Workfare - Slave Labor U.S. Style

Table of Contents

Introduction

WHAT IS THE VIOLENCE INITIATIVE?

Box: Federal Psychiatrist Compares Inner-City Youth to Monkeys

Violence Initiative: A High-Level Federal Policy

Box: One Dutch Family

But Hasn't the Violence Initiative Been Stopped Already?

Box: "Biology of Violence" Research Continues

 

"VIOLENCE CONTROL" IS A POLITICAL ISSUE, NOT A MEDICAL ONE

Medicine As Social Control

Violence Is Not Always Bad

"Crime": Who Breaks the Laws...And Who Makes Them

Capitalist System is the Biggest and Most Violent Criminal of All

Box: Racism: Part and Parcel of Capitalism

 

RACISM AND REDUCTIONISM IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE

Blaming the Victims: Reducing Complex Social Problems to Individual Biology

Diagnosing Children as Potential Criminals

Box: Racism and Psychiatry: Past and Present

Violence Research: Where's The Beef?

The "Halo of Molecular Biology"

Box: Biochemical Confusion: Hormones and Neurotransmitters

 

RACISM AND BIOMEDICAL SCIENCE: DOES HISTORY REPEAT ITSELF?

Box: Crime and Human Nature: The Ideological Offensive

Adopted Children, Identical Twins, and Eugenics

"Heritability" Doesn't Mean "Unchangeability"

Box: Prequel to the Violence Initiative: the XYY Controversy

 

FIGHTING THE VIOLENCE INITIATIVE

Racist Ideology + Economic Crisis = Fascist Repression

What You Can Do: A Program To Fight Back

Further Reading

Box: Protests Against the VIolence Initiative

A Position Paper of the International Committee Against Racism (InCAR)

P.O. Box A3338, Chicago IL 60690 December 1993

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 Biological Determinism Serves Fascism

Oppose Racist "Violence Initiative"

Imagine a fifth-grade classroom --perhaps in the Bronx or in south central LA. The walls are crumbling and maybe leaking deadly asbestos. There aren't enough books or even desks for the thirty or so children. Anyhow, the books are at best boring and irrelevant, and at worst racist, sexist, and filled with patriotic images of the Good Ole' USA. In comes Deshaun, worried because his mother is sick and late because he had to get his little sister off to school. "Late again!" remarks his teacher nastily, "and take off that hat." Deshaun tries to explain, but the teacher barks, "Don't argue with me." "Aw, shit!" mutters Deshaun as he finds his place, the cap still on his head. Later that morning a government-funded medical researcher -- perhaps from Columbia University or the University of California -- visits the classroom. She is looking for ways to identify and treat potential violent criminals. Deshaun fits her description perfectly: already today he has lost his temper, argued with an adult, defied an adult request, used obscene language, and is obviously angry and resentful. Informing the teacher that Deshaun is sick with "Oppositional Defiant Disorder," the researcher signs him up. Soon he will undergo hospitalization for a spinal tap, an electro-encephalogram and a variety of other medical tests. Then he will probably be dosed with Ritalin, a form of amphetamines (speed).

This is not a scene from "Clockwork Orange." It is an all-too-real part of the "Violence Initiative" of the U.S. government's National Institutes of Health (NIH), a multi-$$billion program designed to apply biological psychiatry to potentially criminal youth, especially young black men. We in the International Committee Against Racism (InCAR) believe that the Violence Initiative is helping to justify increasingly fascist repression in U.S. cities. It must be stopped!

In this pamphlet we will:

• describe the Violence Initiative in more detail
• explain why the whole issue is one of political power, not medicine or public health
• expose the fallacies in the ways that science is used for this political agenda
• show how the present proposals link up with a long history of racist ideology
• propose a program of action to STOP THE RACIST VIOLENCE INITIATIVE.

 

What is the Violence Initiative?

Dr. Frederick Goodwin heads the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). He called the Violence Initiative the federal government's top priority for psychiatric research. He describes it as a public health approach to the large social problem of violence, focusing on "the violence-prone individual" in "high impact urban areas." The NIMH intends "to design and evaluate psychosocial, psychological and medical interventions for at-risk children before they become labeled as delinquent or criminal. This is the basic point of it all," he emphasizes, "to try to find out who might be more likely to go on to becoming labeled eventually as delinquent or criminal...identifying at-risk kids at a very early age before they have become criminalized." These children (some 100,000 or more of them) and their families would then be subjected to psychiatric intervention -- mainly drug therapies.

Violence Initiative: A High-Level Federal Policy

Goodwin went public with the Violence Initiative in February 1992. He had influential backers. The then Secretary of Health and Human Services, Dr. Louis Sullivan, appointed Goodwin to the top NIMH job after he made a series of vile racist remarks comparing black people to monkeys (see box), even though Goodwin's so-called "apology" for them included saying the practically the same thing all over again. Among rhesus monkeys, Goodwin repeated, "all males go off and form gangs, and half of them die ... by evoking aggression in others....Can we learn from that?" Then Sullivan claimed that the NIMH job was a "demotion" for Goodwin because of his racist remarks, when a news release from June 17, 1991 (8 months earlier) had already announced that Goodwin would get this job as part of an agency reorganization!

In June 1992 the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) proposed to coordinate work of seven different federal agencies within the Department of Health and Human Services into a $400 million Youth Violence Prevention Initiative. These agencies included the NIMH, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the Office of Minority Health. This proposal called for a mixed bag of research, ranging from prenatal care to gun control to biopsychiatric techniques of social control. The NIH Initial Research Group that evaluated this program proposed that "early onset of antisocial behavior is essentially genetic, persistent and cumulative, while later onset is environmentally determined and transient." As political scientist Ronald Walters has put it, "there is a strong bias within NIH for the early detection of ... biological markers for aggressiveness in individuals [which] ... would enable researchers to identify them as candidates for early intervention utilizing a variety of agents, including genetic alteration, drug therapy or psychosocial intervention strategies, so as to prevent them from commiting anti-social acts in the future."

Because of the controversy that erupted, and because HHS was tied up with "health reform," this proposal was shelved -- BUT ONLY TEMPORARILY.

In November 1992 the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the National Research Council (NRC) issued a 400-page report, Understanding and Preventing Violence. Work on this had been funded since 1988 by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the Justice Department, and the National Science Foundation. The report examined three genetic studies, none of which found any evidence for a genetic factor in violent crime. But it still called for more research on alleged "biological and genetic factors," "new pharmaceuticals that reduce violent behavior" and on whether "male or black persons have a higher potential for violence than others, and if so, why?" It complained that the government is "only" spending $20 million a year on violence research (a serious underestimate: the real figure iscloser to $100 milion) and wants the figure upped to half a billion dollars annually.

Clearly these three events -- the NIMH proposal, the CDC project, and the NRC report -- were closely related. It is not true, as the New York Times (11/13/92) suggested, that they built on "new findings in genetics, biology and neurobiology." They do build on nearly a decade of mass-media propaganda claiming that criminality is "in the genes." All assume that crime and violence are caused by "diseased" individuals and are best addressed by medical authorities.

There is another important link. The key "public relations" event of the genetics-and-crime campaign of the mid-1980s was the publication of Crime and Human Nature by James Q. Wilson and Richard J. Herrnstein in 1985. Within the next few years, Herrnstein wrote a pamphlet for the U.S. Department of Justice entitled Biology and Crime. And immediately after that, the Justice Department co-funded the NRC report that appeared last November -- just in time to support the Violence Initiative funding proposal!

 But Hasn't the Violence Initiative Been Stopped Already?

No. The only thing that was cancelled was a September 1992 conference on "Genetic Factors in Crime: Findings, Uses and Implications" cosponsored by the University of Maryland and the NIH Human Genome Project. This conference was cancelled due to the anti-racist protests of Dr. Peter Breggin and his Center for the Study of Psychiatry, Inc., and a newly formed Washington-based Coalition Against the Violence Initiative. As of October, 1993, NIH was considering restoring funding for this conference.

The conference brochure stated that "genetic and neurobiological research holds out the prospect of identifying individuals who may be predisposed to certain kinds of criminal conduct, of isolating environmental features which trigger those predispositions, and of treating some predispositions with drugs and nonintrusive [sic] therapies." Conference organizers invited as speakers some notorious advocates of the "crime-in-the-genes" theory, including Harvard's Richard Herrnstein and James Q. Wilson. They also invited a variety of liberal scholars, including a few well-known anti-racists. Some of the anti-racists were outraged when they found that their names were being used to give a liberal cover to a conference whose main purpose was to promote the "findings that research on the genetics of crime has already yielded and is likely to yield, and consider the utilization of those findings in criminal investigation and ajudication."

The cancellation of this conference was a small victory, but only a temporary one. The controversy also forced the government agencies involved to back off temporarily -- BUT ONLY TEMPORARILY -- from their most ambitious plans for the Violence Initiative.

Representative John Conyers (D, Mich), who criticized the violence initiative in Congress during the winter and spring, declared in May 1993 that the Clinton administration had scrapped it. But CDC representative James Mercy said that "we have an obligation to pursue this issue." The new head of HSS, Donna Shalala, announced she would develop a plan to address youth violence as "a significant health problem." (Detroit Free Press, May 19, 1993) According to Science (June 11, 1993), violence research "is very much alive. Nine institutes and two centers have funded about 300 research projects totaling $42 million for 1993." And various advisory panels have continued to meet through the summer of 1993.

A government official told members of the NIH special panel in June 1993 that "the violence initiative is 'dead'" but even this hand-picked panel noted that many ongoing NIH projects (including most of the research at NIMH) continue to look for "biological factors that may underlie violent behavior." (Science) In October this panel issued a preliminary report endorsing this research and calling for doubled funding. And it's not just NIH-NIMH. The prestigious MacArthur Foundation and the Department of Justice are currently funding similar studies. Don't be caught off guard!

 "VIOLENCE CONTROL" IS A POLITICAL ISSUE, NOT A MEDICAL ONE

The idea of "violence as a public health issue" was first proposed by liberals about a decade ago in order to call attention to the horrendous numbers of our youth destroyed by street violence every year. Homicide is the second leading cause of death among 15- to 24-year-olds, and the leading cause of death among black youth. If you add in suicide, the numbers soar still higher. Groups like Deborah Prothrow-Stith's National Institute for Violence Prevention (founded in Boston in the mid-1980s) and the San Francisco-based Physicians for a Violence-Free Society (founded in 1993) have taken up this cause.

The American medical establishment is pushing hard for the "medicalization" of violence. George Lundberg and former surgeon general C. Everett Koop made a formal appeal "to the American Medical Association family of journals to address their June 1993 issues to aspects of violence that are medically relevant." Many of them complied. The Journal of the American Medical Association (vol 267 #22) itself featured an editorial by Koop and Lundberg, a report by J. Mason "From the Assistant Secretary of Health, US Public Health Service: Reducing Youth Violence," and a piece from Surgeon-General Antonia C. Novello on "A Medical Response to Violence." "Medicalization" defines a behavior as an illness that requires treatment by doctors and other supposed "experts." Those who engage in medicalization try to remove social problems from public and political discussion by ordinary people. This arrogant elitism provides a cover for tightened social control.

Medicine As Social Control

According to Maisha Bennett, president of the Association of Black Psychologists, "The question which demands an answer is whether the DHHS Violence Initiative is protecting and promoting African-American life; or whether this initiative actually constitutes an act of violence against the very population it proposes to protect." We say that it is the second! The Violence Initiative assumes that individuals, rather than the system itself, is at fault. Even when public health officials acknowledge that unemployment, racism and poverty are among the causes of street violence, they quickly turn their attention elsewhere. As Ron Walters emphasizes, "when it appears that political leaders consider social strategies [to reduce crime and violence] too costly; they resort to the biomedical model."

The NIMH wants to have teachers and psychiatrists identify kids they think will cause problems for the government. Dr. Goodwin doesn't discuss the issue of seeking informed consent of the patients or even their parents. From his point of view, the children themselves are the public health threat and they must be treated, like it or not, as the government sees fit. The NIMH is focusing on children in "high risk areas," "the innercity," "low economic and educational level of parents," "female headed households" -- all easily recognizable code words for "poor black children." Goodwin's own remarks on this subject make it clear that the Violence Initiative is racist to the core.

The problem of violence is often posed in terms of gang warfare (which results in the majority of non-family murders) and other forms of street crime such as robberies (which are seldom accompanied by murder). But what of violence that is even more widespread and more deadly? What of the acts of well-dressed executives, such as those at Ford Motor Company who estimated that the Pinto policy decision would kill over one hundred people and then casually approved the policy? Or the hospital administrator who turns away an uninsured parent carrying a sick child, or the executive board that approves that policy, or the armed security guard who escorts the parent out of the building? What of landlords who pay arsonists to burn down unprofitable buildings? Or the police who beat up Rodney King and thousands more like him? Is there a national initiative to label these practices a disease based on the biology of these individuals?

Is the terrible fighting in the Balkans supposed to reflect a biological peculiarity of the Serbs, Bosnians and Croats? Have the death squads of El Salvador gone through periods of hormone fluctuations? Was U.S. aid to the Nicaraguan contras a public health intervention? Are pilots who bombed civilian areas in Vietnam, Panama, Grenada and Iraq considered to be infected with the disease of violence? What about the politicians and generals who issued their orders? When NIMH and CDC officials say they want to stop "violence" they're not talking about making pacifists out of the Pentagon!

 The decision to label some behaviors "violent" and others not, to subject those engaging in the former and not the latter to "public health" interventions, is inherently and inescapably political. In particular, it is racist.

 Violence Is Not Always Bad

Both supporters and opponents of the Violence Initiative often talk as if "violence" were always a bad thing. But this, too, is a question of politics. We agree that it's bad when teenage drug-dealers shoot it out over turf, often hurting bystanders as well as each other. We also think it's bad when governments convince or coerce working-class youth from different countries to shoot it out in imperialist turf-battles (for example, over oil). However, in some circumstances violence is not only justifiable but necessary. We would be a lot worse off if nobody had ever taken up arms against slavery, or if workers hadn't taken on the capitalists in violent battles for higher wages, shorter hours, and union recognition. We would be a lot better off if more people had violently resisted the rise of Nazi fascism.

A recent report of the American Psychological Association's Commission on Violence and Youth (August 1993) rejected the idea that violence is "in the genes," saying that it is a learned behavior that can also be unlearned. It recommended school-based programs to teach kids how to manage their anger, negotiate, adopt another's perspective, and think of alternative solutions to disagreements. Physicians for A Violence-Free Society wants doctors to "explore new ways of teaching patients non-violent approaches to conflict resolution."

That's fine when you're talking about a domestic disagreement or two kids on a playground. But what about a racist skinhead who's about to burn down a hostel full of immigrant workers? Or a strikebreaker running a truck over a worker on a picket line? "Opposing violence" should not become an excuse for building passivity in the face of racism or exploitation. Prothrow-Stith's group "is committed to advancing a national agenda for violence prevention that complements criminal justice efforts with public health prevention strategies." This sounds to us suspiciously like getting health care professionals to help the cops prevent justifiable rebellion!

We all need to learn how to distinguish friends or potential friends from real enemies. Most important, we must understand that all workers (employed and unemployed, of whatever color, "race," sex, religion, or nationality) have a common interest in smashing racism and opposing the economic violence and imperialist wars of the capitalist system. Among friends we need patience and persuasion, but the class war requires a multi-racial, militant, and sometimes violent fight-back. Think of abolitionists Nat Turner and John Brown, of Ida B. Wells Barnett (who wore two pistols to defy the KKK lynch mobs), of the women, men, and children who rose in arms against the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto and at Stalingrad, and of the militant youth of Soweto and the Intifada.

 "Crime": Who Breaks the Laws...And Who Makes Them

The concept of "violence" is often linked with the concept of "crime." For many, the word conjures up images of an unknown mugger on a dark street or a mysterious rapist climbing into a bedroom window: the image racist Bush brought to TV with the face of Willie Horton. In fact, we are constantly being bombarded with images of "crime": much of local radio/TV/newspaper "news" consists of crime reporting; there are dozens of police or private detective shows on TV, crime movies, even the comics. During the first half of 1993, this barrage was intensified as Clinton forces pushed for his big "anti-crime" bill. According to the New York Times, this media blitz led huge numbers of people to conclude that crime was the #1 social problem in the US.

Actual "crime" statistics are very unreliable. It is certain, however, that federal, state and local government expenditures for police are increasing: for example, from $4.9 billion in 1970 to $20.3 billion in 1983. State government spending for prisons increased from $1.1 billion to $6.7 billion over the same period. These spectacular increases have continued, most recently with Clinton's "crime bill" putting thousands more cops on the streets. As of 1992 more young black U.S. men were in the criminal justice system than in college, and a higher proportion were in the criminal justice system than among young black South African men. "Crime" publicity is meant to justify these huge costs to the taxpayers, while encouraging people to rely on the cops to protect "us" from "them."

Police records of crime and delinquency are virtually the only data "violence researchers" have to measure what they call the "epidemiology" of violence. But laws are enacted and selectively enforced by governments pursuing specific social ends. German judges have recently been accused of "right-eye blindness" for the lenient sentences they give to neonazi thugs. In the US, the violent act of killing someone may or may not be illegal, depending on the circumstances. Is the killer an Air Force bombardier over an Iraqi bomb shelter, or the official executioner of the state of Texas, or a New York City cop shooting wildly at a bank robber and his hostage and killing both? Then the killing will never show up in "crime" statistics -- or in "scientific" studies of biological causes of crime.

Many of the young urban men counted in crime statistics were convicted of selling drugs. But producers and dealers of other drugs, like alcohol and tobacco, are not counted as criminals. These racist killers market their products to children and youth (as with the "Joe Camel" campaign) and target predominantly black and latin neighborhoods. This has nothing to do with the biological characteristics of the "criminals" versus "non-criminals." It simply reflects the economic interests that have ensured that some drugs but not others are illegal. The U.S. tobacco, liquor, and pharmaceutical industries are the biggest drug dealers in the world.

 Capitalist System is the Biggest and Most Violent Criminal of All

Some 90% of U.S. law regulates and implements the capitalist system of private property. At the very core of this system is a form of armed robbery: the capitalists use the cops, the courts, and the treat of starvation to force workers to work more than they need to support themselves and their families. Then they take for themselves the surplus value the workers produce. This is especially clear in places like Haiti or El Salvador, where the most intense exploitation of the workers is enforced with the most brutal repression, backed by the U.S. military.

Meanwhile, capitalism perpetuates mass unemployment, hunger, and preventable disease -- three plagues that kill far more people than urban youth do. But none of this is officially "criminal." None of it violates the law. None of it prompts calls for the screening of children at elite private schools to identify likely perpetrators for early biomedical intervention.

The U.S. rulers claim they want to stop violence and crime when they themselves are the most violent criminals of all. Their profit system kills tens of thousands of people worldwide EVERY DAY through malnutrition and preventable disease. It kills hundreds of thousands more in wars for profit, and millions every time international capitalist competition leads to world war. But all this is perfectly legal, because the capitalists themselves make the laws.

In Capital, Karl Marx described how the breakdown of feudal society created a new criminal class: peasants uprooted from the land and forced to steal in order to eat. Rising capitalism used brutally harsh laws to drive these laborers into public workhouses and private mines, mills, and factories. Marx also analyzed how capitalists constantly introduce labor saving technologies in both agriculture and manufacturing to produce as cheaply as possible. Only thus can they survive in a competitive marketplace. But more production from fewer workers means a "relative surplus population:" increasing numbers of the unemployed. Marx pointed out that capitalism cannot even support "the slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him."

But the crisis of US capitalism has brought with it the destruction of many of the social programs that have fed the unemployed. So inevitably a certain percentage choose street crime: the capitalism of the poor. The bosses are happy to see working class youth high on drugs or killing each other rather than fighting back against the system. U.S. capitalism can't provide jobs or a decent future for most young people. Thus capitalism itself, by its very nature, creates the "crime wave" that the "violence initiative" falsely claims it will stop.

Violence and crime, however and whoever defines them, are political and social problems -- not medical ones.

 RACISM AND REDUCTIONISM IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE

"If we find a gene that increases the risk of alcoholism, manic-depression, or whatever, then we'll find what protein that gene codes for. If we then find out what the protein does, we can understand the basic mechanism of the disease. And if we understand the basic mechanism, then we can develop new treatments." -- Richard Cloninger, M.D., Psychiatrist, Washington University (as quoted in the Wall Street Journal)

This quote summarizes the assumptions of the current focus on criminal behavior: (1) that complex social problems can be reduced to simply-defined individual behaviors; (2) that the appropriate (scientific) approach is to focus on biological or "disease" aspects of such behaviors; and (3) that it is singularly important to focus on genetic determinants of those biological aspects. These same assumptions characterized eugenics movements of the 1910s and 1920s. Both the logic and the data purporting to support them are just as flawed today as they were back then.

 Blaming the Victims: Reducing Complex Social Problems to Individual Biology

The Violence Initiative equates the social problem of "crime" with the existence of criminal individuals. In Goodwin's words: "The predominant tradition in criminology...has been sociological. The working assumption of this literature is that social forces explain behavior and that the variables measured involve large groups of people....In contrast, there is [sic] the clinical approaches which are traditional in psychology and psychiatry, social work and the clinical disciplines. And here the assumption is that behavioral forces must be on an individual basis to understand the causal factors and to, in fact, intervene."

Goodwin has to admit the relevance of "macro-environmental factors," including poor housing and schools, deteriorating economic conditions, and even what he calls the denial of "experiences of significance," although he never mentions racism or mass unemployment. But instead of addressing these directly, he treats them as "risk factors which have been hypothesized to contribute to a younger age of onset and the higher probability of the continuation and intensification of violent behavior." For Goodwin, the root of the problem is the defective individual child.

The NAS-NRC report Understanding and Preventing Violence similarly focuses on "individual vulnerabilities" and proposes a search for "neurobiologic markers for persons with elevated potentials for violent behavior." It calls for large-scale studies following individuals almost frrom birth to adulthood, especially in the inner cities, looking for "biological and hehavioral characteristics of infants that increase their risk of growing up to commit violent crimes." Literature for the Maryland conference on "Genetic Factors in Crime" claimed that "genetic research holds out the prospect of identifying individuals who may be predisposed to certain kinds of criminal conduct, of isolating environmental features which trigger those predispositions, and of treating some predispositions with drugs and unintrusive [sic] therapies."

But crime (and even "violence") only exist in a social context. If it were somehow possible to isolate a young child from society, that child could not become a criminal (violent or otherwise) because there would be no laws to break! Or suppose that the child grows up to join an organized group of young men who ritually chant violent slogans and train with deadly weapons. Is this evidence that he had a "predisposition" to a "certain kind of criminal conduct" that was "triggered" by recruitment to a gang, a KKKlavern, or the Marine Corps?

In sum, we cannot even define -- much less understand or explain -- "crime" or "violence" without reference to the society in which it takes place. Any theory, biological, psychological, or whatever, that tries to reduce "crime" to "individuals predisposed to crime" is inherently flawed.

Diagnosing Children as Potential Criminals

The Youth Violence Prevention Initiative is not even aimed at those convicted of violating laws or perpetrating violent acts. It is aimed at grade-school children.

