the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
May 2, 2005
In mid-April, executives at General Motors dropped a bomb shell. They threatened to draw down the 20 billion dollar fund that had been set aside to pay retiree health benefits if the UAW did not reopen the contract and agree to big cuts in health benefits. GM’s Chief Financial Officer, John Devine, said that the company could take at least six billion dollars from the retirees’ health care fund in 2005, and use it to pay GM’s ordinary operating expenses.
In other words, the company was announcing that one way or another, it was going to slash GM’s health care benefits, especially retiree benefits.
To justify this enormous attack, GM executives told the usual pack of lies, claiming that the company is in danger of going broke. With their next breath, the same executives bragged to investors that GM has over 20 billion dollars in cash stashed away in its bank accounts. And that’s not all they have, since GM has stashed another 33 billion dollars in the accounts of its financial arm and other subsidiaries.
GM–with the stupendous resources of the biggest industrial company in the world–is not "impoverished." They are starting this new attack only because they think they can get away with it.
GM executives have UAW officialdom in their corner. UAW President Ron Gettlefinger may have said he will not renegotiate the contract. He may not have put it up for a vote, but he certainly agreed to change the auto contracts. UAW leaders already let Chrysler impose new deductibles, co-pays and restrictions on workers’ medical benefits in mid-contract; they are changing rules on HMO’s and preferred provider plans at GM; and they let GM cut 6800 jobs it was obligated to fill under the contract.
GM executives also know that UAW leaders already let Caterpillar drain money from the retiree medical fund. And then they turned around to argue that Caterpillar workers had to accept enormous cuts in retiree medical health benefits, along with a $270 per month premium for health care coverage–because there wasn’t enough money in that fund!
None of these cuts have anything to do with the ability of the companies to pay for the retiree health care coverage. Not at GM, not at Caterpillar–just as such cuts had nothing to do with the financial condition of other big companies that are also cutting medical coverage, like the airlines and the steel companies. All these companies are owned and controlled by the same group of capitalists. They don’t own just one company in one industry–they own many companies in many industries and shift money back and forth between them. These capitalists have a much bigger share of society’s wealth today than ever before.
The problem is not lack of money–it’s the relationship of forces between the capitalists and labor. So long as workers don’t respond when they are attacked, big companies are encouraged to come back to demand even more.
GM is ready to take away retiree health benefits today because the auto workers, pushed by top UAW leaders, already let it get away with taking all those other concessions. And if GM gets away with cutting retiree health benefits, the rest of the capitalists will try to come for any other workers who still have medical benefits.
The capitalists dare to think they can deprive the countless millions of workers who produce all their wealth to go without medical care. They think we will all fall like dominoes.
That works both ways. If one group of workers resists, that can encourage others to do the same thing. The millions of workers now under attack can make those sitting in those board rooms fall like dominoes in a spectacular way.
May 2, 2005
The Metro Detroit branch of USLAW (U.S. Labor Against the War) held a rally on April 30. Previously, the branch had gathered over 200 unionists’ signatures on a statement denouncing the war, calling on other unionists and their unions to take a stand on it. The statement was published in the local AFL-CIO newspaper and circulated in some plants.
It’s obviously a start because the unions should denounce the war and the statement and the call for the rally showed that some union activists are ready to take responsibility to do this.
The rally itself drew somewhat fewer than 200 people. Speakers denounced the lies used to justify the war in Iraq; condemned the deaths of soldiers and civilians, as well as the destruction of Iraq; and urged that the war be stopped so that the money spent on it could be channeled into solving the urgent human needs at home.
So far so good. But most of the speakers also suggested–directly or indirectly–that workers who want to stop the war should put their energies into petitions, e-mails, phone calls, and other means of influencing leaders in the unions and leaders in the Democratic Party.
This is the great disconnect. It’s precisely the top leaders of the unions, as well as the whole Democratic Party who have shepherded workers to peacefully accept not only the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, but also all manner of cutbacks at work and in social services.
It’s the disconnect that so many workers encounter when they want to find a way to express their opposition–against the wars, against workplace concessions, against the shredding of basic social services. Yes, workers should be able to sign petitions. Yes, groups of workers should reach out to others and try to gather support and strength. It’s one thing that can be done.
