Markin comment:
I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution that to expect that a constitutional amendment to limit corporate influence in their capitalist system would be effective.
****************
The people will be heard!Join us as we put corporate personhood and money in politics to a public vote!
Are you disgusted with the influence of big money in politics?
Do you feel the political power of large corporations has eroded our
democracy?
Do you believe corporations should not have the same constitutional rights
as human beings?
Many of us across the state and around the country believe that we need a Constitutional amendment to restore our democracy to "We the People." Big-money campaign donations drown out the voices of the vast majority of Americans, and distort both our elections and how our legislators shape the policies that affect us. The Citizens United decision has just made a bad system much worse. We need an amendment to our Constitution to overturn Citizens United and restore the vision of government of, by and for all of us. Visit movetoamend.org for information about Move to Amend and its proposed Constitutional amendment.
We will win this amendment if we build a campaign based on a strong grassroots movement!
The time is right, and YOU can help right here, right now!
Move to Amend volunteer groups in Massachusetts have embarked on a campaign to bring public attention to the need for an amendment and enable the people to demonstrate their support for it in the voting booth. We are working to place "Public Policy Questions" on the November 2012 ballot in legislative districts around the state. Move to Amend affiliates are working with Common Cause of Massachusetts and other local, state, and national organizations.
You can download an overview of the campaign, including expected language of the proposed ballot question, at our website, gbnita.org.
To undertake this campaign in your district, we need volunteers. Will you help?
TO VOLUNTEER, or for more information, contact campaign@gbmta.org, visit gbmta.org, or call 781-894-1179.
We hope you can join us,
The volunteers of Greater Boston Move to Amend
Greater Boston MOVE to AMEND -END CORPORATE RULE. LEGALIZE DEMOCRACY.
Greater Boston Move to Amend * gbmta.org * 781-894-1179 * PO Box 540115, Waltham MA 02454
Showing posts with label As The Class Struggle Heats Up And We Take Arrests-Some Important Information From The American Civil Liberties Union. Show all posts
Showing posts with label As The Class Struggle Heats Up And We Take Arrests-Some Important Information From The American Civil Liberties Union. Show all posts
Monday, April 16, 2012
Help Generate and Demonstrate Public Support For a Constitutional Amendment to Restore Democracy to the People-A Move to Amend Priority Campaign for 2012
Markin comment:
I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution that to expect that a constitutional amendment to limit corporate influence in their capitalist system would be effective.
*******
The next meeting of Greater Boston Move To Amend will be April 19, 2012 at 7pm (meet for cookies at 6:30) in the YWCA's Sylvia Room, at 7 Temple Street. Central Square, Cambridge
Help Generate and Demonstrate Public Support For a Constitutional Amendment to Restore Democracy to the People
A Move to Amend Priority Campaign for 2012
In Massachusetts, voters can put what is called a "public policy question" on the state ballot in state representative and senatorial districts. Public policy questions allow voters to show legislators how a majority of voters in their district wants them to vote on an issue. While these votes do not bind the legislator, they are a concrete way to demonstrate voter "will."
Move to Amend (MTA) in Massachusetts has chosen this as a priority activity for 2012 because it enables us to educate large numbers of people and demonstrate wide public support for our goals, so that legislators will eventually vote to amend our constitution and restore our democracy.
We can decide on the number of legislative districts we want to work in, and identify the best ones for educating voters and winning strong majority votes. The strategy will be to choose districts where there is a strong volunteer group to do an effective public education campaign.
Common Cause Massachusetts has also chosen public policy questions as a priority strategy in Massachusetts, and MTA expects to work closely with them on this effort. We hope many other groups
will join in.
State Process and Timeline:
In early April, MTA and Common Cause will submit proposed language to state officials -the language that we want to appear on the ballot. They give advice as to whether it has the correct form to appear on the ballot.
By April 24, the Secretary of the Commonwealth has petition forms ready for the public.
We collect signatures from voters in any district we have chosen. Deadline for submitting signatures to the local registrars is July 3. For state rep. districts we must collect 200 valid voter signatures, therefore we should seek at least 260 signatures. For state senate districts we must
collect 1,200 valid signatures, and therefore should seek 1500-1600 signatures.