NIMH-funded research uses the diagnostic categories of the American Psychiatric Association's 1987 manual (DSM-III-R for short). This fat book has a section on "Disruptive Behavior Disorders." Of course it says nothing about the racist and repressive institutions that disrupt kids' lives, or about the fact that such institutions ought to be disrupted! Instead it pigeonholes kids (most often boys) as Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, and Conduct Disorder. For example, a kid who often loses his or her temper, often argues with adults, actively defies or refuses adult requests or rules, is angry and resentful, and swears or uses obscene language can be labeled with "Oppositional Defiant Disorder." Never mind that the kid might have good reason -- for example, if he or she is stuck all day with a racist teacher. If a child also is caught stealing on the sly at least twice, "often lies," and is "often truant" he can be labeled with the more serious "Conduct Disorder."

Psychiatrists have conned many parents (especially in middle-class families) into worrying about "hyperactivity" or "attention deficit." A child might earn this label by being fidgety (or just feeling restless, if a teenager), not remaining seated when required to do so, getting distracted from assigned tasks, not paying attention, talking "excessively", not seeming to listen, blurting out answers to questions before they have been completed, and often losing things.

Only a sick society would call such children "sick" and drug them into passivity. And, as the Breggins have pointed out, these diagnoses are racist. A white child from an affluent family might be labeled "attention deficit" while a working-class black or latin child with similar problems is labeled "oppositional defiant," mentally retarded, or severely emotionally disturbed.

 Violence Research: Where's The Beef?

Goodwin himself admits that "we don't have a matching agreement about measurements of behaviors which relate to violence which are not part of diagnostic criteria, such as scales for violence itself, scales for impulsivity, scales for aggressiveness." This is a significant admission, for "impulsivity" and "aggressiveness" have been key elements in reductionist theories of crime. For example, James Q. Wilson and Richard J. Herrnstein in their influential book Crime and Human Nature (1985) claimed there is a relatively permanent personality "trait", typified by the criminal's inability to "delay gratification of impulses." This abnormal type of person, say the authors, "cannot resist the rewards of an immediately available opportunity" and therefore "snatches a purse if it is ready at hand."

Wilson and Herrnstein referred to a few limited and questionable social-psychological studies, which lent their book the aura of "science." As the psychologist Dr. Leon J. Kamin put it in a detailed review in Scientific American (Feb. 1986), "tiny snippets of data are plucked from a stew of conflicting and often nonsensical experimental results. Those snippets are then strung together in an effort to tell a convincing story, rather in the manner of a clever lawyer building a case." For example, one study asked high school students whether they would save or spend certain sums of money, and found that "delinquents" were more likely than "non-delinquents" to say they would spend the money. However, this correlation, only held for small sums (25 cents or $2) and not for large ones ($20 or $200). As Kamin shows, it took some twisting to interpret this as supporting the hypothesis that "delinquents" are more impulsive or present-oriented.

But the patent limitations of reductionist attempts to ground crime in identifiable traits of pathological individuals, from the "criminal anthropology" of Cesare Lombroso a century ago to Wilson and Herrnstein in our own time, have not deterred Goodwin and his merry band from trying again.

 The "Halo of Molecular Biology"

Talk about biological traits usually slides smoothly into talk about genetics, as the quote from Robert Cloninger shows. "There is a genetic contribution to any social personality disorder," Goodwin told the American Psychiatric Association in May 1992, "The environment does not cause one to be violent or to develop a criminal record if there isn't a [genetic] vulnerability already there."

Molecular biology has had spectacular success recently in identifying genes related to specific diseases such as cystic fibrosis. The Human Genome Project, an effort to map and sequence all human genes, is moving along even faster than expected. It is being used as a cover for a tremendous resurgence in eugenic thinking, one which makes the "sociobiology" of the 1970s look like a tiny blip. Even some liberal scientists are jumping on the bandwagon: for example, efforts to prove that homosexuality is "all in the genes."

Ironically, the "genetics" studies cited by biocriminologists owe nothing to the new molecular biology that has flourished since the 1950s. No geneticist in the Genome Project would consider hunting for "crime genes," and if the Genome Project actually achieves its goal, advocates of social control through genetics will be hard-pressed to maintain what one critic, Professor Troy Duster, has called the "halo of molecular biology."

RACISM AND BIOMEDICAL SCIENCE: DOES HISTORY REPEAT ITSELF?

Reductionists often try to link "traits" such as criminality with biological observables. In 1887, the criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso claimed he could identify criminals by physical characteristics he called "stigmata." For example, he said thieves had small, restless eyes while sex criminals had bright eyes and cracked voices. In general, Lombroso said, the more "apish" a person was (thick skull, large jaw, long arms, darker skin) the more likely he or she was to be a criminal. This garbage did a lot of damage in its time, becoming important criteria in criminal trials. Who knows how many were unjustly condemned by Lombroso's racism?

The Harvard anthropologist E. A. Hooton set out in 1926 to update Lombroso's techniques with financial support from the Social Science Research Council and other sources. Unlike Lombroso, Hooton categorized his 17,000 research subjects according to nationality and race, as he measured 125 characteristics for each one. By the time his book Crime and the Man appeared in 1939, English and American critics found Hooton's views to be uncomfortably similar to those of the Nazis. However, he had meanwhile promoted his racist ideas among his graduate students, many of them future leaders of American physical anthropology, and his undergraduate pre-medical students.

Pro-Nazi "race hygienists" held their Fourth Congress of Criminal Biology at Hamburg in June 1934, building on two decades worth of "research" on the supposed genetic basis of crime. Within a few more years, most German universities offered courses on this subject. In 1936 the Nazi "Justice" minister funded fifty research centers nationwide to investigate links between genetics, race and crime, especially in young offenders. Three years later, Nazi boss Himmler ordered that genetic examination be a routine part of criminal investigation. As historian Robert Proctor put it, "Science thus conspired in the solution to the Jewish question....To be Jewish was to be both sick and criminal; Nazi medical science and policy united to help 'solve' this problem."

During the 1940s, Harvard professor W. H. Sheldon measured individual variations in physique, concluding that 200 Boston delinquents were preponderantly "mesomorphic" (square, muscular) in contrast to a group of 4000 college students. Wilson and Herrnstein cited this conclusion some 40 years later as evidence of the "constitutional" underpinning of the criminal personality "trait." As Kamin noted, however, they omitted mention of later studies such as one that showed a sample of Princeton students to be more "mesomorphic" than the Boston delinquents.

In the words of historian Elazar Barkan, Herrnstein and Wilson's book Crime and Human Nature (1985) "is a testimony that Hooton's ideas have been rejuvenated at Harvard." And as Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon J. Kamin said in their 1984 book Not In Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature, "There is an unbroken line of science from the criminal anthropology of 1876 to the criminal cytogenetics of 1975, yet the evidence and argument of determinist claims remain as weak now as they were a hundred years ago." (p. 25)

Adopted Children, Identical Twins, and Eugenics

Biocriminologists today actually use the kind of "family studies" originally popularized by eugenics advocates like Francis Galton and Charles Benedict Davenport in the early years of the century. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, it was the Jukes family who served as a graphic example of the inheritance of crime; in the 1910s they were joined in the textbooks by the Kallikaks and other families (real or imagined) given fictional names by the eugenists: the "Tribe of Ishmael," the "Pineys," the "Happy Hickory" family, etc. These ideas were introduced to a still broader public in the novels of Jack London and by the science-fiction writer Phil Nowlan in his racist "yellow peril" novel Armageddon 2419 A.D., the original "Buck Rogers" story.

More recent studies examine identical twins who have been separated very young. This movement got a big boost in the 1960s, when arch-racist William Shockley (of "genius sperm bank" fame) got Berkeley professor Arthur Jensen working on his 1969 Harvard Educational Review article. Jensen suggested that Head Start had failed (!) because the kids were just born dumb and that black/white differences in average IQ scores reflected inherited racial differences in intelligence. This let loose a torrent of racist propaganda, including Richard Herrnstein's claim that unemployment might run in the genes. It also provoked a storm of anti-racist protest, including the organization of the International Committee Against Racism (InCAR).

Princeton psychologist Leon Kamin showed convincingly that Jensen's whole argument depended on fraudulent "data" collected by Cyril Burt over a 40-year period. But meanwhile Jensen had inspired his student Thomas Bouchard to "research" the heritability of personality. In 1979, Bouchard began his "Minnesota Twins" study with a pair of separated identical twins named Jim, whose first and second wives had the same names, who both drove Chevys and who had given their dogs the same name (among other coincidences). Mass media publicity rounded up other pairs of separated twins who were eager to show off their identical tastes for particular brands of beer or cigarettes or their identical peculiar habits.

Bouchard's work was (and is) so shaky that he has been able to get almost none of it published in scientific journals. Biologists at his own school, the University of Minnesota, refuse to take it seriously. Some of the data he has published (in very obscure journals) contradicts his main thesis that personality is largely determined by the genes. But the mass media have uncritically brought Bouchard's ideas to a huge audience through popular science journals, Time and Rolling Stone magazines, the New York Times and the Washington Post, and the "Tonight" show -- to name just a few.

Today the new eugenicists rely mainly on a series of studies based on adoption records kept by the Danish and Swedish governments. This work was helped along by the Scientific Affairs Division of the NATO military alliance, which sponsored an "Advanced Study Institute" in Italy during September, 1986 on "Biolobical Bases of Antisocial Behavior'" and later published a volume of the conference papers edited by Sarnoff A. Mednick and a co-worker.

Goodwin singles out a 1984 paper in a series by Mednick's group on the chances of an offspring removed from a criminal biological parent developing a criminal record him/herself if the adoptive parents do or do not also have criminal records. He concludes from this study that "the environment does not cause one to be violent or to develop a criminal record if there isn't a vulnerability already there but if there is a vulnerability already there then certainly a bad environment can amplify it." Wilson and Herrnstein cite the same body of research.

There's a lot wrong with each one of these studies. For example, Mednick's correlations only held for crimes of property, and not for violent crime. In another study of female prisoners, their "crimes" included prostitution, adultery, bigamy, desertion, and transmitting a venereal disease. Is there supposed to be one gene that impels its possessor to engage in all of these behaviors? Could the biological basis of criminality be abolished by decriminalizing these behaviors? Or does the gene somehow allow its possessor to intuit what is and is not legal and then "code" for behavior that happens to be illegal? Any way you look at it, this is ridiculous. 

"Heritability" Doesn't Mean "Unchangeability"

Other criticisms apply to the whole genre of studies. For example, correlation is often confused with causation. Correlation simply means finding that two characteristics tend to be found together. Causation is a much stronger claim that the two are interconnected in such a way that one leads to the other. One of the most elementary lessons in statistics is that correlation does not imply causation, or even a common cause. For example, your age over the last ten years shows a strong statistical correlation with the size of the national debt: both have been increasing steadily. But did one cause the other?

Another problem occurs when researchers turn to "heritability" estimates. "Heritability" is a statistical method of estimating what proportion of the total variation in a trait that can be accounted for by genetic variation in a given population in a given environment. But popularizers, and sometimes the researchers themselves, confuse this statistical concept of "heritability" with the biological concept of "genetically determined" and the social concept of "unchangeable," which are not at all the same things. The heritability of a given trait might be extremely high and yet have (as Lewontin, Rose and Kamin point out) "absolutely no predictive power for the result of changing the set of environments." To illustrate: several diseases (such as phenylketonuria and Wilson's disease) are known to be single-gene disorders. However, whether or not the possessors of that gene develop the symptoms of the disease depends entirely on whether or not their environment includes appropriate medical or dietary interventions.

Major methodological flaws such as these have been dissected in detail in the case of the IQ controversy: for example, by Leon Kamin in The Science and Politics of IQ and by Lewontin, Rose and Kamin in Not In Our Genes. The same flaws reappear in the biocriminology studies now being cited in support of the Violence Initiative.

 

"What is the direct evidence for genetic control of specific human social behavior?" asked Stephen Jay Gould, answering his own question: "At the moment, the answer is none whatever."

FIGHTING THE VIOLENCE INITIATIVE

In an editorial provocatively entitled "Anatomy Of An Attempted Murder: How To Kill Research On Violent Behavior", Deborah M. Barnes, editor of the Journal of NIH Research, nearly drowned her readers in self-righteous indignation over the cancellation of the Maryland "Genetics and Crime" conference. "At the heart of the controversy," she asserted, "is a deep-seated fear of discovering that human behaviors, even violent ones, have biological roots." (We wonder whether Barnes think that this "fear" is genetic!) Opponents of the Violence Initiative, she suggested, are against scientific inquiry itself.

We disagree. There is no valid scientific rationale for the Violence Initiative. There have been no recent scientific advances which might justify its political agenda. There is no prospect of making scientific advances using the concepts and methods employed by advocates of the Violence Initiative. "But shouldn't we be willing to follow up any possibility?" some might ask. One might as well say that the Nazi doctors were justified in trying to link "Jewishness" to a variety of social evils because of the "possibility" that such a correlation might have been found.

 Racist Ideology + Economic Crisis = Fascist Repression

The Violence Initiative is being promoted by some of the most influential people in the U.S. government. And it ties directly into the ruling class strategy for maintaining "law and order" in a society coming apart at the seams due to social conflicts stemming from extreme racism and economic injustice. In Chicago, for example, the per capita annual income in the wealthiest neighborhood (the overwhelmingly white "Gold Coast") is $82,000 while in the poorest (the 100% black Stateway Gardens) it is $1600. That's a ratio of over 50:1, and that's just comparing income, not total assets!

President Clinton's aides have already admitted that he can't work economic miracles like eliminating the deficit or creating jobs. And it is precisely the economic crisis of the capitalist system that is both raising the "crime" rate and forcing the rulers to adopt increasingly repressive policies against justifiably rebellious people, especially against black and latin youth in the cities.

 The $billions that the federal government plans to spend on the Violence Initiative could create thousands of jobs outright. These jobs could provide much-needed services for the larger community. This "experiment" could test the hypothesis that rising crime is related to rising unemployment and poverty. Of course, providing decent jobs for everyone who needs one would take far more capital investment than the Violence Initiative, although far more social value would also be generated by putting everyone to work. That's why the Violence Initiative is such an attractive option to federal authorities in the first place!

In this period, the U.S. capitalists are experimenting with "pilot programs" to see what forms of fascist rule will be most effective for them in forcing the working class to submit to a rapidly declining standard of living. Should they rely on psychiatrists administering prescription drugs to ever larger numbers of schoolchildren? Will they try once again to sterilize or castrate those convicted of crimes, or to tamper with their brains? Will they resort to military-style "boot camps" in a National Youth Service, or to massive police occupation of black working-class communities and other policies now being implemented under the federal "Weed and Seed" project? Or will we be subjected to "all of the above"?

 One thing is already clear. The U.S. rulers are relying on "violence research" and its publicity to convince older workers and middle-class people, particularly white professionals, to blame black and latin youth for all the evils of the capitalist system. The Violence Initiative is one of the main vehicles for this fascist agenda. It must be stopped!

What You Can Do: A Program To Fight Back

1. Get the word out about what is going on. Write articles for newsletters of professional and community organizations, or for local newspapers, etc. Organize sessions at professional meetings, or presentations for local groups (churches, PTAs, etc.) Additional copies of this pamphlet are available from the International Committee Against Racism (InCAR), P.O. Box A3338, Chicago IL 60690 (312-663-4138). The Center for the Study of Psychiatry Inc. (301-652-5580) has made available a series of reports and a packet of clippings and reprints.

2. Organize to protest against the Violence Initiative using a variety of forums and tactics. Raise the demands that the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Donna Shalala, cancel the Violence Initiative, that all racist violence research be stopped, and that Frederick Goodwin be fired from the directorship of NIMH.

3. Fight for decent jobs and job-training programs, especially for young people. Build alliances among professionals, employed and unemployed workers, and the youth. Join the International Committee Against Racism (InCAR).

To contact InCAR:

East Coast Midwest West Coast Latin America

212-629-0002 312-663-4138 213-293-4538 A.A. 35498

P.O. Box 904 P.O. Box A3338 2601B M.L.King Jr. Blvd. Bogota, Colombia

Brooklyn NY 11202 Chicago IL 60690 Los Angeles CA 90018

"Biology of Violence" Research Continues

According to Peter Breggin and Ginger Ross Breggin, the hundreds of ongoing federally-funded violence research projects include:

· An in-house NIMH project headed by Judith Rapoport on "Neurobiology of Disruptive Behavior Disorders," scheduled to continue at least through 1995. This subjects children to spinal taps and experimental drugs -- at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars

· James M. Dabbs, a psychologist at Georgia State University in Atlanta, is studying "Testosterone and Anti-Social Behavior" by trying to measure testosterone levels in saliva.

· Rachel Klein of the Long Island Jewish Medical Center and Columbia University is studying Ritalin treatment for young teenagers with "Conduct Disorder," most of them black and latin. Other recipients of NIMH money for research on drugging children include Michael G. Aman of Ohio State University; Kenneth D. Gadow of SUNY-Stony Brook; Russell A. Barkley of the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and Robert K. McMurnett of the University of California-Irvine.

· Gail Wasserman, in the Department of Child Psychiatry at Columbia, is trying to identify "early predictors of anti-social behavior" in the younger brothers of black and latin men arrested in Manhattan and the Bronx by using EEGs, blood work, and neurological tests.

· Felton Earls at Harvard is running a multi-million dollar program, funded by the Department of Justice and the MacArthur Foundation, to screen over 10,000 young people (some of them prenatally!) to find potential criminals and delinquents.

· David Goldman got $200,000 from the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism for "Molecular Genetic Studies of Disturbed Serotonin Function" in which scores of "violent offenders," many of them children, have already been given spinal taps and brain scans.

· The NIMH has coughed up $12 million for a multi-site, multi-year experiment in drugging over 700 children with Ritalin. Recipients include Howard B. Abikoff, Long Island Jewish Medical Center and James M. Swanson of the University of California. A group of black psychologists, led by Dr. Jacquelyne Faye Jackson, have already attacked this study, linking it with the Violence Initiative.

 These and all other studies like them must be stopped.

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Prequel To the Violence Initiative: THE XYY CONTROVERSY

In the 1991 movie "Aliens III", the heroine's spaceship crashlands on a remote planet serving as a prison colony for Earthlings. The prisoners, all hardened violent criminals, are males with an extra Y chromosome (XYY). ("Why you want the help of us Y-chromo boys?" growls one.) The myth that an extra Y is a "criminal chromosome" was debunked 20 years ago. The fact that it surfaced in a recent movie testifies to the durability of the sort of scientific myths that underpin the Violence Prevention Initiative.

In the mid-1960s Patricia Jacobs noted that XYY males were over-represented in a mental-penal institution in Scotland. These XYY males were reported to be on the average taller than the average XY male and those institutionalized had been diagnosed as mildly retarded. The overwhelming majority of XYY males, however, are never arrested and are often not even identified as such. Jacobs speculated that an extra Y chromosome might predispose to aggressive behavior.

The media quickly sensationalized the XYY theory of crime, even misidentifying the mass murderer Richard Speck as an XYY male. A former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Bentley Glass, fantasized that abortion would "rid us of . . . sex deviants such as the XYY type." Meanwhile, Harvard researchers proposed screening the infants born in a Boston hospital for XYY, and observing them as they grew up for evidence of "aggressive" or "criminal" behavior. Fortunately, organized opposition by the radical group Science for the People prevented this study from being carried out.

Biology texts perpetuated the myth, arguing falsely that (1) the Y chromosome causes maleness, which is mediated by testosterone; (2) testosterone is linked to "aggression" (as in the 'roid rage of athletes on steroids); (3) more Y chromosome means more maleness, more testosterone, more aggression, hence crime.

But there was no evidence that XYY males had higher testosterone levels, and the association of "maleness" with "aggression" was just an old sexist stereotype. Soon the "criminal chromosome" hypothesis collapsed. XYY males were not over-represented in ordinary prisons, only in those for mentally-disabled criminals. Most embarrassing for the theory was a study of the crimes for which XYY men were incarcerated: nearly all had been jailed for non-violent property crimes ranging from shoplifting to embezzlement. So much for genes for "aggression."

 

But this didn't stop the NIMH from issuing a report in 1980, Behavioral Genetics, that claimed that "the extra Y does create some special risk for developing antisocial behavior" even though the same report admitted that no evidence had been found for this!

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One Dutch Family

 

"Study Finds a Genetic Flaw That May Explain Some Male Violence" -- this and similar headlines hit the New York Times and other newspapers in October 1993. The study was reported in the influential Science magazine, flagged by the editor as being of special interest. But just what did the researchers find?

* They studied only one family in the Netherlands.

* Some men in that family showed "erratic and often hostile behavior" ranging from shouting and cursing to arson and attempted rape.

* These men and some of their "normal" relatives have a specific genetic mutation that results in a specific enzyme deficiency.

That's it! Even the researchers themselves admitted that "even in a seemingly straightforward case like an enzyme disorder, the spectrum of the afflicted men's behavior cannot be explained by a single genetic defect alone." They do not claim to have found a genetic cause of aggression.

But that doesn't stop Dr. Markku Linnoila, scientific director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, from calling this very limited study "an important step in understanding the biological determinants of human behavior." It doesn't stop the Times from printing misleading headlines.

It's not enough just to do "good" and "honest" scientific research when the capitalists (through their mass media and their financial control over science) have the power to twist the results to meet their own needs.

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Crime and Human Nature: The Ideological Offensive

Although the Violence Initiative is relatively new, the ideology underpinning it has been promoted in the mass media for over a decade. In January 18, 1982, Newsweek featured Sarnoff Mednick, a California psychologist who purported to link "bad genes" with crime. This brief release was the beginning of a veritable flood. For example, The Washington Post (3/5/84) promoted the book Inside the Criminal Mind, by a psychologist named Samenow, that claimed that "...criminals commit crimes because they like to." The Post followed this up a few months later with a piece on how "British scientists invent method to identify genes of criminals." (12/23/84)

During the late 1970s, Herrnstein and Wilson taught an undergraduate course on "Crime and Human Nature" in the Harvard University "Core curriculum." Its most thoroughgoing exposition was James Q. Wilson and Richard J. Herrnstein's book Crime and Human Nature, which came "hot" off Simon and Schuster's press in 1986 straight into the open arms of the capitalist mass media -- including, for example, publicity on The Phil Donahue Show. Parts of Wilson and Herrnstein's book appeared in the Atlantic Monthly and The Public Interest. The New York Times Magazine (8/4/85) helped them along by featuring their answer to the leading question, "Are Criminals Made or Born?" Fortune magazine, wedded to Rockefeller money, ran a story on the Harvard duo, and The Wall Street Journal informed the U.S. business community that "Researchers Close in On Some Genetic Bases of Antisocial Behavior." This piece featured the work of Washington University psychiatrist C. Robert Cloninger.

