AMERICAN LEFT HISTORY

*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-C.L.R. James on Negroes and Bolshevism (1947)

2012-02-02T14:08:00.000-05:00

February Is Black History Month

Markin comment:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
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C.L.R. James on Negroes and Bolshevism

Revolutionary History is grateful to Scott McLemee for permission to use his transcription of this and other CLR James texts. Standard american spellings have been retained here, on the assumption they were used in the original publication

The following article by C.L.R. James appeared under a pseudonym in the 7 April 1947 issue of LABOR ACTION, newspaper of the Workers Party of the United States.

Negroes and Bolshevism
The American government is today building up its campaign against the Communist Party, “the Reds.” Readers of LABOR ACTION know that the Workers Party has been the unswerving foe of the Communist Party. But we oppose the Communist Party because it betrays the revolutionary struggle. We attack it because, in its slavish subservience to the Moscow bureaucracy, it uses Negroes and the American labor movement purely to advance the projects and policies of Russia. Many Negroes know this. And they are filled with a deep skepticism of political movements which are in any way radical. At this time it will be useful to recall exactly what Bolshevism was and will always be. There are many lessons for Negroes, not only in judging political parties in general but in judging and forming organizations of their own.

Mass Action

First of all, Bolshevism represents revolution and the revolutionary struggle. All other political parties depend on parliamentary means, on petitions, telegrams to Senators, mass meetings at which “important” and “distinguished” politicians speak. Bolshevism does not disdain parliamentary means. But fundamentally it relies upon mass action – mass demonstrations of workers, strikes, picketing, mobilizing workers in order to bring the pressure of organized labor and its allies upon the capitalist states. Let us illustrate the difference by an example. In the years before World War I, the Bolsheviks elected about half a dozen members to the Duma – the Russian Parliament. These elected representatives at once became very active about bills, the budget, parliamentary procedure, etc. They went for advice to Lenin, who was living in exile. Lenin laughed heartily and told them what amounted to this:

“Don’t bother about their bills and their budget and their parliamentary procedure. When you turn comes stand up and tell them about the lives of the workers, tell them about all the exploitation and oppression by the classes they represent and then tell them that it would not be long before the workers will rise in their revolutionary wrath and sweep capitalism and its dishonest thieving parliaments into the dustbin.”

Something at once becomes clear. The Bolshvik deputies were not begging the capitalist politicians and the capitalist state for anything. They were not even speaking to the parliamentarians. They were speaking to the workers outside. They were using the Parliament as a forum to make revolutionary propaganda, to force the attention of the more backward workers, to make the middle classes listen, to expose the fraud of parliamentarism. Naturally the revolutionary party holds its own meetings, etc.

But its main interest in the capitalist Parliament was to use it for mobilizing the workers against capitalism and all its works.

Policy for Negroes

The Negroes of the United States would do wonderfully if they could impose upon any Congress or municipal candidate exactly some such policy. “You want to go to Congress by our vote. What do you propose to do there? Are you going to maneuver with the Democratic Party and the Republican Party? Are you going to waste your time and our votes by arguing with Bilbo and Pappy O’Daniel and Taft and Pepper, that liberal from Florida who gets into Congress by preaching white supremacy? You are of no use to us. Go there not to convince and bargain with them, but to say loudly what we want and say it so that the nationa and all the world will hear. Then you will get our vote. Otherwise we have no use for you.” Bolshevism carried to an extraordinary pitch of skill this use of parliaments for revolutionary purposes. For example, the federal government every years passes financial bills for the salaries of a system ridden by Jim Crow. Would a Bolshevik vote for this? No, he would denounce the system and refuse to give his vote for this iniquitous measure. But if during the discussion of details of the bill, there was a division over whether the lowest ranks of government employees should have an increase of ten percent or not, a Bolshevik would speak in favor and vote in favor.

If parliamentary procedure allowed he would move for the reduction of all cabinet members’ salaries, just in order to expose the injustices of the system. If it were possible to get such motion passed, he would vote for it. But then, when it came to the final vote, he would vote a loud and resounding “No,” indicating thereby his repudiation of the whole system. That is the Bolshevik method. There is absolutely no reason why a Congressman elected by Negroes should not carry it out. The appropriations for war? No. And not a mere vote but a detailed exposure of the whole system. And having made these speeches and carried out these actions in Congress, the Congressman who acted in this way on behalf of the Negro people would do more good for Negroes than the whole Democratic Party.

Don’t Need “Friends”

Exactly the same policy is the Bolshevik policy for a labor Congressman. “Friends of labor” in Congress are no good to thw working class movement. “Friends of Negroes” are no good in Congress to the Negro people. They are no good on City Councils. All they do is to confuse and corrupt the people’s political thinking. Now we ask the Negroes: has this or anything like this been the policy of Ben Davis, for example, the Communist Party member on the New York City Council? One year he is supporting Leham and Mead. Then comes an upheaval in the Communist Party. Browder is thrown out. Foster comes in, a new policy is announced and – Ben Davis supports Mead and Lehman! A genuine Bolshevik is distinguished by the consistency of his opposition to all aspects of the capitalist system. He votes for or supports only those specific things which benefit the workers and the oppressed and he opposes everything else. Now it seems to us that a Negro community like Harlem would create a stir that would be felt in all parts of the country if it demanded of its candidate that his main task in and out of Congress or municipality was to denounce the system and use parliamentary forms and practices as a tribune for the education of the people. The great crime of the Communist Party is that it has prostituted the very name of Bolshevism in the service of Moscow, The American capitalist class is out to break these Stalinists. Negroes cannot stand aside and see this happen without protest. It is an invasion [sic] of democratic rights. But our way of defeating these corrupting rats is to put forward labor and Negro candidates who, by a genuinely revolutionary policy, will educate the people both as to the crimes of American imperialism and the betrayals of the Moscow stooges.

The Latest From The “Occupy May 1st” Website- March Separately, Strike Together –International General Strike- Down Tools! Down Computers! Down Books!- All Out On May Day 2012- Why You, Your Union, Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 General Strike In Boston (And Eveywhere) -Stand Up!-Fight Back!

2012-02-02T13:11:00.000-05:00

Click on the headline to link to updates from the Occupy May 1st website. Occupy May Day which has called for an international General Strike on May Day 2012. I will post important updates as they appear on that site.
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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!

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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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OB Endorses Call for General Strike

January 8th, 2012 • mhacker •

Passed Resolutions No comments The following proposal was passed by the General Assembly on Jan 7, 2012:

Occupy Boston supports the call for an international General Strike on May 1, 2012, for immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. We recognize housing, education, health care, LGBT rights and racial equality as human rights; and thus call for the building of a broad coalition that will ensure and promote a democratic standard of living for all peoples.
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Why You, Your Union, Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 General Strike In Boston-Stand Up!-Fight Back!

Last fall there were waves of politically-motivated repressive police attacks on, and evictions of, various Occupy camp sites throughout the country including where the movement started in Zucotti (Liberty) Park. But even before the evictions and
repression escalated, questions were being asked: what is the way forward for the movement? And, from friend and foe alike, the ubiquitous what do we want. We have seen since then glimpses of organizing and action that are leading the way for the rest of us to follow: the Oakland General Strike on November 2nd, the West Coast Port Shutdown actions of December 12th, Occupy Foreclosures, including, most recently, renewed support for the struggles of the hard-pressed longshoremen in Longview, Washington. These actions show that, fundamentally, all of the strategic questions revolve around the question of power. The power, put simply, of the 99% vs. the power of the 1%.

Although the 99% holds enormous power -all wealth is generated, and the
current society is built and maintained through, the collective labor
(paid and unpaid) of the 99%-, we seldom exercise this vast collective power in our own interests. Too often, abetted and egged on by the 1%, we fruitlessly fight among ourselves driven by racism, patriarchy, xenophobia, occupational elitism, geographical prejudice, heterosexism, and other forms of division, oppression and prejudice.

This consciously debilitating strategy on its part is necessary, along with its control of politics, the courts, the prisons, the cops, and the military in order for the 1% to maintain control over us in order not to have to worry about their power and wealth. Their ill-gotten power is only assured by us, actively or passively, working against ours our best interests. Moreover many of us are not today fully aware of, nor organized to utilize, the vast collective power we have. The result is that many of us - people of color, women, GLBTQ, immigrants, those with less formal educational credentials, those in less socially respected occupations or unemployed, the homeless, and the just plain desperate- deal with double and triple forms of oppression and societal prejudice.

Currently the state of the economy has hit all of us hard, although as usual the less able to face the effects are hit the hardest like racial minorities, the elderly, the homeless and those down on their luck due to prolonged un and under- employment. In short, there are too many people out of work; wage rates have has barely kept up with rising costs or gone backwards to near historic post-World War II lows in real time terms; social services like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security have continued to be cut; our influence on their broken, broken for us, government has eroded; and our civil liberties have been seemingly daily attacked en masse. These trends have has been going on while the elites of this country, and of the world, have captured an increasing share of wealth; have had in essence a tax holiday for the past few decades; have viciously attacked our organizations of popular defense such as our public and private unions and community organizations; and have increase their power over us through manipulating their political system even more in their favor than previously.

The way forward, as we can demonstrate by building for the May Day actions, must involve showing our popular power against that of the entrenched elite. But the form of our power, reflecting our different concepts of governing, must be different from the elite’s. Where they have created powerful capitalist profit-driven top down organizations in order to dominate, control, exploit and oppress we must build and exercise bottom-up power in order to cooperate, liberate and collectively empower each other. We need to organize ourselves collectively and apart from these top down power relationships in our communities, schools and workplaces in order to to fight for our real interests. This must include a forthright rejection of the 1%’s attempts, honed after long use, to divide and conquer in order to rule us. A rejection of racism, patriarchy, xenophobia, elitism and other forms of oppression, and, importantly, a rejection of attempts by their electoral parties, mainly the Democrats and Republicans but others as well, powerful special interest groups, and others to co-opt and control our movement.

The Occupy freedom of assembly-driven encampments initially built the mass movement and brought a global spotlight to the bedrock economic and social concerns of the 99%. They inspired many of us, including those most oppressed, provided a sense of hope and solidarity with our fellow citizens and the international 99%, and brought the question of economic justice and the problems of inequality and political voiceless-ness grudgingly back into mainstream political conversation. Moreover they highlighted the need for the creation of cultures, societies, and institutions of direct democracy based on "power with"- not "power over"- each other; served as convivial spaces for sharing ideas and planning action; and in some camps, they even provided a temporary space for those who needed a home. Last fall the camp occupations served a fundamental role in the movement, but it is now time to move beyond the camp mentality and use our energies to struggle to start an offensive against the power of the 1%. On our terms.

Show Power

We demand:

*Hands Off Our Public Worker Unions! Hands Off All Our Unions!

* Put the unemployed to work! Billions for public works projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure (bridges, roads, sewer and water systems, etc.)!

*End the endless wars!

* Full citizenship rights for all those who made it here no matter how they got here!

* A drastic increase in the minimum wage and big wage increases for all workers!

* A moratorium on home foreclosures! No evictions!

* A moratorium on student loan debt! Free, quality higher education for all! Create 100, 200, many publicly-supported Harvards!

*No increases in public transportation fares! No transportation worker lay-offs! Free public transportation!

To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1, 2012 we will be organizing a wide-ranging series of mass collective participatory actions:

*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where there is no union - a one-day general strike.

*We will be organizing where a strike is not possible to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out.”

*We will be organizing students to walk-out of their schools (or not show up in the first place), set up campus picket lines, or to rally at a central location, probably Boston Common.

*We will be calling in our communities for a mass consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to make purchases on that day.

These actions, given the ravages of the capitalist economic system on individual lives, the continuing feelings of hopelessness felt by many, the newness of many of us to collective action, and the slender ties to past class and social struggles will, in many places, necessarily be a symbolic show of power. But let us take and use the day as a wake up call by a risen people.

And perhaps just as important as this year’s May Day itself , the massive organizing and outreach efforts in the months leading up to May 1st will allow us the opportunity to talk to our co-workers, families, neighbors, communities, and friends about the issues confronting us, the source of our power, the need for us to stand up to the attacks we are facing, the need to confront the various oppressions that keep most of us down in one way or another and keep all of us divided, and the need for us to stand in solidarity with each other in order to fight for our collective interests. In short, as one of the street slogans of movement says –“they say cut back, we say fight back.” We can build our collective consciousness, capacity, and confidence through this process; and come out stronger because of it.

Watch this website and other social media sites for further specific details of events and actions.

All out in Boston on May Day 2012.

All Out For The Smedley Butler Brigade Veteran For Peace-Initiated Saint Patrick's Peace Parade, Sunday March 18th In South Boston!

2012-02-02T13:09:00.000-05:00

Markin comment:

Mark the date to express your right to free expression and assembly in the fight for peace, economic justice and social equality.

All Out For The Smedley Butler Brigade Veteran For Peace-Initiated Saint Patrick's Peace Parade, Sunday March 18th, In South Boston! The first Saint Patrick's Peace Parade organization meeting has already met. Endorse or have your organization endorse this important action. Watch here for more details as we get closer to the event

From #Ur-Occupied Boston (#Ur-Tomemonos Boston)-This Is Class War-We Say No More-Defend Our Unions! - Defend The Boston Commune! Take The Offensive!- Why You, Your Union , Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 General Strike In Boston-Stand Up!-Fight Back!

2012-02-02T13:03:00.002-05:00

Click on the headline to link to updates from the Occupy Boston website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011. I will post important updates as they appear on that site.

Markin comment:

We know that we are only at the very start of an upsurge in the labor movement as witness the stellar exemplary actions by the West Coast activists on December 12, 2011. As I have pointed out in remarks previously made elsewhere as part of the Boston solidarity rally with the West Coast Port Shutdown on that date this is the way forward as we struggle against the ruling class for a very different, more equitable society. Not everything went as well, or as well-attended, as expected including at our rally in solidarity in Boston on the afternoon of December 12th but we are still exhibiting growing pains in the post-Occupy encampment era. Some of that will get sorted out in the future as well get a better grip of the important of the labor movement to winning victories in our struggles.
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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!

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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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Why You, Your Union , Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 General Strike In Boston-Stand Up!-Fight Back!

Wage cuts, long work hours, steep consumer price rises, unemployment, small or no pensions, little or no paid vacation time, plenty of poor and inadequate housing, homelessness, and wide-spread sicknesses as a result of a poor medical system or no health insurance. Sound familiar? Words, perhaps, taken from today’s global headlines? Well, yes. But these were also the similar conditions that faced our forebears in America back in the 1880s when the 1% were called, and rightly so, “the robber barons,” and threatened, as one of their kind stated in a fit of candor, “to hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” so that they could maintain their luxury in peace. That too has not changed.

What did change then is that our forebears fought back, fought back long and hard, starting with the fight for the eight-hour day symbolized each year by a May Day celebration of working class power. We need to reassert that claim. This May Day let us revive that tradition as we individually act around our separate grievances and strike, strike like the furies, collectively against the 1%.

No question over the past several years (really decades but it is just more public and in our face now) American working people has taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin in every possible way. Starting with massive job losses, heavy job losses in the service and manufacturing sectors (and jobs that are not coming back), paying for the seemingly never-ending bail–out of banks, other financial institutions and corporations “to big to fail,” home foreclosures and those “under water,” effective tax increases (since the rich refuse to pay, we pay), mountains of consumer debt for everything from modern necessities to just daily get-bys, and college student loan debt as a lifetime deadweight around the neck of the kids there is little to glow about in the harsh light of the “American Dream.”

Add to that the double (and triple) troubles facing immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and women and the grievances voiced in the Declaration of Independence seem like just so much whining. In short, it is not secret that working people have faced, are facing and, apparently, will continue to face an erosion of their material well-being for the foreseeable future something not seen by most people since the 1930s Great Depression, the time of our grandparents (or great-grandparents).

That is this condition will continue unless we take some lessons from those same 1930s and struggle, struggle like demons, against the 1% that seem to have all the card decks stacked against us. Struggle like they did in places like Minneapolis, San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and Detroit. Those labor-centered struggles demonstrated the social power of working people to hit the “economic royalists” (the name coined for the 1% of that day) to shut the bosses down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property. The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take (and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their “free-speech” parks (up to a point as we have found out), and curse them to eternity as long as we don’t touch their production, “perks,” and profits. Moreover an inspired fight like the actions proposed for this May Day 2012 can help new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed, homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, help themselves to get out from under.

Show Power

We demand:

*Hands Off Our Public Worker Unions! Hands Off All Our Unions!

* Give the unemployed work! Billions for public works projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure (bridges, roads, sewer and water systems, etc.)!

*End the endless wars!

* Full citizenship rights for all those who made it here no matter how they got here!

* A drastic increase in the minimum wage and big wage increases for all workers!
•
* A moratorium on home foreclosures! No evictions!

* A moratorium on student loan debt! Free, quality higher education for all! Create 100, 200, many publicly-supported Harvards!

*No increases in public transportation fares! No transportation worker lay-offs! Free public transportation!

To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1, 2012 we will be organizing
a wide-ranging series of mass collective participatory actions:

*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where
there is no union - a one-day general strike.

*We will be organizing where a strike is not possible to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out.”

*We will be organizing students to walk-out of their schools (or not show up in the first place), set up campus picket lines, or to rally at a central location, probably Boston Common.

*We will be calling in our communities for a mass consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to make purchases on that day.

Watch this website and other social media sites for further specific details of events and actions.

All out on May Day 2012.

From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-From "Spartacist"The Senile Dementia of Post-Marxism-A Critique Of The "Occupy" Movement Before There Was An "Occupy" Movement

2012-02-02T13:00:00.000-05:00

Markin comment on this series:

One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.

There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.

The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.

Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:

"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."

This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
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Spartacist English edition No. 59
Spring 2006

Empire, Multitude and the “Death of Communism”

The Senile Dementia of Post-Marxism

Corrections Appended

The November 1999 “battle of Seattle” protests against the World Trade Organization made “anti-globalization” a household word. The publication shortly thereafter of Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000) turned its authors, a young American academic named Michael Hardt and his mentor, veteran Italian New Left intellectual Antonio Negri, into self-appointed media spokesmen for anti-globalization activists. Loaded with arcane post-modernist jargon and paragraph-length sentences, this dense, often impenetrable opus was far more widely talked about than read. But its promise of providing some theoretical coherence to a disparate protest movement made Empire and its sequel, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), a focal point in a larger debate about globalization, class and social change in the post-Soviet era.

In Empire and Multitude, Hardt and Negri seemed to synthesize the ideas of a layer of “post-Marxist” intellectuals who maintain that the structure and functioning of world capitalism has changed fundamentally over the past few decades. Because we now live in a “post-industrial, information-based” economy, they argue, the industrial proletariat is no longer the uniquely revolutionary social force that traditional Marxist doctrine holds it to be. Transnational corporations and banks have effected a complete globalization of production. States and other forms of centrally organized power have been superseded by an intangible network of global interconnections, “Empire.” Hardt and Negri conclude:

“The current global recomposition of social classes, the hegemony of immaterial labor, and the forms of decision-making based on network structures all radically change the conditions of any revolutionary process. The traditional modern conception of insurrection, for example, which was defined primarily in the numerous episodes from the Paris Commune to the October Revolution, was characterized by a movement from the insurrectional activity of the masses to the creation of political vanguards, from civil war to the building of a revolutionary government, from the construction of organizations of counterpower to the conquest of state power, and from opening the constituent process to establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat. Such sequences of revolutionary activity are unimaginable today.”

—Multitude

Claiming to update Marx, Hardt and Negri jettison the programmatic core of Marxism: proletarian revolution to overthrow the capitalist system. They dismiss the lessons distilled from the 1871 Paris Commune, the first proletarian insurrection, and the subsequent history of the revolutionary workers movement. They deride class war and proletarian power as “old, tired and faded” notions (ibid.). But far from proposing anything new, Hardt and Negri offer up an amalgam of anarchistic lifestyle radicalism and utopian reformism reminiscent of the “counterculture” trend in the 1960s New Left: “As we will argue in the course of this book, resistance, exodus, the emptying out of the enemy’s power, and the multitude’s construction of a new society are one and the same process” (ibid.).

Noting that Negri “has learned nothing and forgotten nothing” since the 1970s, reviewer Tony Judt captured something of the dreary quality of Empire and Multitude in his “Dreams of Empire”:

“This is globalization for the politically challenged. In the place of the boring old class struggle we have the voracious imperial nexus now facing a challenger of its own creation, the decentered multitudinous commonality: Alien versus Predator…. With the American left reading Multitude, Dick Cheney can sleep easy.”

—New York Review of Books, 4 November 2004

After some 900 tortuous pages of Empire and its sequel, Hardt and Negri allow that they cannot, in a “philosophical book like this,...evaluate whether the time of revolutionary political decision is imminent,” adding: “A book like this is not the place either to answer the question ‘What is to be done?’” (Multitude). This frankly know-nothing conclusion corresponds to the vaunted diversity of what’s called a “movement of movements,” of “one no and a million yeses.”

As Marxists and Leninists we do know what is to be done. We are fighting for new October Revolutions: the overthrow of the capitalist system by the proletariat, allied with other sections of the exploited and oppressed. The victory of the proletariat on a world scale would place unimagined material abundance at the service of human needs, lay the basis for the elimination of classes, the eradication of social inequality based on sex and the very abolition of the social significance of race, nation and ethnicity. For the first time mankind will grasp the reins of history and control its own creation, society, resulting in an undreamed-of emancipation of human potential.

In the late 1930s, following the victory of fascism in Germany and the defeat of the Spanish Revolution, Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky observed: “As always during epochs of reaction and decay, quacks and charlatans appear on all sides, desirous of revising the whole course of revolutionary thought” (Transitional Program [1938]). The triumph of capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and East Europe in the early 1990s has nurtured a new generation of ideological quacks and charlatans. Hardt and Negri peddle their ideological wares to young leftists who, having no sense of the revolutionary capacity of the proletariat, accept the subjective outlook that a new world will be won not by uprooting the material reality of oppression but by changing the ideas in people’s heads.

It is therefore necessary to reassert the basic premises of historical materialism and the corresponding programmatic principles of Marxism. In doing so, we recall the example of Friedrich Engels’ polemic against a charlatan of his day, Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science (1877-78). Engels actively collaborated with Marx in writing this work, which is commonly known as Anti-Dühring (sections of which were later published in abridged form as Socialism: Utopian and Scientific [1880]). Engels derided Dühring for excelling in “bumptious pseudo-science” and “sublime nonsense” and charged him guilty of “mental incompetence due to megalomania.” But he also methodically dissected Dühring’s arguments and his idealist philosophical outlook, producing a powerful exposition of the materialist conception of history.

For a Materialist Understanding of Class Society

Hardt and Negri toss sand in the eyes of young leftist activists outraged by the manifold horrors of the world capitalist system—the destitution of the masses in the “global South,” racist terror, imperialist war—by providing obscure, confusionist and demonstrably false “theoretical” justifications for prevailing anti-communist prejudices. They solace the largely petty-bourgeois anti-globalization milieu with the false belief that it is itself a force for social change, denying the need for would-be revolutionaries to ally with the social power of the proletariat. They mangle precise Marxist terms like “class” and promote an “anti-capitalist” movement, centered on the World Social Forum, that is funded by and relies on capitalist foundations and even capitalist governments. Throughout, they make absolutely no attempt to analyze reality or provide hard facts to back up their impressionistic claims.

Contrast the meticulously researched historical and statistical documentation to be found in Marx’s Capital or Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism with how Hardt and Negri spin economic and political theories that the reader must accept, like religion, on faith. A review of Multitude by Tom Nairn, long associated with New Left Review, takes note of Hardt and Negri’s rejection of both Marxism and capitalist neoliberalism in favor of an essentially spiritual approach. Citing the authors’ fixation with 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, a precursor to 18th-century Enlightenment rationalism, Nairn comments: “Many readers will sense something odd about such reliance on a vision predating not only David Hume and Adam Smith, but Darwin, Freud, Marx and Durkheim, from an age when genes and the structure of human DNA were undreamt of” (“Make for the Boondocks,” London Review of Books, 5 May 2005). A more recent post-Marxist discourse by Malcolm Bull, citing Cicero, Aristotle and Thomas Hobbes among others, argues that Hardt and Negri misconstrue poor Spinoza, whose concept of “multitude” in any case provides no framework for discussion of contemporary politics (“The Limits of Multitude,” New Left Review, September-October 2005).

Hardt and Negri are representative of what we have described as a profound retrogression in political consciousness—especially pronounced among the leftist intelligentsia—which prepared and was in turn deepened by the final overturn of the October Revolution and imperialist triumphalism over the supposed “death of communism.” This is an era truly awash in bumptious pseudoscience, in which increasingly influential Christian fundamentalist forces in the corridors of power of the world’s most powerful state try to palm off the biblical creation myth as the last word in “science.”

Most young leftists now consider not only proletarian socialism but any form of programmatically defined revolutionary strategy off the agenda. Much of the pseudo-Marxist left disavows even nominal adherence to the Marxist aim of the dictatorship of the proletariat—the replacement of capitalist class rule by the revolutionary rule of the working class. In a short polemic against post-modern idealism titled “In Defence of History,” historian Eric Hobsbawm commented:

“Most intellectuals who became Marxists from the 1880s on, including historians, did so because they wanted to change the world in association with the labour and socialist movements. The motivation remained strong until the 1970s, before a massive political and ideological reaction against Marxism began. Its main effect has been to destroy the belief that the success of a particular way of organising human societies can be predicted and assisted by historical analysis.”

—Guardian [London], 15 January 2005

Marxism took the struggle for an egalitarian society out of the realm of a spiritual or philosophical ideal and rooted it in a scientific, materialist analysis of the historical development of human society. “The final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men’s brains, not in man’s better insight into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange,” wrote Engels in Anti-Dühring. Poverty, oppression, exploitation and war are not caused by bad ideas, greed, power-lust or other presumed traits of a supposedly unchanging “human nature.”

The course of human history has been shaped by an ongoing struggle to secure enough food, clothing and shelter to provide for survival and propagation. For many thousands of years, humans lived in small kinship groups, sharing what they got through hunting and gathering, on the basis of a rough communism of distribution. The invention of agriculture allowed for the production of a surplus beyond that necessary for immediate survival, opening the road to further development of the means of production and posing the question of who would appropriate that surplus and how. The development of private property and the division of society into classes also brought the rise of the family, the chief institution for the oppression of women (and youth), as a way of handing down privately appropriated wealth to the next generation. All history since has been the history of class struggle: “Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes” (Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party [1848]).