The local registrars validate the signatures and submit them to the state by August 1 (this is when we will know for sure that the question will appear on that districts ballot.)
The Secretary of the Commonwealth and Attorney General determine the final language that can go on the ballot and determine which districts have met the required signatures.
The question appears on the ballot on November 6, state and national election day, in every district that qualifies.
To see the Secretary of the Commonwealth web page on this go to: http://www.sec.state.ma.us/ele/eleguide/guidepubpol.htm
The campaign is a vital step toward winning Massachusetts' support for a constitutional amendment to defend democracy from undue corporate influence and unrestrained political spending!
We hope you are willing to participate and we want to put this question to the voters in every district where we can win.
Would you be willing to help with this ballot campaign in your district?
If you're thinking of getting involved, contact us so we can help determine the feasibility of a successful effort in your district. Write to campaign@gbmta.org.
During the campaign, we can provide materials to distribute, fact sheets to explain our goals, training for volunteers and general advice! But we will have to determine whether you have the volunteers to do a successful public education campaign in your district.
Your first step is to gather a group in your district and ask yourselves, whether you have the capability to help with:
Collecting the necessary signatures on the petition (May through July 2)
Raising some funds for materials (by August 1)
Distributing literature throughout the district (events, door to door, etc.)
Conducting a public forum or two (best in September and October)
Placing letters to the editor or other stories in local papers and media
Covering polls on voting day with handouts and signs (November 6)
Ballot Language
Move to Amend and Common Cause in Massachusetts have worked on ballot language that both groups can support and this language is what we expect to put on the ballot.
The state requires that the Public Policy question begin with: "Shall the (senator or representative) from this district be instructed to vote in favor of... " and our expected language is:
Shall the state (senator/representative) from this district he instructed to vote in favor of a resolution calling upon Congress to propose and send to the States for ratification an amendment to the U. S. Constitution stating that 1) corporations are not entitled to the constitutional rights of human beings and 2) both Congress and the States may place limitations on political contributions and political spending.
This language may slightly change upon further consultation with state officials, but we expect this to be very close to final wording.
I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution that to expect that a constitutional amendment to limit corporate influence in their capitalist system would be effective.
*******
The next meeting of Greater Boston Move To Amend will be April 19, 2012 at 7pm (meet for cookies at 6:30) in the YWCA's Sylvia Room, at 7 Temple Street. Central Square, Cambridge
Help Generate and Demonstrate Public Support For a Constitutional Amendment to Restore Democracy to the People
A Move to Amend Priority Campaign for 2012
In Massachusetts, voters can put what is called a "public policy question" on the state ballot in state representative and senatorial districts. Public policy questions allow voters to show legislators how a majority of voters in their district wants them to vote on an issue. While these votes do not bind the legislator, they are a concrete way to demonstrate voter "will."
Move to Amend (MTA) in Massachusetts has chosen this as a priority activity for 2012 because it enables us to educate large numbers of people and demonstrate wide public support for our goals, so that legislators will eventually vote to amend our constitution and restore our democracy.
We can decide on the number of legislative districts we want to work in, and identify the best ones for educating voters and winning strong majority votes. The strategy will be to choose districts where there is a strong volunteer group to do an effective public education campaign.
Common Cause Massachusetts has also chosen public policy questions as a priority strategy in Massachusetts, and MTA expects to work closely with them on this effort. We hope many other groups
will join in.
State Process and Timeline:
In early April, MTA and Common Cause will submit proposed language to state officials -the language that we want to appear on the ballot. They give advice as to whether it has the correct form to appear on the ballot.
By April 24, the Secretary of the Commonwealth has petition forms ready for the public.
We collect signatures from voters in any district we have chosen. Deadline for submitting signatures to the local registrars is July 3. For state rep. districts we must collect 200 valid voter signatures, therefore we should seek at least 260 signatures. For state senate districts we must
collect 1,200 valid signatures, and therefore should seek 1500-1600 signatures.