Wilson and Herrnstein's book was heralded in a pre-publication piece in U.S. News & World Report, in which Wilson revealed the basic outline of the book and glamorized for the public the idea of the inheritance of criminal behavior. Time followed suit (October 21, 1985) with a piece linking Herrnstein's new claim that there are genes for criminal behavior with his old work based on the idea that there are genes for "intelligence." A second U.S. News article (Feb. 10, 1986) following the book's release to the general public also highlighted concurrent studies trying to prove the inheritance of criminality. These included work by psychologists, psychiatrists, and criminologists such as Cloninger (but not geneticists). Meanwhile, a piece entitled "Born to Rob? Why Criminals Do It", in The Washington Monthly (December 1985), citing Crime and Human Nature, also publicized the theory that certain people are genetically predisposed to a life of crime.

Perhaps the most important cheerleader for Wilson and Herrnstein was then-Mayor of New York, Edward Koch. He reviewed their book in the pages of Policy Review (Winter 1986), a publication of the extreme right-wing Heritage Foundation, under the provocative title, "The Mugger and His Genes." Koch praised the thesis that "certain individual biological -- indeed genetic -- traits, when combined with an uncertain moral environment, produce criminal behavior. Moreover, these traits can barely be changed, if at all." Koch also emphasized the application of the book's ideas to law and public policy: instead of government trying to "reshape human nature," he implied, harsher punishment (and perhaps even a revived eugenics program) was needed to reduce crime. Commentary followed suit with a piece by J. Adelson appropriately titled, "Back to Criminal Psychology." (March 1986).

The corporate interconnections among the U.S. mass media and the largest banks and corporations have been well documented. This media-industrial complex orchestrated a major promotional campaign for the "crime-in-the-genes" theory in the mid- to late 1980s, with Crime and Human Nature playing the leading role. It was not simply a "hot" topic: for example, Not In Our Genes (whose authors' credentials are more than a match for those of Wilson and Herrnstein) received no such coordinated ballyhoo.

Make no mistake: the U.S. ruling class selectively promotes that scientific work which provides ideological justification for its own repressive and exploitative policies. The U.S. rulers made very sure that millions of workers, students, and professionals were exposed to Wilson and Herrnstein's views . . . and not to those of their opponents. If people hear this stuff often enough, many begin to believe it.

Racism: Part and Parcel of Capitalism

The ruling class fears working class insurgency against its racist system. It is largely to avert this threat that the rulers promote racist theories of biological determinism, which label those impoverished by the system as morally, biologically, psychologically, or intellectually deficient (or some combination of these).

Racism is the main way that poverty is organized. A "minority" group (black people and immigrants in many U.S. cities; Filipinos and Koreans in Tokyo; Poles in Berlin; indigenous people in Latin America; Sri Lankans in Kuwait; etc.) is segregated and subjected to economic discrimination, and thus forced to bear a disproportionate share of the poverty and unemployment that affects the whole working class. The ruling class can then promote the idea that these individuals are themselves to blame for their own plight and for that of their "majority" working class neighbors.

In the U.S., pro-capitalist intellectuals have promoted the myth of an "underclass" of permanently unemployed and unemployable individuals whom workers and professionals are expected to see as a parasitic burden. In reality, many workers move back and forth between full employment, part-time work, and joblessness. Very few individuals are permanently unemployed. If anyone is a parasite, it is the commodities trader, the junk-bond dealer, the coupon-clipper or the banker who lives high on the hog and never produces any value at all!

So watch out when Violence Initiative advocates claim they are not racist. "Minority group over-representation [in crime statistics] washes out when controlled for social class in urban setting," says Goodwin (he of "urban jungles" fame). The NIMH is not targeting black people, he claims, just the lower class in the inner city! (Edward Banfield pioneered this approach in his 1968 blueprint for urban fascism, The Unheavenly City.) The pseudo-biological categories of "race" are so deeply entrenched in capitalist society that they no longer need to be invoked directly by those who hope to trade on racial stereotypes in the service of repressive social programs.

 FEDERAL PSYCHIATRIST COMPARES INNER-CITY YOUTH TO MONKEYS

"If you look at other primates in nature -- male primates in nature -- you find that even with our violent society we are doing very well. If you look, for example, at male monkeys, especially in the wild, roughly half of them survive to adulthood. The other half die by violence. That is the natural way of it for males, to knock each other off and, in fact, there are some interesting evolutionary implications of that because the same hyperaggressive monkeys who kill each other are also hypersexual, so they copulate more and therefore they reproduce more to offset the fact that half of them are dying.

"Now, one could say that if some of the loss of social structure in this society, and particularly within the high impact inner city areas, has removed some of the civilizing evolutionary things that we have built up and that maybe it isn't just the careless use of the word when people call certain areas of certain cities jungles, that we may have gone back to what might be more natural, without all of the social controls that we have imposed upon ourselves as a civilization over thousands of years in our own evolution."

 --Frederick K. Goodwin,then director of the Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration of the U.S. Government, in speech to National Mental Health Advisory Council, Feb. 11, 1992. (Goodwin, now Director of the National Institute for Mental Health, is one of the main promoters of the Violence Initiative.)

 Further reading:

Chase, Alan. The Legacy of Malthus

Gould, Steven J. The Mismeasure of Man

Hubbard, Ruth, and Elijah Wald. Exploding the Gene Myth

Kamin, L. The Science and Politics of IQ

Lerner, Richard J. Final Solutions: Biology, Prejudice, and Genocide

Lewontin, R. J., Stephen Rose, and Leon Kamin. Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature

Proctor, Robert. Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis

Progressive Labor Party. "Racism, Intelligence and the Working Class"

Rose, Steven, ed. Against Biological Determinism

Science for the People. Biology as a Social Weapon.

Biochemical Confusion: Hormones and Neurotransmitters

The particular "marker" currently favored by violence researchers seems to be a lower-than-normal concentration of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain or spinal fluid. (This is where the rhesus monkey studies came in.) As Goodwin told members of the American Psychiatric Association, "serotonin wasn't related to violence itself but it was related to impulsivity so the group that was impulsively violent ... had the low serotonin." Whether the low serotonin was caused by brain injury, genetics, or something else didn't concern him.

The main source for Goodwin's "monkey business" was the research of Stephen Suomi, who works in another part of NIH. But even Suomi admitted in an interview for the Journal of NIH Research that he only observed violent behavior in monkeys exposed to a stressful environment. "For monkeys living in benign circumstances, there is rarely a problem with violent behavior," he conceded. The problem was obviously not in individual monkeys but in their social environment -- exactly the opposite of the conclusion Goodwin wants to draw.

Goodwin probably also had advance knowledge of two additional NIH-NIMH studies published in the Archives of General Psychiatry (May or June 1992). One study of 29 institutionalized children at NIMH claimed to find correlations between frequency of later institutionalization or aggression and low concentrations of a serotonin by-product in the spinal fluid. But this study -- in which the authors found what they were looking for -- is extremely unreliable. Even the authors admitted that "the follow-up interval is relatively brief ... and ultimate outcome is still unknown." They give no indication that it used a "double-blind" system of evaluation, a basic procedure.

There is no non-invasive method of establishing the level of serotonin in the spinal fluid. The procedure, a spinal tap, can be painful and requires a hospital stay. (This procedure was performed on the men in the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, who were told the lie that it was part of a cure.) Especially for a child, the upsetting experience of hospitalization may itself be enough to set off a storm of hormonal/neurotransmitter disturbances. The NIMH study required spinal taps on all the children, a terrifying experience with serious potential complications and no conceivable benefit to the children themselves. It is no exaggeration to compare this study to the medical experiments of the Nazi doctors.

The other paper claimed to find similar results in free-ranging monkeys. But the researchers admitted they could not observe "aggressivity" directly and instead counted bite wounds and scars, evidence of victimization, not aggression! Even the authors admit that their findings might reflect a correlation between serotonin levels and stress, not aggression.

Scientific Evidence Makes a Monkey out of Goodwin

Goodwin wants to "tease apart some of the neurotransmitter differences from some of the hormonal differences." But in real-life human beings, neurotransmitters like serotonin and hormones like epinephrine always interact in a complex feedback system. For example, low serotonin levels are sometimes (not always) associated with a lower pain threshhold, which can make someone more "irritable" and perhaps more "on edge." But low serotonin is usually associated with low epinephrine, which lowers the basal metabolism rate generally and makes a person sluggish. Together, they sometimes (again, not always) lead to signs of depression -- but not of anxiety or impulsivity. And there is no good reason to think that these complex relations can be disrupted in a simple way. For example, when people have cancerous chromaffin cells in the gut, the adrenal cortex, or elsewhere, these cells secrete excess serotonin. But this excess has not been found to disturb circulation or other functions in a consistent way: the effects depend very much on what's going on in the rest of the body.

The relation between body chemistry and emotions/behaviors is not a one-way street. For example, if someone insults you and you get angry, your hormone levels will temporarily change. That doesn't mean that the hormones caused you to get angry!

In short, the sum total of scientific evidence in support of the Violence Initiative is ZERO.

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 RACISM AND PSYCHIATRY: PAST AND PRESENT

In the 1850s, the Louisiana physician Dr. Samuel Cartwright described a mental disease of slaves he called "drapetomania," which caused its victims to run away from their masters. The cure, he wrote in articles for medical journals, was a good whipping. In persistent cases, he recommended cutting off the rebellious slave's toes.

In 1967, the psychiatrist Frank Ervin and the neurosurgeons Vernon Mark and William Sweet proposed (in a letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association, in Science, and elsewhere) that the urban rebellions in Harlem, Watts, and elsewhere were caused by brain-damaged individuals. "Is there something peculiar about the violent slum dweller that differentiates him from his peaceful neighbor?" they asked. "We need intensive research and clinical studies of the individuals committing the violence." The cure, these Harvard doctors wrote, was psychosurgery, in which physicians deliberately mutilate someone's brain. This letter netted Ervin and Mark $108,930 from the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration of the Justice Department to use Boston City Hospital for screening populations for potential rioters and subjecting their brains to electric shocks. Sweet got half a million more from the National Institute of Mental Health. In 1973, UCLA hired Ervin to help establish a "center for the reduction of violence" there with some $1.5 million from the state of California and another $2 million in grants. Protests led by the Students for a Democratic Society, the Medical Committee for Human Rights, Dr. Peter Breggin and others eventually forced cancellation of this program.

Now Goodwin (with the support of the psychiatric establishment) claims that kids who don't submit passively to the racist jails that often pass for schools in the inner city suffer from the disease of "conduct disorder" and that kids who don't pay attention to their teachers are sick with "attention deficit." He claims that "conduct disorder," especially, is a "reliable" diagnosis because different observers are likely to diagnose the same kids as suffering from it. The same could have been said of "drapetomania".

"When someone starts talking about a racist conspiracy, the first reaction is surprise and disbelief because it's so far-fetched," said the chief of epidemiology at NIMH, Darrel Rieger. Sure, the U.S. Public Health Service funded the Tuskegee syphilis experiment from the 1930s right up until 1972, allowing hundreds of black men to die of untreated syphilis while unknowingly infecting uncounted numbers of others. Sure, the NIMH funded psychosurgery for riot-control. But now we're supposed to believe that the present "Violence Initiative" has nothing to do with race, nothing to do with racism.

Frankly, we don't see a lot of difference between the racist psychiatry of today and that of the past -- except that the ruling class is now more desperate than ever to find excuses for large-scale repression.

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PROTESTS AGAINST THE VIOLENCE INITIATIVE, 1992-93

Spring-Summer 1992: Protests by the Center for the Study of Psychiatry and the Washington-based Coalition Against the Violence Initiative force postponement of the Maryland "Genetics and Crime" conference.

Fall-Winter 1992: DC Coalition Against the Violence Initiative begins circulating petition to remove Goodwin as head of NIMH.

February 1993: Speakers at annual meeting of American Association for the Advancement of Science attack Violence Initiative

Spring 1993: International Committee Against Racism (InCAR) distributes over ten thousand copies of an earlier version of this flier to students, workers, and professionals across the US. Parents bring issue to PTA meetings in several urban school districts.

Summer 1993: DC Coalition members and others testify against Violence Initiative at Congressional hearings; speakers attack Violence Initiative at various professional conferences on sociology, the history and philosophy of science, etc.

October 1993: 250 public health professionals at annual meeting of the American Public Health Association attend session attacking Violence Initiative; group begins organizing for passage of official resolution in 1994.

November 1993: Society for Humanistic Sociology approves resolution to condemn Violence Initiative.

Fall 1993: Hundreds of students attend teach-ins against the Violence Initiative at the University of Connecticut (sponsored by InCAR, Black Student Association and Latin Student Association), University of Wisconsin (sponsored by InCAR, Teaching Assistants Association, Black Graduate and Professional Student Association, and Black Student Union) and elsewhere.

This is only a partial list. Please let us know about other activities (past and future) that we may not be aware of!

 

The U.S. rulers claim they want to stop violence and crime when they themselves are the most violent criminals of all.

Whether you look at the NIMH program from an anti-racist political point of view or from a biological point of view, the result is the same: it's dangerous nonsense.

The rulers are relying on "violence research" and its publicity to convince older workers and middle-class people, particularly white professionals, to blame black and latin youth for all the evils of the capitalist system.

"It is distracting and hazardous to think of violence as a public-health problem ... instead of looking at all the racism, poverty, decay of the schools, lack of health care." -- Dr. Peter Breggin, director, Center for the Study of Psychiatry

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• Black and latin workers get paid about 60% of what white workers get. Three times as many black babies die at birth as white babies.
• Black and latin people die an average of ten years younger than whites.
• One of every three young black men is in the grips of the criminal court system.
• Politicians and the media push bold faced lies that black people on welfare are lazy, drug addicts, gangbangers, and don't the deserve the bosses' welfare crumbs.
• Immigrants are said to be taking American jobs.
• The Mark Fuhrmans are becoming more open and racist terror more commonplace.
• Racist militia groups have tens of thousands of members.

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• Introduction
  • Only Communism Can End Racism.
• Part One:
  • Capitalism Can't Exist Without Racism / Nationalism
  • What Price Racism?
  • White Workers Hurt By Racism
  • Workers Who Believe In Racism Will Not Fight For Communism
• Part Two:
  • Communism and Racism Cannot Coexist
  • Communism Will Smash Racism
• Part Three:
  • Theories of Racism
  • Slavery in the Ancient World
  • Race and Racism Were Created by Capitalism
  • Slavery Ended, but Racism Continued
  • Join Progressive Labor Party

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• The Bosses Proposition 187: An Attack On All Workers
• Louis Farrakhan - The Black Nationalist the Bosses Love to Hate
• There is No Such Thing as Race

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Introduction

Some say there will always be racism. They are wrong. Communist revolution will lead to the death of racism.

Racism -- even the very concept of race -- has not always existed. Race was a term invented by the capitalist class to increase its wealth and profits. By systematically dividing workers by "race" and "nationality," the capitalist ruling class conquers us all. Black and latin workers get the most vicious treatment. That's why  they are the leading forces fighting back against the bosses.

Whole generations of black and latin workers are being wiped out by crushing unemployment. The bosses' racist police work closely with gangs to make sure that workers are drugged and  terrorized. Many families have at least one loved one in jail, strung out on dope, alcoholic, or caught up in the fast "profitable" life on the street that only offers an early grave. Racism cannot be defeated as long as capitalism exists.

Only Communism Can End Racism.

Only communism -- a system of worker's rule through which we share the work and the fruits of our labor -- can end racism. Unlike the capitalists, the working class has no need for racism and every reason to smash it.

Under communism you get up and go to work everyday, but not because your family will starve if you don't. You will go to work because the work needs to be done. Housing needs to be built. Shoes need to be made. Children need to be taught. Your work will make an impact, and society will view your efforts and your ideas as significant contributions. You will work side-by-side with people who look different from you, but you won't be taught the lie that there are different "races" of people. You will get what you need, your share of what society can produce. No group of people will get more or less than any other.

There is no room for racism in a communist society. For workers' rule to succeed, people must cooperate and care for each other, and for the common good. But it will not be easy to eliminate racism because we have been surrounded by racist ideas throughout our lives. Because racism is the lifeblood of capitalism, the only way we can eliminate racism is through communist revolution. To defeat racism we must kill capitalism -- with communist revolution. To make sure workers' rule survives and capitalism can't be revived, we'll have to stamp out races and racism once and for all.

Part One:

Capitalism Can't Exist Without Racism / Nationalism

We are living in a time of crisis. U.S. bosses are locked in battle with other capitalists from Japan, China, Germany, and other countries. They have to increase the exploitation of American workers to survive. They must increase their rate of profit to remain competitive in the world market. They know workers will fight back, so they have planned a fascist response: divide workers by racism and unleash vicious police terror on the working class.

We only see the tip of the iceberg when someone's video camera captures the brutal beating of a Rodney King by the LAPD, or Mexican immigrant workers by California Sheriff's police. Racist cops murder minority workers as part of their routine. In Chicago, a depressed black man was shot to death by cops as his mother and grandmother, handcuffed together in a squad car, watched. In Rockaway N.Y. two young black men were murdered by racist cops in the last year. Racist police terror has become the order of the day. The `Mark Fuhrmans' are the rule not the exception.

The capitalist bosses increase racism by leading white workers into the militias, the KKK and similar fascist groups, while encouraging black and latin nationalism. Certainly, bosses would much rather see us gunning each other down in the streets than have the guns turned on them by a united armed working class led by its communist party. The bosses also make billions from racist super profits paying minority workers less.

What Price Racism?

The bosses' capitalist economy is based on workers producing goods that the bosses sell. The capitalists pay workers a small fraction of the value of they produce, usually just enough to keep them coming back to work. This is what Karl Marx called "subsistence wages". The difference between the value that the workers actually produce and the amount the bosses give back to them is called surplus value. The bosses pocket the surplus value, keeping some of it to make themselves rich, and investing the rest to keep their companies ahead in their dog-eat-dog competition for profits.

The ruling class reaps enormous profits by extracting more and more surplus value from the working class. The fact that black, latin and Asian workers are paid less than white workers amounts to about one-third of all corporate profits in the U.S., more than $240 billion dollars. This is the dividend that capitalism collects from racism. In the U.S. for example, the median income for black families is only 57% of that for white families; latin families get only 63% of what white families do. Unemployment among blacks is more than twice as high as that among whites, and the difference in joblessness is almost as great for latin workers. The bosses save billions by letting schools, hospitals, and housing for black, latin, Asian and other workers deteriorate.

U.S.-born workers are not the only victims of racist pay differentials. Immigrant workers, from Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and Asia, are imported by the capitalists in huge numbers to work in sweatshops and other low-paying jobs.

The bosses also use racist and nationalist ideas to help justify their exploitation of workers in other countries, from Central America to Asia, where they pay a fraction of wages they pay in the U.S. The bosses make $66 billion per year in profits from workers in other countries.

A communist, class analysis shows that nationalism and racism are two sides of the same coin. Both are based on the idea that `my kind is better than your kind.' Both assume that there really are different `kinds' or `races' of people. Both call for people to unite with each other based on skin color, language, or country of origin, not based on class. Racist and nationalist ideas were created by the capitalists to divide us and get us to follow capitalists of our own "race" or "nationality".

White Workers Hurt By Racism

Racism is not a `black' issue or a `latin' issue. All workers are victims of racism. Profits are made by paying black and latin workers less than whites, but that is not the bosses' main benefit. Racist and sexist division of the working class drives down all workers wages. The wages paid to the poorest workers whether they be black, latin, women, or those with disabilities act like an anchor on all. Workers' wages are lowest in those areas where the divisions between workers are the greatest. For example, the South, which has a history of racial division, never experienced a strong union movement. Often, there were divided locals in a shop, one black and one white. The result? The South became the low wage haven of the capitalists.

"Workers' wages are lowest where divisions between workers are the greatest."

Today's garment industry in Los Angeles is surrounded by anti-immigrant racism and sexism. Wages of garment workers in L.A. are among the lowest in the country. And what is happening to the rest of L.A.'s working class? A massive assault by the bosses, jobs slashed, wages cut. Workers who fall for racism are cutting their own throats. Racism hurts everyone!

To the extent that workers are won to racist ideas, they won't take leadership from black workers, who are often the most militant. This was obvious in the response of workers to the O.J. Simpson trial and verdict. Black workers clearly saw the fight against racism and racist cops as the main issue, while many white workers were blind to this danger.

To the extent that workers let divisions such as language get in their way, they are kept from uniting. Such divisions stand in the way of the fight for a communist and egalitarian society. Until we have communism, we will continue to be wage slaves, exploited and suffering at the hands of the capitalists.

Workers Who Believe In Racism Will Not Fight For Communism

Racist super profits are the backbone of capitalist exploitation. Around the world, capitalists find groups of workers to scapegoat in order to guarantee themselves a foothold in the scramble for the highest profits. What is the real reason why Serbs are fighting Croats, Hutu are fighting Tutsi, or the Indians of Guatemala and Mexico are under their governments' guns? Is it that these groups instinctually and naturally hate each other? Hell no! It is capitalists dividing people in their own battle for high profits.

These international examples prove that nationalism is not the answer, it's racism in another form. Black nationalism, Mexican nationalism, any nationalism, really translates to black capitalism, Mexican capitalism, capitalism period. A boss is a boss is a boss: no matter what the color of their skin or the borders they live within, the boss lives to exploit the working class.

Why is it that in the 1990s, the capitalist class has been able to eliminate hundreds of thousands of jobs, lower wages for millions more, bust unions, employ scab labor, force people to accept jobs with no insurance benefits, close down hospitals, raise class sizes, cut programs in working class public schools, shut down welfare, and triple the number of workers in jail - all without facing a huge uprising by the working class?

The main reason is that our class today lacks class consciousness. Instead of seeing ourselves as the working class, we see ourselves primarily as `white' or `black' or `latin' or `men' or `women'. This is the deadly effect of racist and sexist ideology which pours forth from every newspaper, movie, TV and radio, from every style of music, and from our congress and schools.

Over a million black workers came to the Million Man March in 1995 because of intense hatred of racism. Nationalist march organizer, Louis Farrakhan, took this hatred and channeled it into supporting black politicians and businesses and away from working class unity against capitalism. Nationalist politicians have made plans for a Latin March, and a Family March to continue to divide workers and divert their anger.

Until we overcome racist ideas and racial divisions, and develop an iron hard unity, we will be defenseless against the bosses' attacks on us. Racism disarms us. It keeps us from fighting for communist revolution and destroying the capitalist system.

Part Two:

Communism and Racism Cannot Coexist

Communists recognize that racism is at the heart of the capitalist economic and political system. Karl Marx once said "labor in the white skin can never be free while labor in the black skin is in chains." To fight capitalism is to fight racism. This is why the communist movement has historically been in the forefront of the anti-racist movement.

The working class of the Soviet Union consolidated state power in the early 1920s. Workers all over the world were inspired by the Soviet example. Less than ten years later, when a major depression hit worldwide, they took on the bosses in a huge wave of class struggle. In the United States, the old communist party led a massive union organizing drive as well as a mass movement of the unemployed. For the first time since the Civil War, these movements were integrated and consciously anti-racist. Unions up until the 1930s were mainly segregated unions, organized by craft. The communists led black and white workers into industry-wide unions, which brought the bosses of steel, auto, mining, rubber, electrical and other corporations to their knees. These movements of the 1930s won many of the reforms that are being taken from us now: the forty-hour week, unemployment compensation, social security, and welfare. Workers could see what class unity produced. Tens of thousands of workers joined the communist party.

