AMERICAN LEFT HISTORY

The Latest From Occupy U/Mass Boston- Defend The Occupation! Hands Off The Occupiers!

2012-01-26T14:25:00.000-05:00

Click on the headline to link to the Occupy U/Mass Boston website.

Please sign and share! Tell the administration that the occupation of the ONLY public university in Boston should stay!

Why This Is Important

WE ARE THE 99% at UMass Boston who have seen our fees rise 8% year after year with no end inorder to carry out the 1%’s “Master Plan” for our school. We are the 99% who have had our pay frozen by the administration. We are the 99% who are going to graduate from the only public four-year school in this city with $25,000 in student debt and little prospects. We are the 99% who are tired of watching the privatization of this university. We are the 99% who don’t want our university run by the unelected bureaucrats known as the Board of Trustees. We are tired of the Board of Trustees investing our fees in hidden funds and trusts with no interest in insuring that they do not financially support war profiteers.

We have liberated this space in the campus center from the corporate administrators who control this university. We will no longer recognize their illegitimate authority; we will take the entire university back from the 1% so the 99% can have their university. Non-violent direct action and people power is our weapon against the 1% and it’s plans to corporatize the university.For far too long the 99% have been excluded from the global conversation about the direction of our schools, our neighborhoods, and our world. We are in solidarity with Occupy Wall St., Occupy Boston,Occupy UC Davis, Occupy Berkeley, and all other Occupy movements. We are in solidarity with the student revolt in Chile and those at hundreds of other universities who are holding down a space for the 99% in the conversation about our future. We hope our revolt can bring the 1%’s plan of privatization to a halt. We want the voices of every member of 99% to be heard in creating the 99%’s strategic plan for the university.

Join the conversation:
Twitter – https://twitter.com/OccupyUMB
Youtube – http://www.youtube.com/OccupyUMassBoston
Gmail – OccupyUMB@gmail.com

Tags: OUMB, Occupy UMass Boston,

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!

2012-01-26T10:34:00.000-05:00

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.

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

From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky-On The Evolving Theory Of Permanent Revolution-Problems of the Chinese Revolution-The Chinese Revolution and the Theses of Comrade Stalin (1927)

2012-01-26T10:33:00.000-05:00

Click on the headline to link to the Leon Trotsky Internet Archives.

Markin comment:

Blame it on Leon Trotsky, Blame it on Lenin. Blame it on the Russian October Revolution of 1917. Or, maybe, just blame it on my reaction to the residue from the bourgeois holiday celebrations. Today I am, in any case, in a mood for “high Trotskyism.” That is always a good way to readjust the political compass, and read some very literate political writing as well. With all due respect to black author James Baldwin and his great work, Another Country, that I have just finished reading Jimmy you have to share the stage today. Okay?
*********
Leon Trotsky

Problems of the Chinese Revolution

The Chinese Revolution and the Theses of Comrade Stalin

May 17, 1927

The theses of comrade Stalin entitled Problems of the Chinese Revolution were published in Pravda on April 21, 1927, a few days after the close of the plenary session of the Central Committee [1], to which these theses were never presented and at which they were never discussed (although all the members of the plenum were still in Moscow).

Moreover, the theses of comrade Stalin are erroneous to such a point, they turn the matter upside down to such a degree, they are so permeated with the spirit of chvostism, they are so inclined to perpetuate the mistakes already made, that to remain silent about them would be a positive crime.

The Lessons of the Chinese Events Must Be Drawn
1) The prohibition of an open discussion of the theoretical and tactical problems of the Chinese revolution has been motivated of late by the fact that such a discussion would delight the enemies of the USSR. Naturally it would be quite impermissible to make public facts that could be seized upon by enemies, who, incidentally, do not shrink from the direct invention of “facts” and “documents”. But there is no need at all for such a discussion. It is only a question of determining the driving forces of the Chinese revolution and of estimating the basic line of its political direction. In other words, it is a question of discussing the same questions to which the theses of comrade Stalin are devoted. If these theses can be published, then why cannot a criticism of them be published?

It is an unheard-of mistake to contend that a discussion of the problems of the Chinese revolution can injure our state interests. If this were so, then not only the Communist Party of the Soviet Union but every other party of the Communist International, including the Chinese, would have to abstain from any discussion. But the interests of the Chinese revolution, as well as the interests of the education of all the Communist parties in the world, demand an open, energetic, exhaustive discussion of all the problems of the Chinese revolution, especially those in dispute. It is not true that the interests of the Communist International conflict with the state interests of the USSR. The renunciation of discussion of the mistakes is not dictated by the interests of a workers’ state, but by a false “apparatus-like”, bureaucratic attitude towards the Chinese revolution as well as towards the interests of the USSR.

2) The April defeat of the Chinese revolution is not only a defeat for the opportunist line but also a defeat for the bureaucratic methods of the leadership, through which the Party is confronted with every decision as an accomplished fact: the decision, it is explained, does not justify criticism until facts demonstrate its annulment, whereupon it is just as automatically, that is, behind the back of the Party, replaced by a decision which is frequently more erroneous, like the present theses of Stalin. Such a method, which, in and by itself, is incompatible with the development of a revolutionary party, becomes an especially heavy obstacle to young parties that can and should learn independently from the experiences of defeats and mistakes.

The theses of comrade Stalin are published. At least within the limits of these theses, the questions of the Chinese revolution can and must be discussed openly and from every angle.

The Yoke of Imperialism and the Class Struggle
3) The peculiarity of the Chinese revolution – in comparison, for example, with our revolution of 1905 – lies above all in the semi-colonial position in China. A policy that disregarded the powerful pressure of imperialism on the internal life of China would be radically false. But a policy that proceeded from an abstract conception of national oppression without its class refraction and reflection would be no less false. The main source of the mistakes in the theses of comrade Stalin, as in the whole leading line in general, is the false conception of the role of imperialism and its influence on the class relationships of China.

The imperialist yoke is supposed to serve as a justification for the policy of the “bloc of four classes”. The yoke of imperialism leads allegedly to the fact that “all” (!) the classes of China look upon the Canton government as the “national government of the whole of China in the same way” (!). (Speech of comrade Kalinin, Izvestia, March 6) This is essentially the position of the right Guomindang man, Dai Tshi Tao, who pretends that the laws of the class struggle do not exist for China – because of imperialist pressure.

China is an oppressed semi-colonial country. The development of the productive forces of China, which is proceeding in capitalist forms, demands the shaking off of the imperialist yoke. The war of China for its national independence is a progressive war, because it flows from the necessities of the economic and cultural development of China itself, as well as because it facilitates the development of the revolution of the British proletariat and that of the whole world proletariat.

But this by no means signifies that the imperialist yoke is a mechanical one, subjugating “all” the classes of China in the “same” way. The powerful role of foreign capital in the life of China has caused very strong sections of the Chinese bourgeoisie, the bureaucracy and the military to join their destiny with that of imperialism. Without this tie, the enormous role of the so-called “militarists” in the life of modern China would be inconceivable.

It would further be profound na‘veté to believe that an abyss lies between the so-called comprador bourgeoisie, that is, the economic and political agency of foreign capital in China, and the so-called “national” bourgeoisie. No, these two sections stand incomparably closer to each other than the bourgeoisie and the masses of workers and peasants. The bourgeoisie participated in the national war as an internal brake, looking upon the worker and peasant masses with growing hostility, and becoming ever readier to conclude a compromise with imperialism.

Installed within the Guomindang and its leadership, the national bourgeoisie has been essentially an instrument of the compradors and imperialism. It can remain in the camp of the national war only because of the weakness of the worker and peasant masses, the lack of development of the class struggle, the lack of independence of the Chinese Communist Party and the docility of the Guomindang in the hands of the bourgeoisie.

It is a gross mistake to think that imperialism mechanically welds together all the classes of China from without. That is the position of the Chinese Kadet, Dai Tshi Tao, but in no wise ours. The revolutionary struggle against imperialism does not weaken, but rather strengthens the political differentiation of the classes. Imperialism is a highly powerful force in the internal relationships of China. The main source of this force is not the warships in the waters of the Yangtze Kiang – they are only auxiliaries – but the economic and political bond between foreign capital and the native bourgeoisie. The struggle against imperialism, precisely because of its economic and military power, demands a powerful exertion of forces from the very depths of the Chinese people. To really arouse the workers and peasants against imperialism is possible only by connecting their basic and most profound life interests with the cause of the country’s liberation. A workers’ strike – small or large – an agrarian rebellion, an uprising of the oppressed sections in city and country against the usurer, against the bureaucracy, against the local military satraps, all that arouses the multitudes, that welds them together, that educates, steels, is a real step forward on the road to the revolutionary and social liberation of the Chinese people. Without that, the military successes and failures of the right, semi-right or semi-left generals will remain foam on the surface of the ocean. But everything that brings the oppressed and exploited masses of the toilers to their feet inevitably pushes the national bourgeoisie into an open bloc with the imperialists. The class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the masses of workers and peasants is not weakened, but, on the contrary, is sharpened by imperialist oppression, to the point of bloody civil war at every serious conflict. The Chinese bourgeoisie always has a solid rearguard behind it in imperialism, which will always help it with money, goods and shells against the workers and peasants.

Only wretched philistines and sycophants, who hope in their hearts to obtain freedom for China as an imperialist bounty for the good behaviour of the masses, can believe that the national liberation of China can be achieved by moderating the class struggle, by curbing strikes and agrarian uprisings, by abandoning the arming of the masses, etc. When comrade Martynov proposes that strikes and the struggle on the land be replaced by a solution of the questions through the medium of governmental arbitration, then he differs in no way from Dai Tshi Tao, the philosophical inspirer of Chiang Kai-shek’s policy.

Democratic or Socialist Revolution?
4) The senseless contention is attributed to the Opposition that China now stands on the eve of a socialist dictatorship of the proletariat. There is nothing original in this “criticism”. On the eve of 1905 and later on, the Mensheviks frequently declared that Lenin’s tactic would be correct if Russia were directly on the eve of the socialist revolution. Lenin, however, explained to them that his tactic was the only road to the radical victory of the democratic revolution which, under favourable conditions, would begin to grow over into a socialist revolution.

The question of the “non-capitalist” path of development of China was posed in a conditional form by Lenin, for whom, as for us, it was and is ABC wisdom that the Chinese revolution, left to its own forces, that is, without the direct support of the victorious proletariat of the USSR and the working class of all advanced countries, could end only with the conquest of the broadest possibilities for the capitalist development of the country, with more favourable conditions for the labour movement.

5) No less basically false is the contention that the question as to whether the Chinese proletariat needs an independent party; whether this party needs a bloc with the Guomindang or must subordinate itself to it; whether soviets are necessary, etc., must be solved in accordance with how we conceive the course and the tempo of the further stages of the Chinese revolution. It is quite possible that China will have to pass through a relatively prolonged stage of parliamentarism, beginning with a Constituent Assembly. This demand is inscribed on the banner of the Communist Party. If the bourgeois democratic revolution does not grow into a socialist revolution in the near future, then in all probability the workers’ and peasants’ soviets will pass from the scene for a definite stage and give way to a bourgeois régime, which, depending on the progress of the world revolution, will in turn give way, at a new historical stage, to the dictatorship of the proletariat.

6) But first of all, the inevitability of the capitalist path has by no means been proved; and secondly – this argument is now incomparably more timely for us – the bourgeois tasks can be solved in various ways. The slogan of the Constituent Assembly becomes an empty abstraction, often simple charlatanry, if one does not add who will convoke it and with what program. Chiang Kai-shek can raise the slogan of a Constituent Assembly against us even tomorrow, just as he has now raised his “workers’ and peasants’ program” against us. We want a Constituent Assembly convoked not by Chiang Kai-shek but by the executive committee of the workers’ and peasants’ soviets. That is the only serious and sure road.

7) Basically untenable is the endeavour of comrade Bukharin to justify the opportunist and compromising line by referring to the allegedly predominant role of the “remnants of feudalism” in Chinese economy. Even if comrade Bukharin’s estimation of Chinese economy rested on an economic analysis and not on scholastic definitions, the “remnants of feudalism” would still be unable to justify the policy which so manifestly facilitated the April coup d’état.

The Chinese revolution has a national bourgeois character principally because the development of the productive forces of Chinese capitalism collides with its governmental customs dependence upon the countries of imperialism. The obstruction of the development of Chinese industry and the throttling of the internal market involve the conservation and rebirth of the most backward forms of production in agriculture, of the most parasitic forms of exploitation, of the most barbaric forms of oppression and violence, the growth of surplus population, as well as the persistence and aggravation of pauperism and all sorts of slavery. No matter how great the specific weight of the typically “feudal” elements in Chinese economy may be they can be swept away only in a revolutionary way, and consequently not in alliance with the bourgeoisie but in direct struggle against it. The more complicated and tortuous is the interlacing of feudal and capitalist relations, the less the agrarian question can be solved by legislation from above, the more indispensable is the revolutionary initiative of the peasant masses in close union with the workers and the poor population of the cities, the falser is the policy that clings convulsively to the alliance with the bourgeoisie and the large landowner and subordinates its work among the masses to this alliance. The policy of the “bloc of four classes” not only prepared the bloc of the bourgeoisie with imperialism, but also meant the preservation of all the survivals of barbarism in administration and in economy.

To invoke the bourgeois character of the Chinese revolution, in particular against the soviets, is simply to renounce the experiences of our bourgeois revolutions of 1905 and February 1917. In these revolutions, the immediate and essential objective was the abolition of the autocratic and feudal régime. This aim did not exclude, but demanded the arming of the workers and the formation of soviets. Here is how Lenin treated the subject after the February revolution:

“For an effective struggle against the tsarist monarchy, for a real assurance of liberty not only in words, not in elegant promises of the rhetoricians of liberalism, the workers must not support the new government, but the government must ‘support’ the workers. For the only guarantee of freedom and of the final destruction of tsarism is the arming of the proletariat, the consolidation, the extension, the development of the role, the significance, and the power of the workers’ and soldiers’ soviets. Everything else is phrases and lies of the politicians in the liberal and radical camps who are deceiving themselves. Support the arming of the workers or at least do not obstruct this process, and freedom in Russia will be invincible, the monarchy irretrievable, the republic assured. Otherwise the people will be deceived. Promises are cheap. They cost nothing. All the bourgeois politicians in all the bourgeois revolutions have ‘fed’ the people with promises and stupefied the workers. Our revolution is a bourgeois revolution, therefore the workers must support the bourgeoisie; that is what the worthless politicians from the camp of the liquidators say. Our revolution is a bourgeois revolution, say we, the Marxists; therefore the workers must open the eyes of the people to the deception of the bourgeois politicians, must teach it to put no trust in words, to rely upon its own forces, its own organization, its own unity, its own arms.” [2]

The Chinese revolutionist who casts the over-cunning resolutions and comments on the bloc of four classes out of his head, will firmly grasp the sense of these simple words of Lenin, will be sure not to go astray and will attain the goal.

The School of Martynov in the Chinese Question
8) The official leadership of the Chinese revolution has been oriented all this time on a “general national united front” or on the “bloc of four classes” (cf. the report of Bukharin; the leader in the Communist International, no.11; the unpublished speech by Stalin to the Moscow functionaries on April 5, 1927; the article by Martynov in Pravda on April 10; the leader in Pravda of March 16; the speech by comrade Kalinin in Izvestia of March 6, 1927; the speech by comrade Rudzutak in Pravda of March 9, 1927; etc., etc.). Matters had gone so far on this track, that on the eve of Chiang Kai-shek’s coup d’état, Pravda, in order to expose the Opposition, proclaimed that revolutionary China was not being ruled by a bourgeois government but by a “government of the bloc of four classes”.

The philosophy of Martynov, which has the sorry courage to carry all the mistakes of Stalin and Bukharin in the questions of Chinese policy to their logical conclusion, does not meet a trace of objection. Yet it is tantamount to trampling under foot the fundamental principles of Marxism. It reproduces the crudest features of Russian and international Menshevism, applied to the conditions of the Chinese revolution. Not for nothing does the present leader of the Mensheviks, Dan, write in the last number of Sotsialisticheski Vestnik:

“‘In principle’ the Bolsheviks were also for retaining the ‘united front’ in the Chinese revolution up to the completion of the task of national liberation. On April 10, Martynov, in Pravda, most effectively and despite the obligatory abuse of the Social Democrats, in a quite ‘Menshevik manner’ showed the ‘Left’ Oppositionist Radek the correctness of the official position which insists on the necessity of retaining the ‘bloc of four classes’, on not hastening to overthrow the coalition government in which the workers sit side by side with the big bourgeoisie, not to impose ‘socialist tasks’ upon it prematurely.” [3]

Everyone who knows the history of the struggle of Bolshevism against Menshevism, particularly in the question of relations to the liberal bourgeoisie, must acknowledge that Dan’s approval of the “rational principles” of the Martynov school is not accidental, but follows with perfect legitimacy. It is only unnatural that this school should raise its voice with impunity in the ranks of the Comintern.

The old Menshevik tactic of 1905 to 1917, which was crushed under foot by the march of events, is now transferred to China by the Martynov school, much the same as capitalist trade dumps its most inferior merchandise, which finds no market in the mother country, into the colonies. The merchandise has not even been renovated. The arguments are the same, letter for letter, as they were twenty years ago. Only, where formerly the word autocracy stood, the word imperialism has been substituted for it in the text. Naturally, British imperialism is different from autocracy. But the Menshevik reference to it does not differ in the slightest from its reference to autocracy. The struggle against foreign imperialism is as much a class struggle as the struggle against autocracy. That it cannot be exorcized by the idea of the national united front, is far too eloquently proved by the bloody April events, a direct consequence of the policy of the bloc of four classes.

What the “Line” Looked Like in Practice
9) On the past period, which terminated with the April coup d’état, the theses of comrade Stalin announce:

“The line adopted was the only correct line.”

What did it look like in practice? An eloquent reply is supplied by Tang Pingshan, the Communist minister of agriculture, in his report at the Seventh Plenum of the ECCI in December 1926.

“Since the establishment of the national government in Canton last July, which is nominally a government of the left wing, the power has actually been in the hands of the right wing ... The movement of the workers and peasants cannot develop to its full breadth as a result of various obstacles. After the March putsch a military dictatorship of the centre [that is, Chiang Kai-shek] was established, while the political power remained as before in the hands of the right wing. The whole political power, which should properly [!] have belonged to the left wing, is finally lost.”

So: the left “should have” had the power, but finally lost it; the state power belonged to the right, the military authority, which is incomparably more powerful, arid was entirely in the hands of the “centre” of Chiang Kai-shek, which became the centre of the conspiracy. Under such conditions, it is not difficult to understand why “the movement of the workers and peasants” could not develop as it should have.

Tang Pingshan gives an even more precise characterization of what the “only correct line” looked like in reality:

“... We sacrificed the interests of the workers and peasants in practice ... After lengthy negotiations with us, the government did not as much as promulgate a trade-union law ... The government did not accept the demands of the peasantry, which we presented to it in the name of various social organizations. When conflicts arose between the large landowners and the poor peasants, the government always took the side of the former.”

How could all this happen? Tang Pingshan cautiously names two reasons:

a) “The left leaders are not capable of consolidating and extending their influence by means of political power”;

b) The right wing “won the possibility to act, partly as a result of our wrong tactic”.

10) Such are, the political relations that received the pompous title of the “bloc of four classes”. Such “blocs” abound in the revolutionary as well as the parliamentary history of bourgeois countries: the big bourgeoisie leads the petty-bourgeois democrats, the phrase-mongers of the national united front, behind it, and the latter, in turn, confuse the workers and drag them along behind the bourgeoisie. When the proletarian “tail”, despite the efforts of the petty-bourgeois phrase-mongers, begins to stir too violently, the bourgeoisie orders its generals to stamp on it. Then the opportunists observe with an air of profundity that the bourgeoisie has “betrayed” the national cause.

11) But did not the Chinese bourgeoisie “nevertheless” fight against imperialism? This argument too is an empty commonplace. The compromisers of every country, in similar cases, have always assured the workers that the liberal bourgeoisie is fighting against reaction. The Chinese bourgeoisie utilized the petty-bourgeois democracy only in order to conclude an alliance with imperialism against the workers. The Northern expedition only served to strengthen the bourgeoisie and weaken the workers. A tactic that prepared such a result is a false tactic. “We sacrificed the interests of the workers and peasants in practice,” says Tang Pingshan. What for? To support the bloc of four classes. And the results? A colossal success of the bourgeois counter-revolution, the consolidation of shattered imperialism, the weakening of the USSR. Such a policy is criminal. Unless it is mercilessly condemned, we cannot take a step forward.

The Theses Justify a Line for Which There Is No Justification
12) The theses endeavour even now to justify the policy which united the party of the proletariat with the big bourgeoisie within the framework of one organization, the Guomindang, where the whole leadership was in the hands of the bourgeoisie. The theses declare: “This was the line ... for the utilization of the rights, their connections and experiences, in so far as they submitted [!] to the discipline of the Guomindang.” Now we know very well how the bourgeoisie submitted to “discipline” and how the proletariat utilized the rights, that is, the big and middle bourgeoisie, their “connections” (with the imperialists) and their “experiences” (in strangling and shooting the workers). The story of this “utilization” is written in the book of the Chinese revolution with letters of blood. But this does not prevent the theses from saying: “The subsequent events fully confirmed the correctness of this line.” Further than this no one can go!

From an enormous counter-revolutionary coup d’état, the theses of Stalin draw the positively miserable conclusion that the policy of “isolating the right” within the united Guomindang must be “replaced” by a policy of “determined struggle” against the right. All this after the right-wing “comrades” have begun to speak in the language of machine-guns.

13) The theses refer, to be sure, to a “previous prediction” on the inevitability of the bourgeoisie’s withdrawal from the revolution. But are such prophecies by themselves sufficient for a Bolshevik policy? The prediction that the bourgeoisie will quit is an empty commonplace unless definite political conclusions are drawn from it. In the already quoted article, which approves the semi-official line of Martynov, Dan writes: “In a movement that embraces such antagonistic classes, the united front cannot of course last forever.” [4]

So Dan also acknowledges the “inevitability of the bourgeoisie’s withdrawal”. In practice, however, the policy of Menshevism in the revolution consists of retaining the united front at any cost, as long as possible, at the price of adapting its own policy to the policy of the bourgeoisie, at the price of cutting down the slogans and the activity of the masses, and even, as in China, at the price of the organizational subordination of the workers’ party to the political apparatus of the bourgeoisie. The Bolshevik way, however, consists of an unconditional political and organizational demarcation from the bourgeoisie, of a relentless exposure of the bourgeoisie from the very first steps of the revolution, of a destruction of all petty-bourgeois illusions about the united front with the bourgeoisie, of tireless struggle with the bourgeoisie for the leadership of the masses, of the merciless expulsion from the Communist Party of all those elements who sow vain hopes in the bourgeoisie or idealize them.

Two Paths and the Mistakes of the Past
14) The theses of comrade Stalin, to be sure, seek to oppose to each other the two paths of development of the Chinese revolution: one under the leadership of the bourgeoisie, with its suppression of the proletariat and an inevitable alliance with foreign imperialism; the other under the leadership of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie.

But in order that this second prospect of the bourgeois-democratic revolution should not remain an empty phrase, it must be said openly and plainly that the whole leadership of the Chinese revolution up to now has been in irreconcilable contradiction to it. The Opposition has been and is subjected to a rabid criticism precisely because, from the very beginning, it brought to the fore the Leninist manner of putting the question, that is, the path of the struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie for the leadership of the oppressed masses of city and country within the framework and on the foundation of the national-democratic revolution.

15) From the theses of Stalin it follows that the proletariat can separate itself from the bourgeoisie only after the latter has tossed it aside, disarmed it, beheaded it and crushed it under foot. But this is precisely the way the abortive revolution of 1848 developed, where the proletariat had no banner of its own, but followed at the heels of the petty-bourgeois democracy, which in turn trotted behind the liberal bourgeoisie and led the workers under the sabre of Cavaignac. Great though the real peculiarities of the Chinese situation may be, the fundamentals that characterized the development of the 1848 revolution have been repeated in the Chinese revolution with such deadly precision as though neither the lessons of 1848, 1871, 1905 and 1917 nor those of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Comintern had ever existed.

That Chiang Kai-shek played the role of a republican-liberal Cavaignac has already become a commonplace. The theses of Stalin, following the Opposition, recognize this analogy. But the analogy must be supplemented. Cavaignac would have been impossible without the Ledru-Rollins, the Louis Blancs and the other phrasemongers of the all-inclusive national front. And who played these roles in China? Not only Wang Jingwei, but also the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, above all their inspirers of the ECCI. Unless this is stated openly, explained and deeply impressed, the philosophy of – the two paths of development will only serve to screen opportunism à la Louis Blanc and Martynov, that is, to prepare a repetition of the April tragedy at a new stage of the Chinese revolution.

The Position of the Chinese Communist Party
16) In order to have the right to speak about the struggle for the Bolshevik path of the democratic revolution, one must possess the principal instrument of proletarian policy; an independent proletarian party which fights under its own banner and never permits its policy and organization to be dissolved in the policy and organization of other classes. Without assuring the complete theoretical, political and organizational independence of the Communist Party, all talk about “two paths” is a mockery of Bolshevism. The Chinese Communist Party, in this whole period, has not been in alliance with the revolutionary petty-bourgeois section of the Guomindang, but in subordination to the whole Guomindang, led in reality by the bourgeoisie which had the army and the power in its hands. The Communist Party submitted to the political discipline of Chiang Kai-shek. The Communist Party signed the obligation not to criticize Sun-Yat-Sen-ism, a petty-bourgeois theory which is directed not only against imperialism, but also against the class struggle. The Communist Party did not have its own press, that is, it lacked the principal weapon of an independent party. Under such conditions, to speak of the struggle of the proletariat for hegemony means to deceive oneself and others.

17) By what is the submissive, indistinct, and politically unworthy position of the Communist Party in Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang to be explained? By the insistence upon the unity of the national front under the actual leadership of the bourgeoisie which allegedly “could not” withdraw from the revolution (the school of Martynov), that is, the rejection in practice of the second, Bolshevik path of which the theses of Stalin speak as an afterthought, solely for camouflage purposes.

To justify such a policy by the necessity for an alliance of the workers and peasants, is to reduce this alliance itself to a phrase, to a screen for the commanding role of the bourgeoisie. The dependence of the Communist Party, an inevitable result of the “bloc of the four classes”, was the main obstacle in the path of the workers’ and peasants’ movement, and therefore also of the real alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry, without which the victory of the Chinese revolution cannot even be thought of.

18) What should the Communist Party do in the future?

In the theses, there is only a single sentence on this, but one capable of sowing the greatest confusion and causing irreparable harm. “... While fighting in the ranks of the revolutionary Guomindang,” say Stalin’s theses, “the Communist Party must preserve its independence more than ever before.” Preserve? But to this day the Communist Party has had no such independence. Precisely its lack of independence is the source of all the evils and all the mistakes. In this fundamental question, the theses, instead of making an end once and for all to the practice of yesterday, propose to retain it “more than ever before”. But this means that they want to retain the ideological, political and organizational dependence of the proletarian party upon a petty-bourgeois party, which is inevitably converted into an instrument of the big bourgeoisie.

In order to justify a false policy, one is forced to call dependence independence, and to demand the preservation of what ought to be buried for all time.

19) Chinese Bolshevism can rise only under a merciless self-criticism by the best elements of the Communist Party. To support them in this is our direct duty. The attempt to cover up the mistakes of the past by artificially curbing a discussion of them, will cause enormous harm, primarily to the Chinese Communist Party. If we do not help it to purge itself, in the shortest period, from Menshevism and the Mensheviks, it will enter a prolonged crisis, with splits, desertions, and an embittered struggle of various groups. What is more, the heavy defeats of opportunism may clear a road to anarcho-syndicalist influences.

If, in spite of a workers’ mass movement, in spite of the powerful rise of the trade unions, in spite of the revolutionary agrarian movement on the land, the Communist Party should remain as before an integral appendage to a bourgeois party, and what is more, should it enter the national government created by this bourgeois party, it would be better to say frankly: the time has not yet come for a Communist party in China. It is better not to constitute any Communist party at all than to discredit it so cruelly at the time of a revolution, that is, just at the time when the Party is being joined to the working masses with bonds of blood and when great traditions are being created that are destined to live for decades.

Who Was Mistaken on the Tempo?
20) In Stalin’s theses there is of course a whole section devoted to the “mistakes of the Opposition”. Instead of hitting out at the right, that is, at the mistakes of Stalin himself, the theses are intent upon striking at the left, thereby deepening the mistakes, piling up confusion, making the way out more difficult, and driving the line of the leadership down into the swamp of compromise.

21) The main accusation: the Opposition “does not understand that the revolution in China cannot develop at a rapid tempo”. For some reason or other, the theses drag in here the tempo of the October revolution. If the question of tempo is raised, it must not be measured with the external yardstick of the October revolution, but with the internal class relationships of the Chinese revolution itself. The Chinese bourgeoisie, as is known, paid no attention to the precepts about a slow tempo. In April 1927, it considered it quite opportune to throw off the mask of the united front which had served it so well, in order to open an attack upon the revolution with all its strength. The Communist Party, the proletariat, as well as the Left Guomindang people, showed themselves completely unprepared for this blow. Why? Because the leadership counted upon a slower tempo, because it remained hopelessly behindhand, because it was infected with chvostism.

On April 23, that is, after the coup d’état by Chiang Kai-shek, the Central Committee of the Guomindang, together with the “left” Wuhan government, published a manifesto, which said:

“It only remains for us to regret [!] that we did not act when there was still time. For that we apologize [!] sincerely.” [5]

In these doleful and whining avowals lies, against the will of their authors, a pitiless refutation of the Stalinist philosophy on the “tempo” of the Chinese revolution.