The local registrars validate the signatures and submit them to the state by August 1 (this is when we will know for sure that the question will appear on that districts ballot.)
The Secretary of the Commonwealth and Attorney General determine the final language that can go on the ballot and determine which districts have met the required signatures.
The question appears on the ballot on November 6, state and national election day, in every district that qualifies.
To see the Secretary of the Commonwealth web page on this go to: http://www.sec.state.ma.us/ele/eleguide/guidepubpol.htm
The campaign is a vital step toward winning Massachusetts' support for a constitutional amendment to defend democracy from undue corporate influence and unrestrained political spending!
We hope you are willing to participate and we want to put this question to the voters in every district where we can win.
Would you be willing to help with this ballot campaign in your district?
If you're thinking of getting involved, contact us so we can help determine the feasibility of a successful effort in your district. Write to campaign@gbmta.org.
During the campaign, we can provide materials to distribute, fact sheets to explain our goals, training for volunteers and general advice! But we will have to determine whether you have the volunteers to do a successful public education campaign in your district.
Your first step is to gather a group in your district and ask yourselves, whether you have the capability to help with:
Collecting the necessary signatures on the petition (May through July 2)
Raising some funds for materials (by August 1)
Distributing literature throughout the district (events, door to door, etc.)
Conducting a public forum or two (best in September and October)
Placing letters to the editor or other stories in local papers and media
Covering polls on voting day with handouts and signs (November 6)
Ballot Language
Move to Amend and Common Cause in Massachusetts have worked on ballot language that both groups can support and this language is what we expect to put on the ballot.
The state requires that the Public Policy question begin with: "Shall the (senator or representative) from this district be instructed to vote in favor of... " and our expected language is:
Shall the state (senator/representative) from this district he instructed to vote in favor of a resolution calling upon Congress to propose and send to the States for ratification an amendment to the U. S. Constitution stating that 1) corporations are not entitled to the constitutional rights of human beings and 2) both Congress and the States may place limitations on political contributions and political spending.
This language may slightly change upon further consultation with state officials, but we expect this to be very close to final wording.
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-From The Late Communist Leader James P. Cannon-"Those Who Labor Must Rule!"
Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League website.
Workers Vanguard No. 999
30 March 2012
Those Who Labor Must Rule!
(Quote of the Week)
In the midst of a hard-fought 1936-37 West Coast maritime strike, Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon emphasized that labor can advance its cause only by relying on its own class strength and solidarity against the capitalist class enemy. Ben Hanford, who is referred to in the selection below, was a leader of the U.S. Socialist Party in the early 20th century.
A good deal is said about strike “strategy”—and that has its uses within certain clearly defined limits—but when you get down to cases this strike, like every other strike, is simply a bullheaded struggle between two forces whose interests are in constant and irreconcilable conflict. The partnership of capital and labor is a lie. The immediate issue in every case is decided by the relative strength of the opposing forces at the moment. The only strike strategy worth a tinker’s dam is the strategy that begins with this conception.
The problem of the strikers consists in estimating what their strength is, and then mobilizing it in full force and pressing against the enemy until something cracks and a settlement is achieved in consonance with the relation of forces between the unions and the organizations of the bosses. That’s all there is to strike strategy. You cannot maneuver over the head of the class struggle.
We pass over entirely the question of who is “right” in the maritime strike, for we believe with Ben Hanford that the working class is always right. From our point of view the workers have a perfect right to the full control of industry and all the fruits thereof. The employers on the other hand—not merely the shipowners; all bosses are alike—would like a situation where the workers are deprived of all organization and all say about their work and are paid only enough to keep body and soul together and raise a new generation of slaves to take their places when they drop in their tracks.
Any settlement in between these two extremes is only a temporary truce and the nature of such a settlement is decided by power; “justice” has nothing to do with it. The workers will not have justice until they take over the world. The demands of the workers in a strike are to be judged solely by their timeliness and the way they fit realistically into the actual relation of forces at the time.
—James P. Cannon, “The Maritime Strike” (November 1936), reprinted in Notebook of an Agitator (1958)
Workers Vanguard No. 999
30 March 2012
Those Who Labor Must Rule!