Then came the greatest anti-racist struggle of the 20th century: the defeat of the Nazis. Nazi ideology was based on the lie that one "race" of people was superior to all others. The struggle against the Nazis was led by the Soviet Red Army. Millions of workers around the world took part. The defeat of the fascists inspired anti-racist struggle around the world. In Africa, the victory against the Nazis was followed by anti-colonial revolts in one country after another. In the United States, black soldiers came home from the war ready to take up the struggle against segregation at home. The civil rights movement was born. It involved tens of thousands of workers and students in struggle against racism, especially in the form of segregation. People who were trained in the communist led union movement of the 1930s and the communist led anti-fascist fight of the 1940s helped militant youth to lead this new movement. This movement led to the elimination of some forms legal segregation, but it clearly did not succeed in eliminating racism or all forms of segregation. The civil rights movement ended without accomplishing these goals because it was led by a liberal ideology, the idea that racism could be defeated without overthrowing the capitalist system.

The key features of that ideology were anti-communism and nationalism. Nationalism was used by the ruling class to attack the black-white unity of the movement. Nothing other than communism is more terrifying to the bosses than unity of the "races." Not even "militant" black nationalism. When civil rights organizations began throwing out white workers and students in the late 1960s, it was only a few years before those organizations themselves died.

What was won by nationalism? Profits for Johnson products and other black-owned corporations. Jobs for a few highly educated, upper-middle class blacks, helping to exploit black workers for major corporations. Political victories for racist politicians like Mayor Richard Hatcher, who presided over the decline of steelworkers' standard of living in Gary, like Mayor Wilson Goode, who firebombed a black neighborhood in Philadelphia, like Mayor Tom Bradley, who supervised and defended the racist attacks on black and latin workers in Los Angeles. As expected the nationalist-based organizing against Proposition 187 in California has only produced political victories for latin politicians and businessmen. Latin workers are only losing -- jobs, health care and education. There are thousands of black and latin politicians in office across the country -- and racism is getting worse. These politicians perform a tremendously valuable service for the ruling class: they keep oppressed black and latin workers in the polling booths instead of fighting back.

The downfall of the civil rights movement happened at the same time that the entire international communist movement collapsed. The Soviet Union was already state capitalist. In China, the right wing was moving that country in the same direction. The communist party of the United States was advocating "people's capitalism," talking about a peaceful transition to socialism and encouraging anti-racists to vote for liberal ruling class politicians. The anti-colonial movements in Africa threw out the European governors, but stopped short of overthrowing capitalism, merely putting a black face on the exploiters. The misery that existed before continues now, intensified, all around the world because the old communist movement deserted its mission of smashing capitalism and establishing communism. Liberalism and nationalism lead to more racism!

Progressive Labor Party emerged during this turning point. In its short history, PLP has taken on the fight against racism in every aspect of our organizing. The Ku Klux Klan, which still plays the racist terrorist role it was founded for, can't move without confronting violent PLP opposition. In 1975, when racists organized to attack black schoolchildren in Boston during the school busing campaign, PLP organized workers to smash them. In every job and every community where we organize class struggle, racism is the key pivot point. We lead workers to resist anti-immigrant laws and racist policies in schools and hospitals.

In addition to pushing Klan-type racists and black nationalists, the rulers revived an openly racist line, led by well-known university intellectuals. These people, in the service of capitalism, published books and went on speaking tours saying they had "scientific" evidence that white people were genetically superior to black people -- basically, Hitler's line of a "superior race." For twenty-five years, this campaign has been going on; now, they are claiming that everything from intelligence to unemployment to violent behavior is racially based. This line is no more scientific than the idea of "race" as a whole. If even something as simple as skin pigment cannot be genetically determined, it is obvious that complex social behaviors aren't. Our party has organized to chase these guys off the stage and expose their fascist nature from the early 1970s until today. The fight against racist ideology is key to winning workers and students to understanding the true nature of racism as the cornerstone of capitalism.

Communism Will Smash Racism

Communism is the opposite of capitalism. As Karl Marx said, capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction, because capitalism created the working class in order to exploit it. The society we live in today, worldwide, is divided into two main opposing classes: the capitalist ruling class and the working class. These two classes are locked in a struggle over who will get the product of workers' labor. This struggle will only end when it becomes a struggle over power and the working class overthrows the capitalists.

The ideology of communism arises out of the lessons of this class conflict. Communist ideas are the most advanced ideas of the working class' struggle. The communist Progressive Labor Party is the party of the working class, which leads our class in the struggle to overthrow capitalism and end exploitation. Communist revolution will establish rule by the working class, eliminating the whole system of capitalism, the capitalist government and the capitalist class. It will replace these things with an egalitarian society, in which all aspects of life are planned by the working class for the needs of everyone, rather than for the profits of a few.

"Communism can only succeed by winning the working class to reject all racist practices and ideas."

What is the place of racism under communism? Very simply, racism and communism cannot coexist. Communism can only succeed by winning the working class to reject all practices and ideas that are based on one group of people getting better or different treatment than some other group. That is the major lesson which our party has learned from the failures of the old communist movement. Despite being the first country in which the working class took power, and the leader of the greatest anti-racist struggle of the century, the Soviet Union turned into a capitalist country once again: so did China. This is because the old communist parties did not attack inequality in all its forms. Wages continued to exist, meaning some workers had more than others; national differences continued to exist, including separate countries; discrimination against people based on nationality or language continued; women and men were not treated equally on the job or in politics.

Progressive Labor Party has taken a lesson from these mistakes of the past. When the working class takes power next time, wages and money must immediately be abolished. All forms of inequality -- whether according to race, nationality, language, sex, level of education, or whatever -- must be fought tooth and nail. The principle of communism is "from each according to their commitment; to each according to their need." This means everyone will get what they need, within the limits of what society can produce. In relationship to racism and other forms of inequality carried over from capitalism, we know that some people will need more than others. For instance, capitalism has destroyed the health of black and latin workers at a faster pace than that of white workers. Some black and latin workers under communism will need more medical services, at least at first. Racism has led to segregated neighborhoods under capitalism. Minority neighborhoods that have been systematically left to run down will need more of society's resources to fix them up. All neighborhoods will need to be integrated. All aspects of political, economic and social leadership will need to be integrated. There are many similar examples.

Some will object to this plan. All of the racist ideas that exist today will still exist after workers take power. As long as any inequality continues to exist, racist ideas will continue to have life. Every aspect of racism, from the material to the ideological, will be fought in a planned, systematic, detailed way. Obviously, racist groups like the KKK will not be allowed to exist. Anti-racist education will be an important aspect of communist life.

Part Three:

Theories of Racism

History shows us that racism has not always existed and that it did not develop from ideas. It developed from the need for cheap labor in the earliest stages of capitalism, and from the need to divide and conquer workers in order to control them.

Slavery in the Ancient World

Racism in the United States emerged along with slavery, in the 1600s and 1700s. But slavery existed in the world long before that.

Ancient societies were based on slavery; however slavery in these societies, was not based on "race". A person became a slave by being defeated in war, or sometimes because of bankruptcy or punishment for certain crimes. Slaves in Rome came from what is now England, France, eastern Europe, north Africa -- wherever the Roman Empire had conquered. (In fact, the word "slave" comes from Slav -- the name given to people from eastern Europe.) Roman slaves came in all colors, from the palest to the darkest. In north Africa, black Africans were the largest group of slaves, but there were also white, Christian slaves. In those days, slaves could sometimes be set free, and if they were, they would be equal to the other free people. Racism as we know it did not exist.

During the "Middle Ages" in Europe, there was a good deal of contact with African societies. At that time, Africa was more advanced than Europe: it had large cities, universities, huge armies and a lively trade with Asia and the Mediterranean. Africa was admired as a continent of gold and riches. European churches dating back to those days have statues and paintings of black saints in them. Racism as we know it did not exist in those times, either.

Race and Racism Were Created by Capitalism

When slavery developed in the "New World" in the sixteen and seventeen hundreds, it was a new type of slavery. It was slavery within the capitalist economy. But slave labor is not the usual form of labor under capitalism: wage labor is. So why did slavery develop in the Americas? And why is it that the slaves were Africans?

When the British began to develop profitable plantations in their American colonies they faced a serious shortage of workers. They also faced the problem of labor discipline because it was easy for workers to leave the plantations or escape to the Indians.

The British tried several ways of dealing with the labor shortage. The main one, at first, was indentured servitude . Under this system, unemployed people from England were convinced to come to America or were kidnapped. They were forced to work without wages to pay off their passage to America from England, usually for seven years. People were packed like sardines into the holds of ships for two to three months. Sometimes, fewer than half of them survived the trip. When people died, they were tossed overboard. Once they arrived in America, they were auctioned off to buyers. Husbands, wives and children were separated. These were white, English people: racism had nothing to do with it. It was just plain capitalist greed.

Indentured servants were brutally exploited. The plantation owners and the colonial government violently disciplined these workers. Runaways were punished by hanging, burning, being staked in the sun or shot. It was also legal to increase their seven-year contract as punishment for various misdeeds. At this stage, most indentured servants did not even live until the end of their seven year contract.

The shipmasters and merchants who brought white laborers to the colonies also went to Africa to get laborers. Slavery of the early, pre-capitalist type existed in west Africa at that time. When different groups went to war, people who were captured became slaves -- not for life, and not without rights, but still slaves. British and other European merchants offered money to purchase captured slaves, and they found the African slave owning rulers willing to sell.

"Africans joined whites as indentured servants and went through the same hell..."

For several decades, the Africans brought to North America joined whites as indentured servants. They went through the same hell, from the boat passage to the auction block to the beatings and harsh conditions. In the colonies, they worked and lived alongside the whites. There was no barrier between white and black servants: their common enemy created an intense solidarity, which overcame the superficial differences in language and cultural habits. They lived, worked, and married together. They often ran away together, and on several occasions they rebelled together.

In the 1660s all this began to change -- drastically. England cut back on white emigration. The industrial revolution was beginning so more workers were needed in the factories at home. British capitalists also gave massive support to the African slave trade. They had made a decision to base the American economic system on human slavery, and the supply of labor from Africa was cheap and plentiful.

"British capitalists made a conscious decision to base the American economic system on human slavery."

The slave trade was immensely profitable. The profits from buying and selling African workers, combined with the rape of gold and silver from South and Central America, provided the capital to drive the engine of the industrial revolution. Europe became the top dog in the world based on the enslavement of American Indians and Africans.

At this time, the colonial ruling class (plantation owning families like the Washingtons, Jeffersons, Mathers and Byrds: the "fathers of our country") began to legalize slavery. At first, some plantation owners began to hold certain Africans for life, rather than for seven years. Then lifetime servitude for black servants became law. In 1662 came the "principal of heredity," which declared that, legally, if the mother was a black slave, the child would also be a slave from birth.

But in a society which until then had paid almost no attention to skin color, a number of questions had to be answered: what was a black person? What was a white person? What was a child whose parents were different colors? At this stage, the concept of race needed to be made up. To do this, more laws were passed. The Virginia legislature, in 1672, defined a black person: anyone with one black grandparent. (Hitler used a parallel law to define a "Jew".) This was very significant: if it was necessary to pass a law to define a "race," it is obvious that at that time, people did not think of each other as belonging to separate "races."

These laws represent the beginning of the idea of racism. The idea was that whites were superior to blacks. This idea was very profitable, so it didn't bother the capitalist rulers of the colonies that it was a blatant lie. They used the idea to justify all past, present and future exploitation and abuse of black people, Indians, and later, other "people of color."

The final step in this process was that black people lost all their rights and became the property of the slave owners. Every aspect of the trade and of slavery became even more brutal. Millions of black people were murdered by capitalism in this process.

But the colonial rulers still faced a big problem: both whites and blacks resisted the new system. Although most historians today say that racism came about because Europeans were "naturally" prejudiced against Africans because of their skin color, the truth is that skin color was an excuse for racism, not the cause of it.

"The truth is that skin color was an excuse for racism, not the cause of it."

Blacks and whites did not view each other as different races. They had to be trained to. This training was ruthless and carefully planned, and continues to this day! The legislatures, the churches, the courts and the press were all used in the campaign. The purpose was to separate whites and blacks in order to control both. This made slavery possible. It also made it possible for the ruling class to make huge profits off the backs of poor white workers and farmers who were divided from their black brothers and sisters, and confused by racism about the cause of their poverty.

Laws were passed to punish whites who had black friends, or who ran away with black people, and vice versa. Laws were passed against interracial dating and marriage -- which people ignored for more than a century. Black and white people were punished by torture, maiming and death for breaking these laws. Opponents of the system were branded, castrated, starved to death, roasted to death over fires. White and black rebels were beheaded, and their heads put on poles along the roads as warnings.

Despite all this, rebellion and unity continued. Whites in general still had not learned to be racist. They openly disobeyed the laws.

The ruling class began to offer rewards to each group to betray the other: Indians were offered bounties for betraying black runaways, blacks were given minor rewards for helping to fight Indians, whites were used against both.

The bosses eventually "persuaded" many white workers to identify with their masters instead of their black brothers and sisters. As racism came to be more accepted, conditions for whites got even worse. The plantations system grew, forcing them off any land they might farm, and out of any jobs they might get.

The truth, hidden by the bosses, is that racist ideas and practices were forced on the working class by one hundred years of violence, laws and propaganda. White workers as well as black slaves became victims of it. The capitalists who devised racism clearly knew what they were doing.

"Racist ideas were forced on the working class by one hundred years of violence and propaganda."

The capitalists made racism an essential part of their system, but they never succeeded in squashing the opposition to it. Because racism (then and now) is against the direct interests of the working class, many workers, both slave and "free," continued to unite in rebellions against slavery. Although they were defeated by the overwhelmingly superior force of the government, there were hundreds of slave revolts in the United States, a great many of which involved white workers and farmers. The event which touched off the Civil War was the Harper's Ferry raid. This carefully planned raid was intended to be the beginning of an army of escaped slaves and a guerrilla war in the south. It was an integrated raid, and one of the main organizers was John Brown, who was white.

Slavery Ended, but Racism Continued

The Civil War was in part a heroic uprising against slavery by slaves themselves, with the support of many workers from the northern states. The Civil War was also a battle by the industrial capitalists of the north to control the nation, because the southern slave owners were trying to split off and set up their own, separate country. Although they were not particularly out to end slavery, the northern leadership discovered after several years of war that they could not win the war without unleashing the power of the slaves. So, eventually (no thanks to Abe Lincoln), slavery in the U.S. was abolished.

But racism did not die along with it. Capitalists both north and south knew what a profitable thing racism was. And they were terrified by what happened immediately after the Civil War in the south.

At the end of the war, former slaves settled on the old plantation land. (The owners had been driven off during the war, or could no longer control their former slaves.) Poor white workers and farmers came to join them. These integrated forces created a mass movement which took over the plantation land, farmed it communally, set up its own, integrated schools, and elected black and white workers to the state and federal governments. Clearly, this was a no-win situation for capitalism. It had to be stopped, by any means necessary.

The former slave owning ruling class of the south sat down with the bankers to work out a plan to retake the land and bring the workers under their control. They knew it couldn't legally be slavery, but they would opt for the next best thing. To accomplish their plans, they needed a vicious, violent campaign similar to the one which, two hundred years earlier, had established slavery. In the 1870's the Ku Klux Klan was born. The bankers, plantation owners, local police and court officials, and their sons, relatives and friends, put on sheets and went out at night to terrorize the communal farmers. The northern capitalists helped out by withdrawing the anti-racist federal troops which had occupied the south since the Civil War's end.

The newly united ruling class succeeded in forcing the former slaves back to work for next-to-no wages, and in forcing a resegregation of workers. Within a few decades, a fresh crop of racist laws appeared across the south, forbidding any close relationships between black and white. (These were called the Jim Crow laws, and they remained on the books until the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.) The bosses had what they wanted: a beaten down working class, divided by race. Now the northern industrial capitalists had a huge pool of workers to draw from as they expanded their production in the early 1900s. Black workers by the tens of thousands came north to work in the booming factories of Chicago, Detroit and New York. And with them, the bosses made sure, came all the ideas and institutions of racism. What had worked so well to ensure profits and a weakened, divided work force in the south, they wanted in their factories and cities as well.

Join Progressive Labor Party

Racism is necessary to capitalism. The only way to erase it from the face of the earth is for the working class, led by its communist party, to violently overthrow the capitalist government and establish its own power. Bring that day closer! Join and build the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party today!

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The Bosses Proposition 187: An Attack On All Workers

In November 1994, California passed Proposition 187, which keeps undocumented ("illegal") immigrants from getting food stamps, welfare benefits, and medical care. The law also requires teachers, nurses, doctors and other public employees to turn in anyone they think does not have a green card. Then they will use their racist police to arrest these so-called "criminals". The bosses are trying to convince white and black workers that immigrant workers (mainly latino) are sucking up the state's resources. The next step in the plan is to cut all services to legal immigrants. At the same time, the bosses are slashing services for all workers. They will eliminate hospitals, schools and other services in working class communities. They are laying off thousands of workers at L.A. County hospital, all of whom are "legal" and are white, black, Asian and latin. They are planning 16,000 more layoffs.

Meanwhile, the same bosses continue to import undocumented workers so they can super-exploit them in the garment sweatshops. Proposition 187 is the bosses' attempt to divide immigrant workers from other workers. It is a classic example of the divide and conquer tactics of the bosses' racism.

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Louis Farrakhan - The Black Nationalist the Bosses Love to Hate

The bosses love Farrakhan because of his main message to black workers: the enemy, he tells us is the white man, Jews, and Asians, not the capitalist system. The answer to racism that he offers capitalism: black capitalism. Invest in businesses (his businesses), and the profits will set you free. He tells workers he will use the money to build a black business empire which will ultimately lead to their liberation. He has built an empire that serves himself and leaves the workers out.

Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam control businesses from Beverly Hills, California, to Bronwood, Georgia, to Chicago's South side. He runs a number of private security firms, soap and cosmetic companies, a publishing firm, grocery chain, fish franchises, a $5 million restaurant in Chicago, and two clothing firms. Farrakhan promises, that by contributing to his businesses, workers will be part of a billion dollar entity and reap the benefits, but there is as much chance of this than as winning the Lotto.

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There is No Such Thing as Race

If you watch how young children act, you will realize that we learned our ideas about race and nationality -- we weren't born with them.

Two and three year old children usually do not think skin color is very significant. If they are in an integrated day care situation, they are as likely to say, "hey look at that purple kid," identifying another child by the color of a shirt rather than by skin color. It's not that the children don't see each other's skin color, it's just that it means no more than the color of their eyes, or the color of their clothes. As they grow older, they soon learn how significant skin color is in capitalist society.

As much as the capitalists want to force us to believe in race, however, there is no such thing as a race of humans. All humans are part of the same species. There are variations in the physical appearance of humans, but they are insignificant. There is no medical test that will show what so-called "race" a person belongs to. The physical differences between humans are much smaller than you would find in many other species. Think of all the distinct breeds of dogs, horses or cows, for instance.

Many people think that the differences in appearance between people is inherited -- that it's "in the genes." This is a very small part of the story. After all, somewhere between 95% and 98% of human genetic makeup is the same as chimpanzees'. If only 3% to 5% of our genes account for the huge differences between us and chimps, imagine what a tiny amount goes into the small variations in human appearance.

In fact, genes cannot code for race. Many genes code for most human physical characteristics, not just one. There is no such thing as a "black" gene or a "white" gene. All human genes exist in all populations of humans, from all parts of the world. Some appear more frequently in one area than another. There is actually more genetic variation within any given population than there is between groups of so called "races".

The average human being is brown. A smaller number of people are black or white. This is similar to other traits: for example, height. Most people fall in a middle range of height, with a smaller number very tall or very short. There are a few physical traits controlled by only one gene. They are, for example, the ability to curl your tongue, or whether your ear lobes are attached. Those traits don't correspond to the capitalists' needs to divide people into races, however. So nobody even notices them

WHAT IS SEXISM?

Sexism means that, on the personal level:

*a 35-year-old Los Angeles textile worker, a wife and mother of three, works a 50-hour-week for $200 and then labors another 30 hours a week in her home without pay as cook, laundress, and nurturer;

*a 20-year-old single Indonesian woman earns a wage of $40 per month in an electronics factory that hires only women;

*a 60-year-old Mexican grandmother rises early six days a week, makes tortillas for her family, and then puts in another ten hours making tortillas and selling them in downtown Taxco;

*a 42-year-old New Jersey homemaker and mother of four finally leaves her husband after repeated beatings, but loses her house and ends up with her children in a welfare motel full of drug dealers and prostitutes;

*a 10-year-old Sudanese girl shrieks in pain as her aunt, wielding a razor, cuts off her clitoris;

*a 35-year-old Canadian accountant snaps at her underpaid El Salvadoran nanny while she angrily ponders how her own boss shrugged off her suggestions at work;

*a 58-year-old Russian agricultural worker mumbles her resentment that she has to do heavy manual labor while her male co-workers have been trained to operate tractors and receive considerably more pay;

*a 24-year-old pregnant Chinese agricultural worker, having just learned that she is carrying a girl, wonders whether her in-laws, in need of a male grandchild to help support them in old age, will pressure her to have an abortion and try again for a boy;

*a 40-year-old Haitian immigrant to the U. S. , recently divorced, realizes that he never took the time to get to know his children, and that now it is too late to build a relationship with them;

*a 50-year-old waitress, exhausted after eight hours on her feet, wearily fixes dinner while her husband, also just home from an exhausting day, puts up his feet and has a beer. She could be from any country.

 On the statistical level, sexism means that:

*female Korean workers make 51% of men's wages;

*of the 188 workers killed in the May 1994 Thai Kader Industrial Toy Company fire, most were young women;

*between three and four million women in the U. S. are battered by their partners every year;

* ?million women die every year in the world from illegal abortions;

*largely because of prostitution and polygamy, over 10% of the population of Uganda--some __ million people--is dying of AIDS.

*in 1991 and 1992, 6. 7 million female fetuses were aborted in India when it was learned that they were female.

From the above examples, we can conclude that sexism comprises both practices and ideas. It relates to the work women do--whether they're paid a wage or not. It is present in a range of societies--capitalist, socialist, formerly socialist. It signifies women's inferior status in relation to men and, at times, their violent victimization by men.

Sexism is both the practice of superexploiting women workers and the ideology of gender dualism and male supremacy that justifies this practice.

In this pamphlet PLP will present a communist analysis of sexism. We shall argue that sexism, while often felt in the most intimate aspects of our lives, is rooted not in "human nature" but in capitalism's drive to benefit from the grossly underpaid, and often unpaid, labor of women. We shall point out that sexism hurts working- and middle-class men, both materially and psychologically, and they have a direct interest in fighting it. We shall also argue that only communism--the abolition of classes--can put an end to sexism. The fact that socialist societies have failed to emancipate women is proof not that sexism is not based in class society, but, on the contrary, that only the complete eradication of wages and classes can lead to equality between women and men.