But the working class’s strength, its ability to enforce its will, has never yet been found in the embrace of the Democratic Party! The same energy that goes into trying to "influence" the Democrats can better be spent in the workplaces encouraging other workers to take a stand against the war, including inside their unions. Take a stand against the war in their family and their neighborhoods, where young people are being pushed into the army.
The ruling class of this country and the two parties that serve it can be forced to step back on the war and other things but only if they fear the force of the workers organizing themselves.
May 2, 2005
All the auto companies are crying about the health care crisis and their high costs. But the fact that we need blood pressure medication, or need to take our kids in for check-ups doesn’t cause the high costs.
It’s the pharmaceutical companies, hospitals and insurance companies that are all raking in obscene profits.
Quality health care is our right. We worked for it. We earned it. Let these multi-billion dollar corporations give up their obscene profits!
May 2, 2005
The Maryland legislature voted to increase the pay of home care workers in the state’s Medicaid program by 10%. The Baltimore Sun and the City Paper called it a "hefty pay increase!"
Hefty? It brought their pay to only $5.50 an hour–just above the minimum wage. And they were still left without any benefits.
Home care providers should have a real hefty increase. In Maryland, 3,000 of them clean, cook, bathe and do errands for poor people who are disabled, have chronic health problems, dementia or are just too old to take care of themselves completely. Their regular home visits make it possible for their clients to stay out of nursing homes.
Nevertheless, their pitifully low pay has left most of these thousands of home care workers in poverty themselves. The state has skirted the minimum wage laws by hiring them as "independent contractors."
In the last year, about 100 home care providers have stirred things up a little, speaking out publicly, making their demands known, and participating in a couple of demonstrations organized by AFSCME at the headquarters of the State Health Department in Baltimore.
Maybe these activities exposing the pitifully low pay embarrassed the state legislators. In any case, if these women can build on the spirit and initiative they took this year, they can do more than just shame the legislators. They can force them to come up with the money needed for a decent income.
May 2, 2005
The Senate vote was 99 to zero. Without a whisper, the Senators unanimously voted to give Bush another 81 billion dollars for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Just as if the weapons of mass destruction had not been a lie! Just as if every lie produced to start these wars suddenly had became true!
No votes against. Not from any of those Democratic senators who actually did call a lie a lie–during the past election campaign. Only a half-year ago–before the election–some Democrats made noises as if they opposed the lies, opposed the invasion, opposed the cold calculated destruction of Iraq.
But now, every Democratic senator joined every Republican senator to keep the money–and the destruction–flowing.
Some excuse their vote by claiming that the U.S. has an obligation to stay and fix things. As if they have suddenly lost their minds, and now imagine the Bush administration as a friend to Iraq!
No, the senators aren’t fooled. They are funding more of the same. More humiliation, terrorizing and slaughter of innocent civilians. More chaos in basic services like water, electricity, medicine. More child malnutrition and death. More phony elections, deeper divisions among the population–and more oil flowing into the tankers of Exxon, Shell, and Chevron. More U.S. military bases from which to control the people of the whole region.
The U.S. obligation to the people of Iraq begins with the immediate, unconditional exit of U.S. troops from their country. The easiest way in the world to force that exit is to cut off the money. But no senator stood for that.
If there’s one obligation the senators unanimously agree on, it’s their "obligation" to the Exxons and Halliburtons of the world.
May 2, 2005
Oil companies blame today’s high gas prices on high prices for oil caused by a shortage of crude oil.
In the first place, $50 plus prices of oil on the spot market are not what the oil companies and other big companies pay. They only reflect the speculative fever raging through Wall Street
More to the point, there is no shortage of crude oil–but there is one of gasoline. Not a real shortage–it was created by the big oil companies to drive up the price. Oil companies have been closing down refineries and cutting back workforces.
In 1980 there were more than 350 oil refineries operating in the U.S., according to the American Petroleum Institute. Today, there are only 150! In l990, there were 1,102,856 workers employed by the top 25 oil companies; today there are only half as many, 514,020! Without refineries and without workers, no wonder oil companies can claim a "shortage" of gasoline, and raise prices.