(Quote of the Week)
In the midst of a hard-fought 1936-37 West Coast maritime strike, Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon emphasized that labor can advance its cause only by relying on its own class strength and solidarity against the capitalist class enemy. Ben Hanford, who is referred to in the selection below, was a leader of the U.S. Socialist Party in the early 20th century.
A good deal is said about strike “strategy”—and that has its uses within certain clearly defined limits—but when you get down to cases this strike, like every other strike, is simply a bullheaded struggle between two forces whose interests are in constant and irreconcilable conflict. The partnership of capital and labor is a lie. The immediate issue in every case is decided by the relative strength of the opposing forces at the moment. The only strike strategy worth a tinker’s dam is the strategy that begins with this conception.
The problem of the strikers consists in estimating what their strength is, and then mobilizing it in full force and pressing against the enemy until something cracks and a settlement is achieved in consonance with the relation of forces between the unions and the organizations of the bosses. That’s all there is to strike strategy. You cannot maneuver over the head of the class struggle.
We pass over entirely the question of who is “right” in the maritime strike, for we believe with Ben Hanford that the working class is always right. From our point of view the workers have a perfect right to the full control of industry and all the fruits thereof. The employers on the other hand—not merely the shipowners; all bosses are alike—would like a situation where the workers are deprived of all organization and all say about their work and are paid only enough to keep body and soul together and raise a new generation of slaves to take their places when they drop in their tracks.
Any settlement in between these two extremes is only a temporary truce and the nature of such a settlement is decided by power; “justice” has nothing to do with it. The workers will not have justice until they take over the world. The demands of the workers in a strike are to be judged solely by their timeliness and the way they fit realistically into the actual relation of forces at the time.
—James P. Cannon, “The Maritime Strike” (November 1936), reprinted in Notebook of an Agitator (1958)
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-French Elections: No Choice for Workers
Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League website.
Workers Vanguard No. 999
30 March 2012
For a Multiethnic Revolutionary Workers Party!
French Elections: No Choice for Workers
MARCH 25—Three days ago, a special police unit killed Mohamed Merah, a 23-year-old Frenchman who, police say, had killed three paratroopers of black and North African origin and four Jewish civilians—three children and a rabbi—near Toulouse in Southern France over the previous eleven days. Reportedly, Merah had been in Afghanistan and claimed to be appalled by the crimes of the French military, which led him to target soldiers. Police say that on the morning of March 19, Merah arrived too late to kill another soldier he had picked out and instead decided to go on a killing spree in front of a Jewish school, an abominable anti-Semitic crime.
This has become a central issue in the campaign leading up to the presidential election, the first round of which is scheduled for April 22. In the likely event that no one gets an absolute majority, there will be a runoff on May 6 between the two top-polling candidates. Ramping up his anti-immigrant “security” pitch, President Nicolas Sarkozy seized on the case to immediately announce new measures targeting primarily Salafist Muslims in France, threatening to jail people who “regularly” consult Web sites declared haram (illicit) by the French government. Sarkozy plans to introduce new legislation that would outlaw “propagating and advocating extremist ideologies.” This is an open threat to criminalize the dissemination of all “forbidden” opinions—a weapon historically wielded by capitalist governments against the left and the workers movement.
The “war on terror” is currently being used primarily against Muslims, but all opponents of the racist capitalist system, and ultimately the multiracial working class, are targeted. In this heightened atmosphere of racist witchhunt, dark-skinned youth in the heavily immigrant ghettos of the suburbs (banlieues) who are suspected of having Muslim backgrounds will be targeted more than ever for daily state repression. Down with the racist “war on terror”! The workers movement must defend banlieue youth!