WHAT ARE THE ORIGINS OF SEXISM?

Ruling elites would like us to believe that men's possession of superior social status is a function of their innate superiority. Various patriarchal religions--Islam, Christianity, Judaism--teach that God has ordained men to rule over women. Right-wing social "theorists" argue that women's subordination is derived from men's greater strength and aggressiveness.

 

 

Sociobiologist E. O. Wilson, for example, argues that child-rearing is not a role socially assigned to women but a "natural" function.

Anthropological evidence, however, indicates that women's oppression is not a function of "nature" but is instead closely linked with the rise of market societies and class divisions. Hunter-gatherer societies--the types of social formations in which practically all humans originally lived, and do so for tens of thousands of years--are largely egalitarian. There may be a division of labor based upon gender: among the Inuit of the Arctic, men conduct the seal hunt, whereas women make clothes from skins; among the Mbuti of Zaire, hunting is carried out largely by women beating the bushes and men holding the nets. But because the entire social unit is engaged in labor that is necessary for the group's survival, there is no devaluation of "women's work. " Indeed, often the tasks undertaken by women--gathering nuts and fruits, hunting small game--are more crucial to the group's survival than the big-game hunting undertaken more exclusively by men.

Moreover, in most hunter-gatherer societies, the division of labor is not rigid. Among the Mbuti, women and men can change roles in the hunt. Among the Innu (also known as the Montagnais-Naskapi) of Canada, women would work for hours without interruption smoking deer hides while their husbands cared for the children. While women in such primitive communalist societies carry out biological reproduction, there is no separation of "home" and "work," and all labor is seen as productive activity. Furthermore, power is shared on a gendered but egalitarian basis. When Iroquois warriors wished to carry out raids, they had to get the approval of the women, who could supply or not supply food for the expedition as they chose. Women routinely have enjoyed full respect in communalist societies, which have been organized along matrilineal lines (that is, in which kinship is determined by descent on the mother's side).

Communists do not want to romanticize the life of hunter-gatherers: a life close to nature is harsh in many ways. Moreover, the model of "separate but equal" characterizing gender relations in many communalist societies is foreign to modern notions of social equality. (In many hunter-gatherer societies, gods are Great Hunters and goddesses are Great Mothers. )But it is important to be aware that most of human history has been lived in an egalitarian mode. The vast social gaps between classes, genders and races in present-day society--which to many of us seem as "natural" as the air we breathe--are actually of relatively recent appearance and short duration.

As societies become more settled and capable of producing surpluses, however, the differences between "men's work" and "women's work" become more significant. In times of scarcity one tribe raids another and carries off its surpluses--and its women, who take on value by virtue of both their gathering and their

 

 

child-bearing (and hence labor-producing) capacities. In most societies the first slaves were captured women. Moreover, the kinds of surpluses typically amassed by men--herds, pelts--are more readily exchanged in trade. As a society moves away from the production of use values for subsistence, then, and toward the production of exchange values for trade and profit, the gendered division of labor previously based upon mutual agreement becomes increasingly coercive. Women work for men--whether husbands or owners--rather than for a group in which they are equal participants. As Engels pointed out in On the Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, class society becomes patrilineal, then patriarchal (that is, characterized by male rule), as wealthy men come to insist that their assets be passed on to their own children.

The link between women's subordination and class hierarchy emerges most dramatically in places where colonizing powers encountered societies that were either communalist or at least less rigidly stratified. Anthropologist Eleanor Peacock, for instance, notes that the fur traders and Jesuits were shocked by the sexual egalitarianism of the Innu and instituted patriarchal order by issuing payments only to male members of the tribe; it was only then that cooking and cleaning became institutionalized as women's work. While previously the !Kung San women of South Africa had spaced their children widely and foraged freely, after their families were settled on profit-producing cattle stations they became economically dependent on their wage-earning husbands and home-bound by large families.

Colonizing Europeans, accustomed as they were to women's subordination, clearly viewed equality between women and men as a threat to the "brave new world" they wished to establish around the globe. But we should be aware that in many places they encountered class societies where sexist inequality was already firmly entrenched. In India, for example, women performed unpaid domestic labor long before the arrival of the British. Among the Yoruba of West Africa, it was not just Europeans but also local male entrepreneurial capitalists who displaced women traders and undermined their authority. It was the growth of class society, and not just the arrival of European colonialism, that deprived women of economic autonomy and social status.

Sexist inequality in precapitalist societies, while pervasive, has taken quite different forms. In Islamic countries, most women have been kept behind the veil and in the home; men do not even permit them to go to the market. Among the Yoruba, by contrast, women have for centuries functioned as traders--even though the commodities and trade routes they control have become increasingly less central to the economy. In Vietnam, women have traditionally performed heavy work in the fields, whereas in Cuba their agricultural work has generally been light and sporadic. What the range of tasks grouped as "women's work" reveals, then, is that the sexual division of labor has little to do with the intrinsic nature of any kind of work. It is the fact of the label "women's work" that matters, for this dismissive categorization enables the superexploitation of vast numbers of female producers.

SEXISM AND CAPITALISM

While sexism clearly predates capitalist society, capitalism reinforces--indeed promotes--sexism every day because it profits enormously from sexism. And while certain aspects of male dominance in various countries--e. g. , India, China--can be traced to survivals from earlier modes of production, the main reason for women's continuing subordination here as everywhere is their continuing subordination to capital. Some college-educated women in industrialized countries may have gained greater economic and personal independence in the past century. But for the vast majority of the world's women capitalism has meant more degradation and harder work. The liberation of women is inseparable from the destruction of capitalism.

Women as Waged Workers

Since the beginnings of capitalism women have worked for wages as part of what is known as the "formal sector" of the economy. The "dark satanic mills" of the textile industry in England and the United States were originally staffed by women (and children) laborers working up to 16 hours a day under horrific conditions. In recent decades, however, there has been an explosion in the use of women workers in factories all around the world. Some 70% of the workers in the Mexican maquiladoras (factories close to the U. S. border) are women, as are some 80% of the workers in the Asian electronic industry. In Indonesia and the Philippines, women workers--usually young unmarried women--work for pay that is often less than subsistence. In Java, young women jute workers, even if they live at home, do not make enough to cover lunches, clothes and bus fare to and from work. Korean women in electronics factories in a few years often wear out their eyes peering into microscopes and have to return home or seek other jobs. Haitian garment workers can earn as little as 14 U. S. cents per hour, with no fringe benefits. Governments throughout Asia and Latin America ban unions and legislate the terms of women's employment, effectively acting as pimps to the johns of international capital.

Capitalist corporations justify their superexploitation of the world's women by arguing that these women's wages are marginal to their families' earnings. Never mind that more than half the male workers in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, are unemployed or underemployed, or that one-third of the families are in fact headed by women garment workers: the view of women's waged work as secondary to their "real" function as housewives permits, indeed justifies, the gross undercompensation of women's work. Moreover, corporations invoke stereotypes of women's presumably "feminine" essence to rationalize women's assignment to routine, exhausting tasks. A Malaysian government advertisement to international corporations boasts of the "manual dexterity of the oriental female"; INTEL in Malaysia proclaims that its female employees are "more disciplined and easier to control" than men. Exploitation of the labor power of young women of color offers higher yields than any other industrial investment in the world today. The conjunction of racism and sexism is, from the standpoint of capital, unbeatable.

There has also been a global explosion in sex tourism; somewhere between 200,000 and 700,000 young women from desperately poor rural families sell their bodies to wealthy male tourists in Bangkok alone. Many young female landless peasants driven to the cities in China's brutal return to "free market" capitalism can make a living only through prostitution; international and local businessmen are happy to hire their services. For millions of women around the world, capitalism means selling not only their labor power, but their bodies, in order to survive.

Women as Unwaged Workers

Important as the superexploitation of women's waged labor is to the contemporary capitalist economy, this is only one facet of women's profitability to capital. For the majority of the world's women work hard but receive no wages at all. More than half of the world's work is currently expended in the "informal sector" of the economy, that is, the self-employed production of handicrafts and foodstuffs for the market. In Latin America, 60% of urban workers are not proletarians (wage-earners), but peddlers, traders, and craftsworkers. Most rural laborers are in fact "semi-proletarians" who work for wages but also have to farm the land and engage in petty craft production to eke out a livelihood. But informal-sector female employment is not restricted to the so-called "Third World. "Many U. S. women workers supplement their meager wages by working many extra hours as "representatives" for Amway or Avon. The "family wage" (the wage one worker earns to support an entire family) has always been more of a myth than a reality for most of the world's male workers. But in recent decades capital has paid below-subsistence wages to more and more workers, both male and female. It is understood that non-wage-earning members of these workers' households--overwhelmingly women--will find a way to supplement the family income: hence Guatemalan women's production of purses and tablecloths, Indian women's weaving of lace mats, U. S. women's door-to-door hawking of soap and perfume.

From capital's point of view, such production is simply an extension of a woman's household tasks, undertaken in her "leisure" time. And, given the "housewife-ization" of women, many women also see their own work in this way. Peasant women in Oaxaca, Mexico, refer to their petty commodity production as an extension of their householding activities: not "trabajo" (work) but "ayuda" (helping out). That such a use of women's "free" time results in a 16 to 18 hour workday is conveniently overlooked. From a technical standpoint, capital does not "exploit" these nonwaged workers, since they--or their husbands-- usually market their product themselves, either to a consumer or to a middleman. Clearly, however, the existence of these "invisible" nonwaged informal sector workers--who, often working with their children, can bring in more than half of the family's annual income--allows capitalists to pay waged workers much less and thus increases the surplus value they gain.

Women's work is profitable to capitalists not just in the formal and informal sectors of the economy, however, but also in the home itself. For the great majority of the tasks that can be classed as "housework"--cleaning, shopping, cooking, laundering, mending--are essential to producing, on a day-by-day basis, the labor power (of both female and male workers) that creates surplus value for bosses at the point of production. Moreover, the various functions associated with child care--from help with homework to visits to the park to plain old "babysitting"--are, while often pleasureable, clearly "work" that is necessary for producing the next generation of laborers. Since most housework and childcare tasks are performed by women, in their status as housewives women actually work for free for the capitalists as daily and generational producers of labor power. But because this work is done in the home and is seen as part of a woman's "natural" function, it is not, in fact, usually seen as productive work. It is in fact invisible.

Women's work in the home is, then, productive activity, and not simply an extension of their "reproductive" role. Or, to put it another way, reproduction is production, insofar as both modes of activity create value. Again, as with women's nonwaged work in the informal sector, it cannot be precisely said that capital "exploits" women in the home, insofar as housework and childcare do not create surplus value. But it is capitalism that turned the definition of "work" into "wagedwork" to begin with: throughout most of human history work has had nothing to do with money. Clearly capital would have to pay waged workers a lot more if all the tasks involved in producing labor power were turned into wage-earning jobs! That wealthy people themselves have always viewed housework and childcare as "productive" tasks is shown by the willingness of the rich to pay workers to cook, launder, shop, and clean house for them, as well as to take care of--even "mother" and at times breastfeed --their children. What is apparently a "natural" expression of "reproductive" femininity for working-class women is apparently not required for the bourgeois woman in her "reproductive" role.

It is relatively useless to debate whether women are paid low wages because they are viewed as housewives or whether they are treated as housewives because they receive lower wages than men outside the home. The main point is that capitalism, building upon developments in earlier forms of class society, has managed to destroy the domestic economy in which men and women together contribute use values toward the community's survival. Around the globe capitalism has created dual spheres: a "public" world of work, where proletarians, both male and female, exchange labor power for wages; and a "private" world of the home, where women--regardless of how many hours they have worked in the formal or informal sectors--presumably fulfill their biological and spiritual destinies as nose-wipers and floor-scrubbers.

Women and the Welfare System

Particularly in the U. S. , there has recently been a vicious sexist (and racist) assault on welfare recipients. Women without partners who are trying to raise children are stigmatized as irresponsible, stupid, and sexually promiscuous. The "problem" of welfare is seen as the "problem" of the welfare recipient.

What is obscured in the fascist attack on poor mothers is that it is capitalism that has created the welfare system. AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) is a way of getting that sector of the workforce which is employed to pay for sustaining--and raising the children of--that sector of the workforce which is condemned to be unemployed. When the government designates 7% unemployment as "normal" and the Federal Reserve continually raises interest rates (and thus cools down the economy) whenever unemployment goes much below this level, it is pretty clear that many millions of U. S. residents are meant to be unemployed. The problem is not that welfare recipients lack the drive to work; the problem is that there are no jobs--much less the kinds of supports (decent health insurance, day care, etc. ) that single mothers need if they are to raise their families.

The bosses set up, and still need, welfare. Originally it was a way to enable a certain sector of the employer class to hire very poorly paid male workers (e. g. , hotel, restaurant, and other service workers) and have their children--sometimes born out of wedlock--supported through other workers' taxes. Until fairly recently, the U. S. economy has had jobs of one kind or another available to the largely marginal work force coming out of these welfare families. Recently, however, with the fluid movement of capital across national borders, U. S. capitalists have no real need for this sector of the population. They can hire workers in Indonesia for much less. They would just as soon most welfare recipients dropped dead. Hence the current drive toward welfare "reform," by which is meant cutting and eventually eliminating welfare.

While the bosses no longer need welfare recipients or their children as workers, however, they still need them as scapegoats. At a time when millions of U. S. workers are losing their jobs, their benefits, and their former wage levels, welfare recipients supply a convenient target for the anger and frustration of that segment of the working class which is still working. The sexist and racist stereotypes that have been pouring out of the mass media are rooted in this effort to deflect workers' hostility from the bosses to mothers who are without partners and without waged jobs. Lies are spread that welfare recipients stay on welfare for many years (whereas the average stay is two years); that they have large families (whereas the average welfare family size is 1. 9 children); that they are mainly black (whereas about the same number of white and black families are on welfare). It is no accident, moreover, that one of the main targets of Charles Murray's and Richard Herrnstein's recent racist pseudoscientific tract The Bell Curve is welfare recipients.

Welfare recipients are not "pathological"; capitalism is.

SEXISM AND MEN

Some people might grant that women are superexploited under capitalism. But they might still object that men and women just "are different" in fundamental ways that go far beyond the obvious anatomical differences between the sexes. They might also say that men benefit from sexism.

Communists disagree. We think that it is not male "nature," but the way that both men and women are socialized in a society based on maximizing profit, that leads some men to oppress women. We think, moreover, that men do not benefit from women's subordination, even though some men enjoy certain advantages that function as bribes to bind them to the existing class system. Communists see sexism as a class question and argue that it is directly in the interest of men and women of the working and middle classes to fight sexism.

Violence Against Women

Some would cite male-against-female violence as proof of an intrinsically aggressive--and oppressive--male nature. There is no doubt that violence against women is one of the most grotesque features of human interaction in class society. In traditional Vietnamese society, men could take concubines, but unfaithful wives were trampled by elephants. Chinese women for centuries had their feet bound to signify their subordination to men. To this day millions of adolescent girls undergo cliterodectomies (that is, removal of external genitalia) in parts of Moslem Africa to guarantee that they will experience little or no sexual pleasure, and thus be "faithful" to their husbands when they marry. But again, violence against women is not just a "Third World" problem. In the United States, domestic violence is rampant: the single most common cause of women's ending up in hospital emergency rooms is battering by a spouse or partner.

Hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of people in the world accept such manifestations and levels of violence as normal. Some men, attempting to justify their own or their friends' brutal practice, argue that it's "natural" for a man to beat "his" lover or wife--even that doing so makes the relationship sexier. Some women, while hating men for what they do, cynically agree that violence is intrinsic to men. The fact that male violence against women occurs in all segments of society, moreover, is sometimes cited as proof that this practice is not based in class oppression, but in "maleness" as such. 

Communists argue that men's violence against women--while often apparently unrelated to economic issues--is in fact inseparable from men's perception of women's subordinate social positions as both waged and unwaged producers. If women, no matter how hard they work, are viewed and valued as second- or third-class contributors to a family's welfare, then men can assume that their superior earning power entitles them to power and authority. The primary models for human relationships in class society, moreover, are models of dominance and hierarchy. Bosses--whether Chinese landlords, African heads of state, or Italian capitalists--relate to "their" producers as masters to underlings. In dominating women within the family, men simply reproduce the main form that "difference" takes in society at large.

Furthermore, while men's violence toward women creates disruption and instability in many homes, it is a source of great stability to capital, insofar as it encourages male producers, however exploited and oppressed, to think that there's someone they too can kick around, that "a man's home is his castle. "Domestic violence is a safety valve for capital, siphoning off vast amounts of middle- and working-class men's frustration and anger at their own subordination and alienation. Moreover, it reciprocally strengthens capitalism by teaching children very early that inequality and oppression are "natural": if they witness patterns of hierarchy and brutality between their parents, they grow up expecting to find these in society at large.

The main form of human relationship in class society is possession, and the dominant mode of interaction is coercion. While slavery is out of date in all but a few places in the world, wage slavery is the order of the day. At least for the time they labor in the office or factory, workers are essentially "owned" by their bosses. Moreover, they are essentially coerced into labor; if they do not work, they are "free" to starve. Small wonder, then, that love--or what is called love--so often takes the form of possessiveness, and that struggle manifests itself as force. Men may take advantage of their (generally) superior upper-body strength and higher energy hormones when they brutalize the women they live with. But male anatomy and hormones are not the causes of present-day male violence; capitalism is.

How Men Are Hurt by Sexism

Some might concede that male violence against women both reflects and strengthens a hierarchical and coercive social order. But they might nonetheless maintain that men benefit from women's subordination. After all, they generally make higher wages than women. While it is true that in different parts of the world women make somewhere between 50% and 75% percent of what men earn, this does not mean that men gain from that differential. Men's wages are held down precisely because women's are especially depressed. If a woman makes $3. 60 a day sewing baseballs for Rawlings in Haiti, it makes it all the easier for other U. S. -owned Haitian industries to hire men at, say, $4. 50 a day; the few elite families who own 44% of Haiti's wealth laugh all the way to the bank. The differential between male and female wages serves mainly to divide the working class and hurts all workers. If male workers buy into the notion that women's work is worth less than their own, they are not only making it easier for bosses to superexploit women; they are also making it easier for the bosses to exploit them.

But, some might argue, even if men do not benefit from sexist pay differentials on the job, many husbands, fathers, and brothers still have someone to do housework for them. If a man and a woman both stagger home from work, and if she then starts cooking and doing laundry--and helping kids with multiplication tables at the same time--while he flips on the TV and has a beer, isn't he gaining from the situation?

In one sense, yes: there's nothing enjoyable or fulfilling about washing sheets and scrubbing pots. To the extent that husbands or fathers shoulder such tasks off as their wives' or daughters' "natural" domain, they get more leisure time for themselves. (In fact, the average husband adds about five hours a week to a wife's domestic workload. )By treating the women they live with as domestic servants, men become complicit with capitalism's systemic inequality and, in particular, with the ideological rationalization for paying women so little for the work they do. The few privileges that a man gains from having a woman perform various personal services for him are thus greatly outweighed by the losses he experiences from the fact that (1) his daughter earns less than a subsistence-level wage as a maquiladora worker; (2) his wife earns so few dollars for all the hours she puts in as a "self-employed" Amway distributor; (3) he himself has just been reclassified and taken a big pay cut because his boss now assumes that every adult in the modern family of the 1990s is working. Men's entrapment in the notion that women's work is less valuable than their own--and that much of it should be performed for free, for "love"--is one of the principal barriers to their understanding their own exploitation.

There needs to be an out-and-out struggle against sexism in the ranks of the working class. Without such a struggle, it will be impossible to make a revolution. Men workers must recognize that women are and have always been leaders in the struggle for emancipation of the dispossessed--from the abolitionist Harriet Tubman to the Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai to the many women currently leading garment factory organizing internationally as members of PLP. Sexist behavior will not be tolerated in the ranks of the revolutionary movement we are building. Any man who considers himself a fighter for the working class is practicing complete hypocrisy if he does not participate fully and equally in the domestic production taking place in his own home every day. To lift a hand in violence against a female member of his class is, moreover, to commit a counterrevolutionary act.

Sexist Culture as a Reinforcement to Male Supremacy

While men should be struggled with sharply around issues such as domestic violence and domestic labor, violent and oppressive male behavior is reinforced daily by the mass culture of capitalist society. Our world is full of images that reinforce the notion that women are inferior and should be owned and dominated by men. Take the typical liquor ad gracing an urban billboard: a woman in an evening gown with a deep cleavage smiles seductively next to a bottle of vodka. Some might contend that displaying the half-clothed body of a young woman beside a bottle of liquor does not signify her inferiority. But this use of the woman's image objectifies her sexuality. She is--visually at least--made "available" to all who gaze upon her. She is, moreover, linked to the vodka as an object of possession: if you buy the vodka, you also get the woman, or at least a happiness comparable to what her actual presence might bring. (The "you" here is assumed of course to be male; women join in the gazing game by narcissistically identifying with the model. )While male images are also commodified--that is, turned into objects for sale--by advertising, rarely are men reduced to their bodies, or body parts, the way women are. If this is not inferiority, what is?

Mass culture barrages men and women with negative representations of gender that shape sexual desire along the lines of oppression, violence and possession. Pornography brutally objectifies women, much of it associating the most satisfying sexual intercourse with rape and other forms of violence. Some music videos feature half-naked women gyrating and crawling at men's feet. Male rappers frequently link asserting masculinity with insulting women. Many movies promote highly stereotyped images of male toughness and female passivity; even movies featuring supposedly emancipated women characters allow the camera plenty of shots lingering on the female anatomy. Stores sell Wonderbras for women and "I hate bitches" T-shirts for men--and fine plenty of buyers for both. Romantic songs depict the highest happiness as either possessing or belonging to the "loved" one.

Both women and men are constantly being urged to objectify themselves along the lines of gender dualism, that is, the notion that women and men are fundamentally different, and in fact defined in opposition to one another. How often do we hear the phrase, "the opposite sex"? To be female is to be not-male, and above all to be male is to be not-female. Capitalist corporations make big profits from consumer items devoted to reinforcing gender identities--from G. I. Joe and Barbie dolls to sports cars and fur coats. Moreover, capitalism as a system is ideologically shored up by the dissemination of the notion that women and men are just plain different--and that women are inferior to, and dependent on, men.

Women clearly bear the brunt of this sexist dehumanization. Women who enter into relations with men often encounter violence, abuse, and endless labor; women who are celibate by choice or circumstance are often derided as "old maids" and seen as "not real women. "Sometimes women even internalize notions of inferiority to the point of damaging themselves and other women. It was women who bound their daughters' feet in traditional China and who to this day wield the knife cutting off the young girl's clitoris. Many women tell their friends and daughters to accept male violence as part of woman's lot in life. But men are also hurt, psychologically as well as materially, by the assumption that they should assume the "dominant" role. If women are stereotyped as natural nurturers, men are supposed to be involved with their children's upbringing as rule-makers and rule-enforcers. The average father of a newborn, it has been shown, hold his baby less than one minute per day. Some men may feel relief that their wives take responsibility for helping kids with their homework; actually, they are missing a valuable opportunity to be close to their children. The emotional isolation from their children that many men experience--and that they often come to regret too late in their old age--is directly traceable to dichotomized notions of what mothers and fathers "ought" to be and do. Furthermore, many men are repelled by the grossness, even violence, of locker-room banter and wish to talk about their emotions--with the women in their lives, with male friends--but have not learned the most basic vocabulary for doing so. The rigid categories of gender into which men and women are pigeonholed in capitalist society inhibit full human development in men and women alike. The great majority of men and women have a common interest in doing away with a society that produces such barren and alienated human relations.

