Need Collective Leadership here ♦ Young Communists Fight Anti-Immigrant Racism here ♦ Letter: Chávez Racist and Sexist here ♦
Communist Organizing Requires Collective Leadership
CALIFORNIA (USA), March 25— The capitalist press has reported widely that Cesar Chavez sexually abused and raped women and girls in the 1960s and 70s. Chavez was a founder and former president of the United Farm Workers (UFW). He died in 1993.
Two women revealed that Chavez sexually abused them when they were twelve and thirteen years old. They were daughters of UFW organizers in the 1970s. He raped one when she was fifteen.
UFW co-founder Dolores Huerta also accused Chavez of assaulting her in 1960 and raping her in 1966.
Government agencies, politicians, schools, and community organizations quickly condemned Chavez. They removed his name from street signs, murals, holidays, and monuments.
Chavez deserves this public condemnation. But many who now denounce Chavez for sexual abuse have long ignored his anti-worker, racist, and pro-capitalist policies while he led the UFW.
As UFW president, Chavez rejected worker militancy and the critique of capitalism. Instead, he promoted the bankrupt political practices of pacifism, class collaboration, religious fanaticism, racism, and feeble reformism. He mobilized union members to campaign for Democratic Party politicians who were supporting the Vietnam War and the massacre of peasants and workers there.
He used religious mysticism and idealism to convince workers that praying and fasting were more effective than class-conscious militancy in fighting the growers, cops, and scabs. He expelled any union member suspected of being a communist, or who fought against the bosses and the scabs militantly. That included ICWP member Epifanio Camacho.
Chavez’s racism was on full display when he attacked undocumented workers. He accused them of being strikebreakers and reported them to the Migra. But many of the strikers themselves were undocumented.
In May 1968, the UFW paper El Malcriado published the names of forty-eight such individuals. In June 1974, Chavez and the UFW board approved their “Campaign Against Illegals.” That summer, they reported over 5,000 undocumented workers to the Migra.
Chavez implemented a project near Yuma, Arizona from 1973 to 1975 racistly dubbed “the Wet Line”. UFW goons camped on the border to beat undocumented immigrants trying to enter the US to work. They often turned them over to the Border Patrol.
The UFW proudly reported that “approximately 600 men and women, all former lemon pickers, have been transformed into a day and night border patrol . . . at least 50 times more effective than the US Border Patrol.”
Chavez boasted that “soon the only thing that will cross that border without our knowledge will be the desert rats” (El Malcriado 10/18/74). Chavez’s cousin Manuel Chavez commanded “the Wet Line.” The “Wet Line” anticipated the right-wing, white supremacist Minutemen Project which conducted similar activities from 2005-2010.
In 1977, Chavez betrayed Filipino farm workers when he visited the Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos. The Philippines was under martial law. The Marcos regime had tortured, murdered, and imprisoned labor organizers.
Chavez defended Marcos. He stated that conditions for workers in the Philippines were “a hell of a lot better now” than before Marcos imposed martial law.
The ICWP unconditionally condemns the sexual abuse of vulnerable people, including the rape of Dolores Huerta. But Huerta’s situation is also contradictory. She was one of Chavez’s victims of sexual abuse. But she promoted the same anti-worker, racist policies that Chavez did.
That included the racism against undocumented workers, the pro-capitalist unity with politicians, the defeatist pacifism, the religious mysticism, and the attack against communists and militant workers in the union. She remains as guilty as Chavez for doing so.
Under the corrupt leadership of Chavez and Huerta, all the reforms won by the mass militancy of farm workers during the 1960s and 70s were later lost. Conditions in the fields today are in some ways worse than they were before the 1965 Delano Grape Strike.
Communist organizing requires a strong collective dedicated to the working-class struggle against capitalist exploitation. No “leader” should ever be exempt from criticism. Or placed on a pedestal and positioned to be coopted by capitalist politicians.
And even the most honest, anti-racist, and militant trade-unionists fight only to improve conditions of our wage slavery. The decline of US capitalism since the 1970s has made it even harder to win or maintain any such improvements. We must fight to end wage slavery and to build a “share and share alike” communist society with no bosses, borders, or profits.
The reformist history of the UFW proves that farm workers need to build a communist movement now more than ever.
Young Communists Fight Anti-Immigrant Racism, Call Out Chávez before It Was “Popular”
In 1971-1972, a small group of young communists in Los Angeles were active in CASA. It was a community organization whose leadership pretended to fight the racist Dixon-Arnett law. This California law made it illegal to employ undocumented workers.