22) We continued to maintain the bloc with the bourgeoisie at a time when the working masses were driving towards independent struggle. We attempted to utilize the experiences of the “rights” and became playthings in their hands. We carried on an ostrich policy in the press, by suppressing and concealing from our own party the first coup d’état by Chiang Kai-shek in March 1926, the shootings of workers and peasants, and in general all the facts that marked the counter-revolutionary character of the Guomindang leadership. We neglected to look after the independence of our own party. We founded no newspaper for it. “We sacrificed the interests of the workers and peasants in practice” (Tang Pingshan). We did not take a single serious step to win over the soldiers. We allowed the Chiang Kai-shek band to establish a “military dictatorship of the centre”, that is, a dictatorship of the bourgeois counter-revolution. On the very eve of the coup d’état we blew the trumpets for Chiang Kai-shek. We declared that he had “submitted to discipline”, and that we had succeeded “by a skilful tactical manoeuvre in forestalling an abrupt turn to the right that threatened the Chinese revolution”. [6] We remained behind the events all along the line. At every step we lost in tempo to the benefit of the bourgeoisie. In this way we prepared the most favourable conditions for the bourgeois counter-revolution. The Left Guomindang at least offers us its “sincere apology”. The theses of Stalin, on the contrary, draw from this whole chain of truly unparalleled chvostist mistakes the remarkable conclusion that the Opposition demands. a too rapid tempo.

23) Ever more frequently one hears accusations at our party meetings against the “ultra-left” Shanghaiers and in general against the Chinese workers for having provoked Chiang Kai-shek by their “excesses”. No one cites any examples; and what would they prove, anyway? Not a single real people’s revolution, drawing millions into its vortex, proceeds without so-called “excesses”. A policy which seeks to prescribe for the masses just awakening a line of march that will not disturb the bourgeois “order” is a policy of incurable philistines. It will always break its head against the logic of civil war when, while pronouncing belated curses upon the Cavaignacs and Kornilovs, it denounces at the same time the alleged “excesses” of the left.

The “mistake” of the Chinese workers lies in the fact that the critical moment of the revolution found them unprepared, unorganized and unarmed. But that is not their mistake, it is their misfortune. The responsibility for it falls entirely upon a bad leadership, which let every interval pass.

Does a New Revolutionary Centre Already Exist
or Must One First Be Created?
24) On the present state of the Chinese revolution, the theses proclaim: “Chiang Kai-shek’s coup d’état means that there will now be two camps, two governments, two armies, two centres in the South: a revolutionary centre in Wuhan and a counter-revolutionary centre in Nanking.” What an inexact, superficial, vulgar characterization! It is not simply a question of two halves of the Guomindang but of a new grouping of class forces. To believe that the Wuhan government is already a finished centre, which will simply continue the revolution from the point where it was brought to a stop and beaten to the ground by Chiang Kai-shek, is to regard the counter-revolutionary coup d’état in April as a personal “desertion”, an “episode”; in a word, it is to understand nothing.

The workers were not simply crushed. They were crushed by those who led them. Can one believe that the masses will now follow the Left Guomindang with the same confidence that they accorded the whole Guomindang yesterday? From now on the struggle must be conducted not only against the former militarists allied with imperialism, but also against the “national” bourgeoisie which, as a result of our radically incorrect policy, has captured the military apparatus and considerable sections of the army.

For the struggle on a new, higher stage of the revolution, the deceived masses must above all be inspired with confidence in themselves, and the not yet awakened masses must be aroused. For this, it must first of all be demonstrated that not a trace has been left of that disgraceful policy which “sacrificed the interests of the workers and peasants” (cf. Tang Pingshan) in order to support the bloc of the four classes. Anyone who will lean in the direction of this policy must be mercilessly driven out of the Chinese Communist Party.

The miserably superficial and bureaucratic idea must be thrown aside that now, after the sanguinary experiences, millions of workers and peasants can be set in motion and led if only the “banner” of the Guomindang is waved around in the air a little. (We will surrender the blue banner of the Guomindang to nobody! cries Bukharin.)

No, the masses need a revolutionary program and a fighting organization which grows out of their own ranks and contains within itself the guarantee of contact with the masses and of loyalty to them. The Wuhan authorities are not enough for this: workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ soviets are needed for this, soviets of the toilers.

Soviets and the Arming of the Workers and Peasants
25) After rejecting the vital and indispensable slogan of soviets, the theses of comrade Stalin declare somewhat unexpectedly that the principal “antidote [?] to the counter-revolution is the arming of the workers and peasants”. The arming of the workers is undoubtedly a necessary thing. We will have no differences at all on this point. But how are we to explain why it was considered correct up to now to arm the workers to a “minimum” extent for the welfare of the revolution? that the representatives of the Comintern actually opposed the arming of the workers? (cf. the letter of the four comrades to the delegation of the CPSU in the Comintern); that in spite of the full possibility of arming themselves the workers found themselves unarmed at the moment of the coup d’état? All this is to be explained by the desire not to break with Chiang Kai-shek, not to offend Chiang Kai-shek, not to push him to the right. The marvellous “antidote” was lacking precisely on the day when it was most needed. Today the workers are not arming themselves in Wuhan either – so as “not to drive away” Wang Jingwei.

26) The arming of the workers and peasants is an excellent thing. But one must be logical. In Southern China there are already armed peasants; they are the so-called National armies. Yet, far from being an “antidote to the counter-revolution”, they have been its tool. Why? Because the political leadership, instead of embracing the masses of the army through soldiers’ soviets has contented itself with a purely external copy of our political departments and commissars, which, without an independent revolutionary party and without soldiers’ soviets, have been transformed into an empty camouflage for bourgeois militarism.

27) The theses of Stalin reject the slogan of soviets with the argument that it would be a “slogan of struggle against the government of the revolutionary Guomindang”. But in that case, what is the meaning of the words: “The principal antidote to the counter-revolution is the arming of the workers and peasants”?Against whom will the workers and peasants arm themselves? Will it not be against the governmental authority of the revolutionary Guomindang?

The slogan of arming the workers and peasants, if it is not a phrase, a subterfuge, a masquerade, but a call to action, is not less sharp in character than the slogan of workers’ and peasants’ soviets. Is it likely that the armed masses will tolerate at their side or over them the governmental authority of a bureaucracy alien and hostile to them? The real arming of the workers and peasants under present circumstances inevitably involves the formation of soviets.

28) Further: Who will arm the masses? Who will direct the armed men?

So long as the national armies marched forward and the Northern armies yielded ground, the arming of the workers could proceed with relative ease. The timely organization of workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ soviets would have meant a real “antidote” to the counter-revolution. Unfortunately, the mistakes of the past are irreparable. The whole situation has now taken a sharp turn for the worse. The few weapons seized spontaneously by the workers (are not these the “excesses” that are spoken of?) have been torn from them. The advance to the North has been suspended. Under these conditions the arming of the workers and peasants is a labourious and difficult task. To declare that the time for the soviets has not yet arrived and at the same time to launch the slogan for arming the workers and peasants, is to sow confusion. Only the soviets, at a further development of the revolution, can become the organs capable of really conducting the arming of the workers and of directing these armed masses.

Why Is It Impossible to Form Soviets?
29) To this, the theses reply: “In the first place soviets cannot be created at any convenient moment, they are created only in the period of a special rise of the revolutionary wave.” If these words have any sense at all, it is this: We let pass the favourable moment when we did not call upon the masses to create soviets at the beginning of the last period of powerful revolutionary rise. Once again: the mistakes of the past are irreparable. If we are of the opinion that the Chinese revolution has been crushed for a long time, then the slogan of soviets will naturally find no echo in the masses. But all the more unfounded then is the slogan of the arming of the workers and peasants. We do not believe, however, that the consequences of the false policy pursued are so heavy and profound. There are many facts that speak for the possibility and the likelihood of a new revolutionary rise in the near future. Among other things, it is indicated by the fact that Chiang Kai-shek is forced to flirt with the masses, to promise the workers the eight-hour day, and all sorts of relief to the peasants, etc. In the event of a further extension of the agrarian movement and a turning of the petty-bourgeois masses of the city against Chiang Kai-shek as an open agent of imperialism, more favourable conditions can arise in the near future under which the now battered proletarian vanguard will reassemble the ranks of the toilers for a new offensive. Whether this will take place a month sooner or later is of no concern; in any case we must prepare for it now with our own program and our own organizations. In other words: the slogan of soviets will henceforth accompany the whole further course of the Chinese revolution and reflect its destinies.

30) “In the second place,” say the theses, “soviets are not formed for chattering; they are created primarily as organs of struggle against the existing state power, and for the conquest of power.” That soviets are not created for chattering is perhaps the only correct point in the theses. But a revolutionist does not propose the arming of the workers and peasants for chattering either. Whoever says here: at the present stage only chatter can be the result of soviets, but on the contrary, something serious will come out of the arming of the workers and peasants, is either making fun of himself or of others.

31) A third argument: since there is now a series of Left Guomindang organizations in Wuhan, which in their solemn manifesto of April 23 apologized for having overslept the coup d’état of Chiang Kai-shek, the theses draw the conclusion: the creation of soviets would mean an insurrection against the Left Guomindang, “for there is no other governmental authority in this region at present than that of the revolutionary Guomindang”.

These words fairly reek with the apparatus-like, bureaucratic conception of revolutionary authority. The government is not regarded as the expression and consolidation of the developing struggle of the classes, but as the self-sufficient expression of the will of the Guomindang. The classes come and go but the continuity of the Guomindang goes on for ever. But it is not enough to call Wuhan the centre of the revolution for it really to be that. The provincial Guomindang of Chiang Kai-shek had an old, reactionary, mercenary bureaucracy at its disposal. What has the Left Guomindang? For the time being, nothing or almost nothing. The slogan of soviets is a call for the creation of real organs of the new state power right through the transitional régime of a dual government.

32) And what will be the attitude of the soviets to the “government of the revolutionary Guomindang”, allegedly the “only” governmental authority “in this region”?A truly classic question! The attitude of the soviets to the revolutionary Guomindang will correspond to the attitude of the revolutionary Guomindang to the soviets. In other words: to the extent that the soviets arise, arm themselves, consolidate themselves, they will tolerate over them only such a government as bases itself upon the armed workers and peasants. What makes the soviet system valuable is the fact that, especially in directly revolutionary epochs, it furnishes the best means of guaranteeing agreement between the central and local government authorities.

33) Comrade Stalin, as far back as 1925, called the Guomindang a “workers’ and peasants’ party” (!?). [7] This definition has nothing in common with Marxism. But it is clear that with this incorrect formulation comrade Stalin wanted to express the idea that the basis of the Guomindang is an anti-bourgeois alliance of the workers and peasants. This was absolutely false for the period in which it was said: the workers and peasants, it is true, did follow the Guomindang, but they were led by the bourgeoisie and we know where it led them. Such a party is called bourgeois, and not workers’ and peasants’. After the “withdrawal” of the bourgeoisie (that is, after it massacred the unarmed and unprepared proletariat), the revolution, according to Stalin, passes over to a new stage, in which it is to be led by the Left Guomindang, that is, by one, at least so we are to assume, that will finally realize the Stalinist idea of the “workers’ and peasants’ party”. The question arises: why then will the creation of workers’ and peasants’ soviets mean a war against the authority of the workers’ and peasants’ Guomindang?

34) Another argument: To call for the creation of soviets “means to hand the enemies of the Chinese people a new weapon to combat the revolution, to manufacture new legends and to pretend that there is no national revolution in China, but an artificial transplanting of Moscow sovietization”.

This stupefying argument means that if we develop, extend and deepen the revolutionary movement of the masses, the enemies of the Chinese people will redouble their efforts to calumniate it. This argument has no other sense. Therefore it has no sense at all.

Perhaps the theses have not in mind the enemies of the Chinese people, but the fear of the popular masses themselves of a Moscow sovietization? But on what is such a consideration based? It is well known that all the varieties of the “national” bourgeoisie, right, centre and left, zealously smear themselves with a protective Muscovite colouration in all their political work: they create commissars, political army posts, political departments, plenums of the central committee, control commissions, etc. The Chinese bourgeoisie is not at all afraid of transplanting Muscovite forms, which it carefully debases to serve its own class aims. But why do they apply them? Not out of love for Moscow, but rather because they are popular with the masses of the people. The Chinese peasant knows that the soviets gave the land to the Russian peasant, and whoever does not know this ought to learn it. The Chinese workers know that the soviets guaranteed the liberty of the Russian proletariat. The experience of the counter-revolution of Chiang Kai-shek must have made the advanced workers understand that without an independent organization embracing the whole proletariat and assuring its collaboration with the oppressed masses in the city and on the land, the revolution cannot triumph. The creation of soviets follows for the Chinese masses from their own experience, and is far from being an “artificially transplanted sovietization” for them. A policy that is afraid to call things by their right name is a false policy. One must be guided by the revolutionary masses and by the objective needs of the revolution, but not by what the enemy will say.

35) It is said: The Hankow government is nevertheless a fact. Feng Yuxiang is a fact, Tang Shengzhi is a fact, and they have armed forces at their disposal; neither the Wuhan government nor Feng Yuxiang, nor Tang Shengzhi wants soviets. To create soviets would mean to break with these allies. Although this argument is not openly formulated in the theses, it is nevertheless decisive for many comrades. We have already heard from Stalin on the Hankow government: the “revolutionary centre”, the “only governmental authority”. At the same time an advertising campaign is launched for Feng Yuxiang in our party meetings: “a former worker”, “a faithful revolutionist”, “a reliable man”, etc. All this is a repetition of the past mistakes under circumstances in which these mistakes can become even more disastrous. The Hankow government and the army command can be against the soviets only because they will have nothing to do with a radical agrarian program, with a real break with the large landowners and the bourgeoisie, because they secretly cherish the thought of a compromise with the right. But then it becomes all the more important to form soviets. This is the only way to push the revolutionary elements of Hankow to the left and force the counter-revolutionists to retire.

36) But even if the soviets do not carry on a war with the “only” government of Hankow, will they not still bring with them the elements of dual power? Without a doubt. Whoever is really for the course towards a workers’ and peasants’ government, not only in words but in deeds, must understand that this course leads through a certain period of dual power. How long this period will last, what concrete forms it will assume, will depend upon how the “only” government in Hankow conducts itself, upon the independence and initiative of the Communist Party, upon how rapidly the soviets develop, etc. It will be our task, in any case, to strengthen the element of the workers and peasants in the dual power and by that provide the genuine workers’ and peasants’ soviet government with a fully developed democratic program.

37) But dozens of foreign warships are anchored in the Yangtze river which can sweep away Shanghai, Hankow, etc. Is it not insanity to form soviets under such conditions? This argument too is, of course, not formulated in Stalin’s theses, but it is paraded around everywhere in Party meetings (Martynov, Yaroslavsky and others). The school of Martynov would like to kill the idea of the soviets with fear of the British naval artillery. This artifice is not a new one. In 1917, the Social Revolutionists and the Mensheviks sought to frighten us by declaring that the seizure of power by the soviets would mean the occupation of Kronstadt and Petrograd by the Allies. We answered: only the deepening of the revolution can save it. Foreign imperialism will only reconcile itself to such a “revolution” as strengthens its own positions in China at the price of a few concessions to the Chinese bourgeoisie. Every real people’s revolution that undermines the colonial foundation of imperialism will inevitably meet with the latter’s furious resistance. We did try to stop halfway, but this “only correct line” protected Nanking from the cannon of imperialism as little as it did the Chinese workers from the machine-guns of Chiang Kai-shek. Only the transition of the Chinese revolution to the phase of real mass action, only the formation of workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ soviets, only the deepening of the social program of the revolution, are capable, as our own experiences prove, of bringing confusion into the ranks of the foreign armed forces by arousing their sympathy for the soviets and thus really protecting the revolution from blows from without.

What Do the Theses of Stalin Propose in Place of Soviets?
38) The creation of “revolutionary peasant committees, workers’ trade unions, and other mass organizations as preparatory elements for the soviets of the future”. What should be the course of these organizations? We do not find a single word on this in the theses. The phrase that these are “preparatory elements for the soviets of the future” is only a phrase and nothing more. What will these organizations do now? They will have to conduct strikes, boycotts, break the backbone of the bureaucratic apparatus, annihilate the counter-revolutionary military bands, drive out the large landowners, disarm the detachments of the usurers and the rich peasants, arm the workers and peasants, in a word, solve all the problems of the democratic and agrarian revolution that are on the order of the day, and in this way raise themselves to the position of local organs of power. But then they will be soviets, only of a kind that are badly suited to their tasks. The theses therefore propose, if these proposals are to be taken seriously at all, to create substitutes for soviets, instead of soviets themselves.

39) During all the preceding mass movements, the trade unions were compelled to fulfil functions closely approaching the functions of soviets (Hong Kong, Shanghai, and elsewhere). But these were precisely the functions for which the trade unions were entirely insufficient. They embrace a too small number of workers. They do not at all embrace the petty-bourgeois masses in the city that incline towards the proletariat. But such tasks as the carrying through of strikes with the least possible losses to the poorer population of the city, the distribution of provisions, participation in tax policy, participation in the formation of armed forces, to say nothing of carrying through the agrarian revolution in the provinces, can be accomplished with the necessary sweep only when the directing organization embraces not only all the sections of the proletariat, but connects them intimately in the course of its activities with the poor population in the city and country. One would at least think that the military coup d’état of Chiang Kai-shek had finally hammered into the mind of every revolutionist the fact that trade unions separated from the army are one thing, and united workers’ and soldiers’ soviets, on the other hand, are quite another thing. Revolutionary trade unions and peasants’ committees can arouse the hatred of the enemy no less than soviets. But they are far less capable than soviets of warding off its blows.

If we are to speak seriously of the alliance of the proletariat with the oppressed masses in the city and country – not of an “alliance” between the leaders, a semi-adulterated alliance through dubious representatives, but of a real fighting alliance built and steeled in the struggles of the masses against the enemy – then such an alliance can have no other organizational form than that of soviets. This can be denied only by those who rely more upon compromising leaders than upon the revolutionary masses below.

Should We Break with the Left Guomindang?
From the foregoing remarks may be seen how ill-founded are the whispers about a break of the Communist Party with the Guomindang. “This is tantamount,” say the theses, “to deserting the field of struggle and leaving our allies in the Guomindang in the lurch to the delight of the enemies of the revolution.” These pathetic lines are quite out of place. It is not a question of a break but of preparing a bloc, not on the basis of subordination but on the basis of a genuine equality of rights. A revolutionary Guomindang has yet to be formed. We are in favour of the Communists working inside the Guomindang and patiently drawing the workers and peasants over to their side. The Communist Party can gain a petty-bourgeois ally, not by prostrating itself before the Guomindang at every one of its vacillations, but only if it appeals to the workers openly and directly, in its own name, under its own banner, organizes them around it and shows the Guomindang by example and by deed what a party of the masses is, by supporting every forward step of the Guomindang, by relentlessly unmasking every vacillation, every step backward, and by creating a real revolutionary foundation for a bloc with the Guomindang in the form of workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ soviets.

40) It is absurd to assert that the Opposition stands for the “political isolation” of the Communist Party. This assertion contains just as much truth as the one that the Opposition stood for withdrawing from the British trade unions. Both accusations have only served to mask the bloc with the right Guomindang and with the traitorous General Council. The Opposition is energetically in favour of strengthening and developing the bloc with the revolutionary elements of the Guomindang, for a compact fighting alliance of the workers with the poor population of the city and country, for the course towards the revolutionary dictatorship of the workers, peasants and the urban petty-bourgeoisie.

For this it is necessary:

a.to recognize as disastrous such forms of the bloc in which the Communist Party sacrifices the interests of the workers and peasants to the utopian aim of holding the bourgeoisie in the camp of the national revolution;
b.to reject categorically such forms of the bloc in which the Communist Party hauls down its banner and sacrifices the growth of its own influence and its own authority in the interest of its allies;
c.to approve a bloc with clearly formulated common tasks, but not to base it upon misunderstanding, diplomatic manoeuvres, sycophancy and hypocrisy;
d.to lay down the conditions and limits of the bloc with thorough precision and let them be known to all;
e.for the Communist Party to retain full freedom of criticism, and to watch over its allies with no less vigilance than over an enemy, without forgetting for a moment that an ally who bases himself upon other classes or depends upon other classes is only a temporary confederate who can be transformed by the force of circumstances into an opponent and an enemy;
f.to set the connection with the petty-bourgeois masses higher than a connection with their party leaders;
g.finally, to rely only upon ourselves, upon our own organization, arms and power.
Only by observing these conditions will a really revolutionary bloc of the Communist Party with the Guomindang become possible, not a bloc of the leaders, which vacillates and is subject to contingencies, but a bloc based upon all the oppressed masses of the city and country under the political hegemony of the proletarian vanguard.

The Problems of the Chinese Revolution
and the Anglo-Russian Committee
41) In the direction of the Chinese revolution we are confronted not by tactical errors, but by a radically false line. This follows clearly from everything that has been presented above. It becomes still clearer when the policy in China is compared with our policy towards the Anglo-Russian Committee. In the latter case the inconsistency of the opportunistic line did not express itself so tragically as in China, but no less completely and convincingly.

42) In England, as in China, the line was directed towards a rapprochement with the “solid” leaders, based on personal relations, on diplomatic combinations, while renouncing in practice the deepening of the abyss between the revolutionary or leftward-developing masses and the traitorous leaders. We ran after Chiang Kai-shek and thereby drove the Chinese Communists to accept the dictatorial conditions put by Chiang Kai-shek to the Communist Party. In so far as the representatives of the All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions ran after Purcell, Hicks, Citrine and Company and adopted in principle the position of neutrality in the trade-union movement, they recognized the General Council as the only representative of the British proletariat and obligated themselves not to interfere in the affairs of the British labour movement.

43) The decisions of the Berlin Conference of the Anglo-Russian Committee mean our renunciation of support in the future to strikers against the will of avowed strikebreakers. They are tantamount to a condemnation and a flat betrayal of the trade-union minority, all of whose activity is directed against the traitors whom we have recognized as the sole representatives of the English working class. Finally, the solemn proclamation of “non-interference” signifies our capitulation in principle to the national narrowness of the labour movement in its most backward and most conservative form.

44) Chiang Kai-shek accuses us of interfering in the internal affairs of China just as Citrine accuses us of interfering in the internal affairs of the trade unions. Both accusations are only transcriptions of the accusation of world imperialism against a workers’ state which dares to interest itself in the fate of the oppressed masses of the whole world. In this case as in others, Chiang Kai-shek, like Citrine, under different conditions and at different posts, remain the agents of imperialism despite temporary conflicts with it. If we chase after collaboration with such “leaders”, we are forced ever more to restrict, to limit and to emasculate our methods of revolutionary mobilization.

45) Through our false policy we not only helped the General Council to maintain its tottering positions after the strike betrayal, but, what is more, we furnished it with all the necessary weapons for putting impudent demands to us which we meekly accepted. Under the tinkling of phrases about “hegemony”, we acted in the Chinese revolution and the British labour movement as if we were morally vanquished, and by that we prepared our material defeat. An opportunist deviation is always accompanied by a loss of faith in one’s own line.

46) The businessmen of the General Council, having received a guarantee of non-interference from the All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions, are undoubtedly persuading Chamberlain that their method of struggle against Bolshevik propaganda is far more effective than ultimatums and threats. Chamberlain, however, prefers the combined method and combines the diplomacy of the General Council with the violence of British imperialism.

47) If it is alleged against the Opposition that Baldwin or Chamberlain “also” wants the dissolution of the Anglo-Russian Committee, then one understands nothing at all of the political mechanics of the bourgeoisie. Baldwin justly feared and still fears the harmful influence of the Soviet trade unions upon the leftward-developing labour movement of Britain. The British bourgeoisie set its pressure upon the General Council against the pressure of the All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions upon the traitorous leaders of the trade unions, and on this field the bourgeoisie triumphed all along the line. The General Council refused to accept money from the Soviet trade unions and to confer with them on the question of aid for the mine workers. In exercising its pressure upon the General Council, the British bourgeoisie, through it, exerted pressure upon the All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions and at the Berlin Conference obtained from the latter’s representatives an unprecedented capitulation on the fundamental questions of the class struggle. An Anglo-Russian Committee of this kind only serves the British bourgeoisie (cf. the declaration of The Times). This will not hinder it from continuing its pressure in the future upon the General Council, and demanding of it a break with the All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions, for by such a policy of pressure and blackmail the British bourgeoisie wins everything we lose by our senseless and unprincipled conduct.

48) The insinuations that Chiang Kai-shek is “in solidarity” with the Opposition, because he wants to drive the Communists out of the Guomindang, have the same value. A remark by Chiang Kai-shek is being circulated in which he is supposed to have said to another general that he agrees with the Opposition in the CPSU on this point. In the text of the document from which this “quotation” was picked out, the words of Chiang Kai-shek are not adduced as an expression of his views, but as a manifestation of his readiness and aptitude to deceit, to falsehood, and even to disguise himself for a few days as a “Left Communist” in order to be better able to stab us in the back. Still more, the document in question is one long indictment against the line and the work of the Comintern’s representatives in China. Instead of picking quotations out of the document and giving them a sense contrary to that contained in the text, it would be better to make the document itself known to the Comintern. Leave aside, however, the misuse of alleged “quotations” and there remains the “coincidence” that Chiang Kai-shek has always been against a bloc with the Communists, while we are against a bloc with Chiang Kai-shek. The school of Martynov draws from this the conclusion that the policy of the Opposition “generally” serves the reaction. This accusation is not new either. The whole development of Bolshevism in Russia proceeded under the accompaniment of Menshevik accusations that the Bolsheviks were playing the game of the reaction, that they were aiding the monarchy against the Kadets, the Kadets against the SRs and Mensheviks, and so on without end. Renaudel accuses the French Communists of rendering aid to Poincaré when they attack the bloc of the radicals and the Socialists. The German Social Democrats have more than once pretended that our refusal to enter the League of Nations plays the game of the extreme imperialists, etc., etc.

The fact that the big bourgeoisie, represented by Chiang Kai-shek, needs to break with the proletariat, and the revolutionary proletariat on the other hand needs to break with bourgeoisie, is not an evidence of their solidarity, but of the irreconcilable class antagonism between them. The hopeless compromisers stand between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat and accuse both the “extreme” wings of disrupting the national front and rendering assistance to the reaction. To accuse the Opposition of playing the game of Chamberlain, Thomas or Chiang Kai-shek is to show a narrow-minded opportunism, and at the same time to recognize involuntarily the proletarian and revolutionary character of our political line.

49) The Berlin Conference of the Anglo-Russian Committee which coincided with the beginning of British intervention in China, did not even dare to allude to the question of effective measures to take against the hangman’s work of British imperialism in the Far East. Could a more striking proof be found that the Anglo-Russian Committee is incapable of moving as much as a finger towards really preventing war? But it is not simply useless. It has brought immeasurable harm to the revolutionary movement, like every illusion and hypocrisy. By referring to its collaboration with the All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions in the “struggle for peace”, the General Council is able to soothe and lull the consciousness of the British proletariat, stirred by the danger of war. The All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions now appears before the British working class and the working class of the whole world as a sort of guarantor for the international policy of the traitors of the General Council. The criticism directed by the revolutionary elements in Britain against the General Council thereby becomes weakened and blunted. Thanks to Purcell, Hicks and Company, the MacDonalds and Thomases get the possibility of keeping the working masses in a stupor up to the threshold of war itself, in order to call upon them then for the defence of the democratic fatherland. When comrade Tomsky, in his last interview (Pravda, May 8), criticized the Thomases, Havelock Wilsons and the other hirelings of the Stock Exchange, he did not mention by a single word the subversive, disintegrating, lulling, and therefore much more pernicious work of Purcell, Hicks and Company. These “allies” are not mentioned by name in the interview as though they do not even exist. Then why a bloc with them? But they do exist. Without them Thomas does not exist politically. Without Thomas there exists no Baldwin, that is, the capitalist régime in England. Contrary to our best intentions, our support of the bloc with Purcell is actually support of the whole British régime and the facilitation of its work in China. After all that has happened, this is clear to every revolutionist who has gone through the school of Lenin. In a like manner, our collaboration with Chiang Kai-shek blunted the class vigilance of the Chinese proletariat, and thereby facilitated the April coup d’état.

The Theory of Stages and the Theory of Socialism in One Country
50) The chvostist theory of “stages” or “steps” repeatedly proclaimed by Stalin in recent times, has served as the motivation in principle for the opportunist tactic. If the complete organizational and political independence of the Chinese Communist Party is demanded, it means that steps are being skipped over. If soviet organizations are demanded for drawing the worker and peasant masses into the civil war, it means that “stages” are being skipped over. If the dissolution of the political bloc with the traitors of the General Council, who are now carrying on the basest work, is demanded, it means that stages are being skipped over. The conservative bourgeois-national Guomindang government, the military command of Chiang Kai-shek, the General Council – in a word, any one of the institutions created by the pressure of the possessing and ruling classes, and constituting a barrier for the revolutionary class movement, becomes, according to this theory, a great historical stage, to which one’s policy must be adapted until “the masses themselves” pass through it. Once we set out on this road, our policy must be inevitably transformed from a revolutionary factor into a conservative one. The course of the Chinese revolution and the fate of the Anglo-Russian Committee are an imminent warning in this regard.

51) Such facts as the defeat of the great strikes of the British proletariat last year, as the Chinese revolution this year, cannot go by without consequences for the international labour movement, just as the defeat of the German proletariat in the autumn of 1923 did not pass without leaving its traces. An unavoidable temporary weakening of the revolutionary positions is in itself a great evil. It can become irreparable for a long time if the orientation is wrong, if the strategic line is false. Precisely now, in the period of a temporary revolutionary ebb, the struggle against all manifestations of opportunism and national limitedness and for the line of revolutionary internationalism is more necessary than ever.

By recognizing the principle of non-interference, our delegation, regardless of its intentions, promotes the most conservative, most defeatist tendencies in the working class. There is nothing perplexing in the fact that the most backward and weariest sections of the workers of the USSR consider interference in the British strike struggle or the Chinese revolution a mistake. Ever more frequently they argue: “Are we not taught that we can build up socialism in our country, even without the victory of the revolution in other countries, if only there no intervention? Then we must carry on such a policy as does not provoke intervention. Our interference in British and Chinese affairs is a mistake, because without yielding positive results it drives the world bourgeoisie on to the road of military intervention and thus threatens the construction of socialism in our country.”

There is no doubt and there can be none that now, after the new defeats of the international revolutionary movement, the theory of socialism in one country will serve, independent of the will of its creators, to justify, to motivate and to sanctify all the tendencies directed towards restricting the revolutionary objectives, towards quenching the ardour of the struggle, towards a national and conservative narrowness.

The slightest digression towards the side of “non-interference”, whether covered or not with the theory of socialism in one country, only increases the imperialist danger instead of diminishing it.

