highest virtue in its boardrooms, murder the essence of its foreign policy.

Beneath the bread crumb of "fighting crime" is the hook of defenselessness against an armed government, criminal and fascist.

Both the liberals and the NRA-type rightwingers want to forget the reason for the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It enshrines the "right to revolution." It reads: "A well-regulated militia being necessary to a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

Liberals have claimed that if the present National Guard is armed (the "militia"), that alone satisfies the Second Amendment. However, the capitalist state has direct control over the Guard. It's an arm of the military.

The "sense" of the Second Amendment is that the militias of the precolonial and post-colonial United States were actually what we would call workers defense guards or Black self-defense groups today. They are intimately connected with the population and independent of the state.

Historian Charles Leedham put it this way, "With recent history fresh in memory, the amenders [of the Constitution] wanted no restrictions on the people's right to keep arms ... somehow, perhaps soon, the government might just fall into the hands of scheming men who would attempt to rule with an army."

Thomas Jefferson even declared, "What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that the people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms."

The founders of the United States were revolutionaries, unlike the counterrevolutionary capitalist class that runs the country today. Defend the right to keep and bear arms!

Greg Gibbs, Chicago, III.

Reply

Socialist Action agrees with the defense of the right to bear arms, as expressed in the letters printed above. This right was widely embraced by American colonists after 1770, when British Redcoats shot down Boston patriots demonstrating against British oppression.

The right to bear arms, conquered by American colonists in the Revolutionary War, had to be reconquered after independence was won. It was not written into the Constitution by the new U.S. government. Only later, after a political struggle, were this and other basic rights (the Bill of Rights) adopted by Congress and ratified by the states.

The Second Amendment to the Constitution is vital to the defense of human rights, as Thomas Jefferson and other leaders of the first American Revolution explained many times. Citizens need a means of defense against the government of the United States itself, when necessary.

The Second Amendment is vital to the right of Blacks to defend themselves, arms in hand, against mob rule and lynch law—whether carried out by the Ku Klux Klan or, as has often been the case, by racist police or other armed agencies of city, state, or by federal governments.

It is no less central to the right of workers to defend themselves against strikebreakers (whether hired company goons or official police and military forces) when they are unleashed to repress workers' rights under the Constitution.

Regardless of what the Democratic and Republican politicians claim, the major reason for banning semiautomatic weapons is not to disarm dope-pushers or crazy mass murderers. Nor is it aimed at restoring civility in rapidiy disintegrating capitalist America.

The increasing attack on the right to bear arms is part and parcel of the preparation by the capitalist class to defend its rule when the tottering economy collapses, mass misery intensifies—and millions of people decide they have had enough and begin to struggle for a rational reorganization of society.—The editors Capitalism Dear editor, In recent months, Zbigniew Brzezinski and other toadies of the ruling class have proclaimed that the failures and changes experienced by the societies of Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and China indicate that socialism has been discredited and that Marxist theory has been found to be intellectually bankrupt.

These statements are being made at a Cleveland, OH 44101 (216) 429-2167 Detrolt P.O. Box 32546 Detroit, Mi 48232 Los Angolos P.O. Box 862014 Los Angeles, CA 90086-2014 (213) 250-4608 (For information in o ities call 415-821-0451 This is a page where our readers can speak out. We welcome letters. But please keep them short. When ne —The editors time when a conservative estimate of the cost of bailing out the insolvent savings and loans in this country is given as $150 billion—enough to build 1 million houses costing $150,000 each. Homelessness in the United States is a national disgrace.

In the last fiscal year, Japanese corporations spent seven times as much of their after-tax profits purchasing the securities and debt instruments of each other as they spend on building and equipping new productive facilities. Meanwhile, Latin American countries are suffering the greatest economic depression in their history-resulting in widespread malnutrition.

As to the future of capitalism, let's call upon Alfred Malabre, the economics editor of the Wall Street Journal, who writes: "No amount of governmental, or for that matter private, maneuvering will avert a very nasty time ahead.... The next economic hurricane-the first-to strike this country since the Great Depression in 1929—cannot be prevented."

Bill Wilner, Los Angeles, Calif.

Dinkeytown Station Minneapolis, MN 55414 Now York P.O. Box 20209 Ca. Finar 693 Columbus Ave.

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SociaList Action

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Gun Control Dear editor,

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