Capitalism, Imperialism and the Nation-State

Capitalism was historically progressive because it enormously raised the productive forces of society—so much so, that for the first time there was a material basis for envisioning an end to scarcity and class divisions altogether: “Only the immense increase of the productive forces attained by modern industry has made it possible to distribute labour among all members of society without exception, and thereby to limit the labour-time of each individual member to such an extent that all have enough free time left to take part in the general—both theoretical and practical—affairs of society” (Anti-Dühring).

At the same time, private ownership of the means of production increasingly became a barrier to the continued development of the productive forces. Engels explained:

“Both the productive forces created by the modern capitalist mode of production and the system of distribution of goods established by it have come into crying contradiction with that mode of production itself, and in fact to such a degree that, if the whole of modern society is not to perish, a revolution in the mode of production and distribution must take place, a revolution which will put an end to all class distinctions. On this tangible, material fact, which is impressing itself in a more or less clear form, but with insuperable necessity, on the minds of the exploited proletarians—on this fact, and not on the conceptions of justice and injustice held by any armchair philosopher, is modern socialism’s confidence in victory founded.”

—Ibid.

The emergence of modern imperialism at the end of the 19th century marked the onset of an epoch of global capitalist decay. The nation-state system, which had served as a crucible for the rise to power of a modern capitalist class, came ever more sharply into conflict with the needs of the international economic order that capitalism had itself brought about. The capitalist Great Powers, having divided the world through bloody imperial conquest, embarked on a series of wars to redivide it, seeking to expand their colonial holdings and spheres of influence at the expense of their rivals.

The gory barbarism of World War I—described by Trotsky as a “furious pogrom of human culture” (Terrorism and Communism [1920])—was followed by barely two decades of “peace” before the imperialist powers embarked on a second global conflagration. World War II saw the epitome of capitalist barbarism with the Nazi Holocaust of European Jewry—which ended only with the Soviet Red Army’s liberation of Nazi-occupied East Europe—and the incineration of some 200,000 Japanese civilians by U.S. atom bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A future interimperialist world war will likely be fought with nuclear weapons on all sides, threatening the annihilation of all humanity.

Under the modern imperialist system, a handful of advanced capitalist states in North America, Europe and Japan exploit and oppress the downtrodden colonial and semicolonial masses in Asia, Africa and Latin America, arresting the all-round socioeconomic and cultural modernization of the vast majority of humanity. A just, egalitarian and harmonious society requires the overcoming of economic scarcity on a global scale through an internationally planned, socialist economy. Yet many Greens and anarchists regard large-scale technology as inherently evil (though few would personally give up modern medicine, communication and transport for a life where survival itself is a daily scramble). For their part, Hardt and Negri “rebut” Marxist materialism by simply conjuring scarcity away:

“The notion of a foundational war of all against all is based on an economy of private property and scarce resources. Material property, such as land or water or a car, cannot be in two places at once: my having and using it negates your having and using it. Immaterial property, however, such as an idea or an image or a form of communication, is infinitely reproducible…. Some resources do remain scarce today, but many, in fact, particularly the newest elements of the economy, do not operate on a logic of scarcity.”

—Multitude

Our pioneering post-Marxist professors are neither very original nor radical. Charles Leadbeater, an admirer of and highly praised freelance adviser to Tony Blair’s Labour government in Britain, wrote two years before Empire:

“There is no better way of conveying the economic value of knowledge transformation than to think about the home economics of food. Think of the world as divided up into chocolate cakes and chocolate-cake recipes…. We can all use the same chocolate-cake recipe, at the same time, without anyone being worse off. It is quite unlike a piece of cake.”

—Leadbeater, Living on Thin Air: The New Economy (London: Penguin Books, 1999)

Shortly before the French Revolution of 1789, the queen, Marie Antoinette, upon being told that the poor people of Paris had no bread, reputedly replied: “Then let them eat cake.” Leadbeater has gone Marie Antoinette one better. To the impoverished masses of the “global South,” he says: Let them eat cake recipes! As Engels said of Herr Dühring: “Such is the ease with which the living force of the hocus-pocus of the philosophy of reality surmounts the most impassable obstacles” (Anti-Dühring).

The response to Hurricane Katrina showed vividly how the “logic of scarcity” continues to dominate even in the richest capitalist country on earth. The contempt of the venal American ruling class for the black poor of New Orleans—left to the mercies of the flood waters because they did not have the means to get out of town—was evident to horrified TV viewers around the world.

Hardt and Negri’s conceptual meanderings are not to be taken any more seriously than computer-generated special effects in Hollywood films like The Matrix. In the virtual reality world of Empire, Hardt and Negri call for “global citizenship” and a universal social wage. To realize a universal social wage based on even the U.S. legal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour would require an annual outlay greater than the current (2004) gross national income of the whole world. To achieve this goal would entail an enormous leap forward in human productivity, not to mention a revolution in the mode of production and distribution. Yet Hardt and Negri reject the perspective of an international planned economy and deny even that material scarcity remains a central problem facing humanity.

Red October, the Soviet Union and Its Fate

The so-called “failure of the Soviet experiment” is held up by both pseudo-leftists and open right-wingers as irrefutable proof that any attempt to replace capitalism with a “hegemonic system” or “hierarchical socialism” is doomed to collapse under the weight of its necessarily “totalitarian” aims. Echoing the common wisdom of imperialist ideologues and tabloid trash regarding the collapse of the Soviet Union, Hardt and Negri intone: “Resistance to the bureaucratic dictatorship is what drove the crisis” (Empire). And what of the aftermath? Hardt and Negri make no mention at all of the catastrophic and historically unprecedented social and economic collapse of post-Soviet Russia, Ukraine and other former Soviet republics. The immiseration of much of the population of East Europe and the former USSR would seem to be immaterial to these self-proclaimed prophets of the future.

The October Revolution gave flesh and blood to Marx and Engels’ teachings. The workers, leading behind them the impoverished peasant masses, took state power, replacing the class dictatorship of capital with a dictatorship of the proletariat—a necessary step on the road to a global, classless, egalitarian society in which the state as an instrument of repression has completely withered away. A government based on democratically elected councils (soviets) of workers and peasants expropriated the capitalists and landlords, broke their resistance and set about organizing a planned economy based not on profit but on the needs of society. Despite unimaginable poverty and backwardness, Soviet Russia was in the vanguard of all forms of social liberation (see “The Russian Revolution and the Emancipation of Women,” page 56).

It spoke to the proletariat’s unique role as the agency of social revolution in this epoch that the workers could seize and retain state power in a backward country in which they, themselves by and large only a generation or two removed from their peasant origins, were a small minority compared to the peasantry. This understanding had been elaborated by Trotsky in Results and Prospects (1906) as part of his theory of permanent revolution, which asserted that the outstanding democratic tasks in backward, tsarist Russia, such as the agrarian and national questions, could only be resolved in the context of proletarian power. But the permanent revolution was premised on victorious proletarian revolutions in the industrial powers of West Europe. The mass of Russia’s workers, not only the Bolshevik leaders, saw the October Revolution as the beginning of the world socialist revolution. Red Russia helped to inspire millions of workers around the globe with revolutionary consciousness. Revolutionary turbulence did engulf much of Europe, centrally Germany, after World War I. However, in no other country did the working class come to power. This was mainly the result of the counterrevolutionary policies of the workers’ social-democratic misleaders and the absence of authoritative vanguard parties like the Bolshevik Party that Lenin had built in tsarist Russia.

Thus Soviet Russia emerged from seven years of imperialist war and civil war internationally isolated and economically devastated, its proletariat physically decimated and politically exhausted, its huge peasantry (particularly the better-off layers) beginning to assert its own petty-bourgeois class interests. (For further discussion on the latter, see “Kronstadt 1921: Bolshevism vs. Counterrevolution,” page 6.) These conditions allowed for the growth of a bureaucratic layer in the governing apparatus of the Soviet state and ruling Communist Party. Seizing on widespread demoralization following the failure of yet another revolutionary opportunity in Germany in 1923, the bureaucracy asserted its political control. While maintaining the social foundations put in place by Red October, this political counterrevolution marked a qualitative transformation in how and for what purposes the Soviet Union was governed.

The bureaucracy became increasingly hostile to the fight for socialist revolution in the capitalist countries. In late 1924 Stalin promulgated the ridiculous dogma that socialism could be built in the Soviet Union alone, if only the imperialists could be kept from militarily attacking it. Communist parties around the world were transformed into tools of Soviet diplomacy in the search for “peaceful coexistence.” Trotsky, at the head of the Left Opposition (LO), fought against the bureaucratic degeneration of the Russian Revolution in both the Soviet Communist Party and the Communist International. The LO fought to maintain the internationalist program of extending the gains of the Russian Revolution to other countries, the program that had animated the Soviet state and party in the early years of the revolution.

Because of the economic devastation caused by the Civil War and the extreme backwardness of the rural economy, the Bolshevik regime had been forced in 1921 to allow for a limited private market in grain and consumer goods. The LO understood that the layer of better-off peasants (kulaks) and small merchants represented a potential danger to the collectivized property on which the workers state was based. While the growing bureaucratic caste increasingly conciliated the kulaks, the LO advocated a tax on the agricultural surplus to help fund planned industrial development, as well as a policy of material incentives for the poorer peasants to voluntarily collectivize their lands. As the kulaks systematically hoarded grain to drive up prices in 1928, threatening to starve the cities, the bureaucracy was forced, in a deformed way, to implement part of the LO’s program. In typically brutal and bureaucratic fashion, Stalin forcibly collectivized the peasantry. This turn foreclosed the immediate threat of capitalist restoration in the USSR. The accompanying policy of planned industrial development, while rife with tremendous bureaucratic distortions and mismanagement, enabled the Soviet Union to construct a modern, industrial society in which the working class had access to medicine, science, education and culture.

It is not Marxism that failed in the Soviet Union, but the Stalinist perversion expressed in the dogmas of “socialism in one country” and “peaceful coexistence.” Trotsky insisted that the Soviet Union, despite its economic successes, could not in the historical long run survive in a world dominated by capitalist-imperialist states. Central planning can only function effectively under a regime of soviet democracy, which allows for the necessary participation of the workers themselves in regulating and implementing the plan. Nonetheless, as Trotsky wrote in his incisive analysis of Stalinism:

“Socialism has demonstrated its right to victory, not on the pages of Das Kapital, but in an industrial arena comprising a sixth part of the earth’s surface—not in the language of dialectics, but in the language of steel, cement and electricity. Even if the Soviet Union, as a result of internal difficulties, external blows and the mistakes of its leadership, were to collapse—which we firmly hope will not happen—there would remain as an earnest of the future this indestructible fact, that thanks solely to a proletarian revolution a backward country has achieved in less than ten years successes unexampled in history.”

—The Revolution Betrayed (1936)

Throughout the 1930s, the collectivized Soviet economy expanded rapidly even as the capitalist world was mired in depression. Rebuilt after the devastation of the Second World War, by the late 1950s Soviet technological development was such that it could send a man into space. From 1960 to 1980, a massive construction campaign was undertaken, aimed at providing every urban family with an apartment for a nominal rent. This was considered a right of Soviet citizenship—as was the right to a job, public education and free health care. These were historic achievements of the planned economy, despite the terrible bureaucratic overhead of Stalinist misrule, which engendered a dull grayness throughout society, from the slipshod quality of consumer goods to the stifling of intellectual life.

And now? In the six years after counterrevolution, the gross domestic product of post-Soviet Russia fell by 80 percent. Real wages plummeted by a similar amount. Much of the urban population was forced to grow food on small urban garden plots to survive. Today millions in Russia and the other former Soviet republics are on the edge of starvation, while homelessness is rampant.

Hardt, Negri and other worshippers of the accomplished fact proclaim that the collapse of the Soviet Union was inevitable. In fact, had a revolutionary-internationalist program prevailed, the outcome could have been far different. The decades after the October Revolution saw numerous opportunities for proletarian revolutions in advanced capitalist countries, which would have broken the isolation of the world’s first workers state, shattered the stranglehold of the nationalist bureaucracy and revived the revolutionary consciousness of the Soviet proletariat. Trotsky and the Left Opposition waged an unrelenting struggle to defend the revolutionary gains against both external and internal threats. They fought to defeat Stalinism and restore Bolshevik internationalism and soviet democracy in the Soviet Union. Guided by our Trotskyist program, in 1989-92 the International Communist League intervened uniquely, first in East Germany and then in the Soviet Union, with the program of proletarian political revolution: the overthrow of the disintegrating Stalinist bureaucracy and its replacement by a government based on workers councils.

Despite the destruction of the USSR, about a quarter of the world’s population still lives in countries over which the capitalist exploiters do not exercise direct dominion—the remaining deformed workers states of Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea and above all China, the most populous country in the world. Yet China barely merits a mention in Empire and Multitude, much less any indication that it is a society with anything worth defending. In this as well, Hardt and Negri take their cues from the imperialist rulers who, echoed by the anti-Communist labor and social-democratic misleaders, portray China as a giant “slave labor” camp. This was evident at the 1999 Seattle protests where, behind the cute images of “Teamsters and turtles united” lauded by Hardt, Negri and other anti-globalization ideologues, there was a sinister drumbeat by the American AFL-CIO labor bureaucracy for Washington to take stiffer action against China.

The ICL, in contrast, fights for the unconditional military defense of China against imperialism and capitalist counterrevolution. China today remains what it has been since the 1949 Revolution: a bureaucratically ruled workers state structurally similar to the former Soviet Union. Despite major inroads by both foreign and indigenous capitalism, the core elements of its economy are collectivized. At a time when almost all advanced capitalist countries are practicing fiscal austerity, China’s government has launched mammoth infrastructural projects such as dams and canals. State ownership of the banking system has to date insulated China from volatile flows of short-term speculative capital, which periodically wreak havoc on the economies of neocolonial capitalist countries in East Asia and also Latin America.

To the extent that they police the vast “free-trade zones” for offshore Chinese and foreign capital, the Beijing bureaucrats have in a sense become labor contractors for the imperialists. But the capitalist powers will not rest until China is fully under the thumb of the imperialist world market. The U.S. has been building bases in Central Asia, attempting to surround China with American military installations, and recently consummated a pact with Japan to defend the offshore capitalist bastion of Taiwan. Sooner or later, the explosive social tensions in Chinese society will shatter the ruling bureaucracy. Then the question will be starkly posed: proletarian political revolution to open the road to socialism or capitalist enslavement and imperialist subjugation. Working people and leftist youth all over the world have a stake in this struggle. Capitalist counterrevolution would be devastating for China’s workers, women and rural poor, and would embolden the capitalists internationally to launch more savage attacks on workers, rural toilers, women, minorities and immigrants. It would also intensify competition among the imperialist powers, especially the U.S. and Japan, and lead to further imperialist military adventures against the semicolonial countries around the globe.

“New Economy” Nonsense and Petty-Bourgeois Arrogance

It was a tremendous step forward when Marx and Engels realized that the class struggle was the road to the revolutionary transformation of capitalist society, and that the proletariat was the revolutionary class of the modern epoch. When they joined the League of the Just in 1847, it became the Communist League and its slogan changed from “All men are brothers” to “Workers of the world, unite!” Hardt and Negri travel this road in reverse, rejecting the class struggle and dissolving the working class into a supposedly classless “people.”

At the core of Empire and Multitude’s arguments is the claim that the proletariat has been subsumed in the “multitude,” an amorphous term encompassing almost everybody on the planet—industrial worker and peasant smallholder, engineer and janitor, homeless beggar and corporate manager, prisoner and prison guard. With the labor movement weaker than at any time since the 1920s, at least in the United States, most young leftist activists view the working class as irrelevant or, at most, simply one more victim of oppression. Hardt and Negri serve up a “theory” to justify and reinforce this impressionism among the university-educated intellectuals they speak to and glorify. This is nothing new. Pioneer American Trotskyist James P. Cannon put it well in a 1966 speech (though the Socialist Workers Party he had founded had by the early ’60s abandoned a revolutionary perspective):

“You have now a new phenomenon in the American radical movement which I hear is called ‘The New Left.’ This is a broad title given to an assemblage of people who state they don’t like the situation the way it is and something ought to be done about it—but we mustn’t take anything from the experiences of the past; nothing from the ‘Old Left’ or any of its ideas or traditions are any good….

“We have a definite orientation whereas the New Left says the working class is dead. The working class was crossed off by the wiseacres in the twenties. There was a long boom in the 1920s. The workers not only didn’t gain any victories, they lost ground. The trade unions actually declined in number. In all the basic industries, where you now see great flourishing industrial unions—the auto workers, aircraft, steel, rubber, electrical, transportation, maritime—the unions did not exist, just a scattering here and there…. It took a semi-revolutionary uprising in the mid-thirties to break that up and install real unions.”

—Cannon, “Reasons for the Survival of the SWP and for Its New Vitality in the 1960s,” 6 September 1966, reprinted in Spartacist No. 38-39, Summer 1986

It took the May 1968 French general strike to break a layer of West European and North American leftists from New Left nonsense about the demise of the working class. The incipient workers revolution in France reaffirmed in real life the Marxist understanding of the revolutionary potential of the proletariat. Exposing the charlatanry of an earlier generation of “post-Marxist” ideologues, it laid the basis for new layers of youth to be won to revolutionary Marxism.

Notwithstanding various changes in industrial technique and in the world economy, the proletariat remains central to a revolutionary perspective today—because it continues to occupy a unique role at the heart of the process of production. It is through the exploitation of the working class that the capitalist derives profit. Concentrating workers in large factories and great urban centers, the capitalists have created the instrument of their own destruction as an exploiting class. Furthermore, for the working class to emancipate itself from the yoke of capitalism on a global scale it must abolish all exploitation, leading to a society in which there are no class distinctions.

Intermediate between the two basic classes in capitalist society, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, is the petty bourgeoisie. In neither Empire nor Multitude is there any discussion or even mention of the social role of this heterogeneous layer, which ranges from impoverished peasants, small shopkeepers and fast-food branch managers to the university-educated administrative, technical and cultural cadre of the capitalist system and highflying Wall Street brokers. The petty bourgeoisie has no definite relation to the large-scale means of production under capitalism and therefore no independent social power; as a result, though the petty bourgeoisie (or sectors of it) can veer from one political extreme to another, it cannot play an independent role in the class struggle.

The petty bourgeoisie’s social role in turn determines its social outlook. While workers can improve their economic conditions only through collective struggle against the capitalist employers and their state, members of corporate and government bureaucracies seek to increase their incomes and improve their social status by individual competition with one another. A bank loan officer strives to become manager of the branch. The manager of the branch strives to become head of the bank’s regional division, and so on.

Hardt and Negri legitimize petty-bourgeois elitism and contempt for the working class through the notion of a supposedly post-industrial, information-based economy in which it is no longer the proletariat but the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia that plays a pivotal role. They assert that capitalism has passed from “the domination of industry to that of services and information, a process of economic postmodernization, or better, informatization” (Empire [emphasis in original]). Evoking a Joe Six-Pack image of “the male mass factory worker,” they contend: “Today that working class has all but disappeared from view” (ibid.). In the sequel to Empire, Hardt and Negri drop this absurd claim in favor of a no less false argument:

“Agricultural labor remains, as it has for centuries, dominant in quantitative terms, and industrial labor has not declined in terms of numbers globally. Immaterial labor constitutes a minority of global labor, and it is concentrated in some of the dominant regions of the globe. Our claim, rather, is that immaterial labor has become hegemonic in qualitative terms.” [emphasis in original]

—Multitude

Hardt and Negri’s vision of immaterial reality reads like a particularly demented editorial from Wired magazine, or a Silicon Valley venture capitalist out to draw in a new round of funding for the latest “next big” Web site. Likewise, Blairite huckster Charles Leadbeater waxes eloquent: “Our children will not have to toil in dark factories, descend into pits or suffocate in mills, to hew raw materials and turn them into manufactured products. They will make their livings through their creativity, ingenuity and imagination” (Living on Thin Air).

Again, this is nothing new. A 1964 statement signed by a host of left-liberal luminaries—including James Boggs, Todd Gitlin, Michael Harrington, Tom Hayden, Gunnar Myrdal and Linus Pauling—argued:

“A new era of production has begun. Its principles of organization are as different from those of the industrial era as those of the industrial era were different from the agricultural. The cybernation revolution has been brought about by the combination of the computer and the automated self-regulating machine. This results in a system of almost unlimited productive capacity which requires progressively less human labor….

“The cybernation revolution proffers an existence qualitatively richer in democratic as well as material values.”

—“The Triple Revolution,” International Socialist Review, Summer 1964

But for its clarity, this statement could have been lifted from Empire or Multitude.

Proletarian Centrality and Revolutionary Consciousness

The myth of a new networked world where everyone is an independent producer behind a touch screen can only be invented and purveyed by intellectuals who don’t have a clue about conditions of labor in the real world. Somebody produces the clothes our post-modern thinkers wear, the cars they drive, the computers on which they cruise the information superhighway, and the electricity on which those computers (and a lot else, besides) run. Computers may manage inventory control in transport operations, but the cargo containers still have to be taken on and off ships by longshoremen and transported by truck drivers and rail workers. Moreover, if it means greater profit, as in the low-wage garment industry, capitalists will readily revert from automated, capital-intensive methods to labor-intensive sweatshops that look much as they did a century ago. Proletarian labor remains repetitive, backbreaking and often dangerous. In 2003, for example, the injury rate in U.S. auto plants was roughly 15 times that in financial and insurance offices.

It is certainly true, as shown by the Midwest rust bowl that engulfed what had been America’s industrial heartland, that there have been significant changes in the U.S. and world economies. Capital continually seeks out the highest rate of profit and, correspondingly, the lowest cost of production, both within and (in the absence of major protectionist barriers) across national borders. Beginning in the late 1970s, American capital increasingly shifted manufacturing operations to the non-union U.S. South, then Mexico and now even lower-wage countries in Asia. This shift has occurred through direct investment, subcontracting, outsourcing and similar mechanisms—a development greatly accelerated by the international retreat and subsequent collapse of Soviet power. At the same time, the “market reforms” carried out by the Beijing Stalinist regime opened China to large-scale investment, concentrated in light manufacturing, by Western, Japanese and offshore Chinese capital. With a labor force of 160 million employed in manufacturing, China’s working class has become a very important component of the industrial proletariat on an international scale.

In 1970, 33 percent of the non-agricultural labor force in the U.S. was employed in the goods-producing sector (manufacturing, construction and mining) and another 6 percent in transport and utilities (U.S. Department of Commerce, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1971). By 2003, the fraction of the labor force employed in goods production had declined to 20 percent, with 5 percent employed in transport and utilities (Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2004-2005). Simultaneously, the proportion of the U.S. labor force employed in wholesale and retail trade, banks, securities outfits, insurance companies, real estate agencies, etc. has grown to some 22 percent.

But this hardly proves the “hegemony of immaterial labor” even in the “dominant regions of the globe.” (Hardt and Negri could not be more blatant in their appeal to the relatively privileged, university-educated petty bourgeoisie of the “First World”; they do not even take note of the proletariat in China and parts of the semicolonial Third World.) The notion of a “new economy” revolutionized by information technology is no less a myth today than it was in the 1960s. The use of carrier pigeons to speedily transmit news in the days before the telegraph in the early 1800s gave the Rothschild family an enormous edge over their competitors in building a Europe-wide banking empire. But it hardly heralded an economic revolution. Even before the Internet boom of the 1990s went bust, one economist noted:

“Most of the initial applications of mainframe and personal computers have encountered the rapid onset of diminishing returns. Much of the use of the Internet represents a substitution from one type of entertainment or information-gathering for another.”

—Robert J. Gordon, “Does the ‘New Economy’ Measure Up to the Great Inventions of the Past?”, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2000

Nor has the service sector become dominant over industry. The conventional division of the economy into a goods-producing and a service sector obscures the primacy of the former over the latter. Without buildings there can be no real estate and property insurance companies. Without automobiles there can be no auto dealerships and auto insurance companies. And fast-food places are actually the final phase of the food-processing industry: workers at McDonald’s et al. transform frozen meat patties and frozen French fries into edible (sort of) food. Moreover, a huge part of the service sector is directly integrated in the manufacturing process. A rare quantitative survey in this regard in the 1980s showed that an estimated 25 percent of the total U.S. gross domestic product consisted of “services” (e.g., accounting, lawyers, advertising, property insurance, employee health insurance) purchased by manufacturing firms and incorporated into the market price of their products (Stephen S. Cohen and John Zysman, Manufacturing Matters: The Myth of the Post-Industrial Economy [New York: Basic Books, 1987]).

Pointing to Toyota-style “production teams” in some auto plants and far-flung global operations based on “just-in-time” inventory and production policies, Hardt and Negri also trumpet grandiose claims of a fundamental shift in industry from “Fordism” and “Taylorism”—i.e., assembly-line production in large, concentrated plants—to “post-Fordist” methods. To the extent that manufacturers have extended their production operations globally, it underscores the need for international labor solidarity, but it hardly makes labor struggle passé. In 1998, a walkout against threatened layoffs by several thousand workers at a General Motors stamping plant in Flint, Michigan soon brought to a halt practically the entire GM empire in the United States, Canada and Mexico. In an attempt to break the strike, GM moved the stamping dies from Flint to one of its Canadian operations. But the Canadian auto workers refused to touch them—a powerful example of international labor solidarity. Lasting almost two months, the strike cost GM $12 billion in sales and $3 billion in profits. It was the costliest walkout ever for what was then the world’s largest industrial corporation.

The GM strike underscored in a rather dramatic way that the current prostration of the labor movement is the result not of structural changes in capitalism but of the pro-capitalist policies of the bureaucratic misleadership of the trade unions. With GM on its knees, the United Auto Workers bureaucracy corralled the strikers back to work on the basis of a compromise that settled nothing. We wrote at the time:

“By the mere fact of withdrawing their labor power, GM workers demonstrated the potential power of the working class that lies in its numbers, organization and discipline, and most decisively in the fact that it is labor that makes the wheels of profit turn in capitalist society. But the Flint strike also showed how the power of labor is sapped and undermined by the labor bureaucracy, which preaches an identity of interests between the workers and their capitalist exploiters....

