Air safety before profits
In the wake of the ValuJet crash that killed all passengers
and crew earlier this month, even the big-business press is forced
to admit the relationship that has made the "Federal Aviation
Administration [FAA] too cozy with the airlines and airplane
manufacturers that it regulates." (Wall Street Journal 5/17). The
Journal says the FAA is supposed to protect the airline industry
and the public alike. However, this is impossible. One cannot have
it both ways, maximizing public safety and airline profits at the
same time. They also point out that FAA employees get perks (free
transportation) from the airlines, and that "investigations by the
General Accounting Office and a Senate sub-committee indicate that
FAA inspectors are instructed not to go too hard on the airlines."
All the airlines, union organized and non-union alike have curtailed safety as part of their drive for greater profits. There are fewer ground service workers per flight, and all workers are forced to work longer hours for less pay under concessionary contracts. Union officials sit on boards of directors to further tame us and hog-tie us to the company game-plan and anti-worker inter-company competition.
Unions must take the lead in fighting for safety, but all workers, union or not, have it as their responsibility to expose unsafe measures that endanger all of our lives. This is necessary if we look at the increase in railroad accidents and oil refinery explosions. Only we can be the guardians of safety for ourselves and the public. Your recent editorial was right to the point.
I and other airline workers, members of the International Association of Machinists, from the U.S. recently returned from Cuba where we participated in the national congress of the trade union movement. We had a meeting with airline workers from Cuba, Colombia, and Argentina at the José Martí Airport. Those of us not from Cuba spoke of the cutbacks in airline safety because of massive layoffs, privatizations and union-busting that is sweeping the industry. We saw how different it was in Cuba, where through increases in productivity and efficiency organized and carried out by the unions to aid the whole country, safety is not compromised. The difference is workers hold the reins of power in Cuba.
Mark Friedman
Los Angeles, California
Mao and China
I wanted to write a brief letter about the "Discussion with
Our Readers - The Chinese Revolution" column in the May 13
Militant. While I very much agree with the basic line and tone of
the article by Megan Arney, there is one part that I do not agree
with at all. That part is in the paragraph where Arney says, "Mao
at first did not outline a road to socialism. He maintained that
there must first be a democratic revolution and then a socialist
revolution. In this `two stages' policy, a Stalinist conception,
Mao strove to collaborate with bourgeois forces, subordinating the
interests of working people to preserving a capitalist regime."
Mao never outlined a road to socialism, neither in 1949 nor later on. The Chinese Communist Party - the bureaucratic caste of which Mao was the leader - was driven to overturn capitalist property relations in China in the years following the conquest of power in 1949 in the way that Arney describes in the next two paragraphs of her article. The Chinese Communist Party did not at some later period become transformed into a revolutionary, working-class party. In all fairness, I do not think that Arney ever meant to suggest that it did.
More importantly, the "two stages" policy of the democratic revolution and the socialist revolution is not, taken by itself, a Stalinist conception. There is a section of "Their Trotsky and Ours: Communist Continuity Today," pages 37-41, by Jack Barnes, in New International no. 1, which deals specifically with the Chinese revolution, and, I think, deals with it very well. The essential Stalinist conception - rather, misconception - revolved around the "bloc of four classes" idea, invented in 1927 by Stalin and Bukharin, which meant handing over the leadership of the revolution to the bourgeoisie, just as Arney pointed out.
The question was not whether the Chinese revolution would at first have a democratic, anti-imperialist character. It did. And then, depending on the role of the working class, and the course of the class struggle internationally, whether the revolution could develop, down the road, into a socialist revolution (that is, the overthrow of capitalist property relations). It could and it did. Rather, the question was: which class would lead the democratic revolution? The Stalinist, petite-bourgeois answer: the bourgeoisie. The communist, working-class answer: the working class.
If Arney had simply stated, "Mao did not outline a road to socialism. Instead, in accordance with the Stalinist conception that the bourgeoisie must lead the democratic revolution, Mao strove to collaborate with bourgeois forces, subordinating the interests of working people to preserving a capitalist regime," she would have been more accurate. And thus closer to the truth.
Jeff Hamill
Seattle, Washington