Click on the headline to link to the Karl Liebknecht Internet Archive copy of his famous 1915 anti-war tract, The Main Enemy Is At Home!
Markin comment:
I had not originally intended to include this document along with today’s three other related posts but the headline and the substance of article do a rather nice job of summing up what it took me over a decade of my youth to figure out. The lessons: we had a side we wanted to win in the Vietnam War (and it was not the U.S.) and the struggle against imperialist war, is a central component of any program of class struggle under conditions of modern imperialism. Like I said in an earlier post I did not read this material posted today until sometime in the mid-1970s long after DRV-NLF had resolved the question militarily. I could have saved myself some hellious inner turmoil if I had. Finally, I note that this article also parallels most of my own thinking, retrospectively, on the Vietnam War. It is as close as I got to a revolutionary position on that struggle at the time; I did get around to figuring out things better later (and more quickly).
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Victory to the Vietnamese Revolution!
The War and the Class Struggle
—from RCY Newsletter No. 12, May-June 1972 (Revolutionary Communist Youth, then the name of the youth organization affiliated with the Spartacist League)
Roused out of apathy by Nixon's escalation of the Vietnam war students began a massive strike wave on Friday, April 21. On campuses across the country, the RCY is working to extend the student strikes to the working class by raising demands to turn students toward left-wing and anti-war groupings in the unions, and by raising among workers the crucial need for labor strikes against imperialist war. At Brandeis University in Boston for example, a work-stoppage committee was set up, under the direction of the RCY, to contact anti-war workers both on and off campus. At Boston University, already on strike against marine recruiters and the war. the RCY participated in the seizure of the Administration Building, then suggested, and was prominent in building, a defense squad and picket line. While sharply attacking the illusion that student actions by themselves can end the war, the RCY supports student strikes against the war and participates militantly in building such strikes, seeking to extend them to the organized working class. At Columbia University in New York City the RCY participated in militant picketing of buildings and. at mass strike meetings, presented demands aimed at defending and extending the strike, through a working-class orientation. The fact that Columbia workers met separately and voted for a work stoppage on Friday showed the practicality and immediate urgency of working with anti-war workers. At the University of California, Berkeley, all unionized campus workers are on strike for state recognition of their unions. The RCY has been fighting to build student support for the strike with militant picket lines and seeking to link student anti-war sentiment to the workers' struggles. At UCLA and Los Angeles City College, RCYers raised the need to expand the student Strike to a workers' strike, despite SWP/YSA opposition and obstructionism.
The role of the various revisionist tendencies in the current strike wave demonstrates their refusal to formulate working-class strategy for social struggles. Simple campus militancy, supported by various Maoists and leftover New Leftists, can lead at best to starting summer vacation a few weeks early. PL/SDS, while calling for "militant actions," has limited its demands to calling on the universities to divest themselves of "evil" stockholdings and ROTC. The mirror image of PL/SDS's adventurist student vanguardism is the reformist student vanguardism pushed by the SWP/YSA and its front group SMC, which also ignores the need for working-class struggle, calling for students to turn campuses into "anti-war universities." The SWP/YSA seeks to use the student strikes to build its peace rallies as a left cover for McGovern-Muskie-Lindsay's presidential campaign.
The Labor Committee took a sectarian and abstensionist position on the student strikes, calling on the Columbia student strikers to "abandon anarchist tactics, "adopt the full (reformist) program of the Labor Committee, and call for a city-wide meeting of the entire "non-ruling class population" on the basis of a "common-interest program." The Workers League covered its capitulation to the SWP/YSA's pop front by super-sectarianism, demanding repudiation of middle-class student strikes and "posing the question of April 22" and the building of a labor party in '72. At Boston University, the WL's Pat Connolly was the only personal a mass student meeting to vote against calling a student strike!
For Labor Strikes Against the War!
Contrary to SMC claims that "in 1968 the anti-war movement forced Johnson to stop the bombing and invasion" (Columbia SMC leaflet), the re-escalation demonstrates that neither the anti-war movement nor student strikes by themselves can force U.S. imperialism out of Indochina. In fact, in 1968 Johnson did not stop the bombing: he merely moved it from the North to the South where the overall bombing was increased. Nixon only withdrew U.S. troops from Cambodia after he had opened the Cambodian border to successive waves of South Vietnamese Army invasions. U.S. aerial bombings, and last year the re-invasion of U.S. troops.
The present anti-war movement and student strikes have no real impact on the actual course of the war because they lack the social
power to challenge U.S. capitalism. Only the working class has both the social interest and the social power to fight imperialist war. The Cambodia-Kent-Jackson State student strike, while demonstrating the unquestionable opposition to the war of the overwhelming majority of students, ultimately had no real effect on U.S. government policy. On the other hand, the recent West Coast dock strike, if it had been extended to war goods, would have made it logistically impossible for the U.S. to maintain a military presence in Vietnam. Because ten thousand striking dock workers offer a far greater potential threat to capitalism than a million striking students, capitalist politicians like McGovern will support student strikes at the same time they call on Nixon to bust the dock strike.
Student strikes must be extended to labor strikes; the anti-war movement must be turned into an anti-capitalist movement. Radical students must turn their efforts toward support to the only real way of fighting imperialism: class struggle.
All Indochina Must Go Communist!
The liberal defenders of imperialism are quick to seek to turn the revulsion against Nixon's re-escalation to their own advantage. Bella Abzug, for example, rushed up to Columbia in an attempt to rally the striking students around her electoral ambitions. The elementary duty to exclude the class enemy from the student strikes must he linked with ceaseless political exposure of the liberals and fake-lefts who bring the bourgeoisie's program into the strikes. The liberals' call to "set the date" only means that "date" when the Vietnamese revolution is crushed and a pro-American government stabilized. The SMC's emphasis on the single issue of troop withdrawal plays straight into Nixon's "Vietnamization" strategy of replacing U.S. soldiers with soldiers of the Saigon puppet government. To draw a hard line between those who oppose imperialism and those who seek a more popular, less costly way to buttress it. the student strikes must take sides with the embattled working people of Vietnam. They must oppose to the class collaborationist of the U.S. anti-war movement and of the Vietnamese Stalinists the demands:
MILITARY VICTORY TO THE NLF/ DRV! ALL INDOCHINA MUST GO COMMUNIST!
Saturday, October 30, 2010
*From The Archives Of The Spartacist League (U.S.)- The Struggle Against Class Collaboration In The Anti-War Movement- Against NPAC (National Peace Action Commitee) Pop Fronts: For Class Action Against The War (1971)
Click on the headline to link to an American Left History entry entitled WHEN DID THE 1960'S END? for background on the events of May Day 1971 that figure prominently in this post.
Markin comment:
Earlier this month I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement that in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.
After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Deb’s Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.
Today I am starting what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.
However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
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Markin comment on the peace and/or anti-war question:
If I was asked to name the number one political cause that I have fought for in my life, and I thought about it for a few moments, the answer would have to be the peace, or put a better way, the anti-war question. I will just quickly draw a distinction between the two terms for purposes of this commentary. Of course, everybody and their brother and sister wants peace, talks about peace, would love to see in their lifetimes, and so on. By this they mean, usually, no wars, or at least just little ones, or may an occasional civil war or something like that. Mainly though, truth to tell, no wars to intrude on their daily lives, and certainly nothing that they have to take up arms about, or worst, sent their children with those selfsame arms to fight. Sunday speech peace is what this attitude boils down to. We have heard that noise from politicians, high and low, for an eternity. And for a fair part of my political youth, truth to tell, that kind of peace, that kind of striving for peace as a political activist, if not quite put in that hard-boiled a manner had great appeal.
Yes, but I am a big boy now, and have been for quite awhile. Thus, sweet Sunday speech peace preachments leave nothing but a bitter taste in my mouth. First of all, as a historical materialist by political inclination I know that there are some wars, like the class struggle wars that I don not want to be peaceful about, at least if the bourgeoisies of the world get in our way as they usually do. Or certain wars for national self-determination by oppressed nations, like the Vietnam War that caused me to re-evaluate my “peace” principles on more than one occasion back in the 1960s. Or wars fought by progressive, or at least smaller sized and helpless entities against bigger, bullying ones. So no, in the year 2010, I do not want to fight for “peace at any price.” And while I am no inveterate war-monger by any means thems the facts. As to the anti-war part of the question I think that I can stand on that position a little better, a little more truthfully, by opposing the wars that world imperialism, and in the first instance American imperialism, constantly throw at us, including today’s Iraq and Afghan occupations for starters.
That said, let me go back to that Vietnam War anti-war experience or rather experiences for they will be illustrative of the transformation of my search for “peace” to that of class justice in this wicked old world. Early on in that war, before the massive escalations of the mid-1960s, I would characterize my position as pacifistic in the universal sense reflecting a Catholic Worker-type position tinged with not a little unkempt social-patriotism toward the American government. As the bombs kept endlessly falling on that benighted country and I studied and learned more about the historic struggle of the Vietnamese against foreign oppression I came to support their struggles under the rubric of a war of national liberation. As I moved further left I held quasi-positions (quasi in the sense of ill-formed, or not fully worked out in those hectic times when one could not move fast enough leftward, and as importantly, theoretically leftward) that the anti-war movement should act as an active “second front” in the Vietnamese national liberation struggle by “bringing the war home” (and rather passive toward what ultimately needed to be done to the American government). Finally, finally I came closer to Bolshevik positions on the war question, the need to defend a workers state (in whatever condition, that too evolved over time), the need to do with and in the American military to bring the war to an end the Bolshevik way.
That said, this particular series of entries from the archives of the Spartacist League would have made life infinitely easier if I had had access to them in those days as expressions of a clear way forward for the anti-war movement that I (and not I alone) was getting increasingly frustrated with as it got mired into bourgeois defeatism, and then into oblivion as that war wound down. Unfortunately I did not initially read this material until some time in the mid-1970s. I will make additional individual comments on each entry.
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Markin comment on the futility of individual heroic anti-war resistance and the strategy of ever more massive “peace crawls” in the Vietnam War period.
Sometimes in politics, and after a lifetime of experiences I believe this to be true especially in revolutionary politics, the tempo of political struggle and upheaval can in a short period of time take individuals and movements far beyond what it would normally take many years to traverse, if ever. Such was the 1960s, for me as an individual politico and for American (and world) politics. That quickening of the political process (in our leftward favor that time, for a while anyway) is part of the reason that I have spilled no little ink in the space trying to draw some lessons applicable today from that now long ago series of experiences.
Additionally, in the period since about 1975 (I will take other arguments on dates but certainly no later than 1980 and the “Reagan revolution”) there have been few, if any, occasions to draw lessons from since there have not been the kind of political, social and cultural uprisings associated with the 1960s. The end of that period, the proverbial end of the 1960s that has been the subject on a great deal of commentary (including in this space) is the focus of this commentary. (Note: I have posted a link entry from a couple of years ago giving my opinion on the subject of when the 1960s ended. That commentary is also relevant to the time-frame of the document under discussion in this post.)
In two other of today’s posts I have noted that once I came of political age in the early 1960s I was constantly searching, to put it succinctly, for the best way to combine a political career with “doing good in the world.” (See From The Archives Of The Spartacist League (U.S.)-The Struggle Against Class Collaboration In The Anti-War Movement- New York Peace Parade Statement (1965) and From The Archives Of The Spartacist League (U.S.)- The Struggle Against Class Collaboration In The Anti-War Movement- Beyond October 21: From Protest To Power (1967)). Most of that decade was spent essentially hoping against hope that the struggles against war, for nuclear disarmament, for black civil rights, and for working people, black and white, to get a couple of breaks in this sorry, old world could be resolved with the “system” (bourgeois society). As the decade progressed and the rawness, unfairness and irrationality of the “system” kept tripping up my precious political calculations even I began to realize that it was the “system’ itself that was the problem. Getting beyond that understanding, nevertheless, took several more years of political beatings no matter how much previous political baggage, as noted in those other entries, I discarded along the way.
Sometimes political wisdom comes in strange forms and under seemingly improbable circumstances. The death of my beliefs that things could be smoothed out within the capitalist imperial system came not with the various brutally suppressed black rebellions in the cities, nor the constant Johnson Vietnam troop escalations, and not even the death of my last great hope, Senator Robert Kennedy. No, it was a simple letter, a letter from my draft board stating that they would like the pleasure of my company in the U.S. Army. Although I tussled with refusal I allowed myself to be drafted. And not, let me state for the record, under any Bolshevik concept of going off with my fellow working class stiffs in order to win them to the concept of revolutionary defeatism for the American side. That came later, or a variation of it anyway.
I do not want to dwell on my military experience here except to say that after about three days into that mess I was finally broken from my bourgeois illusions and radicalized, and I have never looked back since. All the later stuff leading up to my understanding of the need to struggle for a workers party that fights for a workers government has been a fine-tuning of the reality “discovered” there that when the deal went down the army (and I later incorporated the courts, the prisons, and the other repressive institutions of bourgeois society into this scheme) was the core of the American state. No, thank you.
That said, the next few years were spent in the political wilderness looking for all kinds of, mainly, individual (or small group) radical expressions of my opposition to bourgeois society, including all sorts of communal activities, a small romance with anarchism, a bigger romance with the Black Panthers (at times when whites could approach them), and a very, very big romance with the notion of acting as some kind of “second front” for the Vietnamese in their struggle against American imperialism. Then came May Day 1971 when we collectively, the Mayday Tribe that is, were going to “stop the government, if the government does not stop the war.” We were crushed unceremoniously and with dispatch on that day by that selfsame government. That desperate experience convinced me that brave, if isolated, remnant that we were there had to be a better way to fight the “beast.” Shortly thereafter I started reading serious socialist stuff, and then ….Marxist tracts (via Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution). And I have not looked back, well, except for that life-long necessity of fine-tuning those class struggle understandings.
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Against NPAC Pop Fronts:
For Class Action Against the War!
—from Spartacist supplement, July 1971
The "Spring Offensive" is over, but the Vietnam war drags on. The Mayday Tribe's threat to "Stop the Government" if the government did not stop the war only demonstrated with what ruthless efficiency the government handles radicals who talk about stopping the government but lack any means except wishful thinking. The Mayday Tribe represented merely a new chapter in the conflict of perspectives which has been ingrained in the anti-war movement since its inception: "respectable" reformism vs. petty-bourgeois adventurism. Each outbreak of confrontationism is greeted by a new wave of "we told you so" from the radical-liberal-bourgeois coalition dominated by the astute class-collaborationist maneuvering of the ex-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP). What hypocrisy! For it is precisely the obvious liberalism of the mainstream anti-war movement which has driven the frustrated student protesters in desperation into the ranks of the Mayday Tribe. And as for futility, what has the SWP's much-touted "mass movement" accomplished? the National Peace Action Coalition (NPAC) "peace action" of April 24 only produced the traffic jam to which the Mayday Tribe aspired. So long as the anti-war movement continues to be circumscribed by these two alternatives—reformism or adventurism there can be no way forward.
Kent State Revisited
The outraged opposition spontaneously generated last year by the U.S. invasion of Cambodia and the Kent-Jackson State massacres has been completely dissipated. The invasion of Laos earlier this year an escalation and expansion of the war equal to the Cambodia invasion produced only scattered protests. The July 2-4 NPAC Convention takes place after the first relatively quiet spring in nearly a decade on college campuses, heretofore the bastion of the anti-war movement. Instead, the campus has become a breeding ground for reactionary cultism (with Campus Crusade for Christ Revivals rivalling anti-war rallies for attendance) and relative political apathy.
The energy of the May 1970 upsurge was dissipated precisely because its lessons have been ignored. The massacres ol students took place in the midst of a massive, ascending strike wave representing a radicalization of the U.S. and international working class unprecedented since World War II. One of the most important episodes of this strike wave was the nationwide teamster wildcat. In Ohio during April-May 1970 twenty thousand teamsters went out. Joining with the trucking owners in calling on right-wing Republican Governor Rhoadcs to mobilize four thousand National Guardsmen to break the wildcat were "friends of labor," "friends of the peace movement" like Senator Saxbe and Mayor Stokes, and the international "leadership" of the Teamsters, including President Fit/simmons and Vice-President Harold Gibbons -labor's "representative" on the podium at the April 24 rally in Washington and endorser of this NPAC Convention.
The trucking owners tried to move scab trucks in convoys of five, supported by a massive show of firepower: military helicopters, armored cars and armed Guardsmen literally riding shotgun in each cabin. The teamsters countered by organizing flying-picket squads which massed at terminal gates whenever the owners tried to move scab trucks. The teamsters were able to lace down the Guardsmen and defend their strike.
It was from this strike-breaking detail that four hundred Guardsmen were taken and sent to Kent State. Unlike the teamsters, the students put up no resistance. But it was students, not teamsters. who were gunned down. Why? A massacre of teamsters, in the middle of a tense, militant nationwide wildcat by one of the country's strongest unions, would have precipitated a series of nationwide protest and sympathy strikes a far greater show of social power than all the student strikes, peace crawls and police confrontations combined. In contrast, the massacre of students had little more long-term social impact than starting summer vacation three weeks early on college campuses.