“To take on and roll back the war on organized labor requires a leadership with the understanding that the interests of labor and capital are counterposed, that any serious mobilization of union power threatens the capitalists and will bring the working class into a head-on confrontation with the bourgeois state, whether under a Republican or Democratic administration, and that the working class must therefore vigilantly guard its independence—organizational and political—from the bourgeoisie, its state and its political parties.”

—“For a Class-Struggle Fight Against GM Job Slashing!” Workers Vanguard No. 696, 11 September 1998

The bureaucratic misleaders of the trade unions and of the Labour, social-democratic and other reformist parties outside the U.S. constitute a petty-bourgeois layer within the workers movement, aptly characterized by American Marxist Daniel De Leon as the “labor lieutenants of capital.” While claiming to speak on behalf of the working class, they are in fact loyal to the capitalist system, and are duly compensated for their services. Throughout the latter half of the 19th century, Marx and his followers believed that the influence of reformism—a program of collaboration with the bourgeoisie and piecemeal reform of capitalism—was rooted in the immaturity of the working class. From this, it followed that as the proletariat grew in size and power, such dangerous illusions would be transcended. However, with the advent of the imperialist epoch, Lenin realized that the situation had fundamentally changed. There now existed a strong objective basis for buying off a small section of the working class in the imperialist countries with the superprofits derived from exploitation of the colonial world. The essence of Leninism is the understanding that a party that genuinely represents the interests of the working class must be politically and organizationally counterposed to the John Sweeneys, the Tony Blairs and the Gerhard Schröders.

For the working class to move from being a class in itself—defined simply by its objective relationship to the means of production—to a class for itself, fully conscious of its historic task to overthrow the capitalist order, requires revolutionary leadership. Absent this, the workers’ consciousness is determined to varying degrees by bourgeois (and pre-bourgeois) ideology—nationalism, racism, sexism, religion, illusions in parliamentary reformism, etc.—leading them to see capitalist society as fixed and immutable. The bourgeoisie has in its hands not only enormous wealth and control over the means of information but a vast repressive apparatus—the army, police, etc.—that is centralized at the highest levels. To take on and defeat that power requires a countervailing power that is no less organized and centralized. When the bourgeoisie was a rising class in the late feudal epoch, it gradually acquired increasing social and economic dominance through the expansion of its property and wealth relative to that of the landed nobility. But the proletariat is not a propertied class and is therefore unable to construct the institutions of a new society within the framework of capitalism. In its struggle for state power, the proletariat must rely exclusively on its organization and consciousness, expressed at the highest level in the construction of a democratic-centralist vanguard party whose leadership, tactics and strategy are determined through full internal democracy and implemented on the basis of iron centralism.

Old Reformism in Post-Modern Jargon

Rejecting the proletariat under Leninist leadership as the agency for revolutionary change, Hardt and Negri present the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia as the new vanguard: “Network struggle, again, like post-Fordist production, does not rely on discipline in the same way: creativity, communication, and self-organized cooperation are its primary value…. No longer is ‘the people’ assumed as basis and no longer is taking power of the sovereign state structure the goal. The democratic elements of the guerrilla struggle are pushed further in the network form, and the organization becomes less a means and more an end in itself” (Multitude).

This harks back to the classic expression of social-democratic revisionism by Eduard Bernstein. The executor of Engels’ writings, Bernstein wrote a series of articles in the two years after Engels’ death in 1895 advancing a frankly reformist view. He declared: “I confess openly I have extraordinarily little interest or taste for what is generally called the ‘final goal of Socialism.’ This aim, whatever it be, is nothing to me, the movement everything” (emphasis in original). “By movement,” he continued, “I understand not only the general movement of society, that is, social progress, but political and economic agitation and organization for effecting this progress” (quoted in Peter Gay, The Dilemmas of Democratic Socialism: Eduard Bernstein’s Challenge to Marx [New York: Collier Books, 1962]).

Though he peddled the illusion that socialism could be attained by a gradual process of reform—an illusion of ever deepening historical progress that was ripped apart by the horrible carnage of World War I—at least Bernstein looked to the organized working class to transform society. Hardt and Negri instead counsel petty-bourgeois youth that they can change the world without either having or desiring social power.

They trumpet a “new militancy” of the post-Soviet era, which “does not simply repeat the organizational formulas of the old revolutionary working class…. This militancy makes resistance into counterpower and makes rebellion into a project of love” (Multitude). Another post-Marxist icon, John Holloway, argues explicitly: “The fall of the Soviet Union not only meant disillusionment for millions; it also brought the liberation of revolutionary thought, the liberation from the identification of revolution with the conquest of power” (Change the World Without Taking Power [London: Pluto Press, 2002]).

Hardt and Negri promote petty-bourgeois schemes like “desertion,” “dropping out” and carving out autonomous “spaces” within capitalist society. The latter include the 1970s “counterculture” communes in the U.S. and, Negri’s particular pride and joy, the “autonomous” social centers—often state-funded—set up in Italy after the struggles of the ’60s and ’70s. Low-level community organizing and other forms of “horizontal” activism; trashing Starbucks windows or tearing down fences outside World Bank gatherings; creating nooks and crannies of “liberated spaces” that exist at the sufferance of the state: such activities may be morally satisfying, and may even occasionally inconvenience the capitalist rulers. But none of this brings us even a millimeter nearer to burying capitalist exploitation and oppression; for that, it is necessary for the workers to seize and wield power.

At bottom, Hardt and Negri preach an essentially religious notion that political activists can change the world through moral example, by showing how a new world of peace, love and democracy will look in the mirror of existing “non-hierarchical” forms of organization. A popular model for this is the peasant-based Mexican Zapatistas, who are revered by many young leftist radicals in West Europe and the U.S. Holloway’s book is dedicated to the Zapatistas. Hardt and Negri similarly enthuse that the Zapatistas’ “goal has never been to defeat the state and claim sovereign authority but rather to change the world without taking power” (Multitude).

The Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) originated in the early 1990s as a guerrilla movement based among the impoverished Indian peasant smallholders in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. When the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was introduced in 1994, the EZLN led a brief revolt of the desperate peasants, who knew that they would be further pauperized and driven off the land as a result of this imperialist “free trade” rape of Mexico. But despite Subcomandante Marcos’ facile command of post-modern jargon and Internet communiqués, there is nothing new about the Zapatistas. They are simply a current manifestation of traditional Latin American populist nationalism, a movement led by declassed intellectuals with a certain base among the peasantry.

The Zapatistas have not changed the world much even within the confines of Chiapas. Notwithstanding the EZLN’s brief episode of armed struggle, Chiapas remains a police state with 70,000 government troops, as well as the landlords’ own private paramilitary killers. The economy in EZLN-controlled regions remains largely subsistence-level farming reminiscent of the traditional communal ejido, but without the meager state subsidies the ejidos got for a period of time. While the “caracoles,” the liberated jungle areas, feature “self-managed” schools and even a people’s cyber café, medical care is poor and often continues to utilize relatively ineffective herbal remedies. Social and political leadership is patriarchal, resting to a large extent in the hands of male elders. Furthermore, even this impoverished autonomy is untenable in the long run in the midst of a capitalist world where the drive for profit will inevitably lead to uprooting prior social forms in the interest of expanded access to resources, markets and production.

Hoary Myths of Capitalist “Democracy”…

Multitude is subtitled “War and Democracy in the Age of Empire.” Negri at least is thoroughly familiar with the Marxist doctrine that contemporary parliamentary governments represent the actual political domination of the bourgeoisie. In a blatantly dishonest manner, the book does not address the Marxist position on this key question, either to repudiate or endorse it. Throughout Multitude “democracy” is promiscuously acclaimed as the be-all and end-all of political activism but is almost never defined in concrete institutional terms. However, toward the end of Multitude Hardt and Negri give the game away, proposing a “global parliament”:

“Imagine, for example, that the global voting population of approximately 4 billion (excluding minors from the total global population of more than 6 billion) would be divided into four hundred districts of 10 million people each. North Americans would thus elect about twenty representatives, and the Europeans and Indonesians another twenty each, whereas the Chinese and Indians would elect about one hundred and eighty.”

Imagine, then, Wall Street and the Pentagon sharing wealth and power with India and Indonesia because of a democratic vote! Hardt and Negri’s fantastical proposal to replicate the U.S. Congress or the British “mother of parliaments” on an international scale underlines not only their bourgeois-democratic outlook but also the unreal, idiot utopianism of their whole anti-Empire schema.

Bourgeois electoralism politically reduces the working class to atomized individuals. The bourgeoisie can manipulate the electorate through its control of the media, the education system and the other institutions shaping public opinion. In all capitalist “democracies,” government officials, elected and unelected, are bought and paid for by the banks and large corporations. As Lenin explained in his classic polemic against the German Social Democrat Karl Kautsky:

“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….

“Under bourgeois democracy the capitalists, by thousands of tricks—which are the more artful and effective the more ‘pure’ democracy is developed—drive the people away from administrative work, from freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, etc.... The working people are barred from participation in bourgeois parliaments (they never decide important questions under bourgeois democracy, which are decided by the stock exchange and the banks) by thousands of obstacles, and the workers know and feel, see and realise perfectly well that the bourgeois parliaments are institutions alien to them.” [emphasis in original]

—The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918)

An object lesson in this regard is the aftermath of the courageous, decades-long struggle against the apartheid regime of repulsive segregation and naked police-state terror in South Africa. The African National Congress (ANC) assured the embattled masses that black majority rule would mean a radical redistribution of income and wealth from the affluent white elite to the impoverished nonwhite toilers. But that is not what happened when the ANC replaced the white-supremacists in wielding governmental power after the 1994 elections. Rather a small black elite managed to make it onto the “gravy train” and into the white-dominated ruling class, while the economic conditions of the black workers, urban poor and rural toilers have in important ways actually deteriorated.

The big capitalists and landowners will not countenance a serious threat to their profits or property if they are not deprived of their power. Illusions to the contrary are bred by the parliamentary democracy that partly masks the dictatorship of capital, especially in the wealthier industrial countries. Even there, cherished “inalienable” rights will, aside from the right to property, be alienated whenever the bourgeoisie feels threatened. Trotsky put it well in his polemical defense of the proletarian dictatorship against Kautsky:

“The capitalist bourgeois calculates: ‘while I have in my hands lands, factories, workshops, banks; while I possess newspapers, universities, schools; while—and this most important of all—I retain control of the army: the apparatus of democracy, however you reconstruct it, will remain obedient to my will….’

“To this the revolutionary proletarian replies: ‘Consequently, the first condition of salvation is to tear the weapons of domination out of the hands of the bourgeoisie. It is hopeless to think of a peaceful arrival to power while the bourgeoisie retains in its hands all the apparatus of power. Three times over hopeless is the idea of coming to power by the path which the bourgeoisie itself indicates and, at the same time, barricades—the path of parliamentary democracy’.”

—Terrorism and Communism

…and of “Progressive” Imperialism

Revolution “without taking power” is not revolution but, at best, superficial reform of the existing system under the powers that be. Behind the fashionable talk of “horizontalism” and “alliance-building” as supposed alternatives to the struggle for a Leninist party and proletarian state power is a very old, tired and faded notion, indeed: that poverty, oppression and war can be ended by bringing together people of good will of all classes against a small, greedy, neoliberal, warmongering elite.

In Empire, Hardt and Negri asserted: “What used to be conflict or competition among several imperialist powers has in important respects been replaced by the idea of a single power that overdetermines them all, structures them in a unitary way, and treats them under one common notion of right that is decidedly postcolonial and postimperialist.” This was a crude expression of the widespread view among anti-globalization ideologues that the nation-state system had been supplanted by “transnational” corporations and supranational institutions like the IMF, WTO and World Bank. We extensively refuted such ideas in a 1999 Spartacist pamphlet, Imperialism, the “Global Economy” and Labor Reformism, noting that they had much in common with the theory of “ultra-imperialism” propounded by Kautsky as a justification for repudiating the need for international proletarian revolution at the time of World War I. Drawing on Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), which includes polemics against Kautsky, we argued that “transnational” corporations and banks remained dependent on the military power of their nation-states to protect and expand their foreign investments:

“So-called property rights—whether in the form of loans, direct investments or trade agreements—are just pieces of paper unless they are backed by military force….

“The top managers of Exxon know damn well that without the U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force their oil fields in the Persian Gulf would not be theirs for very long.”

—Imperialism, the “Global Economy” and Labor Reformism

Hardt and Negri claimed, “In this smooth space of Empire there is no place of power—it is both everywhere and nowhere” (Empire [emphasis in original]). Try telling the people of Baghdad today that they live in a postcolonial and postimperialist order in which there is no place of power! Disdaining the post-modern subtleties of Empire in favor of old-fashioned “America über alles” power politics, George W. Bush launched an effectively unilateral (aside from Blair’s Britain) invasion of Iraq in 2003. As anti-globalization protests were supplanted by much larger antiwar marches, overwhelmingly focused by their reformist organizers on the Bush administration’s policies, Hardt and Negri effected a corresponding shift from Empire to Multitude. Now they speak of “a unilateral, or ‘monarchical,’ arrangement of the global order, centered on the military, political, and economic dictation of the United States,” and argue for an “alliance” between the “multitude” and Europe’s ruling “aristocracies” against the American imperial “monarch” (Multitude).

Hardt and Negri’s idiocy that there is no “place of power” is really meant to assert that there is no place for revolution. The real world consists of capitalist states that are not neutral, benign or irrelevant, that cannot be circumvented, reformed or made to serve the interests of the exploited and oppressed. The bourgeois state is an instrument of organized violence for enforcing the exploitation of the working class by capital. It must be smashed in the course of a thoroughgoing socialist revolution and replaced by the class rule of the workers.

“Multitude” vs. “Empire” is but the latest incarnation of the politically bankrupt notion of uniting “the people” against “monopoly” (or war, fascism, ad nauseam). What Hardt and Negri propose is a classic example of what Marxists call class collaborationism: the subordination of the left and workers movement to a “progressive” wing of the bourgeois rulers in order to achieve reform of the existing system. Such reliance on representatives of the enemy class, long promoted by the Stalinists as the “popular front,” has brought only disaster for workers and the oppressed.

In practice, the sanctimonious anti-power idealism preached by Hardt, Negri & Co. degenerates into the grubby politics of “lesser evil” capitalism. American armchair anarchist Noam Chomsky and Canadian anti-globalization publicist Naomi Klein (who found Multitude “inspiring”) supported Democrat John Kerry in the 2004 U.S. election as a more palatable enforcer of global sweatshop democracy, “war on terror” and American Empire. For his part, Negri embraces the supposedly more benign European imperialists against the U.S. This appears to be one of the few concepts in his books that Negri has actually tried to implement. In early 2005, he campaigned for the constitution of the European Union, which is headed by a consortium of imperialist powers committed to driving down wages and benefits for Europe’s workers and bolting shut the gates of Fortress Europe to non-white immigrants and asylum-seekers.

Then there is the World Social Forum (WSF), organizer of the large-scale gatherings against “neoliberalism” that have been held in Brazil and elsewhere over the past several years. In a foreword to a collection of WSF documents, Hardt and Negri claim the WSF “provides an opportunity to reconstitute the Left in each country and internationally” and could herald “the beginning of the democracy of the multitude” (Another World Is Possible, ed. Ponniah and Fisher [London: Zed Books, 2003]). The WSF was set up in the wake of the Seattle protests as a means of defusing street confrontations by providing an ostensibly non-parliamentary milieu for anti-globalization activists. The WSF and its regional counterparts are crystalline expressions of class collaboration, tying workers and ostensible leftists to bourgeois and petty-bourgeois organizations on the basis of a bourgeois program and under the direct auspices of capitalist institutions, politicians and governments. The 2005 WSF in Porto Alegre, for example, received $2.5 million in financing from Brazil’s federal government, which is currently waging savage IMF austerity attacks against workers and the poor, and over $2 million from NGOs like the Ford Foundation, long a conduit for CIA funding. (See “Social Forum Con Game,” Workers Hammer No. 191, Summer 2005, for more details.)

The first European Social Forum (ESF), held in Florence in 2002, was heavily funded by the local and regional governments. It was also strongly promoted by Negri’s followers in the Italian “white overalls,” or disobedienti. Among the pronouncements issued preparatory to this event was a shameless appeal to the imperialist rulers of Europe to oppose the then imminent U.S. war on Iraq: “We call on all the European heads of state to publicly stand against this war, whether it has UN backing or not, and to demand that George Bush abandon his war plans” (Liberazione, 13 September 2002). This grotesque statement of pacifist chauvinism—promoting the butchers of Auschwitz and Algeria as more benevolent and progressive than their U.S. rivals—could only buttress the hold of the European capitalists over “their” working masses. Of course, that is entirely in line with Hardt and Negri’s call to ally with the European “aristocracies” against the American “monarch.”

Pseudo-Marxist groups like the United Secretariat (USec), the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and Workers Power (WP) have published sometimes extensive critiques of Empire and Multitude, debunking various of Hardt and Negri’s inconsistencies and idiocies, especially at an academic level. But in the real world these groups share a common starting point with the post-Marxist charlatans. Erasing the class line in order to “build the movement,” they too peddle myths that there can be a “progressive,” “social” capitalism. The SWP, WP and the USec’s flagship French section are all prominent builders of the popular-frontist Social Forums. They all signed onto the appeal to the European imperialist rulers issued around the Florence ESF.

Whatever their formal analytical stances concerning the former Soviet Union, these groups all allied with the forces of capitalist reaction against the gains of the 1917 workers revolution, and they all agree today that it is good that the USSR is dead and buried. Regarding China, they falsely claim that it is already capitalist in order to abandon defense of the bureaucratically deformed workers state against imperialism and counterrevolution. Like Hardt and Negri, these groups reject in practice the fundamental lesson of the October Revolution: the necessity to make the proletariat conscious of its revolutionary tasks, to forge a vanguard party and overturn the capitalist state to open the road to socialism.

The SWP’s Alex Callinicos, a prominent spokesman on the Social Forum circuit, has written a lengthy pamphlet, An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto (Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 2003), that manages to avoid any discussion of soviets, workers revolution, the revolutionary party or the positive significance of the Russian Revolution. The much smaller WP and its League for the Fifth International (L5I) use more radical rhetoric in an L5I pamphlet titled Anti-Capitalism: Summit Sieges & Social Forums (2005), attacking Empire’s “minimum reformist programme” while arguing for the “anti-capitalist movement” represented by the Social Forums to be organized on a more “democratic” and “revolutionary” basis. But what this amounts to is a call for a return to Seattle-style street demonstrations:

“For five years our movement has besieged the summits of the rich and powerful….

“It must take to the streets again, and show through mass direct action its intent; to build a world without classes, oppression, racism, war and imperialism.”

—Ibid.

“Direct action” based on the popular-front politics embodied in the Social Forums is just class collaboration with a militant face. Yet it is on the basis of such cross-class unity that the L5I proposes to build not only a “movement” but a “revolutionary” party: “The anticapitalist movement, the workers’ movement, the movements of the racially and nationally oppressed, youth, women, all must be brought together to create a new International—a world party of socialist revolution” (ibid.).

Trotsky condemned the popular front as the greatest crime against the proletariat. To suggest today that a revolutionary and proletarian party be built in alliance with other classes is a parody of a travesty. Indeed, insofar as they argue, against Hardt, Negri and the anarchists, that it is necessary to “take power” away from the “neoliberal” capitalists, today’s pseudo-Marxists look not to the model of Lenin’s Bolsheviks but to pro-capitalist social democrats and even outright bourgeois forces. The USec, for example, backed “anti-fascist” French president Jacques Chirac’s re-election in 2002, and has a “comrade” minister in Brazil’s capitalist government.

A particular hero of these outfits is Venezuela’s populist strongman Hugo Chávez, whose speech at the 2005 WSF endorsing a vague “socialism” was cheered by thousands. Aided by windfall profits from high oil prices, Chávez has instituted some social reforms and postures as an “anti-imperialist” in America’s backyard. But Chávez is a bourgeois nationalist who rules for capitalism in Venezuela. Though the Bush neocons backed a military coup against him in 2002, more rational representatives of imperialism recognize that he can be trusted to protect their investments while co-opting the discontented masses through populist demagogy. Yet an extensive polemic against Empire in the British USec’s theoretical journal touts the Chávez regime as an example of “winning the battle for power,” claiming that “Chávez and his supporters have politically organised among the masses and helped to strengthen their self-activity” (Socialist Outlook, Winter 2003).

Even more crudely, the L5I titles a chapter of its adulatory Anti-Capitalism pamphlet, “Hugo Chávez: A New Leader for the Anticapitalist Movement?” While chiding Chávez for “unwillingness” to destroy elements of the Venezuelan state that “frustrate progress,” they positively contrast him to the Zapatistas: “Chávez at least shows that genuine reforms cannot come by pleading, which has brought the precious few results for the Mexican peasants, but rather come from seeking to take hold of power.” What a false “choice” for workers and radical youth: either the utterly ineffectual road of “changing the world” without taking power, or promoting the need to “take hold of power” by pointing to bourgeois politicians managing the capitalist state! This is the epitome of social-democratic reformism—the notion that the bourgeois state need not be smashed on the anvil of proletarian revolution but can be reformed into serving as an instrument of social transformation. In sharp contrast to the fake-Marxists who echo Hardt, Negri et al. in pushing global class collaboration, the International Communist League fights to forge a revolutionary international party rooted in class opposition to the bourgeois rulers of every country.

Forward to a Communist Future!

Hardt and Negri throw around the word “freedom” almost as much as does George Bush. Freedom is not some transcendental absolute toward which humans naturally gravitate; it has always been freedom from some particular constraint, or to carry out some particular act. Man’s actions are constrained by material necessity and the laws of nature. Through scientific investigation, technological innovation and social transformation, humans attain progressively greater knowledge of and control over the conditions of their existence. But what is “freedom” in the abstract? As Marx and Engels wrote: “By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying. But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying disappears also” (Manifesto of the Communist Party).

In popular parlance, freedom is used as a synonym for liberal democracy. Appropriately, a section of Multitude is entitled “Back to the Eighteenth Century!” In particular, Hardt and Negri pay homage to the political wisdom of James Madison, the principal author of the American Constitution:

“The destruction of sovereignty must be organized to go hand in hand with the constitution of new democratic institutional structures based on existing conditions. The writings of James Madison in the Federalist Papers provide a method for such a constitutional project, organized through the pessimism of the will—creating a system of checks and balances, rights and guarantees.”

—Multitude

Like his political mentor Thomas Jefferson, James Madison was the owner of a Virginia plantation worked by black chattel slaves (a biographical fact Hardt and Negri evidently consider too insignificant to mention). Jefferson and Madison insisted on a property qualification even for suffrage for the free white male citizens of the new American republic (another fact ignored by Hardt and Negri). Even the most radical and egalitarian manifestations of 18th-century bourgeois thought (Rousseau) envisioned a society based on economically independent small proprietors—farmers, artisans, shopkeepers.

Classic liberalism was the ideological expression of the rising bourgeoisie in its struggle against the fetters of the late feudal order. Trotsky summarized this doctrinal outlook, which claimed the authority of “natural law”: “The individual is absolute; all persons have the right of expressing their thoughts in speech and print; every man must enjoy equal electoral rights. As a battle cry against feudalism, the demand for democracy had a progressive character” (Terrorism and Communism). However, with the subsequent development of industrial capitalism and therefore of the proletariat, liberal individualism and its political cognate, “pure” democracy, became a potent ideological weapon to suppress the class antagonisms of bourgeois society. The doctrine that all men are equal before the law and have an equal right in determining the fate of the nation masked the actual dictatorship of capital over the exploited and propertyless class that now produced society’s wealth.

Hardt and Negri’s call for a return to 18th-century political thought, i.e., to liberal individualism and “pure” democracy, leads in practice to a capitulation to the savagery of imperialist capitalism, which is the natural offspring of the bourgeois republic of the 18th century. This is but a logical consequence of their rejection of the revolutionary capacity of the only progressive class in the present-day world: the international proletariat.

Only the proletariat has both the social power and social need to reorganize society, eliminating economic scarcity and the deformations of human character conditioned by material want and the resulting competitive struggle. Freedom for the oppressed of the world is not a subjective declaration but requires breaking the material chains of poverty, exploitation and oppression. It is not merely in workers and other toilers taking increasing control of their particular aspects of the productive process that a revolution will occur. Rather, the proletariat must come to recognize that the destructive anarchy of the capitalist mode of production, will, if not overthrown, plunge all humanity into barbarism or nuclear annihilation. It must realize that social control of production means dismantling the capitalist state apparatus of cops, courts, armies and prisons, and founding a workers state in their place. In short, it requires a proletarian revolution.

This alone can lay the basis for a planned, socialized economy on a global scale, the essential precondition for human emancipation from privation and inequality. As Engels wrote in his powerful reassertion of the essentials of Marxist materialism:

“The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now comes under the dominion and control of man, who for the first time becomes the real, conscious lord of nature, because he has now become master of his own social organisation. The laws of his own social action, hitherto standing face to face with man as laws of nature foreign to, and dominating him, will then be used with full understanding, and so mastered by him. Man’s own social organisation, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free action. The extraneous objective forces that have hitherto governed history pass under the control of man himself. Only from that time will man himself, with full consciousness, make his own history—only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is humanity’s leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.

“To accomplish this act of universal emancipation is the historical mission of the modern proletariat. To thoroughly comprehend the historical conditions and thus the very nature of this act, to impart to the now oppressed class a full knowledge of the conditions and of the meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish, this is the task of the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, scientific socialism.”

—Anti-Dühring

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Corrections

There were several factual errors in “The Senile Dementia of Post-Marxism” in Spartacist No. 59 (Spring 2006). The article stated on page 27: “With a labor force of 160 million employed in manufacturing, China’s working class has become a very important component of the industrial proletariat on an international scale.” While there is a wide range of published figures for the number of manufacturing workers in China, the first clause would have been more accurate as follows: “With an estimated workforce of 160 million or more centered in manufacturing and also in construction, energy and extractive industries and transport and telecommunications….” On page 28, we incorrectly cited a passage by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri that asserted a “new militancy” that “makes resistance into counterpower and makes rebellion into a project of love” as coming from their book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. In fact, the passage appeared in their earlier book Empire. On page 29, we spoke of Hardt and Negri “proposing a ‘global parliament’” in Multitude. It would have been more accurate to say that they enthuse over such proposals, as Hardt and Negri qualify their support by asserting that such a scheme “would be unmanageable in practice.” (From Spartacist [English edition] No. 61, Spring 2009.)