The Toulouse killings have been an opportunity for the various candidates, including those on the left, to stand by the President in a despicable show of “national unity.” Green candidate (and former judge) Eva Joly, along with Socialist Party (SP) hopeful François Hollande, joined the fascist Marine Le Pen at the memorial service for the paratroopers, where Sarkozy himself delivered the eulogy. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the candidate of the Left Front (mainly composed of the Communist Party and a split from Hollande’s SP), rushed to “congratulate” the cops for the extra-judicial killing of Merah. Mélenchon seized the opportunity to promote his program for hiring more National Police, which he terms a “public service.” The candidate of Lutte Ouvrière (LO), Nathalie Arthaud, claimed to not partake of the “national unity” hype. However, its initial statement on the anti-Semitic crimes in Toulouse and the killing of the French elite forces stationed in nearby Montauban, a March 20 declaration by Arthaud, was published in Lutte Ouvrière (23 March) with the headline: “The Killings in Montauban and Toulouse: Odious Acts.”
For Marxists there is a distinction between the slaying of Jewish children and a teacher on the one hand and the killing of soldiers from the elite paratrooper units, which have a long history of murderous terror on behalf of French imperialism from Algeria to Afghanistan and Indochina, on the other. The second is not a crime from the standpoint of the working class. But such individual terrorist acts are an obstacle to mobilizing the collective struggle of a politically conscious working class against the capitalist system. One thing is certain: the killings will bring fierce repression down on the heads of minorities and others in the state’s crosshairs. Down with the Vigipirate campaign of racist cop terror! U.S./French/NATO troops out of Afghanistan!
The following excerpted article is translated from Le Bolchévik No. 199 (March 2012), newspaper of the Ligue Trotskyste de France, section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist). The LTF explained in its article that “the President of the Republic is the chief executive, that is to say, the executive director of the capitalist state, chief advocate for the interests of the capitalists as a whole.” As the comrades wrote, as Marxist revolutionaries, we refuse in principle to hold executive positions in the capitalist state—president, governor or mayor. From the same standpoint, we refuse to run for such offices, since doing so would only give legitimacy to the reformist notion that a “revolutionary” at the head of the state could advance the interests of the working class.
* * *
Marxists may consider giving critical support to another organization, even in presidential elections, when doing so can in some way raise the class consciousness of the proletariat. But in this election, there is no one to whom Marxists can even contemplate giving critical support because all the candidates who in any way claim to represent the labor movement are at best a left cover for the SP candidacy, thereby helping to sow illusions in the “change” that it would supposedly bring.
The SP candidate, François Hollande, simply promises to pursue the same policies as Nicolas Sarkozy, but without the “bling-bling” (hobnobbing with the rich and famous). Hollande launched his campaign, in the January 26 televised debate, by declaring his opposition to a “windshield wipers” policy—in other words, Hollande will not sweep away the anti-working-class measures that have been enacted during the ten years of right-wing rule. Hollande promises to deprive of a full pension all those who have not actually worked for at least 41 years.
An entire section of the bourgeoisie is irritated by Sarkozy—not so much because of his nouveau riche vulgarity but because he has not fulfilled his promise to break the labor movement and dramatically increase the capitalists’ rate of profit. Since French imperialism continues to lose ground against its German rival, it is imperative that its next Commander-in-Chief carry out even more radical attacks against the working class and the oppressed. For the capitalists, Hollande would have the advantage of receiving the support of the union bureaucrats, whom he promised to “consult” and soft-soap as “social partners” in leading French imperialism. No vote for François Hollande!
Hollande has also promised a “relentless” fight against undocumented immigrants. The “solution” he promised for the Roma (Gypsies) is putting them in “camps” to “avoid this constant moving around” (Le Monde, 18 February). Meanwhile, he promised to hire more cops, criticizing Sarkozy from the right for insufficient results in maintaining “law and order.” He promised to hire 60,000 teachers—thereby perpetuating a third of the 90,000 job cuts made in education by the right-wing government in recent years—by eliminating jobs in other areas of the public sector.
While Hollande has promised to withdraw French troops from Afghanistan—troops that were initially sent by the Socialist government of [Lionel] Jospin and [Jean-Luc] Mélenchon ten years ago, when Hollande himself was the head of the SP—this is from the standpoint of serving the best interests of French imperialism. The current military losses are no longer justified by the “advantage” of being able to train troops to kill real people and enabling France to negotiate with the United States to obtain certain advantages for its own capitalists. Besides, Hollande has personally declared his support for the bloody military interventions of French imperialism organized by Sarkozy in the Ivory Coast and Libya. French troops out of Afghanistan, Africa, Lebanon, the Balkans and the Arabian Peninsula!