It is perfectly clear and incontestable with regard to the Chinese revolution that only a deeper mass impulsion, a more radical social program, the slogan of the workers’ and peasants’ soviets, can seriously shield the revolution from a military attack from without. Only a revolution on whose banner the toilers and oppressed write plainly their own demands is capable of gripping the feelings not only of the international proletariat but also of the soldiers of capital. We know this well enough from our own experiences. We saw and proved it in the years of the civil war at Archangel, Odessa and elsewhere. The compromising and traitorous leadership did not protect Nanking from destruction. It facilitated the penetration of the enemy ships into the Yangtze. A revolutionary leadership, with a powerful social movement, can make the waters of the Yangtze too hot for the ships of Lloyd George, Chamberlain and MacDonald. In any case, this is the only way and the only hope of defence.

The extension of the soviet front is simultaneously the best defence of the USSR. Under the present circumstances, the talk that our international position has become worse, or can in any way become worse, as a result of some kind of “left” mistake, sounds absurd. If our position has grown worse, it is a result of the defeat of the Chinese revolution, a historical and international event, regardless of whether or not we interfere in it. Were we not to interfere in the intervention of imperialism, we would only facilitate its work – against China, and against ourselves as well. But there is a difference between interference and interference. The falsest and most dangerous interference consists of the endeavour to halt the development of the revolution half-way. The struggle for peace occupies the centre of our international policy. But even the most extreme representative of the Martynov school would never dare to contend that our policy of peace can be in contradiction to the development of the Chinese revolution, or inversely, that its development can be in contradiction to our policy of peace. The one supplements the other. The best way to defend the USSR is to vanquish the Chiang Kai-shek counter-revolution and to raise the movement to a higher stage. Whoever rejects soviets for China under such conditions, disarms the Chinese revolution. Whoever proclaims the principle of non-interference in the relations of the European proletariat weakens its revolutionary vanguard. Both weaken the position of the USSR, the principal fortress of the international proletariat.

Thus we see how one mistake is heaped upon the others and together produce a line which digresses ever more from the line of Bolshevism. Critical voices and warnings are regarded as obstructions. The shifting of the official line towards the right is supplemented by blows at the left. To continue on this path would involve the greatest dangers for the soviet state as well as for the Comintern. Were we to conceal these dangers from the international proletarian vanguard, we would be betraying the banner of Communism.

* * *
We do not doubt for a moment that the mistakes can be repaired, the deviations overcome, and the line rectified without violent crises and convulsions. The language of facts is all too eloquent, the lessons of experience all too plain. It is only necessary that our party, of the Soviet Union as well as of the International, obtains the full possibility to weigh the facts and draw the proper conclusions from them. We firmly believe that they will draw these conclusions in the spirit of revolutionary unity.

Postscript on Comrade Chen Duxiu’s Speech

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Notes
1. The theses of Comrade Stalin are published in the name of the Central Committee. This does not change the fact that the theses were not examined by the plenum of the Central Committee. The Political Committee charged three members, Comrades Stalin, Bukharin and Molotov, to look over the theses of Comrade Stalin and, in case of agreement, to publish them in the name of the Central Committee. Naturally, it is not a question of the formal side of the matter, which nobody raises. But it is quite clear that such a “simplified” method of deciding questions of world importance, after the mistakes made and the heavy defeats, in no way serves the interests of the party and of the Chinese revolution. – L.T.

2. First Letter from Afar, Lenin, Vol.XIV, part 1, pp.10-11; Pravda, March 21, 1917.

3. No.8, April 23, 1927, p.4.

4. Sotsialisticheski Vestnik, April 23, 1927, p.3.

5. Pravda, April 23, 1927.

6. Raskolnikov’s foreword to the pamphlet by Tang Pingshan.

7. Problems of Leninism, page 264.

The Latest From The Partisan Defense Committee-Free The Class-War Prisoners-Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, Free Leonard Peltier, Free Lynne Stewart And Her Co-Workers-Free The Remaining Ohio 7 Prisoners!

2012-01-26T10:23:00.000-05:00

Click on the headline to link to the Partisan Defense Committee website.

Reposted from the American Left History blog, dated December 1, 2010.

Markin comment:

I like to think of myself as a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the working class and, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program. Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year, however, in light of the addition of Attorney Lynne Stewart (yes, I know, she has been disbarred but that does not make her less of a people’s attorney in my eyes) to the stipend program, I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class struggle defense in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).

That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson, present class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers, as represented here by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their better days and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today; the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.

That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.

And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly.

The Latest From The Private Bradley Manning Support Network-Free Bradley Manning Now!

2012-01-26T10:21:00.002-05:00

Click on the headline to link to the Private Bradley Manning Support Network for the latest information in his case.

From the American Left History blog, dated March 17, 2011

Why I Will Be Standing In Solidarity With Private Bradley Manning At Quantico, Virginia On Sunday March 20th At 2:00 PM- A Personal Note From An Ex-Soldier Political Prisoner

Markin comment:

Of course I will be standing at the front gate to the Quantico Marine Base on March 20th because I stand in solidarity with the actions of Private Bradley Manning in bringing to light, just a little light, some of the nefarious doings of this government, Bush-like or Obamian. If he did such acts. I sleep just a shade bit easier these days knowing that Private Manning (or someone) exposed what we all knew, or should have known- the Iraq war and the Afghan war justification rested on a house of card. American imperialism’s house of cards, but cards nevertheless.

Of course I will be standing at the front gate to the Quantico Marine Base on March 20th because I am outraged by the treatment of Private Manning meted to a presumably innocent man by a government who alleges itself to be some “beacon” of the civilized world. The military has gotten more devious although not smarter since I was soldier in their crosshairs over forty years ago. Allegedly Private Manning might become so distraught over his alleged actions that he requires extraordinary protections. He is assumed, in the Catch-22 logic of the military, to be something of a suicide risk on the basis of bringing some fresh air to the nefarious doings of the international imperialist order. Be serious. I, however, noticed no "spike” in suicide rates among the world’s diplomatic community once they were exposed, a place where such activities might have been expected once it was observed in public that most of these persons could barely tie their own shoes.

Now the two reasons above are more than sufficient reasons for my standing at the front gate to the Quantico Marine Base on March 20th although they, in themselves, are only the appropriate reasons that any progressive thinking person would need to show up and shout to the high heavens for Private Manning’s freedom. I have an addition reason though, a very pressing personal reason. As mentioned above I too was in the military’s crosshairs as a soldier during the height of the Vietnam War. I will not go into the details of that episode, this comment after all is about soldier Manning, other than that I spent my own time in an Army stockade for, let’s put it this way, working on the principle of “what if they gave a war and nobody came.” Forty years later I am still working off that principle, and gladly. But here is the real point. During that time I had outside support, outside civilian support, that rallied on several occasions outside the military base where I was confined. Believe me that knowledge helped me through the tough days inside. So on March 20th I am just, as I have been able to on too few other occasions over years, paying my dues for that long ago support. You, brother, are a true winter soldier.

Private Manning I hope that you will hear us, or hear about our rally in your defense. Better yet, everybody who read this join us and make sure that he can hear us loud and clear. And let us shout to those high heavens mentioned above-Free Private Bradley Manning Now!
******
And, of course, I will be standing in support of Private Manning as long as he is not freed from the clutches of his jailers.

The Latest From “The International Marxist Tendency” Website

2012-01-26T10:20:00.002-05:00

Click on to the headline to link to the latest from the International Marxist Tendency website.

Markin comment:

More often than not I disagree with the line of the IMT or its analysis(mainly I do not believe their political analysis leads to adequate programmatically-based conclusions, revolutionary conclusions in any case), nevertheless, they provide interesting material, especially from areas, “third world” areas, where it is hard to get any kind of information (for our purposes). Read the material from this site.

The Latest From The “Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox” Blog

2012-01-26T10:19:00.002-05:00

Click on the headline to link to Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox blog for the latest from her site.

Markin comment:

I find Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox rather a mishmash of eclectic politics and basic old time left-liberal/radical thinking. Not enough, not nearly enough, in our troubled times but enough to take the time to read about and get a sense of the pulse (if any) of that segment of the left to which she is appealing. One though should always remember, despite our political differences, her heroic action in going down to hell-hole Texas to confront one President George W. Bush when many others were resigned to accepting the lies of that administration or who “folded” their tents when the expected end to the Iraq War did not materialize. Hats off on that one, Cindy Sheehan.

The Latest From “The Rag Blog”-Is Science a Religion?

2012-01-26T10:18:00.000-05:00

Markin comment:

I find this The Rag Blog very useful to monitor for the latest in what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody, with some kind of name, who is still around from the 1960s has found a home here. So the remembrances and recollections are helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least ones that would help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time left politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of the last forty plus years. Still this is a must read blog for today’s left militants.
******
Is Science a Religion?

'Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense,' says the Buddha.
By Bill Meacham / The Rag Blog / January 19, 2012

I was asked recently whether science is a religion. My answer: No, not at all, but some people treat it as if it were.

It is easy to contrast science and religion as two fundamentally different and incompatible ways of acquiring beliefs about the world. Science is based on empirical evidence. Religion, many say, is based on faith, which is belief without evidence. And empirical evidence is better than faith, so science is better than religion. In its extreme form, this account says that science is the only reliable way to knowledge, and religion is total bunk. End of story, and a fat fickle finger of fate to those deluded souls who still believe in the latter.

That, however, is rather an oversimplification. In fact there are elements of faith in science and elements of empirical inquiry in religion, or at least religion at its best. (One of the problems in the science-vs-religion controversy is that there are many forms of religion and some of them are undoubtedly full of ignorance and superstition. But some aren’t. So I’ll talk about religion at its worst and religion at its best, recognizing that most religions fall somewhere in between.)

There are a couple of ways to acquire knowledge about the world. The most fundamental, which we all do from infancy onward, is to notice regularities in our experience of the world, devise strategies for dealing with them, and hone and revise our strategies as we get more experience.

Babies and small children are mighty learners, with huge curiosity and love of finding out new things and mastering new skills. If we are lucky, we retain that inquisitiveness throughout life. If not, if we succumb to the distresses of the adults around us and the rigidity of the schools we are forced to attend, we gradually lose our zest for learning.

This is not to say that paying attention to what adults tell us is bad. In fact, it is not only a necessary component of learning, but the other primary way we find out things. We listen to what others tell us about what they have learned from their experience of the world, and thereby avoid having to go through a lot of those experiences ourselves. Without culture, without shared learning, we would hardly be human.

And then we test what others have told us against our own experience, which is why paying attention to our experience is primary and listening to others is secondary, although certainly a very close second.

So here is the fundamental difference between science and religion at its worst: Science is a systematic way of checking what people say about reality. Religion at its worst is systematically believing others without checking. And the claim of the pro-science folks, of which I am one, is that the former is a far more reliable way of acquiring true beliefs than the latter.

The word “science” can mean two things: a method for acquiring knowledge and the sum of the knowledge thus acquired. I am talking about the first meaning, the scientific method, which consists of five steps:(1)
1.Observe and describe some phenomenon or group of phenomena of interest.
2.Formulate a hypothesis to explain the phenomena.
3.Make predictions based on that hypothesis. You can predict observation of other phenomena or the quantitative results of experiments to be performed.
4.Perform experimental tests of the predictions. Ideally, get several independent experimenters to perform the experiments. Document both the procedure and the results so others can replicate them.
5.Come to some conclusion about the hypothesis. If the experiments come out as predicted, they confirm (but do not fully prove) the hypothesis. If the experiments fail to come out as predicted, they disprove the hypothesis.
You don’t have to be a scientist in a laboratory to do this. The scientific method is just a formalized approach to everyday problem solving. For instance:
1.Phenomenon of interest: the car won’t start.
2.Hypothesis: It is out of gas.
3.Prediction: If I put gas in it, it will start.
4.Experiment: Put gas in it and try to start it.
5.Conclusion: If it starts, the hypothesis was correct and the problem is solved. if not, the hypothesis was wrong, and I need to try something else.
Carefully elaborate that procedure, put in stringent safeguards to isolate the variables so you are sure that you are measuring just what you want, and you have the scientific method. The strength of this approach is that it minimizes the influence of bias or prejudice. By getting others to replicate the experiments and document their results the process weeds out mistaken observations, overly-hasty conclusions, biased interpretations and the like.

The result is a model or representation of the world that is reliable, consistent, and non-arbitrary. In other words, it results in our best attempt at knowledge of the world, always recognizing that future findings might alter the model.

In the scientific method, what we take to be true is always provisional, subject to change based on further observation. Of course, some aspects of our knowledge have been confirmed so much that it would take quite a lot to dislodge them. But the point is that science does not give us theoretical certainty, only the practical certainty that comes from basing our actions on what we have found out and having our actions be successful in the world.

And that practical certainty has given us defense against disease, a secure supply of food, roads, bridges, electricity, indoor plumbing, the Internet, and all the other technological marvels that we enjoy today.

It is all based on public verifiability, on repeatable observation of facts that any competent observer can see. But what happens when the phenomena to be investigated are private, not public? What happens, to take an extreme case, when you see a burning bush and hear a voice that nobody else hears, and that voice tells you to do something well outside your comfort zone?

I have addressed this question before. Given a single numinous experience of this kind, there is no way to tell whether it is truthful or delusional. But given more than one of them, or given reports of others about similar experiences, or -- most importantly -- given your response to such an experience and the results of that response, you have some basis for belief.

Image from Rahul's Blog.

In other words, religion at its best bears some resemblance to science. The phenomena it concerns are not public in the same way that the subject matter of the physical sciences is. But they are subject to verification. There exist, for instance, quite detailed sets of instructions for meditative practices that produce altered experiential states. They are reliable, having been replicated many times over the centuries, and if you do the practices you too will experience those states.

The instructions carry with them conceptual frameworks for interpreting and understanding what you experience, including recommendations for how to conduct your life. If you live your life as recommended, you will experience the benefits, which typically include more peace, harmony, and happiness than before.

You can think of spiritual practice as a sort of experiment. You have to do the experiment to get the results, just as you do in the physical sciences. Unlike the physical sciences, the results are largely private, not public; but they are not unverifiable. You can talk to others about them. And some of the results -- increased compassion and generosity, decreased anger and harshness toward others, for instance -- are indeed observable by others.

The best religious teachers encourage a scientific attitude: “Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense,” says the Buddha.(2)

That’s religion at its best. What about science at its worst? Just as many in the pro-science camp find fault with religion, many religionists find fault with science. Science, they fear, leaves out all the important things in life: meaning, value, personal freedom and responsibility, connection with a transcendent reality.

They think science denigrates profound sources of truth, sources on which they have staked their lives. Hence the question that prompted this essay. They think science is just another form of religion, antithetical to their own.

Science itself is not religion, it’s a method of investigation, but some people do make a religion out of it. We can call that religion “scientism” rather than science. Scientism asserts that public knowledge is the only real knowledge; that physical matter is all that exists; that consciousness is at best an epiphenomenon, along for the ride so to speak, but without causal efficacy; that belief in God, spirits or anything that goes beyond the physical is sheer delusion.

People who espouse scientism (perhaps we could call them “scientismists” to distinguish them from true scientists) take as the ultimate and only truth a narrow view of the scientific method and a subset of the findings of science. In this they are indeed religious; they espouse their view of the world with the same dogmatism and fervor as the worst of the religionists.

What those who make a religion out of science don’t seem to understand is that the scientific method itself is based on some assumptions that are not, strictly speaking, demonstrated by the method: that there is an objective reality; that it is ordered in a rational and intelligible way; that it is describable by immutable mathematical laws, laws that are not going to change arbitrarily with the passage of time or in different regions of space; and that these laws are discoverable by systematic observation and experimentation.

And science -- meaning both the scientific method and the results of that method so far -- fails to explain why these things are so. Science cannot tell us where the mathematical laws come from, nor why they apply as they do. Science is based on faith in an orderly universe. So far that faith has panned out, and we have no reason to disbelieve it; but faith it is, nevertheless.

Uncritical faith in anything is unworthy of a true human being, whether that be revealed religion or the findings of science. Religious believers would do well to understand and appreciate what science is really about: “The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you don’t actually know.”(3)

And those who make a religion out of science would do well to have some humility and realize that they are not so different from those to whom they think they are superior.

[Bill Meacham is an independent scholar in philosophy. A former staffer at Austin's 60s underground paper, The Rag, Bill received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin. Meacham spent many years working as a computer programmer, systems analyst, and project manager. He posts at Philosophy for Real Life, where this article also appears. Read more articles by Bill Meacham on The Rag Blog.]

Notes

(1) Wolfs, Frank L. H, “Appendix E: Introduction to the Scientific Method.” On-line publication, URL = http://teacher.pas.rochester.edu/phy_labs/appendixe/appendixe.html as of 22 November 2011. See also Science Made Simple, Inc., “Understanding and using the Scientific Method.” On-line publication, URL = http://www.sciencemadesimple.com/scientific_method.html as of 22 November 2011.

(2) Buddhist-Tourism.Com, “Buddha Quotes.” On-line publication, URL = http://www.buddhist-tourism.com/buddhism/buddha-quotes.html as of 7 January 2012.

(3) Pirsig, Robert M., _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_ as quoted in Railsback, Bruce, “Some Definitions of Science.” On-line publication, URL = http://www.gly.uga.edu/railsback/1122sciencedefns.html as of 22 November 2011.

References

Davies, Paul. “Taking Science on Faith.” On-line publication, URL = http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/24/opinion/24davies.html as of 7 January 2012.

Overby, Dennis. “Laws of Nature, Source Unknown.” On-line publication, URL = http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/18/science/18law.html as of 7 January 2012.

Wikipedia. “Science.” On-line publication, URL = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science as of 22 November 2011.

The Rag Blog

Posted by thorne dreyer at 9:44 AM
ANTI-IMPERIALISM, CLASS STRUGGLE

The Latest From The "Jobs With Justice Blog"-The Seemingly One-Sided Struggle Continues-It's High Time To Push Back-Push Back Hard-30 For 40 Is The Slogan Of The Day.

2012-01-26T10:14:00.000-05:00

Click on the headline to link to the Jobs With Justice Blog for the latest national and international labor news, and of the efforts to counteract the massively one-sided class struggle against the international working class movement.

a working class story, anti-capitalism, ANTI-IMPERIALISM, class struggle defense, international working class solidarity, jobs with justice blog, workers government
From the American Left History blog-Wednesday, June 17, 2009

With Unemployment Rising- The Call "30 For 40"- Now More Than Ever- The Transitional Socialist Program

Google To Link To The Full Transitional Program Of The Fourth International Adopted In 1938 As A Fighting Program In The Struggle For Socialism In That Era. Many Of The Points, Including The Headline Point Of 30 Hours Work For 40 Hours Pay To Spread The Work Around Among All Workers, Is As Valid Today As Then.

Guest Commentary

From The Transitional Program Of The 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.

The Latest From The “Veterans For Peace” Facebook Page-Gear Up For The 2012 Anti-War Season-Troops Out Now!

2012-01-26T10:13:00.000-05:00

Click on the headline to link to the Veterans For Peace website for the latest news.

Re-posted From American Left History- Thursday, November 11, 2010

*A Stroll In The Park On Veterans Day- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops From Iraq and Afghanistan!

Markin comment:

Listen, I have been to many marches and demonstrations for democratic, progressive, socialist and communist causes in my long political life. However, of all those events none, by far, has been more satisfying that to march alongside my fellow ex-soldiers who have “switched” over to the other side and are now part of the struggle against war, the hard, hard struggle against the permanent war machine that this imperial system has embarked upon. From as far back as in the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) days I have always felt that ex-soldiers (hell, active soldiers too, if you can get them) have had just a little bit more “street cred” on the war issue than the professors, pacifists and little old ladies in tennis sneakers who have traditionally led the anti-war movements. Maybe those brothers (and in my generation it was mainly only brothers) and now sisters may not quite pose the questions of war and peace the way I do, or the way that I would like them to do, but they are kindred spirits.

Now normally in Boston, and in most places, a Veterans Day parade means a bunch of Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) or American Legion-types taking time off from drinking at their post bars (“the battle of the barstool”) and donning the old overstuffed uniform and heading out on to Main Street to be waved at, and cheered on, by like-minded, thankful citizens. And of course that happened this time as well. What also happened in Boston this year (and other years but I have not been involved in previous marches) was that the Veterans For Peace (VFP) organized an anti-war march as part of their “Veterans Day” program. Said march to be held at the same place and time as the official one.

Previously there had been a certain amount of trouble, although I am not sure that it came to blows, between the two groups. (I have only heard third-hand reports on previous events.) You know the "super-patriots" vs. “commie symps” thing that has been going on as long as there have been ex-soldiers (and others) who have differed from the bourgeois party pro-war line. In any case the way this impasse had been resolved previously, and the way the parameters were set this year as well, was that the VFP took up the rear of the official parade, and took up the rear in an obvious way. Separated from the main body of the official parade by a medical emergency truck. Nice, right? Something of the old I’ll take my ball and bat and go home by the "officials" was in the air on that one.

But here is where there is a certain amount of rough plebeian justice, a small dose for those on the side of the angels, in the world. In order to form up, and this was done knowingly by VFP organizers, the official marchers, the bands and battalions that make up such a march, had to “run the gauntlet” of dove emblem-emblazoned VFP banners waving frantically directly in front of their faces as they passed by. Moreover, although we formed the caboose of this thing the crowds along the parade route actually waited as the official paraders marched by and waved and clapped at our procession. Be still my heart. But that response just provides another example of the ‘street cred” that ex-soldiers have on the anti-war question. Now, if there is to be any really serious justice in the world, if only these vets would go beyond the “bring the troops home” and embrace- immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all U.S./Allied Troops from Iraq and Afghanistan then we could maybe start to get somewhere out on those streets. But today I was very glad to be fighting for our communist future among those who know first-hand about the dark side of the American experience. No question.

From The "Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives" Website- The Alba Blog

2012-01-26T10:11:00.002-05:00

Click on the headline to link to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archive blog page for all kinds of interesting information about that important historic grouping.

Markin comment:

This blog had gotten my attention for two reasons: those rank and filers who fought to defend democracy, fight the fascists and fight for socialism in Spain for the most part, political opponents or not, were kindred spirits; and, those with first-hand knowledge of those times over seventy years ago are dwindling down to a precious few and so we had better listen to their stories while they are around to tell it. More, later.

The Latest From The SteveLendmanBlog-

2012-01-26T10:10:00.000-05:00

Markin comment:

I am always happy to post material from the SteveLendmanBlog, although I am not always in agreement with his analysis. I am always interested in getting a left-liberal/radical perspective on some issues that I don’t generally have time to cover in full like the question of Palestine, the Middle East in general, and civil rights and economic issues here in America and elsewhere. Moreover the blog provides plenty of useful links to other sources of information about the subject under discussion.

AAAAAAAA
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Obama's Failed State of the Union

Obama's Failed State of the Union

by Stephen Lendman

It was typical Obama, taking credit for what should be condemned. He's a fraud, a crime boss, a war criminal multiple times over, a moral coward, and serial liar.

His State of the Union address was beginning-to-end doublespeak, duplicity, coverup, and denial of failed policies complicit with Wall Street crooks, war profiteers, and other corporate favorites while popular needs go begging.

Not according to fawning New York Times writers, however. Suppressing truth and full disclosure, Helene Cooper headlined, Obama Speech Makes Pitch for Economic Fairness," saying:

Obama "pledged on Tuesday night to use government power to balance the scale between America's rich and the rest of the public....toward an economy 'built to last' and what he called irresponsible policies of the past that caused economic collapse."

Fact check

Throughout his tenure, Obama transferred trillions of dollars to Wall Street, other corporate favorites, and America's rich already with too much. In the process, he deepened a Main Street Depression. As a result, half of US households are impoverished or bordering on it. Hunger and homelessness grow. Nothing's done to help. Unaddressed human need is incalculable.

Over 25 million remain unemployed. Job creation is nil except for low wage/no benefit temp or part-time ones. Inequality in America is unprecedented. Obama supports austerity when massive stimulus is needed. Rich elites never had it so good at the expense of ordinary people left out.

Obama's Failed State isn’t fit to live in for growing millions.

Nonetheless, an accompanying Times editorial headlined, "The State of the Union in 2012," saying:

"A year ago....we applauded" Obama's plan to "put millions of struggling people to work (and his support for) wrestl(ing) down the deficit (by requiring) the wealthy (to pay) a fairer share of taxes."

Applause continued, ignoring Obama's duplicitous Tuesday address and agenda.

Fact check

It includes imperial wars, tax cuts for the rich, corporate handouts, and austerity for ordinary people losing out.

His America perpetuates permanent wars, disproportionate wealth extremes, spiraling debt, and unaddressed human need.

He ignores growing millions unemployed and impoverished. He cut Medicare for seniors and America's disabled as well as Medicaid for poor and disadvantaged recipients. He left growing millions of students debt entrapped, many for life.

He's destroying Middle America. His latest proposal involves looting pension funds to enrich mortgage lenders. Yet he's packaging fraud as a boon to ordinary people. It's typical Obama - say one thing, do another.

Nonetheless, major media scoundrels applaud. As a result, they're part of the problem, not the solution.

The editorial highlighted Obama's "achievements" and plans. It ignored his destructive agenda. It was typical Times, backing rogue politics.

Obama's address wreaked of failed state duplicity, coverup and denial. Throughout his tenure, rhetoric and gimmickry substituted for constructive policies. Tuesday was no different.

He left festering social and economic distress unaddressed, as well as the American dream in shambles. Expect continued business as usual to assure harder than ever times ahead.

He lied saying "The state of our union is getting stronger....In the last 22 months, businesses have created more than three million jobs."

Progressive Radio News Hour regular, economist Jack Rasmus said Obama's "stimulus" programs consisted largely of corporate and personal super-rich tax cuts. As a result, they failed.

Corporations hoarded cuts and other subsidies. Job creation investments weren't made. Business benefitted. Ordinary people lost out. Economic recovery failed. Ongoing policies assure continued failure packaged as success.

According to Rasmus, Obama's agenda "failed because (it) relied on the private market sector to generate a sustained recovery, instead of on the government directly taking the lead to create jobs, rescue homeowners and resurrect housing, and stabilize state-local government finances long run."

He "bailed out banks that (don't) lend, rescued corporations that (don't) create jobs, and (inadequately) subsidized state and local governments for a brief period and then cut them loose to fend fiscally for themselves."

His agenda was and remains devastating for ordinary Americans. At the same time, corporations and rich ones flourish. His "built to last" economy favors them alone. He lied saying he wants to assure "everyone gets a fair shot." His notion of "American values" rewards the rich at the expense of everyone else.

He took credit for letting auto giants destroy jobs, slash worker pay and benefits, ban strike actions, and let corrupt union bosses serve as corporate enforcers. He said what Detroit did "can happen in other industries."

In fact, Detroit's "success" is bankruptcy and ruin. Motown became ghost town. In death throes, it symbolizes America's decline. In disrepair and decline, it's dying with shocking unemployment, poverty and unaddressed human need levels.

What Obama did to Detroit, he offers other cities packaged as populism. He took direct aim at destroying decades of painful labor struggles. They included taking to the streets, going on strike, holding boycotts, battling rogue bosses, police and National Guard forces, as well as paying with their blood and lives before real gains were won.

Now they're lost, including a living wage, decent benefits, and the right to bargain collectively on equal terms with management. Obama deplores the idea and fights it.

What grassroots struggles achieved, he and other rogue leaders destroyed. All this in a nation claiming to be government of, by and for the people, most of whom are working class ones struggling to get by. What Reagan era politics began, Obama raised to new levels.

Praising "America's Armed Forces," he also assured permanent war. They "exceed all expectations," he said. "Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example." Perhaps he has destroying humanity in mind to assure unchallenged US hegemony.

Ron Paul Responds to Obama's Address

Obama "once again showed that he does not represent the fundamental change this country needs. Instead of offering solutions to the problems our country faces, (he) deliver(ed) a campaign speech....typical (of) Washington political gamesmanship that (got) us exactly nowhere close to improving the lives of the American people."

His policies assure "continue economic stagnation" and decline. He "claims to want an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules."

"Yet he remains committed to the same old system of debt, deficits, bailouts and cronyism that created our economic troubles."

"Of course, (he) refuses to even mention the role the Federal Reserve plays in creating an economic system where some are denied a fair shot or even to support my efforts at bringing transparency" to an opaque, secretive process.

"In the area of foreign policy and civil liberties, (Obama's) rhetoric" belies his agenda. It's "hardly 'change we can believe in.' " No wonder more and more Americans, especially young people, (reject his) phony alternatives (and those of) establishment Republicans.."

A Final Comment

Throughout his tenure, Obama waged multiple imperial wars, plans others, looted the nation's wealth, wrecked the economy, consigned growing millions to impoverishment without jobs, and institutionalized tyranny to target dissenters challenging political corruption, corporate crooks, or abuse of power lawlessness.

He also destroyed hard won labor rights, wants education commodified as another business profit center, and wages war on whistleblowers, dissenters, Muslims, Latino immigrants, and environmental and animal rights activists called terrorists.

He wrecked America, governs lawlessly, and threatens worse ahead. Imagine the unpalatable options facing voters in November between a lawless/crime boss/militarist/pro-war/anti-populist/morally corrupt president, and a rogue's gallery of alternatives looking more like a police lineup than legitimate candidates.

They assure continued pro-business/pro-war/anti-populist policies. They threaten Middle America's survival and perhaps humanity if they're not stopped.

Imagine a president taking credit for what should be condemned. Imagine an aroused public refusing to let him.

It's happening with legs but needs to grow. What OWS began, millions need to join and support. That's how great struggles are won. This one's the mother of them all.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.

posted by Steve Lendman @ 12:54 AM

The Latest From "The National Committee to Free the Cuban Five" Website -Free The Five Ahora! -The Defense Of The Cuban Revolution Begins With The Defense Of The Cuban Five

2012-01-26T10:06:00.002-05:00

Click on the title to link to the website mentioned in the headline for the latest news and opinion from that site.

Markin comment (re-post from July 26, 2011):

On a day, July 26th, important in the history of the Cuban revolutionary movement it is also important, as always, to remember that the defense of the Cuban revolution here in the United States, the "heart of the beast", starts with the defense of the Cuban Five.

The Latest From The "National Jericho Movement"- Free All Our Class-War Prisoners

2012-01-26T10:05:00.000-05:00

Click on the headline to link to the National Jericho Movement website for the latest news on our brother and sister class-war political prisoners.