The case of Shell’s refinery in Bakersfield, California, is educational. Shell said it would close and demolish the refinery because it wasn’t making money. But internal company records turned up that showed Bakersfield was Shell’s most profitable refinery, pumping out profit to the tune of 55¢ per gallon. And before the closing, the plant general manager told an employee meeting that Bakersfield would be closed instead of sold because "it does not want the competition"; that is, Shell would decide for itself how much gasoline was put on the market.
Now that oil companies have closed refineries, decimated the workforces, choked off the supply of gasoline, raised prices, and skimmed off billions in profits–they want even more. Cheney and Bush are teamed with that millionaire’s club called Congress to make it easy on the other oilmen.
The House of Representatives passed Bush’s energy bill that will provide land (old military bases) for new oil company refineries. The bill gives extra tax credits to companies that already get a lot. It relaxes pollution rules so they can poison air and water more freely. And the bill over-rides the local populations–it allows federal agencies to okay refinery construction, regardless of local and state regulations.
The House bill gives away all of that, without requiring any commitments from the oil companies in return. No guaranteed employment levels. No minimum production levels. And certainly no cap on the price of whatever gasoline or heating oil is produced!
In other words, this bill is not aimed at lowering prices–it’s aimed at increasing profits to these already fabulously profitable companies.
May 2, 2005
The Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation (PBGC), says it could run out of money. If that’s true, this government agency better blame itself. It hasn’t required companies to keep their pension plans fully funded, and it doesn’t tax them enough to cover the losses they expect.
It’s nothing but an invitation for some of the biggest corporations in the country to declare bankruptcy so they can strip workers of their pensions–and then continue right on in business. And that’s exactly what they’ve done.
Caterpillar was one of the first big corporations to attack its workers this way many years ago. Since that time, the steel bosses have stripped tens of thousands of steelworkers of their company pensions and health insurance, as one big steel corporation after another cooked its books and got the OK of federal judges to junk all their contract obligations to workers. Some of these corporations merged, or were bought out by other steel companies. But in one way or another, they went on operating as usual. Today, they are very profitable.
More recently, the airline bosses have been pulling the same phoney bankruptcy maneuvers to cheat their workers out of their pensions, health care and other benefits, similar to what most steel bosses have done.
And now we hear rumbles that the big auto companies are thinking of doing the same thing.
During the past 20 years, over 2,000 pension plans that were terminated due to "bankruptcy"–mostly larger ones–were dumped onto the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation.
This is part of a bigger move to dump pensions for all workers. The number of private defined-benefit pension plans has already dropped from about 112,000 such plans in the mid-1980s to only about 30,000 plans today.
Corporate robbers and government officials work hand in hand to do their dirty work against the workers. And so do many top union officials, who have known for years what the corporations and government officials have been up to. They monitored the plans; they saw that the plans were underfunded. Year after year, they turned a blind eye.
The unions are supposed to be the watch dogs for the workers of their pension money. Instead many union leaders have proved themselves to be the lap dogs of the bosses!
May 2, 2005
Recently we got our 401K plan statements. The value of our pension plan was down. We have been playing this lottery for 20 years and the only ones that are winning are companies and brokers on Wall Street.
These 401K plans are just like the "private investment accounts" the Bush administration wants to set up for younger people.
What advantage is there in gambling on our futures? We need secure pensions.
May 2, 2005
This article is the text of a forum presented in Detroit April 17, 2005.
All we need to know about Social Security can be conveyed in one sentence: SOCIAL SECURITY IS NOT IN CRISIS.
What’s more, it’s in better shape than any other government program. It is simple, it costs very little to administer–and it has a surplus of money, a big surplus. Not only does it have 1.7 trillion dollars surplus in U.S. Treasury bonds today. The program administrators estimate that by 2016 it will have six trillion dollars, surplus. Six trillion is more than half the value of all the goods and services produced by all the workers in all 50 states last year.
No, there’s no real crisis. But Social Security is under attack because the politicians want to go on taking its surplus to give away to the corporations and the wealthy. And they can CREATE a real crisis for all workers.
We hear about the "baby boomers" and all the scare stories about how they are going to break the Social Security fund. All lies. The fund already took in extra taxes going back to the Carter Administration and increasing since then, under the pretext it was banking that surplus to take care of the baby boomers when they retired.