Moreover, François Hollande is running as the joint candidate of the SP and the Left Radical Party, a bourgeois party. This kind of coalition is a “popular front,” a bloc between bourgeois parties and bourgeois workers parties—that is, parties like the SP or the Communist Party (PCF), which have ties to the labor movement and claim, in one way or another, to be part of it, even though their leadership and program are totally bourgeois. In such coalitions, it is the bourgeois parties that inevitably determine the class character of the alliance, guaranteeing that it will loyally serve the capitalists.
By tying the workers to their class enemy, popular-front alliances have always paved the way for defeat. That is why it is a matter of principle for Marxists to oppose them. The June 1936 Popular Front led to [the Nazi collaborator] Pétain; the 1936 Popular Front in Spain led to the Franco dictatorship which ruled for nearly 40 years; in Chile it led to Pinochet’s coup in 1973. Beginning with [Socialist Party leader François] Mitterrand in 1981, a succession of popular fronts has each time been followed five years later by a return to power of right-wing reactionaries. Meanwhile, the fascists of the National Front have taken root.
We also refuse to give any support to the candidates of the “left of the left.” The social democrats of the PCF and the Left Party (PG) have united behind Jean-Luc Mélenchon, formerly a longtime Socialist Party leader who had held a minor ministerial post during the last years of the Jospin government. The latter boasted of having performed more privatizations than all of the previous right-wing governments. The PCF and PG are unconditionally determined to “defeat the right” on the second round, which decoded means “vote for Hollande.” They are thus acting simply as vote-getters for the popular front.
This is also the role of the NPA [New Anti-Capitalist Party] of Olivier Besancenot and Philippe Poutou. In fact, much of the NPA has been going over to Mélenchon’s party in order to support the popular front more directly (and have a better chance at getting sinecures if the “left” wins the elections). As for Lutte Ouvrière’s candidate, Nathalie Arthaud, she refuses, for the time being, to oppose voting for Hollande. In the 2007 presidential elections, these opportunists called for a vote for [SP candidate] Ségolène Royal on the second round. We call on workers not to vote in the presidential elections, neither on the first nor the second round.
Workers should also not vote in the coming parliamentary elections. This is how Lenin described parliamentarism:
“To decide once every few years which members of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament—this is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarism, not only in parliamentary-constitutional monarchies, but also in the most democratic republics.”
— The State and Revolution (1917)
However, in parliamentary elections, unlike presidential elections, Marxists may consider running candidates and using the election campaign and, if elected, the parliamentary podium as oppositionists, that is, in opposition to the capitalist executive power, no matter who is running the state. The purpose is to disseminate revolutionary propaganda and act as a tribune of the workers and the oppressed.
Down With the European Union!
The chauvinist and anti-working-class program of the SP appears particularly clearly in regard to the European Union (EU). The EU is an entirely reactionary institution—a consortium of imperialist states and weaker states—led by Germany. The initial purpose of the EU’s predecessors, the European Coal and Steel Community, the Europe of Six, etc., was to strengthen the economic cohesion of capitalist West Europe—mainly France and Germany—in order to consolidate the NATO military alliance against the Soviet Union.
In the 1980s, the SP of Mitterrand and Mélenchon contributed in no small measure to the victory of capitalist counterrevolution in East Europe. We Trotskyists were for the unconditional military defense of the USSR. In 1989-1990, the left in general, from the SP to Lutte Ouvrière, rejoiced at the prospect of a capitalist reunification of Germany. In contrast, we fought against the absorption of the East German deformed workers state by capitalist West Germany and for revolutionary reunification, through a proletarian political revolution against the parasitic Stalinist bureaucracy in East Germany and a socialist revolution in the West to overthrow and expropriate the German bourgeoisie.