What made the protesting students so vulnerable was precisely the question of brute social power: the teamsters and other organized workers have it; students do not. Likewise, while polls, parades and police confrontations may demonstrate that the overwhelming majority in this country is against the war, no variation or combination of protest politics can force the U.S. ruling class out of Indochina. Only a combination of social forces whose consciousness and militancy pose a greater threat to the world hegemony of U.S. imperialism than military defeat in Vietnam can force a halt to the war.
NPAC's Predecessor
The predecessor to this NPAC Convention was last year's "Emergency National Conference Against the Cambodia-Laos-Vietnam War" held in Cleveland over June 19-21. Mayor Stokes, fresh from helping break the teamster strike, officiary endorsed the conference and proclaimed June 19-21 as "Peace Action Days." The SWP-dominated conference immediately proposed a demonstration in downtown Cleveland "against Agnew"—a demonstration which any liberal Republican or Democratic hustler like Stokes could solidari/.e with. SDS, supported in their demand by Progressive Labor and the Spartacist League, counterposed a demonstration in support of the teamster wildcat and against Stokes as well as Agnew. The SWP, predictably, was enraged at the suggestion of anything that might "divide" the peace movement and alienate its "friends" in the Democratic Party and trade union bureaucracy.
In addition to marching "against Agnew," the conference attempted to reassemble from the wreckage of various Mobilizations, Coalitions. Committees, Conferences. Caucuses, Congresses, Con¬ventions and other concoctions an even newer, broader, more indivisible peace-group-to-end-all-peace-groups—the "National Peace Action Coalition." Although maneuvering in lesser arenas, the SWP has adopted the Communist Party's proclivity for forming coalitions only to toss them out again when their treachery is no longer of service. Such was the history of the "Spring," "National" and "New" Mobili/ations behind which the SWP was the motivating force, and such will be the history of NPAC. NPAC is a Popular Front combining the SWP with the liberal bourgeoisie and Cold Warrior "socialists," through which the SWP can "lead" masses of people and rub shoulders with .Vance Hartke and Victor Reuther. The SWP is able to "lead" these masses through the oldest opportunist sleight-of-hand in the world —by adopting the liberal bourgeoisie's program! Capitalist politicians like Hartke know that the real decisions about when and how to "end" the war are made in Wall Street high-rises and Pentagon sub-basements. They come to these conferences as they go to livestock shows and state fairs—to garner votes.
"Mass Actions"
To the accusation that formations like NPAC are Popular Fronts of class collaboration, SWPer Doug Jenness responded:
"If NPAC was watering down its program to get support from capitalist politicians, your charges would be justified. But NPAC follows an entirely different course. It has an independent perspective to unite as many people as possible, regardless of political affiliations or views, in mass actions against the Vietnam War." -Militant, 28 May 1970
And to be sure, the Cleveland "Emergency Conference" dutifully passed a resolution calling for "mass actions." Jenness' statement is perfectly clear—and perfectly meaningless. The SWP wants to "unite" lots of "people" (explicitly regardless of politics) in "mass actions." "Unite" which "people," on the basis of what program, in what kind of "mass action"? The massacre of a million Indonesian communist workers was a "mass action." So were the Cossack pogroms. So, for that matter, was the October Revolution. The demonstration "against Agnew" and the teamster wildcat were also "mass actions." However, the SWP endorsed the former while one of their spokesmen (Miguel Padilla.at Cleveland) dismissed the latter as "racist and reactionary." Why do the self-proclaimed "Marxists" of the SWP have so much difficulty understanding that society is made up of classes, not undifferentiated masses, and that the two primary classes in capitalist society are the bourgeoisie and the working class? It is absurd to talk about having "an independent perspective"; the reformist anti-war movement is deliberately organized as a classless formation, but though it may opt to ignore the class struggle, the class struggle does not ignore it! The middle-class youth who have flocked to the anti-war movement in moral outrage must choose sides in the class struggle; they can play no role outside it. The SWP's "independent perspective" in reality means independence from the fight for the international proletarian revolution, in favor of back¬handed support to the class enemy of U.S. workers and their class brothers in Indochina.
Lest anyone should think that the SWP has gone astray through simple ignorance of these elementary tenets of Marxist analysis, it is instructive to compare the SWP's current politics with its analysis of the way to conduct anti-war struggle at the time of the Korean war, another instance of imperialism's continuing assault on the gains of limited social revolutions abroad expressed militarily. In March 1953 Farrcll Dobbs then and now a principal leadei of theSWP- wrote:
"... the most vital place to carry on anti-war agitation and participate in anti-war actions is in the unions where the masses are. We have always envisaged the struggle against war as an extension of the class
struggle onto a higher plane. The fight against the war can really be
effective only to the extent that the workers adopt class-struggle
policies in defending their interests. If we are to help this process along
we must be in the unions "
SWP Internal Bulletin Vol. 15. No. 6, March 1953 (our
emphasis)
Now this is neither a particularly profound nor a particularly eloquent polemic. It is simple matter-of-fact statement of an orientation which stands blatantly and diametrically counterposed to the current politics of the SWP. The SWP leaders are not naive would-be revolutionaries ignorant of the theories of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky; they have consciously rejected Trotskyism in favor of a perspective of reformist class collaboration.
Clear-Cut Choice
Like the national postal strike before it and the recent two-day mini-general strike of New York City public employees, the Teamster wildcat produced a clear-cut line-up of class forces. The trucking owners, cops, courts, the bourgeois press and politicians (from the most liberal to the most conservative) stood united as a class and, together with their agents in the unions, the labor bureaucracy, tried to crush the Teamster struggle. On the other side of the barricades were the Teamsters. The SDS resolution put before the Cleveland "Emergency Conference" a clear-cut, inescapable choice: support the Teamsters (which would have forced NPAC to break with capitalist politicians like Stokes and the "lieutenants of capital" within the workers movement like Fitzsimmons and Gibbons); or cement the Popular Front bloc by calling the Teamsters simply "racist and reactionary" and demonstrating against Agnew. The SWP chose the latter course -the course of class collaboration and betrayal.
On the main issue facing the Cleveland conference—class collaboration the SWP's conduct was unequivocal. Not so that of the pseudo-Trotskyist Workers League (WL) which, in a frenzy of the same opportunist appetite which led it to enthusiastically and virtually uncritically endorse the wretched 1970 SWPneleetorat campaigns, insisted that the real issue was "Trotskyism vs. Stalinism." By this catchy slogan the WL meant that its main enemy at the conference was PL ("Stalinism") and the SDS motions which posed, in a limited but generally correct way, an anti-liberal, working-class orientation for the anti-war movement. The WL in effect made a bloc with the SWP ("Trotskyism"—but since when is the SWP legitimately Trotskyist?) against opposition from the left, thereby endorsing the essence of Stalinism though not the label, for Stalinism like all varieties of revisionism—is nothing more or less than the abandonment of an international, proletarian and revolutionary perspective in favor of alliances with some wing of the class enemy, precisely'the SWP's policy in the anti-war movement! (The WL, which has jumped all over the map on the anti-war question tailending the Popular Front in 1965, offering critical political support to the NLF Stalinists and Ho Chi Minh in 1967— recently adopted a new face: calling its own rally on April 24, the WL denounced all those who participated in the "official" rally, thus condemning the mass of anti-war activists for the betrayals of their reformist, social-chauvinist leaders.)
The SWP Rediscovers Workers
The SWP and its succession of front groups have made their choice—class collaboration rather than class struggle. But since the SWP's usefulness to its bourgeois allies depends precisely on its continued ability to lead the would-be radicals among the anti-war protesters into the Popular Front trap, the SWP now needs the left cover of a pseudo-working-class orientation. Many of the more conscious student activists cannot fail to compare the futility of the April 24 "mass action" with the virtual paralysis of New York City caused by a few thousands of militant workers, even despite their sellout leaders. So the SWP is making renewed efforts to develop the facade of a labor base. A call in the June 18 Militant for the NPAC Convention announces tha.t NPAC is preparing a series of letters addressed to "various anti-war constituencies." Prominent among these separate-but-equal "constituencies" is "trade unionists," and several union bureaucrats are listed among the sponsors of the Convention.
But a Marxist working-class perspective does not consist of the
willingness to orient towards workers (mediated through the class
(traitors of the labor bureaucracy, to be sure) for the purpose of
including them among the various other "constituencies" assembled under the political banner of the liberal bourgeoisie. The empirical reflex of much of the U.S. left, faced with the demonstrated revolutionary aspirations of the working class following the 1968 French upsurge, has been to go where the action is by adopting a simple-minded "workerism" underlaid with the social do-goodism previously characteristic of the New Left's attitude toward the "Third World." In this respect PL-SDS's "tactics" of "allying" with workers by showing how much you want to help them is not atypical, and provides yet another excuse for the right wing of the radical movement (perfectly typified by the SWP's Padilla as well as the old New Leftists) to justify dismissal of the working class as the force for revolution because of the false consciousness (racism, patriotism) which simple-minded "workerism" must ignore as a principle.
To the extent that sections of the working class do remain imbued with the ideology of the bourgeoisie, groups like the SWP have only themselves to blame. Workers see their most sophisticated enemies (McCarthy, Lindsay, Hartkc) lauded by the supposed "Marxists," cheered on by the labor parasites who serve the bourgeoisie within the workers' own organizations. The sections of the left who recognize the SWP's sellout for what it is must go beyond "workerism" to a program which can break the disastrous unity of anti-war militants with the most sell-conscious and dangerous wing of the bourgeoisie, and replace it by a real unity a unity based on a program of international class struggle:
Class Struggle Program
1. No Liberal Bourgeois Speakers at Anti-War Rallies! Under the
rubric of "non-exclusionism" and "independence',' the SWP-NPAC
leadership welcomes the class enemy into the anti-war movement.
The major activity of the movement's "mass actions" has been to
provide both the forum and a captive audience for liberals to do their
canvassing. The only real "independence" for the movement is
irreconcilable opposition to the class enemy.
2. For Labor Political Strikes Against the War! No amount of
student strikes and weekend peace crawls can force U.S. imperialism
to end the Indochinese war. But a strike by U.S. workers in solidarity
with the Indochinese working people could compel the capitalists to
face an enemy even more potent than the Vietnamese Revolution—a
powerful, organized and conscious working class in struggle for its
own class interests in the very citadel of imperialism. The NPAC
leadership opposes this perspective because it wants to maintain its
alliance with the liberal bourgeoisie, trading away the potential of a
powerful, working-class-based mass movement in order to win the
adherence ol "moderates" to a classless, implicitly pro-capitalist line.
A struggle for this demand means the struggle against the conservative, self-interested labor bureaucracy which mortally fears any class action which would upset its peaceful coexistence with the bosses and their politicians.
3. Break with the Capitalist Parties—For a Political Party of the
Working Class! The U.S. working class will remain politically
trapped until it has built, by struggle against its fake "leaders," its own
party. A workers party must have a consistent class program as well
as a working-class base. We do not call upon the tested servants of
capitalism, the labor bureaucrats, to form this party; we do not seek
to pressure them into building a trap for the workers along the lines of
the British Labour Party. We must fight from the beginning to make the workers party a revolutionary party.
4. Smash Imperialism—All U.S. Troops Out of Asia Now! We
must expose the pro-imperialist liberals who speak at the invitation
of the SWP-NPAC —no negotiations, no timetables! We must make
it clear that we want no bourgeois evasions de-escalation, troop
shifts, moratoriums — to interfere with the defeat of imperialism in
Asia!
5. Victory to the Indochinese Revolution — No Confidence in
Sellout "Leaders" at Home or Abroad! The SWP-NPAC demands
"self-determination" for Vietnam. But for Marxists there is an even
higher principle at stake: the class nature of the war. We have a
responsibility to take sides. Our commitment to the revolutionary
struggle of the Indochinese working people demands that we must
give no confidence to the Stalinist traitors who have repeatedly sold
out the struggle (from the Geneva Accords to the People's Peace
Treaty) All Indochina Must Go Communist!
******
The document printed above was prepared for the July 1971 NPAC conference and encapsulated the sharp political struggle which had raged within the antiwar movement for six years. That conference represented a political milestone where the SWP, now class-collahorationist to the core, sealed its popular-front strategy in hlood. After years of organizing toothless pacifist ic conferences and "peace now" marches on a hasis politically acceptable to the "dove" section of the bourgeoisie, these ex- Trotskyists finally succeeded in luring a genuine capitalist politician, U.S. Senator Vance Hartke, onto the NPAC steering committee. At the conference the SWP demonstrated that its political degeneration was matched by the appropriate organizational methods— Stalinist-style gangster attacks on left critics.
To the discomfiture of the SWP and its friend Hartke, Spartacist League supporters demanded that this imperialist spokesman be summarily excluded from the conference, and (when the SL motion was ignored by the chairman) SLers joined with supporters of Progressive Labor (PL) and SDS in soundly booing Hartke's speech. The second major spokesman was Victor Reuther. United Automobile Workers (UAW representative and a key red-baiting CIA lackey within the AFL-CIO bureaucracy. As Reuther rose to speak, the Spartacist delegation chanted "Labor Strikes Against the War," a slogan designed to expose the labor leadership's pro-imperialist hypocrisy, and then sat down.
PL supporters, who saw no difference between Reuther, a "labor lieutenant of capital" within the workers movement and Hartke, a direct representative of the bourgeoisie, attempted to prevent the UAW misleader from speaking. At that point the SWP marshals responded to PL's verbal disruption with a vicious assault and began to physicially throw them out. The SL supporters jumped up to protest these goon-squad tactics and were also attacked, resulting in injuries to several comrades.
The following day, while Hartke denounced PL as "just as responsible for the war as Nixon," the SWP capped its thug attack with a political purge and refused to allow any PL or SL supporters hack into the conference. So blatantly provocative were the SWP's actions that even political tendencies that had not lifted a finger during the attack fell compelled to separate themselves from this violent exclusionism. Only one group was shameless enough to join with the SWP in the assault (later serving up nauseating left" justifications lo whitewash the SWP's anti-red purge): the Healyile Workers League, then pursuing one of its many unprincipled belly-crawling maneuvers toward the U.S. Pabloites.
Markin comment:
Earlier this month I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement that in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.
After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Deb’s Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.
Today I am starting what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.
However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
***********
Markin comment on the peace and/or anti-war question:
If I was asked to name the number one political cause that I have fought for in my life, and I thought about it for a few moments, the answer would have to be the peace, or put a better way, the anti-war question. I will just quickly draw a distinction between the two terms for purposes of this commentary. Of course, everybody and their brother and sister wants peace, talks about peace, would love to see in their lifetimes, and so on. By this they mean, usually, no wars, or at least just little ones, or may an occasional civil war or something like that. Mainly though, truth to tell, no wars to intrude on their daily lives, and certainly nothing that they have to take up arms about, or worst, sent their children with those selfsame arms to fight. Sunday speech peace is what this attitude boils down to. We have heard that noise from politicians, high and low, for an eternity. And for a fair part of my political youth, truth to tell, that kind of peace, that kind of striving for peace as a political activist, if not quite put in that hard-boiled a manner had great appeal.
Yes, but I am a big boy now, and have been for quite awhile. Thus, sweet Sunday speech peace preachments leave nothing but a bitter taste in my mouth. First of all, as a historical materialist by political inclination I know that there are some wars, like the class struggle wars that I don not want to be peaceful about, at least if the bourgeoisies of the world get in our way as they usually do. Or certain wars for national self-determination by oppressed nations, like the Vietnam War that caused me to re-evaluate my “peace” principles on more than one occasion back in the 1960s. Or wars fought by progressive, or at least smaller sized and helpless entities against bigger, bullying ones. So no, in the year 2010, I do not want to fight for “peace at any price.” And while I am no inveterate war-monger by any means thems the facts. As to the anti-war part of the question I think that I can stand on that position a little better, a little more truthfully, by opposing the wars that world imperialism, and in the first instance American imperialism, constantly throw at us, including today’s Iraq and Afghan occupations for starters.
That said, let me go back to that Vietnam War anti-war experience or rather experiences for they will be illustrative of the transformation of my search for “peace” to that of class justice in this wicked old world. Early on in that war, before the massive escalations of the mid-1960s, I would characterize my position as pacifistic in the universal sense reflecting a Catholic Worker-type position tinged with not a little unkempt social-patriotism toward the American government. As the bombs kept endlessly falling on that benighted country and I studied and learned more about the historic struggle of the Vietnamese against foreign oppression I came to support their struggles under the rubric of a war of national liberation. As I moved further left I held quasi-positions (quasi in the sense of ill-formed, or not fully worked out in those hectic times when one could not move fast enough leftward, and as importantly, theoretically leftward) that the anti-war movement should act as an active “second front” in the Vietnamese national liberation struggle by “bringing the war home” (and rather passive toward what ultimately needed to be done to the American government). Finally, finally I came closer to Bolshevik positions on the war question, the need to defend a workers state (in whatever condition, that too evolved over time), the need to do with and in the American military to bring the war to an end the Bolshevik way.