The trustees and actuaries who administer Social Security make "what if" predictions. Their most pessimistic prediction is that Social Security’s money is good to cover every penny of every person’s benefits until 2041. If everything goes as wrong as it possibly could, Social Security is safe for 36 years. That’s what the professionals say. They have another "what if" prediction, too. If everything goes well, then social security is good for another 39 years after that.
In fact, the economists know they can’t predict what will happen even 36 years from now. So when Bush and Company want to get us all excited about 2041, they are stacking their deck. With jokers.
But let’s suppose that all the facts are wrong and Bush is right; that Social Security will need more money in 2041. There’s a simple solution to that: tax the wealthy at the same full rate as everyone else.
Why is it that income above a skilled worker’s wage level has never been taxed for Social Security? Workers pay the FICA tax on every dollar they earn. But the wealthy pay only on their first $90,000. Relative to income, the FICA tax falls hardest on those least able to pay. Every worker who grosses less than $90,000 has to pay FICA for every single hour he or she works, all year long; at 40 hours a week that’s 2080 hours. But when Ford CEO Bill Ford gets paid 17.5 million dollars a year, how many hours does he pay FICA on? 10.7! 10.7 hours out of his year. In January he clocks in for one 10-hour shift (or 5 of his 2-hour shifts) and he’s done paying for the year. That’s how unbalanced the Social Security tax is. Well, balance it, and there would be lots more money for Social Security.
Ignoring all that, Bush insists that Social Security needs to be rescued by turning it into private investment accounts. Sounds like he wants us to go back about 80 years. Back to the Roaring 20s, they were called. There was no Social Security, and people worked until they died. A few workers, lucky enough to have a little extra money, invested in their own private accounts in the stock market. Then, too, bourgeois economists touted the stock market. But l929–just like every stock market "correction" since–showed that private security was no security at all.
With the last stock market downturn, workers with 401(k)s discovered just how quickly they could lose their security.
Yet we hear Bush and all kinds of people telling us we should forget about social security and go back to privatization. They have got to be crazy.
Of course they’re not crazy, they are just in favor of supporting Wall Street with our money. Privatizing Social Security means that windfalls of Social Security money will be transferred to investment houses like Charles Schwab and Merrill Lynch. Even if there’s no stock market crash, the way they "manage" accounts means that they manage to take all the money they can.
The Democrats pretend to be against privatization. They say they aren’t ready to hand over our retirement money to Wall Street. But they aren’t ready for us to keep it either!
They say that if Bush takes the idea of privatization off the table, then everything else is on the table. That "everything else" includes:
1. Making us work longer, maybe until we’re 70. Already in 1983, the government moved up the age of retirement from 65 to 67, and that is now being phased in by monthly increments.
2. Shrinking our monthly benefits. By a variety of little tricks, they would reduce the monthly benefits that future retirees start out with–with much bigger reductions for those who retire "early."
3. Reducing our cost of living protection. Since l972, Social Security benefits have had a cost-of-living raise every year. But almost as soon as it was introduced, government economists began tinkering with the formula that is used to calculate COLA. Since 1983, the formula has been revised 13 times–and each time, we lost money.
4. Penalizing still further anyone who was unable to work for a while: people who had a long-term illness, for example, or someone laid off repeatedly, or women who took off work to have children and raise them.
5. Increasing the FICA tax rate–the tax we all pay now for Social Security.
Add it all up. It means a great big attack on every worker–and especially the youngest workers.
The one thing Congress is not proposing is to tax the wealthy on every dollar of their income. Anyone who tells us Social Security is in trouble, but doesn’t propose to tax the wealthy fully, is running a scam on us.
Both parties know perfectly well that Social Security is not in trouble. So why are they so eager to take our money?
It has nothing to do with Social Security. But it has everything to do with government deficits and tax cuts for the rich. The entire scam is to cover the deficits and protect those tax cuts.
The government has always taken care of its corporate sponsors. Starting in the John F. Kennedy administration and speeding up since then, the rich have been served up enormous tax cuts and breaks. But what happens then? Those tax cuts immediately show up as budget deficits. The government has covered up the deficits for many years now by using what? The Social Security surpluses! It increased Social Security taxes in l977 under Carter, and again in l984 under Reagan. Their excuse, by the way, was that they had to prepare to take care of the baby boomers! Anyway, the new taxes created a very big Social Security surplus, which the government promptly "borrowed"–for its own spending, its own wars, for the corporate welfare it hands out on every side.
