Because the original article was edited for space, there was some confusion that should be cleared up. It was Northwest Airlines, at the initiative of the L.A. station manager and the director of subcontracting in Minneapolis, that eliminated union cleaners from performing their jobs on Hawaiian, VASP, and any new carriers Northwest employees work. At this point, loading and mechanical work are still done by IAM organized Northwest employees. The layoffs of hundreds around the country in ramp, cleaning and ticketing was accepted by union officials and we were notified through an internal company newswire.

Another question was the Militant's source on cuts in safety training. A Northwest newswire on March 21, 1997, sent from "Ground-Ops Education" to station managers and instructors announced the elimination of large categories of safety training amounting to thousands of hours in several job classifications. Classroom instruction will be reduced to only what is absolutely mandated by the FAA.

The fact that new hires will not be receiving necessary safety training and that veterans' safety training will also be reduced has angered ramp workers in L.A. This endangers the lives of all ground workers, flight crews, and passengers. The result will be a rise in the already high injury and accident rate in an increasingly unsafe industry.

Mark Friedman

Los Angeles, California

Wrong to vote Labour
Jonathan Silberman, in answer to Ahmad Haghighat's letter "Why vote for Labour?" gives some dubious reasons for supporting Labour in the past election.

His main premise of wanting to support Labour like a rope supports the hanging man was first used by Lenin in Left Wing Communism - An Infantile Order in 1920. He used this analogy to support his argument that voting for Labour would help the progress of the British Communist movement and the working class and by doing so, Lenin gave concrete reasons.

However, the historical conditions are completely different now. Labour is no longer the fledgling party of the working class. Its party membership is presently overwhelmingly middle class (see P. Seyd and P. Whiteley, Labour's Grass Roots). The Party has moved much more to the centre and Blair's abstract election campaign centered on being tough on crime (meaning less personal freedoms) and this, combined with his Christian moralism, poses more of a threat to the working class than the Tories ever did.

We do not have to wait four years to see that Labour won't defend our interests. The history is already there to defrock them. One example which is still pertinent today is that Labour was in government when British troops were introduced to Ireland during the present troubles. Blair has recently praised Loyalist Paramilitaries for their `formal' maintenance of their ceasefire and yet Catholics are still being murdered by Loyalist groups, albeit "unofficially." Instead of using "infantile" excuses, we should be showing workers why the British Labour party will not work by illustrating their compromising history. It was nothing but an unimaginative `kop out' for the Communist League to advise the working class to vote for Labour. Giving Labour the `nod' in the election can only be compared to the Socialist Workers Party backing the Democrats in the U.S.

If you use the premise of giving enemies of the Communist League enough rope to hang themselves, who next will you be supporting, the British Nationalist Party? Ah, I can see it now: "History will show who is right over the next few years when the masses see the BNP cannot live up to any of their election promises. Lets vote them in and thus end Fascism."

This may be a crass example, but if we do not correctly apply the lessons of Lenin, then this is what they will amount to.

Ciarán Farrell

Burke, Virginia

Why `Black' is nationality
Reader Ian Harvey disputes my argument that capitalizing the word Black is simply consistent with the policy of capitalizing the names of all nationalities. Blacks are not a nationality, he states, because they have no common country of origin, only a common continent that no more makes Black a nationality than a common European ancestry makes white a nationality. Better to use a capital `B,' he affirms, simply as a recognition of the vanguard role of Black people because of their heroic struggles against oppression and exploitation.

But this moralistic approach undermines a scientific understanding of the nature of this historic struggle and the line of march that will bring it to victory.

Harvey is correct in his argument that the common origin of Blacks in Africa would not in and of itself mean there is a distinct Black nationality in the United States. But when Russian revolutionary leader V. I. Lenin first introduced this characterization of U.S. Blacks into the Marxist movement, he wasn't looking to any common African origin - but rather to a specific historical development - namely the successful counterrevolution against the Radical Reconstruction governments that came to power with the victory of the Union forces in the Civil War.

This counterrevolution blocked the distribution of "forty acres and a mule" and other measures that could have transformed the freed slaves into a layer of independent small farmers. Instead, Blacks were not only politically disenfranchised, but subjected to a whole range of economic and social discrimination which continues through today.

During the Russian revolution numerous peoples rose up and sometimes even unexpectedly proclaimed their distinct rights as oppressed nationalities in the course of the struggle to overthrow the Tsar. The Bolshevik Party led the fighting workers of the Russian state to champion these struggles for self-determination. That strategy was key not only to victory against the Tsar, but to the unity of the new workers state that emerged from the victorious revolution. The Communist International sought to alert working people around the world to the importance of this lesson.

Blacks are a distinct, oppressed nationality forged out of the very conditions that gave birth to U.S. imperialism. It flows from this crucial understanding that their struggle against national oppression, as noted by the Communist International, is of great strategic importance to the worldwide struggle against the capitalist system.

Pete Seidman

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania  
 
 
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