That said, this particular series of entries from the archives of the Spartacist League would have made life infinitely easier if I had had access to them in those days as expressions of a clear way forward for the anti-war movement that I (and not I alone) was getting increasingly frustrated with as it got mired into bourgeois defeatism, and then into oblivion as that war wound down. Unfortunately I did not initially read this material until some time in the mid-1970s. I will make additional individual comments on each entry.
********
Markin comment on the futility of individual heroic anti-war resistance and the strategy of ever more massive “peace crawls” in the Vietnam War period.
Sometimes in politics, and after a lifetime of experiences I believe this to be true especially in revolutionary politics, the tempo of political struggle and upheaval can in a short period of time take individuals and movements far beyond what it would normally take many years to traverse, if ever. Such was the 1960s, for me as an individual politico and for American (and world) politics. That quickening of the political process (in our leftward favor that time, for a while anyway) is part of the reason that I have spilled no little ink in the space trying to draw some lessons applicable today from that now long ago series of experiences.
Additionally, in the period since about 1975 (I will take other arguments on dates but certainly no later than 1980 and the “Reagan revolution”) there have been few, if any, occasions to draw lessons from since there have not been the kind of political, social and cultural uprisings associated with the 1960s. The end of that period, the proverbial end of the 1960s that has been the subject on a great deal of commentary (including in this space) is the focus of this commentary. (Note: I have posted a link entry from a couple of years ago giving my opinion on the subject of when the 1960s ended. That commentary is also relevant to the time-frame of the document under discussion in this post.)
In two other of today’s posts I have noted that once I came of political age in the early 1960s I was constantly searching, to put it succinctly, for the best way to combine a political career with “doing good in the world.” (See From The Archives Of The Spartacist League (U.S.)-The Struggle Against Class Collaboration In The Anti-War Movement- New York Peace Parade Statement (1965) and From The Archives Of The Spartacist League (U.S.)- The Struggle Against Class Collaboration In The Anti-War Movement- Beyond October 21: From Protest To Power (1967)). Most of that decade was spent essentially hoping against hope that the struggles against war, for nuclear disarmament, for black civil rights, and for working people, black and white, to get a couple of breaks in this sorry, old world could be resolved with the “system” (bourgeois society). As the decade progressed and the rawness, unfairness and irrationality of the “system” kept tripping up my precious political calculations even I began to realize that it was the “system’ itself that was the problem. Getting beyond that understanding, nevertheless, took several more years of political beatings no matter how much previous political baggage, as noted in those other entries, I discarded along the way.
Sometimes political wisdom comes in strange forms and under seemingly improbable circumstances. The death of my beliefs that things could be smoothed out within the capitalist imperial system came not with the various brutally suppressed black rebellions in the cities, nor the constant Johnson Vietnam troop escalations, and not even the death of my last great hope, Senator Robert Kennedy. No, it was a simple letter, a letter from my draft board stating that they would like the pleasure of my company in the U.S. Army. Although I tussled with refusal I allowed myself to be drafted. And not, let me state for the record, under any Bolshevik concept of going off with my fellow working class stiffs in order to win them to the concept of revolutionary defeatism for the American side. That came later, or a variation of it anyway.
I do not want to dwell on my military experience here except to say that after about three days into that mess I was finally broken from my bourgeois illusions and radicalized, and I have never looked back since. All the later stuff leading up to my understanding of the need to struggle for a workers party that fights for a workers government has been a fine-tuning of the reality “discovered” there that when the deal went down the army (and I later incorporated the courts, the prisons, and the other repressive institutions of bourgeois society into this scheme) was the core of the American state. No, thank you.
That said, the next few years were spent in the political wilderness looking for all kinds of, mainly, individual (or small group) radical expressions of my opposition to bourgeois society, including all sorts of communal activities, a small romance with anarchism, a bigger romance with the Black Panthers (at times when whites could approach them), and a very, very big romance with the notion of acting as some kind of “second front” for the Vietnamese in their struggle against American imperialism. Then came May Day 1971 when we collectively, the Mayday Tribe that is, were going to “stop the government, if the government does not stop the war.” We were crushed unceremoniously and with dispatch on that day by that selfsame government. That desperate experience convinced me that brave, if isolated, remnant that we were there had to be a better way to fight the “beast.” Shortly thereafter I started reading serious socialist stuff, and then ….Marxist tracts (via Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution). And I have not looked back, well, except for that life-long necessity of fine-tuning those class struggle understandings.
**************
Against NPAC Pop Fronts:
For Class Action Against the War!
—from Spartacist supplement, July 1971
The "Spring Offensive" is over, but the Vietnam war drags on. The Mayday Tribe's threat to "Stop the Government" if the government did not stop the war only demonstrated with what ruthless efficiency the government handles radicals who talk about stopping the government but lack any means except wishful thinking. The Mayday Tribe represented merely a new chapter in the conflict of perspectives which has been ingrained in the anti-war movement since its inception: "respectable" reformism vs. petty-bourgeois adventurism. Each outbreak of confrontationism is greeted by a new wave of "we told you so" from the radical-liberal-bourgeois coalition dominated by the astute class-collaborationist maneuvering of the ex-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP). What hypocrisy! For it is precisely the obvious liberalism of the mainstream anti-war movement which has driven the frustrated student protesters in desperation into the ranks of the Mayday Tribe. And as for futility, what has the SWP's much-touted "mass movement" accomplished? the National Peace Action Coalition (NPAC) "peace action" of April 24 only produced the traffic jam to which the Mayday Tribe aspired. So long as the anti-war movement continues to be circumscribed by these two alternatives—reformism or adventurism there can be no way forward.
Kent State Revisited
The outraged opposition spontaneously generated last year by the U.S. invasion of Cambodia and the Kent-Jackson State massacres has been completely dissipated. The invasion of Laos earlier this year an escalation and expansion of the war equal to the Cambodia invasion produced only scattered protests. The July 2-4 NPAC Convention takes place after the first relatively quiet spring in nearly a decade on college campuses, heretofore the bastion of the anti-war movement. Instead, the campus has become a breeding ground for reactionary cultism (with Campus Crusade for Christ Revivals rivalling anti-war rallies for attendance) and relative political apathy.
The energy of the May 1970 upsurge was dissipated precisely because its lessons have been ignored. The massacres ol students took place in the midst of a massive, ascending strike wave representing a radicalization of the U.S. and international working class unprecedented since World War II. One of the most important episodes of this strike wave was the nationwide teamster wildcat. In Ohio during April-May 1970 twenty thousand teamsters went out. Joining with the trucking owners in calling on right-wing Republican Governor Rhoadcs to mobilize four thousand National Guardsmen to break the wildcat were "friends of labor," "friends of the peace movement" like Senator Saxbe and Mayor Stokes, and the international "leadership" of the Teamsters, including President Fit/simmons and Vice-President Harold Gibbons -labor's "representative" on the podium at the April 24 rally in Washington and endorser of this NPAC Convention.
The trucking owners tried to move scab trucks in convoys of five, supported by a massive show of firepower: military helicopters, armored cars and armed Guardsmen literally riding shotgun in each cabin. The teamsters countered by organizing flying-picket squads which massed at terminal gates whenever the owners tried to move scab trucks. The teamsters were able to lace down the Guardsmen and defend their strike.
It was from this strike-breaking detail that four hundred Guardsmen were taken and sent to Kent State. Unlike the teamsters, the students put up no resistance. But it was students, not teamsters. who were gunned down. Why? A massacre of teamsters, in the middle of a tense, militant nationwide wildcat by one of the country's strongest unions, would have precipitated a series of nationwide protest and sympathy strikes a far greater show of social power than all the student strikes, peace crawls and police confrontations combined. In contrast, the massacre of students had little more long-term social impact than starting summer vacation three weeks early on college campuses.
What made the protesting students so vulnerable was precisely the question of brute social power: the teamsters and other organized workers have it; students do not. Likewise, while polls, parades and police confrontations may demonstrate that the overwhelming majority in this country is against the war, no variation or combination of protest politics can force the U.S. ruling class out of Indochina. Only a combination of social forces whose consciousness and militancy pose a greater threat to the world hegemony of U.S. imperialism than military defeat in Vietnam can force a halt to the war.
NPAC's Predecessor
The predecessor to this NPAC Convention was last year's "Emergency National Conference Against the Cambodia-Laos-Vietnam War" held in Cleveland over June 19-21. Mayor Stokes, fresh from helping break the teamster strike, officiary endorsed the conference and proclaimed June 19-21 as "Peace Action Days." The SWP-dominated conference immediately proposed a demonstration in downtown Cleveland "against Agnew"—a demonstration which any liberal Republican or Democratic hustler like Stokes could solidari/.e with. SDS, supported in their demand by Progressive Labor and the Spartacist League, counterposed a demonstration in support of the teamster wildcat and against Stokes as well as Agnew. The SWP, predictably, was enraged at the suggestion of anything that might "divide" the peace movement and alienate its "friends" in the Democratic Party and trade union bureaucracy.
In addition to marching "against Agnew," the conference attempted to reassemble from the wreckage of various Mobilizations, Coalitions. Committees, Conferences. Caucuses, Congresses, Con¬ventions and other concoctions an even newer, broader, more indivisible peace-group-to-end-all-peace-groups—the "National Peace Action Coalition." Although maneuvering in lesser arenas, the SWP has adopted the Communist Party's proclivity for forming coalitions only to toss them out again when their treachery is no longer of service. Such was the history of the "Spring," "National" and "New" Mobili/ations behind which the SWP was the motivating force, and such will be the history of NPAC. NPAC is a Popular Front combining the SWP with the liberal bourgeoisie and Cold Warrior "socialists," through which the SWP can "lead" masses of people and rub shoulders with .Vance Hartke and Victor Reuther. The SWP is able to "lead" these masses through the oldest opportunist sleight-of-hand in the world —by adopting the liberal bourgeoisie's program! Capitalist politicians like Hartke know that the real decisions about when and how to "end" the war are made in Wall Street high-rises and Pentagon sub-basements. They come to these conferences as they go to livestock shows and state fairs—to garner votes.
"Mass Actions"
To the accusation that formations like NPAC are Popular Fronts of class collaboration, SWPer Doug Jenness responded:
"If NPAC was watering down its program to get support from capitalist politicians, your charges would be justified. But NPAC follows an entirely different course. It has an independent perspective to unite as many people as possible, regardless of political affiliations or views, in mass actions against the Vietnam War." -Militant, 28 May 1970
And to be sure, the Cleveland "Emergency Conference" dutifully passed a resolution calling for "mass actions." Jenness' statement is perfectly clear—and perfectly meaningless. The SWP wants to "unite" lots of "people" (explicitly regardless of politics) in "mass actions." "Unite" which "people," on the basis of what program, in what kind of "mass action"? The massacre of a million Indonesian communist workers was a "mass action." So were the Cossack pogroms. So, for that matter, was the October Revolution. The demonstration "against Agnew" and the teamster wildcat were also "mass actions." However, the SWP endorsed the former while one of their spokesmen (Miguel Padilla.at Cleveland) dismissed the latter as "racist and reactionary." Why do the self-proclaimed "Marxists" of the SWP have so much difficulty understanding that society is made up of classes, not undifferentiated masses, and that the two primary classes in capitalist society are the bourgeoisie and the working class? It is absurd to talk about having "an independent perspective"; the reformist anti-war movement is deliberately organized as a classless formation, but though it may opt to ignore the class struggle, the class struggle does not ignore it! The middle-class youth who have flocked to the anti-war movement in moral outrage must choose sides in the class struggle; they can play no role outside it. The SWP's "independent perspective" in reality means independence from the fight for the international proletarian revolution, in favor of back¬handed support to the class enemy of U.S. workers and their class brothers in Indochina.
Lest anyone should think that the SWP has gone astray through simple ignorance of these elementary tenets of Marxist analysis, it is instructive to compare the SWP's current politics with its analysis of the way to conduct anti-war struggle at the time of the Korean war, another instance of imperialism's continuing assault on the gains of limited social revolutions abroad expressed militarily. In March 1953 Farrcll Dobbs then and now a principal leadei of theSWP- wrote:
"... the most vital place to carry on anti-war agitation and participate in anti-war actions is in the unions where the masses are. We have always envisaged the struggle against war as an extension of the class
struggle onto a higher plane. The fight against the war can really be
effective only to the extent that the workers adopt class-struggle
policies in defending their interests. If we are to help this process along
we must be in the unions "
SWP Internal Bulletin Vol. 15. No. 6, March 1953 (our
emphasis)
Now this is neither a particularly profound nor a particularly eloquent polemic. It is simple matter-of-fact statement of an orientation which stands blatantly and diametrically counterposed to the current politics of the SWP. The SWP leaders are not naive would-be revolutionaries ignorant of the theories of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky; they have consciously rejected Trotskyism in favor of a perspective of reformist class collaboration.
Clear-Cut Choice
Like the national postal strike before it and the recent two-day mini-general strike of New York City public employees, the Teamster wildcat produced a clear-cut line-up of class forces. The trucking owners, cops, courts, the bourgeois press and politicians (from the most liberal to the most conservative) stood united as a class and, together with their agents in the unions, the labor bureaucracy, tried to crush the Teamster struggle. On the other side of the barricades were the Teamsters. The SDS resolution put before the Cleveland "Emergency Conference" a clear-cut, inescapable choice: support the Teamsters (which would have forced NPAC to break with capitalist politicians like Stokes and the "lieutenants of capital" within the workers movement like Fitzsimmons and Gibbons); or cement the Popular Front bloc by calling the Teamsters simply "racist and reactionary" and demonstrating against Agnew. The SWP chose the latter course -the course of class collaboration and betrayal.
On the main issue facing the Cleveland conference—class collaboration the SWP's conduct was unequivocal. Not so that of the pseudo-Trotskyist Workers League (WL) which, in a frenzy of the same opportunist appetite which led it to enthusiastically and virtually uncritically endorse the wretched 1970 SWPneleetorat campaigns, insisted that the real issue was "Trotskyism vs. Stalinism." By this catchy slogan the WL meant that its main enemy at the conference was PL ("Stalinism") and the SDS motions which posed, in a limited but generally correct way, an anti-liberal, working-class orientation for the anti-war movement. The WL in effect made a bloc with the SWP ("Trotskyism"—but since when is the SWP legitimately Trotskyist?) against opposition from the left, thereby endorsing the essence of Stalinism though not the label, for Stalinism like all varieties of revisionism—is nothing more or less than the abandonment of an international, proletarian and revolutionary perspective in favor of alliances with some wing of the class enemy, precisely'the SWP's policy in the anti-war movement! (The WL, which has jumped all over the map on the anti-war question tailending the Popular Front in 1965, offering critical political support to the NLF Stalinists and Ho Chi Minh in 1967— recently adopted a new face: calling its own rally on April 24, the WL denounced all those who participated in the "official" rally, thus condemning the mass of anti-war activists for the betrayals of their reformist, social-chauvinist leaders.)
The SWP Rediscovers Workers
The SWP and its succession of front groups have made their choice—class collaboration rather than class struggle. But since the SWP's usefulness to its bourgeois allies depends precisely on its continued ability to lead the would-be radicals among the anti-war protesters into the Popular Front trap, the SWP now needs the left cover of a pseudo-working-class orientation. Many of the more conscious student activists cannot fail to compare the futility of the April 24 "mass action" with the virtual paralysis of New York City caused by a few thousands of militant workers, even despite their sellout leaders. So the SWP is making renewed efforts to develop the facade of a labor base. A call in the June 18 Militant for the NPAC Convention announces tha.t NPAC is preparing a series of letters addressed to "various anti-war constituencies." Prominent among these separate-but-equal "constituencies" is "trade unionists," and several union bureaucrats are listed among the sponsors of the Convention.
But a Marxist working-class perspective does not consist of the
willingness to orient towards workers (mediated through the class
(traitors of the labor bureaucracy, to be sure) for the purpose of
including them among the various other "constituencies" assembled under the political banner of the liberal bourgeoisie. The empirical reflex of much of the U.S. left, faced with the demonstrated revolutionary aspirations of the working class following the 1968 French upsurge, has been to go where the action is by adopting a simple-minded "workerism" underlaid with the social do-goodism previously characteristic of the New Left's attitude toward the "Third World." In this respect PL-SDS's "tactics" of "allying" with workers by showing how much you want to help them is not atypical, and provides yet another excuse for the right wing of the radical movement (perfectly typified by the SWP's Padilla as well as the old New Leftists) to justify dismissal of the working class as the force for revolution because of the false consciousness (racism, patriotism) which simple-minded "workerism" must ignore as a principle.