William Singletary, 65, Courageous Witness of Mumia's Innocence -Free Mumia Now!

2012-02-02T12:52:00.000-05:00

William Singletary, 65, Courageous Witness of Mumia's Innocence
by Steven Argue
(
No verified email address) 12 Jan 2012
Modified: 03:22:51 PM

"I learned from William Singletary's wife, Jeannette, that he died this morning. Bill was a courageous man who lived fighting to make the truth known that Mumia is innocent in the shooting death of police officer Daniel Faulkner. For that Bill suffered severe personal and financial consequences. I've known Bill since June 1990 when he came forward with his eyewitness testimony for Mumia and as a witness at the PCRA hearing in 1995, when I was co-counsel for Mumia." -Rachel Wolkenstein
Click on image for a larger version

William Singletary, 65, Courageous Witness of Mumia's Innocence

Mumia is Innocent, Free Him Now!

By Steven Argue

William Singletary died on December 31, 2011 at 65 years of age. His wife, Jeannette, passed on this this final message to Mumia Abu-Jamal and all his supporters:

"I didn't know Mumia personally, but love him like a brother. I know what he's gone through and he is innocent. I would give up everything for Mumia to be free."

Mumia Abu-Jamal was framed and sentenced to death in 1981 for the murder of Officer Faulkner in Philadelphia. In 2011 the prosecution announced they would not seek to reinstate Mumia’s overturned death penalty, but Mumia continues to sit in prison for a murder he did not do. William Singletary, at great personal cost, helped reveal the truth of Mumia’s innocence.

William Singletary gave an eyewitness account of Mumia Abu-Jamal not being the shooter. He also gave an eyewitness account, one of many, of police threats and intimidation to obtain false testimony against Mumia Abu-Jamal. While William Singletary did sign a statement saying that Mumia did it on the night of the murder, he immediately stated after that he signed that statement under the duress of police threats. Of that statement he says, “That's what they made me say, I stayed in there [in a police interrogation room] from 4:30 to 9:30 a.m. and when I left, I felt like I had been raped.”

That night, while trying to intimidate William Singletary for refusing to lie about what he had seen, the police told William Singletary that they would beat him up in the elevator and destroy his business if he didn’t sign. He came out immediately after saying that what they forced him to sign was a lie. Cops with guns drawn then showed-up at his business, trashing his work place and hassling the drivers working for him. This police intimidation and harassment caused William Singletary to close his business. He then fled Philadelphia fearing for his life and the safety of his family.

William Singletary said he saw another man shoot Officer Faulkner, and it was not Mumia Abu-Jamal. He was in fact the only credible eyewitness to actually see who shot Officer Faulkner. He said that a man in a green army jacket got out of the VW stopped by police, shot Faulkner, and ran. This account was corroborated by other eyewitnesses as well as by physical evidence. Mumia Abu-Jamal was not wearing an army jacket that night and not riding in the VW. Nor did Mumia run away, he was shot and ran nowhere. The jacket Mumia was wearing is in evidence and it is a red quilted ski jacket with a couple blue stripes. Nor was William Cook, the driver of the VW, wearing a green army jacket.

The prosecution’s star witness, Cynthia White, gave two extremely different versions of events at two different trials. One version was given at William Cook’s trial, and a differing version at Mumia’s trial. At Cook’s trial she said there was a passenger in Cook’s VW. At Mumia’s trial she claimed there was no passenger.

In the case of Mumia, eyewitnesses have said that the passenger in Cook’s VW was one of the actual killers. Yet Mumia was not riding in the VW and the prosecution claims that Mumia was the lone killer. So in Mumia’s trial, it was useful for the prosecution to disappear the passenger from the testimony, despite White’s other testimony that there was a passenger. These two differing versions, obviously including perjured testimony, were cynically used by prosecutors to fit differing prosecutions.

There is also physical evidence of a passenger in the VW, evidence that was illegally suppressed by the prosecution for 13 years. That evidence was an ID found on the body of Officer Faulkner. It was in the name of Arnold Howard. At the time of the shooting, as a result of this evidence, Arnold Howard was arrested by the police and tested to see if he had fired a gun the night of the shooting (something interestingly enough never done to Mumia Abu-Jamal). Arnold Howard told the police that he had loaned his ID to Kenneth Freeman. (Transcript for August 11, 1995, pp. 130-131.)

Along with physical evidence, the VW driver, William Cook, also placed Kenneth Freeman as the passenger in the VW. In Cook’s signed declaration of what happened he also says Freeman was carrying a .38 that night. Cook went on to say, in that declaration, that after the shooting,

“Poppi [Kenneth Freeman] talked about a plan to kill Faulkner. He told me that he was armed on that night and participated in the shooting. He was connected and knew all kinds of people. I used to ask him about it but he talked but never said much. He wasn't a talker. I didn't see Poppi [Kenneth Freeman] for a while after that. Poppi [Kenneth Freeman] had been in Germany in the army. That night he was wearing his green army jacket.”

On May 14, 1985, according to the testimony of Arnold Howard, Kenneth Freeman’s naked corpse was found outside in the cold handcuffed. No investigation was carried out on Freeman’s death and the coroner reported the cause of death to be a heart attack. This has the appearance of an extra-judicial police murder of an actual killer of Officer Faulkner, but has not been investigated.

The prosecution’s version of events denies anyone on the scene wearing a green army jacket. Besides Singletary and Cook, five other eyewitnesses also put a man in a green army jacket on the scene. These were stake out Officer Forbes (the putative first officer to arrive), Officer Stephen Trembetta, Robert Magiltan, Michael Scanlan, and Arnold Beverly, who has confessed to being one of two people who killed Faulkner. Beverly states in his confession that he was also wearing a green army jacket that night as well.

In addition, the prosecution’s version of events denies anyone running from the scene. Six eyewitnesses contradict this by saying they saw men running from the scene. These would have been the real shooter or shooters. Those eyewitnesses are Dessie Hightower, William Singletary, Veronica Jones, Robert Chobert, Arnold Beverly, and William Cook.

Before the trial, Veronica Jones changed her story before she testified. In her original version of events, contained in a report she gave to police, Veronica Jones said she saw two men running from the scene. Yet at the trial the two men running were missing from her testimony. This came as a complete surprise to the defense because Mumia’s supposed attorney, Anthony Jackson, did not even bother to interview witnesses before the trial. Earlier in the trial Mumia was denied his legal rights when his attempt to fire Anthony Jackson was denied by Judge Sabo.

Jones retracted her 1982 court testimony in 1996, saying that her original police report was the truth, and that she was coerced by the police into saying she didn’t see anybody running from the scene. She gave this testimony despite being forcefully reminded by Judge Sabo that her testimony could be seen as an admission of perjury and could land her seven years in prison. She was in fact arrested from the witness stand, but for a bounced check from a different state, being served with an insufficient warrant by out of state New Jersey State Troopers.

Despite the police harassment, and a review of her entire criminal history on the witness stand, including her life as a prostitute, Jones brought her children to court to learn from her mistakes. She explained that she was relieved to be setting things straight because what she did to Mumia with her false testimony had been eating her up inside over all those years.

On the stand, admitting to perjury, Jones explained that she was awaiting trial for an unrelated robbery charge in 1982 when police detectives approached her in her cell offering to give her a deal by changing her story as a witness in Mumia’s case. She had originally stated that she heard two shots, looked around the corner, and saw two men running from the scene. The two men running fit the version of William Singletary where he saw someone else shoot Mumia and run, but it didn’t fit the police/prosecution story being woven against Mumia.

She explained that the deal offered by the police was that she could go to prison for five to ten years and lose custody of her two young children or she could get out of the predicament by lying for the police saying that nobody was running from the scene.

Despite the importance of the testimony of Veronica Jones in Mumia’s case, both in corroborating eyewitnesses who say the actual killer or killers ran from the scene, and as another witness testifying to a clear pattern of police intimidation to acquire falsified testimony, Judge Sabo ruled in 1996 against her testimony being heard by a new jury trial.

Likewise, in the original trial, Sabo ruled in favor of prosecution objections when Veronica Jones was already admitting to being the target of the police in their attempts at gaining false testimony:

"I had got locked up [together with other prostitutes] I think it was in January [1982]. […] I think sometime after that incident. They were getting on me telling me I was in the area and I seen Mumia, you know, do it, intentionally. They were trying to get me to say something that the other girl [Cynthia White] said. I couldn’t do that."

As Jackson continued this questioning, Veronica Jones said, “we had brought up Cynthia [White]’s name and they told us we can work the area [as prostitutes] if we tell them [what the police wanted to hear].” At this point Judge Sabo ruled in favor of prosecutor McGill’s objections and would only allow further questions of Veronica Jones on what she saw the night of the shooting. As from the beginning of the trial, ruling after ruling has declared police misconduct is not open to scrutiny and a court of law is no place for evidence of Mumia’s innocence.

So it is established, with her contradictory stories, that Cynthia White was not telling the truth. This would be bad enough. But, in fact, none of the nine eyewitnesses who testified at the trial and subsequent hearings can remember seeing Cynthia White at the immediate scene at all. None, this includes the other prosecution witnesses.

William Singletary states that he saw her earlier down the street. When he saw her she said, “Hey, how you doing? It's cold out here.” Then noticing his car she said “a brand-new Cadillac Eldorado, 1982 model, wow, that's a great car! You ain't that bad-looking either. But I don't date black guys.” To which Singletary says he responded, “And I don't date prostitutes.” Singletary says that she then walked down the street and didn’t actually see the shooting. ("Witness: Abu-Jamal didn't do it" Philadelphia Daily News Dec. 8, 2006)

In fact, Cynthia White confessed to both Pamela Jenkins and Yvette Williams that she did not see the shooting and that the police put the screws to her to lie. In addition, a mountain of testimony shows a clear pattern by the police to try to get similar perjured testimony from other people.

In a hearing after the trial, Pamela Jenkins testified, “I know that Cynthia White worked as a prostitute in the Center City area, specifically at Locust and 13th Street, during 1980 and 1981, and that she was a prostitute, police informant, and turned tricks for the police officers in the district.”

If in fact Cynthia White was a police informant, and this information was withheld from the defense by the prosecution, that alone would be legal grounds for a new trial, but it gets much worse.

Jenkins testified at hearings in 1997 that Police Officer Thomas Ryan tried to make her testify that she saw Mumia shoot Officer Faulkner at the original trial, even though she was not at the scene of the shooting. Jenkins, 15 and a prostitute, was the girlfriend of Officer Ryan at that time. She also testified that she worked both as a prostitute for the police and as a police informant for the corrupt Center City Police.

Jenkins also testified that Cynthia White told her in late 1981 that she was also being pressured to testify against Mumia, and that White was afraid for her life. In a signed affidavit Jenkins states,

“Tom Ryan, Richard Ryan and other police officers pressured me and asked me if I had seen the shooting of the police officer and whether I had been in the area of the shooting that night. When I said 'no' they pressured (me) some more and asked me was I really sure that I hadn't been on the street that night and seen the shooting. It was clear to me that Tom Ryan and Richard Ryan wanted me to perjure myself and say that I had seen Jamal shoot the police officer."

Despite showing a clear intention by the police to frame Mumia, no jury has been allowed to hear Jenkins’ testimony in Mumia’s case. Not only is Pamela Jenkin's testimony essential evidence of a deliberate police conspiracy to frame Mumia by manufacturing perjured evidence, it also helps to destroy the testimony of the prosecution’s star witness, Cynthia White.

Jenkins' credibility has, however, been bolstered by the fact that she was a key witness used to unravel the massive police corruption in Center City District. Her testimony was instrumental in reversing the decisions of hundreds of cases of people thrown in prison through corrupt tactics and helped lead to the removal of the entire team of cops that led the “investigation” of Mumia’s case due to their corruption and mob connections. Unfortunately, what has overturned many other convictions is not being applied to the case of political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Other eyewitnesses have said the same thing as Jenkins. In a signed affidavit Yvette Williams has stated,

“I was in jail with Cynthia White in December of 1981 after Police Officer Daniel Faulkner was shot and killed. Cynthia White told me the police were making her lie and say she saw Mr. Jamal shoot Officer Faulkner when she really did not see who did it.”

Later in the Affidavit Yvette Williams states,

“When Lucky [Cynthia White] told me she didn’t even see who shot Officer Faulkner, I asked her why she was “lying on that man” [Mumia Abu-Jamal]. She told me it was because for the police and vice threatened her life. Additionally, the police were giving her money for tricks. “The way she talked, we were talking “G’s” [$1,000.00]. She also said she was terrified of what the police would do to her if she didn’t say that Mumia shot Officer Faulkner. According to Lucky, the police told her they would consolidate all her cases and send her “up” (Muncy), a women’s prison, for a long time if she didn’t testify to what they told her to say. Lucky told me she had a lot of open cases and out-of-state warrants and was scared of going to Muncy. She was scared that her pimp “would get pissed off” at all the money he was losing when she was locked up, and off the street. She was afraid that when she got out he would beat her up or kill her.”

According to legal papers filed by the defense,

“in the days after the shooting, [White] was arrested at least twice for prostitution. Her picture was posted in the 6th District with instructions for arresting officers to 'Contact Homicide'. Each time police picked White up and took her statement, she revised her story [on Faulkner's shooting]. Without explanation, bench warrants against her were not prosecuted.”

Pamela Jenkins has publicly asked Cynthia White to tell the truth stating:

“We know we can bring this down to a nutshell if you just come forward. We've all lost a lot by coming forward, I've lost somebody I love dearly... Just do it this one time, one favor, that's not asking a lot. Then maybe you can clean up your past, like the rest of us are doing.”

The prosecution does seem to be afraid of Cynthia White coming forward to tell the truth, and have presented false testimony of evidence that she is dead. In a hearing in Judge Sabo’s court, a Philadelphia police detective testified that the FBI had "authenticated" that a corpse had the same fingerprints as White. Yet the DA withheld the fingerprints at that time. When they finally produced them for the now cremated corpse, they didn’t match the fingerprints of Cynthia White.

Cynthia White’s own mother stated that the same corpse was not Cynthia White. Other eyewitnesses, that the defense attempted to have testify, testimony denied by Judge Sabo, had seen Cynthia White alive and walking around during the time she was supposed to be dead. Yet instead of hearing defense witnesses that stated that Cynthia White was alive, the only testimony Sabo would allow was the false testimony of the Philadelphia detective claiming “authenticated” fingerprints. Sabo snapped, “As far as I’m concerned she’s dead. I’m making a ruling. We’re finished.” Evidence has never meant much in Judge Sabo’s court, if the prosecution says she’s dead, she’s dead.

Judge Sabo was in fact heard by court reporter, Terri Maurer-Carter, telling another person during the time of Mumia’s trial saying, “I’ll help you fry the nigger”.

Besides Cynthia White, the only other “eyewitness” who said he saw Mumia kill Officer Faulkner was Robert Chobert.

Robert Chobert, a convicted arsonist who was driving on a suspended license and was on felony probation at the time of the shooting, has also recanted his testimony according to a sworn statement by prize winning investigator Mark Newman.

At the time of Mumia’s trial, Chobert was on felony probation for the firebombing of a school. Revocation of that probation could have meant over 20 years in prison. Chobert was in fact violating that probation by unlawfully driving his taxi on a suspended license that night. Thus, Chobert would have been easily manipulated by the police and/or by the prosecution.

Under penalty of perjury, Mike Newman stated in a signed affidavit that, “Chobert told me that he did not see anyone standing over a prone Officer Faulkner, firing shots at the officer. Chobert said that what actually happened was that he was sitting in his taxi when he heard gunfire.” And that he did not actually see the shooting.

According to that signed affidavit of Mike Newman, Chobert didn't see Mumia shoot Faulkner, wasn't parked behind Faulkner as he said he was at the trial, and that Chobert gave the police the false testimony they wanted in order to avoid having his parole revoked.

Physical evidence, as well as eyewitness testimony, proves that Chobert's cab was not parked behind Faulkner's as Chobert claimed in court. This evidence includes 31 photos taken by photojournalist Pedro Polakoff just minutes after the shooting. These photos clearly show that Chobert's cab was not parked behind Faulkner’s police car as Chobert had claimed in court.

That new evidence corroborated the testimony of Mike Newman when he stated, "Chobert told me that on December 9, 1981, he had actually been parked, in his taxi, on 13th Street, north of Locust (contradicting his trial testimony that he was parked behind Officer Faulkner's police car on Locust St., east of 13th Street.)" This is also relevant to Chobert not having the vantage for seeing the shooting.

Newman’s testimony is also corroborated by Chobert’s legal troubles and a clear pattern by the police to offer similar deals to other witnesses including three eyewitnesses, Pamela Jenkins, William Singletary, and Veronica Jones, stating publicly, and Cynthia White also stating privately, that they were coerced, threatened, or otherwise offered deals by the cops to give false testimony.

In fact Robert Chobert revealed at a 1995 PCRA hearing that Prosecutor McGill, while recognizing that Chobert had been driving on a suspended license at the time of the killing, had indicated that rather than prosecuting for the violation, he had promised to "look into" how Chobert could get his license reinstated. This would allow Chobert to continue his job as a taxi driver and kept him out of trouble for a parole violation. On the stand Chobert admitted that he believed McGill was intending to assist him. Yet information of a deal was not only wrongfully withheld from the jury, McGill mislead the jury further by asking, "What motivation would Robert Chobert have to make up a story?" So the jury was never allowed to hear that a deal was made with Chobert and Prosecutor McGill felt free to lie.

The police officer who got the “identification” of Mumia from Robert Chobert was Alfonzo Giordano. In the original police report Robert Chobert is said by Giordano to say it was the guy from MOVE that did it. Giordano was removed from the force and prosecuted for corruption related to the mob, a corruption probe that turned over many other police/prosecution convictions. In addition, Giordano had been involved in political operations against Philadelphia MOVE and the Black Panther Party. As such, Giordano would have instantly recognized Mumia, a former Black Panther and an independent journalist who had exposed police wrong doing against MOVE.

In a revealing set of moves, Giordano was never called as a witness at Mumia’s trial. This despite Giordano providing testimony at Mumia’s preliminary hearing of a “confession” in the van, despite his being the senior officer at the scene, despite his supposed firsthand identification of a witness, and despite his testimony of finding the “murder weapon”. During the trial Giordano was removed from active duty and assigned to a desk. The first working day after the trial was over Giordano resigned from the Philadelphia police force. In 1986 Giordano copped a plea on federal charges based on receiving tens of thousands of dollars in illegal payoffs during the 1979-80 period but didn’t spend any time in jail.

In addition to Giordono’s corruption, under racist Police Chief Frank Rizzo, Giordono was in charge of the Stake Out Unit of the Philadelphia Police that carried out repression against the Black Panther Party from 1968 –1970. Giordono also played a supervisory role in the 1977-78 police barricade and attack on the MOVE organization under Mayor Frank Rizzo. That police attack had followed earlier murders by the Philadelphia police of MOVE members and followed a long starvation blockade by the Philadelphia Police against the MOVE headquarters. In the police attack two MOVE members were shot, nine MOVE members were framed by the Philadelphia Police, MOVE children were stolen, and, as film footage shows, Delbert Africa was kicked and stomped by the police as he lay on the ground. In addition, Officer Ramp was shot and killed.

While nine MOVE members were railroaded to prison for the death of Officer Ramp, the evidence does not fit. The one bullet that killed Ramp came from behind and had a downward trajectory. Yet Ramp was facing the MOVE headquarters where MOVE members were in the basement and any bullets would have had an upward trajectory and hit him from in front.

Presiding over the kangaroo court that convicted the MOVE 9 was Judge Malmed. Shortly after the trial and conviction of the MOVE 9, Mumia, as an independent journalist, called in to a talk radio show where he asked Judge Malmed, “Who shot James Ramp?” Judge Malmed honestly answered, “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

In the attack on MOVE the police and Mayor Rizzo claimed that the first shots came from the MOVE headquarters, but the independent eyewitnesses including a number of journalists present, confirm what MOVE members and the physical evidence says, that the first shot came from across the street and not from the MOVE headquarters.

At Mayor Frank Rizzo’s victory press conference on the 1978 police attack, Frank Rizzo directly threatened Mumia Abu-Jamal when Mumia asked him a question. Mumia was present as a freelance journalist and asked the gloating Rizzo, “What about the brutality?” Instead of answering Mumia’s question Rizzo responded angrily with a threat: “They believe what you write, and what you say, and it's got to stop. And one day, and I hope it's in my career, that you're going to have to be held responsible and accountable for what you do.”

In addition to commanding this attack against MOVE, Giordono, earlier, then under Police Chief Rizzo, carried out surveillance of leftists including the Black Panther Party.

With Mumia having been a former member of the Black Panther Party and a high profile critic of police actions against MOVE, there is no question that officer Giordono would have instantly recognized Mumia at the crime scene. This would be one of the motives for Giordono to want to falsify testimony and other evidence to pin the murder on Mumia.
Giordono rode with Officer Trombetta with Mumia in the van to the hospital after Mumia had been shot and beaten by the police. Inspector Alfonso Giordano, this senior officer on the scene in charge of the Mumia “investigation”, reported that on that van ride Mumia had confessed to shooting Faulkner. Yet, Officer Trembetta was with Mumia during that entire van ride and, in direct contradiction to Giordano’s claim of a confession, reported that Mumia made no comment. With the van confession discredited, the prosecution manufactured new accounts of a confession at the hospital which were used during the trial. Those accounts have been thoroughly discredited by a number of eyewitnesses, yet the courts have refused to put that evidence in front of a jury as well. Giordano was removed from the Philadelphia Police and prosecuted for corruption immediately after Mumia’s trial.

A number of other well-known political frame-ups have occurred in the United States. The prosecution of Mumia fits the pattern of the FBI’s COINTELPRO program against the Black Panther Party (BPP), where local law enforcement worked with the FBI in murdering some BPP leaders in cold blood, such as Fred Hampton in Chicago, and knowingly framed and prosecuted other innocent BPP members, such as Geronimo ji Jagga in LA who spent 30 years in prison before he was exonerated of the false charges against him and freed.

A possible additional possible double motive for framing Mumia can be found in the confession of Arnold Beverly. Beverly stated, “I was hired, along with another guy, and paid to shoot and kill Faulkner. I had heard that Faulkner was a problem for the mob and corrupt policemen because he interfered with the graft and payoffs made to allow illegal activity including prostitution, gambling, drugs without prosecution in the center city area.”

Beverly’s testimony is corroborated by, among other things, police corruption, three separate FBI investigations of police corruption in the Center City area at the time, evidence of fear that Faulkner was an FBI informant, evidence that Faulkner was an FBI informant, and the murder of other witnesses involved in cases against the Center City Police at that time. One of those murders was of Bertram Schlein, an eyewitness who testified against Central Division Chief John DeBenedetto. A suspect in that murder was Kenneth Schwartz, a former police officer and reported associate of Inspector Alfonzo Giordono.

A former Philadelphia Police Officer turned mob hit man, Ronald Previte, has testified as a government informant on mob killings. Previte stated that during his ten years as a Philadelphia cop he “learned more about being a crook” than any other time in his life.

If the police were in fact involved in the murder of Police Officer Faulkner, this would mean that they would not be interested in finding the actual killer. They would want to pin the murder on someone else, and who better in the eyes of Giordano than his journalistic critic, Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Whatever the exact motive or motives, the mountain of police, prosecutorial, and judicial misconduct in this case proves that the criminal “justice” system both had (and has) no interest in finding the real killer or killers while at the same time desiring to imprison and execute an innocent man.

Despite great personal cost, William Singletary stuck to his story and told the truth. He stands as an exemplary fighter in the struggle for justice.

The Revolutionary Tendency of the Socialist Party (RT-SP) demands: Freedom for all political prisoners including Mumia Abu-Jamal! And we call for an end to the corrupt, repressive, and brutal police occupations of communities of color throughout the United States through the abolition of all current police forces and the building of new ones controlled by the people through a new revolutionary proletarian democracy. Join the RT-SP.

For more information on the RT-SP see:
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2012/01/07/18704314.php

For more information on what you can work for Mumia’s freedom, see:
http://www.laboractionmumia.org/index.html

This is an article of Liberation News, subscribe free:
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Theory and Practice in Occupy by workers action-A Guest Commentary Via Boston IndyMedia

2012-02-02T12:47:00.000-05:00

Theory and Practice in Occupy by workers action

(No verified email address) 14 Jan 2012

For a movement that started with one strategy and a couple of slogans, Occupy has preformed brilliantly. Having based itself on the examples of Egypt and Wisconsin, the Occupy Movement has raised the political consciousness of millions and created a large layer of new activists. But the uninterrupted string of successes of Egypt and Tunisia haven’t materialized for Occupy. We're in a lull period. Next steps are being considered and some tactics are being re-thought.
This is where revolutionary theory comes into play: a set of ideas that help guide action. Sometimes theory is learned unconsciously, where it resembles a set of non-ideological "assumptions" about movement building and politics. Occupy's theory began mostly with assumptions, many of them true.

One assumption was that previous political theories have failed — that past social movements contained deep ideological flaws. There is more than some truth in these conclusions, but other truths were thrown out as well.

The youth who built Occupy were born as the Berlin Wall was falling; "communism" had failed. Mass disillusion followed the loss of a socialist movement that had inspired dozens of revolutions in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe when half the globe declared itself for "socialism.” Many socialist-leaning countries inflicted heavy damage on capitalism while a few had crushed it outright.

The United States spent the 20th century fighting these movements: the Korean and Vietnam wars, the failed invasion of Cuba, the dirty wars in Central America, countless CIA coups in South America, Africa, Asia and elsewhere (the history of the CIA is a history of fighting "socialism" by any means necessary). A U.S. domestic war was waged by the FBI and police against socialists and other left activists during McCarthy's Red Scare of the 1950s. Nuclear war against the USSR and China was a button push away during the Cuban Missile Crisis. All of this madness was in the name of fighting socialism and revolution.