Markin comment:

Free Mumia, Free Lynne, Free Bradley, Free Hugo, Free Ruchell-Free all our class-war prisoners

The Latest From The "Leonard Peltier Defense Committee" Website-Free Leonard Peltier Now!-Free All Our Class-War Prisoners!-An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!

2012-01-26T10:04:00.000-05:00

Click on the headline to link to the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee website for the latest news on our class-war political prisoner brother, Leonard Peltier.

Markin comment:

Long live the tradition of the James P. Cannon-founded International Labor Defense (via the American Communist Party and the Communist International's Red Aid). Free Leonard, Free Mumia, Free Lynne, Free Bradley, Free Hugo, Free Ruchell-Free all our class-war prisoners!

From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-From Socialist Alternative Archives- A Fighting Program for Teamsters

2012-01-26T10:02:00.000-05:00

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.
*********
From Socialist Alternative

A Fighting Program for Teamsters
Part 1

Millions of workers, in unions and unorganized, have followed the struggle and victory of the reform movement in the Teamsters. The election of Ron Carey as International President and the election of the reform slate to 16 to 19 executive board positions represents a turning point in the history of the Teamsters Union. The task in front of Teamsters now is to turn this powerful union into an instrument that can defend wages and conditions for its members and help transform the entire labor movement.

The election result represented the crystallization of anger of rank and file Teamsters at the erosion of living standards, benefits and working conditions. It was also a rejection of the Old Guard and their policies: the multi-salaried bureaucrats, the corruption, the trampling on the rights of workers in locals, the wholesale misspending of members' pension funds, the sweetheart deals with the bosses, the rejection of all attempts of the rank and file to have a say in the union.

Some important steps toward rebuilding the trust of members in their union have been taken. The private jets have been sold, and Carey has cut his own pay and benefits. He has replaced a layer of Old Guard officials with new full-time officials who are paid only one salary and who do not have ties with the past methods. He has joined workers on the picket lines, at plant gates, and at their barns - something unheard of in recent years. As a result, Northwest flight attendants decided to stay with the Teamsters. Also, the demands by management for major concessions in the car-haulers contract were defeated in part through mobilizing Teamsters to picket Ryder corporation. In this contract, the first steps were taken in the struggle against double-breasting. The victory of the reform movement has also inspired clerical workers at Boeing to approach the Teamsters to organize.

Workers and opposition movements who seek to change their leadership in other unions have been inspired by the victory of the Teamsters. This year has seen the rise of the New Directions Movement opposition in the UAW. In the Carpenters' union there was the first contested leadership election in recent memory and oppositions have developed in CWA, SEIU and several other unions. This is a process of growing realization among workers that in order to defend jobs and wages they need to transform their unions. This process will gather strength and speed in the coming period.

Rank and File Must Transform the Teamsters

The anger of workers and their opposition to concessions and the methods of the Old Guard crystallized around the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU). It grew in support and strength as discontent with the old leadership developed. It was the existence of TDU that enabled Carey to be successful in his campaign for President. TDU's 10,000 members were instrumental in combating the bureaucracy's mobilization around the campaigns of the Old-Guard candidates and giving an organized expression to the anger of rank and file Teamsters.
The task of transforming the Teamsters has only begun. Most of the Locals, Joint Councils and Policy Committees of the regional Conferences are still under the control of the Old Guard. The bulk of the members' dues goes not to the International, but instead to these local and regional bodies. These bodies must be reclaimed by the rank and file if they are to be effective in fighting the employers. Already there has been an upsurge in new reform campaigns at the local level. The task of rank and file Teamsters is to challenge these leaders by organizing in TDU, and elect members and programs that will defend living standards.

The new leadership of the Teamsters has immediately been confronted with the employers' offensive. Management has pushed to cut wages and benefits, introduce two-tier contracts and cut pensions and health benefits. At the same time, it has pushed to replace the union drivers with non-union ones. In this situation, the union needs to change its strategy and tactics. The failed policies of the 1970s and 1980s must join the Old Guard on the scrap heap.

Teamsters must oppose government intervention in the affairs of the union. The government is horrified at the prospect of a democratic and militant Teamsters union giving a new direction to the labor movement. Under the consent decree signed by the Old Guard leadership and the government takeover of the union, an independent review board was to be set up with one member to be appointed by the Justice Department, one by the union and the third member to be chosen by the other two members. But, in August the government arbitrarily decided to appoint the third member: William Webster, ex-leader of the CIA and FBI giving the government a two to one majority on this body! Teamsters should note that William Webster is a member of the Board of Directors of Anheuser-Busch, a major employer with whom the union has a contract.

A federal judge has also extended and expanded the government's right to interfere in the affairs of the union, including its right to attend any meeting and spend union dues - and the right for each investigator to charge the union $385 an hour to do so. This shows that the government plans to meddle even more in the workings of the union and throw up obstacles and delaying tactics. Despite the claims of "protecting democracy," the smashing of the PACTO union, the ordering of railroad workers back to work and the strengthening of anti-union laws are reminders that the government - and both political parties - are completely committed to weakening unions and defending the interests of the employers.

The reform movement is under threat from the employers, the government and the Old Guard. Despite Carey's good reputation as a fighter for the rank and file of the union, enormous pressure is being placed on him and other reformers in the union as big business seeks to stifle and crush the development of a strong, militant Teamsters union. The history of the union movement is full of examples of leaders who came into office as fighters, but who cracked under the pressure of the employers. The reason for this is that they had no program or strategy to deal with the problems their members faced. The leadership should mobilize the rank and file to strengthen the union. This can only be done on the basis of a fighting program that can galvanize the members and transform the union from top to bottom and prepare for the battles that lie ahead. This is the decisive task facing TDU and the new leadership of the International; otherwise, they also will be faced with that danger.

1990s - A Period of Crisis

The conditions facing Teamsters and other workers are the most serious in over 50 years. Capitalism is in a period of deepening crisis. This is reflected in the decay of the infrastructure, the huge level of indebtedness and the length of the 1990-92 recession. Living standards have been cut by 19% since 1973, according to the AFL-CIO News. Since George Bush came to power, the economy has grown at its slowest rate under any president since the 1930s. The decline in the US economy over the last 40 years can be seen in the figures below.

Average Annual Rate of Growth of Gross Domestic Product:
1960-73 4.0% per year
1973-79 2.4%
1979-90 2.6%

Average Annual Productivity Growth:
1960-73 2.2% per year
1973-89 0.0%
1979-90 0.8%

The decline in the rate of growth in gross national product (GNP) shows how the rate of growth of the economy has slowed since the 1960s. The decline in the annual rate of growth in productivity shows how big business has not invested in new plants and new technology to compete with its rivals. The fact that there was hardly any improvement in these figures between 1979 and 1990 shows how weak the boom of the 1980s was. The situation in the 1990s, with much slower growth than in the 1980s, will make the economic situation even worse.

At present, all the major countries of the world are facing a deepening crisis of capitalism. The economies of Japan and Germany, which have been major engines of growth in the last couple of years, are mired in crises with a slowing rate of growth and the threat of recession. The world economic upswing of the 1950s and 1960s is decisively over, leading to a period of declining production, bankruptcies, plant closures and layoffs.

Management has adapted to these new conditions by directly attacking workers' wages and the unions. From the time attacks were made on the building trades in the 1970s, during Chryslers' threatened bankruptcy in 1979, and the firing of the air traffic controllers with the smashing of PACTO in 1981, management has gone on the offensive. Concessions were forced through. Two-tier contracts were introduced, benefits were cut and union-busting companies were hired to help employers weaken unions and to set up non-union operations. All this was organized with the support of their two political parties, the Republicans and Democrats, and backed up by the courts and government agencies.

Deregulation

One of the main weapons big business used was deregulation of trucking, alongside deregulation of other industries. Deregulation of trucking, which was signed into law by President Carter, was supposed to create more competition and more efficiency. Senator Edward Kennedy, a ranking Democrat who campaigned vigorously for the bill, and who masquerades as a friend of labor, called the Motor Carrier Act "a significant victory" in the "ongoing battle to ... reform and reduce needless federal government regulation of business ... It means less government and interference in industry ... and more freedom for individual firms to conduct their business in the way they think best. It'll mean new opportunities, new jobs."
It certainly allowed business to operate "in the way they think best." It led to a proliferation of non-union unregulated companies entering the market to take work away from union companies, which joined existing non-union trucking companies like Federal Express. Also, it has created "new jobs" - non-union, low-paid jobs with no job security and working conditions that are intolerable. While these jobs were created, they in no way compensate for the 150,000 union jobs that were lost. Of the 30 largest trucking companies that existed before deregulation, only 10 now survive. Many of the remaining union companies have made deep inroads into wages and benefits by introducing two-tier contracts that divide the workforce in preparation for lowering all wages in the future.

While in the initial stages deregulation increased competition, the overall direction has been the opposite. There has been an increase in monopolization with the big companies using their advantage to demand cuts in wages and drive out competitors. Before deregulation, the three largest trucking companies accounted for one-third of the revenues of the top 25 companies. Today, the top three - Roadway Express, Consolidated Freightways and Yellow Freight, Inc. - account for one half of all the revenues of the top 25 companies. The big three have undercut other companies by offering only 70% of the full wage and discounts of up to 60% in targeted areas.

A Brookings Institute survey estimated in 1990 the total "savings" from deregulation of trucking and rail freight at $20 billion dollars a year. This is what workers in these industries had to pay in the 1980s for deregulation.

Now workers face a further threat from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Once again, workers are being told it will create hobs and "increase productivity." However, it will open up US roads to Mexican trucking companies who pay workers in Mexico a fraction of those in the US - often $7 dollars a day. 85% of all trade between Mexico and the United States is carried by truck. NAFTA would allow Mexican truck companies to operate in the US without the need for CDLs and without safety regulations workers have forced companies to accept in the US and Canada. It shows the clear intent of big business to drive wages and conditions down to the level of those paid in Mexico. The way forward for Teamsters is not to campaign to bar Mexican workers from the US. This will only weaken the union's position, by dividing us from our brothers and sisters in Mexico and weaken our ability to link up with workers and unions in Mexico. It must be remembered that the Teamsters are an international union, representing workers in the US and Canada. The only way to protect wages in the next period is for the Teamsters to launch an organizing drive and link up with unions in Mexico to help raise their wages up to the level of Teamsters in the US and Canada.

Unions Must Lead Struggle to Defend Wages and Conditions

This offensive of the employers was only successful because the leaders of the Teamsters and their unions failed to fight to defend their members. The United Auto Workers gave concessions and the AFL-CIO didn't organize a national work stoppage to defend the air traffic controllers' strike.
When employers said concessions were necessary, the union leaders accepted this at face value and repeated it to their members. But once concessions are given, management only comes back for more. Now management routinely organizes strikebreakers to replace striking workers, and the big business courts back them up. The unions have only been weakened by the leadership's policy of accepting concessions. The labor leadership must launch a campaign to explain to workers how the rich and big business have taken 90% of all the income growth in the 1980s, and how it is time for workers to get their share. This means preparing for a serious struggle. This can only be done by mobilizing members around demands that will inspire them to move into struggle and can gain support from other workers.

In the 1990s, Teamsters will face the greatest attacks on their living standards since the 1930s. US capitalism is now in a long-term decline and forced to attack living standards. At the same time, rank and file Teamsters are now in the best situation in their history to build a strong and fighting union. The mobilization of the rank and file leading to the defeat of the old Guard has given Teamsters a chance to make a fundamental break with the methods of the past. To seize this opportunity, it is necessary to learn the lessons of the Teamsters' tremendous history, especially in the 1930s.
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Fighting Program for Teamsters
Part 2

Militant Traditions of the Teamsters Union

The Teamsters Union was built through the struggle of the working Teamsters to organize against the terror of their employers. Through the bloody Teamsters strike in Chicago in 1905, the union began to develop. As was the case in all the unions, it was only by sacrifice, dedication and the vision of working people demanding their say at work, as well as the running of society, that the unions were built. On almost every occasion, the figures who built the unions were militant workers. Often they were socialists who understood that only by challenging big business' control of society would workers be able to make any real and lasting gains. It was people such as Eugene Debs (who twice won nearly one million votes as the presidential candidate of the Socialist Party and who built the National Railway Union) and Big Bill Haywood (who was the leader of the Industrial Workers of the World - the Wobblies - and who led the Western Federation of Miners) who built the unions and laid the foundation for the modern labor movement.

However, during the 1920s and 1930s, the unions were under the control of leaders who refused to organize any workers other than skilled ones, and who put their relations with management before those with their members. In many ways, their outlook was similar to that of the Teamsters over the last 15 years. The 1929 stock market crash and the subsequent Great Depression of the 1930s exposed the strategies of these leaders. Cuts in wages were accepted, attacks on workers were not fought and the movement was in retreat.

Minneapolis Teamsters Win Victories

In this situation, a new leadership arose in Minneapolis in Teamsters' Local 574. This leadership transformed the situation of the Teamsters and other workers in Minneapolis and then built the over-the-road organizing drive that laid the foundations for the strength of the modern Teamsters of today. It is by examining the methods and strategies they used that Teamsters can see how the union can be rebuilt in this present period of recession, stagnation and attacks by the bosses.
The Minneapolis Teamsters developed an alternative strategy to build the union. Starting with an organizing victory for coal and yard workers and drivers through a swift strike in early 1934, they then mounted an organizing drive among truck drivers in the city. Through audacious organizing drives around a clear program of demands, they transformed the situation in the local from between 100 and 200 members in 1933 to over 7,000 by the middle of 1934. Due to the support they won from rank and file Teamsters, they soon emerged as the dominant force in the local and prepared for a major struggle to win recognition for Local 574 from the trucking companies in Minneapolis.

The strategy of this campaign was to develop a clear program that dealt with the needs of the workers. This was worked out in discussions with the workers involved. Their demands meant a fundamental change in the conditions of workers and inspired them to rally around the union. These demands were agreed in mass meetings of the union. The members then elected a committee of 100 rank-and-filers to prepare for a serious struggle to win these demands.

Along with demands on wages and working conditions, nine key demands were codified by the new Teamsters leadership in Minneapolis into the "Model Contract" and are printed in the adjacent box.

Minneapolis Teamsters Model Contract Demands:
1. Contracts with employers to be limited to a term of one year.

2. Demands concerning wages and working conditions to be decided in consultation with the union members involved in each particular case.

3. Premium pay to be received for overtime, with the added provision that there be no overtime until all employees on the job worked their full quota of regular hours.

4. If the workweek should be reduced by legislative act, rates of pay to be increased in the proportion necessary to guarantee that there would be no reduction in total week pay.

5. Disputes over seniority standing to be settled by the union. The employer to have no voice in the matter.

6. Back pay owed to workers because of contract violations by the employer to be computed at two times the regular wage rate.

7. Formal recognition to be required from the employer of the unions right to operate a shop steward system.

8. The Union to retain the right to strike over employer violations of the working agreement.

9. No boss to order his employees to go through a picket line of a striking union.

Farrell Dobbs, who soon emerged as the leading figure in Local 574, explained this "Model Contract" in the following way: "None of these provisions represented mere bargaining points to be used for horse-trading in negotiations with employers. Each and every one constituted a matter of basic policy. All were enforced according to actual practice. As staff director, it was my job to see that this was the case."

The principal organizers of these struggles were Ray Dunne, Micky Dunne, Grant Dunne, and Carl Skoglund. Soon, new leaders developed out of the struggle, including individuals such as Farrell Dobbs, Harry DeBoer and Lack Maloney. These leaders were socialists and committed supporters of the ideas or Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky, co-leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution when the working class came to power for the first time in history. It was Trotsky and his supporters internationally that first fought against the Stalinist bureaucracy that developed in the Soviet Union.

The socialist leadership of the Minneapolis Teamsters saw that through unity, workers could be the most powerful force in the city. This power could stop production, gain support from other workers and unions, and reach out to the unemployed and small farmers. In other works, they made the struggle of the members the struggle of all workers across the city of Minneapolis. Workers in the city saw that a victory for Teamsters Local 574 would be a victory for all labor, and a defeat for all employers.

In the face of this upsurge in union militancy, the employers, who were organized in the misnamed Citizens Alliance, pulled together their forces to defeat this threat to their profits and their right to run Minneapolis in their own interests. By utilizing the Minneapolis newspapers, the judges and the two major political parties, they mounted a campaign of slander against the union, including vicious red-baiting. At the same time, they mobilized the police to attempt to defeat the mass strikes that developed.

In the face of these threats, the socialist leadership of the Minneapolis Teamsters relied on the power of a class-conscious and well-informed, organized working class. An essential part of this was the role played by The Organizer, the first daily strike newspaper in the US. This kept all workers in the city informed and involved. It also clarified the role of the big-business press, the two major political parties, the judges and the courts, and how they all defended the bosses. It clarified that by relying on its own strength and by being conscious of its enemies, the working class was the most powerful force in society when organized around a class-conscious leadership.

The leadership in Minneapolis also put forward a program to win support from the unemployed. This included building an unemployed section of the union, which fought to improve the conditions of the unemployed. This turned potential scabs into some of the best fighters for the union and was an essential weapon in defeating the employers' attempt to recruit thugs and strikebreakers.

1934 Strikes Turn Around Situation in Minneapolis

The decisive strikes in the spring and summer of 1934 were only successful because they mobilized Teamsters and other workers and the unemployed in the city. Faced with employers who refused to negotiate, and who claimed poverty, the socialist Teamster leadership prepared for a serious battle. A headquarters was rented, a rank-and-file committee of 100 was elected to take over the day-to-day running of the strike, a women's auxiliary made up of wives and girlfriends was organized, and kitchens were set up to feed over 4,000 and provide all workers who were involved with a meal.
As a result, members and workers across the city of Minneapolis were prepared for a major struggle. At short notice, mass picket lines, sometimes with thousands of Teamsters and other workers, were organized to stop all movement of trucks and shut down the operations of the employers. Workers from all trades came to help, including farmers who distributed food and nurses and doctors who donated time in the union hospital established in the headquarters. The union received copies of letters from secretaries who sent copies of the bosses' plans to the union.

Farrell Dobbs explains in the Book Teamster Rebellion the enthusiasm that developed around the important strike of May 1934:

"Assembling the mass forces for such extensive picketing proved to be no problem at all. As soon as the strike was called, new members poured into Local 574 from all sections of the trucking industry. In no time at all, the union almost doubled its mid-April strength, reaching a figure of nearly 6,000. The union's approach to the unemployed workers brought spectacular results. Hundreds upon hundreds of jobless poured into the strike headquarters, volunteering their services; they fought like tigers in the battles that followed. Together with women and men from other unions, they came to the strike headquarters at the end of their day's work, ready to help in whatever way they could. Deep in the night they would finally stretch out wherever they found a place to get a little sleep before returning to their jobs. A significant number of college students pitched in to help the union. All in all, pickets were on hand by the thousands."
In the two major strikes of 1934, the strategy was to win a decent contract for all truck drivers and warehouse workers in the city. To achieve this, it was necessary to stop every truck from moving. Cruising pickets were dispatched to challenge any truck that moved and ensure that it was prevented from continuing. Workers were organized across the city at public phones to watch for any movement of trucks and call the union, which would quickly dispatch a truckload of strikers to the scene. The Citizens Alliance response was to write out injunctions to prevent picketing. Unlike today's union leadership, the Minneapolis strike leaders refused to obey these injunctions. When this happened, the police were dispatched to the scene. However, the police found themselves outnumbered on the picket lines which often involved thousands of workers. By using these innovative tactics, the union managed to stop all trucks from moving.

Faced with the failure of their regular methods of strikebreaking by using the city police, both uniformed and plain-clothed, the Citizens Alliance resorted to recruiting special deputies to beef up the police. They saw that the only way they might win was to use force. Specially organized deputies assaulted workers with riot gear and bullets.

In response, workers outnumbered and outlasted the police on the picket lines. On a number of occasions, well-organized strikers armed with baseball bats showed the cops and deputies that they could defeat them on the streets. Appalled at the murderous actions of the employers, Teamsters found that atrocities committed by the forces of "law and order" only hardened their resolve to win their struggle, and allowed them to win support from wider layers of workers and the population.

The final attempt of the bosses to win the strike in the summer of 1934 was to dispatch the National Guard, put the union leaders in a stockade, and attempt to use traitorous local union leaders to sell out the strike. However, rank-and-file leaders came forward to continue to lead the strike and to ensure that there was no sell-out. In the end, the employers were forced to capitulate and accept the major demands of the union, which won representation for all employees in 62 firms, including all the major companies and gained large wage increases for the workers.

After the successful May 1934 strike, management refused to accept the agreed settlement, precipitating the seven-week strike of July and August 1934, which was necessary to force employers to accept the agreements. Following that, the socialists were elected to the leadership of Local 574, with Farrell Dobbs elected as Secretary-Treasurer. The local then won increased wages for workers and established new traditions of union solidarity, which transformed the situation for labor in the city. Their methods of mobilizing for a struggle were often sufficient to force employers to settle. Those who did not soon learned how powerful organized labor can be.

During these struggle, the leaders of Local 574 also had to deal with attacks from Teamster International leader Daniel Tobin. In 1935, Tobin attempted to crush this socialist leadership by expelling Local 574 from the Teamsters International and built a new paper Local 500 in its place. However, the socialist leadership of Local 574 fought back and led a movement for reinstatement into the International. When it was clear that Tobin's strategy had failed to break the ranks from their militant leadership, the militants were reinstated into the Teamsters International as a newly merged Local 544 in August 1936. The militant socialists were soon elected to its leadership in a stronger position than ever.

Minneapolis Teamsters Enforce the Contract

The Minneapolis Teamsters did not only win good contracts. They also didn't hesitate to enforce them. An essential tactic used by Farrell Dobbs and other leaders of Local 574 in Minneapolis was the demand for the right to strike during a contract. This included the company having to pay double if they broke contract rules! If a number of grievances built up, the union would demand they be resolved or the company would be struck. Companies soon learned to respect the union when they found their businesses closed down. If there were any questions about seniority, the union decided this issue - the union had the final decision. This method was swift and effective and did not involve dependence on expensive lawyers. Also, it kept the rank and file in control of the grievance procedure and kept the power of the union where it was strongest - on the shop floor, not in lawyers' offices.
In their struggles, the socialist Teamster leadership in Minneapolis immediately had to face the problem of the intervention of the City Council, the Mayor and the Governor. In most cities, these officials are members of the Democratic or Republican Parties. Their approach to labor is to use the laws to defend the right of the employer to hire strikebreakers, to restrict effective picketing, and to call arbitrators when labor seems to be getting too powerful.

The attitude of Dobbs and the Minneapolis Teamsters was to put no trust in capitalist politicians, but instead to expose their links to business and demand that workers must put their own representatives into power. In Minneapolis at the time, they supported candidates of the Farmer-Labor Party, but overall they supported the creation of a Labor Party as the only way that workers could win any serious, lasting gains. They argues that big business puts its own class interests forward at all times and has two political parties to defend them. Labor had to draw similar conclusions in order to defend the interests of the working class.

Through these methods and struggles, the wages and working conditions of Teamster members were transformed. For example, a wholesale grocery driver in 1933 was earning around $15 a week for an average 54-hour workweek, with no extra pay for overtime. That came out to about 28 cents an hour. After the victorious strikes in 1934, a driver was earning 52 cents an hour! Three years later, that worker was on 70 to 75 cents an hour and his workweek was down to 48 hours. In some areas, workers won pay raises of up to 64% as a result of the over-the-road organizing drive. These gains should be held up as an example of the kind of gains that could be won by unions today if they followed similar strategies.

Local 574 saw that the only way union leaders and business agents could represent their members was if they lived a lifestyle similar to that of their members. Farrell Dobbs explains their policy: "On the question of staff wages, the union leadership junked the outrageous bureaucratic practice of conniving to draw salaries comparable to those received by corporation executives. Staff pay was supposed to be $26 a week, the going wage for truck drivers at the time; as new wage increases were won for the workers, the staff would then get a similar raise." Thus, all business agents and union officials were paid no more than the average wage of the workers they represented. Often it was much less. As Dobbs explains, "In this, as in every other respect, there was only one class of citizenship in the local; it was shared equally by elected officers, full-time organizers and rank-and-file members." This ensured that only people who were willing to put the interests of the movement first came forward as business agents. Also, it ensured that their outlook did not get elevated above that of the members.

It should be noted that the Minneapolis leadership refused to use the term "business agents," so as not to identify the union with a business. Instead, they called them "organizers." Also, they instituted a policy that if a worker became an organizer, then his seniority was maintained. This ensured that he was not separated from the workforce and could always return to a regular job at a later date.

On grievances, organizers were expected to fight for their members. When face to face with management, they were expected to always argue as strongly as possible for the concerns of their members, and not to horse-trade or give up workers' rights to management. It was only later, at the union hall, that the situation would be assessed as to the best way the problem could be resolved.

Minneapolis Teamsters Increase Their Influence

Between 1934 and 1940 the socialist leadership of Local 574 and then Local 544 won victory after victory. Local 544 became the most powerful union in the city. This power was extended to the Minneapolis Teamster Joint Council. This allowed them to initiate their plans to launch the over-the-road organizing drive. Before then, the Teamsters union was essentially a grouping of colonial empires that were governed by the rules of the local in that area. Now all drivers were to be organized in 11 states in the Midwest around a similar contract. This strategy again used the method of organizing the members around demands that would change their lives. The North Central District Drivers Council was organized by the Minneapolis Teamsters under the leadership of Farrell Dobbs. It soon represented the most powerful Teamster locals in the region and organized all drivers in the region under one contract. The first area contract signed in 1938 represented 175 Teamster locals, 1,700 companies and 125,000 workers - the largest contract ever signed to date by Teamsters. The 1939 Agreement covered 350 union locals in 12 states (2,500 companies) and covered close to 200,000 workers. It forged a new direction for the Teamsters union.
Through this organizing drive and the signing of the first area contract, the foundation was laid for the establishment of the Teamsters as a powerful industrial and international union. The membership of the Teamsters exploded from 75,000 in 1993 to 420,000 in 1939. Some of the major problems facing Teamsters today were turned around by the militant tactics used in this organizing drive, which drew on the lessons learned in Minneapolis. For example, today Teamsters face a proliferation of owner-operator drivers who have been convinced that they can improve their lives by buying their own truck. Very often this results in worse conditions. The Minneapolis Teamsters developed a clear strategy towards these drivers. They demanded that the company include these workers in the union contract. The company was to pay all the cost of running the rig, and the driver would be paid either at a rate per hour or per mile. This won these drivers to the union and increased the power of the Teamsters.

Lessons for Today

The lessons to be learned from the struggles of Teamsters and the working class under the socialist leadership of the Teamsters in Minneapolis is clear. A program of demands must be drawn up that deals with the problems of all workers. Through such a program, Teamsters and other workers can be mobilized into a powerful force. By clarifying the role of the press, the two political parties, the courts and the police as allied to the employers, workers can then move into struggle with a clear understanding that their task is to rely on spreading support among the widest possible layer of workers and involving them in struggle. In this way, big business is faced with an escalating movement of the working class, which threatens to challenge its power in society. This will force management to the bargaining table and increase the consciousness, cohesion and power of the working class in its struggle to build a Labor Party and move toward the socialist transformation of society.
Through this program and strategy, the working class of Minneapolis was mobilized into a fighting force, which then could strengthen each group of workers when their own contracts came up. Minneapolis was transformed from a non-union city, under the control of the employers' organizations, into probably the strongest and most organized union city in the US.

Despite all the obstacles thrown at the union by employers, the un ion was able to win a contract and win important improvements in wages and conditions by using skillful tactics, by giving a clear explanation to workers of the issues involved, and by involving the membership at every turn of events. Through articles in the strike newspaper The Organizer, daily mass meetings of the union,, the involvement of workers from other unions and the involvement of all members in running the strike, the tables were turned on management.

This upsurge of the Teamsters in Minneapolis beginning in 1934 was one of the three militant strikes that won important victories and inspired the huge upsurge of labor in the mid-1930s. The tactics of mass picket lines began to be adopted by the newly emerged Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO). This process culminated in 1937 with the successful 44-day sit-down strike at General Motors, which forced the biggest and most powerful company in the country to accept the right of United Auto Workers to represent all autoworkers at the company. The power of the rank and file was shown to be decisive in the massive organizing drives that developed at this time. Huge gains were won during these militant struggles of the 1930s, and the situation of workers was transformed.

Union Leadership Contains Militancy

However, a leadership did not develop in the unions to take forward these new, successful tactics of the 1930s, with the exception of the Minneapolis Teamsters. Instead, the old leaders looked to contain these struggles whenever possible and return union methods to those of the past. In this they were aided by big business, which began to create many government agencies and bargaining bodies as well as legislation. The tactic of big business was to take the struggle off the streets, where it was successful, and into the courts and arbitration bodies, which are dominated by big business. Unfortunately, the union leaders cooperated in this.
At this time, big business and the government launched a campaign of terror against socialists and union militants. This was repeated by many union leaders. Red-baiting and terror was used to intimidate and victimize activists who looked to maintain the best traditions of struggles of the '30s.

A vicious campaign of slander, red-baiting and distortion was launched by the Teamster International leadership and President Roosevelt against the Minneapolis Teamsters in 1941. Local 544 was put into receivership and the socialist leaders removed from their positions. At the same time, the government charged the leaders with sedition and "threatening to overthrow the government." Farrell Dobbs, Carl Skoglund, Ray Dunne and Harry DeBoer and other leaders were jailed under the infamous Smith Act. In this way, the Teamsters International leadership and the government used repressive legislation passed in preparation for US entry into World War II to remove this leadership which had written some of the most heroic chapters in the struggle of workers in the US. It is an important warning to Teamsters today about the role of the government and the state toward union militants.

Having gained enormous power as a result of the terrific rise of membership - achieved by the over-the-road organizing drives - the international leadership of Tobin and Beck moved to throttle the upsurge of rank-and-file militancy in the Teamsters. Their methods were the methods of "business unionism." Beck's contempt for ordinary workers was shown in his 1949 statement (before he was elected president in 1952): "I'm paid $25,000 to run this union... Unions are big business. Why should truck drivers and bottle washers be allowed to make big decisions affecting union policy? Would any corporation allow it?"

In this situation, the rights of the rank and file were restricted and orders were issued from the top. Locals were restricted and put into trusteeship if they challenged Beck's leadership. In spite of Beck, the union continued to grow in membership. He failed to win decent improvements in wages and working conditions even in the West (which was his base), and he failed to achieve uniform contracts as had been achieved by the Minneapolis Teamsters in the Mid-West.