To the extent that sections of the working class do remain imbued with the ideology of the bourgeoisie, groups like the SWP have only themselves to blame. Workers see their most sophisticated enemies (McCarthy, Lindsay, Hartkc) lauded by the supposed "Marxists," cheered on by the labor parasites who serve the bourgeoisie within the workers' own organizations. The sections of the left who recognize the SWP's sellout for what it is must go beyond "workerism" to a program which can break the disastrous unity of anti-war militants with the most sell-conscious and dangerous wing of the bourgeoisie, and replace it by a real unity a unity based on a program of international class struggle:
Class Struggle Program
1. No Liberal Bourgeois Speakers at Anti-War Rallies! Under the
rubric of "non-exclusionism" and "independence',' the SWP-NPAC
leadership welcomes the class enemy into the anti-war movement.
The major activity of the movement's "mass actions" has been to
provide both the forum and a captive audience for liberals to do their
canvassing. The only real "independence" for the movement is
irreconcilable opposition to the class enemy.
2. For Labor Political Strikes Against the War! No amount of
student strikes and weekend peace crawls can force U.S. imperialism
to end the Indochinese war. But a strike by U.S. workers in solidarity
with the Indochinese working people could compel the capitalists to
face an enemy even more potent than the Vietnamese Revolution—a
powerful, organized and conscious working class in struggle for its
own class interests in the very citadel of imperialism. The NPAC
leadership opposes this perspective because it wants to maintain its
alliance with the liberal bourgeoisie, trading away the potential of a
powerful, working-class-based mass movement in order to win the
adherence ol "moderates" to a classless, implicitly pro-capitalist line.
A struggle for this demand means the struggle against the conservative, self-interested labor bureaucracy which mortally fears any class action which would upset its peaceful coexistence with the bosses and their politicians.
3. Break with the Capitalist Parties—For a Political Party of the
Working Class! The U.S. working class will remain politically
trapped until it has built, by struggle against its fake "leaders," its own
party. A workers party must have a consistent class program as well
as a working-class base. We do not call upon the tested servants of
capitalism, the labor bureaucrats, to form this party; we do not seek
to pressure them into building a trap for the workers along the lines of
the British Labour Party. We must fight from the beginning to make the workers party a revolutionary party.
4. Smash Imperialism—All U.S. Troops Out of Asia Now! We
must expose the pro-imperialist liberals who speak at the invitation
of the SWP-NPAC —no negotiations, no timetables! We must make
it clear that we want no bourgeois evasions de-escalation, troop
shifts, moratoriums — to interfere with the defeat of imperialism in
Asia!
5. Victory to the Indochinese Revolution — No Confidence in
Sellout "Leaders" at Home or Abroad! The SWP-NPAC demands
"self-determination" for Vietnam. But for Marxists there is an even
higher principle at stake: the class nature of the war. We have a
responsibility to take sides. Our commitment to the revolutionary
struggle of the Indochinese working people demands that we must
give no confidence to the Stalinist traitors who have repeatedly sold
out the struggle (from the Geneva Accords to the People's Peace
Treaty) All Indochina Must Go Communist!
******
The document printed above was prepared for the July 1971 NPAC conference and encapsulated the sharp political struggle which had raged within the antiwar movement for six years. That conference represented a political milestone where the SWP, now class-collahorationist to the core, sealed its popular-front strategy in hlood. After years of organizing toothless pacifist ic conferences and "peace now" marches on a hasis politically acceptable to the "dove" section of the bourgeoisie, these ex- Trotskyists finally succeeded in luring a genuine capitalist politician, U.S. Senator Vance Hartke, onto the NPAC steering committee. At the conference the SWP demonstrated that its political degeneration was matched by the appropriate organizational methods— Stalinist-style gangster attacks on left critics.
To the discomfiture of the SWP and its friend Hartke, Spartacist League supporters demanded that this imperialist spokesman be summarily excluded from the conference, and (when the SL motion was ignored by the chairman) SLers joined with supporters of Progressive Labor (PL) and SDS in soundly booing Hartke's speech. The second major spokesman was Victor Reuther. United Automobile Workers (UAW representative and a key red-baiting CIA lackey within the AFL-CIO bureaucracy. As Reuther rose to speak, the Spartacist delegation chanted "Labor Strikes Against the War," a slogan designed to expose the labor leadership's pro-imperialist hypocrisy, and then sat down.
PL supporters, who saw no difference between Reuther, a "labor lieutenant of capital" within the workers movement and Hartke, a direct representative of the bourgeoisie, attempted to prevent the UAW misleader from speaking. At that point the SWP marshals responded to PL's verbal disruption with a vicious assault and began to physicially throw them out. The SL supporters jumped up to protest these goon-squad tactics and were also attacked, resulting in injuries to several comrades.
The following day, while Hartke denounced PL as "just as responsible for the war as Nixon," the SWP capped its thug attack with a political purge and refused to allow any PL or SL supporters hack into the conference. So blatantly provocative were the SWP's actions that even political tendencies that had not lifted a finger during the attack fell compelled to separate themselves from this violent exclusionism. Only one group was shameless enough to join with the SWP in the assault (later serving up nauseating left" justifications lo whitewash the SWP's anti-red purge): the Healyile Workers League, then pursuing one of its many unprincipled belly-crawling maneuvers toward the U.S. Pabloites.
From The Archives Of The Spartacist League (U.S.)- The Struggle Against Class Collaboration In The Anti-War Movement- New York Peace Parade Statement (1965)
Click on the headline to link to a Zimmerwald Conference website online copy of the Zimmerwald Manifesto, a document that heads in the right direction against pacifistic class collaboration in the anti-war movement discussed below.
Markin comment:
Earlier this month I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement that in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.
After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Deb’s Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.
Today I am starting what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.
However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
*********
Markin comment on the peace and/or anti-war question:
If I was asked to name the number one political cause that I have fought for in my life, and I thought about it for a few moments, the answer would have to be the peace, or put a better way, the anti-war question. I will just quickly draw a distinction between the two terms for purposes of this commentary. Of course, everybody and their brother and sister wants peace, talks about peace, would love to see in their lifetimes, and so on. By this they mean, usually, no wars, or at least just little ones, or may an occasional civil war or something like that. Mainly though, truth to tell, no wars to intrude on their daily lives, and certainly nothing that they have to take up arms about, or worst, sent their children with those selfsame arms to fight. Sunday speech peace is what this attitude boils down to. We have heard that noise from politicians, high and low, for an eternity. And for a fair part of my political youth, truth to tell, that kind of peace, that kind of striving for peace as a political activist, if not quite put in that hard-boiled a manner had great appeal.
Yes, but I am a big boy now, and have been for quite awhile. Thus, sweet Sunday speech peace preachments leave nothing but a bitter taste in my mouth. First of all, as a historical materialist by political inclination I know that there are some wars, like the class struggle wars that I don not want to be peaceful about, at least if the bourgeoisies of the world get in our way as they usually do. Or certain wars for national self-determination by oppressed nations, like the Vietnam War that caused me to re-evaluate my “peace” principles on more than one occasion back in the 1960s. Or wars fought by progressive, or at least smaller sized and helpless entities against bigger, bullying ones. So no, in the year 2010, I do not want to fight for “peace at any price.” And while I am no inveterate war-monger by any means thems the facts. As to the anti-war part of the question I think that I can stand on that position a little better, a little more truthfully, by opposing the wars that world imperialism, and in the first instance American imperialism, constantly throw at us, including today’s Iraq and Afghan occupations for starters.
That said, let me go back to that Vietnam War anti-war experience or rather experiences for they will be illustrative of the transformation of my search for “peace” to that of class justice in this wicked old world. Early on in that war, before the massive escalations of the mid-1960s, I would characterize my position as pacifistic in the universal sense reflecting a Catholic Worker-type position tinged with not a little unkempt social-patriotism toward the American government. As the bombs kept endlessly falling on that benighted country and I studied and learned more about the historic struggle of the Vietnamese against foreign oppression I came to support their struggles under the rubric of a war of national liberation. As I moved further left I held quasi-positions (quasi in the sense of ill-formed, or not fully worked out in those hectic times when one could not move fast enough leftward, and as importantly, theoretically leftward) that the anti-war movement should act as an active “second front” in the Vietnamese national liberation struggle by “bringing the war home” (and rather passive toward what ultimately needed to be done to the American government). Finally, finally I came closer to Bolshevik positions on the war question, the need to defend a workers state (in whatever condition, that too evolved over time), the need to do with and in the American military to bring the war to an end the Bolshevik way.
That said, this particular series of entries from the archives of the Spartacist League would have made life infinitely easier if I had had access to them in those days as expressions of a clear way forward for the anti-war movement that I (and not I alone) was getting increasingly frustrated with as it got mired into bourgeois defeatism, and then into oblivion as that war wound down. Unfortunately I did not initially read this material until some time in the mid-1970s. I will make additional individual comments on each entry.
******
Markin comment on Spartacist statement
In many ways 1965 was a watershed year in the struggle against the Kennedy-Johnson Vietnam War. Not only was there a grievous escalation of troop levels and bombing attacks based on the usual frame-up set-up (the Gulf of Tonkin incident) that seem to be conveniently available when the tom-toms of war get beating but the fledgling anti-war movement (at least in the East) was getting organized in more than a token manner. Thus, on the serious matter of which way forward for that movement to drive it to victory those New York meetings, the epicenter of the East Coast opposition, described in the document below take on added meaning both for the immediate struggle against the war and the long term prospects for a real anti-imperialist opposition. And, maybe, more.
Listen, in 1965, I was at the height of my Catholic Worker/ Americans for Democratic Action (ADA)-tinged left liberal pacifistic political views. Although not philosophically absolutely committed to non-violence or to working totally within the parliamentary system I was no embryonic Bolshevik ready to raise all kind of hell. I still believed that “sweet” reason could be brought into play in bourgeois politics and the “better angels of our nature” (a term that I was fond of even then) would prevail. I was in no way hostile to communists, of whatever tendency, but merely saw them as another set of partners in the struggle against war. In short, I held a very popular frontist attitude to use a term of art in our communist movement that I was not familiar with then.
All of the above is by way of saying that had I been at the New York anti-war meetings, as I had been at various Boston meetings with the same kind of groups, including SANE (a group that I had worked with on their nuclear disarmament campaigns in the very early 1960s) which drove anti-war efforts around here in those days, I would have been nonplussed by the Spartacist League withdrawal statement. Whatever their reasons. Now, of course, long after the fact, I can see that the commitment of the vast majority of anti-war groups to “sweet” reason toward Johnson Administration war policy and a commitment to an essentially pacifist, parliamentary opposition that could easily be pieced off was doomed to failure. Failure, if the object, as it was for me to stop the bloody bastards.
Fortunately the North Vietnamese army and the National Liberation Front took matters into their own hands and saved the day by beating the American imperialist forces and ending the war. No one can say truthfully that the American anti-war movement was minimal in that effort but it was, in the end, hardly decisive as some would have it. Those famous pictures of the United States Embassy in Saigon being evaluated by helicopter from the rooftops graphically make the point for those who want to argue otherwise.
History is full of little twists and turns, and maybe, just maybe, we can learn something from studying it. Here is the lesson that we can use today. The next time that you are in an anti-war planning meeting and someone argues for immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all troops and mercenaries from (name the current imperial adventure) as a central slogan for the demonstration vote for that proposal with both hands (and feet if you have to). That, in effect, is today’s anti-war version of those 1965 events.
*****************
NY Peace Parade
Press Release:
Spartacist Breaks with New York Parade Committee
—from Spartacist No. 5, November-December 1965
The following statement was read by a Spartacist representative at the 29 September 1965 meeting of the New York Peace Parade Committee, an anti-war coalition dominated by right-wing pacifists and liberals. Among the "individuals" in the committee were members of Progressive Labor Party, the Socialist Party, Workers World, ACFL (predecessor of the Workers League), the Communist Party, the liberal New York SANE and the Committee for Non-Violent Action. Previous meetings had decided in favor of a single, liberal slogan ("Stop the War in Vietnam Now") for the October 16 anti-war parade and a speakers list at the rally featuring the liberal Dr. Benjamin Spock, among others. The committee's grossly social-patriotic "Call" objected to in the Spartacist statement said that the "war in Vietnam is not necessary for national security," since the "United Slates is the richest, most powerful...nation in the world," and the war "cannot enhance the honor of the American people." After reading its statement the Spartacist delegation withdrew from the committee.
*****
At the last meeting on September 22, we raised serious objections to the "one slogan" policy and the political composition of the Rally speakers list.
Had we been invited to the first meeting on September 15 where the substantial issue of non-exclusion was discussed and decided, we would have made our views known then. We objected to the concept that this is a committee of "individuals" rather than organizations.
But of course votes are taken on the basis of organization and not individuals since that is the reality. In an attempt to obscure the exclusion taking place, speakers for the rally were chosen on the basis of artificial "representative" categories: Women. Art. Negroes. Puerto Ricans. Students, Marxist-anti-lmperialists. etc.. with one speaker from each category. But our objections are not simply petty organizational grievances they are political ones.
Since the last meeting we have carefully considered these issues as well as the line of the Call that has been issued and have decided that we can no longer participate in this committee on a principled political basis. Therefore we announce our withdrawal and request that our name be removed from the list of sponsors of the demonstration.
Stop WHOSE War in Vietnam?
The slogan "Stop the War in Vietnam Now" can mean many things to many people. But given the composition of this Committee, the fact that it is dominated by right-wing pacifists and "liberals," i.e., pro-capitalist and pro-LBJ, it is clear that the slogan is deliberately ambiguous in order to avoid facing the duty to advance the only demand that has any meaning: "For the Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal of All U.S. Troops from Vietnam!" Instead of this, the Call demands that "all foreign troops" be removed from Vietnam. This is only an endorsement of the position of the U.S. Government. Further, we are not simply for stopping the war, but rather for the victory of the social revolution that is taking place in Vietnam. It is absurd, and against the interest of the revolution, to call simply for disengagement of forces, and implies a confidence in the integrity of U.S. Imperialism to keep such a bargain. You have completely obscured what we think is the most important character of the Vietnam war -that this is a naked, ruthless intervention by U.S. Imperialism to interrupt and drive back a social revolution in Vietnam, a revolution that is the only road to freedom for the Vietnamese working masses. We are not neutral in this. What is involved is not simply a matter of self-determination or moral indignation or national security or the honor and reputation of the American people as the Call indicates. The best defense of the Vietnamese revolution in this country is to build a militant antiwar movement strong enough to compel the United States to get out of Vietnam!
For Real United Action!
There are many people in this committee with whom we share a number of positions on a range of issues including Vietnam. As in the past, we stand ready to work fully and loyally with you on the basis of political agreement. But we cannot be a party to this committee as it is presently constituted, containing forces that in a class sense are simply not compatible.
This split might have been avoided by a policy of genuine non-exclusion, where all political viewpoints could be expressed. This would have meant, of course, that SANE and some others would have left the committee as they have threatened to do. Instead, in the name of "unity," you have combined with these right-wing elements and chosen to frustrate this alternative and suppress all but the most "respectable" political views. The Socialist Workers Party has deliberately acted as a broker to cement this unprincipled alliance. Well, we for one value our political viewpoints more than we do such a fake "unity."
All those who recognize the truth of what I have said should seriously reconsider their continued participation in this committee and act accordingly.
Markin comment:
Earlier this month I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement that in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.
After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Deb’s Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.
Today I am starting what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.
However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
*********
Markin comment on the peace and/or anti-war question:
If I was asked to name the number one political cause that I have fought for in my life, and I thought about it for a few moments, the answer would have to be the peace, or put a better way, the anti-war question. I will just quickly draw a distinction between the two terms for purposes of this commentary. Of course, everybody and their brother and sister wants peace, talks about peace, would love to see in their lifetimes, and so on. By this they mean, usually, no wars, or at least just little ones, or may an occasional civil war or something like that. Mainly though, truth to tell, no wars to intrude on their daily lives, and certainly nothing that they have to take up arms about, or worst, sent their children with those selfsame arms to fight. Sunday speech peace is what this attitude boils down to. We have heard that noise from politicians, high and low, for an eternity. And for a fair part of my political youth, truth to tell, that kind of peace, that kind of striving for peace as a political activist, if not quite put in that hard-boiled a manner had great appeal.
Yes, but I am a big boy now, and have been for quite awhile. Thus, sweet Sunday speech peace preachments leave nothing but a bitter taste in my mouth. First of all, as a historical materialist by political inclination I know that there are some wars, like the class struggle wars that I don not want to be peaceful about, at least if the bourgeoisies of the world get in our way as they usually do. Or certain wars for national self-determination by oppressed nations, like the Vietnam War that caused me to re-evaluate my “peace” principles on more than one occasion back in the 1960s. Or wars fought by progressive, or at least smaller sized and helpless entities against bigger, bullying ones. So no, in the year 2010, I do not want to fight for “peace at any price.” And while I am no inveterate war-monger by any means thems the facts. As to the anti-war part of the question I think that I can stand on that position a little better, a little more truthfully, by opposing the wars that world imperialism, and in the first instance American imperialism, constantly throw at us, including today’s Iraq and Afghan occupations for starters.