The U.S. wars against these socialist movements was not irrational. A very real fear existed that capitalism was in danger — that corporations would instead be run in the public interest. In some countries capitalism was destroyed. But what replaced it seemed no better, and in some cases worse. Why? The popular (corporate) explanation is that any break from capitalism equals "authoritarianism.” Another popular argument is that without rich people running the economy it would cease to run; there is no alternative to capitalism, we were told.

This analysis is biased, shallow, and stupid. The truth makes far more sense anyway.

To this day no wealthy country has had a successful socialist revolution. Many have come close, especially several European countries before and after WWI and WWII. The 1968 general strike in France pinned capitalism to the floor, but its life was spared; corporations were allowed to continue to run social life, the super-rich remained so.

Real socialism cannot exist in a poor country. If Haiti implemented a "socialist" economy tomorrow it would still suffer under post-earthquake rubble, mass homelessness and life-sucking poverty. A "healthy democracy" cannot exist in these conditions. A socialist economy cannot transform mud into gold.

But capitalism took centuries to transform poor countries into rich ones, and even today a tiny minority of rich countries dominate a hundred plus poor capitalist nations. Poor capitalist countries — like their poor socialist counterparts — suffer from a chronic democracy deficit, forever destined to remain poor.

If Haiti were to leave capitalism, however, it would be allowed to escape the profit motive of development; items could be built with social need in mind, not simply profit. China and Russia were able to develop into powerful countries by escaping capitalism. Eventually, however, their undemocratic leaders decided to give capitalism a second chance; these leaders wanted to exchange their bureaucratic privileges —access to better food and nicer cars, etc. — for the billions of dollars that come with ownership rights (it's no coincidence that China and Russia are #2 and #3 on the "nations with the most billionaires" list).

Occupy is right not to embrace the fake socialism of the past, undemocratic as it was. But past socialist experiments contained progressive elements that shouldn't be forgotten.

For example, revolutionaries learned that they could not let a tiny group of super-rich shareholders own and run giant corporations that employed thousands of workers and made socially useful goods. Instead, these companies could be made into public utilities, run by the workers, engineers, and office staff that already do all the work for the benefit of society in general.

Revolutionaries also learned that organization and collective action was instrumental in overcoming the organized opposition of the rich. Capitalism can only be overthrown by a real revolution that draws into action the majority of working people, using the tactics of mass demonstrations, mass strikes, mass civil disobedience, and other mass actions that help to give shape, organization, and unity to working people. Once a powerful and united movement emerges, it must ultimately challenge the corporate elite nationally, which means wresting the levers of state power from their hands and using new organizational methods to make the post-revolutionary country more democratic.

How have these lessons been ignored by Occupy?

In reaction to the non-democratic USSR, Occupy eschews "centralization" in favor of "decentralization.” Instead of decentralization simply meaning "democracy,” in practice it often means "disorganization” and extreme individualism. Any powerful social movement must inevitably be organized; and although Occupy seems to realize this with its useful experiments in direct democracy, the movement as a whole remains incredibly disorganized and uncoordinated.

This is important insofar as disorganization prevents collective action. The Pre-Occupy Movement — what little there was — consisted of "issue-based activism,” i.e., different groups working disconnectedly towards various goals. Occupy has the power to change this, to create real power for working people. Initially, Occupy had united all the various left groups while bringing in new blood. But the old habits of issue-based, fragmented activism were hard to break.

Many Occupiers are content with "autonomous" actions, i.e., small groups acting independently of a larger body towards various ends. Small actions have their time and place, but a powerful movement is one that inspires. Working people are given hope when they sense that a movement is able to achieve victories for working people, i.e., when it is powerful. And working people are only truly powerful when they are united and acting collectively in massive numbers (the corporate elite uses divide and conquer tactics for a reason).

One reason that Occupy is fearful of centralization (organization) is because being organized inevitably creates leaders. And since much of Occupy is "anti-authoritarian" (again in response to the failed USSR), "leaders" are not welcome. But leaders exist within Occupy regardless of intentions; saying that Occupy is a "leaderless movement" does not make it so.

The inevitable leaders of Occupy are those who dedicate their time to the movement, organize events, are spokespeople, those who help set agendas for meetings or actions, those who set up and run web pages, etc. In reality there already exists a spectrum of leadership that is essential to keeping the movement functioning.

Occupy needs both leaders and organization while still operating entirely democratically. It already has leaders who refuse to accept the title as such, much like Noam Chomsky does, the famous anti-authoritarian and leader of the anarchist left, who thinks that by saying he is "not a leader,” he ceases to be one. In reality his massive authority continues to exist outside of his humble intentions.

Occupy seems, at times, so fearful of power or creating leaders that many Occupiers would focus on neutering the movement, so as to prevent Occupy from ever having real power, and therefore preventing the movement from ever making real change. The left has long suffered from the self-induced fear that, if we have actual power, we'll become like our oppressors, since "absolute power corrupts absolutely" (a hangover from yet another shallow analysis of past socialist experiments).

In Occupy, this expresses itself by a fanatical fear of the movement being co-opted. Yes, Occupy should be wary of Democratic Party representatives in sheep's clothing, but this fear has infected and has spread throughout Occupy and now includes internal finger pointing and accusations of "co-opting,” creating more unnecessary divisiveness.

It is a healthy impulse to strive towards greater democracy and away from charisma-based leadership, but any idea taken to its extreme can become nonsense. To denounce real organization and leadership "on principle" is to vastly oversimplify the real processes of movement building while erecting unnecessary barriers in Occupy's path to real power. To self-mutilate a movement because of leader-paranoia is similar to euthanize a puppy because of its potentially dangerous sharp teeth. In fact, true leaders can only emerge in the context of real democracy; both need the other.

There is no blueprint for movement building, but general principles can be erected based on the revolutionary experiences of the past. The key strategies of Occupy should be based on those ideas that unify and promote collective action against the 1%.

Ultimately Occupy needs to organize for power; we need a greater power to displace the current power of the 1%. This doesn't mean that we must adopt the same forms of power utilized by the state, but that new ones must be created, while using EVERY opportunity within the existing structure to organize, educate, and mobilize working people.

Luckily, an upcoming action has the potential to put the above ideas into action. The current struggle of the Longview, Washington ILWU Local 21 is a chance to see real power in action. The Longview Longshoremen have asked for Occupy's support to create massive mobilizations against the union busting corporate-conglomerate EGT. Hopefully this action has the potential to unite Occupy in practice over a concrete struggle. If the action-- or actions-- are effective it will prove that Occupy needs to organize and mobilize in large numbers over issues that connect with working people — proving that theory is best learned in action.
See also:
http://www.workerscompass.org

From The Pages Of TheSocialist Alternative Press-Defend Public Education - Build for March 1st Actions!

2012-02-02T12:40:00.000-05:00

Click on the headline to link to the Socialist Alternative (CWI) website.

Defend Public Education - Build for March 1st Actions!

Jan 27, 2012
By Pete Ikeler, Grad Student and Adjunct Instructor at the City University of New York

Higher education is still under attack, now more than ever. Across the U.S., tuition and student debt are rising dramatically while the quality of education, graduate job prospects, and working conditions for academic laborers are rapidly declining.

Between 1980 and 2010, average annual tuition at all four-year institutions (public and private) rose from $8,672 to $20,986 — 142 percent! — in inflation-adjusted dollars. For public institutions alone, the hike was hardly less at 135 percent: from $6,320 in 1980 to $14,870 in 2010 (U.S. Department of Education). College grads in 2010 owed an average of $25,250 to the banks and government loan institutions for the ”privilege” of their education — five percent more than just one year before (NY Times, 11/2/2011).

At the same time, jobs are drying up! As of 2009, 22.4 percent of college grads were not working at all, while another 22 percent worked in jobs such as food service and retail that don’t require a degree and pay next to nothing. Even those lucky enough to work in a job for which they trained earned a meager median income of $26,756 before taxes (NY Times, 5/11/2011). Have fun paying off $25,250 in debt on that!

Youth have begun to rebel against these conditions on a grand scale through the Occupy movement. Now there is a call for March 1 to see a national day of action of mass protests throughout the country against tuition hikes, education cuts, and a future of joblessness, alienation, and corporate domination. Mobilize in your school and community to make March 1 the biggest protest possible!

If we don’t take action, then the situation will only get worse. As state governments become ever stingier, ostensibly public institutions are forced more and more to seek private funding — all strings attached. The City University of New York (CUNY) system, once completely free and practicing open admissions, is a case in point. In 2000, its “23 colleges and professional schools…were raising $50 million a year collectively.” By 2010, “that figure is $200 million, and officials have set a goal of $3 billion by 2015.” (NY Times, 1/15/2011) Recently, the State University of New York at Stony Brook also received a record $150 million donation from rich financier James H. Simons, most of which was earmarked by him for medical and business programs (Chronicle of Philanthropy, 12/14/2011).

The 1% Is Transforming Education

These same universities continue to demand ever-higher tuition from working-class students while exploiting an ever-expanding pool of underpaid, “contingent” academic laborers, otherwise known as adjuncts. In the CUNY system, they teach 60 percent of the courses but receive only a third of the pay (on a per-course basis) of tenure-track professors; they can also be dismissed at any time without due process.

Why is all this happening? Why are universities being transformed like this at the expense of students, teachers, and other academic laborers?

Historically, colleges and universities have served as pathways of social mobility for working people. They allowed a certain number of working-class youth the opportunity to obtain credentials needed for a shot at the salaried middle class, especially in the decades following World War II. But more than that, the expansion of affordable higher education during this brief window in the mid-20th Century gave first-generation college students the freedom and the space to grow intellectually, to contemplate the power structures of capitalist society, and indeed, through the student movements of the 1960s and ‘70s, to challenge those structures. In turn, this window of access to higher education — as with the expansion of public education in general — was itself a direct result of militant workers’ struggles in the first half of the 20th Century. Taken in historical perspective, we can say that the availability of high-quality public education under capitalism is indeed a function and a measure of the power of the working class.

Building Resistance

Since the 1970s, however, ruling classes across the world have launched a wholesale attack on all previous achievements of the labor movement, higher education included. They are trying to return college to the elitist system that existed in the early 20th Century. Why? Because they know their declining capitalist system can’t provide enough meaningful jobs for so many graduates. If they can’t turn us into bankers or technicians, then they’ll relegate us to low-wage service jobs, and they don’t want millions of educated impoverished people conscious of their history and confident they can fight back.

This doesn’t have to happen. As the massive resistance of California, Chile, and U.K. students last year shows, the fight-back has already begun. With the wind in our sails and hundreds of new activists from the Occupy movement, we’ll need to get serious about discussing a strategy that can build an ongoing movement to win victories. Letters to Congress, jumping through the hoops of administrators, polite petitioning, and playing nice with politicians won’t be enough to defeat this offensive by the 1%. We need determined action to win!

Tactics like occupations and strikes are far more effective than institutionalized begging, but they have to be well-planned, well-organized, and have clear goals to win. Otherwise, the participating activists risk being isolated and victimized by administrators. For working and immigrant students especially, the question of occupations cannot be taken lightly, since the risks for them are potentially even greater. “Occupy everything! Demand nothing!” will lead to defeats, not victories.

In order for occupations to be successful, they need the widest possible support among the student body, the teaching faculty, and non-faculty staff, as well as from the surrounding community. They also need democratic decision-making structures for rapid response to the sudden challenges that will inevitably face such a movement. These elements, combined with a national and international linking of student struggles, provide a mass-action strategy of occupations, demonstrations, and other forms of direct struggle that are planned democratically within the student movement and link up with exploited part-time faculty, university clerical staff, and the broader movements for workers’ rights and social equality.

Concretely, this means organizing around clear demands with wide appeal — to start, a reversal of all tuition increases, cancelation of student debt, and continuation of programs such as black, women’s, and queer studies that are constantly threatened with elimination. But beyond this, transformative demands for free universities run by democratic councils of students, teachers, and staff should also be raised. We need to aim for more than maintaining the status quo or recreating the systems of decades past. We want a higher education system that is open, engaging, and accessible to all, that serves our needs as human beings to grow intellectually and socially, not just to give us “credentials” for a particular slot in the declining capitalist labor market!

A next step in this struggle is the March 1 National Day of Action to Defend Education. Across the country, students, activists, and their allies should use this day as a rallying point to build local actions and galvanize the student movement in the spring. Planning for such actions — be they teach-ins, speak-outs, demonstrations, or occupations — will provide forums for discussing the questions of goals, strategy, and organization raised here and for building links with non-student allies, both within and outside of the university. For a united movement of students and workers to challenge the onslaught of the 1%!

Socialist Alternative, P.O. Box 45343, Seattle WA 98145
Phone: (206)526-7185
Comments? Suggestions for improving our web page? Please email info@SocialistAlternative.org

The Latest From The United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) Website- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops, Mercenaries, Contractors, Etc, From Afghanistan! Hands Off Iran! All Out In Boston On February 4th

2012-02-02T12:37:00.000-05:00

Click on the headline to link to the United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) Website for more information about various anti-war, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist actions around the country.

Hands Off Iran! March and Rally
Park Street Station, Boston Common
February 4th, 1:00 PM

Markin comment:

Every once in a while it is necessary, if for not other reason than to proclaim from the public square that we are alive, and fighting, to show “the colors,” our anti-war colors. While, as I have mentioned many times in this space, endless marches are not going to end any war the street opposition to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as protests against other imperialist adventures has been under the radar of late. It is time for anti-warriors to get back where we belong in the struggle against Obama’s wars. The UNAC appears to be the umbrella clearing house these days for many anti-war, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist actions. Not all the demands of this coalition are ones that I would raise but the key one is enough to take to the streets. Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops, Mercenaries, Contractors, Etc, From Afghanistan! Hands Off Iran!

BostonUNAC.org | 781-285-8622 | BostonUNAC(S)gmail.com

On The 40th Anniversary Of The Death Of Black Panther George Jackson-From San Quentin To Attica To Pelican Bay- Never Forget!

2012-02-02T05:57:00.001-05:00

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the black liberation fighter and Black Panther Party leader, George Jackson.

Reposted from the American Left History blog, dated August 23, 2011, for February Is Black History Month.

Bob Dylan- George Jackson Lyrics

I woke up this morning
There were tears in my bed
They killed a man I really loved
Shot him through the head

Lord, Lord, they cut George Jackson down
Lord, Lord, they laid him in the ground

Sent him off to prison
For a seventy dollar robbery
Closed the door behind him
And they threw away the key

Lord, Lord, they cut George Jackson down
Lord, Lord, they laid him in the ground
[ Lyrics from: http://www.lyricsfreak.com/b/bob+dylan/george+jackson_20207841.html ]
He wouldn't take shit from no one
He wouldn't bow down or kneel
Authorities, they hated him
Because he was just too real

Lord, Lord, they cut George Jackson down
Lord, Lord, they laid him in the ground

Prison guards, they cursed him
As they watched him from above
But they were frightened of his power
They were scared of his love

Lord, Lord, so they cut George Jackson down
Lord, Lord, they laid him in the ground

Sometimes I think this whole world
Is one big prison yard
Some of us are prisoners
The rest of us are guards

Lord, Lord, they cut George Jackson down
Lord, Lord, they laid him in the ground

From #Ur-Occupied Boston (#Ur-Tomemonos Boston)-General Assembly-The Embryo Of An Alternate Government-Learn The Lessons Of History- From The Pages Of The French Revolution- Ernest Belfort Bax-The Last Episode of the French Revolution-I. Origin and Youth of Babeuf

2012-02-02T01:19:00.001-05:00

Click on the headline to link to updates from the Occupy Boston website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011. I will post important updates as they appear on that site.
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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend All The Occupation Sites And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Protesters Everywhere!

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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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Below I am posting, occasionally, comments on the Occupy movement as I see or hear things of interest, or that cause alarm bells to ring in my head. The first comment directly below from October 1, which represented my first impressions of Occupy Boston, is the lead for all further postings.
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Markin comment October 1, 2011:

There is a lot of naiveté expressed about the nature of capitalism, capitalists, and the way to win in the class struggle by various participants in this occupation. Many also have attempted to make a virtue out of that naiveté, particularly around the issues of effective democratic organization (the General Assembly, its unrepresentative nature and its undemocratic consensus process) and relationships with the police (they are not our friends, no way, when the deal goes down). However, their spirit is refreshing, they are acting out of good subjective anti-capitalist motives and, most importantly, even those of us who call ourselves "reds" (communists), including this writer, started out from liberal premises as naive, if not more so, than those encountered at the occupation site. We can all learn something but in the meantime we must defend the "occupation" and the occupiers. More later as the occupation continues.
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As part of my comment here, dated October 20, 2011, I noted the following:

“… The idea of the General Assembly with each individual attendee acting as a “tribune of the people” is interesting and important. And, of course, it represents, for today anyway, the embryo of what the “new world” we need to create might look like at the governmental level.”

A couple of the people that I have talked to were not quite sure what to make of that idea. The idea that what is going on in Occupy Boston at the governmental level could, should, would be a possible form of governing this society in the “new world a-borning” with the rise of the Occupy movement. Part of the problem is that there was some confusion on the part of the listeners that one of the possible aims of this movement is to create an alternative government, or at least provide a model for such a government. I will argue here now, and in the future, that it should be one the goals. In short, we need to take power away from the Democrats and Republicans and their tired old congressional/executive/judicial doesn’t work checks and balances form of governing and place it at the grassroots level and work upward from there rather than, as now, have power devolve from the top. (And stop well short of the bottom.)

I will leave aside the question (the problem really) of what it would take to create such a possibility. Of course a revolutionary solution would, of necessity, have be on the table since there is no way that the current powerful interests, Democratic, Republican or those having no named politics, is going to give up power without a fight. What I want to pose now is the use of the General Assembly as a deliberative executive, legislative, and judicial body all rolled into one. In that sense previous historical models come to mind; the short-lived but heroic Paris Commune of 1871 that Karl Marx tirelessly defended against the reactionaries of Europe as the prototype of a workers government; the early heroic days of the Russian October Revolution of 1917 when the workers councils (soviets in Russian parlance) acted as a true workers' government; and the period in the Spanish Revolution of 1936-39 where the Central Committee of the Anti-Fascist Militias acted, de facto, as a workers government. All the just mentioned examples had their problems and flaws, no question. However, merely mentioning the General Assembly concept in the same paragraph as these great historic examples should signal that thoughtful leftists and other militants need to investigate and study these examples.

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Recently (see October 22, 2011 comment above) I noted the following while arguing for the General Assembly concept as a form of alternate government using historic examples like the Paris Commune (1871), the early soviets in Russia (1905 and 1917), and the early days of the antifascist militias in the Spanish Civil War (1936-37):

“However, merely mentioning the General Assembly concept in the same paragraph as these great historic examples should signal that thoughtful leftists and other militants need to investigate and study these examples.”

In order to facilitate the investigation and study of those examples I will, occasionally, post works in this space that deal with these forbears from several leftist perspectives (rightist perspectives were clear- crush all the above examples ruthlessly, and with no mercy- so we need not look at them now). I started this Lesson Of History series with Karl Marx’s classic defense and critique of the Paris Commune, The Civil War In France and today’s presentation noted in the headline continues on in that same vein.
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Markin comment January 15, 2012

In several recent comments in this space (in late December) my old radical friend and alternative newspaper commentator, Josh Breslin, noted that the Occupy movement seemed to have lost energy and was , as he vividly described it, a movement of generals without an army. I, initially, argued with him about that characterization saying that this was just a period of growing pains and things would sort themselves out over the next several months. Then a series of disturbing events occurred topped off by what I will here call the “sex registry question” to make me thing that old Josh, once again, was right. Only I would characterize things, unlike Josh, as a succumbing to the circle spirit and as yet another example of the revolution devouring its own. In either case not a healthy situation.

With that said, I have long noted that although I believed that the General Assembly concept was potentially the embryo of an alternate form of government that would drive our vision for a new society there were some structural problems with the concept as practiced. Among those criticisms were the simple notions that majority rule and representative government based on political positions were concepts better suited to the struggle. Well, apparently others have, in the crucible of struggle, learned some of those lessons. Lessons that, perhaps, needed to be painfully worked through in practice before their shortcomings could be exposed. In any case this latest news from OB (consenting to a once a week strategic assembly) about a willingness to think about other governing forms is welcome news. Whether we remain generals without an army can now be hashed out but one thing seems certain this will go a long way toward breaking out of the circle spirit.
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A Five-Point Program As Talking Points

*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around. Organize the unorganized- Organize the South- Organize Wal-Mart- Defend the right for public and private workers to unionize.

* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized and other labor-specific causes (example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio).

*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!

*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!

*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed.

Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!

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I. Origin and Youth of Babeuf

FRANÇOIS NOEL BABEUF, it has now been decided by the researches of M. Victor Advielle, was born at St Quentin, on Sunday the 23rd November 1760. Babeuf, in some of the notes intimes which the industry of the same investigator has unearthed, states, that he was born of so delicate a constitution that he was not expected to live. This he attributes to the poor circumstances of his parents, and the privations of his mother during her pregnancy. Babeuf’s father appears to have been many years older than his mother. The former is described in the certificate of birth as “employé des fermes du roy au Faubourg St Martin de la ville de St Quentin”, of which town his mother was also a native. There is little doubt, however, that they originally came from the small town of Bobeuf, or Baboeuf, in Picardy, in the present department of the Oise. This commune is stated to have been founded by a descendant of the family of Calvin, to have been peopled by a colony of Protestant refugees from various quarters, and to have maintained relations with other similar Calvinist colonies, all composed of peasant cultivators.

It is related of Babeuf’s father that, on account of his abilities, he was in his younger days deputed by the members of the colony to undertake some negotiations in various foreign countries with a view to the union of the Lutheran and Calvinist sects, but his mission proving a failure, he took service in the troops of Maria Theresa, where he attained the rank of major under the name of l’Epine Babeuf, and that he was subsequently appointed tutor to the children of Maria Theresa. It is further related that in after years the Emperor Joseph II, as he happened to be passing through Picardy, became acquainted with the son of his former major, the hero of this book, to whom he made the most brilliant offers of employment at the Court of Vienna. François Noel’s severe democratic principles, even at that date, induced him resolutely to decline them. These details are taken from some manuscript notes respecting his youth, written by Babeuf at the close of his life. Considering the enthusiasm of the philosophic Emperor Joseph II for the very same revolutionary ideas to which Babeuf himself was devoted, and his expressed intention, as related in these same memorial notes, of using his power to carry these ideas into effect, the rigid refusal of Babeuf to accept employment under him seems strange, and, taking all the circumstances into consideration, not a little improbable, more especially when we consider the immaturity of Babeuf’s revolutionary principles at that time. One is inclined to suspect some exaggeration or distortion of the facts, probably unintentional, in Babeuf’s account of his relations with Joseph II.

Babeuf speaks of his father, Claude Babeuf, as of a man “as proud as a Castilian, always counting himself rich and happy even in the midst of profound misery”. He never, he says, “went to a wine shop, but delighted on rare occasions to don his soldier’s uniform, which he carefully preserved, together with his formidable sabre, which he handled with the greatest ease and dexterity.” He taught his son the elements of Latin, mathematics, and of the German language.

When about fifteen years of age, François Noel entered the service, as junior clerk, of a land commissioner, who taught him land surveying. Two years later it is stated that he became attached to a landowner, near the small town of Roye in Picardy. The elder Babeuf appears to have died some time in 1781, and henceforth his mother and sisters became the charge of François Noel. He kept them for over sixteen years. Old Claude

Babeuf, we are told, on his deathbed, handed to his son, as a last gift, a well-worn copy of Plutarch’s Lives, telling him that the book had been his solace throughout the joys and sorrows of his life. He continued to press upon his son to study the lives of the great men of antiquity. “As for me,” he went on to say, “I could have wished to have resembled Caius Gracchus, even though I were doomed to perish like him and his for the greatest of all causes, the cause of the common welfare; but circumstances have not been favourable to the accomplishment of my designs.” Expressing his conviction that his son would follow in his steps: “Swear,” said he, “upon this sword, that has never yet departed from the path of honour, never to abandon the interests of the people, which are everything, and to pour out, if need be, the last drop of your blood to enlighten and defend this downtrodden race.” The oath on the sword was taken as desired.

On the 13th of November 1782, young Babeuf married one of the lady’s maids of the Countess in whose husband’s service he was. His wife was a native of Amiens, of poor parents, and seems to have been, to a great extent at least, illiterate. Babeuf afterwards called her “a woman of nature”. Soon afterwards Babeuf found a position at Noyon in connection with land administration. The following year, after the birth of his first child, he again removed to the town of Roye, where he soon obtained a similar position as land-commissioner, [There seems to be some difficulty in ascertaining the status of Babeuf, or the precise nature of the office he held in the French bureaucratic system of the ancien régime. The exact title of Babeuf’s office was “Commissaire à Terrier”, the “Terrier” being a kind of “Domesday” of the various feudal holdings within the jurisdiction of the French monarchy.] the highest he had yet held, which was confirmed to him by letters patent.

At the age of twenty-five, François Noel Babeuf thus found himself in a position, not only fairly remunerative, but involving a certain social standing. He was by this time a prosperous father of a family, the head of an office, with clerks employed under him, and with leisure enough to devote himself to literary pursuits and public affairs. During these years Babeuf had relations with the Academie Royale des belles lettres at Arras. The Academy of Arras was one of the numerous literary societies that sprang up in the course of the eighteenth century in most French towns of any importance, one of the functions of which was to start competitions for the solution of given questions. As is well known, Rousseau’s first important essay in literary composition was the attempted solution of a problem put forward for competition by a similar society at an earlier date.

In 1785 the Arras Academy started the following question: “Is it advantageous to reduce the number of roads in the territories of the villages of the province of Artois, and to give to those preserved a breadth sufficient to enable them to be planted with trees? Indicate, in the case of the affirmative, the means of effectuating such reduction.” Babeuf was one of the first to enter the lists as candidate, and sent in his paper on the 25th November 1785. In spite of his practical knowledge of matters connected with the subject in question, the paper was among those rejected by the society. The incident, however, was the occasion of a friendship and correspondence, which lasted some years, with Dubois de Fosseux, the secretary of the society, who, twenty years older than Babeuf, came, in course of time, to seek his opinion on all subjects.