As fast as Social Security banks its surplus–the government "borrows" it and gives the Social Security account U.S. Treasury bonds as its IOUs. Those are the famous IOUs that Bush pointed to and called worthless–U.S. Treasury bonds. Those bonds will start to come due–and not in 2041 but in 2017. Will the government have money to repay what it borrowed from Social Security AS WELL AS have money to cover the rest of its budget? Not unless they start laying some real taxes on the wealthy, they won’t! But that’s what they don’t want to do. And that’s why they’re talking about "reforming" Social Security–so they can take more of our money. From workers’ pensions, workers’ benefits, workers’ FICA taxes, workers’ labor.
That’s the whole dirty deal behind all the scare stories about having to "save" Social Security. The politicians are all agreed that workers should work more years before retiring; should pay more and higher taxes for those years; should get even smaller monthly checks; should receive less and less reward from the society that they spent their lives building up. All so the government can take still more Social Security money, cover their budget deficit with it, and therefore protect the wealthy from any more taxes. That is the whole crisis in a nutshell.
It’s no surprise, of course, that this is not Bush’s own idea. He’s just the clown in front. But, given how the Democrats have been talking, it might be a surprise to learn that Bush is pushing Bill Clinton’s program. Democrat Bill Clinton set up a commission that proposed the changes Bush is proposing. Clinton was going to go ahead with ending Social Security as we know it, just like he ended welfare as we knew it. But along came Monica–and that ended his presidency as he knew it. The job of cutting Social Security passed to Bush.
And if Bush doesn’t succeed, the job will pass to whoever’s next. This is a project of the ruling class, and they don’t care if it’s a Democrat or a Republican, so long as it gets done. That gives us an idea of what we are up against. That gives us an idea of how strongly the working class must say NO. We have to make the wealthy fear us enough so they back off, not just for now, but for a long time to come.
The Social Security program has always been a sort of measure of the balance of power between the working class and the capitalist class. The first Social Security law of l935–which included not only pensions but also unemployment and disability benefits–was passed after the three big strikes of 1934: in Toledo, Minneapolis and San Francisco. And it was quickly improved just four years later, after a huge strike wave, sit-down strikes, union organizing spread all through the industrial states. In the same way, Medicare was added to Social Security as one result of the vast mobilization of the 1960s.
If Congress is coming for Social Security now, it’s because they believe the fight has gone out of workers. Despite all the attacks mounted on working people, we haven’t called them to account yet. They believe they can make us pay even more of society’s bills so they can keep their tax cuts and exemptions.
Eighty-two out of the top 275 corporations paid no taxes in at least one of Bush’s first three years in office, and some of them even got money back from the government. As a% of Gross Domestic Product, corporate profits are the highest since just before that crash of l929–and the owners of those corporations want to make even higher profits. They want to go on taking our Social Security taxes–to go on covering their government’s expenses. They want to cut back pensions, make workers work longer, see the next generation of workers face absolute poverty–anything to keep their profits high and their share of taxes close to zero.
IF they can. That’s a big IF. The way to keep Social Security from shrinking and disappearing is to prove to the politicians, and the wealthy ruling class behind them, that the working class, our class, is not as beaten down as they think. If workers 80 years ago could be stuck in the hole of the Great Depression and still organize themselves to the point that the bosses had to come across with some Social Security for the first time–if they could do it, then we can find a way.
The fact that Bush has been back-pedaling lately shows that the ruling class already is a bit worried. It doesn’t mean they’ve given up, but their fear can reinforce our determination to protect what we have–and to improve it.
From workers’ point of view, Social Security does need to be brought up to date. In the opposite way from what the politicians are proposing! We should retire earlier. We should get a really livable pension. They set 65 as retirement in the 1930s. Since then the productivity of labor has grown immensely. The social surplus value available from our productivity has grown far beyond anything that could have been imagined in l939. They say there’s not enough money? There’s more than enough money to let us all retire at 50, and not on peanuts, either. Real Social Security should allow us to live at least as well in retirement as when we worked.