That said, let me go back to that Vietnam War anti-war experience or rather experiences for they will be illustrative of the transformation of my search for “peace” to that of class justice in this wicked old world. Early on in that war, before the massive escalations of the mid-1960s, I would characterize my position as pacifistic in the universal sense reflecting a Catholic Worker-type position tinged with not a little unkempt social-patriotism toward the American government. As the bombs kept endlessly falling on that benighted country and I studied and learned more about the historic struggle of the Vietnamese against foreign oppression I came to support their struggles under the rubric of a war of national liberation. As I moved further left I held quasi-positions (quasi in the sense of ill-formed, or not fully worked out in those hectic times when one could not move fast enough leftward, and as importantly, theoretically leftward) that the anti-war movement should act as an active “second front” in the Vietnamese national liberation struggle by “bringing the war home” (and rather passive toward what ultimately needed to be done to the American government). Finally, finally I came closer to Bolshevik positions on the war question, the need to defend a workers state (in whatever condition, that too evolved over time), the need to do with and in the American military to bring the war to an end the Bolshevik way.
That said, this particular series of entries from the archives of the Spartacist League would have made life infinitely easier if I had had access to them in those days as expressions of a clear way forward for the anti-war movement that I (and not I alone) was getting increasingly frustrated with as it got mired into bourgeois defeatism, and then into oblivion as that war wound down. Unfortunately I did not initially read this material until some time in the mid-1970s. I will make additional individual comments on each entry.
******
Markin comment on Spartacist statement
In many ways 1965 was a watershed year in the struggle against the Kennedy-Johnson Vietnam War. Not only was there a grievous escalation of troop levels and bombing attacks based on the usual frame-up set-up (the Gulf of Tonkin incident) that seem to be conveniently available when the tom-toms of war get beating but the fledgling anti-war movement (at least in the East) was getting organized in more than a token manner. Thus, on the serious matter of which way forward for that movement to drive it to victory those New York meetings, the epicenter of the East Coast opposition, described in the document below take on added meaning both for the immediate struggle against the war and the long term prospects for a real anti-imperialist opposition. And, maybe, more.
Listen, in 1965, I was at the height of my Catholic Worker/ Americans for Democratic Action (ADA)-tinged left liberal pacifistic political views. Although not philosophically absolutely committed to non-violence or to working totally within the parliamentary system I was no embryonic Bolshevik ready to raise all kind of hell. I still believed that “sweet” reason could be brought into play in bourgeois politics and the “better angels of our nature” (a term that I was fond of even then) would prevail. I was in no way hostile to communists, of whatever tendency, but merely saw them as another set of partners in the struggle against war. In short, I held a very popular frontist attitude to use a term of art in our communist movement that I was not familiar with then.
All of the above is by way of saying that had I been at the New York anti-war meetings, as I had been at various Boston meetings with the same kind of groups, including SANE (a group that I had worked with on their nuclear disarmament campaigns in the very early 1960s) which drove anti-war efforts around here in those days, I would have been nonplussed by the Spartacist League withdrawal statement. Whatever their reasons. Now, of course, long after the fact, I can see that the commitment of the vast majority of anti-war groups to “sweet” reason toward Johnson Administration war policy and a commitment to an essentially pacifist, parliamentary opposition that could easily be pieced off was doomed to failure. Failure, if the object, as it was for me to stop the bloody bastards.
Fortunately the North Vietnamese army and the National Liberation Front took matters into their own hands and saved the day by beating the American imperialist forces and ending the war. No one can say truthfully that the American anti-war movement was minimal in that effort but it was, in the end, hardly decisive as some would have it. Those famous pictures of the United States Embassy in Saigon being evaluated by helicopter from the rooftops graphically make the point for those who want to argue otherwise.
History is full of little twists and turns, and maybe, just maybe, we can learn something from studying it. Here is the lesson that we can use today. The next time that you are in an anti-war planning meeting and someone argues for immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all troops and mercenaries from (name the current imperial adventure) as a central slogan for the demonstration vote for that proposal with both hands (and feet if you have to). That, in effect, is today’s anti-war version of those 1965 events.
*****************
NY Peace Parade
Press Release:
Spartacist Breaks with New York Parade Committee
—from Spartacist No. 5, November-December 1965
The following statement was read by a Spartacist representative at the 29 September 1965 meeting of the New York Peace Parade Committee, an anti-war coalition dominated by right-wing pacifists and liberals. Among the "individuals" in the committee were members of Progressive Labor Party, the Socialist Party, Workers World, ACFL (predecessor of the Workers League), the Communist Party, the liberal New York SANE and the Committee for Non-Violent Action. Previous meetings had decided in favor of a single, liberal slogan ("Stop the War in Vietnam Now") for the October 16 anti-war parade and a speakers list at the rally featuring the liberal Dr. Benjamin Spock, among others. The committee's grossly social-patriotic "Call" objected to in the Spartacist statement said that the "war in Vietnam is not necessary for national security," since the "United Slates is the richest, most powerful...nation in the world," and the war "cannot enhance the honor of the American people." After reading its statement the Spartacist delegation withdrew from the committee.
*****
At the last meeting on September 22, we raised serious objections to the "one slogan" policy and the political composition of the Rally speakers list.
Had we been invited to the first meeting on September 15 where the substantial issue of non-exclusion was discussed and decided, we would have made our views known then. We objected to the concept that this is a committee of "individuals" rather than organizations.
But of course votes are taken on the basis of organization and not individuals since that is the reality. In an attempt to obscure the exclusion taking place, speakers for the rally were chosen on the basis of artificial "representative" categories: Women. Art. Negroes. Puerto Ricans. Students, Marxist-anti-lmperialists. etc.. with one speaker from each category. But our objections are not simply petty organizational grievances they are political ones.
Since the last meeting we have carefully considered these issues as well as the line of the Call that has been issued and have decided that we can no longer participate in this committee on a principled political basis. Therefore we announce our withdrawal and request that our name be removed from the list of sponsors of the demonstration.
Stop WHOSE War in Vietnam?
The slogan "Stop the War in Vietnam Now" can mean many things to many people. But given the composition of this Committee, the fact that it is dominated by right-wing pacifists and "liberals," i.e., pro-capitalist and pro-LBJ, it is clear that the slogan is deliberately ambiguous in order to avoid facing the duty to advance the only demand that has any meaning: "For the Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal of All U.S. Troops from Vietnam!" Instead of this, the Call demands that "all foreign troops" be removed from Vietnam. This is only an endorsement of the position of the U.S. Government. Further, we are not simply for stopping the war, but rather for the victory of the social revolution that is taking place in Vietnam. It is absurd, and against the interest of the revolution, to call simply for disengagement of forces, and implies a confidence in the integrity of U.S. Imperialism to keep such a bargain. You have completely obscured what we think is the most important character of the Vietnam war -that this is a naked, ruthless intervention by U.S. Imperialism to interrupt and drive back a social revolution in Vietnam, a revolution that is the only road to freedom for the Vietnamese working masses. We are not neutral in this. What is involved is not simply a matter of self-determination or moral indignation or national security or the honor and reputation of the American people as the Call indicates. The best defense of the Vietnamese revolution in this country is to build a militant antiwar movement strong enough to compel the United States to get out of Vietnam!
For Real United Action!
There are many people in this committee with whom we share a number of positions on a range of issues including Vietnam. As in the past, we stand ready to work fully and loyally with you on the basis of political agreement. But we cannot be a party to this committee as it is presently constituted, containing forces that in a class sense are simply not compatible.
This split might have been avoided by a policy of genuine non-exclusion, where all political viewpoints could be expressed. This would have meant, of course, that SANE and some others would have left the committee as they have threatened to do. Instead, in the name of "unity," you have combined with these right-wing elements and chosen to frustrate this alternative and suppress all but the most "respectable" political views. The Socialist Workers Party has deliberately acted as a broker to cement this unprincipled alliance. Well, we for one value our political viewpoints more than we do such a fake "unity."
All those who recognize the truth of what I have said should seriously reconsider their continued participation in this committee and act accordingly.
*From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America)-Traditions and Guiding Ideas of the SWP in Defence Activities (1941)
Click on the headline to link to the article described in the title.
Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement that in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League. A recent example of that linkage in this space was when I argued in this space that, for those who stand in the Trotskyist tradition, one must examine closely the fate of Marx’s First International, the generic socialist Second International, Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Revolution-inspired Communist International, and Trotsky’s revolutionary successor, the Fourth International before one looks elsewhere for a centralized international working class organization that codifies the principle –“workers of the world unite.”
On the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I am speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Deb’s Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that made up the organization under review, the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Beyond that there are several directions to go in but these are the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s. If I am asked, and I have been, this is the material that I suggest young militants should start of studying to learn about our common political forbears. And that premise underlines the point of the entries that will posted under this headline in further exploration of the early days, “the dog days” of the Socialist Workers Party.
Note: I can just now almost hear some very nice and proper socialists (descendents of those socialism for dentist-types) just now, screaming in the night, yelling what about Max Shachtman (and, I presume, his henchman, Albert Glotzer, as well) and his various organizational formations starting with the Workers party when he split from the Socialist Workers Party in 1940? Well, what about old Max and his “third camp” tradition? I said the Trotskyist tradition not the State Department socialist tradition. If you want to trace Marxist continuity that way, go to it. That, in any case, is not my sense of continuity, although old Max knew how to “speak” Marxism early in his career under Jim Cannon’s prodding. Moreover at the name Max Shachtman I can hear some moaning, some serious moaning about blackguards and turncoats, from the revolutionary pantheon by Messrs. Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. I rest my case.
********************
Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement that in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League. A recent example of that linkage in this space was when I argued in this space that, for those who stand in the Trotskyist tradition, one must examine closely the fate of Marx’s First International, the generic socialist Second International, Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Revolution-inspired Communist International, and Trotsky’s revolutionary successor, the Fourth International before one looks elsewhere for a centralized international working class organization that codifies the principle –“workers of the world unite.”
On the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I am speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Deb’s Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that made up the organization under review, the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Beyond that there are several directions to go in but these are the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s. If I am asked, and I have been, this is the material that I suggest young militants should start of studying to learn about our common political forbears. And that premise underlines the point of the entries that will posted under this headline in further exploration of the early days, “the dog days” of the Socialist Workers Party.
Note: I can just now almost hear some very nice and proper socialists (descendents of those socialism for dentist-types) just now, screaming in the night, yelling what about Max Shachtman (and, I presume, his henchman, Albert Glotzer, as well) and his various organizational formations starting with the Workers party when he split from the Socialist Workers Party in 1940? Well, what about old Max and his “third camp” tradition? I said the Trotskyist tradition not the State Department socialist tradition. If you want to trace Marxist continuity that way, go to it. That, in any case, is not my sense of continuity, although old Max knew how to “speak” Marxism early in his career under Jim Cannon’s prodding. Moreover at the name Max Shachtman I can hear some moaning, some serious moaning about blackguards and turncoats, from the revolutionary pantheon by Messrs. Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. I rest my case.
********************
Friday, October 29, 2010
*From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Vote Yes on California Prop 19 -Decriminalize marijuana (herb, maryjane, joints, ganja or whatever your favorite name for it is) - Down With the Racist “War on Drugs”!
Markin comment:
This article goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist future mentioned in this day's other posts.
Additionally, everyone who has ever smoked a joint, thought about smoking a joint or thought about inhaling the smoke from a joint, in short everyone from the baby boomer generation (except good old boy Bill Clinton it seems) should vote YES with both hands on this one, despite its limitations. Hell, if we had won our fight for the new society back then in the 1960s this would already be the law of the land (actually a better version as noted in the article) and nobody would think twice about it today.
********
Workers Vanguard No. 967
22 October 2010
Vote Yes on California Prop 19
Down With the Racist “War on Drugs”!
OAKLAND—An initiative on the November 2 ballot in California would make the state the first in the country to legalize the sale of marijuana as well as eliminate criminal penalties for possession or use of an ounce or less by those over 21. It would make cannabis available for scientific, medical, industrial and research purposes and permit the cultivation of small amounts for personal consumption. Proposition 19, “The Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010,” is written narrowly to leave much of pot use illegal and concerns itself with regulating and taxing its sale. Nevertheless, a vote for Prop. 19 is an elementary expression of support for a simple democratic right: that the government keep its claws off of people’s private lives.
Equally important, a vote for this initiative is a vote against the “war on drugs,” which is in the main a war against black people. While blacks and whites use marijuana at close to the same rate, the arrest rate for blacks is three times greater nationally and ranges up to four times greater in California counties.
The “war on drugs” has served to greatly intensify capitalist state repression, whose daily workings include street executions by marauding cops, such as the brutal killings of Oscar Grant in Oakland last year and Manuel Jamines in Los Angeles this September. In Latin America, U.S. imperialism—under both Democratic and Republican administrations—has used the “war on drugs” as a pretext for expanding its military presence and propping up pro-U.S. regimes (see “Mexico: Down With ‘Drug Wars’ Militarization!” WV No. 953, 26 February).
Contrary to government claims, the criminalization of marijuana has never had anything to do with protecting anyone’s welfare. Anti-drug laws are designed to maintain social control and regimentation of the population, providing a legal pretext to repress black people, immigrants, youth and others.
Laws against marijuana were first adopted beginning in 1914 as a racist measure against Mexican immigrants in the Southwest. A federal ban in 1937 opened the era of campaigns against “reefer madness,” especially targeting both blacks and Latinos. The first federal “drug czar,” Harry Anslinger, captured that ban’s spirit with such racist diatribes as “reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.”
Today’s plethora of drug laws are an outgrowth of the web of legal repression under the “war on crime,” kicked off with Democrat Lyndon Johnson’s 1968 “Safe Streets Act” and Republican Richard Nixon’s 1970 “Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act.” These and subsequent measures were implemented to target black militants and the ghetto poor following the upheavals against segregation, poverty and racist cop terror in the mid-to-late 1960s. Under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, the bipartisan “war on drugs” was officially launched, centered on a racist crack cocaine witchhunt. Incarceration rates skyrocketed, especially for young black men, for whom the capitalist rulers have had increasingly little use since the devastation of unionized industrial jobs beginning in the 1970s.
Starting in the early 1990s, marijuana arrests began to shoot up as crack cocaine arrests leveled off. By 2009, annual marijuana prosecutions had reached more than 858,000. More than half of all drug arrests are for marijuana, and 46 percent of all drug arrests—nearly 760,000 a year—are for possession. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has made clear the government’s opposition to Prop. 19, vowing that the Obama administration would “vigorously enforce” federal drug laws.
The government has no business criminalizing the personal use of any drug, for any purpose, regardless of its particular risks or effects. As communists, we demand an end to all laws against “crimes without victims,” such as gambling, prostitution, drug use, pornography and all consensual sex. Likewise, we oppose “sin taxes” on activities and products the bourgeoisie deems “immoral” or unhealthy, like alcohol and tobacco.
In fact, marijuana is among the safest of non-food substances consumed by humans. Yet under the Controlled Substances Act, the Feds put it on the list of the supposedly most dangerous drugs, Schedule I, along with heroin, and ahead of Schedule II drugs like cocaine and morphine. Despite the passage of Prop. 215 in 1996, which made medical use of marijuana legal in California, the federal government did not stop persecuting a number of patients with harrowing illnesses for whom pot provided some relief.
NAACP president Alice Huffman explained why the California NAACP endorsed Prop. 19 by correctly denouncing “the so called ‘war on drugs’” as “a war that disproportionately affects young men and women and the latest tool for imposing Jim Crow justice on poor African-Americans” (San Francisco Chronicle, 16 September). For this, she has come under fire, with more than 20 black preachers and others demanding her resignation. Nate Holden, a longtime black Democratic Los Angeles politician, has come out against Prop. 19. The capitalist Democratic Party, and black elected officials in particular, have been instrumental in the anti-drug crusade. Huffman herself has endorsed Democratic state attorney general Jerry Brown for governor. Brown boasts of enforcing the racist drug laws and opposes Prop. 19. In their role of tying labor to the capitalist class enemy, the bureaucratic misleaders of almost all of California’s public workers unions have also backed Brown, who promises to cut public workers pensions.