SEXISM AND FASCISM

Under "ordinary" capitalism, we have been arguing, women and men have a vital common stake in fighting sexism. As capitalism moves deeper and deeper into fascism, however, the fight against sexism becomes a matter of life and death.

The Nazis used sexist ideology as a crucial component in solidifying their political base. "Male" and "female" were rigidly dichtomized in Nazi propaganda. The Nazis preached "Kinder Kuche Kirche" ("Children Kitchen Church") as women's proper domain; established stud farms in which especially "beautiful" young women were chosen to bear the children of officers of the Reich; and--for German women--criminalized abortion. The Nazi high command was notorious for their bisexual carousing, but, as a matter of public policy, gay men and lesbians--who clearly did not fit into the official Nazi gender categories--were declared enemies of the state and exterminated in huge numbers. As part of the Nazis' biological doctrines of race and nation, women and men were reduced to their biological "essences" and, when found wanting, wiped out.

It is important, however, not to view fascism as a past historical phenomenon restricted to Italy and Germany of the 1930s and 1940s. Fascist regimes have thrived on almost every continent in the twentieth century, and most formerly "liberal democratic" countries have entered into a fascist phase. While anti-black and anti-immigrant racism are in some ways the "cutting edge" of the contemporary U. S. movement into fascism, sexism is playing a crucial role. The attack on affirmative action portrays both women and people of color as leeches on the body politic--when actually these programs, in giving a certain limited "advantage" to some women, blacks, hispanics, etc. , have helped to sustain--or at least halted the slide--of the wage levels of all workers. The current promotion of "family values" and the attack on abortion rights are baldfaced attempts to reinforce male supremacist ideology and subdue women's demands for equality on the job. The "family values" campaign--sponsored by the Republican right, but catered to by the Clinton Democrats--supports an increasingly authoritarian state by claiming as its model the "natural" patriarchal family. Those who do not conform to this model are not "real Americans. "

Moreover, the recent rise in homophobic assaults--which are rarely punished--and the various moves to rescind homosexual civil rights are part and parcel of the almost hysterical gender dualism fostered by fascism. The climate of fear and prejudice built up around AIDS, and the drive to reduce spending on AIDS--conveys the Nazi notion that some people--sexual "others"--are spreading disease and unworthy of life. Homophobia here supplements racism: while most "second wave" AIDS cases involve not white homosexual men but blacks and latinos of both sexes, the homophobic disgust whipped by the Pat Buchanans and Jesse Helmses blends into a racist disregard permitting and justifying massive neglect. Clearly the placement of gay men and lesbians in the economy of capitalism is different from that of women as a group, insofar as the former are not as such subject to sexist superexploitation. "Homophobia" and sexism" are related but by no means equivalent phenomena: the former is ideological, whereas the latter is both ideological and material. Nonetheless, capitalism in its fascist phase does all it can to encourage workers to think in terms of categories that divide them from other workers: race versus race, nation versus nation, gender versus gender. To the extent that homosexuals call into question the dichotomous gender categories dualism that sustain sexist ideology, they are the targets of increasingly vicious sexist attack.

SEXISM AND SOCIALISM

Some would argue that, even though women are clearly oppressed and exploited under capitalism, societies which supposedly emancipated workers from class exploitation did not free women from various forms of exploitation and subordination. Women cannot and should not look to communist parties to free them in the future, it can be argued, because communist parties have not freed them in the past. Women are oppressed by both capitalism and patriarchy--that is, male rule--and any movement for women's liberation cannot rely exclusively upon the eradication of class.

Communists in PLP do not agree with this position. We think that women's subordination is caused by class society, and class society alone. While socialism failed to emancipate women, it also failed to emancipate the working class: the two failures are inseparable.

This is not to deny the very real initial achievements of socialism in the arena of fighting sexism. In China, Vietnam, and Soviet Asia, socialist revolution meant that practices such as foot-binding, bride price, child and contractual marriage, polygamy, wife-beating, and veiling were immediately made illegal. According to the 1950 Chinese marriage law--which coincided with the Land Reform Act--women attained equal rights to own property. In the USSR, divorce became readily available after the Bolshevik Revolution (and some millions of women flocked to take advantage of it!). Tens of thousands of women in the Soviet East took part in ceremonies to burn the foul, hot, heavy horsehair veils that symbolized their possession by their husbands. In Cuba, the 1970 marriage law stipulated that men and women equally share child-rearing and domestic labor. In all socialist countries, abortion was--at least for a while--made legal and free, and prostitution was almost entirely eliminated. Under socialism, in other words, centuries-old oppressive practices were instantly wiped out by law. Many "rights" for which women were--and in many cases still are--struggling in capitalist "democracies" were treated as women's unquestioned human inheritance.

In addition, some important steps were taken toward reorganizing the economies of socialist societies so that women could enjoy in practice the freedoms and rights guaranteed by law. In the USSR, day care centers were established at factories, offices and collective farms so that women could breastfeed and care for their children during the workday. In some places community dining halls were set up, and certain domestic chores--e. g. ,laundry--were socialized. The most dramatic steps toward eliminating "women's work" in the home were taken during the commune movement of the late 1950s in China, when 90% of rural women joined the waged work force because nuclear households were for a time essentially dissolved and virtually all household tasks were socialized. During the Great Leap Forward, 4,980,000 nurseries and kindergartens were set up in rural China, along with 3,600,000 public dining rooms.

Yet socialism ultimately failed women. Women never participated fully in political life in socialist countries. While active on the local level and significantly present in secondary leadership, women numbered fewer and fewer the higher the level of political responsibility. In 1976 there was a total of some 197 Politboro members from the Eastern European countries, Albania, and China; of these, only 10 were women. In the same year, the USSR had 75 top government posts; none was filled by a woman.

Despite women's shouldering guns and undertaking many "men's" tasks during the period of insurrection, moreover, work quickly fell back into being ordered--and compensated--along gendered lines, even if the content of the gendered categories at times altered. In the USSR, older women were streetsweepers, and heavy manual work in the fields was done by women, whereas men tended to drive the busses and operate the tractors. The popular Soviet image of the smiling young woman driving the tractor was a myth: females never totaled more than 4% of the total number of tractor drivers. Perhaps not surprisingly, Soviet male agricultural workers earned on the average 25% more than women. At the same time, the health care professions--including the job of doctor--became highly feminized. As a consequence, however, being a physician in the USSR became no great shakes: by the 1970s doctors (mostly women) started at wages only 2/3 those of skilled workers (mostly men).

The payment of unequal wages to women and men for comparable work in socialist countries was compounded by a retreat from the commitment to socializing domestic labor. At the height of collectivization in the USSR, no more than 30% of worksites had daycare centers and dining halls. These were attacked only to the most profitable enterprises: the primary purpose of such facilities was to maximize production, not to lay the basis for new relations between women and men and new forms of the family. The Chinese experiment in socialized domestic labor collapsed along with the rest of the commune movement in the early 1960s. The argument advanced in defense of the cutback in socialized domestic services was that it had proven too costly to pay wages to workers to produce the labor power of other workers--that is, to do what women had previously done for free. Besides, it was said, grandmothers were available for child care in the home. But these cutbacks inevitably meant that women were increasingly given mixed messages under socialism. On the one hand, they were urged to participate as waged workers in the formal economy. On the other, they were not being given the support systems necessary for such participation. Women were essentially being told that they should work full-time for pay and then part-time for free.

Even the equal wages paid to women and men in a few lines of work did not establish full equality, for women were not paid when they took time off work--as they routinely did--to tend to necessary domestic tasks. Women's domestic labor in the home became once again uncompensated and therefore invisible. While cooking a pot of borscht for a neighborhood dining hall had been viewed as productive--that is, waged--labor in the USSR of the 1930s, by the 1950s this was see not as a public productive task but a private reproductive one. Not surprisingly, the inequality in men's and women's earnings was accompanied by an inequality in the amounts of leisure time they enjoyed in socialist countries. In Czechoslovakia of the 1970s, women were reported to have eleven hours a week less leisure time than men.

Gender inequality persisted after socialist revolutions partly because sexist assumptions were deeply rooted, especially in men. "A hundred women are not worth a single testicle" was a Vietnamese saying many hundreds of years old. Some men reacted violently to the prospect of losing control over the domestic services of their wives. After 100,000 Bukharan women burned their veils on International Women's Day in 1927, hundreds were murdered by their husbands or fathers. In 1950-51, tens of thousands of young Chinese wives who demanded equality in their marriages either were murdered by their husbands or committed suicide after being socially ostracized.

Another reason why socialist countries never eradicated sexism is that none ever undertook a concerted campaign to call upon men to shoulder their part of the burden of domestic labor. Revolutionary movements from Mozambique to Vietnam featured the poster-figure of the young woman bearing a baby in one arm and an AK-47 in the other; none, however, promoted the icon of a young man in the same posture. During the period of socialist construction in Vietnam, "new cultured families" were held up as models, but they were praised for their harmonious relations and their commitment to raising socialist-minded children rather than for setting examples in sharing household tasks equally. In the USSR of 1944, women who had ten children or more were honored by entry into the "Order of Motherhood. "In 1974, a Soviet study announced that women's presence in the home with children under the age of four was an absolute necessity--a "finding" that, needless to say, called into question the nation's entire network of daycare centers.

But the main reason for the persistence of male dominance in socialist societies was not feudalistic survivals or the recalcitrance of men. The primary reason sexist attitudes could not be rooted out was that women's productive work was not being valued equally with that of men. Cuba could legislate till the cows came home that men and women were to be equal partners in domestic labor. But as long as Cuban men worked in "men's" jobs and earned substantially more than their wives or daughters, it was impossible to convince them that they "ought" to wash shirts and do dishes. The Chinese government can proclaim against female infanticide; but as long as a male child promises to be a better compensated earner than a female, and thus a better support for his parents in their old age, the murderous practice will persist.

Moreover, as socialism moved away from egalitarianism and back toward market capitalism, women's unwaged labor in the revived informal sector of the economy became increasingly important to the subsistence of the working class. In agriculturally based socialist economies, the private plots that provided families with food for subsistence--and, increasingly, with commodities for petty exchange on local markets--were tended almost exclusively by women. In villages following ujamaa (communalization) policies in socialist Tanzania, for example, married women still tended plots owned by individual families, while their husbands received wages for work on the communal farms and even marketed the surplus product of their wives' domestic labor. Under socialism, in other words, Tanzanian wives saw little change in their position in the relations of production.

It could be said, indeed, that socialist accumulation--that is, the production of the surplus needed to jumpstart socialist economies--took place largely off the backs of undercompensated women working in the formal economy and uncompensated women working in the informal economy and in the home. Even under socialism women continued to experience sexist exploitation. It was not failures in governmental propaganda or the tenacity of traditional attitudes, but continuing material inequalities between the valuation of men's and women's labor, that guaranteed women's continuing subordination to men.

Socialism failed women, then, not because proletarian revolutions did not address "patriarchy" along with class oppression, but because they did not eradicate inequality. Bent upon above all developing the productive forces and committed to eliminating wages and producing for use only in an ever-receding communist future, socialism places primacy upon accumulation over the social relations under and through which accumulation takes place. Because of this tragically mistaken priority, socialist societies have not simply slowed in their advance toward, but have in fact at this point entirely backtracked away from, the movement toward communist egalitarianism. Retaining wages as a means of compensating workers for the work they have done and of motivating them to do more, socialist societies have lapsed into the essentially capitalist practice of equating productive work with waged work in the formal sector. While they have made attempts to exhort men to view women as their equals, these societies have never recognized all necessary human labor as labor that is equally productive and equally valuable. The consequences of this failure have been devastating, for men and women alike.

COMMUNISM AND THE FIGHT AGAINST SEXISM

Socialism failed to emancipate women, but communism will succeed. Women do not need separate organizations to guarantee that their interests will be safeguarded in revolution--after all, the Bolsheviks and Chinese Communists had such organizations, and women still got the short end of the stick. What is needed is an international, multiracial party consisting of women and men that is uncompromisingly committed to communism--that is, complete equality. PLP is that party.

Communism Versus Socialism

Through a critical analysis of how twentieth-century socialist movements have been derailed and destroyed, primarily through their own internal weaknesses, PLP has determined that fighting for socialism is a waste of time and effort. It is necessary to fight from the outset for nothing less than a society in which women and men work not for wages, but out of commitment to the collective--that is, for communism. They will produce not for exchange, for there will be no money: they will produce for use. While this program may sound utopian, we should remember that throughout most of human history people have in fact lived in this way--although in primitive, undeveloped societies that were at the mercy of nature. It is only class society that has destroyed people's incentive to work voluntarily and cooperatively in ways that fulfill the needs of both the individual and the group; it is only class society that has made money the sole means of compensating and motivating labor. The great majority of the world's people have it in their interest, however, to live without wages and without social hierarchy. We don't need the bosses or their money.

No matter what skeptics may say, only communism can abolish sexism. Women's superexploitation and subordination are directly linked to the predominance of exchange-production over use-production under capitalism. Much of the work women currently do consists in creating things and performing services that people need--but never getting paid for doing so. Women will continue to be domestic slaves, superexploited workers, and second-class citizens as long as capitalism lasts, for capitalism is happy to have them just where they are.

It is only under communism that all production will be for use, and all socially necessary labor recognized as productive labor--and therefore that the stigma currently attached to "women's work" will be removed. This is not to say that, in the first stages of communism, there will not have to be rigorous ideological struggle to break down the traditional sexual division of labor. Both women and men will be used to doing things in the old way. We will have to use all available aspects of the cultural apparatus--movies, videos, books, the visual arts, sports, social clubs, and of course the schools--to demonstrate how poisonous sexism is for the entire working class. But--unlike the comparable ideological struggles sporadically undertaken under socialism--this struggle will be materially sustained by the abolition of any difference in compensation--that is, in any different payment for men's and women's work. All work will be unwaged. As communism develops, then, there will be no material basis for differentiating between "women's work" and "men's work"; there will only be human work, divided between the sexes in egalitarian and creative ways that we can only begin to imagine. There will be no more division between "public" and "private" spheres. And, as a consequence, there will be no dualistic conceptions of "male" and "female" that set the mold for human development--no superiority and inferiority, no dominance and submission. 

Communism Versus Feminism

The feminist movement, while attracting to its ranks many energetic and honest people committed to ending women's subordination, does not effectively fight sexism. Indeed, because it posits that not capitalism but something in men is the cause of women's oppression, it usually turns women and men against one another. Lacking a class analysis, it proposes that all women have more in common with one another than bourgeois women have with bourgeois men, and working-class women with working-class men. Feminism only leads anti-sexist fighters back into the arms of capitalism.

Feminism takes up important issues, but in a counterproductive way. Anti-pornography feminists like Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, for example, legitimately point out how pornography degrades women and fosters violence against them, but they build the illusion that capitalist governments can pass laws that will safeguard women--even though, as we have pointed out, violence against women is one of capitalism's most important safety valves for channeling and controlling working- and middle-class men's alienation. Moreover, some anti-pornography feminists--e. g. , Dworkin--demonize all male desire for women and treat all heterosexual intercourse as rape. Pro-choice feminists, while legitimately resisting the fundamentalist religious right's attack on abortion, treat the issue of abortion in individualistic and middle-class terms as a woman's "right to control her own body. "This strategy separates abortion rights away from other aspects of reproductive health care of equal importance to working-class women--contraception, prenatal care, maternity benefits--and turns a working-class public health issue into a right-of-privacy issue. It is perhaps no accident that the logo of NARAL (National Abortion Rights Action League) is the Statue of Liberty! Finally, equity feminists--that is, feminists such as those in NOW (National Organization for Women) seeking equal legal and economic treatment for women--ignore capitalism's systemic need to superexploit women's labor, both paid and unpaid. Equity issues often turn out to be "glass ceiling" issues concerned with the small percentage of middle-class women who face discrimination in professional and middle-management jobs. The millions of women who toil in mostly-female garment and electronics factories are untouched by the demands of equity feminism. Even the demand for "comparable worth"--that is, equal compensation in female-coded jobs--leaves untouched the vast arena of work performed by women in the home for free, as well as women's participation in the unwaged "self-employed" (informal) sector of the economy.

Feminists may come away from United Nations-sponsored conferences abuzz with celebrations of global sisterhood. But all the "women of the world" do not have the same interests. New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman, who is presiding over vicious welfare cuts to unemployed women and lay-offs of women state workers, has nothing in common but biology with the women whose lives she is helping to ruin. The woman president of Turkey who recently sent in the Turkish army to destroy Kurdish "strongholds" is the enemy of all oppressed Kurd workers and peasants, women as well as men. The list could go on.

If the great majority of the world's women are to be freed from the massive sexist exploitation and oppression that they face, their slogan must be not "women of the world unite," but "workers of the world unite. "

Join PLP to Eliminate Sexism

Progressive Labor Party, which is organizing around the world, stands for complete equality between women and men. In the area where we are most developed, the United States, women and men occupy positions of equal importance and influence within the organization, at all levels. In areas where we are less developed but growing rapidly, such as India and Mexico, we carry forward an uncompromising struggle to bring women into all levels of leadership. Knowing that no one in capitalist society comes to the communist movement free of sexist ideas and attitudes, we struggle around issues of sexism in a collective way. But the struggle is sharp; communists do not tolerate sexism in word or deed.

PLP works hard to organize women workers, who, as both females and proletarians--and often as people of color as well--are frequently the most class-conscious and militant fighters. PLP's international concentration in the garment industry is largely a concentration among women workers; this organizing will not succeed unless garment workers and their families understand the nature of sexism and fight it tooth and nail--both on the job and in their personal lives. But we do not call upon women to form women's caucuses, nor do we have any special women's groups within our own ranks. As the foregoing analysis shows, we believe that sexism hurts men and women alike, and that therefore it is best fought by women and men together.

The great majority of women and men have only their chains to lose, and a world to win. 

(4th Edition, February 1995) published by the PROGRESSIVE LABOR PARTY

In the fall of 1994, the newsletter of the Los Angeles chapter of Mensa (an organization for people with high IQs) published an article calling for the sterilization of individuals with low IQs. This open advocacy of Nazi-style fascism coincided with the outrageous anti-immigrant racism centered on California's notorious Proposition 187. In the wake of Prop. 187, organizers had also begun to push the so-called "California Civil Rights Initiative." This would bar affirmative action programs for women and minorities in all state government jobs, contracts, and schools. Nationally, Democrats and Republicans alike were converging on a plan for "welfare reform." This campaign justified brutal cutbacks in vital services by using vile racist and sexist stereotypes of black women having "too many babies."

The pending welfare bill would make recipients work 35 hours per week for their checks, at a median wage of $2.43 an hour. In the wake of Prop. 187, employers slashed wages in garment and other California industries based on immigrant labor. Prisoners in the US are increasingly serving as virtually slave labor, sometimes even for private enterprises. "Three strikes and you're out" will swell their ranks. These measures -- all justified by racism -- drive down wages across the board. It is no exaggeration to say that racism is the cutting edge of a very sharp attack on the lives and livelihoods of the entire working class.

This racism is fueled by professors who dress up their prejudices in the language of science and wrap themselves in the cloak of "academic freedom." Traits such as criminality, alcoholism, intelligence, and homosexuality, we are told, are biologically determined. Daniel Koshland, editor of the influential journal Science, even suggested a genetic basis for homelessness. The federal "Violence Initiative" seeks biological "factors" in crime and proposes drugging large numbers of young children (mainly black boys) in the name of "violence prevention."

Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein's book The Bell Curve (1994) is the most alarming recent example of this trend. The authors assert that the government should reduce the number of children born to poor "low IQ" mothers by eliminating welfare and tightening immigration. Otherwise, they say, it will have to set up a "virulently racist custodial state" to control urban "high tech Indian reservations." That's some choice: eugenics or fascism! Although they present nothing new or scientific, they are given wide exposure by the mass media, from "Nightline" to Newsweek, from the New York Times to The New Republic, from Discover to the Rolling Stone.

Murray and Herrnstein explain in their preface why they wrote their slick and revoltingly racist book. In the late twentieth century, they say, "the principle of equal rights triumphs" but the US has become increasingly polarized. On one side are the "fortunate ones [who] commonly have six-figure incomes" while "in the other group, life gets worse, and its members collect at the bottom of society." And "pressures from these contrasting movements at the opposite ends of society put terrific stress on the entire structure." They want to influence policymaking in the face of this social crisis. To be blunt: they are among the leading theorists for the fascist agenda.

CHARLES MURRAY, BOSSES' MOUTHPIECE

The Bell Curve fits squarely in the sordid tradition of American Eugenics. Amid growing labor militancy of the 1910s-1920s, US leaders used IQ tests and Eugenics to weaken class unity with anti-immigrant racism. When anti-racist rebellions rocked the country in the mid-1960s, soon followed by a strike wave, Arthur Jensen's anti-Black update on Eugenics -- also centered on IQ -- took center stage. Now along come Murray and Herrnstein, warning that class conflict will tear the country apart and encouraging white middle-class readers to blame "less intelligent" Black and Latin workers for everyone's problems.

The first edition of this pamphlet appeared nearly twenty-five years ago. It was a response to the resurgence of academic racism encouraged especially by the work of a Berkeley psychologist, Arthur Jensen. Students and teachers distributed thousands of copies of three editions on campuses across the US. They helped to organize mass, often militant, protests that put the academic racists on the run.

"Letters I have received from professors at Berkeley and elsewhere lead me to believe that there may have been voices which might have been heard in the controversy had they not been silenced by fear," Jensen whined in 1972. "In the 1970s," Murray and Herrnstein complain, "scholars observed that colleagues who tried to say publicly that IQ tests had merit, or that intelligence was substantially inherited, or even that intelligence existed as a definable and measurable human quality, paid too high a price. Their careers, family lives, relationships with colleagues, and even physical safety could be jeopardized by speaking out."

To that we say: "Hooray!" Imagine how much harder it would have been for the Nazis to carry out their program of genocide if anti-racists had driven Nazi professors underground in the 1920s and early 1930s instead of vice versa. The PROGRESSIVE LABOR PARTY is proud of the role we played in helping to organize the International Committee Against Racism to galvanize the opposition to the academic racists. But Herrnstein and Murray add: "Research on cognitive abilities continued to flourish, but only in the sanctuary of the ivory tower." Anti-racist students, workers, and professors must step up the fight against academic racism so there will be no sanctuary anywhere for the Nazi theorists of today.

The present edition of "Racism, Intelligence, and the Working Class" has two main goals. The first is to arm our readers for the fight against racist ideology. The second is to explain why we believe that this fight can only be won, finally, by destroying the capitalist system that relies on and nurtures racism.