The Role of Jimmy Hoffa

Jimmy Hoffa was never formally on the North Central District Drivers Council that won uniform contracts for members. He emerged as an energetic organizer in Detroit and saw how Dobbs's strategy and methods had been successful. Observing some of the lessons of the Minneapolis Teamsters and the over-the-road organizing drives, he saw the huge power a uniform regional contract gave to workers and the union. He moved to organize the South and then the West into uniform regional contracts. This led to major gains for Teamsters and his becoming International President of the union in 1958. Under Hoffa, Teamsters emerged as one of the best-paid workers in the country, with improvements in wages and conditions. The signing of the first National Master Freight Agreement (NMFA) in 1964 was an enormous gain for rank-and-file Teamsters, and was mostly due to the struggle put up by the Minneapolis Teamsters.
At the same time as Hoffa won big gains for Teamsters, he concentrated power at the top of the union and weakened the involvement of the rank and file. His methods were to strike deals with the companies, using threats and at times organizing swift, well-organized strikes, to force employers to buckle under. Hoffa dealt ruthlessly with any rank and file workers or union activists who crossed his path. He also had dealings with the Mafia. This further created secrecy at the top of the union and introduced the Mafia into the Teamsters. It also gave a weapon of big business in its drive to weaken the union.

Despite his continual accumulation of power at the top and the increasingly luxurious and extravagant lifestyle of the Teamster leadership, Hoffa did understand the power of the strike method, and extracted major concessions through his use of secondary picketing, negotiating similar contract dates, and using open-ended grievance procedures. The grievance procedure established in the original 1938 over-the-road agreement, did not allow for automatic arbitration and Hoffa could strike by watching the methods of Dobbs and the Minneapolis Teamsters.

Anti-Union Legislation

However, the union movement was faced with increased anti-union legislation. Starting with the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, big business sought to force the unions into a legal straightjacket. The provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act, especially Section 14b, restricted the right to secondary picketing, opened the union to injunctions and lawsuits, and built up official channels through which big business sought to weaken labor's powers. The Taft-Hartley Act was put through by a majority of Democrats and Republicans. Despite threats of mass actions against this legislation, both the AFL and the CIO foiled to mobilize workers and allowed this legislation to become law without a major challenge.
The response of Hoffa, from the time he became International President, was to attempt to find a way around the Taft-Hartley Act and subsequent anti-union legislation like the Landrum-Griffin Act of 1959, by depending more on using clauses in contracts guaranteeing the right to strike. Ever mindful of the threat of further anti-union legislation, he attempted to keep struggles to a minimum and especially avoided calling a national strike, which might have provoked big business and the federal government to bring its weight down on the Teamsters. His failure to confront the anti-union laws and to educate the membership as had been done by the socialist leadership in Minneapolis left the members open to the attacks of the 1970s and 1980s. It was the heritage of the struggles of the 1930s, along with the economic upswing of the US and world capitalism, that allowed Hoffa's limited strategy to make some gains at that time.

Big business launched an offensive to weaken the powerful Teamsters Union by attempting to convict Hoffa for corruption. Big business wanted to weaken the National Master Freight Agreement (NMFA) and it was no accident that the Kennedys intensified their "investigation" of Hoffa immediately after the National Master Freight Agreement was signed. Almost all goods in the US were carried by trucks. If the Teamsters could be weakened, then all employers would be able to make higher profits. Eventually, Hoffa was put in jail in 1967, and power in the union passed to Fitzsimmons. Fitzsimmons and the other leaders of the Teamsters favored complete capitulation to the employers and came under the thumb of the Mafia. They adopted a conciliatory attitude to management.

These events occurred during the 1950s and 1960s, a period of economic upswing for capitalism. Production raced ahead, based on the dominant position of the US at the end of World War II. Management was seeing profits increase. During this period, gains could often be won by workers without having to resort to the militant strikes of the 1930s. The union leaders were able to point to their methods of one-to-one negotiation with management as all that was necessary to improve conditions for their members.

The union leaders deliberately buried all the traditions of the 1930s which they considered "outdated" and "disruptive" and discouraged workers from participating in the day-to-day life of the union. What the labor leaders did not understand and did not warn the workers about was that the postwar upswing of the economy was only a brief respite in the history of US capitalism. On the basis of capitalism it was inevitable that the upswing would break down into a period of deepening crisis.

Militancy Won Reforms

Important lessons for today can be learned by looking at the overall process of the 1930s through the 1950s. An explosive upsurge of labor in the mid-1930s built new powerful industrial unions and won major gains for workers. This movement then attempted to extend its power onto the political front by moving toward a labor party but that was blocked by the majority of the tops of the labor leadership. During and after World War II, the Roosevelt Administration and big business tried to break the unions, but failed. Faced with this situation, big business moved on the political front to weaken the power of the unions by getting its two major parties to pass the Taft-Hartley Act.
Since the labor leadership failed to challenge the law by mobilizing the industrial power of workers as well as failing to build a Labor Party, the labor movement saw a steady erosion of its legal rights and an increase of anti-union legislation. However, it was only when President Reagan moved to break PACTO that the employers dared return to the open-shop, union-busting measures they use today. This was again accepted without a serious challenge from the leadership of the union movement.

The unions are suffering the consequences of this today when attempts to organize effective picket lines are slapped down with injunctions and courts. The only way for labor to overcome these laws is to expose their class nature and launch a campaign to openly challenge injunctions and court actions. Part of this process should include the building of a political Party of Labor, based on the trade unions, to send workers' representatives to Congress against the hired hands of big business: the Democrats and Republicans.

When the postwar upswing came to an end with the 1974-75 recession, big business moved to drive down the living standards for workers in order to preserve their profits. The assault on living standards started under Democratic President Jimmy Carter with the deregulation of trucking and other industries. It was intensified under Reagan, and then Bush. Open union-busting came onto the agenda, and across the country labor found itself on the retreat.
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A Fighting Program for Teamsters
Part 3

Attacks on Teamsters

For Teamsters, the period of the last 15 years has been a continuous assault on wages, job security, benefits and conditions: wage freezes; wage cuts; the introduction of two-tier contracts, probationary periods and productivity deals; wholesale introduction of double-breasting and all that goes with it; the erosion of the 8-hour day; and the demand for co-payments for health benefits are just some of the cuts they have faced.

The offensive of the employers was only successful because the past corrupt Teamsters' leadership followed a policy of cooperating with management rather than fighting for the interests of the rank and file. Practically all the gains of the past were given up by the Old Guard leadership with hardly a struggle. At the same time, rather than organize new members, the Teamster leadership orchestrated raids on other unions, and signed contracts that hurt other workers. The pension funds of the union were plundered as bribes and corruption became the method of the union to gain favors.

The number of workers covered by the National Master Freight Agreement declined from 500,000 in the 1970s to about 200,000- today. The membership of the union fell from 2.2 million in 1978 to approximately 1.5 million at the present time. This reflected the total inability of the Old Guard leadership to deal with the conditions of the 1980s and '90s. At the same time, their corruption has allowed the big-business press to smear hard-working Teamsters with images of the mob and gangsters and invited government interference in the affairs of the union.

Opposition Grows

In this situation, opposition to the policies of the leadership developed. Rank-and-file Teamsters led a wildcat strike against Fitzsimmons' attempts to negotiate concessions in the 1970 National Master Freight Agreement. As a result of this strike, a significant wage gain was won. It was out of this strike that the union's first short-lived national rank-and-file movement began.
In 1976, Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) was formed. This gave rank-and-file Teamsters an organization to coordinate their struggles against concessionary contracts and to make their union more accountable to its members. TDU had been created at this time because of its members. TDU had been created at this time because of the fear of members that the national leadership would sell them out in the 1976 Master Freight Agreement negotiations. The pressure of TDU was instrumental in forcing Fitzsimmons to call the first national Teamster strike in 1976. This led to most concessions being defeated. TDU was strengthened by merging with the other major national Teamster reform group, PROD, in 1979.

A major victory was won in 1983 when Presser's attempt to put a concessionary rider on the National Master Freight Contract was defeated. The rider would have created a two-tier system, threatening a wage cut between 18% and 35%. The consequences would have been devastating. An eruption of anger from the rank and file alongside an all-out campaign by TDU led to its rejection by 94,086 votes t o13,082. It was a stunning defeat for the Teamsters Leadership and gave the reform movement a sense of its power. Members saw that the leadership was losing its grip on the union and prepared the way for the growth of the opposition movement in the union.

In August 1987, 53% of members rejected the UPS contract, and in May 1988, 64% of freight workers rejected their contract. Despite this, the union declared these contracts passed due to the two-thirds rule. As a result of the anger of workers at this ruling and a court action started by Ron Carey, the leadership was forced to change the rules to allow a 50% vote for the ratification of all future contracts. However, Teamsters should be warned that if less than 50% of workers fail to vote during a ratification vote, then the two-thirds rule still applies. This is one of the many changes that must be made at the next Teamsters' Convention. In a further defeat for the leadership, in July 1988, 72% of car haulers rejected their contract.

At the same time, members went on to the picket lines to defend their living standards. One of the most important strikes was the heroic struggle by cannery workers in Watsonville, California, where management attempted to reduce their low wages from $6.66 to $4.25 an hour. This militant strike was organized mainly by Latina women. After being out on strike for one and a half years, these workers managed to keep their jobs and gain a raise in wages. This strike drew support from workers across the country. With the threat of the North American Free Trade Agreement on the horizon, Teamsters should note that many of these Watsonville workers now face the loss of their jobs as their employers have plans to move production to Mexico.

The government sought to take advantage of the weakened situation in the Teamsters union by filing a lawsuit to take control of the running of the union. However, the rank and file opposed the government takeover of the union and, instead, raised the demand for the right to clean out their corrupt leaders themselves. The TDU built pressure for direct elections of the International President and Executive Board leadership of the union as a way for workers to solve their own problems. The incumbent Executive Board, fearful that they would go to jail, signed a consent decree with the government. Under this agreement, the government dropped its lawsuit against the union and accepted direct election of national leadership by the rank and file. At the same time, the government was given the power to oversee the operations of the future and showing the results of legal entanglements with the government in the labor movement.

The anger of members at the Old Guard and their failed policies led to the sweeping victory of the Ron Carey/TDU slate in the election of 1992. It is a sign of the mistaken view of big business that their attempts to throttle the most powerful union in the US and to smear all unions, has resulted in the election of a reform slate to the leadership of the union. It shows how big business has nothing but contempt for working people and their abilities to organize and struggle to change their conditions. The Teamsters Union now has the potential to organize a movement to give a new direction to labor nationally. The continued intervention of the government in the union has been left as a further legacy of the misrule of the Old Guard.

Now that the Old Guard has been swept aside by the rank and file at the top, but only at the top, it is necessary to prepare the entire union to confront the coming crisis of the 1990s. To do this, it is essential that the leadership of the union develops a fighting program and campaign for this program among the members and against the employers.

The Need for a Fighting Program

Rejection of concessions must be the starting point. But workers cannot be effectively mobilized into struggle just on demands against concessions. As in Minneapolis, workers will respond enthusiastically to a series of demands that will boldly confront the major problems they face. These demands should address the needs of all Teamsters as well as the concerns of other workers - organized or unorganized - so they can be rallied around the labor movement:
• A minimum wage of at least $10 an hour. For a 20% increase in pay on all contracts and full, uncapped COLA. This would raise the wages of the lowest-paid members to a level that would provide a basic standard of living and would compensate workers for the loss of earnings over the last period. This would get an enthusiastic response from members and be a beacon to workers across the country.

• A 32-hour workweek with no loss of pay. This would undoubtedly help to guarantee full employment for all Teamster members without a cut in wages. Also, it would be a clear signal to unemployed workers that the union is fighting for jobs for all workers.

• The right to strike for violation of the contract to be included in all contracts. This is the only way the union can effectively pressure management to accept and abide by all the provisions of the contract, and it puts the day-to-day enforcement of contracts in the hands of the rank and file. This will also avoid costly legal fees and third party interventions.

• No employer to have the right to order his employees to go through a picket line of a striking union to be included in all contracts as has been provided for in the NMFA. This was one of the key demands in Minneapolis contracts and was extended through the over-the-road drive, and is essential to building up the power of the Teamsters and building solidarity with other unions and workers. Drivers should have the right to turn trucks around at a picket line. Management or scabs should not be allowed to unload trucks or drive them through picket lines.

• Restore the practice of pattern bargaining on a national and regional level. All employers who employ workers in similar line of employment to have to conform to area agreements. This will prevent employers from chiseling away at our wages and benefits by signing separate deals and by getting workers to compete against each other.

• All employees must be paid for all time spent in the service of the employer. No stand-by or dead-time practices should be allowed. This demand was accepted by employers as early as the September 1938 Over-the-Road Motor Freight Agreement.

• Free nationalized health care. Only this can guarantee that members are not gouged by the for-profit health industry. Neither Teamsters nor other workers have any security under the present system, because workers who lose their jobs or have to take work in other industries have no fallback.

• Free on-site childcare. The Teamsters are organizing more and more woman workers. For working families, childcare, along with a year's paid family leave is a key demand. They cannot work and look after the children, and they cannot afford not to work. The present cost of childcare is prohibitive for most families.

• Fight all attempts by the employers to divide workers. This means taking a clear stand against racism or sexual discrimination.

• All union officials should be on the same wage scale as the average wage of the members they represent. This will ensure that the leaders understand the members' concerns and will fight for their interests.

• Organize the Unorganized! There are millions of truck drivers, warehouse workers and other workers looking to get the protection of the Teamsters. Carey has taken some important steps forward. This can lead to an explosive growth of the Teamsters in the next period. In order to accomplish this, a general mobilization of the rank and file is necessary.

• Repeal all anti-union legislation, including the Taft-Hartley Act. These laws were created by big business to cripple the unions. Both the Democrats and Republicans are responsible for this legislation.

• Companies who declare themselves unable to pay decent wages or who claim bankruptcy should open their books and show their profits. All the books of account of the company should be opened for inspection by the union. This principle was established as early as 1939 in the over-the-road organizing drive. Those companies who refuse to pay, or threaten to move or shut down should be taken into public ownership under workers' democratic control and management to save jobs.

• All-out opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement. According to the AFL-CIO, over 500,000 union jobs will be lost if this agreement becomes law.

• A massive program of public works to rebuild the infrastructure and provide housing, health and environmental cleanup. Private industry is offering no prospect for full employment in the coming period.

• Drive the government out of the Teamsters! No cooperation with the Review Board established by the consent decree signed by the Old Guard and the government. This body is now stacked 2-1 by government appointees! The union should refuse to cooperate in any way with the Review Board. The government's aim is to weaken the Teamsters and all other unions, to smear organized labor, to discourage workers from joining unions, and to set a precedent for agents of the government to take over other unions. Rank-and-file Teamsters do not need any lessons from government on how to eliminate corruption or on how to ruin their union!

• Break from supporting candidates of the Democratic and Republican parties. Instead, the Teamsters should campaign for the AFL-CIO to call a Conference of Labor to build a Labor Party.

Such a program would get enormous support from Teamsters and other workers to fight for improvements in conditions. It would mean exposing the overall attack on workers and how this is rooted in the deepening economic crisis of capitalism.

Challenge for International Leadership

An important challenge now faces the new Teamsters leadership. The replacement of the Old Guard at the top of the union is an important step forward. However, many good fighters have come forward in the past, but have been derailed because they accepted the limits that capitalism puts on the demands of workers. These leaders have not failed because of personal weaknesses, but because they have accepted capitalism and restricted the demands of workers.
The days of economic upswing of the 1950s and 1960s, when lasting reforms could be granted by the system, have ended. Now we face the 1990s and a deepening crisis of capitalism in the US and on a world scale. In this period, big business wants to take back the gains workers have won in the past. This creates a dilemma for the leaders of the labor movement. Either they accept the limits of the system, or they need to challenge the domination of society by the 500 corporations who control 70-75% of production and constitute the ruling class. This means clarifying the role of the press the courts, the police and the two big major political parties as having been established to defend the interests of this unelected minority who are the real "owners" of America. Unless Ron Carey and the new leadership clarify these issues, and draw the necessary conclusions, they will be forced to restrict the demands of Teamsters. This will mean accepting concessionary contracts and the derailing of the reform movement.

It was the clear understanding of the nature of capitalism that enabled the socialist leadership of the Teamsters in Minneapolis to prepare workers for the necessary battles, to marshal the necessary forces, and to defeat the forces that big business threw across their path.

Farrell Dobbs explained their position in this way:

"Local 574's leadership flatly repudiated the bankrupt line of the class collaborationists. There can be no such thing as an equitable class peace, the membership were taught. The law of the jungle prevails under capitalism. If the workers don't fight as a class to defend their interests, the bosses will gouge them. Reflecting these concepts, the preamble to the new by-laws adopted by the local stated:

'The working class whose life depends on the sale of labor and the employing class who live upon the labor of others, confront each other on the industrial field contending for the wealth created by those who toil. The drive of profit dominates the bosses' life. Low wages, long hours, the speed-up are weapons in the hands of the employer under the wage system. Striving always for a greater share of the wealth created by his labor, the worker must depend upon his organized strength. A militant policy backed up by united action must be opposed to the program of the boss.
'It is the natural right of all labor to own and enjoy the wealth created by it. Organized by industry and prepared for a grueling daily struggle is the only way in which lasting gains can be won by workers as a class.'"

The Teamster Leadership's strategy must include the demand that all jobs be protected and that businesses who claim they cannot pay will have their books inspected by the union and their members. The union must be prepared to say that the owners of trucking companies and other industries have shown themselves incapable of running their industries in the interests of society and workers. It must point to the long hours, low wages and wrecked family lives of those workers who do have jobs as unacceptable.
The Teamster leadership must be prepared to call for public ownership of the trucking industry, and other key industries, under workers' democratic control and management. It is only by taking the top 500 corporations into public ownership and a socialist plan of production being implemented that jobs, wages and working conditions can be defended in the coming period.

Teamsters for a Democratic Union

Since its inception, TDU, along with individuals like Ron Carey, has played the leading role in fighting for democratic reforms and fighting against the Old Guard. At the same time, it has led campaigns to oppose concessionary contracts and other decisions that adversely affect the members. TDU must intensify this struggle, and especially target locals with Old Guard leadership for reform. Also, new challenges have been placed in front of TDU. For example, TDU must give support to Carey in fighting the Webster appointment, as part of the struggle to end the government's intervention in the union. In the stormy period of the 1990s that is opening up, TDU should develop a fighting program similar to that explained above to give leadership to the rank and file in order to defend the living standards and interests of all Teamsters.
In the past years, TDU has provided leadership on a number of issues including one person-one vote in the union, and ousting corrupt officials. Teamsters should recognize the role TDE has played in this. Now, however, rank-and-file Teamsters and TDU face much bigger problems. As workers get activated around the need for reform, they will be looking for answers on all the issues they face. TDU will have to provide answers to these problems to keep these members involved. This can only be done through a fighting program. The leadership of TDU should now develop such a program to solve these problems, and then campaign among the ranks to commit the leadership of the unions to such a program.

Most of the problems Teamsters face today, such as government interference in the union, can only be solved by breaking from supporting the Democrats and the Republicans and beginning to launch a Labor Party. Farrell Dobbs, leader of the Minneapolis Teamsters and the original over-the-road drive, explained this issue in relation to government attacks against Hoffa in the 1960s:

"He [Hoffa] has been unable to rise above peanut politics with the Democrats and Republicans office holders. The limitation has been very costly to Teamsters. Restrictive laws passed by the capitalist politicians have weakened the Teamsters' inherent power to defend their class interests. A nine-year vendetta has been waged against them by the capitalist government, under both Democratic and Republican administrations. To politically class-conscious workers the answer to these attacks is self-evident. The Teamsters should take the lead in breaking with capitalist politics and launching an independent Labor Party. Their perspective should be to build a class political movement oriented towards the workers taking governmental power away from the capitalists."
The leadership of TDU needs to include the demand for a Labor Party in its goals and principles. Through utilizing a page from the Convoy Dispatch, Teamsters could learn how support is growing for a labor party and how they can become involved in building such a party. Teamsters in the US could then follow the steps taken by Canadian sisters and brothers, whose unions have built a labor party, the New Democratic Party (NDP).

Up until now, the main efforts of TDU have been directed to making changes at the top leadership level of the union. The election of Carey/TDU now means the struggle must be intensified on the local level. Those locals with Old Guard leadership must be targeted for reform. The Old Guard are still entrenched at the Joint Councils and Conference level of the Teamsters. These bodies also must be captured by the reform movement.

On the local level, the leadership of TDU must establish new traditions for the role of union officials and business agents. As reformers take over union goals, business agents must either transform their way of working or else be replaced by those who will. Just as management defends its own interests, the BAs must defend the interests of the workers against management. Shop stewards need to be elected regularly by the membership and linked into a strong shop steward system. TDU must also campaign for the principle that when workers are slapped down with grievances, the company and the union should treat them as innocent until, or if, the company can prove them guilty. Only in this way can trust and support be built up among members so they will come forward to reclaim their union.

TDU must fight to include demands in local contracts built around the already-mentioned nine-point "Model Contract" of the Minneapolis Teamsters, and which was the basis for the original over-the-road contract. The principles behind these demands show a way to rebuild the Teamsters. Most particularly, the principle of the right to strike over grievances during a contract must be restored, and included in all the contracts. This is the only way to stop the employers piling up grievances and bogging down the union in arbitration, and weakening the ability of the union to defend the contract. Ron Carey attempted, but failed, to include this demand in the recent car haulers contract, but it must be included in all future contracts. This program will put power back into the hands of the rank and file, and make the Teamsters a fighting union.

In the next period, many honest fighting Teamsters will come forward as reform candidates. However, without understanding the seriousness of the situation they face, they will not be able to mobilize the rank and file, who alone can give the power to defeat concessions. In this situation, workers can suffer defeats and the reform movement can be derailed. It must be remembered that many of the Old Guard who have taken the union away from the members started, themselves, as workers who wanted to build the union. Without a correct understanding of the problems and how they could be overcome, they were forced to accept concessionary contracts. Also, because they sought to isolate the union from the struggles of workers and youth outside the workplace, they found themselves supporting the wider demands of big business, which are attacks on workers. Very soon they were defending concessionary contracts against the rank and file who opposed them. This led them to use the union structures against workers and to try to hide the real state of affairs from the members.

More and more Teamsters will be moving forward into struggle against the attacks of the employers. They will be looking for a fighting leadership to organize their struggles. By adopting a bold program and campaigning among the members, TDU can make these workers conscious of their power and the role that the labor movement can play in transforming society. It is essential that TSU re-establish the fighting traditions set forth by the socialist leadership of the Teamsters in Minneapolis and as was continued in the original over-the-road organization drive. It is only then that the present assault of management can be defeated.

Building the Union in the 1990s

The working class, and especially organized labor is the force that can turn around the present situation. Such was the threat that big business saw from a national rail strike in 1991 that both political parties managed to pass legislation against the railroad union, and wake the President to sign it, in less than 17 hours! They knew that major sections of industry would come to a halt in days if workers were allowed to continue their strike.
However, the labor leaders do not see the potential power of the unions. In fact, at present the labor leaders have started to draw pessimistic conclusions. Following the recent strikes at Eastern, Greyhound and now Caterpillar, they have begun to conclude that strikes cannot be won. These are wrong conclusions. The correct conclusion is that isolated strikes organized as they are at present are not sufficient to defeat the employers in this period.

The solution is to clarify the necessary program and strategy of labor, and then build the solidarity and support behind the struggle of workers. Throwing workers on the streets with no mobilization, no program, and no perspective for victory just does not work. In the recent Caterpillar strike, the task of the union should have been to take the offensive through a clear program of demands and then to occupy the plant. As in the successful sit-down strikes of the '30s, this would put employers on the defensive as they are unable to operate their plant with strikebreakers, and it would have put workers in control of the struggle. In this way, the union could have rallied thousands of workers to support such a strategy. Not only could Caterpillar workers have won a victory, but such a victory would have shown a way forward to workers across the country. Around the time the Caterpillar strike ended, the uprising in South Central Los Angeles took place. Had the UAW taken the strategy proposed here, it would have united the struggle of its members with the struggle of youth and workers against racism and poverty. In this way, a generalized fight back throughout America could have developed under the leadership of the unions.

Along with this strategy, it is essential to confront the array of legal hurdles and roadblocks that the employers and big business throw down across the path of labor. It must be remembered that when the labor movement began, it was illegal to form a union or go on strike. The labor movement must throw down a challenge to injunctions put out by bosses' courts. All Teamsters and other workers must be told that the union does not accept these injunctions and laws that are created by the bosses purely to protect their profits. Any threat of lawsuits or fines must be met with a continued escalation and spreading of the action until such threats are removed.

The example of Teamsters Local 211 in Pittsburgh shows a way forward for all workers. In response to demands by the Pittsburgh Press to lay off 450 out of 600 union workers and fire the thousands of mainly teenagers who deliver the paper, the union appealed for support from the public. This put the union in a strong position when on July 27 management attempted to operate the presses and distribute the paper using scabs. Thousands of Teamsters and other workers blocked the distribution of the paper. They defied the injunction passed by the courts. This drew support from the AFL-CIO unions in Pittsburgh, who threatened to call a general strike if the paper was still produced. This built a huge feeling of solidarity and forced management within two days to back down from its attempt to replace workers with scabs, at the time of this writing, these workers were still on the picket line on strike.

This action by Teamsters and other workers in Pittsburgh shows that when mobilized, the labor movement is the most powerful force in society. The working class today is much larger as a proportion of society than in the 1930s. Union membership, while reduced in the past decade, is still much greater in proportion and in absolute terms than it was before the great leap forward in the 1930s. The New York Times (4/19/92) quoted what it called a prominent economist: "American trade unionism is slowly being limited in influence by changes which destroy the basis on which it was erected. The changes, occupational and technological, which checked the advance of unionism in the last decade are likely to continue in the same direction."

This sounds familiar because it is part of the employers' constant refrain of the recent years. The only problem is that this statement was made in 1932! Two years later, the general strikes in Minneapolis, San Francisco and the mass strike in Toledo exploded, resulting in a fivefold increase in union membership in the following ten years.

The lesson to be learned from the past two decades is that the policies of the union leaders in general have been a disaster. The balance of forces is in favor of the working class - workers are prepared to fight. What is needed is a program and a strategy to meet the challenge of the new period that has opened up.

The Teamsters can play a major role in forging a new direction for working people across the country. The fear, insecurity, falling living standards and the pain of day-to-day life that shatters the lives of workers, the youth and the unemployed can be ended. The country can be rebuilt on new foundations not based on individual greed or profit. Through socialist policies that benefit the majority of society, the vast resources of this country can be utilized to tackle the problems workers face. This can be achieved on the basis of the top 500 monopolies being taken into public ownership and under democratic workers' control and management. On the basis of a Labor Party with a socialist program and a fighting trade union movement, the working class in America will be able to look forward to the creation of a new humane society.
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A Fighting Program for Teamsters
Annotated Bibliography

Teamster Rebellion by Farrell Dobbs, Pathfinder Press. This book, along with Teamster Power are essential reading for all Teamsters who want to see how the Minneapolis Teamsters built Local 574 in 1934 through mass strikes.

Teamster Power by Farrell Dobbs, Pathfinder Press. Every Teamster should read this book. It documents the strong trade union principles upon which the Minneapolis Teamsters built Local 574 and then 544, and how they organized the over-the-road organizing drive.

Teamster Politics by Farrell Dobbs, Pathfinder Press. It describes how the Minneapolis Teamsters continued their struggle to build the union through 1939.

Teamster Bureaucracy by Farrell Dobbs, Pathfinder Press. It describes how the Minneapolis Teamsters fought to defend the union against attacks from the union leadership and the government.

Labor's Giant Step by Art Preis, Pathfinder Press. This excellent book documents the explosive rise of the Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO) in the 1930s and how it changed history. It also clearly documents the role of the Democratic Party as an enemy of labor, as well as the rank and file struggles to build a Labor Party.

Rank and File Rebellion by Dan LaBotz, Verso. It documents the rise of union opposition in the Teamsters and the history of TDU. Despite its lack of a program, the book demonstrates the continual sacrifice of the rank and file to change the union and the role of TDU in organizing this opposition in the last two decades.

The Autobiography of Big Bill Haywood, International Publishers. This book documents the life of Big Bill Haywood as leader of the Western Federation of Miners and the Industrial Workers of the World.

Strike! by Jeremy Brecher, South End Press. The book describes the explosive history of the struggles of American labor. Despite its anarcho-syndicalist slant, it documents the enormous power of the rank and file.

Hoffa and the Teamsters by Ralph and Estelle James, D. Van Nostrand Company. This book, which is out of print, gives the best description of Jimmy Hoffa and the role he played in the Teamsters. It can be found in many public libraries.

The Living Thoughts of Karl Marx by Leon Trotsky. This pamphlet, which is out of print, gives a crushing refutation of the arguments that capitalism has solved its problems and argues for a socialist solution.

Facing the Challenge of the '90s, a Labor Militant Publication by Sean Herron. This pamphlet describes the enormous crisis facing US and world capitalism. It shows the enormous potential power of the labor movement and draws the perspective and program necessary for labor to meet the challenges of the next decade.

From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Egypt: Military and Islamists Target Women, Copts, Workers-For a Workers and Peasants Government!

2012-01-26T09:55:00.001-05:00

Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League website.

Workers Vanguard No. 994
20 January 2012

Egypt: Military and Islamists Target Women, Copts, Workers-For a Workers and Peasants Government!

JANUARY 14—As the beginning of parliamentary elections approached in November, almost a year after the overthrow of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, mass protests demanding an end to military rule broke out in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and across urban Egypt. Police and the army attacked demonstrators with whips, tasers, truncheons and live ammunition, killing dozens. With more rounds of elections scheduled, it is far from clear that the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) has any intention of allowing a civilian government to be established. Ominously, Islamists, the largest organized opposition, have swept the polls, with the reactionary Muslim Brotherhood and the even more hardline Salafists winning some 70 percent of the vote between them.

Last winter’s uprising toppled Mubarak’s hated, military-backed regime, only to result in an even more open dictatorship of the armed forces. At the time, the bourgeois media and almost the entire left internationally hailed this as the Egyptian “revolution.” Since taking power, the SCAF has strengthened the police powers of the capitalist state and cracked down on social unrest. This is precisely what we warned about at the time, in opposition to widespread illusions that “the army and the people are one hand.”