None of the wealth that exists would be here if somebody hadn’t worked, put in labor, to create it. Workers have created more than enough wealth, far more than enough to provide everyone a decent retirement. Those who created it should have first claim on it. But just like it’s always been: we can’t get our rights without a fight.
May 2, 2005
The meat packing and poultry industry in the U.S. is based on a brutal line speed and repressive efforts to crush unions, according to a study published in January by Human Rights Watch. This organization, known for investigating inhuman living conditions around the world, interviewed workers who butchered hogs, cattle and chicken in the United States, under conditions that are barbaric.
The three corporations at the heart of this report are Tysons Foods, which calls itself "the world leader in producing and marketing beef, pork and chicken"; Smithfield Foods (half of whose South Carolina hourly employees are immigrants); and Nebraska Beef, founded by a former executive of a beef processor which had closed down and then re-opened with multi-million dollar tax credits.
The inhuman pace on the cutting lines results in repetitive motion injuries and life-threatening wounds. Similar conditions in the meat-packing industry were documented by a book called The Jungle. This book was published 99 years ago!
According to the Government Accounting Office, meat packing remains one of the most dangerous industries in the country. Each year, there are almost 15 injuries for every 100 full-time workers. And those figures come with the GAO’s acknowledgment that plants do not report all or–in some cases–even any of their injuries on the job. Neither OSHA nor the Department of Agriculture has ever taken any responsibility for controlling the inhuman speed of the line, which Human Rights Watch pointed out was the cause of most injuries.
At Smithfield, a workforce of 5,000 is slaughtering, cutting, packaging and shipping out 25,000 hogs every day. To process this many animals every single day, the workers face a ferocious intensity of work. A beef worker, one of those handling 50,000 cattle a day, told Human Rights Watch, the company bosses "love you if you’re healthy and work like a dog, but if you get hurt you are trash..... they will look for a way to get rid of you before they report [any accident.]"
At Smithfield in both 1997 and 2003, when workers attempted to organize, the company used its own police force to intimidate the workers while it fired union supporters on trumped-up charges and threatened to close the plant.
When workers dared to complain about working conditions, bosses threatened to call Immigration services, a serious threat since a quarter of meat packing workers are not born in the U.S.
Meat packing workers discovered a century ago they could not depend on government agencies to protect them from their companies’ inhumane treatment nor to give them unions. Workers organized unions through their own activity–the Amalgamated Meat Cutters in the early part of the century and then the Packinghouse Workers in 1937, during an enormous upsurge of factory militancy. These workers had to fight the companies every step of the way in order to improve their working conditions.
It’s the only way.hyperlink
May 2, 2005
Jean Ziegler, the U.N. Human Rights Commission’s special expert on food, reported that the rate of malnutrition in Iraqi children has nearly doubled since Saddam Hussein was ousted.
More than a quarter of Iraqi children don’t get enough to eat. And the proportion of children under age five suffering from acute malnutrition rose to 7.7% by last fall from four% in April 2003.
Many of these children will die. Most of those who survive will be physically and mentally impaired and more vulnerable to disease for the rest of their lives.
No one would ever claim that children had a decent life under the regime of Saddam Hussein. But since the multiple U.S. attacks on Iraq, things have only gotten worse, year by year. The first U.S. war, followed by 13 years of economic sanctions and repeated bombings, destroyed Iraq’s infrastructure and made life worse for Iraq’s children. More than 500,000 children under age five died in that period.
But even that situation has grown desperately worse after the second U.S. invasion and two years of U.S. occupation.
In his April 28 news conference, Bush declared, "... we are making good progress in Iraq because the Iraqi people are beginning to see the benefits of a free society."
Benefits? Not unless starvation, death and destruction count as benefits!
Every single day the U.S. troops stay in Iraq only makes things worse.
May 2, 2005
On April 30th, 1975, Saigon fell. The 20-year war between Viet Nam and the United States had come to an end. What was left of South Viet Nam’s army surrendered and U.S. helicopters airlifted the last U.S. officials and their Vietnamese puppets off the roof of the U.S. embassy.
The Vietnamese had already been fighting for their independence long before the U.S. entered the war. France had originally sent its navy to Viet Nam in the 1860s to ensure a supply of rubber for France’s industries. Viet Nam also had rice and coal, mostly sold to China at a fat profit to the French, who ruled the colony. Not only were the Vietnamese prevented from governing their own country, under the French, the vast majority of the population was kept illiterate and impoverished.