The “war on drugs” has at times been supported by large sections of working people and the oppressed who wrongly believe that cops and prisons are a means for combatting the social pathology of drug addiction and the drug trade. In fact, decriminalization, by taking the superprofits out of the drug trade, would also reduce the crime associated with it. For those who wish, any associated psychological or medical problem that may arise from drug use should be treated as a medical issue, not a criminal one. At the same time, we understand that drug addiction in the ghetto is a reflection of the hellish conditions imposed on masses of black people in this racist capitalist society. As we wrote in “Anti-Immigrant, Anti-Woman, Anti-Sex: U.S./UN Crusade Against ‘Sex Trafficking’” (Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 58, Spring 2004):
“Recreational drug use is nobody else’s business, but widespread drug addiction and alcoholism sap the revolutionary energy of the working class and other sections of the oppressed. The social oppression that breeds alcoholism and drug addiction among the poor should be fought through the moral authority of the proletarian socialist movement, and not through state coercion.”
Whipping up hysteria about drugs in the workplace, the California Chamber of Commerce opposes Prop. 19 because the measure approves only the “existing right of an employer to address consumption that actually impairs job performance”—i.e., the current norm for subjecting workers to drug tests. We oppose all workplace drug testing, which the bosses use as a pretext to frame up or target militants and cow the entire workforce.
The racism and union-busting of the “war on drugs” come together in the Transportation Worker Identification Credential (TWIC) program, under which port workers are branded as a “threat to national security” for offenses ranging from drug possession with intent to distribute to fraud and being an “illegal immigrant.” Under TWIC, many port workers have lost their jobs, disproportionately blacks and Latinos, and including members of the largely immigrant port truckers. As the Northern California District Council of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union declared in a statement endorsing Prop. 19: “Peoples’ lives are ruined for a lifetime because of criminal records incurred from using a drug that is used recreationally by people from all walks of life. Those criminal records fall disproportionately on the backs of workers, poor people, and people of color.” Down with TWIC!
We support Prop. 19 as a step toward removing all laws against drug use, but we do not take a position on the particular schemes advanced by Prop. 19 to regulate the commercial production and taxation of marijuana. Moreover, we oppose the draconian measures it would mete out when it comes to youth—the other group specially targeted by drug laws—and those who provide them marijuana. These include up to seven years in prison for offering or providing pot to youth under 14, up to five years for ages 14-18 and six months for ages 18-21. Despite its weaknesses, however, if passed and actually implemented—no sure thing given federal and police hostility—Prop. 19 would eliminate a key legal pretext for state harassment and violence. Down with the racist and anti-labor “war on drugs”! For decriminalization of drugs! Vote yes on Prop. 19!
This article goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist future mentioned in this day's other posts.
Additionally, everyone who has ever smoked a joint, thought about smoking a joint or thought about inhaling the smoke from a joint, in short everyone from the baby boomer generation (except good old boy Bill Clinton it seems) should vote YES with both hands on this one, despite its limitations. Hell, if we had won our fight for the new society back then in the 1960s this would already be the law of the land (actually a better version as noted in the article) and nobody would think twice about it today.
********
Workers Vanguard No. 967
22 October 2010
Vote Yes on California Prop 19
Down With the Racist “War on Drugs”!
OAKLAND—An initiative on the November 2 ballot in California would make the state the first in the country to legalize the sale of marijuana as well as eliminate criminal penalties for possession or use of an ounce or less by those over 21. It would make cannabis available for scientific, medical, industrial and research purposes and permit the cultivation of small amounts for personal consumption. Proposition 19, “The Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010,” is written narrowly to leave much of pot use illegal and concerns itself with regulating and taxing its sale. Nevertheless, a vote for Prop. 19 is an elementary expression of support for a simple democratic right: that the government keep its claws off of people’s private lives.
Equally important, a vote for this initiative is a vote against the “war on drugs,” which is in the main a war against black people. While blacks and whites use marijuana at close to the same rate, the arrest rate for blacks is three times greater nationally and ranges up to four times greater in California counties.
The “war on drugs” has served to greatly intensify capitalist state repression, whose daily workings include street executions by marauding cops, such as the brutal killings of Oscar Grant in Oakland last year and Manuel Jamines in Los Angeles this September. In Latin America, U.S. imperialism—under both Democratic and Republican administrations—has used the “war on drugs” as a pretext for expanding its military presence and propping up pro-U.S. regimes (see “Mexico: Down With ‘Drug Wars’ Militarization!” WV No. 953, 26 February).
Contrary to government claims, the criminalization of marijuana has never had anything to do with protecting anyone’s welfare. Anti-drug laws are designed to maintain social control and regimentation of the population, providing a legal pretext to repress black people, immigrants, youth and others.
Laws against marijuana were first adopted beginning in 1914 as a racist measure against Mexican immigrants in the Southwest. A federal ban in 1937 opened the era of campaigns against “reefer madness,” especially targeting both blacks and Latinos. The first federal “drug czar,” Harry Anslinger, captured that ban’s spirit with such racist diatribes as “reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.”
Today’s plethora of drug laws are an outgrowth of the web of legal repression under the “war on crime,” kicked off with Democrat Lyndon Johnson’s 1968 “Safe Streets Act” and Republican Richard Nixon’s 1970 “Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act.” These and subsequent measures were implemented to target black militants and the ghetto poor following the upheavals against segregation, poverty and racist cop terror in the mid-to-late 1960s. Under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, the bipartisan “war on drugs” was officially launched, centered on a racist crack cocaine witchhunt. Incarceration rates skyrocketed, especially for young black men, for whom the capitalist rulers have had increasingly little use since the devastation of unionized industrial jobs beginning in the 1970s.
Starting in the early 1990s, marijuana arrests began to shoot up as crack cocaine arrests leveled off. By 2009, annual marijuana prosecutions had reached more than 858,000. More than half of all drug arrests are for marijuana, and 46 percent of all drug arrests—nearly 760,000 a year—are for possession. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has made clear the government’s opposition to Prop. 19, vowing that the Obama administration would “vigorously enforce” federal drug laws.
The government has no business criminalizing the personal use of any drug, for any purpose, regardless of its particular risks or effects. As communists, we demand an end to all laws against “crimes without victims,” such as gambling, prostitution, drug use, pornography and all consensual sex. Likewise, we oppose “sin taxes” on activities and products the bourgeoisie deems “immoral” or unhealthy, like alcohol and tobacco.
In fact, marijuana is among the safest of non-food substances consumed by humans. Yet under the Controlled Substances Act, the Feds put it on the list of the supposedly most dangerous drugs, Schedule I, along with heroin, and ahead of Schedule II drugs like cocaine and morphine. Despite the passage of Prop. 215 in 1996, which made medical use of marijuana legal in California, the federal government did not stop persecuting a number of patients with harrowing illnesses for whom pot provided some relief.
NAACP president Alice Huffman explained why the California NAACP endorsed Prop. 19 by correctly denouncing “the so called ‘war on drugs’” as “a war that disproportionately affects young men and women and the latest tool for imposing Jim Crow justice on poor African-Americans” (San Francisco Chronicle, 16 September). For this, she has come under fire, with more than 20 black preachers and others demanding her resignation. Nate Holden, a longtime black Democratic Los Angeles politician, has come out against Prop. 19. The capitalist Democratic Party, and black elected officials in particular, have been instrumental in the anti-drug crusade. Huffman herself has endorsed Democratic state attorney general Jerry Brown for governor. Brown boasts of enforcing the racist drug laws and opposes Prop. 19. In their role of tying labor to the capitalist class enemy, the bureaucratic misleaders of almost all of California’s public workers unions have also backed Brown, who promises to cut public workers pensions.
The “war on drugs” has at times been supported by large sections of working people and the oppressed who wrongly believe that cops and prisons are a means for combatting the social pathology of drug addiction and the drug trade. In fact, decriminalization, by taking the superprofits out of the drug trade, would also reduce the crime associated with it. For those who wish, any associated psychological or medical problem that may arise from drug use should be treated as a medical issue, not a criminal one. At the same time, we understand that drug addiction in the ghetto is a reflection of the hellish conditions imposed on masses of black people in this racist capitalist society. As we wrote in “Anti-Immigrant, Anti-Woman, Anti-Sex: U.S./UN Crusade Against ‘Sex Trafficking’” (Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 58, Spring 2004):
“Recreational drug use is nobody else’s business, but widespread drug addiction and alcoholism sap the revolutionary energy of the working class and other sections of the oppressed. The social oppression that breeds alcoholism and drug addiction among the poor should be fought through the moral authority of the proletarian socialist movement, and not through state coercion.”
Whipping up hysteria about drugs in the workplace, the California Chamber of Commerce opposes Prop. 19 because the measure approves only the “existing right of an employer to address consumption that actually impairs job performance”—i.e., the current norm for subjecting workers to drug tests. We oppose all workplace drug testing, which the bosses use as a pretext to frame up or target militants and cow the entire workforce.
The racism and union-busting of the “war on drugs” come together in the Transportation Worker Identification Credential (TWIC) program, under which port workers are branded as a “threat to national security” for offenses ranging from drug possession with intent to distribute to fraud and being an “illegal immigrant.” Under TWIC, many port workers have lost their jobs, disproportionately blacks and Latinos, and including members of the largely immigrant port truckers. As the Northern California District Council of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union declared in a statement endorsing Prop. 19: “Peoples’ lives are ruined for a lifetime because of criminal records incurred from using a drug that is used recreationally by people from all walks of life. Those criminal records fall disproportionately on the backs of workers, poor people, and people of color.” Down with TWIC!
We support Prop. 19 as a step toward removing all laws against drug use, but we do not take a position on the particular schemes advanced by Prop. 19 to regulate the commercial production and taxation of marijuana. Moreover, we oppose the draconian measures it would mete out when it comes to youth—the other group specially targeted by drug laws—and those who provide them marijuana. These include up to seven years in prison for offering or providing pot to youth under 14, up to five years for ages 14-18 and six months for ages 18-21. Despite its weaknesses, however, if passed and actually implemented—no sure thing given federal and police hostility—Prop. 19 would eliminate a key legal pretext for state harassment and violence. Down with the racist and anti-labor “war on drugs”! For decriminalization of drugs! Vote yes on Prop. 19!
*From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"- "The Fraud Of Bourgeois Democracy"-V.I. Lenin
Markin comment:
This one is almost self-explanatory, or should be for serious leftists militants, but just in case here is a sample of the way we look at bourgeois democracy from Comrade Lenin. Then go read the whole thing, and then especially the stuff in Left-Wing Communism-An Infantile Disorder on revolutionary work in bourgeois legislative bodies.
*******
Workers Vanguard No. 967
22 October 2010
The Fraud of Bourgeois Democracy
(Quote of the Week)
Writing at the close of World War I, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin exposed bourgeois democracy as a cover for brutal exploitation and oppression, a facade to conceal the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Lenin’s 1918 work—a continuation of his 1917 classic The State and Revolution—polemicized against apologists for “democratic” bourgeois rule, centrally Karl Kautsky, a leading German Social Democrat who bitterly opposed the 1917 October Revolution and soviet rule (i.e., workers democracy).
********
If we are not to mock at common sense and history, it is obvious that we cannot speak of “pure democracy” as long as different classes exist; we can only speak of class democracy. (Let us say in parenthesis that “pure democracy” is not only an ignorant phrase, revealing a lack of understanding both of the class struggle and of the nature of the state, but also a thrice-empty phrase, since in communist society democracy will wither away in the process of changing and becoming a habit, but will never be “pure” democracy.)
“Pure democracy” is the mendacious phrase of a liberal who wants to fool the workers. History knows of bourgeois democracy which takes the place of feudalism, and of proletarian democracy which takes the place of bourgeois democracy....
Take the bourgeois parliament. Can it be that the learned Kautsky has never heard that the more highly democracy is developed, the more the bourgeois parliaments are subjected by the stock exchange and the bankers? This does not mean that we must not make use of bourgeois parliament.... But it does mean that only a liberal can forget the historical limitations and conventional nature of the bourgeois parliamentary system as Kautsky does. Even in the most democratic bourgeois state the oppressed people at every step encounter the crying contradiction between the formal equality proclaimed by the “democracy” of the capitalists and the thousands of real limitations and subterfuges which turn the proletarians into wage-slaves. It is precisely this contradiction that is opening the eyes of the people to the rottenness, mendacity and hypocrisy of capitalism. It is this contradiction that the agitators and propagandists of socialism are constantly exposing to the people, in order to prepare them for revolution!
—V.I. Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918)
This one is almost self-explanatory, or should be for serious leftists militants, but just in case here is a sample of the way we look at bourgeois democracy from Comrade Lenin. Then go read the whole thing, and then especially the stuff in Left-Wing Communism-An Infantile Disorder on revolutionary work in bourgeois legislative bodies.
*******
Workers Vanguard No. 967
22 October 2010
The Fraud of Bourgeois Democracy
(Quote of the Week)
Writing at the close of World War I, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin exposed bourgeois democracy as a cover for brutal exploitation and oppression, a facade to conceal the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Lenin’s 1918 work—a continuation of his 1917 classic The State and Revolution—polemicized against apologists for “democratic” bourgeois rule, centrally Karl Kautsky, a leading German Social Democrat who bitterly opposed the 1917 October Revolution and soviet rule (i.e., workers democracy).
********
If we are not to mock at common sense and history, it is obvious that we cannot speak of “pure democracy” as long as different classes exist; we can only speak of class democracy. (Let us say in parenthesis that “pure democracy” is not only an ignorant phrase, revealing a lack of understanding both of the class struggle and of the nature of the state, but also a thrice-empty phrase, since in communist society democracy will wither away in the process of changing and becoming a habit, but will never be “pure” democracy.)
“Pure democracy” is the mendacious phrase of a liberal who wants to fool the workers. History knows of bourgeois democracy which takes the place of feudalism, and of proletarian democracy which takes the place of bourgeois democracy....
Take the bourgeois parliament. Can it be that the learned Kautsky has never heard that the more highly democracy is developed, the more the bourgeois parliaments are subjected by the stock exchange and the bankers? This does not mean that we must not make use of bourgeois parliament.... But it does mean that only a liberal can forget the historical limitations and conventional nature of the bourgeois parliamentary system as Kautsky does. Even in the most democratic bourgeois state the oppressed people at every step encounter the crying contradiction between the formal equality proclaimed by the “democracy” of the capitalists and the thousands of real limitations and subterfuges which turn the proletarians into wage-slaves. It is precisely this contradiction that is opening the eyes of the people to the rottenness, mendacity and hypocrisy of capitalism. It is this contradiction that the agitators and propagandists of socialism are constantly exposing to the people, in order to prepare them for revolution!
—V.I. Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918)
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"- Stop Persecution of Tamils!-Asylum Now for All Refugees!-On The Planet Without A Passport, One More Time
Workers Vanguard No. 967
22 October 2010
Asylum Now for All Refugees!
Stop Persecution of Tamils!
The following article is reprinted from Workers Hammer No. 212 (Autumn 2010), newspaper of the Spartacist League/Britain, section of the International Communist League.
Despite an attempted cover-up by the brutal Sri Lanka regime, evidence is emerging about the mass slaughter that was inflicted on the Tamil people in the North East of the island last year. During the final stages of the Sri Lankan army’s military offensive, it is estimated that tens of thousands of Tamil civilians were slaughtered. At the end of the bloody 26-year war by the Sri Lankan armed forces against the Tamil people, the remnants of the Tamil mini-state were destroyed, the nationalist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which has been fighting for an independent Tamil state for the last three decades, suffered a military defeat and its leader, Vellupilai Prabhakaran, was executed. Some 300,000 Tamils who were trapped in a small area of the North East were interned in horrific prison camps and interrogation centres.
The Sinhala-chauvinist regime of Mahinda Rajapaksa, who was re-elected president in January in a grotesque display of anti-Tamil triumphalism, has continually sought to extract vengeance on the beleaguered survivors of this blood-bath. Over the past year many desperate refugees have lost their lives on the high seas as they attempt to flee to safety abroad. When nearly 500 Tamil refugees managed to make it to Canada, the Sri Lanka regime obscenely tried to vilify them as “terrorists.”
The Canadian government whipped up a racist furore, sending a naval warship on August 12 armed with guided missiles to intercept the barely seaworthy cargo ship carrying the refugees, which had left Thailand in May and had already been turned away from Australia. Canadian police as well as the military boarded the vessel and took the migrants into custody; the majority of the refugees languish in jail while the state demonises them as potential “terrorists.” The Canadian government also vowed to work with Australia and other countries to stop the Tamils from even setting sail. Australia already sends its navy to intercept refugees on the high seas, turning them back or redirecting them to Indonesia, which incarcerates them in Australian-funded detention centres. Those captured in “Australian waters” are imprisoned behind razor wire on remote Christmas Island. Five refugees died and scores were injured last year when their boat exploded after it was seized by the Australian navy. More recently, the Labor Party government there suspended the processing of all new asylum claims by Tamil as well as Afghan refugees and signalled its intent to ramp up deportations.
The plight of the refugees was captured in a 16 August letter issued by the Canadian Tamil Congress which stated:
“We have undergone severe hardships with very little or no access to basic necessities such as food, water, sleeping space, medicine and sanitary facilities. We have traveled for almost four months with much suffering and pain. We have come here, to this wonderful country Canada, to protect ourselves and our family members from the murders, disappearances and violence that still exist in our native country.”