The military’s repressive measures have been aimed centrally at the restive working class. Within months of Mubarak’s ouster, the regime banned strikes and demonstrations. In September, the SCAF expanded the hated emergency law to ban damaging state property, disrupting work and blocking roads with demonstrations. Between February and September, at least 12,000 civilians were tried in military courts, more than under Mubarak’s 30-year rule. With the first anniversary of the outbreak of mass protests approaching, the regime postponed the verdict in the trial of Mubarak for ordering the killing of protesters.

The oppressive conditions of life in neocolonial Egypt have generated enormous popular anger. In a country where 40 percent of the population lives on $2 a day or less, many families spend more than half their income on food. In 2008, when the prices of basic foods doubled, riots broke out across the country. Today the military regime is threatening to slash the bread subsidy. Unemployment is pervasive, affecting a quarter of youth and 60 percent of the rural population. The peasantry, more than 30 percent of Egypt’s population, toils in conditions that have scarcely changed from the time of the pharaohs. Malnutrition and anemia are rampant. Most peasants are either smallholders with less than one acre, tenants or migrant rural laborers. The terrible impoverishment continues to be enforced through police-state repression. As one striking worker explained, there are no jobs, no money, no food, and those who complain about it are thrown in prison.

The leadership of last spring’s protests offered nothing to alleviate the material conditions of life for the majority of the population, instead subordinating everything to the question of electoral democracy and preaching the nationalist lie that Egyptians of all classes had common interests. As we emphasized shortly before Mubarak’s ouster, “What is urgently posed in Egypt today is that the powerful proletariat—the only class with the social power to overturn the brutal and decrepit capitalist order—emerge as the leader of all the oppressed masses” (“Egypt: Mass Upheaval Challenges Dictatorship,” WV No. 973, 4 February 2011).

The industrial working class has amply demonstrated its social power and militancy, particularly in the textile industry. Strike waves continue to sweep the country. Bus drivers, textile workers, government employees and others have fought in defense of their unions and their livelihoods. But for the proletariat to emerge as a contender for power in its own right will require a tremendous leap in political consciousness. It must be broken from nationalist illusions and religious reaction and be won to the defense of all those oppressed in capitalist society. This requires the leadership of a vanguard workers party that opposes all bourgeois forces—from the military and the liberal opposition to reactionary political Islam—in the fight for proletarian revolution.

The Military and the Islamists

In the absence of a revolutionary proletarian alternative capable of addressing the felt needs of the mass of the population, the election returns are giving a measure of the grip that politically organized religion has on the downtrodden. The Muslim Brotherhood’s reactionary purpose is expressed in the slogan “the Koran is our constitution.” Promoting itself as a civilian alternative to military rule, it would dominate any government elected today. Its self-proclaimed “tolerance” for Coptic Christians is belied by its long history of organized terror. The Brotherhood’s historic aim of establishing an Islamic state has often brought it into violent conflict with the Egyptian government; nonetheless, successive regimes have encouraged the Islamists in countless ways and used them as a battering ram against workers, leftists, women and minorities.

The military, police and Islamists have all joined in recent attacks on women and on the Coptic Christian minority, which constitutes some 10 percent of the population. On October 9, protesters rallying against the burning of Coptic churches outside the Maspero state television studio in Cairo were attacked by uniformed military forces and Islamist mobs. In collusion with the army and riot police, armed thugs roamed the streets seeking out Christians, including women and children, killing more than 20 and maiming hundreds.

Women were targeted soon after the military takeover. Thugs who were mobilized around slogans such as “the people want women to step down” and “the Koran is our ruler” violently attacked a March 8 International Women’s Day demonstration in Cairo. In an act of calculated humiliation, women arrested at a protest the next day were forced to undergo “virginity” tests. Now, the image of a young woman, some of her clothing torn off, being dragged through the streets by military thugs in a December protest has become symbolic of the public degradation of women. This earned the regime a slap on the wrist from its U.S. patron, with Hillary Clinton commenting that such conduct “dishonors the revolution.”

Dead-End Reformism

In December, the Islamists launched a vicious campaign against the Revolutionary Socialists (RS) that was seized on by state security forces and propagated in much of the bourgeois media. The Muslim Brotherhood’s newspaper ran a front-page article baiting the RS as violent while the Salafist Al-Nour Party accused the organization of “anarchy” and of being funded by the CIA, setting it up for state repression. It is in the interests of the whole working class to defend the RS and to defeat such slanderous attacks, which are meant to send a message to all leftists and the workers movement as a whole.

Along with its cothinkers of the international tendency founded by the late Tony Cliff, the RS countered the attack by organizing a public defense campaign. At the same time, they were taken aback that the Muslim Brotherhood had joined in the witchhunt against them: “The attack on the Revolutionary Socialists by prominent Brotherhood members sparked outrage because the RS played such a central role in defending the Brotherhood at the height of Mubarak’s campaign against the Islamists” (socialistworker.co.uk, 26 December). In the mass protests last year, the RS embraced the Brotherhood as allies in the struggle against dictatorship, even posting on the RS Web site a statement by the Brotherhood, complete with the Brotherhood’s emblem of crossed swords cradling the Koran. Even when the RS itself is the target, these inveterate tailists have continued to pursue an alliance with the forces of religious reaction.

In March, the military government issued a law regulating the formation of parties. With the pretense of defending secularism against the Islamists, the law targets organizations of the working class as well as those that seek to represent women and oppressed minorities. It reasserts a reactionary 1977 ban on parties that are based on “religion, class, sect, profession or geography” or are established “on account of gender, language, religion or creed” (“The Main Features of the Amended Law on Political Parties 2011,” www.sis.gov.eg).

As we wrote last year in a polemic against the RS and its international cothinkers, we reject the “bankrupt reformist framework, which posits that the only two ‘choices’ for the working class in Egypt are to capitulate either to the ‘secular,’ military-backed bourgeois-nationalist regime or to political Islam. In fact, these are alternative ways of propping up capitalist class rule, the system which ensures vast wealth for its rulers and dire poverty for the urban and rural masses” (“Pandering to Reactionary Muslim Brotherhood,” WV No. 974, 18 February 2011).

The three major electoral blocs—those representing the Muslim Brotherhood, the Salafists and the bourgeois liberals—have all taken aim at the working class in their election campaigns, explicitly condemning strikes. While the widespread strikes and protests of the last year have given leftist organizations an opening to operate more publicly, the situation has also made clear how the reformist organizations act as an obstacle to the fight to build a revolutionary party that champions the working class, poor peasants and all the oppressed.

The Democratic Workers Party (DWP), which is associated with the RS, promotes itself as representing the interests of the working class. Along with other left organizations and prominent figures like feminist author Nawal El-Saadawi, the DWP has called to boycott the elections in protest against the military regime’s brutality. The DWP’s program makes no pretense of socialism, instead demanding “the establishment of a parliamentary republic” (International Socialism, 28 June 2011). This is simply a call for a species of bourgeois government.

In promoting the call for a parliamentary republic, the reformists falsely tie the democratic aspirations of the population to the class rule of the Egyptian bourgeoisie. In Egypt, where successive parliaments have served as fig leaves for military dictatorship, the desires of the masses for political democracy, including freedom of the press and freedom of assembly, are just and deeply felt. However, the burning needs of the Egyptian masses—from fundamental democratic rights to women’s emancipation and eradicating the desperate urban and rural poverty—cannot be addressed except by uprooting the capitalist order and establishing a workers and peasants government. As Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin wrote:

“The dictatorship of the proletariat alone can emancipate humanity from the oppression of capital, from the lies, falsehood and hypocrisy of bourgeois democracy—democracy for the rich—and establish democracy for the poor, that is, make the blessings of democracy really accessible to the workers and poor peasants, whereas now (even in the most democratic—bourgeois—republic) the blessings of democracy are, in fact, inaccessible to the vast majority of working people.

—V.I. Lenin, “‘Democracy’ and Dictatorship” (December 1918)

Imperialism and the Mask of “Human Rights”

The imperialist rulers are past masters at cloaking their bloody depredations in the rhetoric of “human rights” and “democracy.” Bourgeois liberals, the supposedly “non-governmental organizations” (NGOs) and the reformist left have done their bit to embellish this image. In Libya, the imperialists carried out the terror bombing that led to the ouster and assassination of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi under a “humanitarian” banner, with the authorization of the United Nations. Cheerleading for the “Arab revolution” against dictatorship, much of the reformist left internationally fell into line with the imperialists’ campaign, hailing the Libyan “rebels” who were willing tools for the NATO attack. The RS enthused over rebel-controlled “liberated Libya,” where “all the institutions, including the courts, military forces, police and prisons, are under the popular democratic control” (Center for Socialist Studies, 4 March 2011).

The Libyan “rebels” comprised a collection of defectors from the Qaddafi regime, monarchists, Islamic fundamentalists, former CIA assets, tribal chiefs and others. They gave a pretext for the imperialist bombing, acted as the ground troops for the imperialists and carried out pogroms against black African immigrants in the territories they had seized. In a statement issued the day after the imperialist bombing began, the International Communist League put forward a perspective of proletarian internationalism, giving no political support to Qaddafi but calling on “workers around the world to take a stand for military defense of semicolonial Libya.” We added: “From Indochina and the Korean peninsula to the U.S.-led occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan today, the ‘democratic’ imperialist rulers wade in the blood of millions upon millions of their victims” (“Defend Libya Against Imperialist Attack!” WV No. 977, 1 April 2011).

Egypt was and remains a top recipient of U.S. military aid, to the tune of $1.3 billion a year. At the same time, provoking bitter complaints from the SCAF, the imperialists have also cultivated “democratic” opposition groups to give a humanitarian guise to their operations and to influence protest movements. And now that the Islamists are riding high on their electoral victory, the Obama administration has held high-level meetings with the Muslim Brotherhood in an attempt to forge closer ties.

Since Mubarak’s overthrow, the U.S. has given more than $40 million to Egyptian “human rights” groups. In December, Britain announced plans to double the amount of aid it gives to NGOs in the Near East. A major sponsor of NGOs around the world is the United Nations, which itself was set up to give a humanitarian veneer to the depredations of imperialism, particularly American imperialism. The NGOs, sanctioned by and receiving funding from the imperialists, are hardly independent from their bourgeois sponsors.

Showing how little tolerance it has for political activity even when it is backed by its own imperialist patrons, Egypt’s military regime raided the offices of 17 NGOs on December 29. These included the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, linked to German chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic party, as well as the notorious CIA conduit Freedom House. After the U.S. State Department announced it was “deeply concerned” and threatened to cut military aid to Egypt, the regime promised to return all of the seized materials and allow the NGOs to return to normal operations.

A 14 April 2011 article on the “Arab Spring” in the New York Times reported that “the United States’ democracy-building campaigns played a bigger role in fomenting protests than was previously known, with key leaders of the movements having been trained by the Americans.” One vehicle for this is the Center for Applied NonViolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS), which has advised “pro-democracy” activists on overthrowing regimes that are in the imperialists’ crosshairs, from Zimbabwe to Iran to Venezuela. In Egypt, the role of organizations such as CANVAS is to steer mass protests in directions acceptable to the imperialists.

CANVAS describes itself in the vaguest of terms, stating that it does not receive funding from any government and that “our agenda is educational, not political” (www.canvasopedia.org). But CANVAS’s purpose is amply illustrated by its history. It was founded by Slobodan Djinovic, the head of Serbia’s largest private Internet and phone company, and Srdja Popovic, a former member of parliament. Both were leaders of the Serbian student opposition group Otpor, which received funds from imperialist conduits such as the National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA front, and the U.S. Agency for International Development, another CIA conduit. Otpor spearheaded the protests that toppled Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic in the fall of 2000. These protests amounted to a continuation by other means of the 1999 NATO “human rights” bombing campaign against Serbia, carried out under the pretense of defending the Kosovar Albanians. The April 6 Youth Movement, hailed in the bourgeois media for its role in the Egyptian “revolution,” modeled its logo on Otpor’s and used CANVAS’s materials to train its membership.

April 6 is part of the Revolution Youth Council (RYC), a bloc that formed last winter and claimed to speak on behalf of protesters in Tahrir Square. The RYC also includes representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood and supporters of “democratic” oppositionist Mohamed ElBaradei. The U.S. International Socialist Organization, former affiliates of the Cliff tendency, hailed them as “Egypt’s young revolutionaries.” Both April 6 and the RYC have demanded that the SCAF hand power to a “national salvation government” headed by ElBaradei, who announced today that he was withdrawing from the presidential race, saying that the military was not about to hand power to elected rulers. ElBaradei has proved his usefulness to the imperialists: While head of the UN’s nuclear watchdog, he led the charge to investigate Iraq’s supposed “weapons of mass destruction” in the run-up to the U.S. invasion in 2003.

For Trade Unions Independent of the Capitalist State!

In the decade leading to Mubarak’s ouster, the Egyptian proletariat engaged in a wave of struggle that included over two million workers participating in over 3,000 strikes, sit-ins and other actions. These were carried out in defiance of the corrupt leadership of the state-run Egyptian Trade Union Federation (ETUF), the only legally recognized union body, whose predecessor was established by Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1957. For over two decades, it was customary for the federation’s president to serve as the Minister of Labor. Acting as the Egyptian dictatorship’s lieutenants within the labor movement, the ETUF leadership refused to approve strikes, sabotaged workers struggles and informed on militants, setting them up for repression.

Since Mubarak’s fall, a number of new trade unions have flourished. According to historian Joel Beinin, “Some independent unions—like the Cairo Joint Transport Authority union of bus drivers and garage workers and the RETA [Real Estate Tax Authority] workers’ union—are quite large and command the loyalty of a great majority of the potential bargaining unit. Others have only fifty to one hundred members in factories employing hundreds or thousands” (“What Have Workers Gained from Egypt’s Revolution?” Foreign Policy, 20 July 2011). The Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions (EFITU), founded last January, has been feted by the tops of the AFL-CIO and the British Trades Union Congress, labor bureaucrats who act as the agents of their imperialist ruling classes, as well as by reformist “socialists.”

Although the EFITU is not directly run by the Egyptian state, it is not politically independent from the capitalist rulers. Beinin approvingly reports that the EFITU and other organizations filed a court suit calling on the military regime to dissolve the ETUF and seize its assets, which the military did. This was an open invitation for the bosses’ state to attack not only the ETUF unions but the workers movement more broadly, serving to renew labor’s ties to the state. The development of a new, class-struggle leadership in the unions—one that would fight for strong industrial unions independent of the capitalist state—is a crucial part of the struggle to build the revolutionary workers party that is urgently needed.

Bankrupt Nationalism Breeds Religious Reaction

Born of a history of imperialist subjugation, Egyptian nationalism has long served the country’s capitalist rulers by obscuring the class divide between the tiny layer of filthy rich at the top and the brutally exploited and impoverished working class. Rather than struggling to break the working class from these illusions, left organizations including the RS have bolstered them. Harking back to the 1950s-60s, when the left-nationalist strongman Nasser wielded substantial influence in the Near East, the RS proclaimed, “Revolution must restore Egypt’s independence, dignity and leadership in the region” (see “Egypt: Military Takeover Props Up Capitalist Rule,” WV No. 974, 18 February 2011).

Nasser’s bourgeois regime, which continues to be idealized by the Egyptian left today, came to power in a military coup during a period of mass protests and strikes that followed World War II. Military forces led by Colonel Nasser overthrew the monarchy of King Farouk in 1952, followed shortly afterward by the departure of British troops. While Nasser won wide recognition as an “anti-imperialist,” especially with the nationalization of the Suez Canal, Egypt remained an impoverished country ultimately subordinated to imperialism.

Nasser succeeded in stabilizing the rule of the capitalist class, in part through concessions—such as a partial land redistribution, raising wages and expanding access to health care and education—but most characteristically through brutal repression. To consolidate his rule, Nasser suppressed the Communists, imprisoning, torturing and killing them. But even as he brutalized them, the Stalinist Communist Party continued its class-collaborationist support to Nasser, liquidating into his Arab Socialist Union in 1965. The Soviet Union provided economic and military aid to Nasser’s regime, allowing him a degree of independence from imperialist control that would not be possible today.

The bankruptcy of both secular nationalism and Stalinism, forces that were once dominant among the poor and oppressed in the region, fed the dramatic rise of political Islam. Generously funded by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, the Islamists, even while nominally banned, built a mass base in large part by providing charity and social services to masses of people to whom the bourgeois state has nothing to offer except abject poverty and police repression. American journalist Mary Anne Weaver described her experience in Cairo’s Imbaba slum:

“The Islamists, led by the Brotherhood, had built their own social and welfare system here, rivalling that of the state. [The hardline Islamist] Gama’a-controlled ‘popular’ mosques had set up discount health clinics and schools, day-care centers, and furniture factories to employ the unemployed, and they provided meat, at wholesale prices, to the poor. Despite an aggressive $10 million social program launched by the government at the end of 1994, the Islamists’ institutions remained generally far more efficient and far superior to run-down government facilities.”

—A Portrait of Egypt (1999)

Today the Islamists are once again trying to establish a base among the organized working class, where they historically have had little support. In 1946, when they did have a hearing among a layer of industrial workers, they played a strikebreaking role. The Muslim Brotherhood opposed major strikes in the Shubra al-Khayama textile plant while its newspaper spread anti-Communist and anti-Semitic poison. When the strike leaders were arrested during a strike in January of that year, the Brotherhood condemned them, saying they were “members of communist cells headed by Jews.” During a June strike in the same plant, the Brotherhood “informed the police of the names and addresses of the strike committee” (Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman, Workers on the Nile [1998]).

Cliffites and Islam: Feeding the Hand That Bites Them

The RS and its cothinkers in the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP) have gone out of their way to bolster illusions in the Muslim Brotherhood, promoting it as a potential ally of the working class in the fight against imperialism and capitalist oppression. In an article titled “Comrades and Brothers” published in Middle East Report (Spring 2007), RS spokesman Hossam El-Hamalawy boasted that his organization “pushed for close coordination” with the Brotherhood and praised its “brotherly spirit.” Half a year ago, in an article printed in the SWP’s Socialist Review (June 2011) titled “The Islamists and the Egyptian Revolution,” Egyptian Cliffite Sameh Naguib complained about the “state of hysteria” among the left and liberals over the resurgent Islamist movement. Naguib went so far as to denounce those “lured into debates over Article 2 of the constitution, which enshrines Islam as ‘the religion of the state…and Islamic law as the principal source of legislation’.”

Long before that, in the seminal International Socialism (Autumn 1994) article “The Prophet and the Proletariat,” SWP leader Chris Harman went to some lengths to present political Islam favorably for seeking “to transform society, not to conserve it in the old way” and for “anti-imperialist slogans and some anti-imperialist actions which have embarrassed very important national and international capitalist interests.” This was the criminal line taken by the bulk of the left internationally in supporting Ayatollah Khomeini’s forces in the mass upsurge in Iran in the late 1970s against the bloody, U.S.-backed Shah. The result was the beheading of the militant working class, as Communists and other leftists were butchered, women were further enslaved, and national and other minorities were brutally repressed by the new Islamic regime.

While the SWP can fill reams of paper with nonsense about the Brotherhood’s “anti-imperialist stance,” Islamists, including the Brotherhood, have historically been the willing tool of imperialism against Communists, modernizing nationalists and secular liberals. Following World War II, U.S. imperialism promoted and funded the Brotherhood as part of its Cold War drive against Communism. This was one expression of the policy described in 1950 by John Foster Dulles, who would later serve as Eisenhower’s Secretary of State: “The religions of the East are deeply rooted and have many precious values. Their spiritual beliefs cannot be reconciled with Communist atheism and materialism. That creates a common bond between us, and our task is to find it and develop it.”

The Cliff tendency has a long history of siding with the forces of Islamic reaction, including cheering the mujahedin—anti-Soviet “holy warriors”—in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The imperialists funneled vast quantities of arms and money to these Islamist terrorists in the largest CIA operation in history. The Muslim Brotherhood provided a major contingent of the mujahedin, whose jihad against a Soviet-backed, modernizing nationalist government was sparked when the regime introduced such reforms as lowering the bride price. In the first war in modern history in which the status of women was a central issue, the Soviet Red Army battled Islamic fundamentalists who threw acid in the faces of unveiled women and killed teachers who taught young girls to read.

We hailed the Red Army in Afghanistan. Its presence opened the possibility of extending the gains of the 1917 Russian Revolution to Afghanistan, just as those parts of Central Asia that were incorporated into the Soviet Union progressed centuries beyond the medieval conditions that prevailed in Afghanistan. The withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1988-89 was a betrayal by the Moscow Stalinist bureaucracy that left the country mired in backwardness and internecine bloodletting. The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan was the precursor to the collapse of the Soviet Union itself.

Although deformed by the parasitic rule of a bureaucratic caste, the Soviet Union represented the dictatorship of the working class. When the USSR was destroyed through capitalist counterrevolution in 1991-92, the SWP welcomed this, proclaiming “Communism has collapsed” and adding “It is a fact that should have every socialist rejoicing” (Socialist Worker [Britain], 31 August 1991). A grave defeat for working people and the oppressed internationally, the end of the Soviet Union has meant a more dangerous world, where U.S. imperialism has a free hand and forces of religious and social reaction have grown stronger.

Permanent Revolution

The Bolshevik Revolution was a defining event of the 20th century. The working class took state power, leading the peasantry, national minorities and all of the oppressed in overthrowing bourgeois rule, sweeping away as well the tsarist autocracy and the state church. It established the dictatorship of the proletariat, liberating the working people from capitalist exploitation. The Revolution confirmed the theory of permanent revolution developed by Leon Trotsky in 1904-1906. Trotsky had projected that, despite its economic and social backwardness, Russia was already part of a world capitalist economy that was ripe for socialist transformation, requiring proletarian revolution not only in backward countries like Russia but especially in the advanced capitalist states. The workers in Russia, who were small in number but strategically concentrated in large industry, could come to power before the country had undergone an extended period of capitalist development. Moreover, the workers in Russia would have to come to power if Russia was to be liberated from the yoke of its feudal past.

As Trotsky wrote in 1929 in The Permanent Revolution:

“With regard to countries with a belated bourgeois development, especially the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the theory of the permanent revolution signifies that the complete and genuine solution of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation, above all of its peasant masses....

“The dictatorship of the proletariat which has risen to power as the leader of the democratic revolution is inevitably and very quickly confronted with tasks, the fulfillment of which is bound up with deep inroads into the rights of bourgeois property.”

In the same work, Trotsky stressed that “the socialist revolution begins on the national arena, it unfolds on the international arena, and is completed on the world arena. Thus, the socialist revolution becomes a permanent revolution in a newer and broader sense of the word; it attains completion only in the final victory of the new society on our entire planet.”

In articles on the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt a year ago, we raised the call for a revolutionary constituent assembly along with a series of democratic demands while centrally stressing the need for the working class to establish factory committees and other organs of dual power. As a result of subsequent discussion, the ICL rejected on principle the call for a constituent assembly, which can be nothing other than a form of bourgeois state. As we wrote in “Tunisian Elections: Victory for Islamic Reactionaries” (WV No. 993, 6 January): “Our understanding of the reactionary character of the bourgeoisie, in the semicolonial countries as well as the advanced capitalist states, means that there can be no revolutionary bourgeois parliament. The call for a constituent assembly consequently runs counter to the permanent revolution.”

Permanent revolution provides the only program for resolving the fundamental questions posed in Egypt and throughout the Near East today. The region is marked by abject poverty, benighted enslavement of women, the dispossession of the Palestinian people by Israel and the oppression of numerous other national and religious minorities by the Arab-nationalist and Islamist regimes. This legacy of social backwardness and oppression is reinforced by domination by the imperialist powers, whose overriding concern is control of the supply of oil. Egypt, the most populous Arab nation and site of the strategically important Suez Canal, is ruled by a venal bourgeoisie that has been a willing pawn of U.S. imperialism and, since 1979, a stalwart ally of Israel. In recent years, Egypt’s capitalist rulers have aided in the starvation blockade of the Palestinians in Gaza, including by sealing the border in Sinai.

Today, almost 60 years after the withdrawal of the last British colonial troops, Egypt is mired in some $35 billion of foreign debt. Over the past ten years, $24 billion in debt servicing payments has been bled from the country, while its debt burden has increased by 15 percent. Under the “structural adjustment programs” imposed by the International Monetary Fund, Nasser-era state control of industry has been progressively rolled back and factories sold off below cost to Mubarak’s cronies and foreign investors. At the same time, the military has retained extensive holdings, although their extent is kept secret. Journalist Joshua Hammer described them: “The military controls a labyrinth of companies that manufacture everything from medical equipment to laptops to television sets, as well as vast tracts of real estate…with command of as much as 40 percent of the Egyptian economy” (New York Review of Books, 18 August 2011).

The neoliberal “reforms” that led the World Bank to declare Egyptian agriculture a “fully privatized sector” by 2001 have vastly increased the misery of the rural population. Since the mid ’90s, tenant farmers’ rents have shot up from an equivalent of about $4 an acre annually to as high as $60, the equivalent of three months’ earnings. Some five million peasants and their families have been forced into penury after having been evicted because they were unable to pay their rent or because of state-sanctioned land grabs. Dispossessed peasants were driven into the slums and shantytowns of major cities, where they became a fertile recruiting ground for the Islamic reactionaries. Resistance to the land “reform” has continued over the years: peasants have marched in demonstrations, blocked main roads, set landlords’ houses on fire and attacked government offices. The government has responded with severe repression, with police and armed gangs attacking peasants, seizing crops and occupying fields by force.

The end of legal protections on land tenure opened the way for foreign companies to purchase huge tracts. The past two decades saw a tenfold rise in agricultural exports as production shifted away from staples for domestic consumption to high-cash produce for sale in Europe. Once capable of producing enough food to feed its population, Egypt is now the world’s biggest importer of wheat, leaving the impoverished population at the mercy of the world market, which is dominated by U.S. agribusiness.

In a country where more than 90 percent of women, both Muslim and Christian, are subjected to genital mutilation, courts run under Islamic law adjudicate family disputes and “honor killing” runs rampant. For Marxists, the question of women’s liberation cannot be separated from the struggle to emancipate the whole of the working class. Women workers are a vital part of the Egyptian proletariat. They have been prominent in the wave of strikes that has swept Egypt over the past decade, especially in the textile industry. Won to a revolutionary program, they will have a leading role to play in breaking the chains of social backwardness and religious obscurantism. As Trotsky stressed in his 1924 speech “Perspectives and Tasks in the East,” “There will be no better communist in the East, no better fighter for the ideas of the revolution and for the ideas of communism than the awakened woman worker.”

For Proletarian Internationalism!

The liberation of the Egyptian masses requires the overthrow not simply of the military but of the capitalists, landlords, Islamic clergy and imperialists who profit from the grinding oppression of the populace. The power to do this lies in the hands of the working class, whose consciousness must be transformed from that of a class in itself, fighting to improve its status within the framework of capitalism, to a class for itself, realizing its historic potential to lead all the oppressed in a revolutionary struggle against the capitalist system. Crucially, this includes the mobilization of the working class in the imperialist centers to overthrow their “own” exploiters. The capitalist economic crisis that has ravaged the lives and livelihoods of working people from North Africa and the Near East to Europe, North America and Japan only further underscores the necessity for a perspective that is at once revolutionary, proletarian and internationalist.

In Egypt, the struggle of the proletariat must be welded to the defense of the many oppressed layers in the society, including women, youth and Coptic Christians as well as Bedouins, Nubians and other minority groups. A workers and peasants government would expropriate the capitalist class, including the landlords, and establish a planned, collectivized economy. A planned economy on an international scale would open the way to develop industry at the highest level, providing jobs for the impoverished urban masses and applying the most advanced technology to agriculture.

The struggle against imperialist domination and the oppressive rule of the sheiks, kings, colonels, ayatollahs, nationalist and Zionist rulers throughout the region cannot be resolved under capitalism. There will be no end to ethnic and national oppression, no emancipation of women, no end to the exploitation of working people short of a thoroughgoing proletarian revolution that opens the road to the establishment of a socialist federation of the Near East, as part of the struggle for world proletarian revolution. To bring this perspective to the working class requires the construction of a Leninist vanguard party, which will be forged in combat against the reformist “socialists” and others who seek to subordinate the working class to the imperialists, nationalists and forces of Islamic reaction. The International Communist League is dedicated to forging such parties.

From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Defend the Unions Through Class Struggle!-Indiana: Battle Against “Right to Work” Hitched to Democrats

2012-01-26T09:53:00.000-05:00

Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League website.

Workers Vanguard No. 994
20 January 2012

Defend the Unions Through Class Struggle!-Indiana: Battle Against “Right to Work” Hitched to Democrats

JANUARY 16—More than 17,000 unionists and their supporters have rallied in Indianapolis over the last two weeks to protest an anti-union “right to work” bill making its way through the state legislature. On January 10, protesters packed the statehouse during the “State of the State” address by Republican governor Mitch Daniels, a notorious union-buster who on his first day in office in 2005 abolished collective bargaining for 25,000 state employees. As of 2011, dues-paying union membership plummeted 90 percent among these workers. Now aiming his fire at all unions, Daniels has taken up the “right to work” crusade to outlaw the union shop in Indiana, which lies in the middle of the manufacturing belt stretching across the Great Lakes region.

The entire purpose of the legislation, which is disguised as a job-creation measure, is to financially and otherwise cripple unions by making union dues payments optional. States with the lowest levels of unionization are overwhelmingly concentrated in the 22 with “right to work” laws. These include practically the entire South and a number of Great Plains and Rocky Mountain states. The average income for workers in such states is $1,500 a year less than in other states, to say nothing of the lower percentage of workers who have health coverage and pensions. All this represents billions of dollars in additional profits annually for the capitalists. In advance of next month’s Super Bowl in Indianapolis, the NFL Players Association issued a statement denouncing the Indiana bill as a “political ploy designed to destroy basic workers’ rights.”

The 2005 decertification of the Indiana state employee unions was a template for attacks on public workers in Wisconsin, Ohio and elsewhere last year, as state governments nationwide pled poverty amid the capitalist economic downturn. Feeling wind in their sails, “right to work” forces are gunning for the private-sector unions as well in Indiana, a historic center of industrial unionism. In the face of this offensive, Indiana labor bureaucrats are following the same losing playbook as their counterparts did in Wisconsin last year: channeling workers’ anger over union-busting into the dead end of support to the “lesser evil” capitalist Democratic Party. In Wisconsin, tens of thousands of working people repeatedly turned out at the state capitol to fight a massive anti-labor assault on public workers by the Republican-led state government. But union officials were dead set against using labor’s strike weapon, diverting workers’ militancy into a campaign to recall Republican officeholders. As a result, the public employees unions were clobbered.