EUGENICS: 75 YEARS OF RACIST IDEOLOGY

The "Old" Eugenics: From IQ Tests to Gas Chambers

Stanford professor Lewis Terman was a leader in the Eugenics movement seventy-five years ago. According to Eugenics, the so-called "inferior races" included immigrants from southern and eastern Europe as well as Mexicans and black people. Eugenicists said they had too many children, and the so-called "superior white race" didn't have enough. That, they said, caused social problems such as poverty and crime. "Inferiority" and "superiority" were measured with Terman's Stanford-Binet IQ test. Eugenicists successfully campaigned for restrictive immigration laws and forced sterilization.

Government and business leaders supported eugenics. The Carnegie steel fortune, Harriman railroad money, and Rockefeller's oil profits backed institutions like the Station for Experimental Evolution and the Eugenics Record Office (ERO). Together with the US Public Health Service, the ERO set up an inspection station at Ellis Island in 1912. Here most new immigrants to the US were given IQ tests. Over 80% of those from southern and eastern Europe were declared "feebleminded." The Second National Conference on Race Betterment, held in 1915, included representatives from the Rockefeller Foundation, US Steel, Ford Motor Company, Aetna Life Insurance, Metropolitan Life Insurance, National Cash Register Company, and the Carnegie Foundation.

During World War I, the US President was Woodrow Wilson, who had segregated all federal civil service jobs and had given his official blessing to the pro-KKK movie "Birth of a Nation." He appointed racist Harvard psychologist Robert Yerkes to the position of Chief of Army Testing. Yerkes and his eugenics colleagues gave IQ tests to tens of thousands of new recruits. They concluded (of course) that their tests proved black and immigrant people to be inferior. Yerkes' protégé was Carl Brigham, founder of the Educational Testing Service (the outfit that runs SAT tests today). Brigham reported that "Negro," "Alpine," and "Mediterranean" people were inferior to "Nordics." His report helped persuade Congress to pass the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924. This law cut off almost all immigration from southern and eastern Europe. Many who were locked out of the US by this law later died in Hitler's gas chambers.

The main impact of Eugenics was to spread racist ideas far and wide. Big businessmen and the government officials who served them feared the working class movement that was gaining in numbers and militancy during the 1910s and 1920s. Their fears intensified when capitalist intervention failed to crush the 1917 Russian socialist revolution. Immigrants were among the strongest and most radical leaders among workers in the US. They helped to organize the Communist Party. Thousands were deported as "dangerous aliens." The US rulers used eugenics, along with the Ku Klux Klan and other fascist organizations, to weaken the unity of the industrial working class and to build support for the racist and anti-communist terrorism perpetrated by the government itself.

By 1930, thirty-four states had laws against marriages between whites and blacks (and sometimes Asians as well). Twenty-four states had passed laws calling for sterilization of the "feebleminded," criminals, and paupers. By 1927, Terman's home state of California had sterilized nearly 4,000 people, mostly from immigrant families. Some 80,000 were eventually sterilized in state institutions across the country. In Lynchburg, Virginia alone, 8,000 children were sterilized between 1927 and 1972. When the Nazis passed the racist German Sterilization Law in 1935, they modeled it on laws already on the books in the United States. The Nazi "final solution" was a logical extension of the ideas of Terman, Yerkes, and Brigham.

Allan Chase in The Legacy of Malthus, William Tucker in The Science and Politics of Racial Research, and Stefan Kuhl in The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism, have all demonstrated the close ties between American eugenicists and German Nazis. Among Hitler's American supporters was the textile magnate Wickliffe Draper. He paid for the establishment of the Pioneer Fund in 1937 to support "race betterment" in the United States. Draper wanted to send black Americans "back" to Africa. He distributed the Nazi eugenics propaganda film "Hereditary Defective" to high schools and churches across the US. Later, the Pioneer Fund began to bankroll professors and journals (notably Mankind Quarterly) dedicated to racism and eugenics. As we will see, virtually all the research seeking cause-and-effect links between IQ, social behavior, and race in the US from 1937 to the present has come from the fascist Pioneer Fund-Mankind Quarterly network.

Jensenism: Bosses' Response to Anti-Racist Rebellion

In the ten years following the 1954 US Supreme Court decision to desegregate public schools, racist theoreticians (with the help of the Pioneer Fund) carried the Eugenics flag in the southern states. Then anti-racist rebellions began to rock the rest of the country: Harlem (New York City) in 1964, Watts (in LA) in 1965, Detroit in 1967, and almost everywhere in 1968. Black workers began to give important leadership in strikes that united black and white in sharp struggle against the bosses: the Newport News shipyard, General Electric, General Motors, the US Post Office, and many more.

Re-enter Eugenics! In 1969, Berkeley psychologist Arthur Jensen published an article in the Harvard Educational Review entitled "How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?" Its main point -- that black children are genetically less intelligent than white children -- was broadcast over the length and breadth of the land by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, and Life, among other media. The Pioneer Fund bankrolled Jensen's work to the tune of over $1.1 million dollars. For 22 years, Jensen collaborated with Nobel-prize physicist William Shockley, also a Pioneer Fund beneficiary. "Nature has color-coded groups of individuals," Shockley wrote in 1972, "so that statistically reliable predictions of their adaptability to intellectually rewarding and effective lives can easily be made and profitably be used by the pragmatic man in the street."

In 1992, the unabashed Nazi Roger Pearson -- with the help of Jensen -- edited Shockley's collected ravings on "Eugenics and Race." Murray and Herrnstein do not even try to distance themselves from this fascist confederation. Of Shockley they say only that he was "as eccentric as he was brilliant" and that "he seemed to relish expressing sensitive scientific findings in a way that would outrage or disturb as many people as possible."

The same Richard Herrnstein followed Jensen's suit in 1971 with "IQ," published in the Atlantic Monthly at the urging of editor Robert Manning. (As Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs from 1961-64, it had been Manning's job to lie about the early stages of the Vietnam war.) Three other magazines began pushing the Jensen/Herrnstein/Shockley theme with particular energy: Commentary, Encounter, and The Public Interest. All three -- and Irving Kristol, who at one time or another edited all three -- had been exposed in 1967 as being controlled by the CIA. Their heavy involvement in "Jensenism" shows clearly that the government was behind it. Around the same time, too, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and the US Public Health Service began giving lavish grants for a whole new field of Jensen-style research known as "human behavioral genetics." David Rosenthal, Chief of Laboratories at NIMH, joined Jensen, Herrnstein, and 47 others in signing a statement in American Psychologist endorsing the "hereditarian" view of human behavior.

No wonder, then, that Fortune magazine praised the "hard-headed realism" of the new "nativists" (that is, racists), singling out Jensen and Herrnstein as their leaders. No wonder that, in the words of then-White House advisor Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "the winds of Jensen were gusting through the capital at gale force." You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to see that the US ruling class was promoting Jensenism to whip up racism and to build support for cuts in education and social services.

The consequences of Eugenics, new or old, are disastrous. Whether it leads to the repression characteristic of the US in the 1920s, or to the brutality of Hitler's Germany, is but a matter of degree. When eugenicist thinking starts to become popular in the press, and in the thinking of government officials, and when it is taught in the schools, the working people and students are in for trouble.

But as thousands, and then millions, join the fight against racist eugenics, it will be the racists and their bosses (the big capitalists) who are in for trouble. Through the struggle against academic racism, students and workers come to understand better the thoroughly racist nature of capitalism itself. Many will become communists and join the fight to smash capitalism and build a new society based on equality and cooperation. In spite of the rise of fascism around the world, a bright future is waiting for us to seize it.

THE IQ ARGUMENT

For the last 75 years, IQ tests have been the main pseudo-scientific justification for racism against immigrant and black workers. The racist argument goes like this:

Lie #1. IQ measures some important trait that can be called "general intelligence." This trait (called "g") differs significantly from person to person. It correlates highly with success in school and later life.

Lie #2. According to the methods of population genetics, IQ is highly heritable. As much as 80% of the difference among people's intelligence may be genetically determined.

Lie #3. Racial differences are also inherited. So, though nobody claims to have absolute proof, genetics probably explains black-white differences in average IQ scores.

Lie #4. Success in modern society depends on intelligence.

Lie #5. That's why liberal social programs have failed to create equality.

We don't have room in a short pamphlet to itemize everything that's wrong with these arguments. For those who wish to learn more about the IQ controversy and the history of scientific racism, we have included a list of publications that have demolished these lies. The issues are really not very complicated.

All of us should be prepared to expose and attack the bosses' racist lies, especially when they come up in classrooms and textbooks. But we will not sit on a platform with a Charles Murray or an Arthur Jensen and debate the equality of billions of non-white people. The struggle against these racists is not solely or even mainly an intellectual one. We must build a mass movement uniting students with workers and youth to stop the Nazi ideologues -- along with all other Nazis -- in their tracks.

Lie #1: "IQ Tests Measure Intelligence"

IQ tests are supposed to measure an inborn trait called "g," or "general intelligence." Murray and Herrnstein's phrase "cognitive ability" means the same thing. But defining "intelligence" is a political question .

In a capitalist society (like ours) that is based on a struggle between opposing classes, the answer will depend on where you stand in that struggle. What's smart for capitalists is the opposite of what's smart for workers. For example, business professors from the University of Wisconsin, UCLA, and Harvard are now developing a theory of "agile management." This means eliminating job categories and using more temporary workers and part-timers in order to reduce labor costs and increase profits. It is smart for the US capitalists, because it helps them to compete internationally. But to workers -- for example, at Boeing, where "agile management" is being introduced -- it seems like a pretty dumb idea. As of February, 1995, it has already meant the loss of 6500 jobs, or 6% of the Boeing work force. It will mean more work for less pay for those who remain. What's smart for workers is to organize and fight back.

It is smart for bosses to promote racism and individual competition among workers, but it is smart for workers to overcome these divisions and unite as a class against the bosses. From the point of view of the communist Progressive Labor Party, rebellion and revolution are the most intelligent kinds of behavior working people and students can adopt. Obviously Murray and Herrnstein -- and the makers of IQ tests -- disagree.

Every type of measurement assumes some form of distribution of intelligence. For example, it would be scientifically valid to develop a test that 99% of the population would pass. Then we would "find" that 99% of the population is intelligent and 1% or so is mentally defective. Such a test would assume that intelligence is simply an attribute of the normal functioning human. It would not be useful at all for those wishing to defend social inequality. After all, if pretty much everyone is intelligent, why should a few be richer and more powerful than the rest?

Existing IQ tests assume that intelligence is a single thing that can be measured with one number. They assume there are large differences in intelligence, that most people have a mediocre amount, a few have a lot, and some very little. By the definition of these tests, half the population is "below average" in intelligence. Only a few (Murray and Herrnstein's "cognitive elite") are smart enough to make decisions and run things.

Some influential psychologists, notably Howard Gardner, deny that "g" really exists . But Murray and Herrnstein blow them off by claiming that its existence is "beyond significant technical dispute" within the "classical tradition" of their field. This is like arguing that astrology and fortune-telling are scientific because astrologers and psychics all agree. The whole tradition of psychometrics (IQ testing) was built up around the same assumptions about intelligence that Murray and Herrnstein believe in. This whole tradition is racist and elitist to the core. The crucial research in this field for the last 50 years has been funded primarily by the pro-Nazi Pioneer Fund.

The early testers loved and admired the ruling class. Listen to Terman: "Moral judgment, like business judgment, social judgment, or any other kind of higher thought process, is a function of intelligence." Or E.L. Thorndike, one of the most important figures in the history of US educational psychology: "Our superiors in ability are on the average our benefactors, and it is often safer to trust our interests to them than to ourselves." But it took many tries before they came up with a test on which the rich would come out on top and the poor on the bottom. In fact, it took a lot of work to come up with a test that would serve its stated purpose: to correlate well with other measures of "success" such as class background and performance in school.

Here is Herrnstein's own account of how Binet constructed the prototype IQ test: "He took some children rated by their teachers as the brightest and the dullest ... and subjected them to a lengthy series of tests.... A number of the tests worked, which is to say they distinguished between the two groups of children." The testing manual for the Stanford-Binet Scale says, "Many of the so-called performance test items tried out for inclusion in the scale were eliminated because they contributed little or nothing to the total score." That is, when checked with teachers' ratings, they did not match, so they were dropped. The IQ tests were designed to reflect a racist and elitist school system that was itself designed to reproduce a grossly unequal social system.

Much has been written about just how the tests reflect their makers' biases. They are heavily weighted toward language: not just everyday language, but the sort of vocabulary found mainly in literature. They put a high premium on speed, on motivation, on willingness to cooperate with the tester. Many questions require that the child either believe in bourgeois values like patriotism, or be cagey enough to give the answer the tester wants. But the main point is that if they weren't biased, they wouldn't serve their intended purpose: to justify inequality.

One way to see this is to look at the history of gender differences in IQ. On Terman's original (1916) Stanford-Binet, the average score for women was about 10 points less than for men. Twenty years later, the political climate had changed. The 1937 version was standardized for sex. Some questions were added and some dropped, equalizing the means for men and women. Presto! All of a sudden, the tests showed women to be as "smart" as men. Testmakers could easily use the same procedure to eliminate average differences between black and white people, or between the working class and the capitalist class.

If the testmakers did that, the "predictive value" of the tests would be lessened. Those who did well on the tests wouldn't be as likely to do well in school or to make a lot of money. That's what happened when women's scores were equalized. It was no longer cool to say that men were smarter. But the US was (and is) still a very sexist society. Women were (and are) not treated equally in the workplace, so the test lost some of its ability to predict who would do well in later life. In just the same way, as long as racism keeps black and immigrant workers in the worst jobs at the lowest pay, attempts to equalize "racial" differences in average test scores would lower the "predictive value" of the tests.

All this "prediction" is really after-the-fact rationalization. Capitalism requires inequality and competition. The whole idea of "intelligence" as something that people have in different amounts exists only to justify capitalist inequality and competition.

Lie #2: "IQ Is Highly Heritable"

There's no reason to assume that "intelligence" is a trait that varies widely from one person to another, and certainly no reason to think that IQ measures anything of the sort. But even if we cared about IQ, the argument about "heritability" would still be bogus.

You can measure how much a trait varies among the individuals in a population. "Heritability" is a statistical method of estimating how much of the variation can be accounted for by genetic variation in that population, but only in a given environment. The heritability of a given trait might be extremely high and yet have (as Lewontin, Rose and Kamin point out) "absolutely no predictive power for the result of changing the set of environments." To illustrate: several diseases (such as phenylketonuria and Wilson's disease) are known to be single-gene disorders. However, whether or not possessors of that gene develop the symptoms of the disease depends entirely on whether or not their environment includes appropriate medical or dietary interventions. Popularizers, and sometimes researchers themselves, confuse the statistical concept of "heritability" with the biological concept of "genetically determined" and the social concept of "unchangeable." These things are not at all the same. We all have genes for hair color, but people change the color of their hair all the time!

In any case, the studies generally cited to "prove" the heritability of IQ are either seriously flawed or totally fraudulent. The main so-called "evidence" for the heritability of IQ comes from the studies of identical twins Jensen cited twenty years ago. The Princeton psychologist Leon Kamin has shown that Jensen's whole argument depended on fraudulent "data" collected (or made up) by Cyril Burt over a 40-year period. Others have confirmed Kamin's findings.

Murray and Herrnstein have two things to say about this embarrassing fact. First, they tell us -- without citing arguments or evidence -- that we should believe two other writers who claim they have vindicated Burt. Second, they say, new studies by Thomas Bouchard have come up with a figure for the heritability of IQ that is almost identical to Burt's.

Bouchard was Jensen's student. His team has received more money from the Pioneer Fund than any other recipient -- well over a million dollars to date. In 1979 he began his "Minnesota Twins" study with a pair of separated identical twins named Jim, whose first and second wives had the same names, who both drove Chevys and who had given their dogs the same name. Mass media publicity rounded up other pairs of separated twins who were eager to show off their identical tastes for particular brands of beer or cigarettes. This whole circus would be laughable except for the fact that Bouchard's "findings" are cited in current human-genetics textbooks to show that social behavior is "in the genes."

And the third authority Murray and Herrnstein cite for the literature on heritability of IQ is Penn State professor Richard Plomin -- yet another Pioneer Fund recipient! Other critics have already deconstructed in detail the pseudoscientific hocus-pocus of this neo-Nazi cabal. Stephen J. Gould, for example, has pointed out that the correlations Murray and Herrnstein report between AFQT (Armed Forces Qualifying Test) scores and NLSY (National Longitudinal Study of Youth) data are extremely weak. With all the funds and resources at their disposal, Murray and Herrnstein were unable to do little more than cobble together 800 pages of pathetic lies. The Bell Curve is no more scientific than Hitler's Mein Kampf. In the next section we will show the direct links between these two monuments of master-race theory.

One final point about statistics. Murray and Herrnstein, like Jensen and the others, make much of correlations between IQ and other statistics, such as rates of poverty or crime. Correlation is often confused with causation. Correlation simply means finding that two characteristics tend to be found together. Causation is a much stronger claim that the two are interconnected in such a way that one leads to the other. One of the first lessons in statistics is that correlation does not imply causation, or even a common cause. For example, your age over the last ten years shows a strong statistical correlation with the size of the national debt: both have been increasing steadily. But did one cause the other?

Murray and Herrnstein, like Jensen, admit all this. In fact, they go out of their way to say that we can't assume that Eugenics and IQ testing actually influenced immigration policy in the 1920s just because they accompanied each other in time and goals. But if correlation doesn't imply causation, then their whole book really says nothing at all. Since when do Nazis care about consistency -- let alone the truth?

Lie #3: "Black People Are Not As Smart As Whites"

This centuries-old racist slander is behind the whole IQ charade. And there's not a shred of a reason to believe it.

Jensen, in the mid-1970s, accepted as fact a grotesque list of physical differences long cited by ardent racists as supposedly distinguishing black from white people. Like him, Murray and Herrnstein just assume that there are biologically distinct "races." "Some ethnic groups differ genetically for sure," they write, "otherwise they would not have differing skin colors or hair textures or muscle mass." This is just plain ridiculous. Skin color is only skin-deep. Some people who are socially "black" have fairer complexions than some who are socially "white." Quite a few "white" individuals have recent African ancestry (less than 400 years) and may not even know it, while many "black" individuals have as many Europeans as Africans in their family tree.

Racial categories are not a fact of biology. There is no single physical trait, or combination of traits, that separate human beings into "races" as they are commonly understood. There never was. All humans originated in Africa. Even after they dispersed, warfare and trade guaranteed intermarriage and the mingling of population groups over thousands of years. It does not even make scientific sense to speculate about the evolution of distinct human "races."

Seventeenth-century scientists invented the division of humanity into "races" in order to justify the domination of European ruling elites over people in other parts of the world. As Martin Bernal showed in Black Athena, racist European "scholars" systematically rewrote human history in order to invent a "white European" race that was not "contaminated" by any intermingling with Africans and Asians. They could not then, and have not since, even come to agreement among themselves on how many "races" there are, let alone how to distinguish them.

In colonial America, judges and legislatures created legal definitions of "black," "white," and "red" people. These suited the convenience of plantation owners eager to control and exploit a large and potentially rebellious workforce. Since that time, bosses (whether plantation owners or industrial capitalists or the politicians who represent them) have maintained racial segregation in a variety of forms for exactly the same reason. That's why "race" is a nasty fact about our society, not a biological fact of any sort.

Laboratory evidence now coming in on human variation indicates that genetic differences among human beings are even smaller than previously supposed. For example, the genetic differences between two people coming from different continents are much less than those between two lowland gorillas from the same valley. Black Africans are genetically closer to white Swedes than to black Australian aborigines, who are genetically closer to East Asians. The more research is done, the more obvious it is that "race" is not a valid biological concept.

There is no relation (even a statistical one) between heritability within groups and heritability between groups. Suppose someone chooses to believe, in spite of the best scientific evidence, that "races" are distinct populations. Suppose they choose to believe the shoddy (or outright fraudulent) "evidence" that IQ is heritable. They still can't legitimately conclude that "racial differences" are genetic in origin, because heritability only measures the extent to which variation within a population comes from genes. It says nothing about whether variations among different populations are genetic.

Murray and Herrnstein know this; they even say so. However, they insist that social environments for black and white people in the US just aren't different enough to explain differences in average IQ test scores. In other words, their whole argument hangs on denying the depth and extent of racism in US society today. When you cut through pages and pages of statistics and references, Murray and Herrnstein's position is no different from that of the Ku Klux Klan: "the problem isn't racism; it's the black people themselves."

Murray and Herrnstein's monstrous lie that racism is all but gone sets up their attack on affirmative action programs. They push the slander that black people are getting into schools and jobs instead of supposedly smarter white people. This pits white workers and students against black workers and students. Racism like this divides and weakens the whole working class!

Hitler bragged about his "Big Lie" technique: if you say something often and loudly enough, people will begin to believe it. He might have added: especially if you buy some professors and have them write it up in scientific journals. Charles Murray has fed at the capitalists' trough for decades. The whole field of alleged hereditary racial difference in intelligence has been bought and paid for by outright Nazis. If you believe them, you might as well believe that the Holocaust never happened.

"There are differences between races, and they are the rule, not the exception," say Murray and Herrnstein at the outset. One of their favorite experts on "racial and ethnic differences" is an Irish psychology professor, Richard Lynn. Lynn has hauled in $325,000 from the Pioneer Fund. Leon Kamin's review of The Bell Curve in Scientific American does an excellent job of tearing apart Lynn's so-called research and exposing his fundamental dishonesty and exceptionally gross racism. ("Who can doubt," Lynn wrote, "that the Caucasoids and the Mongoloids are the only two races that have made any significant contribution to civilization.")

Murray and Herrnstein claim that black Africans have lower IQs than African-Americans. This, they say, shows that genes determine black-white IQ differences in the US. This comes from Lynn, who scrounged up eleven studies to "prove" it. Five took place in apartheid South Africa and a sixth in 1952 in the Belgian Congo, where colonial rulers had slaughtered millions of black people. The best study Lynn could find was one which even the author said did "not at all" indicate that intelligence is inherited. The author himself pointed to poorer schooling for black students and difficulty with English as a second language as reasons for the subjects' poor performances.

For an overview on "race and intelligence," Murray and Herrnstein recommend two books by three Pioneer Fund recipients: Audrey Shuey, Frank C. J. McGurk, and R. Travis Osborne. McGurk is the main authority they cite to "prove" that IQ tests are not racially biased. He was one of the "scientific" mainstays of the segregationist movement in the southern US. In 1959 McGurk and Shuey became leading members of the International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics, first publisher of Mankind Quarterly. Other members included Senator Jesse Helms and the oil billionaire Hunt brothers. Arch-racists in the South introduced Shuey's book in court during the 1960s to argue for continuing school segregation and denying the vote to black people. University of Georgia professor Osborne also testified in court against school integration. Osborne was still, in 1992, trying to prove the long-discarded theory that brain size is somehow related to intelligence.

A Newsweek review of The Bell Curve (Oct. 24, 1994) called its scholarship "overwhelmingly mainstream." If that's true, it only serves to prove that fascism is now the mainstream for the US ruling class.