Fosseux seemed to have been immediately struck with Babeuf’s capacity, and wrote him a friendly letter, suggesting he should continue his efforts to obtain recognition by the society. He, however, would not appear to have been a person remarkable for tact – and proceeded, in the ensuing letters, to inflict upon Babeuf posers entirely out of the range of his line of thought, such as, “Why are negroes born black?” “Which is the more happy in the social order, the sensitive man or the apathetic man?” and so forth. At the same time he loaded Babeuf with effusions of his own, poetical and otherwise. Notwithstanding the correspondents indulged in mutual flattery, they were not always in accord. Fosseux found some verses, sent to him by Babeuf, not fit to be read before ladies “with delicate nerves.” To this the future Tribune of the people suggests that they might be furtively brought under the notice “of robust men, who might acquire fresh force from them.”

In March 1787 Babeuf makes an appeal to Fosseux to circulate a brochure entitled La Constitution du Corps-militaire en France, dans ses rapports avec celle du Gouvernement et avec le caractère National, of which he sends him a copy. He says that it is written by a person of his acquaintance, who was particularly anxious that it should be widely read in the town of Arras. The work was of a distinctly revolutionary character, criticising severely the aristocratic caste-system of grades in the French army, by which all the higher positions were in the hands of courtiers and aristocrats; and also advocates the convocation of an assembly of the people, to which the king should be responsible for his acts, and which should be the ultimate court of appeal. M. Advielle would attribute this little work to Babeuf himself; but, although this may be so, no conclusive evidence as to authorship is adducible. Fosseux acknowledges the receipt of the book, with compliments to the anonymous author, in his usual effusive style; but a little later he writes “that it has been impossible for him to find anyone to undertake its distribution.” “All our booksellers,” he says, “fear to compromise themselves with the police, and, in my capacity as sheriff; it would be equally unsuitable for me to become the distributor, since, from beginning to end, it does not cease to attack the government. For the rest, the work seems to me to be well put together, excellently written, and very interesting. I should be extremely flattered to make the acquaintance of the author, who is assuredly a man of much spirit and merit. In these circumstances, Monsieur, and not having better fulfilled my commission, I feel bound to return to you the copy you confided to me. I have been well recompensed for the little trouble I have taken by the pleasure I have had in reading it.”

It is curious that in the very same letter in which he shirks the danger of helping to circulate La Constitution du Corps-militaire, Fosseux is enthusiastic over the project of a book bearing the title Le Changement du monde entier. It was to be divided into six parts: the first to contain a detailed table of the misery afflicting the society of the day, “of the abuses, the disorders, the calamities, the wrongs, the injustices, the bankruptcies, the subjects of despair, the brigandages, the thefts, the assassinations, the crimes and horrors of all sorts, which take place”; the second was to contain the cause of these evils; the third, to expound principles and preliminary notions; the fourth, the expedients, means, and regulations by which “all citizens who are in necessity, or who only enjoy a modest fortune, may, together with their wives and children, be in the future well nourished, clothed, lighted, and warmed, receive a perfect education, and enjoy, by means of their honest labour, each according to his or her strength, abilities, sex, age, talent, trade, or profession, much more ease, liberty, justice, comfort, and advantage than nowadays.” The fifth section should deal with the means of procuring at once an adequate sum of money without the imposition of taxes on the peoples! The sixth should consist of a reply to all objections.

This syllabus, sketched out by Dubois de Fosseux, is not only noteworthy as showing the beginnings of Utopian Socialism, which had been already formulated in Morelly’s Le Code de la nature, published in 1755, though at first attributed to Diderot. But what is especially interesting is the fact, that the Utopian scheme which so fascinated his friend Fosseux, in spite of its suggestion of the programme of the Equals of eight years later, does not seem to have attracted the future “people’s tribune” at all at this time. Writing a little later, he treats the supposititious author of the scheme, who may well have been Fosseux himself, as “a mere dreamer”.

Early in May of this year Babeuf went to Paris, on a visit of a few days, where he made the acquaintance of a rich merchant named Audiffret, who proved a true friend to him, and to whose purse he had recourse when, later on, he found himself abandoned by everyone. At this time he started a work on the simplification of the land register, but it did not appear until three years later, when it was associated with the name of his friend Audiffret, who had doubtless contributed to defray the cost of publication. Writing to a proposal of one Lemoignan to reform the magistracy, about this time, Babeuf expresses himself as partisan of a unified code of law, which would once for all sweep away the chaos of medieval customs and regulations, valid in one province and invalid in the next, and would “procure for all individuals indiscriminately, as regards the blessings and advantages enjoyed in this lower world, an absolutely equal position”.

We may regard this and other expressions of opinion in the correspondence of Babeuf at this time as showing that the beginnings of the future People’s Tribune, and leader of the “Equals” of 1796, were already present in the land-commissioner of 1787. The last letter in the correspondence between Fosseux and Babeuf was by the former, dated the 11th March 1788, and complains of the neglect of Babeuf to return certain literary pieces sent, and concludes with an urgent wish that this should be done promptly, even though without accompanying letter. From whatever reason, all relations between the two correspondents seem to have abruptly terminated at this time. Up to the present the future Tribune had not shown any marked signs of revolutionary sentiment or conviction, beyond a few expressions of opinion such as those above quoted – at least, unless we are to consider the Constitution militaire as coming from his pen.

Babeuf, we gather, read but few papers, and these irregularly, amongst which are mentioned Le Mercure de France and the Journal de la langue française. Neither, as far as we can see, was his other reading of a revolutionary character. Coming into contact, however, in the course of his professional duties, it may be mentioned, with the king’s Field-Marshal, the Comte de Casteja, who seems to have treated him with the haughtiness of the aristocrat of the ancien régime, Babeuf had a passage of arms with him, in which he defended himself with tact and dignity.

The year before the outbreak of the Revolution found Babeuf at the zenith of his prosperity as a land-agent, with a considerable clientele among the nobility and clergy, all of them eager to avail themselves of his knowledge of land tenure and of his practical ability as a business man. About this time he was charged by the Prior of St Taurin, a religious foundation in the neighbourhood of the town of Roye, to form an abstract of all the titles of the priory, together with all possible rights and privileges that could be invoked. The work occupied him six months. Shortly after, he also undertook important researches into the territorial archives of the Marquis de Soyecourt, one of the many nobles of the ancien régime who had exhausted his available substance in hanging round the court at Versailles, and who, in spite of his immense landed possessions, had at that time the not unusual aristocratic notoriety of not paying anyone, not even the innkeepers to whose houses he had resort on his travels. As might be expected, on the termination of his arduous labours, Babeuf found his bill of 12,000 livres (francs) disputed by his patron, who refused to hand over more than a hundred louis, a sum with which the creditor, hard driven as he was, and quite unable to risk the expenses of a lawsuit, had to be content. The affair absolutely ruined Babeuf, as it had occupied all his time for months, and had in consequence caused him to refuse several advantageous offers of other work. In this matter a certain influential family of the town of Roye, named Billecocq, had, it appears, been involved. The Billecocqs seem to have had an implacable hostility to Babeuf, whom they suspected of having done them an evil turn, they having lost their position as attorneys to the Marquis de Soyecourt, as they imagined, owing to the influence of Babeuf.

It was now the eve of the opening of the world-renowned series of events constituting the French Revolution; and our hero, under the combined influence of personal troubles, and of the social and political atmosphere in which he lived and moved, was rapidly becoming a changed man. Babeuf, at the time, it should be said, was the father of an increasing family.

The Latest From The “Occupy Oakland” Website-This Is Class War-We Say No More- Take The Offensive- Defend The Oakland Commune!- A Five Point Program For Discussion

2012-02-02T01:01:00.002-05:00

Click on the headline to link to Occupy Oakland website for the latest from the Bay Area vanguard battleground in the struggle for social justice.
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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!

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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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A Five-Point Program As Talking Points

*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was this high in the American labor force. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work. Work that would be divided through local representative workers’ councils which would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work. Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing as implement “30 for 40” so that it will, in the end, be necessary to fight for and win a workers government to implement this demand.

Organize the unorganized is a demand that cries out for solution today now that the organized sectors of the labor movement, both public and private, in America are at historic lows, just over ten percent of the workforce. Part of the task is to reorganize some of the old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. The other sector that desperately need to be organized is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the service industries, hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that have become a dominant aspect of the American economy.

Organize the South-this low wage area, this consciously low-wage area, where many industries land before heading off-shore to even lower wage places cries out for organizing, especially among black and Hispanic workers who form the bulk of this industrial workforce. A corollary to organizing the South is obviously to organize internationally to keep the “race to the bottom” from continually occurring short of being resolved in favor of an international commonwealth of workers’ governments. Nobody said it was going to be easy.

Organize Wal-Mart- millions of workers, thousands of trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A victory here would be the springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement just as auto and steel lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant. Well, that’s a thought.

Defend the right of public and private workers to unionize. Simple-No more Wisconsins, no more attacks on collective bargaining the hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, or bourgeois recall elections either. Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.

Guest Commentary

From The Transitional Program Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International In 1938Sliding Scale of Wages and Sliding Scale of Hours

Under the conditions of disintegrating capitalism, the masses continue to live the meagerized life of the oppressed, threatened now more than at any other time with the danger of being cast into the pit of pauperism. They must defend their mouthful of bread, if they cannot increase or better it. There is neither the need nor the opportunity to enumerate here those separate, partial demands which time and again arise on the basis of concrete circumstances – national, local, trade union. But two basic economic afflictions, in which is summarized the increasing absurdity of the capitalist system, that is, unemployment and high prices, demand generalized slogans and methods of struggle.

The Fourth International declares uncompromising war on the politics of the capitalists which, to a considerable degree, like the politics of their agents, the reformists, aims to place the whole burden of militarism, the crisis, the disorganization of the monetary system and all other scourges stemming from capitalism’s death agony upon the backs of the toilers. The Fourth International demands employment and decent living conditions for all.

Neither monetary inflation nor stabilization can serve as slogans for the proletariat because these are but two ends of the same stick. Against a bounding rise in prices, which with the approach of war will assume an ever more unbridled character, one can fight only under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages. This means that collective agreements should assure an automatic rise in wages in relation to the increase in price of consumer goods.

Under the menace of its own disintegration, the proletariat cannot permit the transformation of an increasing section of the workers into chronically unemployed paupers, living off the slops of a crumbling society. The right to employment is the only serious right left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is being shorn from him at every step. Against unemployment, “structural” as well as “conjunctural,” the time is ripe to advance along with the slogan of public works, the slogan of a sliding scale of working hours. Trade unions and other mass organizations should bind the workers and the unemployed together in the solidarity of mutual responsibility. On this basis all the work on hand would then be divided among all existing workers in accordance with how the extent of the working week is defined. The average wage of every worker remains the same as it was under the old working week. Wages, under a strictly guaranteed minimum, would follow the movement of prices. It is impossible to accept any other program for the present catastrophic period.

Property owners and their lawyers will prove the “unrealizability” of these demands. Smaller, especially ruined capitalists, in addition will refer to their account ledgers. The workers categorically denounce such conclusions and references. The question is not one of a “normal” collision between opposing material interests. The question is one of guarding the proletariat from decay, demoralization and ruin. The question is one of life or death of the only creative and progressive class, and by that token of the future of mankind. If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. “Realizability” or “unrealizability” is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.

* Defend the independence of the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. In 2008 labor, organized labor, spent around 450 million dollars trying to elect Barack Obama and other Democrats (mainly). The results speak for themselves. For those bogus efforts the labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea then was (and is, as we come up to another presidential election cycle) that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of labor.” The past period of cuts-backs, cut-in-the back give backs should put paid to that notion. Although anyone who is politically savvy at all knows that is not true, not true for the labor skates at the top of the movement.

The hard reality is that the labor skates, not used to any form of class struggle or any kind of struggle, know no other way than class-collaboration, arbitration, courts, and every other way to avoid the appearance of strife, strife in defense of the bosses’ profits. The most egregious recent example- the return of the Verizon workers to work after two weeks last summer when they had the company on the run and the subsequent announcement by the company of record profits. That sellout strategy may have worked for the bureaucrats, or rather their “fathers” for a time back in the 1950s “golden age” of labor, but now we are in a very hard and open class war. The rank and file must demand an end to using their precious dues payments period for bourgeois candidates all of whom have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor from Obama on down.

This does not mean not using union dues for political purposes though. On the contrary we need to use them now more than ever in the class battles ahead. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized, organizing the South, organizing Wal-Mart, and other pro-labor causes. Think, for example, of the dough spent on the successful November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio. That type of activity is where labor’s money and other resources should go.

*End the endless wars!- As the so-called draw-down of American and Allied troops in Iraq reaches it final stages, the draw down of non-mercenary forces anyway, we must recognize that we anti-warriors failed, and failed rather spectacularly, to affect that withdrawal after a promising start to our opposition in late 2002 and early 2003 (and a little in 2006). As the endless American-led wars (even if behind the scenes, as in Libya) continue we had better straighten out our anti-war, anti-imperialist front quickly if we are to have any effect on the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan!

U.S. Hands Off Iran!- American (and world) imperialists are ratcheting up their propaganda war (right now) and increased economic sanctions that are a prelude to war well before the dust has settled on the now unsettled situation in Iraq and well before they have even sniffed at an Afghan withdrawal of any import. We will hold our noses, as we did with the Saddam leadership in Iraq and on other occasions, and call for the defense of Iran against the American imperial monster. A victory for the Americans (and their junior partner, Israel) in Iran is not in the interests of the international working class. Especially here in the “belly of the beast” we are duty-bound to call not just for non-intervention but for defense of Iran. We will, believe me we will, deal with the mullahs, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Islamic fundamentalist in our own way in our own time.

U.S. Hands Off The World!- With the number of “hot spots” that the American imperialists, or one or another of their junior allies, have their hands on in this wicked old world this generic slogan would seem to fill the bill.

Down With The War Budget! Not One Penny, Not One Person For The Wars! Honor World War I German Social-Democratic Party MP, Karl Liebknecht, who did just that. The litmus test for every political candidate must be first opposition to the war budgets (let’s see, right now winding up Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran preparations, China preparations, etc. you get my drift). Then that big leap. The whole damn imperialist military budget. Again, no one said it would be simple. Revolution may be easier that depriving the imperialists of their military money. Well….okay.

*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Free Quality Healthcare For All! This would be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The health and welfare of any society’s citizenry is the simple glue that holds that society together. It is no accident that one of the prime concerns of workers states like Cuba, whatever their other political problems, has been to place health care and education front and center and to provide to the best of their capacity for free, quality healthcare and education for all. Even the hide-bound social-democratic-run capitalist governments of Europe have, until recently anyway, placed the “welfare state” protections central to their programs.

Free, quality higher education for all! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! One Hundred, Two Hundred, Many Harvards!
This would again be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The struggle to increase the educational level of a society’s citizenry is another part of the simple glue that holds that society together. Today higher education is being placed out of reach for many working-class and minority families. Hell, it is getting tough for the middle class as well.
Moreover the whole higher educational system is increasing skewed toward those who have better formal preparation and family lives leaving many deserving students in the wilderness. Take the resources of the private institutions and spread them around, throw in hundreds of billions from the government (take from the military budget and the bank bail-out money), get rid of the top heavy and useless college administration apparatuses, mix it up, and let students, teachers, and campus workers run the thing through councils on a democratic basis.

Forgive student debt! The latest reports indicate that college student debt is something like a trillion dollars, give or take a few billion but who is counting. The price of tuition and expenses has gone up dramatically while services have not kept pace. What has happened is that the future highly educated workforce that a modern society, and certainly a socialist society, desperately needs is going to be cast in some form of indentured servitude to the banks or other lending agencies for much of their young working lives. Let the banks take a “hit” for a change!

Stop housing foreclosures now! Hey, everybody, everywhere in the world not just in America should have a safe, clean roof over their heads. Hell, even a single family home that is part of the “American dream,” if that is what they want. We didn’t make the housing crisis in America (or elsewhere, like in Ireland, where the bubble has also burst). The banks did. Their predatory lending practices and slip-shot application processes were out of control. Let them take the “hit” here as well.

*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Karl Marx was right way back in the 19th century on his labor theory of value, the workers do produce the social surplus appropriated by the capitalists. Capitalism tends to immiserate the mass of society for the few. Most importantly capitalism, a system that at one time was historically progressive in the fight against feudalism and other ancient forms of production, has turned into its opposite and now is a fetter on production. The current multiple crises spawned by this system show there is no way forward, except that unless we push them out, push them out fast, they will muddle through, again.

Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Socialism is the only serious answer to the human crisis we face economically, socially, culturally and politically. This socialist system is the only one calculated to take one of the great tragedies of life, the struggle for daily survival in a world that we did not create, and replace it with more co-operative human endeavors.

Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. None of the nice things mentioned above can be accomplished without as serious struggle for political power. We need to struggle for an independent working-class-centered political party that we can call our own and where our leaders act as “tribunes of the people” not hacks. The creation of that workers party, however, will get us nowhere unless it fights for a workers government to begin the transition to the next level of human progress on a world-wide scale.

Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!

Guest Commentary from the IWW (Industrial Workers Of The World, Wobblies) website http://www.iww.org/en/culture/official/preamble.shtml

Preamble to the IWW Constitution (1905)

Posted Sun, 05/01/2005 - 8:34am by IWW.org Editor

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.

Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.

We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.

These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.

Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."

It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.

The Latest From The United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) Website- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops, Mercenaries, Contractors, Etc, From Afghanistan! Hands Off Iran! All Out In Boston On February 4th

2012-02-01T18:38:00.000-05:00

Click on the headline to link to the United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) Website for more information about various anti-war, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist actions around the country.

Hands Off Iran! March and Rally
Park Street Station, Boston Common
February 4th, 1:00 PM

Markin comment:

Every once in a while it is necessary, if for not other reason than to proclaim from the public square that we are alive, and fighting, to show “the colors,” our anti-war colors. While, as I have mentioned many times in this space, endless marches are not going to end any war the street opposition to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as protests against other imperialist adventures has been under the radar of late. It is time for anti-warriors to get back where we belong in the struggle against Obama’s wars. The UNAC appears to be the umbrella clearing house these days for many anti-war, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist actions. Not all the demands of this coalition are ones that I would raise but the key one is enough to take to the streets. Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops, Mercenaries, Contractors, Etc, From Afghanistan and Iraq!

BostonUNAC.org | 781-285-8622 | BostonUNAC(S)gmail.com

February Is Black History Month-From The Pages Of The Socialist Alternative Press-The Life And Legacy Of Malcolm X

2012-02-01T00:29:00.001-05:00

Click on the headline to link to the Socialist Alternative (CWI) website.

The Life And Legacy Of Malcolm X

Introduction

"You're living at a time of revolution...people in power have misused it and now a better world has to be built."
— Malcolm X

On 21 February 1965 Malcolm X was shot dead minutes before he was about to address a rally in Harlem, New York. As with the firebombing of his home a week earlier, the finger was automatically pointed at the Nation of Islam with whom Malcolm had split the previous year.

Threatened by his radical ideas and appeal to young blacks, the FBI had Malcolm X under surveillance. Speculation continues that the capitalist state itself used its own agents to eliminate their number one public enemy.

Of what there is no doubt is that after the murder the American state drew a huge sigh of relief. One of the most vocal, uncompromising opponents of their system had apparently been silenced. However history continues to show that revolutionary ideas can never be silenced.

The assassination of Malcolm X spawned the Black Panther Party. In Seize The Time, the story of the Black Panthers, Co-founder Bobby Seale tells us the tremendous effect the killing of Malcolm X had on him: "I got mad, I put my fist through a window. I told them all, I'll make my own self into a Malcolm X, and if they want to kill me they'll have to kill me...That a big change for me...Malcolm X had an impact on everybody like that". The next year the Black Panther Party was formed. They represent the highest point in the civil rights movement that engulfed the US for over two decades. They took Malcolm's message of self-defense for blacks and translated it into action. During the 1970s they became a focal point for young blacks wanting to fight back against the racist police and state in America. They inspired youth and blacks internationally with their preparedness to fight racism and police brutality. They too posed a threat to the American state. At one stage300 of their leaders were imprisoned on various trumped up charges. Many more were gunned down by police.

For many youth today - black and white - the life and ideas of Malcolm X a great inspiration. The X icon we see depicted on T-shirts, baseball caps etc. represents a lot more than merely a fashion accessory. It shows a layer of people groping for the ideas and strategy to take them forward. There're few if any obvious leaders that young people today identify with. Internationally the leaders of the labor movement certainly have no attraction. Their "do nothing" policy does nothing but frustrate radical youth looking for away out of the conditions they are condemned to live in.

In the 1990s little has changed. The situation certainly hasn't improved for most blacks in the US or Britain. Every social statistic from education to housing to employment finds blacks at the bottom of the heap. The rise of racism and fascism across Europe has resulted in blacks being brutalized and murdered. The public lynchings that were commonplace for decades in the US have not gone away, they have merely been replaced with less visible racist attacks and murders. In New York alone there were 1,110 "hate crimes" committed against blacks and Jews in 1992. There are over 300 white supremacy groups active in the United States. Against this background Malcolm's message of fighting back "by any means necessary" is as relevant as ever.

Big business has jumped on the bandwagon of a man who wholeheartedly denounced their system. They attempt to sanitize his message and make a profit out of doing so! A mass industry has developed that expects to net over £63million in 1993 from the sale of X merchandise, including board games, crisps and air fresheners!

Eighty four percent of young black Americans consider Malcolm X their hero. However it is claimed that only one in four of those aged under 24 know what he actually stood for. Almost every black leader in America now attempts to claim the mantle of Malcolm - even those reformist leaders embroiled in the Democrat Party that Malcolm consistently condemned. Louis Farrakhan, current leader of the Nation of Islam, while quick to sing the praises of Malcolm X today, joined in denouncing him at the time of Malcolm's split with the Nation. He wrote in the Nation's main publication: "such a man as this is worthy of death."

There is much debate over which direction Malcolm's ideas were going in the last year of his life. Militant believes that his experiences and international outlook was leading him to understand that the system had to be overthrown. There is no doubt however that he was an internationalist and a revolutionary, who clearly perceived the rottenness of world capitalism.

Militant have produced this pamphlet to trace the life and ideas of Malcolm X and the civil rights movement and most importantly to explain their relevance today. His courageous stand must not be forgotten and his ideas must be built on. In the 1990s we must draw the same conclusions that Malcolm X and hundreds of other heroic blacks drew in the course of their struggle. Only a revolutionary fight to change society will truly lead to black liberation. But Militant goes further. We fight for a socialist society based on the needs of working-class people, black and white. We believe that only a society run democratically by ordinary people will end once and for all the racism and exploitation that is part and parcel of this capitalist system.

Andrea Enisuoh, 1993

The Early Years

"They called me the angriest Negro in America."
— Malcolm X

Malcolm Little was born in 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska. Malcolm was still very young when after threats from the Ku Klux Klan his family was forced to move to Omaha. He was only six years old when his father was savagely murdered by a local white supremacy group. The same group had earlier torched his family's home.

At school he proved a promising pupil with the talents and enthusiasm that exist in all young people. Unfortunately, as with numerous other young blacks even today, the system was unable or unwilling to develop those talents and aspirations. Instead they were to be crushed. He was told by his teacher that his dream to become a lawyer was "unrealistic for a Nigger."

After school Malcolm turned to a life of petty crime. He spent some time in state detention centers. In 1945 he was sentenced to 8-10 years in prison for burglary. There is little doubt that the severity of his sentence was provoked by the outrage of the jury after they were told that Malcolm had been assisted by his white mistress.

For the first 20 years of his life Malcolm experienced nothing but racism. It was those experiences that alienated him, firstly from whites, but also from the whole American system. It was later that he began to realize that the "American system" that failed to offer him any hope of a decent future was the capitalist system. Militant believes that the political consciousness of individuals is formed by their day-to-day experiences. It was Malcolm's own conditions and accumulated experiences that eventually led him to the correct conclusion: "You can't have capitalism without racism."

During his first year in prison Malcolm expressed his frustration and despair in the only way he knew. He deliberately alienated himself, not only from prison guards but also other inmates.

Eventually he used his time to educate himself. He began classes in English and Latin and read so voraciously, even after lights out, that he permanently impaired his vision.

It was in prison that Malcolm eventually converted to the Nation of Islam, a Black Muslim organization espousing separatism as the way forward for the black race. It was this radical religion, described to him as "the natural religion for the black man" that seemed to offer him a way out. Malcolm grasped it with his heart and soul.

The Nation of Islam (Black Muslims)

"Any time I have a religion that won't let me fight for my people, I say to hell with that religion. That's why I am a Muslim."
— Malcolm X

The Nation of Islam was founded in 1931 by Wallace D Fard. He presented himself as a Muslim prophet and preached a message of "black redemption within Islam". He claimed "the Asiatic Black Man" had been the original inhabitant of the earth. The white race had been given 6,000 years to rule and eventually whites and white Christianity would be destroyed. Elijah Muhammad, who became leader of the Nation after Fard disappeared, developed this. He claimed originally that the black race had inhabited the moon and that at one time the moon and earth were one. A black scientist, Yakub, supposedly caused an explosion that separated the two. The first people to inhabit the earth were members of a black tribe called Shabazz. While these theories seem, they are no more so than the Christian theory of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden. However, white Christianity in all its permutations has been developed over centuries. It has been used to justify slavery, racism and imperialism. It is a religion that the ruling class needed and continue to uphold.

The attraction of the Nation of Islam to blacks was its apparent ability to voice the anger and discontent that existed in every black community. In terms of rhetoric they were amongst the strongest advocates of black pride but their separatist outlook and refusal to actively engage in the civil rights struggle left them spectating from the sidelines of the movement. They produced proud books on black history. Discarding their surnames as marks of their slave past, they replaced them with the suffix "X". Converts had to follow a strict code of discipline - no pork, tobacco, alcohol, drugs or extra marital sex. Engagement in political activity with non-Muslims was not permitted. Until their demand for a separate state was met Muslims were to have no social, political or religious contact with whites. They demanded self-determination; an independent black state in America or a return to Africa.

As Marxists, Militant would argue that this policy is fundamentally flawed. We believe that the sustained division of the working class along racial lines will greatly weaken the potential of the struggle against capitalism. It can also aid the policy of the ruling class to keep divisions running through the class. It was to keep black and white workers divided that the ruling class created and nurtured organizations like the Ku Klux Klan.