Protesting the government’s racist treatment and detention of the Tamils in British Columbia, our Canadian comrades wrote: “We demand that all those now detained in B.C. be released immediately and that all Tamil refugees be given full asylum! The fight to end the racist deportations and for full citizenship rights for everyone who has made it here is part of the struggle to sweep away the brutal rule of capitalism through socialist revolution” (Spartacist Canada No. 166, Fall 2010). The working class internationally must defend the Tamil people! From Britain to Canada to Australia we demand: Asylum for Tamil refugees, fleeing the murderous onslaught by the Sri Lankan government and army!
U.S. imperialism gave clear backing to the Rajapaksa government’s offensive against the Tamils. On 6 January 2009 the American ambassador in Colombo issued a statement welcoming the fall of the Tigers’ administrative capital, Kilinochchi, to the Lankan army and affirming that the U.S. “does not advocate that the Government of Sri Lanka negotiate with the LTTE” (Asian Tribune, 9 January 2009). Soon after, a high-level delegation from the U.S. Pacific Fleet Command arrived for “discussions” with the heads of the Lankan security forces (Indo-Asian News Service, 21 January 2009). Only after the army drove the LTTE from its final urban bases in early February did the U.S. and Britain call for a “temporary no-fire” agreement (International Herald Tribune, 4 February 2009).
Over the past year tens of thousands of Tamils in London, Toronto and other cities around the world have taken to the streets in protest at the desperate plight of the Tamil people on the island. The Spartacist League/Britain and other sections of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) have joined protests against the massacre, distributing literature in solidarity with the besieged Tamils and putting forward our proletarian-revolutionary perspective for national and social liberation. We have long upheld the right of self-determination for the Tamil people—i.e., their right to form an independent state in the largely Tamil North and East. We stand for the military defence of the LTTE against the army assault and demand the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of the Lankan army from the area.
At the same time, we give no political support to the LTTE—bourgeois nationalists who, following the logic of nationalism, have staged their own inter-ethnic attacks on Sinhalese villagers and expelled Muslims from the historic Tamil city of Jaffna, the capital of the northern region, while employing murderous violence against other Tamil nationalist groups. Our perspective is the fight for Marxist workers parties throughout the region that can unite the working people and oppressed in the struggle for workers revolutions in Lanka and throughout South Asia. That is the only road to liberation from the poverty, oppression and national chauvinism that are endemic to capitalist rule and have been visited with particular brutality on the masses of imperialism’s neocolonies in Sri Lanka and the Indian subcontinent.
No Illusions in UN “Human Rights” Hypocrisy
Leaflets for Tamil protests in Britain have appealed to Western imperialist governments and the United Nations to come to the aid of the Tamils. A press statement issued following a July London rally by the British Tamils Forum reports that thousands gathered carrying placards and hoisting flags “appealing to the UK establishment and the UN to investigate war crimes and crimes against humanity in Sri Lanka.” There should be absolutely no illusions that the UN, or the governments in Ottawa, London, Washington or other imperialist centres will defend the interests of the Tamil people. The often heated diplomatic rifts between the Colombo government on the one hand and the UN or the British government merely reflect tactical differences. The imperialist powers, including the UN, would prefer the blood-soaked Sri Lanka regime to adopt a hypocritical concern about “human rights” now that the war has ended. But the vindictive Rajapaksa regime is not about to pay lip service to “human rights” for Tamils. Indeed other repressive regimes such as in Israel, Myanmar and Thailand are beating a path to Colombo to learn how to apply the “Sri Lanka option”—i.e., mass slaughter—against the oppressed peoples on their own terrain.
When in February 2009 David Miliband, as foreign secretary under the then Labour government, addressed a meeting of the Global Tamil Forum in London (alongside the present Tory foreign secretary, William Hague) furious Sinhala-chauvinist protests in Colombo attacked the British High Commission and burned an effigy of Miliband. Needless to say Miliband used his speech to the Global Tamil Forum to denounce the LTTE, describing it as “a terrorist organisation which committed countless atrocities.” This is rich, coming from a spokesman for a government that has responsibility for the brutal occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq that have led to countless thousands of deaths.
The Colombo government also went foam-flecked in June when UN secretary general Ban Ki Moon appointed a three-member advisory panel, which was intended to deflect external pressure from human rights groups and figures in the U.S. Congress. But this toothless UN body drew mobs of government-backed protesters onto the streets of Colombo, where the UN office was besieged and a cabinet minister, Wimal Weerawansa, went on a hunger strike. In response, the UN made it abundantly clear that the panel’s aims are to award the Sri Lanka regime a “human rights” stamp of approval. A UN statement of 9 July said the panel’s objectives include the “fostering of reconciliation” as well as “reflecting the commitment by Sri Lanka to the promotion and protection of human rights.” The UN panel will also assist the “Lessons learnt and reconciliation commission” set up by the Rajapaksa regime to investigate why the 2002 ceasefire ended—i.e., to take the heat off the army and put the LTTE into the frame.
The UN is preparing a whitewash of the Sri Lankan military’s heinous crimes and of the “democratic” imperialist powers who backed the Sri Lankan state in carrying out its brutal war against the Tamil people. The UN panel was set up over a year after the war had ended and amid widespread anger when information about Sri Lankan atrocities against the Tamils began to leak out into the public domain. Moreover, the UN itself was under criticism. A report in the (London) Times said that Ban Ki Moon’s chief of staff, Vijar Nambiar, was told in late May 2009 that “at least 20,000 Tamil civilians were killed in the Sri Lankan government’s final offensive” (30 May 2009).
In addition to aiding in the murderous anti-Tamil offensive, the “democratic” imperialist powers—the U.S., Britain, Canada—have declared the LTTE a “terrorist” organisation, as has the European Union, effectively giving the Lankan regime a green light for its attacks. As we wrote in protest against the Tony Blair Labour government’s Terrorism Act 2000 which outlawed the LTTE, among other organisations:
“This Labour government has committed heinous crimes at home and abroad—from the bombing of Serbia and Iraq to drumming up anti-immigrant racism. The British state itself is an international force for terrorism—it carried out colonial massacres in Ireland, Asia and Africa—yet it brands political organisations from the Indian subcontinent and Ireland as ‘terrorists.’ This illustrates what British ‘justice’ and democracy is all about—the capitalist state is the repressive apparatus which defends the private property and rule of the bourgeoisie against the working class and oppressed.”
—Workers Hammer No. 176, Spring 2001
The roots of the decades-long Tamil insurgency lie in systematic discrimination against the Tamil people by successive Sri Lankan governments following independence from British colonial rule in 1948. The deep communal division in Sri Lanka today is itself a legacy of divide-and-rule by the British imperialists who incorporated many Tamils into the colonial administration. But following independence the Sinhalese displaced the Tamils in government service and in access to higher education. The agitation for a chauvinist “Sinhala only” language policy, led by the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) in the mid-1950s, codified anti-Tamil communalism as official policy and unleashed a wave of anti-Tamil pogroms.
The national chauvinism of the Sinhalese ruling class led to growing communal polarisation that culminated in massive bloodshed in 1983 with government-inspired pogroms against the Tamils, many thousands of whom were murdered. Tamil homes and businesses in the capital, Colombo, were burnt to the ground, often with the occupants inside. Following the 1983 pogroms, orchestrated under president J.R. Jayewardene of the United National Party, we wrote:
“The massive atrocity taking place in Sri Lanka marks a watershed in that island’s history. The bloodletting and the mass population transfers have set the economy back at least a decade and are forcing the separation of the peoples. J.R. has ripped the country apart, massacring many thousands and forcing the survivors into a virtual ‘bantustan’ in the barren North.”
—“Massacre in Sri Lanka,” Spartacist (English-language edition) No. 35, Autumn 1983
Lessons of Bitter Defeat
The dire situation of the Lankan Tamil people today is testimony to the reactionary logic of nationalism. It also confirms that under capitalism, where two peoples are interpenetrated within the same territory, the national rights of one people can only be expressed at the expense of the other people. Prior to 1983 there was considerable economical and geographic interpenetration of the Tamil and Sinhalese peoples. But the bloodletting and mass population transfers of 1983 forced a separation of the island’s peoples. Tamils were increasingly compacted in the North and the East, which had been largely Tamil but had also historically been a region of mixed populations, including a substantial Muslim component. Only the overthrow of capitalism through workers revolution can lay the basis for the equitable resolution of the conflicting national claims of the peoples of Sri Lanka.
Drawing the lessons from a bitter defeat is difficult, but necessary. For Tamil (and Sinhalese) pro-working-class activists who are reeling from this massive defeat, the chief political lesson is that the programme of nationalism has proven bankrupt for the oppressed Tamils. We base ourselves on the Trotskyist programme of permanent revolution, a programme for the semicolonial countries which means the industrial and agricultural proletariat must lead all the oppressed in the struggle against semi-feudal backwardness that is the heritage of centuries of colonial subjugation, a struggle which can attain victory only through the overthrow of capitalist rule and the establishment of proletarian power.
The core of this programme is proletarian internationalism: a perspective for socialist revolution not only in Lanka but throughout the Indian subcontinent. Developments in Sri Lanka do not take place in isolation but are subject to developments in the international situation. The venal ruling class is beholden to the imperialist powers and the Sri Lankan economy is dependent on foreign investment and on the European Union as a market for the island’s textiles. The working class—including textile workers who are mainly women, and the strategically placed “Indian Tamil” tea plantation workers in the central highlands, descendants of a deeply exploited population brought in from India as indentured labourers by the British—are class brothers and sisters of the more powerful working class in India and elsewhere. We fight for Marxist workers parties throughout South Asia that can unite the working people and oppressed in the struggle for workers revolutions which provide the only road to liberation from the poverty, oppression and national chauvinism that are endemic to capitalist rule, particularly in the neocolonies.
The authentic programme of Trotskyism is today upheld by the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist). The once-Trotskyist Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) abandoned the interests of the proletariat and the defence of the Tamil people when it entered the Sinhala-chauvinist government of the SLFP in 1964. This was prefigured by the LSSP’s support to the “Sinhala only” campaign against the Tamil minority. Again in the 1980s, government terror against the Tamils drew the line sharply between revolutionists and fake Trotskyists, who capitulated to Sinhala chauvinism.
At the time of the 1983 pogroms, our international tendency was virtually alone on the left in initiating and joining protests internationally in defence of the Tamils. Noting that the blood-bath had “catastrophically altered for the foreseeable future the prospects for common class struggle between the Sinhalese working class and the oppressed Tamil minority,” we raised the call for the right of Tamil Eelam—a separate Tamil state in the North—and for a federated socialist republic of Eelam and Lanka as part of a socialist federation of South Asia.
Prior to 1983 our organisation had upheld the right to Tamil self-determination while counselling against separation, arguing in favour of united working-class struggle for Tamil freedom and socialist revolution in Lanka (formerly Ceylon) and its extension through the Indian subcontinent. But as we wrote, “in the wake of the mass killing of Tamils, the bitterness and hostility between the peoples of Ceylon has evidently become insurmountable at least in the short run.” While calling for the right of Tamil Eelam, we also noted: “The bloody communal struggle argues that even with proletarian revolution in Ceylon and South Asia generally, a federated socialist republic in Ceylon will be necessary to achieve the unity of Tamils and Sinhalese on a basis of justice and equality” (Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 35, Autumn 1983).
At the same time we noted that the prospects for an independent Tamil capitalist state in the underdeveloped North were poor. Nor would the formation of such a state ensure the national survival of the Tamils, who were interpenetrated with the Sinhalese majority throughout much of the island. On the other hand, the establishment of a federated socialist republic of Eelam and Lanka would be a beacon to the oppressed and subjugated masses throughout the subcontinent, including among the 65 million Tamils across the Palk Strait in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu.
In the years of civil war that followed the 1983 pogroms, at least 70,000 civilians have been killed and hundreds of thousands of Tamils driven into exile or squalid refugee camps. The LTTE managed to compact a Tamil mini-state in parts of the North and East and eventually signed a ceasefire agreement with the Colombo government in 2002. But the Sinhalese-chauvinist army’s provocations never stopped. After the 2005 election of hard-line SLFP president Mahinda Rajapaksa, who ruled out even autonomy for Tamil regions, the government abrogated the ceasefire and then withdrew from it entirely in early 2008.
Today, contrary to imperialist hype about reconciliation and a return to “stability” on the island, the Rajapaksa family oligarchy makes little effort to maintain even the trappings of “democracy,” having even locked up Sarath Fonseka, who was head of the military during the war on the Tamils and who challenged Mahinda Rajapaksa for the presidency in the last election. Stable bourgeois democratic rule is not on the historic agenda in Sri Lanka, nor is a democratic resolution of the oppression of the Tamil minority. Washington’s central strategic goal on the island is a stable regime that can provide access to the strategic deep-water harbour of Trincomalee in the Eastern Province.
Successive Sri Lankan governments have engaged in brutal “ethnic cleansing” and a bloody process of “Sinhalisation” has forced hundreds of thousands of Tamils to leave the area while those who remain live under a state of siege. Large tracts of land are still prohibited areas and in all likelihood Tamils will not be allowed to return to certain locations. Foreigners and journalists are still restricted from travelling to the North, where permanent military cantonments are being built on former Tamil areas. Many Tamil refugees remain in camps in the North and thousands of alleged LTTE cadres are held in camps to which relatives, aid organisations or the Red Cross have no access.
The struggle to forge a new, revolutionary party in Lanka must begin with the understanding that the eradication of national oppression and true social progress for the peoples of Lanka and the region will come when the barbaric rule of capital and the divisions inherited from imperialist domination are overturned through socialist revolution. Lasting national and class justice for the Tamil working people will be secured through rule by the workers and peasants in a socialist federation of South Asia, and the extension of proletarian revolutions into the imperialist centres.
22 October 2010
Asylum Now for All Refugees!
Stop Persecution of Tamils!
The following article is reprinted from Workers Hammer No. 212 (Autumn 2010), newspaper of the Spartacist League/Britain, section of the International Communist League.
Despite an attempted cover-up by the brutal Sri Lanka regime, evidence is emerging about the mass slaughter that was inflicted on the Tamil people in the North East of the island last year. During the final stages of the Sri Lankan army’s military offensive, it is estimated that tens of thousands of Tamil civilians were slaughtered. At the end of the bloody 26-year war by the Sri Lankan armed forces against the Tamil people, the remnants of the Tamil mini-state were destroyed, the nationalist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which has been fighting for an independent Tamil state for the last three decades, suffered a military defeat and its leader, Vellupilai Prabhakaran, was executed. Some 300,000 Tamils who were trapped in a small area of the North East were interned in horrific prison camps and interrogation centres.
The Sinhala-chauvinist regime of Mahinda Rajapaksa, who was re-elected president in January in a grotesque display of anti-Tamil triumphalism, has continually sought to extract vengeance on the beleaguered survivors of this blood-bath. Over the past year many desperate refugees have lost their lives on the high seas as they attempt to flee to safety abroad. When nearly 500 Tamil refugees managed to make it to Canada, the Sri Lanka regime obscenely tried to vilify them as “terrorists.”
The Canadian government whipped up a racist furore, sending a naval warship on August 12 armed with guided missiles to intercept the barely seaworthy cargo ship carrying the refugees, which had left Thailand in May and had already been turned away from Australia. Canadian police as well as the military boarded the vessel and took the migrants into custody; the majority of the refugees languish in jail while the state demonises them as potential “terrorists.” The Canadian government also vowed to work with Australia and other countries to stop the Tamils from even setting sail. Australia already sends its navy to intercept refugees on the high seas, turning them back or redirecting them to Indonesia, which incarcerates them in Australian-funded detention centres. Those captured in “Australian waters” are imprisoned behind razor wire on remote Christmas Island. Five refugees died and scores were injured last year when their boat exploded after it was seized by the Australian navy. More recently, the Labor Party government there suspended the processing of all new asylum claims by Tamil as well as Afghan refugees and signalled its intent to ramp up deportations.
The plight of the refugees was captured in a 16 August letter issued by the Canadian Tamil Congress which stated:
“We have undergone severe hardships with very little or no access to basic necessities such as food, water, sleeping space, medicine and sanitary facilities. We have traveled for almost four months with much suffering and pain. We have come here, to this wonderful country Canada, to protect ourselves and our family members from the murders, disappearances and violence that still exist in our native country.”
Protesting the government’s racist treatment and detention of the Tamils in British Columbia, our Canadian comrades wrote: “We demand that all those now detained in B.C. be released immediately and that all Tamil refugees be given full asylum! The fight to end the racist deportations and for full citizenship rights for everyone who has made it here is part of the struggle to sweep away the brutal rule of capitalism through socialist revolution” (Spartacist Canada No. 166, Fall 2010). The working class internationally must defend the Tamil people! From Britain to Canada to Australia we demand: Asylum for Tamil refugees, fleeing the murderous onslaught by the Sri Lankan government and army!