In the 1920s, the Vietnamese organized major resistance movements to French colonization. These movements continued during World War II against Japan. The Japanese wanted the Vietnamese rubber, rice and coal for their war effort.
With the end of the war, the Vietnamese independence forces expected an end to foreign occupation. The French instead came back, trying to hold onto Viet Nam as a colony. So the Vietnamese began a new war to drive the French out. This lasted another nine years until the underfed, poorly armed Vietnamese peasant army defeated the French on May 8, 1954, after the battle at Dien Bien Phu.
Much of the French effort to hold onto Viet Nam was bankrolled by the U.S. With the defeat of the French, the U.S. tried to step in to stop the Vietnamese. First, in the Geneva negotiations, the U.S. got the Vietnamese to accept dividing the country into two parts, North and South, with the provision that the country would be united in elections in 1956.
It was widely conceded that Ho Chi Minh, one of the leaders of the Vietnamese struggle, would have been elected, if the elections had been held.
The U.S. then abrogated the election in the southern part of Viet Nam and propped up one puppet government after another in Saigon. But this repressive corrupt dictatorship soon provoked a new movement of resistance in the South. To stem the movement, U.S. troops began to flow into Viet Nam, slowly at first. From 1962, when there were 12,000 U.S. troops in the country, the force grew to 23,000 by the end of 1964; then took a big jump to 185,000 by the end of 1965. By 1968, the U.S. had half a million troops in Viet Nam and hundreds of body bags with dead young men coming back to the U.S. every month.
During this same time, the U.S. saw an explosion of protest inside its own borders with the radicalization among the black population, which had been fighting for its own rights for several decades. Their fight had an impact on the troops in Viet Nam.
As in every war, working class and poor youth did more of the fighting and dying than richer youth, who were able to avoid the war by staying in college and then entering the National Guard, which during the Viet Nam War was not used in combat. This created anger among the U.S. troops. The war had become unpopular enough that some officers were dying in "fragging" incidents, that is, death from hand grenades deliberately thrown by their own dissatisfied troops. U.S. army commanders had to worry about the reliability of their own troops in combat.
On the college campuses of this country, the anti-war debates increased the atmosphere of protest. Demonstrators filled the streets. Then came the riots sweeping through almost every big city and many small ones. The black population shook the government’s resolve.
All this weighed on the decision at the highest reaches of government to deny General Westmoreland’s request for more troops at the end of 1968.
In 1968, Republican Richard Nixon won the election with the promise that he had a secret plan to end the war. But he and his henchman Kissinger at the so-called peace talks would maneuver for another seven years before conceding defeat.
To a French general, Ho Chi Minh had once said, "You can kill ten of my men for every one of yours I kill. But even at those odds, you will lose and I will win."
Ho Chi Minh turned out to be right, not just against the French, but against the U.S., too. But the U.S. made the Vietnamese pay a staggering price to serve as an example of U.S. power, that is, of what the U.S. would do to any people who dared to defy them. Not counting casualties from the earlier decades of warfare against Japan and France, a million Vietnamese fighters were estimated to have died in the war with the United States, and another million Vietnamese were civilian casualties of U.S. bombings or of the brutalities of the South Vietnamese army. The U.S. not only dropped more tonnage of bombs on this one country (half the size of Texas) than all the tonnage dropped by all the Allied forces in World War II; in addition, the country was devastated by chemical warfare.
A chemical defoliant known as Agent Orange stripped away trees and vegetation to let U.S. bombers obtain a better view of their targets, and to destroy agricultural production. A primarily agricultural country, Viet Nam required a generation to overcome the gross effects of war on growing crops. Even worse, the generation of babies born after the war had a high rate of deformities due to their parents’ contact with Agent Orange.
Any number of factors determine the outcome of war. For Viet Nam, the most important was the determination of an entire population to overcome an enormously powerful foe, the U.S.
The most powerful and wealthiest imperialism ever seen was unable to defeat a relatively small agricultural country that had already been decimated by years of war. This fact made the U.S. withdrawal a defeat for imperialism.