We say “pretended” because their real interest was in attracting undocumented members. They lied that the CASA “carnet” would prevent their deportation and help them legalize their immigration status. They charged $15 for the “carnet.” Over thirty thousand workers joined.
Besides raking in all this money, the huge membership made CASA an important “community organization” for the US rulers. Their main agenda was pushing anti-communism and Chicano and Mexican nationalism. The goal was to prevent our Mexican brothers and sisters, immigrants and citizens, from uniting with our white, Black, and other Latinx class siblings to organize to overthrow capitalism. For this they were handsomely rewarded to the tune of about $50K a month.
Blinded by their deceitful propaganda, hundreds of immigrants attended weekly Friday night meetings. They hoped to hear about organizing a serious militant movement to oppose the fascist law. All they heard, however, were politicians’ lies and Catholic Church priests who offered their churches as refuge if they became jobless.
In the face of CASA leadership’s ferocious opposition, the young communists called upon the masses to organize to militantly march in downtown Los Angeles protesting this racist anti-immigrant legislation. The masses responded.
On a Friday night in 1972, instead of coming to the regular meeting, thousands of workers, mainly undocumented, met at Olympic and Broadway. They marched to City Hall. The young communists led the first mass march of undocumented workers bravely defying the rulers’ open fascist attacks.
CASA leaders went out of their way to praise Cesar Chavez. He was the supposed leader of the growing mass movement of farmworkers in California against the growers’ racist abuses. The young communists heard about a sign in the United Farm Workers (UFW) union hall. It said, “To apply for a job or become a union member, you must show your green card.”
They made this known to the masses when they spoke at mass meetings, smaller meetings to organize the march, and other actions to defend undocumented workers who were under attack. They made clear that Chavez, in effect, supported the proposed Dixon-Arnett Bill and was already implementing it!
For this, they earned the workers’ respect. And hatred by the pro-Democratic Party, pro-capitalist leadership. But CASA didn’t last much longer. Some of the young communists remained active and faithful to the working class and the fight for communism for life.
Letter: Chávez Racist and Sexist
Around 1973, communist workers met farmworkers organizing in the United Farm Workers (UFW) against anti-worker attacks. One was Epifanio Camacho, who had been organizing in the fields, striking, and opposing the sellout pacifist and anti-undocumented workers politics of Cesar Chávez. Epifanio became a communist organizer who built a collective which brought communist politics and leadership to farmworkers throughout California’s San Joaquin Valley. They exposed the racism and pacifism of the Chavez leadership. Camacho joined ICWP.
Now it has been revealed that Chávez was also a sexual predator. Some of his victims kept this secret for up to 60 years because they didn’t want to “hurt the movement.” The “movement” ceased to be a force among farmworkers many years ago. All that was left was the image that the ruling class created of a pacifist reformer who supposedly single handedly won reforms for farmworkers.
Whatever short-term victories the farmworkers got were from militant class struggle against the growers, in spite of Chávez’ pacifism. The main victory was that some of the farmworkers became communist fighters for the working class. Their goal: instead of reform, a communist society free from wage slavery, money, racism, sexism, and borders.
Now the same ruling class mouthpieces, like the New York Times, which built Chávez into a “hero” are tearing him down exposing his sexism and pedophilia which was kept secret until now. The New York Times is not including his anti-immigrant racism.
Are they exposing this now because they want young Latinos/as to think the only way they can be respected is to fight bravely for US imperialism? Or because the US government is bringing in vastly more temporary workers and wants to prevent organizing in the fields and factories?
Capitalism breeds individualism, racism, and sexism. Our sympathies and solidarity go to the women Chávez molested and to all workers victimized by the rulers and their agents.
But one of his victims, Dolores Huerta, was the Vice President of the UFW for many years. She helped lead the attack on undocumented workers. It was she who demanded that union members turn in the names of undocumented workers they knew so that the union could report them to the immigration department. Most workers refused.
She has campaigned for the Democratic Party for years and has personally attacked and maligned communism and communists.
She kept silent about Chávez’ assaults for 60 years while she built a career with the UFW supporting the Democratic Party.
The working class has masses of actual heroes—who fought the Nazis, who fought the bosses all over the world, who fought for revolution, who fought the red bourgeoisie in China.
And those who are fighting for communism today. We hail the past, present, and future communist fighters for our class. We don’t need the ruling class to either create or tear down their pro-capitalist “heroes.” Join and build ICWP to build collective leadership fighting to eliminate racism, borders, sexism, and imperialist wars with communist revolution.
—A Comrade
Read the ICWP pamphlet Fight for the Day when No Worker Is Called Foreigner here