While holding this position we do not arrogantly condemn blacks attracted to nationalist ideas. We would support the right to self-determination for any nation, but we also have a duty to point out that under the capitalist system this is unrealistic. We need only look to Zionism - the establishment of Israel on a capitalist basis - to illustrate the point Israel is no safe haven for Jews. It is an armed camp for US imperialism. The creation of a separate black state in America would pose even more difficulties. By the l960s, blacks did not make up the majority in any one state. Two in three blacks lived in the cities so for a black nation to be created, tens of millions of blacks and whites would have to be forcibly uprooted.

Black nationalism is not black racism. Of course, taken to ludicrous extremes, it can be thoroughly reactionary. Louis Farrakhan today uses Black Nationalism to try to justify black capitalism. Malcolm X as a leader of the Nation of Islam met with the Ku Klux Klan to discuss ways of ensuring separatism. However many ordinary blacks who conclude that there is no road out of this capitalist system turn to the ideas of separatism. The job of Marxists is not to dismiss blacks drawn to these conclusions but to show that struggle for a socialist revolution is the only true road to black liberation.

From having just a few hundred supporters initially, by the early 1960s the Black Muslims had 100,000 members. The liberation struggles sweeping Africa and Asia at the time undoubtedly affected blacks in the US. Racial pride was stimulated amongst the whole of the black population. It was on the tide of this new wave of confidence that the Nation of Islam was able to grow. Malcolm X was one of their foremost ministers; his oratory skills attracted a new section of youth towards the religion. Even the media and press hyped up the Black Muslims. A section of the ruling class recognized that they would eventually be forced to make concessions to the black masses of America. They deliberately portrayed the Nation as the nasty vicious side of the black movement, thus bolstering the respectable non-violent mainstream of Martin Luther King.

It was a conscious strategy of the Nation of Islam to target prisons as a recruitment ground. This can be traced back to 1942 when Elijah Muhammad and 62 of his followers were convicted of draft evasion (their religion does no tallow them to serve in the armed forces) and jailed for three years. While in prison Muhammad recognized the fertile ground that existed for any radical ideas amongst what was known as the black underclass. After the war much time and energy was devoted specifically to winning over prisoners.

But to many, the Black Muslims were rife with contradictions. It wasn't enough for them to simply attack white society and preach black unity. In the early 1960s demonstrations, sit-ins and marches swept almost every state. At a time when militant blacks were involved in mass action the Nation were seen to be doing nothing. They would attack the strategy of the mainstream civil rights movement and yet offer no alternative struggle outside the confines of their own organization.

Malcolm X became a popular leader of the Nation. He threw himself into his work and into the black community. He was catapulted to fame in the press. Much more able than Elijah Muhammad to gauge the killings of young blacks, he became frustrated by the restraints of the organization. When he eventually split with them in 1964 he said: "If I harbored any personal disappointment whatsoever, it was that privately I was convinced that our Nation of Islam could be an even greater force in the black man's overall struggle if we engaged in more action. It could be heard increasingly in the Negro communities 'Those Muslims talk tough, but they never do anything.'" Although the eventual split was put down to "internal differences" there is no doubt that his desire to politically organize blacks in action was unimportant factor. At his first press conference after the split he still defended the Nation, Elijah Muhammad and their 'back to Africa' policy. But he did say: "separation back to Africa is a long term program and while it is yet to materialize 22 million of our people who are still here in America need better food, clothing, housing and jobs right now...Now that I have more independence of action, I intend to use a more flexible approach toward working with others to get a solution to this problem."

The Civil Rights Movement

"The black revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is interrelated...racism, poverty, militarism and imperialism. Evils that are deeply rooted in the whole structure of our society."
— Martin Luther King

"If George Washington didn't get independence for this country non-violently...and you taught me to look upon heroes, then it's time for you to realize - I have studied your books well."

— Malcolm X

The tremendous Civil Rights movement of the 1950s, 60s and early 70s shook America to its very foundations. It was a movement that in one or another touched every black family in the US. Internationally throughout Africa, the Caribbean and even Europe blacks were imbued with a new confidence. It seemed on every continent a liberation struggle was taking place. America the 'land of the free' was no exception.

Jim Crow (Racial Segregation)

This was a struggle that had to be fought Blacks in America did not just face poverty, but a degrading, racist social system commonly known as Jim Crow (racial segregation). In the South rights to vote, organize, even to assemble were taken away from blacks. Segregated schools, transport, public toilets etc. condemned blacks to the worst conditions.

Jim Crow was not simply some nasty piece of legislation that evolved over the. It was a carefully worked out, carefully executed, social system devised by the ruling class. At times of economic crisis the ruling class often use racism to divide working people. It is also used to drive down wages and working conditions thus providing pools of cheap labor. Before World War Two in the South there were vast amounts of land and yet an enormous shortage of labor. Taking away the rights of blacks enabled the bosses to force them to work for pitifully low wages. After World War Two the mechanization of agriculture solved the bosses problem and blacks were literally driven off the land. There now existed, after the war, a labor shortage in the factories of the North. Migration of huge numbers of blacks to the North began. This continued through the 1950s and 1960s and created the black ghettos we see there today.

During World War Two over 3 million blacks registered for the army. Over 500,000 fought and many died "to defend democracy" in racially segregated units. Those that returned did so in the knowledge that things would never be the same again. Blacks came back wanting, expecting and prepared to fight for change.

1954 Supreme Court Ruling

There had often been struggles through the courts by blacks to end segregation, but before 1954 they had little effect. Now the ruling class realized there had to be change. Throughout Africa and Asia there were huge movements for independence, against military and economic domination by Imperialism. Colonial rule in its previous form was coming to an end. Imperialist America found itself having to negotiate with new, confident black governments. To uphold their position of influence the US had to try to convince these governments that they were the friends of blacks. They therefore looked to produce cosmetic changes at home.

This was the reason for the 1954 Supreme Court Ruling that deemed segregation in schools illegal. But rather than satisfy blacks in the US it led to them demanding more. Blacks demanded the right to vote and boldly went to register.

Lynchings

There was always strong resistance to the dismantling of Jim Crow. The Southern Democratic Party, made up of white small property owners was based on this racist system. While industrialization benefited big capitalist firms, the small property owners still needed to exploit blacks to make their profits.

To sustain the Jim Crow system lynchings and murders became commonplace. Blacks who registered to vote were assassinated and any blacks that fought for their rights in any way were met with a reign of terror.

Lynchings became an integral part of the Jim Crow system. Far from being an aberration they became an American institution. Many people traveled for miles see the lynching of a black take place, with discounts introduced on the railroads for those traveling to a lynching. Rallies with Democratic Party speakers were held before some lynchings took place and photographs of the events were even taken and sold as souvenirs.

In 1955 things began to change. Emmett Till, a 14 year old black boy from Chicago was visiting family in Mississippi. Coming from the North he was seen by Southern whites to have ideas above his station. The final straw came when he sweet-talked' a white woman. For this "crime" he was beaten, shot through the head and his body mutilated. Yet this was not allowed to become just another lynching. His mother had his body shipped back to Chicago and demanded an open casket funeral so the whole world could see what America had done to her son. Over 250 000 people came to view the body. Jet magazine carried a picture of Emmett's mutilated body that sent shockwaves through every black community. Meetings were called in every black ghetto. Demands for troops to be sent to Mississippi to protect blacks spread, not only through the North, but also through the South. Till's mother demanded a meeting with President Eisenhower but this was refused. Instead the FBI was sent to investigate who was organizing the protests. A mock trial with an all white jury let the lynchers off scott free. Everywhere demands for action for demonstrations could be heard. The tide had begun to turn.

Against this background the mass movement began to evolve. In Montgomery, Alabama, action began. In December 1955 Rosa Parks, an activist in the National Association for the Advancement of Black people (NAACP), made her stand.

The bus system in Montgomery was totally segregated, with priority given to whites for the best seats. While 70% of the passengers were black they had to board at the backs of the buses. If all the white seats were taken then whites could demand that blacks gave up their seats. When a white demanded Rosa Parks' seat she refused saying, she was tired from work and tired of giving in. For this she was arrested and fined $ 10. She along with E D Nixon, a black trade union organizer, decided it was time to fight back. They used her case to organize one-day boycott of the buses.

Through the churches, which were the backbone of the black community the campaign was organized. Ministers who were the traditionally accepted leaders of the black community were approached to lead the campaign. One of those that accepted was a new minister in town, Martin Luther King. He went on to become the most famous leader of the Civil Rights movement.

Montgomery Bus Boycott

The whole black community in the area rallied behind the boycott. As the boycott spiraled from one day to almost a year, its demands got bolder. While initially the campaign simply demanded sensitive treatment for blacks on buses, they soon realized they had to go the whole way and they demanded the end of segregation on buses.

Even with support from the whole community it was a long, hard struggle. A complex system of private cars had to be used to transport blacks. Martin Luther King put out a call for 100 station wagons to come to Montgomery to be used as free shuttle services. Some sympathetic whites even gave lifts to blacks. Even so many were forced to walk miles every day to get to work. But the resolve hardened each day. When asked by a reporter why she was walking, one middle aged black woman replied, "For me, my children and my grand children."

The resolve of racist whites also hardened. The white Citizens council developed as the main organization against the boycott and grew massively during this period. Violence spiraled and during the campaign at least eight bombings took place. The Ku Klux Klan held highly visible, intimidatory rallies. Nevertheless six months into the boycott another began in Florida, forcing the bus company there out of business. Eleven months on the battle was won. Enormous pressure forced the desegregation of Montgomery buses and a small taste of what mass action could achieve left the black community hungry for much more.

After the Montgomery boycott Martin Luther King became greatly respected for his leadership qualities. However Malcolm X was quick to condemn his ideas of pacifism and non-violence as ideas that disarmed the black community. "You don't have to criticize Reverend King, his actions criticize him. Any Negro who teaches other Negroes to turn the other cheek is disarming that Negro."

Segregation in Schools

The late 1950s saw the famous Brown vs. Brown case that ruled against segregation in schools. But it would take a lot more than paper legislation to have any effective change.

In Little Rock, Arkansas, 1957, came the first major confrontation to desegregate schools. Nine black teenagers were set to attend a school in Little Rock and the state Governor Orval Faubus, a Democrat, had initially been elected with the backing of groups like the NAACP and the trade union movement. But, once in office he soon shed his liberal image. Playing on the discontent that existed amongst whites to integration, he became a hardened segregationist. Refusing to enforce any law to integrate schools. Racist mobs rallied to physically stop the black teenagers getting to the school. Pressure forced President Eisenhower to act. He sent Federal troops to ensure passage for the blacks students. The fact that the state had been forced to intervene represented another victory for the black movement and greatly demoralized the racists.

Sit-Ins and Freedom Rides

Until the early 1960s the struggles of blacks against segregation had mainly consisted of local action. 1960 changed that and the movement rapidly spread from state to state with young people playing a key role.

It began with the sit-in movement. A new generation inspired by the movements already taking place in the US and internationally, decided they too should get involved. They would enter lunch bars and demand to be served and when they were refused they would literally sit-in! The invasion of the bar meant that its owners lost money. Eventually the police would be called and the youth, predominantly students, would be arrested. Many were beaten. Every time a group was arrested another group would come to take their place. Thousands were arrested and many were expelled from school but the sit-ins continued.

Then came the Freedom Rides where black and white students would board buses and travel through the Southern states. These actions were taken to force the integration of buses that had already been passed in law. Many of the freedom riders were beaten and brutalized by racist mobs. But still the Freedom Rides continued.

It became clear to the youth that they needed their own organization to discuss the strategies and actions they needed to take. They were invited by Martin Luther King to form the youth wing of his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), an organization that although had a strong pacifist thread, supported direct acts of disobedience. But this offer was rejected and instead the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was formed. While still defending the tactic of non- violence, this was for them a tactic not a principle.

Martin Luther King

Martin Luther King evolved as the most important leader of the Civil Rights Movement. His principles of pacifism were the dominant feature of the movement for a long period. But once youth entered the scene of battle it was much harder for him to hold this line. Faced with beatings, lynching and petrol bombings, the idea of non-violence somehow did not ring true. Figures like Malcolm X with his message of militant action, became a much more attractive focus for young blacks. Malcolm totally rejected the idea of turning the other cheek and he advocated black people defending themselves "...by any means necessary. If someone puts a hand on you, send him to the cemetery."

While King believed that mass peaceful protests would convince the government to implement reforms Malcolm X soon became one of the most vocal opponents of King's strategy for the movement After the famous 250,000 strong 1963 March on Washington, where King delivered his well remembered "I have a Dream," speech, Malcolm X was later to comment "While they're dreaming, our people are living a nightmare." Malcolm was not alone in criticizing aspects of King's leadership. He was effectively voicing the thoughts of many younger activists. Anne Mood who was at the Washington demonstration recalled: "I sat on the grass and listened to the speakers to discover we had dreamers instead of a leader leading us. Martin Luther King went on and on talking about his dream. I sat there thinking that in Canton, Mississippi, we never had time to sleep much less to dream."

After King was presented with the Nobel peace Prize Malcolm again used the opportunity to highlight their different approaches. "He got the Peace Prize, we got the problem. I don't want the white man giving me medals. If I'm following a general and he's leading me into battle, and the enemy tends to give him rewards or awards. I get suspicious of him, especially if he gets a peace award before the war is over."

However even Martin Luther King was to talk of revolution towards the end of his life. In 1967 he commented "For the last 2 years we have been a reform movement...But after Selma and the Voting rights Bill (1965) we moved into a new era which must be an era of revolution. What good does it do a man to have integrated lunch counters if he can't buy a hamburger?" This was too much for the ruling class. King started supporting marches of striking workers and was gunned down as he prepared to march with refuse workers in Memphis.

The Last Year

"We are seeing a global rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressor, the exploited against the exploiter."
— Malcolm X

Behind the Split

Malcolm's eventual split with the Nation of Islam was finally provoked by the death of John F Kennedy. Unlike the leaders of the mainstream movement Malcolm had never sown illusions in Kennedy or the big business Democrat Party. Kennedy had come to government on the back of the Civil Rights movement. In 1960 when he closely beat Richard Nixon he had received 68% of the black vote. But like US President Clinton today, he soon ditched many of his election promises. For this Malcolm rightly denounced him: "Kennedy ran on a platform as a white liberal three years ago and said all he had to do was take out his fountain pen put his name on some paper and our problem could be solved. He was three years in office before he found where his fountain pen was...and the problem isn't solved yet". It was therefore true to form for Malcolm to refuse to be silent after Kennedy's death. Elijah Muhammad ordered his members not to publicly comment on the issue. Yet when quizzed by the press Malcolm said simply "The chickens have come home to roost. Being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they've always made me glad." An outraged Muhammad suspended Malcolm for ninety days. During that period Malcolm was not to speak publicly on behalf of the Nation. After the 90 days the suspension was not lifted, it had in reality become an expulsion. This was not a real surprise to Malcolm and reflected the growing differences between Malcolm and Elijah Muhammad. On March 8 1964 Malcolm formally announced that he was leaving the Nation of Islam to build a new organization.

It was clear that Malcolm and Muhammad had begun to differ on the question of how to struggle long before the split. In 1962 the Los Angeles Police, in a highly provocative attack, gunned down seven black Muslims. Sixteen were arrested and charged with "criminal assault against the police."

Malcolm was shipped to LA to deal with the case. He automatically recognized the huge potential that existed to unite Muslims and non-Muslims in a campaign against police brutality. Mass meetings were organized immediately. Media coverage raised the awareness of the campaign. Material was produced that aimed to cross religious divides leaflets pointed out that "It was a Muslim mosque this time; next it will be the Protestant church, the Catholic cathedral, the Jewish synagogue." But Malcolm's plans to launch a massive nation-wide campaign were eventually vetoed by the leadership. It was quickly becoming clear that Malcolm represented the militant tendency within the organization. Elijah Muhammad's conservative tendencies were holding things back. In a statement after the split Malcolm made it clear where he now stood. Talking about the new organization he was to launch he said: "It's going to be different now, I'm going to join in the fight wherever Negroes ask for my help and I suspect my activities will be on a greater and more intensive scale than in the past."

Malcolm did not want to be left on the sidelines of the great revolutionary struggle that was sweeping America. But the Black Muslims abstentionist message of "boycott the civil rights struggle, have nothing to do with the white man and his society" made it inevitable that unless he broke with them he would be left on the sidelines. The break came at the height of the civil rights movement, when Malcolm X realized he had to take part in the struggle.

A week before his assassination Malcolm X publicly revealed that the leaders of the Black Muslims had been colluding with the Ku Klux Klan and Rockwell, the leader of the US Nazi Party. They had looked to giving Elijah Muhammed financial aid. In return he was to continue churning out the separatist message and at the same time keep the heat off racist organizations. This graphically shows how Black Nationalism could play into the hands of the racists. In the course of struggle Malcolm X was forced to question whether Black Nationalism was the correct philosophy. He did not break with the idea of blacks organizing separately but he recognized using the term Black Nationalist was setting him apart from "true revolutionaries dedicated to overturning the system of exploitation that exists on this earth." he said, "Can we sum up the solution to the problems confronting our people as Black Nationalism? If you notice, I haven't been using that expression for several months now."

Muslim Mosque Inc.

Malcolm's new organization, the Muslim Mosque Inc. aimed to organize in action both Muslims and non-Muslims. While he was still a committed black nationalist, his aim being the return of Blacks to Africa, he saw this as a long way off. He wanted the Muslim Mosque Inc., working alongside other civil rights groups to spearhead a campaign for decent housing, education, jobs etc. He correctly saw the crucial importance that youth would play in any radical organization saying "Our accent will be on the youth. We need new ideas, new methods, new approaches. We are completely disenchanted with the old, adult established politicians. We want some new, more militant faces."

He also began to develop his ideas on self-defense for black communities. "Concerning nonviolence: It is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of racial attacks." He called for blacks to take up their legal right to own a shotgun or rifle. Where the state refused to intervene in communities under attack he said those communities should form rifle clubs. "We should be peaceful, law abiding - but the time has come for the American Negro to fight back in self-defense whenever and wherever he is being unjustly or unlawfully attacked. If the Government thinks I am wrong for saying this then let the government start doing it's job."

However from it's inception the Muslim Mosque Inc received little funding or support from established civil rights groups. The SNCC refused to enter into any sort of working alliance. The media also refused to portray the new direction that Malcolm was moving in. In his own words he was "caught in a trap". He wanted to build an all-black organization "whose ultimate objective was to help create a society in which there could exist honest white-black brotherhood." Perhaps the leaders of the Civil Rights movement recognized just what a threat Malcolm's new leftward direction posed. He was now more than just an angry black man. He was beginning to work out tactics and strategies that would mobilize blacks into action. Now more than ever he posed a threat to the leadership of the civil rights movement He was evolving into a revolutionary and challenging not just racism, but the whole of the capitalist system.

Malcolm spent just 50 weeks apart from the Nation of Islam before he was assassinated. But even in that brief time his political thinking changed dramatically. He spent over half this time abroad touring Africa and the Middle East. This was biggest factor to change his way of thinking. "They say travel broadens your scope," he said "and recently I've had the opportunity to do a lot of it. While I was traveling I noticed that most of the countries that have recently emerged into independence have turned away from the so-called capitalistic system in the direction of socialism." "Most of the countries that were colonial powers were capitalist countries...You can't have capitalism without racism."

Initially he still rejected the idea of black and white workers uniting against oppression. "They'll never do it with working-class whites. The history is that working-class whites have been just as much against not only working Negroes but all Negroes period. I think one of the mistakes Negroes make is this worker solidarity thing. There's no such thing -it didn't even work in Russia." But history tells another story. Blacks, in struggles against racial oppression, have always looked to unite with other oppressed groups. During the great slave revolts of the past, black slaves formed strong alliances with Native American Indians. During the Civil War, alliances were formed with northern trade unionists and in 1880, black and white small farmers came together to form the Populist movement to defend their common interests.

Again after visits abroad Malcolm's position on this began to change. "In my recent travels into the African countries and others, it was impressed upon me the importance of having a working unity among all peoples, black as well as white. But the only way that this is going to be brought about is that the black ones have to be in unity first." He went on to say: "We will work with anyone, with any group, no matter what their color is, as long as they are genuinely interested in taking the type of steps necessary to bring an end to the injustices that black people in this country are inflicted by."

Even on the issue black nationalism, Malcolm's thoughts began to change. "I used to define Black Nationalism as the idea that the black man should control the economy of his community, the politics of the community and so forth. But when I was in Africa in May, in Ghana, I was speaking with the Algerian ambassador who is extremely militant and is a revolutionary in the truest sense of the word...When I told him my political, social and economic philosophy was black nationalism, he asked me where did that leave him? Because he was white. He was an African but he was Algerian and to all appearances, a white man. And I said I define my objective as the victory of Black Nationalism - where did that leave him? Where does that leave revolutionaries in Morocco, Egypt, Iraq and Mauritania? So he showed me where I was alienating people who were true revolutionaries, dedicated to overthrowing the system of exploitation that exists on this earth by any means necessary. So I had to do a lot of thinking and reappraising of my definition of Black Nationalism. Can we sum up the solution to the problems confronting our people as Black Nationalism? And if you noticed I haven't been using the expression for several months. But I would still be hard pressed to give a specific definition of the overall philosophy which I think is necessary for the liberation of black people in this country."

Organization of Afro American Unity (OAAU)

In June 1964 Malcolm announced the formation of the Organization of Afro American Unity. Self Defense of Afro Americans was an important feature in the program of this organization.

A voter registration drive was launched in the black community to make "every unregistered voter an independent voter." This in no way detracted from his position that the two capitalist parties of America: The Republican Party and the Democrat Party should in no way be supported by black people.

The OAAU launched a petition to be presented to the United Nations Human Right Commission, calling for the prosecution of the US government for their crimes against Afro Americans. While this may have been an effective propaganda campaign, that was all it could ever be. The United Nations has never and will never be an international upholder of justice. Rather it plays the role of a cover for US interests. We need only look at its role today in the Gulf war with the UN's refusal to lift a finger against Israel despite that government's treatment of Palestinians. Its role has never been to protect the rights of small countries or oppressed minorities.

If anyone was clear what a threat to the system he posed then Malcolm himself knew. He experienced weekly diatribes against him in the Nation of Islam newspaper, the firebombing of his home, FBI surveillance. He himself said, "Anything I do today, I regard as urgent. No man is given but so much to accomplish whatever his life's work...l am only facing facts when I know that any moment of any day, or any night, could bring me death." Malcolm X was assassinated before he was able to effectively translate his new ideas into action. He was buried at the age of 40 but as the next chapter shows, his ideas lived on.

The Black Panther Party

"Working class people of all colors must unite against the exploitative, oppressive ruling class. Let me emphasize again - we believe our fight is a class struggle not a race struggle."
— Bobby Seale, co-founder Black Panther Party

The death of Malcolm X spawned a new, determined layer of black youth. Having tried and tested the strategy of peaceful, non-violence they had found it wanting. They were now prepared for a different kind of action.

The Black Panther Party formed in 1966, drew much inspiration from the ideas of Malcolm X. They rejected pacifism and reformism in favor of militant action and self-defense against racists. They were the logical development of the struggle onto a higher level.

From their formation in Oakland, California, support grew rapidly for the Black Panthers. Their uncompromising Ten-point program called for full employment, decent housing and education for blacks. They demanded that blacks should be exempted from military service because they did not want to defend the American racist government. Most popular of all was their demand for an end to police brutality. Many young blacks, sick of daily harassment from the police were attracted to the Panthers, not only their program but their ability to organize a fight on these issues. Yet the Black Panthers went further, they recognized that to effectively change things they had to fight for an end to capitalism and for the establishment of a socialist society.

They are most famous for exercising their legal right to carry guns. This they used to patrol their communities and monitor the actions of the police.

They also established free food, clothing and Medicare programs for the poor. Much of this was financed by money they demanded off local business. They campaigned for democratic control of the police, for blacks to register as voters and called for a 30-hour week, without loss of pay to create more jobs from the unemployed.

All over America Panther chapters were formed. Panthers drafted into the army during the Vietnam War formed groups there. Panther caucuses were also set up within trade unions.

The state was terrified of the potential for the Panthers to gain mass support. White youth were in rebellion against the Vietnam War. Forty five percent of blacks fighting in Vietnam said they would be prepared to take up arms to secure justice at home.

The government replied to the movement, on the one hand, with concessions to the mass of blacks but they also meted out vicious repression to the most militant black leaders. At one stage, out of a leadership of 1000 three hundred of these were awaiting trial. Thirty-nine Panthers were gunned down in the street by the police.

Prisons became a fertile place where Panther members would recruit and educate other blacks. George Jackson, a young black, was won to the Panthers in this way. When he was eighteen he was convicted of robbery. After poor legal advice he had pleaded guilty expecting a sentence of one year or less. He was sentenced to one year to life imprisonment. Technically the parole board should determine when a prisoner on this sentence could be released. Racist violence was commonplace in the prisons. Any black that fought back would lose their parole. This happened to Jackson year after year.

As revolutionary socialists the leaders of the Black Panthers looked to other revolutionary leaders for guidance. They looked to Mao-Tse-Tung in China and Fidel Castro in Cuba. Although both had successfully carried through revolutions the vital missing ingredient in both cases was a working class leadership and workers democracy. The main mistake of the Panthers was not to clearly recognize the crucial role of the organized working class, both black and white in the struggle for socialism. The Panthers needed to organize black workers and appeal to white workers to form a united struggle to change society. Genuine Marxism would have advised the Panthers to win over the workers not by them robbing the rich to feed and defend the poor but by agitating for working people to take action to defend and feed themselves - by strikes and mass protests which would have given them the confidence of their own strength. This would prepare the movement for the greater confrontations with the ruling class that would inevitably be necessary to change society. In Revolutionary Suicide, Huey Newton, one of the founders of the Party said, "we were looked upon as an ad-hoc military group, acting outside the community fabric and too radical to be part of it. We saw ourselves as the revolutionary vanguard and did not fully understand that only the people can create the revolution. And hence the people did not follow our lead in picking up the gun."

We believe nevertheless that the Black Panthers represented a great step forward in the movement against racial oppression.