When the Indiana “right to work” bill was on the floor last February, state Democrats followed the example of their Wisconsin colleagues by fleeing to Illinois to prevent a quorum for a vote. “They knocked out right to work,” pronounced AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka at the time. Trumka to the contrary, the bill is now advancing in the legislature. In response, the labor tops have joined hands with the Democrats in pleading that this measure be made a statewide referendum on election day in November, putting the unions’ existence at the mercy of voters. While a referendum in Ohio last year succeeded in overturning a newly enacted law limiting collective bargaining for public workers, union officials used the campaign to further tie labor to the Democrats.

No less than the Republicans, the Democratic Party is a party of the capitalist class enemy and will not hesitate to savage workers and their organizations. Following a record effort by the union tops to put him into the White House, Barack Obama spearheaded the gutting of the United Auto Workers (UAW), with the obliging help of the UAW bureaucracy, as part of bailing out the auto companies. He also launched a war against teachers unions and imposed a two-year wage freeze on federal employees. Just last October, Obama banned a potential strike by tens of thousands of freight rail workers. Meanwhile, Democratic governors have wrenched massive concessions from public workers in New York and California.

Posturing as “friends of labor,” the Democrats may not favor getting rid of unions altogether, preferring instead to keep them docile through the agency of the union officialdom, which provides them with union money and manpower for election campaigns. Much of the labor bureaucracy is itself a component part of the Democratic Party. In Republican-dominated Indiana, since 2005 AFL-CIO affiliates have contributed more than $1.2 million to capitalist politicians, almost all Democrats, while the SEIU has spent $2.7 million.

The labor bureaucrats long ago abandoned the class-struggle methods that built the unions—mass pickets, sit-down strikes, secondary boycotts—in favor of reliance on the capitalist government and its political parties. Their class-collaborationist policies have sapped the fighting strength of the unions and demoralized workers, setting the stage for the current anti-labor assault. Indiana is a case in point. The state was the site of countless pitched labor battles that made it a stronghold of the Steelworkers, the UAW and other unions. But in recent decades Indiana has seen a steep decline in union membership, to 10.9 percent of the workforce in 2010. Despite the ongoing deindustrialization of the Rust Belt, there remains a concentration of manufacturing in the state. But increasingly these jobs are non-union, including at auto plants owned by Toyota, Honda and Subaru. Barely paying lip service to the need to organize the unorganized, the prostrate union officialdom has only further whetted the appetites of those trying to drive unions out of the state.

Providing cover for the labor tops is the reformist International Socialist Organization (ISO), whose January 4 article on Indiana on its Web site raised not even a perfunctory word of caution against reliance on the Democrats. At the time of the showdown in Wisconsin, the ISO disparaged the call for a statewide strike as “unlikely to get very far.” Indeed, for the ISO and its ilk the purpose of labor protest is to pressure the Democratic Party representatives of capital to “fight” for a few more crumbs for working people.

In its Indiana article, the ISO praises such New Deal legislation as the 1935 Wagner Act, which supposedly “codified the legal rights of workers to organize for unionization and challenge the often-violent resistance of employers.” In fact, the Wagner Act was passed to head off and regulate the unions in the aftermath of victorious general strikes in Minneapolis, San Francisco and Toledo in 1934, all of which were led by reds. Those strikes paved the way for the founding of the CIO industrial unions. Along with other laws, the Wagner Act was designed to wrest control of organizing drives from union militants and to set up a government mechanism for putting the unions under the thumb of the capitalist state.

To cover its tracks, the ISO offers that “legislation on its own has never built the labor movement.” In fact, all of labor history shows that no decisive gain for the working class has ever been won through Congress, the courts, government agencies or the ballot box. It has taken hard and bitter class struggle to wrest anything of value from the capitalist exploiters. For the ISO to warn against relying on legislation is sheer hypocrisy. For years, this outfit promoted the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), which helped shackle that union’s power by, for example, using the courts to bring the government into the union’s internal affairs. The TDU did so under the Landrum-Griffin Act, a legal sledgehammer against unions that the ISO conveniently disappears in its narrative.

The Wagner Act was amended in 1947 by the union-busting Taft-Hartley Act, which outlawed labor solidarity actions like secondary boycotts and sympathy strikes. Enacted following the post-World War II strike wave, the largest in U.S. history, Taft-Hartley passed Congress with the support of a majority of Democrats. Its provisions demanding loyalty oaths from union officials were used to purge all manner of reds from the unions, consolidating the hold of the anti-Communist labor bureaucracy. Now, taking a page from the Cold War, when anti-Communism was wielded to bash the unions, a lurid full-page ad in the New York Times (5 January) equates unions with North Korea’s Stalinist regime on the grounds that workers in union shops are not given the option to stop paying dues. The ad was paid for by lobbyist Richard Berman’s “Center for Union Facts,” a shadowy outfit funded by corporate money committed to pushing “right to work” laws and otherwise attacking labor.

Taft-Hartley also banned closed shop contracts, which prohibit companies from employing non-union workers, and empowered states to pass “right to work” laws. Most of those statutes were adopted shortly after Taft-Hartley was enacted, overwhelmingly in the Jim Crow South, where the color bar had long served to divide workers and keep unions out. They were supplemented by “anti-violence” bills aimed at curbing picketing. The Indiana Chamber of Commerce’s first “right to work” campaign got its start in 1955 after scabs opened fire on striking UAW workers at a piston ring plant in New Castle, sparking an armed confrontation that left several wounded.

Two years later, Indiana became the first Northern industrial state to join the “right to work” fold. A bastion of racist bigotry, the state was a natural fit for organizations that combined vicious anti-unionism with virulent racism in pushing for these laws. In the 1920s, Indiana was a center of Ku Klux Klan terror and murder. By the middle of that decade, over half the General Assembly, the governor and other high-ranking government officials were Klansmen. In 1965, amid the social ferment of the civil rights movement, the “right to work” statute was repealed, after struggles in defense of the union shop by the UAW and other unions had largely rendered it a dead letter.

With vicious racism a fault line in the U.S. to this day, black rights and union rights will either go forward together or fall back separately. It is crucial for the working class to defend every gain it has won, beginning with the very existence of the unions. Turning back the ruling-class war against labor, black people and other minorities requires breaking the labor movement from its political subservience to the Democrats. The fight for a class-struggle leadership of the unions is an integral part of forging a revolutionary workers party, the necessary instrument to lead all the exploited and the oppressed in overthrowing the decaying capitalist system and replacing it with a planned economy under a workers government.

From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-NYC Holiday Appeal-Remembering the Life and Struggle of Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt)

2012-01-26T09:50:00.000-05:00

Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League website.

Workers Vanguard No. 994
20 January 2012

NYC Holiday Appeal-Remembering the Life and Struggle of Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt)

(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)

On January 6, 125 people packed the Communications Workers Local 1180 union hall in lower Manhattan to take part in a fund-raiser with live jazz for the 26th annual Partisan Defense Committee Holiday Appeal. Along with benefits in other cities, this event helped support the PDC’s program of annual stipends and holiday gifts to 16 class-war prisoners—former Black Panther Party (BPP) members, MOVE supporters and others singled out and thrown behind bars for standing up to racist capitalist oppression. Our support to these prisoners is an expression of non-sectarian, class-struggle defense: it is the duty of the workers movement to defend such victims of capitalist repression irrespective of their particular political viewpoints.

The New York fund-raiser took place just days after President Obama signed into law the prerogative of the Commander-in-Chief to “disappear” into a military brig, here or anywhere else in the world, any U.S. citizen or foreign national whom the government deems a supporter of “terrorism.” In the fourth year of a world capitalist economic crisis that is pounding the working class and the poor, the government is intent on expanding its repressive powers, knowing that the massive and growing inequality sows the seeds of class and social struggle.

The audience heard taped greetings from “slow Death Row” by Mumia Abu-Jamal (see below). Prosecutors recently dropped their decades-long drive to execute Mumia, who had already spent 30 years on death row, falsely convicted for the December 1981 killing of Philly police officer Daniel Faulkner (see “Drive to Execute Mumia Halted,” WV No. 993, 6 January). Now Mumia—a BPP leader in his youth and later a MOVE supporter and renowned journalist known as the “Voice of the Voiceless”—is condemned to life in prison without parole despite massive evidence of innocence. The chants of “Free Mumia!” that followed his greetings were a sign of our determination that he not be forgotten and that the struggle on his behalf goes on.

Ralph Poynter read greetings from his wife, Lynne Stewart, a 72-year-old radical attorney who is imprisoned in Fort Worth, Texas, for vigorously defending her client, a blind Egyptian cleric convicted for an alleged plot to blow up NYC landmarks in the early 1990s. Stewart, who has cancer, is appealing the quadrupling of her sentence to ten years. Her resentencing was pushed by the Obama administration to make her an example in the capitalist rulers’ concocted “war on terror.”

The NYC event also heard from Francisco Torres, a supporter of Puerto Rican independence and one of the San Francisco 8 (SF8). These were former BPP members whom the government attempted to frame up for the 1971 killing of a cop, finally stopping its efforts after no less than 40 years. “So we had it all,” Torres said of the SF8 case, “the torture, the waterboarding, the electronic torture. Prior to them talking about it happening in the Middle East and Abu Ghraib and so forth…it actually started with the Native Americans here in America and prior to that, of course, with the enslavement of Africans.” As Torres said, “Torture is in the DNA of America.”

Since the PDC stipends program began, it has provided support to more than 30 prisoners on three continents, trade-union militants and others; in the U.S., a large proportion of the prisoners have been black activists. Both Rosie Gonzalez of the NYC Spartacus Youth Club and Ed Jarvis, speaking for the Spartacist League, linked defense of class-war prisoners to the fight to sweep away the entire apparatus of capitalist repression and replace it with a workers state. As Jarvis said, “Capitalist society as a prison for working people is also literally a prison for the millions who have been thrown behind bars primarily in the ‘war on drugs,’ which targets poor black and Latino ghettos.” He continued, “It will take a revolution that finishes the historic tasks of the Civil War to end black inequality—that is to say, it will take a socialist revolution.”

A highlight of the evening was a tribute by the PDC’s Valerie West to the life of Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt), a former Black Panther leader who died last year. West’s remarks, printed below as edited for publication, were based on her work with attorney Stuart Hanlon in the legal defense of Geronimo, who spent 27 years in California prisons for a crime the government knows he did not commit.

* * *

I think I’m more upset about Geronimo’s death than I’ve been willing to concede so far. So bear with me. I do want to say that we were all really saddened. But for me, who knew Geronimo pretty well for about a decade, it was really an unexpected personal blow. He died in Tanzania on June 2. Stuart Hanlon, who I spoke to and who was close to his family, didn’t know whether he died of a heart attack or a stroke but said that he had contracted malaria and was hospitalized. I want to try to recount some of my experiences with Geronimo.

I first met him as a kind of still young attorney, and I remember being very nervous going to San Quentin. It was my first trip to a California prison and my first meeting of Geronimo, so I was pretty nervous. Right away Geronimo had a big smile. He was very welcoming and really set me at ease. Over the years I visited him many, many times and he was great company. Of course, we also had disagreements. But we spent many hours chatting, laughing, playing Scrabble, as well as tackling how to increase exposure of his frame-up conviction and establish his innocence. He always willingly endorsed our anti-Klan mobilizations and defense campaigns. And, likewise, he always asked me about my aging mother and told me that I smoked too much. At the end of each visit inevitably came this horrible moment when you had to leave, and Geronimo solved that with big hugs.

He was a really easy person to get to know and to visit. And in the course of getting to know him I learned quite a bit about his history. You can’t understand Geronimo’s case without knowing about the Black Panther Party. So I want to say a bit about that.

They were for sure the best of a generation of black militants. But they were also a deeply contradictory radical formation, genuinely seeking black liberation but lacking the working-class perspective that could show them the road. Their militant, organized stand for black rights made J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, truly apoplectic. So in the late 1960s the FBI declared war on the Panthers. And I mean war. As part of the infamous Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), Panther offices across the country were raided and 38 Panthers were mowed down in the streets. Many of the remaining leaders were jailed. Not for short little stints either.

On December 4, 1969, two Chicago Panthers, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, were murdered in their sleep. Four days after that, the LAPD conducted an hours-long, Gestapo-type raid on the L.A. Panther office. It was meant to get Geronimo but it didn’t. As a highly decorated paratrooper who had served two tours in Vietnam (he was wounded there as well), and as a dynamic black leader, Geronimo stood out as a particular target for “neutralization” by the FBI. That’s the word they used. Geronimo told me once that there were so many cases against him in the late 1960s that it was hard for him to even keep them straight.

In the end, the FBI concocted an elaborate frame-up that charged Geronimo with robbery and the murder of Caroline Olsen at a Santa Monica tennis court on December 18, 1968. Kenneth Olsen, her husband, was wounded in the incident but did not die. The charges rested on the lying accusation by one Julio Butler—a former sheriff’s deputy, onetime Panther and also an FBI/LAPD informer—who claimed Geronimo had confessed the murder to him. This was backed up by police-orchestrated ID testimony (now acknowledged to be generally unreliable in any case) from Olsen’s husband and a Santa Monica storeowner and finally coupled with phony ballistics evidence backed up again by Julio Butler. Geronimo maintained his innocence from the beginning. He was over 400 miles away in Oakland, California, attending Panther meetings at the time the murder took place.

At the time of his 1972 trial, Geronimo knew he had been framed up but he did not know that the FBI had orders to “neutralize” him in collusion with the LAPD. To make matters worse, his trial took place months after the 1971 split in the Panthers. That split was a result of murderous internal factionalism fueled by FBI COINTELPRO dirty tricks. One wing of the Panthers, the Huey Newton wing, would openly embrace pro-Democratic Party politics, while the Eldridge Cleaver wing adopted the dead-end program of urban guerrillaism.

Geronimo sided with the Cleaver wing and was abandoned, therefore, by the Newton wing. Kathleen Cleaver was the sole Panther leader who backed up Geronimo at trial. Our comrade Don A. attended portions of that trial in Los Angeles and wrote about it last year to WV (see “Geronimo Pratt Refused to Bow,” WV No. 988, 14 October 2011). This is what he said: “Without exaggeration I can say that, more than any single individual then, it was seeing how Pratt refused to bow down in that court that made me want to stay in the struggle. He knew the purpose of his conviction and that it was bigger than him.”

Geronimo was also abandoned by much of the reformist left as the influence of the Panthers waned. We in the Spartacist League and PDC, applying our policy of non-sectarian defense for those cases and causes in the interests of the whole of the working people, stood in defense of all these militants against state repression despite our many political differences. And we should be clear that we had many political differences. Unlike much of the reformist left, who initially simply cheered the Panthers, we wrote articles sharply criticizing their radical nationalist politics in contrast to our revolutionary Marxist perspective. Later, both Geronimo and Emory Douglas, who some may remember was the cartoonist for The Black Panther, acknowledged that they remembered our sharp polemical criticisms. Despite the depth of our differences, Geronimo welcomed our support and defended us when we were attacked or excluded by political opponents, particularly those who shared his views. Importantly, Geronimo offered key assistance in defense of Mumia.

After his conviction, through a series of partial Freedom of Information Act disclosures and a lawsuit to get a few more disclosures, Geronimo began to be able to assemble proof of his frame-up. In 1985, WV did an interview with him in which he talked about his hearing in federal court, where a former FBI agent, Wesley Swearingen, testified that “Pratt was set up” and that he, Swearingen, had seen wiretap logs for Panther headquarters in Oakland showing that Geronimo was there. The FBI, on the other hand, claimed that those logs were mysteriously missing, and Geronimo got no relief.

In 1986, after the denial of Geronimo’s federal petition, the PDC began a campaign to build support for him in the labor movement. For many years, PDC and Labor Black League representatives spoke at trade-union executive boards and local meetings to garner support for Geronimo. We were actually quite successful in getting endorsements and support, particularly from unions with a significant black membership that identified with Geronimo’s struggle. We would explain that our fight to free Geronimo and all class-war prisoners flowed from our program to build a multiracial revolutionary party that serves as a tribune of the people and fights all forms of social repression.

Of course, COINTELPRO harassment did not stop even after Geronimo was sentenced to life; it followed Geronimo to prison and caused him to spend the first eight years in solitary. His only company was a dictionary during those eight years, and he memorized it. Geronimo used to joke that as a result he was terrific at Scrabble. I can attest to this because we played many games, and once in a while he let me win.

It is almost impossible to convey, simultaneously, the deadly nature and the absurdity of the COINTELPRO lies that made their way into Geronimo’s prison file. They claimed that he participated in a scheme to kill guards with poison darts and to kidnap guards’ children and hold them hostage. But these lies greatly inflamed guards and endangered his life, so he had to fight the lies, and he did so vigilantly.

It had taken a federal case to gain his release from solitary, but that did not stop the lies and the vendetta. Beginning in 1989, as PDC staff counsel, I represented Geronimo, along with his longtime counsel Stuart Hanlon (who also represented one of the SF8) in a federal suit. The suit was aimed at stopping the retaliation against Geronimo for his fighting to expose COINTELPRO, and also at literally keeping him alive. The suit was against officials of the California Department of Corrections (CDC), who got in the habit not only of lying about Geronimo but of transferring him from prison to prison, away from his family, as a prime tool of retaliation. From 1989 until his release in 1997, I traveled up and down the state, from the Sierra foothills to the Tehachapi Mountains to the Mexican border, visiting Geronimo and fighting the CDC. Stuart Hanlon and I were kicked out of Tehachapi Prison for eating potato chips, routinely permitted, because such a vindictive atmosphere had been whipped up against Geronimo.

We in the PDC, LBL and SL publicized the suit against the CDC and gained an ever-widening circle of labor support to free Geronimo. By about 1994, unions representing hundreds of thousands were on record on his behalf. That support, together with the very important assistance of several particularly friendly journalists, was critical in keeping Geronimo’s case in the public eye. Geronimo kept at it, and we kept at it. We hoped for a break, and finally one came in 1996. At the time, many of the frame-up perpetrators were either dead or retired, and the D.A.’s office in L.A. was in much need of a facelift after the Rodney King debacle. Some of you may not know what that is but you can ask later. It was bad for the Los Angeles D.A. A lower court judge in L.A. granted Geronimo a hearing, which ultimately led to his release in June 1997 when the conviction was overturned, unfortunately on the narrowest possible grounds. A dismissal of the charges followed a couple of years later.

Through 27 years of California prison hell Geronimo remained unbroken and unbowed. He fought the prison officials who regularly endangered his life, he fought to prove his innocence, and he fought to assist other victims of capitalist injustice. Now I want to say to all of you out there: As you know, we live in a period of increased state repression, and the state has pretty much unlimited resources. We need your help to continue the fight to free the class-war prisoners and to defend those cases and causes in the interest of the whole of the working people. A small but fitting tribute to Geronimo would be for those of you who aren’t PDC sustainers to become sustainers tonight. I hope that you will consider that.

From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-From the International Communist League Archives-Honor Lenin, Liebknecht, Luxemburg!

2012-01-26T09:47:00.000-05:00

Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League website.

Workers Vanguard No. 994
20 January 2012

From the International Communist League Archives-Honor Lenin, Liebknecht, Luxemburg!

This month we honor the memory of the “Three L’s”: Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin, who died on 21 January 1924, and Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, who were assassinated on 15 January 1919 by reactionary Freikorps officers at the behest of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) government of Friedrich Ebert, Philipp Scheidemann and Gustav Noske. Liebknecht and Luxemburg were revolutionary Marxists who upheld proletarian internationalism against Ebert & Co.’s support for German imperialism in World War I. After belatedly splitting from the SPD and its centrist spin-off, the Independent Socialist Party, Liebknecht and Luxemburg went on to play leading roles in the founding of the German Communist Party (KPD) in December 1918-January 1919. Their murders were part of the Ebert government’s suppression of the proletarian Spartakist uprising of January 1919.

We reprint below a call by the Spartakist Groups and the Trotzkistische Liga Deutschlands for a revolutionary contingent at a 1990 Berlin demonstration honoring Liebknecht and Luxemburg. This call was part of the International Communist League’s intervention into the incipient proletarian political revolution in the bureaucratically deformed workers state of East Germany (DDR). From November 1989 on, we mobilized all the resources at our disposal in an attempt to give revolutionary leadership to the DDR’s working people, many of whom desperately wanted to replace the collapsing Stalinist regime with an egalitarian socialist order. We uniquely fought against capitalist counterrevolution and for the revolutionary reunification of Germany—for proletarian political revolution in the East and socialist revolution in the West. Our comrades emphasized the tradition of revolutionary internationalist solidarity between the German, Polish and Russian proletariats, which the “Three L’s” embodied.

An important component of our intervention in the DDR in 1989-90 was our warning that the West German SPD—the heirs of Ebert, Scheidemann and Noske—represented the Trojan horse of counterrevolution. This was in sharp contrast to the DDR’s Stalinist ruling party, the Socialist Unity Party (SED, renamed SED-PDS in December 1989), whose leaders increasingly embraced social democracy. This included upholding the heritage of Eduard Bernstein, notorious for his anti-revolutionary revisionism, and Karl Kautsky, a centrist renegade who bitterly opposed the Bolshevik Revolution. In late January 1990, under the pressure of a counterrevolutionary onslaught led by the imperialists, the SED-PDS followed the lead of Kremlin leader Mikhail Gorbachev in embracing capitalist reunification and going on to sell out the DDR workers state to West German imperialism.

The following is translated from the 10 January 1990 issue of Arbeiterpressekorrespondenz (Workers Press Correspondence), which was initiated by the TLD and published, sometimes on a daily basis, as a collective organizer of the Spartakist Groups in the heat of the battle against capitalist counterrevolution. In January 1990, the TLD and Spartakist Groups fused to form the Spartakist Workers Party, the ICL’s German section.

* * *

There will be a mass demonstration Saturday, January 14, starting at 9 a.m. at the memorial site in Berlin Friedrichsfelde, in honor of the revolutionary workers’ leaders Liebknecht and Luxemburg on the 71st anniversary of their murder. Following in the footsteps of early Communist tradition, the Spartakist Groups and the Trotzkistische Liga will pay tribute to Luxemburg, Liebknecht and also Lenin. We call on all who wish to honor the “Three L’s” of Bolshevism to assemble around our banner and attend the Spartakist public forum.

In the demonstration call of the SED-PDS, Karl and Rosa are characterized as “outstanding leaders of the German Social Democrats and Communists.” This is closely connected to the SED’s current notion equating Liebknecht and Luxemburg with Kautsky and Bernstein. In this way the SED conceals the fact that it was precisely officers deployed by Social Democrat Gustav Noske who killed these Communists so as to smash the Spartakist uprising of January 1919. Noske (“Someone has to be the bloodhound”) acted on behalf of the government of the Social Democrat Friedrich Ebert, who proudly declared in 1918, “I hate the revolution like the plague!”

For decades, the leaders of the Social Democracy have attempted to cover up their bloody crime, the birthmark of the Weimar Republic. To that end, they have done their all to transform our revolutionary martyrs into social-democratic reformists. Stalin, who was equally fearful of proletarian revolution, similarly tried to rob Luxemburg of her revolutionary honor and greatness. We Spartakists, who fight for communism in the spirit of Lenin and Trotsky, stand for the revolutionary heritage of the two cofounders of the German Communist Party.

Social democrats, now including those in the SED-PDS as well, speak of “unambiguous warnings” by Rosa Luxemburg (as well as by Kautsky and Bernstein!) about the possibility of “a dictatorial-terroristic development in the Soviet Union,” not under the Stalinist bureaucracy but during Lenin’s time! Here they invoke an article she wrote in prison, without any access to accurate reports on the events in Russia, and never published. In doing so, they disregard what Rosa stated at the founding congress of the KPD on December 31 [1918]:

“...when people approach us with calumnies against the Russian Bolsheviks, we should never forget to reply: Where did you learn the ABCs of your current revolution? You got them from the Russians: the workers and soldiers councils.”

The social democrats seek to present Karl as a petty-bourgeois pacifist. But Karl was raised by his father Wilhelm as a “soldier of the revolution.” Speaking on May Day 1916, he counterposed to the Wilhelminian slogan “The war is preferable to insurrection” the socialist slogan “Insurrection, revolution are preferable to the war!” And against both the SPD’s warmongering social patriotism and Kautsky’s and Bernstein’s pacifism, Karl Liebknecht took Lenin’s side when he declared at his court-martial: “Not civil peace but civil war is my slogan!”

Above all, Karl and Rosa were internationalists. Karl—who courageously refused to vote for the war credits on 2 December 1914, saying: “Proletarians of all countries, unite again, despite everything!” Rosa—who was despised by the reactionaries of all countries as a Polish woman, a Jew and a Communist. In combating reformism for decades, both embraced the program of world socialist revolution. This was the cornerstone of the Communist International founded by Lenin and Trotsky, feared by Kautsky and Bernstein, buried by Stalin.

Today the International Communist League is fighting for the rebirth of the Trotskyist Fourth International. We are well aware of the mistakes committed by the leaders of the revolutionary socialists in Germany, in particular their failure to split early enough from the reformists and centrists. It was necessary to forge an independent revolutionary party as the Bolsheviks did, an act that was decisive for the victory of the 1917 October Revolution. But when Lenin applied to Rosa Luxemburg the old Russian couplet, “Eagles may at times fly lower than hens, but hens can never rise to the height of eagles,” he was passing judgment on the hens Kautsky and Bernstein.

In the third week of January 1933, shortly before Hitler came to power and while the Stalinized KPD was still battling “the remnants of Luxemburgism,” the German Trotskyists wrote:

“Outlawed, hunted, Lenin, Liebknecht and Luxemburg stood in battle against a host of enemies during the World War. Nevertheless, the power of their idea vanquished reformism, tsarism and the Hohenzollern [dynasty]. Like them, the International Left Opposition finds itself involved in an unequal struggle: here, with us, the power of the idea—there, the might of the apparatus. For us Bolshevik-Leninists as well, swimming against the stream, Liebknecht’s words remain true: Victory will be ours—despite everything!”

—from Permanente Revolution, third week of January 1933

— For a Leninist-communist party! Return to the road of Lenin and Trotsky!

— Stop the Nazis through workers united-front action!

— Full citizenship rights for foreign workers!

— Down with NATO! Defend the DDR, Soviet Union!

— For a planned economy under a government of workers and soldiers councils!

— No sellout of the DDR! For a red soviet Germany as part of the socialist states of Europe!

From The Pages Of The Socialist Alternative Press-Answering Common Questions - Socialism FAQs

2012-01-26T09:42:00.000-05:00

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

Jan 24, 2012

By Brandon Madsen

With the rise of the Occupy movement, opposition to the existing political and economic order has gone mainstream. It’s hard to imagine that the bandana-clad woman on the cover of Time magazine – representing “The Protestor,” Time's “Person of the Year” – has many nice things to say about capitalism, and the ubiquity of the Guy Fawkes mask – popularized by “V for Vendetta” – further underscores how widespread the idea of revolution has become.

However, this growing support for system change has not yet been matched by a serious public dialogue about what an alternative might look like. A new Pew poll published 12/28/2011 indicated that people who are under 30 or black are more likely to favor socialism than capitalism, but this does not correspond to clear ideas of what socialism is or how a socialist economic and political system would work. We offer up this FAQ as a contribution to the discussion.

How would a socialist economy work?

Under capitalism, institutions where immense wealth is concentrated (corporations) run the economy, exploiting working people to increase their own concentrated wealth. The essence of a socialist economy is to flip this relationship upside-down, with working people running the economy, utilizing the enormous wealth and productivity of society to enrich their lives. To do this, we would have to take over all the biggest banks and corporations and put their resources into public ownership and democratic control.

Employing those out of work and reallocating investment and jobs towards social priorities – healthcare, education, clean energy, etc. – would give a huge boost to productivity and wealth in society. Democratic planning of the economy would allow us to make sure everyone had a good-paying job, high-quality health care, free education at all levels, and, of course, basic physical necessities like food and housing. It wouldn’t be limited to just the basics, though; we could choose to invest in empowering people to make music, art, writing, film, fashion, and all sorts of other forms of cultural development.

This type of economic system would require conscious planning, but this is already true to a large extent under capitalism. Corporations larger than entire countries are able to plan out their levels of production, spread of distribution, pricing schemes and so on without falling to pieces, so there’s no reason working people shouldn’t be able to do the same.

The difference is that planning under capitalism is fractured, incomplete and undemocratic, with the goal of maximizing profit for the individual firm. Under socialism, we could structure investment of the world’s wealth with a big picture, bird’s eye view of the whole economy, with the goal of fulfilling human needs, sustaining the environment and enabling a liberated human existence.

A socialist economic system would have to be globally integrated. This is also the case already under capitalism, where we live in a globally interdependent world. Right now globalization on a capitalist basis means brutal exploitation of the weaker economies, and a race to the bottom for workers everywhere. Under socialism, global economic integration would be part of the plan to enrich people’s lives on a global scale.

A socialist economy would handle the environment very differently. Today, companies don’t care about environmental costs because they are able to externalize them onto the public. The costs associated with contaminated air and drinking water are real, but they don’t show up as a red number on Monsanto’s balance sheet. That is why no corporation will ever undertake the necessary steps to save the environment on the basis of “free market” principles.

Democratic planning of the economy would eliminate the profit motive behind externalizing the costs of pollution. Instead, efficiency, environmental sustainability and meeting the basic needs of all would form the core principles of economic decision-making. Instead of inadequate measures like energy-efficient light bulbs and recycling-awareness programs, a socialist economy could invest in completely overhauling the way everything is produced, utilizing all the latest green technologies for maximum sustainability and creating millions of jobs in the process.

How would a socialist democracy work?

As most of us currently experience it, “democracy” boils down to voting once every couple years for which wealthy career politician will make all the decisions for us. Of course, there’s nothing democratic about this at all, especially when the whole process is corrupted by corporate money.

In contrast, socialist democracy would take place day to day, week to week, in every workplace, school and community. Workers would rotate management tasks, and elected managers would be subject to recall and replacement whenever the workers saw fit. All decisions could be overturned by majority vote.