U.S. imperialism gave clear backing to the Rajapaksa government’s offensive against the Tamils. On 6 January 2009 the American ambassador in Colombo issued a statement welcoming the fall of the Tigers’ administrative capital, Kilinochchi, to the Lankan army and affirming that the U.S. “does not advocate that the Government of Sri Lanka negotiate with the LTTE” (Asian Tribune, 9 January 2009). Soon after, a high-level delegation from the U.S. Pacific Fleet Command arrived for “discussions” with the heads of the Lankan security forces (Indo-Asian News Service, 21 January 2009). Only after the army drove the LTTE from its final urban bases in early February did the U.S. and Britain call for a “temporary no-fire” agreement (International Herald Tribune, 4 February 2009).
Over the past year tens of thousands of Tamils in London, Toronto and other cities around the world have taken to the streets in protest at the desperate plight of the Tamil people on the island. The Spartacist League/Britain and other sections of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) have joined protests against the massacre, distributing literature in solidarity with the besieged Tamils and putting forward our proletarian-revolutionary perspective for national and social liberation. We have long upheld the right of self-determination for the Tamil people—i.e., their right to form an independent state in the largely Tamil North and East. We stand for the military defence of the LTTE against the army assault and demand the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of the Lankan army from the area.
At the same time, we give no political support to the LTTE—bourgeois nationalists who, following the logic of nationalism, have staged their own inter-ethnic attacks on Sinhalese villagers and expelled Muslims from the historic Tamil city of Jaffna, the capital of the northern region, while employing murderous violence against other Tamil nationalist groups. Our perspective is the fight for Marxist workers parties throughout the region that can unite the working people and oppressed in the struggle for workers revolutions in Lanka and throughout South Asia. That is the only road to liberation from the poverty, oppression and national chauvinism that are endemic to capitalist rule and have been visited with particular brutality on the masses of imperialism’s neocolonies in Sri Lanka and the Indian subcontinent.
No Illusions in UN “Human Rights” Hypocrisy
Leaflets for Tamil protests in Britain have appealed to Western imperialist governments and the United Nations to come to the aid of the Tamils. A press statement issued following a July London rally by the British Tamils Forum reports that thousands gathered carrying placards and hoisting flags “appealing to the UK establishment and the UN to investigate war crimes and crimes against humanity in Sri Lanka.” There should be absolutely no illusions that the UN, or the governments in Ottawa, London, Washington or other imperialist centres will defend the interests of the Tamil people. The often heated diplomatic rifts between the Colombo government on the one hand and the UN or the British government merely reflect tactical differences. The imperialist powers, including the UN, would prefer the blood-soaked Sri Lanka regime to adopt a hypocritical concern about “human rights” now that the war has ended. But the vindictive Rajapaksa regime is not about to pay lip service to “human rights” for Tamils. Indeed other repressive regimes such as in Israel, Myanmar and Thailand are beating a path to Colombo to learn how to apply the “Sri Lanka option”—i.e., mass slaughter—against the oppressed peoples on their own terrain.
When in February 2009 David Miliband, as foreign secretary under the then Labour government, addressed a meeting of the Global Tamil Forum in London (alongside the present Tory foreign secretary, William Hague) furious Sinhala-chauvinist protests in Colombo attacked the British High Commission and burned an effigy of Miliband. Needless to say Miliband used his speech to the Global Tamil Forum to denounce the LTTE, describing it as “a terrorist organisation which committed countless atrocities.” This is rich, coming from a spokesman for a government that has responsibility for the brutal occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq that have led to countless thousands of deaths.
The Colombo government also went foam-flecked in June when UN secretary general Ban Ki Moon appointed a three-member advisory panel, which was intended to deflect external pressure from human rights groups and figures in the U.S. Congress. But this toothless UN body drew mobs of government-backed protesters onto the streets of Colombo, where the UN office was besieged and a cabinet minister, Wimal Weerawansa, went on a hunger strike. In response, the UN made it abundantly clear that the panel’s aims are to award the Sri Lanka regime a “human rights” stamp of approval. A UN statement of 9 July said the panel’s objectives include the “fostering of reconciliation” as well as “reflecting the commitment by Sri Lanka to the promotion and protection of human rights.” The UN panel will also assist the “Lessons learnt and reconciliation commission” set up by the Rajapaksa regime to investigate why the 2002 ceasefire ended—i.e., to take the heat off the army and put the LTTE into the frame.
The UN is preparing a whitewash of the Sri Lankan military’s heinous crimes and of the “democratic” imperialist powers who backed the Sri Lankan state in carrying out its brutal war against the Tamil people. The UN panel was set up over a year after the war had ended and amid widespread anger when information about Sri Lankan atrocities against the Tamils began to leak out into the public domain. Moreover, the UN itself was under criticism. A report in the (London) Times said that Ban Ki Moon’s chief of staff, Vijar Nambiar, was told in late May 2009 that “at least 20,000 Tamil civilians were killed in the Sri Lankan government’s final offensive” (30 May 2009).
In addition to aiding in the murderous anti-Tamil offensive, the “democratic” imperialist powers—the U.S., Britain, Canada—have declared the LTTE a “terrorist” organisation, as has the European Union, effectively giving the Lankan regime a green light for its attacks. As we wrote in protest against the Tony Blair Labour government’s Terrorism Act 2000 which outlawed the LTTE, among other organisations:
“This Labour government has committed heinous crimes at home and abroad—from the bombing of Serbia and Iraq to drumming up anti-immigrant racism. The British state itself is an international force for terrorism—it carried out colonial massacres in Ireland, Asia and Africa—yet it brands political organisations from the Indian subcontinent and Ireland as ‘terrorists.’ This illustrates what British ‘justice’ and democracy is all about—the capitalist state is the repressive apparatus which defends the private property and rule of the bourgeoisie against the working class and oppressed.”
—Workers Hammer No. 176, Spring 2001
The roots of the decades-long Tamil insurgency lie in systematic discrimination against the Tamil people by successive Sri Lankan governments following independence from British colonial rule in 1948. The deep communal division in Sri Lanka today is itself a legacy of divide-and-rule by the British imperialists who incorporated many Tamils into the colonial administration. But following independence the Sinhalese displaced the Tamils in government service and in access to higher education. The agitation for a chauvinist “Sinhala only” language policy, led by the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) in the mid-1950s, codified anti-Tamil communalism as official policy and unleashed a wave of anti-Tamil pogroms.
The national chauvinism of the Sinhalese ruling class led to growing communal polarisation that culminated in massive bloodshed in 1983 with government-inspired pogroms against the Tamils, many thousands of whom were murdered. Tamil homes and businesses in the capital, Colombo, were burnt to the ground, often with the occupants inside. Following the 1983 pogroms, orchestrated under president J.R. Jayewardene of the United National Party, we wrote:
“The massive atrocity taking place in Sri Lanka marks a watershed in that island’s history. The bloodletting and the mass population transfers have set the economy back at least a decade and are forcing the separation of the peoples. J.R. has ripped the country apart, massacring many thousands and forcing the survivors into a virtual ‘bantustan’ in the barren North.”
—“Massacre in Sri Lanka,” Spartacist (English-language edition) No. 35, Autumn 1983
Lessons of Bitter Defeat
The dire situation of the Lankan Tamil people today is testimony to the reactionary logic of nationalism. It also confirms that under capitalism, where two peoples are interpenetrated within the same territory, the national rights of one people can only be expressed at the expense of the other people. Prior to 1983 there was considerable economical and geographic interpenetration of the Tamil and Sinhalese peoples. But the bloodletting and mass population transfers of 1983 forced a separation of the island’s peoples. Tamils were increasingly compacted in the North and the East, which had been largely Tamil but had also historically been a region of mixed populations, including a substantial Muslim component. Only the overthrow of capitalism through workers revolution can lay the basis for the equitable resolution of the conflicting national claims of the peoples of Sri Lanka.
Drawing the lessons from a bitter defeat is difficult, but necessary. For Tamil (and Sinhalese) pro-working-class activists who are reeling from this massive defeat, the chief political lesson is that the programme of nationalism has proven bankrupt for the oppressed Tamils. We base ourselves on the Trotskyist programme of permanent revolution, a programme for the semicolonial countries which means the industrial and agricultural proletariat must lead all the oppressed in the struggle against semi-feudal backwardness that is the heritage of centuries of colonial subjugation, a struggle which can attain victory only through the overthrow of capitalist rule and the establishment of proletarian power.
The core of this programme is proletarian internationalism: a perspective for socialist revolution not only in Lanka but throughout the Indian subcontinent. Developments in Sri Lanka do not take place in isolation but are subject to developments in the international situation. The venal ruling class is beholden to the imperialist powers and the Sri Lankan economy is dependent on foreign investment and on the European Union as a market for the island’s textiles. The working class—including textile workers who are mainly women, and the strategically placed “Indian Tamil” tea plantation workers in the central highlands, descendants of a deeply exploited population brought in from India as indentured labourers by the British—are class brothers and sisters of the more powerful working class in India and elsewhere. We fight for Marxist workers parties throughout South Asia that can unite the working people and oppressed in the struggle for workers revolutions which provide the only road to liberation from the poverty, oppression and national chauvinism that are endemic to capitalist rule, particularly in the neocolonies.
The authentic programme of Trotskyism is today upheld by the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist). The once-Trotskyist Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) abandoned the interests of the proletariat and the defence of the Tamil people when it entered the Sinhala-chauvinist government of the SLFP in 1964. This was prefigured by the LSSP’s support to the “Sinhala only” campaign against the Tamil minority. Again in the 1980s, government terror against the Tamils drew the line sharply between revolutionists and fake Trotskyists, who capitulated to Sinhala chauvinism.
At the time of the 1983 pogroms, our international tendency was virtually alone on the left in initiating and joining protests internationally in defence of the Tamils. Noting that the blood-bath had “catastrophically altered for the foreseeable future the prospects for common class struggle between the Sinhalese working class and the oppressed Tamil minority,” we raised the call for the right of Tamil Eelam—a separate Tamil state in the North—and for a federated socialist republic of Eelam and Lanka as part of a socialist federation of South Asia.
Prior to 1983 our organisation had upheld the right to Tamil self-determination while counselling against separation, arguing in favour of united working-class struggle for Tamil freedom and socialist revolution in Lanka (formerly Ceylon) and its extension through the Indian subcontinent. But as we wrote, “in the wake of the mass killing of Tamils, the bitterness and hostility between the peoples of Ceylon has evidently become insurmountable at least in the short run.” While calling for the right of Tamil Eelam, we also noted: “The bloody communal struggle argues that even with proletarian revolution in Ceylon and South Asia generally, a federated socialist republic in Ceylon will be necessary to achieve the unity of Tamils and Sinhalese on a basis of justice and equality” (Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 35, Autumn 1983).
At the same time we noted that the prospects for an independent Tamil capitalist state in the underdeveloped North were poor. Nor would the formation of such a state ensure the national survival of the Tamils, who were interpenetrated with the Sinhalese majority throughout much of the island. On the other hand, the establishment of a federated socialist republic of Eelam and Lanka would be a beacon to the oppressed and subjugated masses throughout the subcontinent, including among the 65 million Tamils across the Palk Strait in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu.
In the years of civil war that followed the 1983 pogroms, at least 70,000 civilians have been killed and hundreds of thousands of Tamils driven into exile or squalid refugee camps. The LTTE managed to compact a Tamil mini-state in parts of the North and East and eventually signed a ceasefire agreement with the Colombo government in 2002. But the Sinhalese-chauvinist army’s provocations never stopped. After the 2005 election of hard-line SLFP president Mahinda Rajapaksa, who ruled out even autonomy for Tamil regions, the government abrogated the ceasefire and then withdrew from it entirely in early 2008.
Today, contrary to imperialist hype about reconciliation and a return to “stability” on the island, the Rajapaksa family oligarchy makes little effort to maintain even the trappings of “democracy,” having even locked up Sarath Fonseka, who was head of the military during the war on the Tamils and who challenged Mahinda Rajapaksa for the presidency in the last election. Stable bourgeois democratic rule is not on the historic agenda in Sri Lanka, nor is a democratic resolution of the oppression of the Tamil minority. Washington’s central strategic goal on the island is a stable regime that can provide access to the strategic deep-water harbour of Trincomalee in the Eastern Province.
Successive Sri Lankan governments have engaged in brutal “ethnic cleansing” and a bloody process of “Sinhalisation” has forced hundreds of thousands of Tamils to leave the area while those who remain live under a state of siege. Large tracts of land are still prohibited areas and in all likelihood Tamils will not be allowed to return to certain locations. Foreigners and journalists are still restricted from travelling to the North, where permanent military cantonments are being built on former Tamil areas. Many Tamil refugees remain in camps in the North and thousands of alleged LTTE cadres are held in camps to which relatives, aid organisations or the Red Cross have no access.
The struggle to forge a new, revolutionary party in Lanka must begin with the understanding that the eradication of national oppression and true social progress for the peoples of Lanka and the region will come when the barbaric rule of capital and the divisions inherited from imperialist domination are overturned through socialist revolution. Lasting national and class justice for the Tamil working people will be secured through rule by the workers and peasants in a socialist federation of South Asia, and the extension of proletarian revolutions into the imperialist centres.
*Playwright’s Corner- Tennessee Williams’ "Fugitive Kind"
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for American playwright Tennessee Williams' early play, Fugitive Kind.
Book Review
Fugitive Kind, Tennessee Williams, New Directions, 2001
“Hey, the message of the social gospel (Marx or Christ, or some such figure) is fine, but I want get mine now not in the great by-and-by.” That message, or my paraphrase of that message, may seem old hat, but in one form or another it has animated the characters that people most of Tennessee Williams’ plays, including this early effort when he was just starting out in the old St. Louis days of the 1930s long before A Streetcar Named Desire insured his literary immortality. Here Williams uses the time-tested devise of the flop house (also used in Maxim Gorky’s Lower Depths, Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, and in other places like in Norman Mailer’s Barbary Shore) that permits him to, with some emotional and psychic economy, look at the human condition without having to stir up too much trouble out in the mean streets of Depression-era America (1930s version, sorry).
Of course when one thinks of flop houses, or rather when I think of flop houses I think of “losers” of one sort or another. The marginal people whose very existence is a monument to the paraphrase above, including one of the key characters here hiding away in that anonymous space, Terry. Outlaws, grifters, drifters, midnight shifters, drunks, homosexuals when that was a closeted thing, leftist political exiles (self-imposed or not), and generally those who must live by their wits as best they can are the stuff of Williams fare. After reading the introduction to this play apparently this gnawing search motivated him from early on in his writing career. And this is great stuff on the theater stage, although out in those means streets such characters are as likely to knock you down for your ready cash as be “colorful”. Marx (and others) called them the lumpen element that parasitically fed off and broke down the solidarity of the working stiffs. The Paris Commune, in its short existence, declared “death to thieves” from much the same motivation. Tennessee Williams says let’s get the stethoscope out and see what makes them tick. And on the stage he is right. Read this one, read (or see) every Williams play you can.
Book Review
Fugitive Kind, Tennessee Williams, New Directions, 2001
“Hey, the message of the social gospel (Marx or Christ, or some such figure) is fine, but I want get mine now not in the great by-and-by.” That message, or my paraphrase of that message, may seem old hat, but in one form or another it has animated the characters that people most of Tennessee Williams’ plays, including this early effort when he was just starting out in the old St. Louis days of the 1930s long before A Streetcar Named Desire insured his literary immortality. Here Williams uses the time-tested devise of the flop house (also used in Maxim Gorky’s Lower Depths, Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, and in other places like in Norman Mailer’s Barbary Shore) that permits him to, with some emotional and psychic economy, look at the human condition without having to stir up too much trouble out in the mean streets of Depression-era America (1930s version, sorry).
Of course when one thinks of flop houses, or rather when I think of flop houses I think of “losers” of one sort or another. The marginal people whose very existence is a monument to the paraphrase above, including one of the key characters here hiding away in that anonymous space, Terry. Outlaws, grifters, drifters, midnight shifters, drunks, homosexuals when that was a closeted thing, leftist political exiles (self-imposed or not), and generally those who must live by their wits as best they can are the stuff of Williams fare. After reading the introduction to this play apparently this gnawing search motivated him from early on in his writing career. And this is great stuff on the theater stage, although out in those means streets such characters are as likely to knock you down for your ready cash as be “colorful”. Marx (and others) called them the lumpen element that parasitically fed off and broke down the solidarity of the working stiffs. The Paris Commune, in its short existence, declared “death to thieves” from much the same motivation. Tennessee Williams says let’s get the stethoscope out and see what makes them tick. And on the stage he is right. Read this one, read (or see) every Williams play you can.
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