Some try to claim that the Panthers stood for black separatism. This is totally incorrect In Seize the Time, Bobby Seale, the other founder of the Black Panthers stressed, "We do not fight racism with racism. We fight racism with solidarity. We do not fight exploitative capitalism with black capitalism. We fight capitalism with basic socialism. We fight imperialism with proletarian internationalism."

They recognized that the working class could not afford to let racial or national prejudices divide them. Speaking about black separatists within the movement Bobby Seale said: "Those who want to obscure the struggle with ethnic differences are the ones who are aiding and maintaining the exploitation of the masses. We need unity to defeat the boss class - every strike shows that. All of us are laboring class people...in our view it is a class struggle between the massive proletarian working class and the small minority ruling class. Working class people of all colors must unite against the exploitative ruling class."

There is no doubt that the potential of the Panthers organizing terrified the American state. J Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, declared them the number one threat to the internal security of the US. The state tried to stamp them out in any way they could. Yet even now the message of the Black panthers can be heard. Internationally from the Middle East to the Caribbean to Britain; groups carrying their name have been formed. From Malcolm X to the Black Panthers to the present day the ideas of struggle and of socialist revolution live on.

Conclusion - Change the System

"The system cannot produce freedom for the Afro American. It is impossible for this system, this economic system, this political system, this social system, this system period. "
— Malcolm X

Governments, press and media would have us believe that much has improved for blacks since the days of the civil rights movement. Yet the illusion they try to create flies in the face of reality. Yes there maybe more black MPs, mayors and businessmen, but facts show that for the vast majority of black people nothing has fundamentally changed.

America

The scenes of wealth and happiness we see portrayed on television in The Cosby are a world apart from the average black family in the United States. Of the urban underclass in America 59% are black. The average white household is 32 times more wealthy than the average black household. One in three of the black population lives below the poverty line.

Britain

In Britain the unemployment rate amongst blacks is twice that of whites. While making up just 4.4% of the population blacks make up over 20% of the prisoners on remand.

These figures show that the few black "high flyers" have become totally removed from the reality of life for black people.

After the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, violent protests swept over 100 cities in America, 146 people were killed in riots that shook the government In response to the racial upheavals of the time the Kerner Commission was set up by President Johnson to investigate the causes. It drew the conclusion: "Our nation is moving towards two separate societies, one black, one white - separate and unequal," (with the likelihood of more and more blacks) "extending support to extremists who advocate civil disruption." The ruling class realized that unless reforms were carried out, revolutionary upheavals would develop. The Commission concluded that it would be unrealistic to try to abolish the ghettos i.e. poverty. Instead it recommended a strategy to take "substantial numbers of Negroes into the society outside the ghettos." Black tokenism followed and a practice that in essence amounted to a policy of liberation one at a time. For some this was of benefit. The number of black businesses rose 50% in the six years after 1970. But for most blacks things stayed the same. America, the richest, most powerful country in the world was unable to solve the problems facing ordinary African Americans.

After the upheavals of the early 1980s in Britain - Moss Side, Toxteth, London, Bristol - the ruling class tried a similar strategy here. To take the heat out of the struggle black leaders were drawn into the Government sponsored Race Relations Industry. Thousands of documents were written about meaningless equal opportunity programs and a small minority of blacks has well paid jobs within this industry. Many in effect have turned their back on the struggle. But for most blacks nothing has changed.

This system, capitalism, has miserably failed as far as black people are concerned. Also for white workers and youth this system has nothing to offer. Every major black struggle against racial oppression has been forced to draw the conclusion that unity against class oppression is imperative.

The anti-slavery movements, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Huey P. Newton all traveled down the road of believing black liberation could be achieved under capitalism. They were however forced to conclude the need for revolution and class unity.

Militant calls on all people, black-and white who want to fight racism to join us. But our battle will not stop at challenging the evils of racism. This entire system has to be changed. We fight for a socialist society that would eradicate racism, oppression and exploitation once and for all. Join with the Militant in the campaign for socialism internationally.

The Latest From The “Occupy May 1st” Website- March Separately, Strike Together –International General Strike- Down Tools! Down Computers! Down Books!- All Out On May Day 2012- Why You, Your Union, Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 General Strike In Boston (And Eveywhere) -Stand Up!-Fight Back!

2012-01-31T13:52:00.000-05:00

All Out For The Smedley Butler Brigade Veteran For Peace-Initiated Saint Patrick's Peace Parade, Sunday March 18th In South Boston!

2012-01-31T13:49:00.003-05:00

All Out For The Smedley Butler Brigade Veteran For Peace-Initiated Saint Patrick's Peace Parade, Sunday March 18th In South Boston!

From The “West Coast Port Shutdown” Website-This Is Class War, We Say No More!- Support The Defense Of The Longview, Washington Longshoremen!

2012-01-31T13:47:00.000-05:00

Click on the headline to link to the West Coast Port Shutdown website.

Markin comment:

We know that we are only at the very start of an upsurge in the labor movement as witness the stellar exemplary actions by the West Coast activists on December 12, 2011. As I have pointed out in remarks previously made elsewhere as part of the Boston solidarity rally with the West Coast Port Shutdown this is the way forward as we struggle against the ruling class for a very different, more equitable society. Not everything went as well, or as well-attended, as expected including at our rally in solidarity in Boston but we are still exhibiting growing pains in the post-Occupy encampment era which will get sorted out in the future.
******
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!

*******
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points

*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was this high in the American labor force. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work. Work that would be divided through local representative workers’ councils which would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work. Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing as implement “30 for 40” so that it will, in the end, be necessary to fight for and win a workers government to implement this demand.

Organize the unorganized is a demand that cries out for solution today now that the organized sectors of the labor movement, both public and private, in America are at historic lows, just over ten percent of the workforce. Part of the task is to reorganize some of the old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. The other sector that desperately need to be organized is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the service industries, hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that have become a dominant aspect of the American economy.

Organize the South-this low wage area, this consciously low-wage area, where many industries land before heading off-shore to even lower wage places cries out for organizing, especially among black and Hispanic workers who form the bulk of this industrial workforce. A corollary to organizing the South is obviously to organize internationally to keep the “race to the bottom” from continually occurring short of being resolved in favor of an international commonwealth of workers’ governments. Nobody said it was going to be easy.

Organize Wal-Mart- millions of workers, thousands of trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A victory here would be the springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement just as auto and steel lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant. Well, that’s a thought.

Defend the right of public and private workers to unionize. Simple-No more Wisconsins, no more attacks on collective bargaining the hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, or bourgeois recall elections either. Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.

Guest Commentary

From The Transitional Program Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International In 1938Sliding Scale of Wages and Sliding Scale of Hours

Under the conditions of disintegrating capitalism, the masses continue to live the meagerized life of the oppressed, threatened now more than at any other time with the danger of being cast into the pit of pauperism. They must defend their mouthful of bread, if they cannot increase or better it. There is neither the need nor the opportunity to enumerate here those separate, partial demands which time and again arise on the basis of concrete circumstances – national, local, trade union. But two basic economic afflictions, in which is summarized the increasing absurdity of the capitalist system, that is, unemployment and high prices, demand generalized slogans and methods of struggle.

The Fourth International declares uncompromising war on the politics of the capitalists which, to a considerable degree, like the politics of their agents, the reformists, aims to place the whole burden of militarism, the crisis, the disorganization of the monetary system and all other scourges stemming from capitalism’s death agony upon the backs of the toilers. The Fourth International demands employment and decent living conditions for all.

Neither monetary inflation nor stabilization can serve as slogans for the proletariat because these are but two ends of the same stick. Against a bounding rise in prices, which with the approach of war will assume an ever more unbridled character, one can fight only under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages. This means that collective agreements should assure an automatic rise in wages in relation to the increase in price of consumer goods.

Under the menace of its own disintegration, the proletariat cannot permit the transformation of an increasing section of the workers into chronically unemployed paupers, living off the slops of a crumbling society. The right to employment is the only serious right left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is being shorn from him at every step. Against unemployment, “structural” as well as “conjunctural,” the time is ripe to advance along with the slogan of public works, the slogan of a sliding scale of working hours. Trade unions and other mass organizations should bind the workers and the unemployed together in the solidarity of mutual responsibility. On this basis all the work on hand would then be divided among all existing workers in accordance with how the extent of the working week is defined. The average wage of every worker remains the same as it was under the old working week. Wages, under a strictly guaranteed minimum, would follow the movement of prices. It is impossible to accept any other program for the present catastrophic period.

Property owners and their lawyers will prove the “unrealizability” of these demands. Smaller, especially ruined capitalists, in addition will refer to their account ledgers. The workers categorically denounce such conclusions and references. The question is not one of a “normal” collision between opposing material interests. The question is one of guarding the proletariat from decay, demoralization and ruin. The question is one of life or death of the only creative and progressive class, and by that token of the future of mankind. If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. “Realizability” or “unrealizability” is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.

* Defend the independence of the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. In 2008 labor, organized labor, spent around 450 million dollars trying to elect Barack Obama and other Democrats (mainly). The results speak for themselves. For those bogus efforts the labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea then was (and is, as we come up to another presidential election cycle) that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of labor.” The past period of cuts-backs, cut-in-the back give backs should put paid to that notion. Although anyone who is politically savvy at all knows that is not true, not true for the labor skates at the top of the movement.

The hard reality is that the labor skates, not used to any form of class struggle or any kind of struggle, know no other way than class-collaboration, arbitration, courts, and every other way to avoid the appearance of strife, strife in defense of the bosses’ profits. The most egregious recent example- the return of the Verizon workers to work after two weeks last summer when they had the company on the run and the subsequent announcement by the company of record profits. That sellout strategy may have worked for the bureaucrats, or rather their “fathers” for a time back in the 1950s “golden age” of labor, but now we are in a very hard and open class war. The rank and file must demand an end to using their precious dues payments period for bourgeois candidates all of whom have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor from Obama on down.

This does not mean not using union dues for political purposes though. On the contrary we need to use them now more than ever in the class battles ahead. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized, organizing the South, organizing Wal-Mart, and other pro-labor causes. Think, for example, of the dough spent on the successful November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio. That type of activity is where labor’s money and other resources should go.

*End the endless wars!- As the so-called draw-down of American and Allied troops in Iraq reaches it final stages, the draw down of non-mercenary forces anyway, we must recognize that we anti-warriors failed, and failed rather spectacularly, to affect that withdrawal after a promising start to our opposition in late 2002 and early 2003 (and a little in 2006). As the endless American-led wars (even if behind the scenes, as in Libya) continue we had better straighten out our anti-war, anti-imperialist front quickly if we are to have any effect on the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan!

U.S. Hands Off Iran!- American (and world) imperialists are ratcheting up their propaganda war (right now) and increased economic sanctions that are a prelude to war well before the dust has settled on the now unsettled situation in Iraq and well before they have even sniffed at an Afghan withdrawal of any import. We will hold our noses, as we did with the Saddam leadership in Iraq and on other occasions, and call for the defense of Iran against the American imperial monster. A victory for the Americans (and their junior partner, Israel) in Iran is not in the interests of the international working class. Especially here in the “belly of the beast” we are duty-bound to call not just for non-intervention but for defense of Iran. We will, believe me we will, deal with the mullahs, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Islamic fundamentalist in our own way in our own time.

U.S. Hands Off The World!- With the number of “hot spots” that the American imperialists, or one or another of their junior allies, have their hands on in this wicked old world this generic slogan would seem to fill the bill.

Down With The War Budget! Not One Penny, Not One Person For The Wars! Honor World War I German Social-Democratic Party MP, Karl Liebknecht, who did just that. The litmus test for every political candidate must be first opposition to the war budgets (let’s see, right now winding up Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran preparations, China preparations, etc. you get my drift). Then that big leap. The whole damn imperialist military budget. Again, no one said it would be simple. Revolution may be easier that depriving the imperialists of their military money. Well….okay.

*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Free Quality Healthcare For All! This would be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The health and welfare of any society’s citizenry is the simple glue that holds that society together. It is no accident that one of the prime concerns of workers states like Cuba, whatever their other political problems, has been to place health care and education front and center and to provide to the best of their capacity for free, quality healthcare and education for all. Even the hide-bound social-democratic-run capitalist governments of Europe have, until recently anyway, placed the “welfare state” protections central to their programs.

Free, quality higher education for all! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! One Hundred, Two Hundred, Many Harvards!
This would again be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The struggle to increase the educational level of a society’s citizenry is another part of the simple glue that holds that society together. Today higher education is being placed out of reach for many working-class and minority families. Hell, it is getting tough for the middle class as well.
Moreover the whole higher educational system is increasing skewed toward those who have better formal preparation and family lives leaving many deserving students in the wilderness. Take the resources of the private institutions and spread them around, throw in hundreds of billions from the government (take from the military budget and the bank bail-out money), get rid of the top heavy and useless college administration apparatuses, mix it up, and let students, teachers, and campus workers run the thing through councils on a democratic basis.

Forgive student debt! The latest reports indicate that college student debt is something like a trillion dollars, give or take a few billion but who is counting. The price of tuition and expenses has gone up dramatically while services have not kept pace. What has happened is that the future highly educated workforce that a modern society, and certainly a socialist society, desperately needs is going to be cast in some form of indentured servitude to the banks or other lending agencies for much of their young working lives. Let the banks take a “hit” for a change!

Stop housing foreclosures now! Hey, everybody, everywhere in the world not just in America should have a safe, clean roof over their heads. Hell, even a single family home that is part of the “American dream,” if that is what they want. We didn’t make the housing crisis in America (or elsewhere, like in Ireland, where the bubble has also burst). The banks did. Their predatory lending practices and slip-shot application processes were out of control. Let them take the “hit” here as well.

*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Karl Marx was right way back in the 19th century on his labor theory of value, the workers do produce the social surplus appropriated by the capitalists. Capitalism tends to immiserate the mass of society for the few. Most importantly capitalism, a system that at one time was historically progressive in the fight against feudalism and other ancient forms of production, has turned into its opposite and now is a fetter on production. The current multiple crises spawned by this system show there is no way forward, except that unless we push them out, push them out fast, they will muddle through, again.

Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Socialism is the only serious answer to the human crisis we face economically, socially, culturally and politically. This socialist system is the only one calculated to take one of the great tragedies of life, the struggle for daily survival in a world that we did not create, and replace it with more co-operative human endeavors.

Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. None of the nice things mentioned above can be accomplished without as serious struggle for political power. We need to struggle for an independent working-class-centered political party that we can call our own and where our leaders act as “tribunes of the people” not hacks. The creation of that workers party, however, will get us nowhere unless it fights for a workers government to begin the transition to the next level of human progress on a world-wide scale.

Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!

Guest Commentary from the IWW (Industrial Workers Of The World, Wobblies) website http://www.iww.org/en/culture/official/preamble.shtml

Preamble to the IWW Constitution (1905)

Posted Sun, 05/01/2005 - 8:34am by IWW.org Editor

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.

Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.

We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.

These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.

Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."

It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.

From #Ur-Occupied Boston (#Ur-Tomemonos Boston)-This Is Class War-We Say No More-Defend Our Unions! - Defend The Boston Commune! Take The Offensive!- Why You, Your Union , Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 General Strike In Boston-Stand Up!-Fight Back!

2012-01-31T13:45:00.001-05:00

Click on the headline to link to updates from the Occupy Boston website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011. I will post important updates as they appear on that site.

Markin comment:

We know that we are only at the very start of an upsurge in the labor movement as witness the stellar exemplary actions by the West Coast activists on December 12, 2011. As I have pointed out in remarks previously made elsewhere as part of the Boston solidarity rally with the West Coast Port Shutdown on that date this is the way forward as we struggle against the ruling class for a very different, more equitable society. Not everything went as well, or as well-attended, as expected including at our rally in solidarity in Boston on the afternoon of December 12th but we are still exhibiting growing pains in the post-Occupy encampment era. Some of that will get sorted out in the future as well get a better grip of the important of the labor movement to winning victories in our struggles.
******
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!

*******
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
Why You, Your Union , Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 General Strike In Boston-Stand Up!-Fight Back!

Wage cuts, long work hours, steep consumer price rises, unemployment, small or no pensions, little or no paid vacation time, plenty of poor and inadequate housing, homelessness, and wide-spread sicknesses as a result of a poor medical system or no health insurance. Sound familiar? Words, perhaps, taken from today’s global headlines? Well, yes. But these were also the similar conditions that faced our forebears in America back in the 1880s when the 1% were called, and rightly so, “the robber barons,” and threatened, as one of their kind stated in a fit of candor, “to hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” so that they could maintain their luxury in peace. That too has not changed.

What did change then is that our forebears fought back, fought back long and hard, starting with the fight for the eight-hour day symbolized each year by a May Day celebration of working class power. We need to reassert that claim. This May Day let us revive that tradition as we individually act around our separate grievances and strike, strike like the furies, collectively against the 1%.

No question over the past several years (really decades but it is just more public and in our face now) American working people has taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin in every possible way. Starting with massive job losses, heavy job losses in the service and manufacturing sectors (and jobs that are not coming back), paying for the seemingly never-ending bail–out of banks, other financial institutions and corporations “to big to fail,” home foreclosures and those “under water,” effective tax increases (since the rich refuse to pay, we pay), mountains of consumer debt for everything from modern necessities to just daily get-bys, and college student loan debt as a lifetime deadweight around the neck of the kids there is little to glow about in the harsh light of the “American Dream.”

Add to that the double (and triple) troubles facing immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and women and the grievances voiced in the Declaration of Independence seem like just so much whining. In short, it is not secret that working people have faced, are facing and, apparently, will continue to face an erosion of their material well-being for the foreseeable future something not seen by most people since the 1930s Great Depression, the time of our grandparents (or great-grandparents).

That is this condition will continue unless we take some lessons from those same 1930s and struggle, struggle like demons, against the 1% that seem to have all the card decks stacked against us. Struggle like they did in places like Minneapolis, San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and Detroit. Those labor-centered struggles demonstrated the social power of working people to hit the “economic royalists” (the name coined for the 1% of that day) to shut the bosses down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property. The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take (and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their “free-speech” parks (up to a point as we have found out), and curse them to eternity as long as we don’t touch their production, “perks,” and profits. Moreover an inspired fight like the actions proposed for this May Day 2012 can help new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed, homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, help themselves to get out from under.

Show Power

We demand:

*Hands Off Our Public Worker Unions! Hands Off All Our Unions!

* Give the unemployed work! Billions for public works projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure (bridges, roads, sewer and water systems, etc.)!

*End the endless wars!

* Full citizenship rights for all those who made it here no matter how they got here!

* A drastic increase in the minimum wage and big wage increases for all workers!
•
* A moratorium on home foreclosures! No evictions!

* A moratorium on student loan debt! Free, quality higher education for all! Create 100, 200, many publicly-supported Harvards!

*No increases in public transportation fares! No transportation worker lay-offs! Free public transportation!

To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1, 2012 we will be organizing
a wide-ranging series of mass collective participatory actions:

*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where
there is no union - a one-day general strike.

*We will be organizing where a strike is not possible to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out.”

*We will be organizing students to walk-out of their schools (or not show up in the first place), set up campus picket lines, or to rally at a central location, probably Boston Common.

*We will be calling in our communities for a mass consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to make purchases on that day.

Watch this website and other social media sites for further specific details of events and actions.

All out on May Day 2012.

*Out In The Be-Bop Night- In The Time Of The High School Hop, Circa 1960

2012-01-31T03:27:00.000-05:00

Recently I have been in something of 1960s high school remembrance mode, mainly as a result of evaluating the influence of the “beats” (Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady and the usual suspects), on my youthful political (not much), social (a fair amount), and cultural (lots) development, but also as a result of re-watching George Lucas’ American Graffiti, a 1960s coming-of-age film that fits comfortably in my own high school mode. I have reviewed the film as a whole elsewhere in this space but I wish to make a special point about the high school dance segment of the film (“Not Ready For Prime Time Class Struggle-The Baby-Boomer Birth Of The Search For The Blue-Pink American Western Night- “American Graffiti”-Film Review”, dated September, 8, 2010).

George Lucas’s inclusion of a local high school dance segment in this film was inspired. The segment is not central to the action, such as it is, of the film, but it certainly is calculated to evoke almost universal nostalgia for anyone (meaning almost everyone these days) who has very had to deal, in one way or another, with the question of this time-honored (if hoary) high school tradition. Each generation probably has its own take on what this experience was like, but most of the real action was behind the scenes. And in that sense the film caught the three high points. Women can fill in own blanks in reverse, but here are some of them from a man’s perspective.

First of all stag (single no way, with the guys, or not at all, although how many and who was always up for grabs, especially on the important “shotgun” question) or on a date (double-date, somebody’s left out sister, your sister, anything to not be a wallflower, a sickly wallflower among the ‘losers’ to boot, as those dance moments ticked slowly, so slowly by)? Many an ungodly hour was spent on that date question mulling over, no, not what you think, who to invite, no that was usually the easy part, but rather getting up enough nerve to make the call to make the invitation. And check this out, on more than one occasion, and I am sure the same was true for you, somehow your intelligence network had failed and it turns out that the certain she, your dreamy certain she, damn, her, had a “steady.” Christ, what a waste of time.

Secondly, grooming preparations- I will propose here, in best scientific method form (or at least quasi- scientific form for that is all this thing will hold) that there was an inverse relationship to the amount of time that one spent on this work, you know, shower, shave (in those days you had to, if you could), comb always at the ready, a little something for the underarms and some men’s fragrance to give the smell of being the least bit civilized, and the answer to the stag/date question. In this sense the inverse is the extra time spent in order to attract that certain she (remember women just reverse the gender, or today everyone fill in your own preference experience) so when the next goddam dance or mixed social event came up you were dated up with that certain she and you could just throw a little fatal after-shave on and fly out the door. Oh, by the way, I refuse, I totally refuse to go over the number of time that I cooled my heels while that occasional captured “she” made her grooming preparations, first date or any date, even if it was just to make preparations to the drugstore soda fountain. Mercifully, on that score I did not have a sister to scream at or else I might not be writing this screed today, at least this side of a cellblock.

Thirdly, the gathering of the dough, the always short of dough problem that plagued our poor working class household and that I noticed did not seem to be any kind of problem in that California suburban valley locale of “American Graffiti”. Money for exotic appearing (hey, it was California, remember, even the fast food drive-ins had to be retro-fine) double-dip hamburgers (with fries), cherry cokes, for two, for two, my god, plus some gas money, plus, plus, plus, you know a guy has got expenses in this world. The real problem was whether to borrow from parents, or pick up some chattel slave job. Getting it from the parents always came with some awful terms, usually worthy of some international diplomatic accord, and more grief than it was worth, unless I was desperate, or girl-hungry. Oh ya, and you had to hear the obligatory we do this and that to keep a roof over your head along with the bucks. You know the drill, probably.

And while we are on the subject of parents the inevitable question comes up about what time one should be home by. They say X, and make that loan, that hard-scrabble hideous loan that has more conditions and enforcements than a loan shark, contingent on the observance of a “reasonable” (parent reasonable) hour. I say Y, because in the back of my mind I, if I get lucky (no further discussion necessary, right?) then I need plenty of time and can’t be worried about curfews, or reasonable times. Come to think of it, even fifty years later, come on Ma you be reasonable (and it was always Ma on this one in our old working class neighborhoods, and maybe yours too. Dad was brought in, if he was brought in at all, at this point in our lives only for the heavy artillery stuff).

Once these preparations and battles have been settled then, and here is where American Graffiti is like from a dream, the question of transportation to the dance comes into play. Here I mean a car, and if you’ve read my review of American Graffiti you know I mean a “boss” car. You would have to go to an automobile museum to see such treasures these days. By the way don’t even utter the words public transportation for this occasion or I will think that you grew up in New York City or some place like than and that you have not really been paying attention after all my paeans to the California endless highways and the search of the elusive blue-pink great American Western night.

In any case, this car-less writer, this foot-sore, shoe leather-beaten, car-less writer, depended, sometimes cynically so, on cultivating friendships with guys who had such “boss” cars, particularly the renowned ’57 Chevy that still makes me quiver at the thought of. Needless to say, in expectation at least, of the night’s successes a stop at the local gas station for a fill-up (a couple of bucks then) check the oil and water, kick the tires and so on preceded our big entrance at the dance.

Part of the charm of the American Graffiti segment on the local high school dance is, as I have noted previously, once you get indoors it could have been anyplace U.S.A. (and I am willing to bet anytime U.S.A., as well. For this baby-boomer, that particular high school dance, could have taken place at my high school when I was a student in the early 1960s). From the throwaway crepe paper decorations that festooned the place to the ever-present gym bleachers to the chaperones to the platform the local band (a band that if it did not hit it big would go on to greater glory at our future weddings, birthday parties, and other important occasion) covering the top hits of the day performed on it was a perfect replica.

Also perfect replica were the classic boys’ attire for a casual dance, plaid or white sports shirt, chinos, stolid shoes, and short-trimmed hair (no beards, beads, bell-bottoms, its much to early in the decade for that) and for the girls blouses (or maybe sweaters, cashmere, if I recall being in fashion at the time, at least in the colder East), full swirling dresses, and, I think beehive hair-dos. Wow! Of course, perfect replica were the infinite variety of dances (frug, watusi, twist, stroll, etc) that blessed, no, twice blessed, rock and roll let us do in order to not to have to dance too waltz close. Mercy. And I cannot finish up this part without saying perfect replica hes looking at certain shes (if stag, of course, eyes straight forward if dated up, or else bloody hell) and also perfect replica wallflowers, as well.

Not filmed in American Graffiti, although a solo slow one highlighted the tensions between Steve and Laurie) Ron Howard and Cindy Williams) but ever present and certainly the subject of some comment in this space was that end of the night dance. I’ll just repeat what I have repeated elsewhere. This last dance was always one of those slow ones that you had to dance close on. And just hope, hope to high heaven, that you didn’t destroy your partner’s shoes and feet. Well, as I have noted before, one learns a few social skills in this world if for no other reason that to “impress” that certain she (or he for shes, or nowadays, just mix and match your sexual preferences) mentioned above. I did, didn’t you?

And after the dance? Well, I am the soul of discretion, and you should be too. Let’s put it this way. Sometimes I got home earlier than the Ma agreed time, but sometimes, not enough now that I think about it, I saw huge red suns rising up over the blue waters. Either way, my friends, worth every blessed minute of anguish, right?