Applauding the efforts of Chinese-born garment workers in San Francisco, who recently organized protests to demand $850,000 in back pay from bosses who shut down the Wins of California plant, Koppel pointed out that the employing class in the United States has a long history of being challenged by Chinese workers who resist oppression and exploitation, dating back to the Boxer Rebellion a century ago and the Chinese Revolution in 1949.

"These workers haven't panicked and bought gas masks" against supposed terrorist attacks, Koppel said. "They are too busy defending their rights."

"The class struggle hasn't gone away," the mayoral candidate said, in spite of efforts by the bosses to convince workers to subordinate their own struggles to the imperialist war drive against the people of Afghanistan. "Struggles like these are the biggest obstacle to the attacks on workers at home and abroad being carried out by the wealthy rulers of this country."

Koppel also expressed support for the 22,000 striking Minnesota state employees who stood up to Governor Jesse Ventura's use of National Guardsmen to do struck work, and the coal miners in Alabama--members of the United Mine Workers of America--who recently called a one-day "Memorial Day" work stoppage in response to the death of 13 miners in an explosion in a mine owned by Jim Walter Resources Inc.

Koppel, 44, is editor of the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial.

Douglas Nelson, 26, who is the Socialist Workers candidate for city council in District 3 in the heart of Manhattan's garment district, chaired the meeting. Nelson invited participants to join in the campaign of Koppel and himself as well as William Estrada, running for city council in District 10 in the Washington Heights area of Manhattan, and Olympia Newton, running in District 38 in the Sunset Park area of Brooklyn.

"Washington is raining death on Afghanistan," Koppel said, "including by using cluster bombs that are designed to inflict the maximum damage to human beings and the minimum damage to property. The Socialist Workers campaign demands that Washington stop the bombing and get out of Central Asia and the Mideast," Koppel said. "We demand the rulers stop the attacks on workers rights at home as well.

"We're not alone in calling for an end to the U.S. invasion," he continued. "This week there were protests in Pakistan, the Philippines, India, and Brazil."

The imperial arrogance of the Bush administration, which called the war drive a "crusade" against "evil" and initially named it Operation "Infinite Justice," is a continuation of the arrogance of the administration of former president William Clinton, who spoke of the United States as the "one indispensable nation" in the world, Koppel explained.

"The rulers want us to ask, 'What are we going to do?'" Koppel continued. "But the 'we' that is the working class has nothing in common with the handful of billionaire families who rule this country, and everything in common with workers in Afghanistan and Pakistan. That is the real 'we,'" he said, "and as long as imperialism continues to exist, this system will be a death trap for workers in the imperialist countries."

Koppel described Washington's admonishments to the U.S. press not to publicize statements by Osama bin Laden, leader of the Afghanistan-based Al Qaeda organization, who has been blamed by the U.S. government for the suicide bombings of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon September 11. "This is not a message of a crazed fanatic," Koppel stated. "There is political content in it and that's why it's a problem for the U.S. rulers. That's why they suppress it."

The employers and their government are using the September 11 attack as a pretext to accelerate attacks on workers' rights, Koppel explained, citing the new legislation permitting more extensive wiretapping by police and the extension of "preventive detention" of immigrants accused of crimes. "Here in New York," he pointed out, the rulers "are deploying the National Guard at Penn Station and yesterday they searched every car and van that went through the Queens-Midtown tunnel."

"What is the purpose of all these moves to beef up the cops and increase the militarization of the country?" Koppel asked. "It's the rulers' anticipation of coming battles that will erupt out of the growing resistance by working people to the bosses' antilabor offensive."

During the discussion period following Koppel's talk, one participant in the meeting questioned "whether the United Nations is a viable option" as a forum for revolutionary-minded workers to oppose the imperialist assault, and asked, "how is it possible for the working class to raise its voice?"

Koppel responded, "There is no such thing as 'the United Nations,' it's just a building. Governments that represent classes use the UN to act in their interests. At best the UN is an arena for revolutionary forces to present a real explanation of the class struggle, as Cuban leaders Fidel Castro and Che Guevara and others have done." The last time there was a real international political organization that acted in the interests of working people, Koppel explained, was when the Communist International, led by Russian revolutionary leader V.I. Lenin, reached out to the peoples of Central Asia and the Mideast to attend conferences such as the multilingual conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, in 1920. "Revolutionary leaderships like that in Cuba have used every opportunity to get a platform for their anti-imperialist views."

Koppel agreed with the questioner, who had pointed out that the 15th World Festival of Youth and Students, held in August in Algeria and attended by 6,500 anti-imperialist youth from around the world, registered the beginning of the possibility of rebuilding a revolutionary international.

Koppel concluded his remarks by reading from a statement made by Cuban revolutionary leader José Martí in 1883 in solidarity with the rebellion of the Sepoy, Indians in the British colonial army, the Irish toilers who fought British military assault, as well as "selfless Arabs who, undaunted by defeat or intimidated by numbers, defend their homeland with faith in Allah, a lance in each hand and a pistol between their teeth."

In days leading up to the meeting, Koppel was interviewed by a New York University journalism student and campaigned in the Garment District at the door to a building that houses union and nonunion sewing shops. Nelson also campaigned in the Garment District and among taxi drivers refueling at a gas station. The drivers, mostly immigrants from South and Central Asia and West Africa, gave Nelson and his supporters a warm response, and five bought copies of the Militant.  
 
 
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