ROGER PEARSON AND THE MANKIND QUARTERLY KLAN

LIE #4: "Success depends on intelligence."

Capitalism defines success as making a lot of money. But only a few can be really rich, because the only way to make a lot of money is to exploit the labor of a lot of other people. A somewhat larger number get to be middle-level bureaucrats and professionals who make more money than workers but much less than the big bosses. This has nothing to do with the distribution of "intelligence." It has everything to do with the fundamental nature of capitalist society.

Since few of us will ever be successful in capitalist terms, schools and employers use so-called intelligence and achievement tests to sort and select people. This promotes competition among workers and youth. Instead of uniting, we just try harder to climb over our class sisters and brothers. The tests also lead many to believe the lie that it's your own fault if you don't "make it." This can make us passive. Elaine and Harry Mensh document an important point in The IQ Mythology: Class, Race, Gender, and Inequality. They show that IQ tests exist to "prove" that most people -- workers, and especially black and women workers -- are not smart enough to be leaders or thinkers or deserve a lot of money. IQ tests thus legitimize capitalist inequality.

Liberal reformers want more money for schools. They say that more people should have the chance to be successful in capitalist terms. This is an illusion. A college education is no guarantee even of a steady job, let alone riches. Middle-level managers and technical people are losing their jobs like crazy. About 14% of recent university graduates with Ph.D. degrees in math are unemployed. Is that evidence that they have low intelligence? Many professionals have come to the US fleeing poverty and political repression, but their credentials don't count here. Teachers, nurses, and doctors are scrubbing floors, driving cabs, and working in factories. Did they lose their "intelligence" when they crossed the border? Black workers (including those in professional or technical positions) earn less, on the average, than white workers even when you control for age and level of educational attainment. We live in a racist system of class oppression, not a "meritocracy" where the "cream" rises to the top.

Fortune magazine made an interesting point when Herrnstein first came up with his "IQ and the Meritocracy" nonsense. In general, it noted, college professors have higher IQs than business leaders. But business leaders are richer and (in that sense ) more successful.

If anything, it's the scum that rises to the top. Those who are willing to exploit others, or to help the bosses do their dirty work, are rewarded for it. The more ruthless the exploitation -- for example, the rip-off of black, latino, other immigrant, and women workers in the U.S., or the horrors of child labor in India, Pakistan, and Thailand -- the more successful the capitalist. Much of what passes for college "education" is designed to convince students that they deserve better than most workers because they are "smarter." The "better" jobs they hope to get -- as teachers, social workers, managers, etc. -- would often put them in positions where the bosses will expect them to help keep workers down. Students and professionals have to choose sides in the class struggle between capitalists and workers. Do you have a particular fondness for racism, sexism, gross economic inequality, imperialist war, and all the cultural degeneracy and political repression that comes with fascism? If not, it's "smart" to choose the side of the working class.

Eugene Debs, a socialist labor leader who lived in the early part of this century, put it well. "I want to rise with the working class, not from it," he declared. The capitalist definition of "success" serves only the capitalists. For the rest of us, real "success" means smashing capitalism itself.

Trying to "make it" under capitalism is like scratching for the biggest crumbs from a shrinking loaf. We all want a better future for ourselves and our kids. But success in school isn't the way to go. Communism is. The working class, once united, can take over the whole bakery. We will build a new society without "races," without "nations," without money. Our principle will be "from each according to commitment, to each according to need" -- not "the market rules." No one will be better or worse off than anyone else. Social inequality, the material basis for racism, sexism, and other divisive ideologies, will disappear. We will struggle hard against these bosses' ideas among the people. And we will allow no "free speech" or "academic freedom" for professional racists and neo-nazis, no matter how many letters of the alphabet trail after their names.

LIE #5: "That's why liberal social programs have failed"

The social agenda of the academic racists has changed little over the last eighty years. Eugenicists in the 1910s and 1920s hoped to keep "undesirable" immigrants out of the country and to coerce the "unfit" (mainly, the poor) into having fewer babies. Nazi intellectuals in the 1930s wanted to justify imperialist war and genocide. US racial theorists in the 1950s fought to uphold segregation and "white supremacy." Jensen in 1969 argued for cutbacks in Head Start and other educational programs for workers' children. Herrnstein and James Q. Wilson, in Crime and Human Nature (1985) pushed for more cops, jails, and "tough on crime" legislation.

Murray and Herrnstein make parts of their agenda for the `90s very clear. They want to keep "undesirable" immigrants out of the country. They think welfare programs should be slashed to force poor women to have fewer babies. They suggest that programs like Affirmative Action, which helped to integrate workplaces and colleges, should be dropped. They link crime with genetically low intelligence, lending support to "tough on crime" policies and to the racist "violence initiative" of the National Institute for Mental Health and other agencies. They say that the poorest quarter of the US population is a "net drag" on society and that there is "nothing they can learn that will repay the cost of teaching" them. Funds "wasted" on the "disadvantaged" should be reallocated "to programs for the gifted" -- meaning, of course, mainly the well-to-do.

Murray and Herrnstein seem to be testing the limits of the present political climate with their assertion that the ruling class should choose between their eugenic policies and a "custodial" fascist state with "high tech reservations" (concentration camps) for the "underclass." Their "logic" thus leads directly to the gas chambers.

Murray and Herrnstein have one thing going for them that their predecessors, by and large, did not. That is the indisputable fact that thirty years of liberal reform programs -- the legacy of the Johnson's "Great Society" -- have failed to create social equality. In fact, income gaps between black and white workers, which decreased somewhat between 1965 and 1975, have been increasing ever since. Real wages for all workers have at best held steady, and more often have fallen, especially for younger workers. The gap between the richest and the poorest continues to grow. Thirty years ago, a 4% unemployment rate was considered recessionary. Today government economists consider at least 6% to be necessary. They raise interest rates to "slow the economy" if it drops lower.

True, the anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-sexist, and labor movements of the last few decades won some significant reforms. When Jensen attacked education programs such as Head Start in 1969, many anti-racists responded with studies showing that such programs did raise IQ scores and enhance children's prospects for success in school. Similarly, it is easy to show that Affirmative Action programs, limited as they have been, did go part of the way toward knocking down racist barriers that historically kept black and other "minority" individuals out of more skilled and better-paying jobs. Social programs like WIC, AFDC, Medicaid, and Medicare have meant the difference between survival and starvation for many.

But the "War on Poverty," which Murray has made a living on criticizing, was never meant to create equality. Its few reforms mainly produced an illusion of change while maintaining the reality of class inequality. It was meant to pacify the militant rebels who were rocking US cities, and the many more who supported them.

Now these reforms have mostly been cut back or dismantled altogether. Many are on the chopping block as this pamphlet goes to press (February 1995) amid congressional debates over welfare "reform" and the balanced-budget amendment. President Clinton has made it clear that Democrats differ from Republicans only over the details of this massive attack -- spearheaded by racism -- on the whole working class. Asked about Murray's 1993 Wall Street Journal article advocating cutting single mothers off AFDC, President Clinton responded: "I think his analysis is essentially correct." (Nation's Business, August "94)

In the same way, as Adolph Reed, Jr. noted in his Nation review of The Bell Curve, "we can trace Murray's legitimacy directly to the spinelessness, opportunism and racial bad faith of the liberals in the social policy establishment. ... Most of those objecting to Herrnstein and Murray's racism," Reed continued, "embrace positions that are almost indistinguishable, except for the resort to biology." These liberals agree with Murray that IQ tests "prove" black people (and workers generally) are less intelligent. They simply offer different excuses. "Lack of prenatal care," they say. "No breastfeeding. Not enough mental stimulation for infants." What a phony debate! Both sides are just building support for racism and class inequality.

Liberal reformers promoted cultural theories of racial and class inferiority to push government programs such as the "war on poverty." They wanted to change the alleged inferior values and lifestyles of impoverished workers so their children would be "smarter." Workers and our children don't need to be smarter. We need to be more class-conscious. We need to fight harder to unite our class across the bosses' lines of "race" and "nationality." We need to become clearer on the fact that you can't help people by becoming part of the system that is grinding them down. The way to help the working class is to fight to smash that system.

ONLY COMMUNISM CAN DEFEAT RACISM AND FASCISM

Liberal social programs have failed, and will continue to fail, because of the fundamental nature of capitalism. Even in its heyday, capitalism required a large pool of unemployed and impoverished workers to drive wages down. The present era is one of ever-sharpening international capitalist competition (imperialism). This competition demands that the bosses turn the screws ever more tightly on the workers in order to maximize profits. This, in turn, demands fascist rather than liberal-democratic forms of rule in order to suppress the anger inevitably developing within the working class, and especially among the most exploited, oppressed, and impoverished.

The choices are narrowing. Murray and Herrnstein, advocates of the Violence Initiative, and other academic racists offer us fascism as a solution to the profound crisis in contemporary capitalism. With liberalism less and less appealing as an option, many potential anti-racist activists are simply wallowing in despair. This passivity gives aid and comfort to the fascist enemy. But there is another alternative: to build a revolutionary party and a mass movement with the goal of smashing capitalism and building an entirely different system, communism.

"But hasn't communism failed?" many ask. We say it hasn't really been tried. From the Soviet Union to eastern Europe, from China to Cuba, socialism was tried. And socialism failed to lead to communism, as revolutionary leaders had promised. Instead it maintained fundamental capitalist institutions such as wage-labor and nation-states. So in the end it reverted everywhere to open capitalism.

A big part of the reason that revolutionary leaders thought they needed to build socialism rather than communism right from the start was that they didn't think the masses of people (workers and poor peasants) were "ready" for communism. In effect, these leaders bought into the idea that the masses weren't smart enough to recognize that communism was in their best interest. They thought they needed to "buy off" intellectuals and people with technical training because the workers wouldn't be able to run society by themselves.

We disagree. If "intelligent" means "fit to rule," then no group in the world, no "cognitive elite," is more intelligent than the working class acting collectively in its own interest as a class. The fight against racism is the key to developing this class unity.

Under communism we will do away with the foolish idea of judging people on the basis of a test. We will do away with the ruthless judgments of the marketplace that say you and you are "worth" more and you and you are "worth" less (or even, according to fascists like Murray, "worthless"). Instead of setting ourselves up in judgment on people, we will dedicate ourselves to assessing and meeting their needs.

Call us "idealistic" if you will -- but we are convinced that there is nothing more realistic than fighting for a communist world of comradeship and equality.

Intelligence and leadership

HOW TO FIGHT ACADEMIC RACISM

To cut off the killer weed of racism at its root, we need to destroy the capitalist system that nourishes it. Thousands, then tens of thousands, then millions of workers, students, and youth must join the PROGRESSIVE LABOR PARTY and help to win millions more to fight to make egalitarian communist society a reality worldwide.

Such a movement cannot develop without an all-out fight against racism. Racism is the cornerstone that supports all class exploitation. It drives down wages and the quality of life for "white" workers and students as well as for the super-exploited and super-oppressed "minority" workers and students. In the present period, racism is the cutting edge of a growing fascism that could turn every bit as horrible as German Nazism.

But for this very reason racism is capitalism's Achilles heel. The fight against racism (academic and otherwise) will grow and sharpen. Workers, increasingly looking toward communist leadership, will reject racism and nationalism in favor of class unity. Students and youth will see in this united working class movement a real alternative to capitalist dictatorship.

What You Can Do:

* Form study-action groups to discuss the ideas in this pamphlet Bring these ideas to clubs and organizations of all sorts, on and off campus. Hold forums, teach-ins, and rallies to expose and attack racist ideas. Build real grass-roots unity among students of different "races" and "nationalities" -- not just a top-down "rainbow coalition" of groups.

* Use all available media, from leaflets to school radio stations and newspapers to `zines and the Internet, to attack racist ideas and to promote anti-racist action. Try to get teachers to use this pamphlet and other anti-racist materials in the classroom. Set up regular literature tables as centers for anti-racist agitation and organizing.

* Sign, circulate, and collect funds for the nationwide ad/petition campaign "Oppose the Resurgence of Academic Racism."

* Find out which teachers and textbooks at your school do racist research or push racist and anti-working class theories. Challenge them in class, protest them, try to get rid of them. No academic freedom for racism and fascism!

* Join with workers on and off campus to fight racist programs like the Violence Initiative and welfare "reform." Support strikes and anti-racist rebellions whenever they happen. Attack corporate recruiters for companies which support academic racists like Murray as well as exploiting their workers.

* Write up your experiences for Challenge newspaper, and sell Challenge to your friends, classmates, and co-workers. Contact the Progressive Labor Party to be in touch with others involved in the campaign against academic racism.

We can't afford to be passive in the face of the present racist onslaught. No racist incident is too small to fight over. No racist movement is too large to take on. Organize, organize, organize!

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Recommended Reading

Joseph Graves, Jr. and Terri Place. Race and IQ revisited: Figures nerver lie, but often liars figure. SAGE Race Relations Abstracts.

Breggin, Peter and Ginger Ross. The War Against Children. (documents current racist Violence Initiative)

Chase, Alan. The Legacy of Malthus (an encyclopedic history of scientific racism)

Gould, Steven J. The Mismeasure of Man (includes detailed critique of IQ testing movement)

Hubbard, Ruth, and Elijah Wald. Exploding the Gene Myth (more general analysis of recent trends in genetic determinism)

Kamin, Leon. The Science and Politics of IQ (exposes Burt's fraudulent "research")

Kuhl, Stefan. The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism (documents collusion between US and German eugenicists during the 1930's and Pioneer Fund financing of Nazi "research" from 1937 until the present.)

Lewontin, R. J., Stephen Rose, and Leon Kamin. Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature (excellent scientific overview)

Mensh, Elaine and Harry. The IQ Mythology: Class, Race, Gender, and Inequality (demonstrates that IQ testing is a pseudoscience that legitimizes inequalities in the US and imperialist exploitation in Africa.)

Tucker, William. The Science and Politics of Racial Research. (excellent historical critique of racist research in the US from the 19th century to the present.)

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Smash Racist "Violence Initiative"

*In 1992 a top federal mental health administrator, Frederick K. Goodwin, compared black urban youth to violent, hypersexual monkeys, declaring that "some of the loss of social structure in this society, and particularly within the high impact inner city areas, has removed some of the civilizing evolutionary things that we have built up and that maybe it isn't just the careless use of the word when people call certain areas of certain cities jungles."

* The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the National Research Council (NRC) issued a 400-page report, Understanding and Preventing Violence (1992), backed by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the Justice Department, and the National Science Foundation, that called for more attention to alleged "biological and genetic factors" in violent crime, for research on "new pharmaceuticals that reduce violent behavior" and on whether "male or black persons have a higher potential for violence than others, and if so, why?" The study proposed in this report is now being carried out in Chicago under Harvard professor Felton Earls.

* Chicago Tribune science writer Ron Kotulak won a Pulitzer Prize for his four-day front page series "Aggression: The Monster Within" (December 1993). Kotulak wrote that "simple screening tests will be developed to determine levels of serotonin and noradrenalin. Anti-violence medications conceivably could be given, perhaps forcibly, to people with abnormal levels." Dozens of studies along these lines, financed by the National Institute of Mental Health, currently target black and Latin youth.

* The Human Genome Project plans to sponsor a new version of a University of Maryland conference originally titled "Genetic Factors in Crime" that was postponed amid charges of racism but is now tentatively scheduled for October, 1995.

Put these developments together and you have the "Violence Initiative." This is racist ideology in action. It must be stopped! See the PLP pamphlet "Biological Determinism Feeds Fascism" for more details.

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A Century of "Crime in the Genes"

One of the most fertile fields for eugenics was the search for biological causes of crime. In 1887, the criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso claimed he could identify criminals by physical characteristics. For example, he said thieves had small, restless eyes while sex criminals had bright eyes and cracked voices. In general, Lombroso said, the more "apish" a person was (thick skull, large jaw, long arms, darker skin) the more likely he or she was to be a criminal. This racist garbage was introduced in criminal trials and did a lot of damage in its time.

The Harvard anthropologist E. A. Hooton set out in 1926 to update Lombroso's techniques with financial support from the Social Science Research Council. Unlike Lombroso, Hooton categorized his 17,000 research subjects according to nationality and race. By the time his book Crime and the Man appeared in 1939, English and American critics found Hooton's views to be uncomfortably similar to those of the Nazis. However, he had meanwhile promoted his racist ideas among his students, a whole generation of physical anthropologists and physicians.

Pro-Nazi "race hygienists" held their Fourth Congress of Criminal Biology at Hamburg in June 1934, building on two decades worth of "research" on the supposed genetic basis of crime. Two years later, the Nazi "Justice" minister funded fifty research centers nationwide to investigate links between genetics, race and crime, especially in young offenders. In 1939, Nazi boss Himmler ordered that genetic examination be a routine part of criminal investigation.

Undeterred by this precedent, Columbia professor W. H. Sheldon tried to link crime with individual variations in physique during the 1940s. He concluded that 200 Boston delinquents were preponderantly "mesomorphic" (square, muscular) in contrast to a group of 4000 college students. The New York Times recently exposed the fact that Sheldon's eugenic experiments continued throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s. The bosses' elite colleges and universities -- including Harvard, Yale, Brown, and Wellesley -- forced first-year students to pose nude for Sheldon and his associates in the name of "screening for poor posture." Sheldon, a stone racist, wrote in a 1924 paper that "Negro intelligence" comes to a "standstill at about the 10th year," with "Mexican intelligence" stopping at age twelve.

Wilson and Herrnstein cited Sheldon's conclusions in Crime and Human Nature (1985) as evidence of the "constitutional" underpinning of the criminal personality "trait." As critic Leon Kamin noted, however, they omitted mention of later studies such as one that showed a sample of Princeton students to be more "mesomorphic" than the Boston delinquents. In the words of historian Elazar Barkan, Herrnstein and Wilson's book was "testimony that Hooton's ideas have been rejuvenated at Harvard."

Fight Builds Against Racist "Violence Research" in Chicago

Harvard's most recent contribution to crime "research" is euphemistically called the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods. It is run by child psychiatrist Felton Earls, from the Harvard School of Public Health with funds from the US Department of "Justice" and the McArthur Foundation (i.e., insurance profits). This project hopes to study over 11,000 children between 1994 and 2002 and to find ways to predict which ones will become violent criminals. Researchers say that "special attention will be given to conditions that develop before birth (during the mother's pregnancy), as well as in infancy and early childhood." This project has been in the works for over a decade, and its entire history involved searching for biological causes of crime.

The Earls study is also racist to the core (even though Earls himself is black). It is designed to analyze the interaction of "community characteristics" and individual traits. Chicago is one of the most segregated large cities in the world. "Neighborhood" boundaries are almost always drawn along "racial" or "ethnic" lines. Studying "neighborhoods" in Chicago is a code-word for studying "racial differences." It is a slick way to claim the project is studying both the individual and the "environment" while ignoring the real cause of crime (and its biggest perpetrator), the capitalist system itself. For example, a high unemployment rate will be taken as characteristic of a "neighborhood" when the truth is that it comes from decisions made by business people and bankers downtown to close factories in the "neighborhood."

The Chicago Coalition Against the Violence Initiative is organizing against this racist mega-project. For more information, call (312) 761-0580 or write to P.O. Box 268287, Chicago IL 60626.

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EUGENICS: 75 YEARS OF RACIST IDEOLOGY

1916 -- "Their dullness seems to be racial, or at least inherent in the family stocks from which they come. The fact that one meets this type with such extraordinary frequency among Indians, Mexicans, and negroes suggests quite forcibly that the whole question of racial differences in mental traits will have to be taken up anew." -- Lewis Terman, author of Stanford-Binet IQ test

1969 -- "There are intelligence genes, which are found in populations in different proportions...The number of intelligence genes seems lower, overall, in the black population than in the white." -- Arthur Jensen, "How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?"

1994 -- "A substantial difference in cognitive ability distributions separates whites from blacks. ... Latino and black immigrants are ... putting some downward pressure on the distribution of intelligence." -- Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, The Bell Curve, pp. 315; 360-61.

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Charles Murray, Roger Pearson and the Mankind Quarterly Klan

Much of The Bell Curve's racist drivel comes from Mankind Quarterly, whose principle is that the "Negroid" race is inferior to all others, and from professors funded by the pro-Nazi Pioneer Fund (PF). Behind this fascist gang stand important members of the US ruling class.

Seventeen authors cited in The Bell Curve are Mankind Quarterly (MQ) contributors. Ten are former or present editors or members of its editorial advisory board. MQ's avowed purpose is to counter "Communist" and "egalitarian" influences in anthropology. From its start in 1960, its founders and funders believed that white people were genetically superior. Robert Gayre was the founder of MQ and its editor-in-chief until 1978. As a champion of South African apartheid and a member of the ultra-right Candour League of white-ruled Rhodesia, he testified in court in 1968 that black people as a group are "worthless." Other MQ contributors have included Henry Garrett of Columbia University, who wrote pamphlets for the pro-segregation White Citizens Councils; Corrado Gini, the leader of fascist Italy's eugenics movement; and Ottmar von Verschner, a leading Nazi race-scientist and academic mentor of the concentration camp butcher Joseph Mengele.

The key figure in the PF network is Roger Pearson, who is close to Jesse Helms. Sam Crutchfield, a lawyer for Helms, has been the lawyer for Pearson's Institute for the Study of Man. The PF has given Pearson over $787,400, mostly for editing Mankind Quarterly and The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies. The last publishes articles by PF recipients, notably Arthur Jensen, Michael Levin, and Richard Lynn. Thomas Ellis, a PF director, is a long-time friend and campaign manager for Helms.

In 1958, Pearson, living in London, led the Northern League. This white-power organization included former Nazi SS officials. Willis Carto, founder of the anti-black and anti-semitic Liberty Lobby, arranged a 1959 U.S. speaking tour for him. Pearson soon moved to the U.S. to edit the neo-Nazi publication Western Destiny. In Eugenics and Race he asserted: "If a nation with a more advanced, more specialized, or in any way superior set of genes mingles with, instead of exterminating, an inferior tribe, then it commits racial suicide. "

This track record won Pearson influence in Washington, DC. In 1975 he became editor of the journal of the American Security Council. Retired military officers, corporate executives and conservative politicians formed this outfit. It promoted big military spending, cold war policies, and aid to the Nicaraguan contras and UNITA in Angola. The ASC was very influential during the Reagan and Bush administrations. It was closely tied to the military, the National Security Council, and the State Department.

Pearson also headed the U.S. chapter of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL). In 1977 he became the international chair of this nest of fascist vipers. He organized its 1978 convention, which featured two U.S. Senators as keynote speakers. Then he was exposed as having recruited open neo-Nazis to WACL, and was forced to resign. Four years later, President Reagan personally thanked Pearson for his "substantial contributions to promoting and upholding those ideals and principles that we value at home and abroad."

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Charles Murray: Bosses' Mouthpiece

Murray is on the payroll of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative public-policy research outfit which has also employed Richard Herrnstein's other pal, James Q. Wilson. Founded by the industrialist Lewis Brown in 1943, it has spent a half-century promoting social policies favorable to big business: tax cuts for the wealthy, dere