School curriculum and policy would be jointly agreed upon by parents, teachers and students, rather than imposed by distant administrators and bureaucrats. Neighborhood assemblies would decide who is and is not empowered with policing authority and instruct elected officers how to prioritize their efforts.

All investment and economic decisions should be made democratically. Workplace and neighborhood assemblies would elect representatives to massively expanded local and regional councils, which in turn would elect national representatives. Elected representatives should have no special privileges or pay above their electorate, and they should be subject to instant recall.

In order to facilitate this process of democratic decision-making, there should be space roped off in regular work and school schedules for decision-making meetings and discussions. With the increased wealth created, the work-week could be shortened without loss of pay to allow people time and energy to become engaged politically, and to pursue their other life goals outside work and school.

Wouldn’t a bureaucratic elite just take over?

Undoubtedly, in the first stages of a socialist society, a struggle against careerists and corruption within the system would be necessary. The poisonous ideological baggage inherited from centuries of class rule would not just fade away overnight. However, by establishing public ownership of society’s productive resources, eliminating privileges, and creating bottom-up structures of democratic management and control, the obstacles to prevent aspiring bureaucrats seizing power would be immense.

The main example driving fear of a bureaucratic takeover is Stalin seizing power in the Soviet Union only a few years after Russia’s working-class revolution in 1917. This tragic degeneration of the Russian Revolution is something Marxists have grappled with in numerous books. The basic conclusion supported by a serious historical analysis is that this degeneration was neither natural nor inevitable, but the result of particular circumstances.

Russia was among the poorest countries in the world at the time of its revolution, and it was even further devastated when the deposed capitalist rulers, backed by 21 foreign armies, tried to violently retake power from the democratic workers’ movement, resulting in a bloody civil war. Though revolutions took place elsewhere across Europe, most notably Germany, they were all defeated, leaving Russia poor, broken and alone.

This was not a healthy ground upon which socialism could be built. The whole basis of socialism is having enough to go around, but Russia didn’t have that. In this context, the democratic structures in the Soviets (workers’ assemblies) ceased to function. Who wants to go to political meetings when you’re worried about where your next meal is going to come from?

It was this vacuum of workers’ power from below, fueled by the isolation and economic starvation of the country, that spawned the bureaucratization of Russian society and the rise of Stalin as this bureaucracy’s dictatorial figurehead. Even then, it was not a natural progression. Stalin had to jail, murder, exile, or otherwise force into submission literally millions of people whose only crime was adherence to the democratic principles of the 1917 revolution.

This experience shows the importance of building the fight for socialism as a global movement. Because of imperialist plundering of resources around the world, some countries may lack a stable economic basis for socialism, and will need to trade with and get help from the richer countries. If Russia had been joined by a successful revolution in even one other country, such as Germany, history would have turned out very differently.

Wouldn’t it be easier to reform capitalism?

Unfortunately, contrary to official accounts, the history of capitalism is not one of consistent progress towards ever loftier heights of democracy and prosperity. Rather, every serious reform has required mass struggle, often shaking the system to its core.

Reforms are not granted out of the kind hearts of well-meaning politicians, but are concessions grudgingly granted to appease or distract rising movements of working people hungry for real change. Whether we’re talking about civil rights, the weekend off, or the right to organize a union, every one of these required an all-out fight against the profit-driven logic of capitalism, where countless innocents were murdered by elites desperate to put down their struggles.

Under capitalism, even these partial reforms are not permanent, not a foothold or new baseline to work from. As we have seen in the last few decades, the capitalists and their politicians will roll back reforms as soon as they think they can get away with it.

Social programs that people fought tooth and nail for in the past are being dismantled or undermined via budget cuts. After almost destroying unions in the private sector already – where less than 7% of workers are in a union – corporate politicians in state after state are now going after the public sector, where over a third of workers are still unionized.

A stable basis for ongoing reforms will require working people to take political power out of the hands of the capitalists and wield it themselves – that is, overthrow capitalism and establish socialism. There’s no way around it; the fight for reforms and the struggle for socialist transformation are one and the same.

Socialism sounds great on paper, but is it realistic?

The only constant in history is uninterrupted change. From ancient slave states to the feudal landowner lordships to the global capitalist system of today, people have repeatedly overthrown old systems after they became a brake on progressive development. The truly unrealistic and utopian idea is that problems like war, poverty and environmental devastation will be solved on the basis of capitalism.

Though socialism is realistic, it’s not inevitable. Again and again, crisis-ridden capitalism has forced workers and the oppressed into revolutionary uprisings. Several have happened in the last year, most prominently in Egypt and Tunisia. But while many revolutions succeed in toppling governments, few have achieved system change. Capitalism will always find a way out on the backs of workers, youth and the poor if we fail to replace it with something better.

That’s where socialists come in: We take seriously the study of history, learning from both defeats and successes of revolutions and mass movements. We aim to spread these lessons widely so that future revolutions succeed in establishing socialism. That doesn’t just mean reading a lot of books. It means actively building and engaging with the movements that exist right now, boldly bringing in socialist ideas while learning from others in struggle, working out the way forward together.

If you agree with these ideas, consider joining Socialist Alternative!

Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits-Honor 1920s German Left Communist Leader Karl Korsch-Lenin and the Comintern (1924)

2012-01-26T00:01:00.008-05:00

Markin comment:

Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices. This year we pay special honor to American Communist party founder and later Trotskyist leader, James P. Cannon, Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, and German Left Communist Karl Korsch.

Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
*******
Karl Korsch 1924

Lenin and the Comintern (1924)

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First Published: in Internationale, 1924
Translated by Roy Jameson
Source: Class Against Class;
Transcribed: by Zdravko Saveski, for marxists.org 2009;

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I
The first item on the agenda of the Fifth World Congress of the Communist International reads: "Lenin and the Comintern. On the Basic Principles and Propaganda of Leninism." This indicates not only a commitment by the Congress to the spirit of Leninism and a widely perceivable declaration of the will of the participants to solve all questions which stand before them in the spirit of true Leninism. This does not merely indicate that particular problems which have entered into the focal point of the struggle in the last year of the Communist International in Central and Western Europe, and which appear later on in the agenda, should be taken care of from the beginning before the analysis of the economic situation which fills out its second item. Certainly the most important task of the present developmental period of the Communist International, among all of the tasks of the Central and West European and American Communists, consists in the task assigned us by Lenin: "conquering the majority of the most important strata of the working classes." Moreover, this task which is not yet resolved can only be truly solved in the spirit of Leninism: that is, concretely in the spirit of those "consequences" which Lenin derived in a most impressive manner at the end of his classic writing on Radicalism-the infantile sickness of communism-out of the history of the Russian Bolsheviks and out of the experiences of the European parties. "The main task of contemporary communism in Western Europe and America" lies today, in the year 1924, just as Lenin expressed it four years ago, after three years of the so-called united front tactics, now even more obviously than then, in "finding, feeling, and realizing the concrete plan of the not yet entirely revolutionary measures and methods which will lead the masses to a real, decisive, last great revolutionary struggle." But the solution of this practical main task of the Leninists is relevant to an entire row of items on the agenda, and no single one in particular, and only in this sense does it also serve all other tasks with this first item, which speaks of the "Fundamentals and Propaganda of Leninism." It comes down to the following: Today the entire Comintern, after the shattering event of the death of its great founder and leader, V. I. Lenin, can now first show, and must, that it is able and willing to take on the inheritance of Lenin, both theoretically and ideologically, to preserve, to enliven, and to further develop in the present situation the "spirit" of Lenin in its theory and praxis as historical reality, as Leninism. Thus in this manner the Comintern must replace the dead Lenin in his theoretical ideological function through a large powerful collective of living Leninists.[1]

In setting "Lenin and the Comintern" on the agenda of the Fifth World Congress, the executive committee has declared before the entire world that towards the fulfillment of this great task-a wholly colossal task that has never before in world history been set before a party in this form-not only the natural main inheritors of Lenin, the Russian Bolshevik party, but all the other sections of our great Communist party, the Communist International, should theoretically and practically work together. And the Congress itself will have to take the first important steps down this path; its task will be, clearly and completely and in detail, to formulate the slogans of the "Propaganda of Leninism" (which in the agenda are only indeterminately indicated) in a manner valid for the entire Comintern; to point each section of the International to the particularly important individual tasks according to their situation and their state of development, and to determine the larger guiding principles by which the solution of all these tasks is to be carried out.

But the importance of the first item on the agenda of the Fifth World Congress extends much further. One should make clear to oneself that with the closer determination of the manifold partial tasks out of which the "Propaganda of Leninism" is composed, the Congress will have taken a position with regard to the question of "Leninism" only according to the, if we may express it so, technical side, Obviously, this technical side of the question also has an inordinately large importance: The "Propaganda of Leninism" constitutes an important part of the great Communist total task of the "Organization of the Revolution." And, of course the fulfillment of precisely this propagandistic task shows itself to be in those sections of the Communist International which have not yet won state power (that is, therefore, in all European and American sections already under legal, but probably at first under illegal conditions) inordinately more difficult than in the proletarian Soviet Union. In those lands it will therefore, for the most part, have to take on entirely different forms-exactly conforming to the particular situation of each land - which by all means need a more precise explication and determination through the highest organ of the Communist International, the world Congress, But these more or less technical questions comprise in no way the kernel of the matter.

In reality the method of the Bolshevik theory as such is placed on the agenda by the inclusion of the question, "Lenin and the Comintern, On the Fundamentals and the Propaganda of Leninism." Through the clarification of the “Basic Principles of Leninism," and the development of a system of Leninistic propaganda based on these principles in all sections of the Communist International, the entire Comintern should be smelted ideologically into one firm unity, on the common basis of the revolutionary Marxian method in that form which the theoretician of Bolshevism Lenin, "restored" it and oppose it to the falsification and confusions of the so-called Marxists of the united Second International. The third item of the agenda, the Program of the Communist International, as well as the method of our revolutionary Bolshevist theory, is placed before debate in the question of "Leninism."

II
Will the Fifth World Congress be able to solve this immensely important, but at the same time immensely difficult task? Will it be able to formulate the methodological fundamentals of Leninism so sharply and correctly that a methodical and systematic Leninistic propaganda can be constructed on this basis? Will the process of ideological unification within the Communist International have progressed enough to allow all sections and groups of the Comintern to unite in a commitment to one theoretical method which in its essential features is identical for all?

Here immense difficulties arise which nearly exclude a radical solution of the task. On the one hand, we cannot yet at all speak of a unitary commitment in the various sections of the Communist International, and particularly in the German Communist party, to "Leninism" as "the" sole valid method of Marxian theory. On the other hand, in relation to the question, in what the essence of "Leninism" as a method consists, (even among those who count themselves as Leninist), there exist presently several views which depart from one another in essential features. A large number of leading and other Marxian theoreticians who belong to the organization of the Communist International and are prepared in their practical politics to act "according to Lenin," soundly reject in theory the principle of the method of Lenin as "the" restored method of "scientific Marxism." They recognize the Leninist method as one method of orientation, sufficient for the practical-political purposes of the proletarian class struggle in the present period (that is, in a period which in international scope and in European and American national scope, does not yet represent the period of the seizure of political power) - but do not recognize it as the most concrete and truest method of materialistic dialectics, as the restored method of revolutionary Marxism. For them the valid method is either the method of the founder of the German Communist party, Rosa Luxemburg, or they declare the Leninist as well as the Luxemburgian method to be one-sided, and want to recognize only the method applied by Karl Marx in his scientific period of maturity as the true Marxian method. It is not possible in this short essay to even begin a thorough debate with these absolute opponents of the Leninist method (as one, or "the" method of scientific Marxism). This task shall be taken up in the following issues of this journal in the collective work of as large a circle of Communist theoreticians as possible. For the present we suffice ourselves with the observation that the political praxis of Bolshevism and the restored form of revolutionary Marxian theory (by Lenin) builds such an indivisible cohesive whole that we are not able to see how, for example, one can bring it about to take, in regard to the role of the Communist party for the proletarian revolution, as "practical politician," the Communist standpoint on the resolution of the Second World Congress, and simultaneously as "scientific Marxist" to comprehend the relationship between the economic development and the proletarian class struggle in the specific Luxumburgian form of the dialectical materialist method. It seems to us that solely from the standpoint of the wholly "materialistic" materialism of Marx, "restored" by Lenin and advanced one step further, which also comprehends human sensuous activity and praxis as such in its objectifying reality, can the Bolshevist version of the "role of the party" be recognized. On the other hand, from the standpoint of the Luxemburgian dialectic, which on its practical side is not nearly so "materialistic" a dialectic as the Leninist one, there is always a painful remnant of "subjectivism," as regards the Leninist account of the role of the party. But be this as it may, so much seems clear: a resolution on the "Basic principles of Leninism," and a system of "Leninist Propaganda," which could be collectively agreed upon at the Fifth World Congress by Luxemburgian and Leninistic Marxists (to this must be added, thirdly, those Marxists who recognize neither the Luxernburgian further development nor the Leninistic restoration of the Marxian method as genuine and complete Marxism) would unavoidably remain just as unsatisfactory as a Communist program overwhelmingly agreed upon by these same theoreticians for the entire Communist International. The complete clarification of the relation between the Luxemburgian and the Leninistic methods of Marxian theory comprises the indispensable presuppositions for the determination of the "Basic Principles and Propaganda of Leninism."

Irrespective of the conflict between the Luxemburgians and the Leninists, there exists no general agreement today on the question of the essence of Leninism as a theoretical method; or stronger, this agreement exists today even less than previously. And it is also entirely understandable that, at a time when as the consequence of an acute crisis the most important questions of Bolshevik praxis have become the object of a bitter factional controversy, the question of the theoretical method of Leninism has also to be pulled into the maelstrom of the struggle, for the methodological consciousness of a Marxian-Communist party does not stand outside of, or in any sense above, the praxis of the party, but rather builds an important constituent of this revolutionary praxis itself. We should therefore not wonder that we find again in the presently undertaken attempts at a determination of the methods of Leninist dialectics-undertaken by various sides-all the factions which today also practically oppose one another in the struggle over tactics and other practical-political questions inside the Comintern. Particularly interesting in this regard is an essay by the comrade Thalheimer, "On the Application of the Materialistic Dialectic by Lenin in Some Questions of the Proletarian Revolution," which appeared in volumes 1/2 of the new Communist journal Arbeiterliteratur.

III
Comrade Thalheimer wants to explicate the Leninist method, which according to him is nothing but the same Marxist method of materialist dialectics which Lenin applied with the same boldness and with the same foresight and exactness as Marx himself. He shall do this by the development of three particular questions: the question of proletarian dictatorship; the agrarian question, and the question of the nationalist and imperialist wars. The section on the question of the dictatorship ends with the statement that Lenin characterized the Soviet form of the state not as "the finally discovered political form" of the dictatorship of the working class, but rather only as "a new type" of state in which the possibility of deviating "species, varieties, forms" of this type is contained. The section on the agrarian question explains that Lenin, by his treatment of this question, has given "a particularly instructive and exact application of the materialist-dialectical method." (This application consists, according to Thalheimer's portrayal, in the fact that Lenin, in order to save the kernel of the matter of the proletarian revolution-that is, the transfer of the political power to the proletariat-allowed to let fall all "rigid" demands of the previous Bolshevist agrarian program and trust that in the course of "life" everything else would find itself "by itself" "as the result of the power of example, as the result of practical considerations.") In the third and last section Comrade Thalheimer characterizes Lenin's treatment of the national question as "a true model of concrete dialectical analysis." For Lenin, on the one hand, critically destroyed the falsifications of social patriotism, and on the other hand also stressed that under certain conditions even in Europe during the World War the transformation of the imperialist war into a nationalist war would be to be sure, "not probable" but was certainly nonetheless "theoretically not impossible."

It lies far from us to want to stand back even by one hair's breadth from the admiration with which Comrade Thalheimer appraises Lenin's solution to these three important and difficult questions. We must, however, very seriously raise this question: To what extent has Lenin in his treatment of these questions as portrayed by Comrade Thalheimer given such "particularly" instructive and exact model examples of the application of the materialist method of Marxism? In what, for example, consists the particularly instructive and exact use of the materialist dialectical method in the Leninist approach to the agrarian question? Karl Marx also, as is known, recognized the capability of the revolutionary class, as soon as they had raised themselves, "to find immediately in their own situation the content and the material of their revolutionary activity: to strike down enemies, to seize measures given by the need of war, to carry forward the consequences of their own deeds. They set no theoretical undertakings above their own tasks" (Class Struggles in France, Dietzsche edition, p. 31). The theoreticians and practitioners of the Russian Revolution could trust in the middle of the struggle to the immanent, unconscious and natural dialectic with the same right which permeates in "life" and in the revolutionary class struggle as a part of this life "from itself." But does he apply the dialectical method here, precisely where he (to speak with Marx) "denies theoretical undertakings"? Does he apply the dialectic thereby in a "particularly instructive" and "particularly exact" form?

We suggest, rather, that to the contrary, precisely the position is reached where the highly developed materialist dialectic, which according to its conception of the historical process of the proletarian revolution should be fully comprehended, reaches its limit, where the concrete historical process in its material living reality, to be sure, proceeds dialectically but at a certain point in the course of its process cannot be grasped by the dialectician, It belongs to the requirements of an exact theory of the Marxian method not to ignore the existence of this limit; but it is already too much when one wants precisely to see in this the actual kernel of the "materialist dialectics" of Marx and Lenin. Similarly, although in another way, Comrade Thalheimer constructs his two other chosen examples of Lenin's application of the Marxian method in a way which certainly belong to a true materialism, and in no sense to any metaphysical methodology, but nonetheless, for heaven's sake, does not make up the innermost essence of this dialectical materialist method, the main feature and the kernel of materialism, of Marxism and Leninism generally. And to this distortion of the essence of the Marxist-Leninist method, which he accomplishes concretely in his three examples, he further adds, in the introduction and in scattered remarks in his essay, an equally contorted general theory of the essence of this method. He exaggerates the Marxian basic principle that the truth is always concrete into the caricature that the results of materialist dialectical thought in Lenin as well as Marx could not at all, never, and in no form generally be valid beyond the momentary realm of experience out of which it is derived and for which it is determined-as if Marx (e.g, in his letter to Michailowski) and Lenin (e.g., in the introduction to "Radicalism," which has the subtitle: "In what form can one speak of the international importance of the Russian Revolution?") had not very exactly distinguished between those results of their materialist dialectical research which have such general importance and those which do not. What then is a "materialistic-dialectical" method worth which gives us nothing more than that which in some sense reaches out beyond the already known present experience? Or further, as Thalheimer expresses it, brings forth nothing more than historical results, on the one side theoretical reflections (!), analysis of a particular time, on the other only guidelines for the struggle of the proletariat, "likewise in a particular time"?

In reality this new method, created by Comrade Thalheimer and transformed out of the Marxist-Leninist materialist dialectic, has nothing more to do with the materialist dialectics. In his efforts to grasp the materialist methodology of Marx and Lenin totally "materially," as a method of a pure historical science of experience and practice, Comrade Thalheimer has already overstepped the limits of that which one can call materialist dialectics, and has achieved a completely undialectical historicism, positivism, and practicism. While Rosa Luxemburg, as we have indicated above, in her version of human praxis has not wholly become materialistic, and in this one respect has remained a Hegelian dialectician, Comrade Thalheimer, on the contrary, has driven out with the remains of the Hegelian dialectic at the same time everything dialectical in the methodology of Marxian science; the materialist dialectical method of Marx, which essentially is the concrete comprehension of the proletarian revolution as historical process and as a historical action of the proletarian class, transforms itself in Thalheimer into a merely passive, ideological "reflection" of solitary historical factuality’s diverse in time and place.

This theoretical falsification of the essence of the Marxist-Leninist dialectical method leads practically to a devaluation of all the results won by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and others through these methods. And it is fairly easy to see where this tendency towards the devaluation of the results of the Marxist-Leninist research method has come from and where it leads. Let us take the example, repeated a hundred times by Thalheimer that the Soviet state is characterized by Lenin only as a type with possible varieties and species. One can devalue the results of the Marxist-Leninist methodology so much only when one, whether consciously or unconsciously, wants to disengage oneself from these results. The conception of the Soviet state, as only one type of proletarian dictatorship, with a multiplicity of possible forms, makes it possible for the theoretician of "Leninism" to disengage himself from the "rigid" form of the council dictatorship (which is, according to Lenin, capable of further development, but is even so, "the" beginning of "the" socialistic form, of democracy!) and reach the various possible "species, varieties" and degenerations of this "type," for example, the Saxony "workers' government." And likewise with all other "results" of the Marxist and Leninist theory. If they all are purely "historical creations," bound to their particular historical presuppositions, applicable only to the relation of a particular time and land, then it is self-evident that under new relations, against new experiences, and changed political needs all of these previous "results" of Marxism would lose their validity and could and must be replaced by new knowledge and guidelines, in which these new situations now "are reflected" for the "Leninist" application of the materialist dialectic. In transforming the revolutionary dialectical materialism of Marx and Lenin into a no longer dialectical and therefore also no longer revolutionary (and the converse: no longer revolutionary and thus also no longer dialectical), purely historical, empirical science and practice, Comrade Thalheimer posits under the seductive clothing of "Leninism" actually a method which by tendency is opportunistic and reformistic in place of the revolutionary method of Marxism.

IV
We have treated Thalheimer's conception of the Leninist method with such detail not only because Comrade Thalheimer has been named as the second speaker on the "question of the program" at the Fifth World Congress, and thus for that reason will be heard at the Congress with particular attention on the question of the essence of Leninism as methodology. More importantly, it was crucial to show by a typical example, in detail and clearly, that the attempt of a determination of the "Basic Principles of Leninism," and particularly a fixing of the essence of the Leninist method at the Fifth World Congress is hound up not only with great present difficulties, but beyond this also with certain dangers which are all the greater in so far as they remain very much unrecognized and unwatched precisely in this seemingly purely theoretical region, far removed from the practical struggle of the factions. Recently there have been attempts to smuggle in under the revered, revolutionary flag of "Leninism," various revisionistic, reformistic, opportunistic and liquidating contraband in the praxis and the theory of revolutionary communism. And in its innermost foundation the theory of Leninist method which Thalheimer has now formulated signifies only a false theory of a false political praxis. Just as the opportunist and reformist united front tactic is related to the revolutionary method of agitation and mass mobilization applied in Germany since the Leipzig Party Congress, so does the "Leninist" method of Thalheimer and his close comrades relate to the genuine method of revolutionary Leninism, that is to the dialectical method of revolutionary Marxism completed and restored by Lenin. The Fifth World Congress, in the explication of the fundamentals of this position, will have to erect particular protective walls against the rising flood of communist revisionism in the questions of the program and in the question of the Basic Principles of Leninism, just as with all other, immediately practical questions of Communist politics. By the fulfillment of this negative function it can powerfully counteract the threatening collapse of the completed method of revolutionary Marxist science restored by Lenin, which in its essence is nothing other than the theoretical consciousness of the revolutionary actions of the proletarian class. For a positive fixation of the essence of Leninism as method, the present moment in the development of the Comintern is just as little appropriate as for the fixation of a final Communist program, valid for an entire epoch of Communist politics.

Note

[1] More on this can be found in the last section of Zinoviev's essay, "V. I. Lenin--Genius, Teacher, Leader, and Human," nos. 31/32 of KI, and in a special essay by Bela Kun, "The Propaganda of Leninism," in no. 33.

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Out In The 1940s Crime Noir Night- A Pre-Miranda Nightmare- Dana Andrew’s “Boomerang”- A Review

2012-01-25T17:59:00.000-05:00

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the crime noir Boomerang.

DVD Review

Boomerang, starring Dana Andrews, Jane Wyatt, Lee J. Cobb, Ed Begley, directed by Elia Kazan, 1947

Most crime noir is NOT a lesson in plebeian civil virtue, good republican police procedure, or wavy grey area moral dilemmas. The best crime noir is where, sure, the bad guys has it coming and by fair means or foul the good guys, cops, privates dicks, or just guys and gals caught in the middle of something, made sure they got it, got in spades, right up to the chair. No quarter given, none taken and we, the audience we, were happy with the result, or at least were not going waste good mother-washed and ironed handkerchiefs over their fate. Or, alternatively, alternatively, best crime noir, that is, occurred when some femme fatale, good or bad, and, we, the male part of the we audience anyway, were not all that choosey which as long as she was fetching, wrapped up a guy so bad he couldn’t think straight, and led him, maybe led him right up to that aforementioned chair. Gladly, or half gladly anyway.

In the film under review, Boomerang, neither of these conditions exists yet this is still an interesting crime noir despite its sometimes cloying moral certitudes and raw virtuous civics lesson overhang. Moreover, watching this thing in a post-Miranda (1964) world made this reviewer finally realize what the fuss was all about when the Warren Court brought the wild west boys cop justice under a little control. A little I said, so don’t make too much of it. Let’s just get to the plot and you can figure out why, okay.

As the film opens a man of the cloth, a padre, gets dead-aim stone-cold killer shot out in the mean 1940s Middle America Connecticut streets by a someone, some guy. Back then, and maybe today too, this gangster-style or psycho-driven execution rated big 24/7 news and howls of protest, especially since the padre was on the way to neighborhood sainthood. So like any high profile murder case the cops and the DA are pressing, and being pressed, and pressed hard to find this killer who is still walking free to maybe do murder and mayhem again.

And here is where the Miranda part comes in. The cops, the newly anointed town reform civil leaders, the recently thrown-out corrupt city leaders, the newspapers, and the DA’s office are all crying for vengeance and a quick solution to the murder (and their PR problems). The cops, the pre-Miranda cops, led by Lee J. Cobb, are more than happy to oblige them when after a massive manhunt they turn up one drifter, grifter, down at the heels guy, played by Arthur Kennedy, as the fall guy. The frame is on, on big time. Of course, he is the fall guy after a little off-hand by the book, the unwritten book, rough stuff down sans lawyer at the precinct house and some very tricky footwork around the evidence bin, the human witness and murder weapon evidence bin. They have poor Brother Kennedy screaming “uncle” before long and he is tailor-made for the big house, and the chair. Open and shut.

But hold on a minute, a very long minute, the DA, played by Dana Andrews, has second thought qualms about this railroad job and despite every possible corrupt effort to derail him from the compliant judge, to the cops, to some newspaper guys, to those virtuous civic-minded city fathers, he is after all a truth-seeker. He plods on supported only by wifey, played by Jane Wyatt, who knowing her man, sticks by him through thick and thin. Natch. But, jesus, justice in this case was a close thing, and only came off because our DA boy actually listened up that day they had the ethics class in law school. So you see what I mean about this being an okay film even with no drop-dead bad guys, or drop-dead beautiful femme fatales.

Note behind the camera: Looking at the credits here you will note at least two names that deserve special mention, the director Elia Kazan and the actor Lee J. Cobb. No, not for their well-known cinematic efforts then, or later (films such as On The Waterfront, Viva Zapata, Death Of A Salesman, etc. between them), but for their less that stellar (I am being kind here considering we are dealing with classic “finks” and stoolies.”) performances before various congressional committees in high 1950s cold war, red scare times “dropping dimes, (hell, quarters and half dollars)” on their communist fellows (mostly one-time pinkish fellow-travelers but the effect was the same) in the entertainment industry. Obviously these two guys didn’t “get” the point in Boomerang after all. The hell with them.

Out Of The 1940s Crime Noir Night-Have Gun Will Travel- “Gun Crazy”- A Film Review

2012-01-25T17:18:00.001-05:00

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the crime noir Gun Crazy.

DVD Review

Gun Crazy, starring Peggy Cummins, John Dall, screenplay by Dalton Trumbo and MacKinlay Kantor, 1949

Personally I like my crime noir femme fatales on the kind of good side, not too good but maybe good like Lauren Bacall in To Have or Have Not or The Big Sleep. Or Rita Hayworth when the dust settled in Gilda. No way do I want a dame that I have to watch out over my shoulder on like the same Rita Hayworth in The Lady From Shang-hia or Jane Greer in Out Of The Past. That company is just a little too fast for me. And, no I ain’t no Walter Mitty, or no fading, wilting flower but a guy has enough troubles in this world without some frail turning him over, turning him over bad. And no way, no way in hell, do I want some femme fatale, good, bad, or indifference who is kind of trigger-happy. Jesus, no way. So needless to say I am staying far, far away from Ms. Laurie (played by Peggy Cummins), the twist that has our guy Bart (played by John Dall) all wired up in the film under review, Gun Crazy.

And this is a good place to run the plot line in this little 1949 sleeper of a film. While the dialogue gets thin in spots and it’s just a little too didactic in the "don’t play with guns" department the adventures of this pair and the fast pace they need to travel at makes this an enjoyable one and one half hour see. As you can tell from the film’s title and as I have already tipped you to this is about guns, or rather about a pair of young, post-World War II modern alienated youth who have a yearning, a lust, for guns. And each other, make of that what you will. As for Bart the gun thing is more a fascination, a feel good thing . And as for Laurie, well let’s just say she has problems, serious problems every time she gets within two feet of a gun, and the slightest smell of danger.

What hold this thing together is that Bart is dizzy, dizzier that he is about guns, for the dame, unlike sensible guys like you and me. Laurie wants to live the high life and in order to do so she needs a guy who can step with her. And shooting the stars out of the rubes in a two-bit back road carnival where she meets up with Bart is not going to do it. So they run away, off-handedly get married (this is 1949 after all), and try their luck at this and that. But like many young footloose couples then, and now, this and that didn’t work out. So a little career change was in order, say armed robbery to get a stake together and then on to easy street down in some south of the border lamster village.

But, see, here is where the “moral” that drives all of these crime noirs, crime doesn’t pay, kicks in, kicks in big time. Crime and guns don’t pay for good guys, or bad, or even young footloose couples trying to make a stake, especially when wifey has that loose trigger-finger. So you know without me telling you that this pair, out of luck, on the lam, and friendless can’t ever, ever see that white picket fence day just ahead. No way.

Note: Of course 1949 was the heart of the cold war, red scare, commie under every bed, and behind every film, Hollywood Ten before congressional subpoena committees, dark cultural blizzard night. So don’t be fooled by the screenplay writer credits. This joint effort had one red scare Hollywood Ten writer, Dalton Trumbo, using that old time devise, the front. Hollywood, this country, and future generations should remember that black time, that dark night when some vaunted cultural freedoms got short shrift. And remember too a guy name Kirk Douglas who said the hell with all that later and gave Hollywood Ten-types like Trumbo and John Howard Lawson screen credit when he made Spartacus.