With the USSR now destroyed, the EU is merely a trading bloc of competing imperialist powers, mainly Germany, France and Britain, which went to war with each other twice in the last century alone to achieve supremacy in Europe and to seize their rivals’ global market share. Supposedly, the only purpose of the EU is to promote “free and fair competition” (even though capitalism over a century ago entered the era of cartels and monopolies). This is an ideological cover for increasing attacks against the gains that workers were able to wrest through their struggles when the Soviet Union still existed. Thus, the anti-union Bolkestein Directive aims at pitting the workers of the various European countries against each other. As we wrote in a leaflet (reprinted in Le Bolchévik, March 2006), “The Bolkestein Directive gets to the heart of what the European Union is.” More recently, we stressed in the most recent Le Bolchévik (December 2011):
“The EU is a fragile formation exposed to continuous tensions stemming from the disparate national interests of the European imperialists, which are constantly threatening to tear it apart. Nor can it be otherwise. Although the productive forces have long since outgrown a national framework, capitalism is a system that rests essentially on nation-states: each of the various national capitalist classes needs its own state to push through and defend its interests at home and abroad. Hence under capitalism, the goal of political union or a European superstate is necessarily reactionary and an empty utopia.”
— see “Economic Crisis Rips Europe,” WV No. 992, 9 December 2011
The International Communist League has always opposed the EU and its monetary instrument, the euro. In May 1997, as the imperialists’ negotiations for the creation of the euro were being finalized, we wrote a leaflet calling for not voting for the PCF/Jospin popular front, which declared: “If in the future, because of workers’ struggles, the ‘monetary union’ is abandoned or postponed indefinitely, this would be a victory for workers, who throughout Europe have militantly resisted the capitalist offensive.” We explained at the time that a single currency was not viable in the absence of a single European government, and that such a government “can only be achieved by the methods of Adolf Hitler, not by those of Jacques Delors, the French social-democratic architect of Maastricht [treaty establishing the euro]” (see “For a Workers Europe—For Socialist Revolution!” WV No. 670, 13 June 1997).
Hollande’s opposition to Sarkozy on the question of Europe is solely from the standpoint of the interests of French imperialism, not those of the working class. Hollande accuses Sarkozy of capitulating to France’s German rivals. He went to London not only to reassure the financiers of the City that they had nothing to fear from his speech against “the world of finance,” but also to advocate closer ties between France and Britain against Germany. Hollande has, for example, no intention of changing the conditions imposed by [German chancellor Angela] Merkel and Sarkozy on Greece, which are strangling that country and literally driving its people into extreme poverty. Those measures are also laying the groundwork for intensifying attacks on workers in the rest of Europe, including Germany and France.
In France, the social democrats have always played a decisive role regarding the EU and the euro. In December 1989, seeking to maintain some leverage over Germany, Mitterrand negotiated a common currency with Chancellor Kohl in exchange for agreeing to the capitalist reunification of Germany, which inevitably would lead to strengthening the power of Germany relative to France. He had the Maastricht Treaty approved by referendum in 1992. (It was approved only by a narrow margin, thanks in part to Mélenchon’s vote in favor and LO’s abstention.) The euro itself was introduced under Jospin’s SP-PCF-Green government, which Mélenchon was part of from 2000 to 2002. Hollande’s SP later campaigned for the Lisbon Treaty [approving a new EU constitution]. (The treaty was rejected by referendum in 2005, but nevertheless adopted in 2008 thanks to the abstention or “yes” vote of over 150 SP members of parliament.) Recently, by deciding to abstain in parliament, the SP saved the latest scheme by “Merkozy” to asphyxiate Greece, called the “European Stability Mechanism.”
That is the EU’s balance sheet for French imperialism. Thanks to the capitalist counterrevolution in East Europe, and the concomitant wage cuts and loss of workers’ gains, the German bourgeoisie was able to outsource a growing share of the inputs of its industrial products to those countries, which are increasingly its economic hinterland. The strength of the euro against the local currencies has further lowered the cost of these products for German capitalists. In addition, wage cuts in Germany itself, particularly under the social-democratic governments headed by Gerhard Schröder in the 2000s, gave German capitalists an increased competitive advantage over the French. The French reformists, who supported the counterrevolution (in the name of “democracy”) and the European Union, are now very disappointed with the outcome: Their own bourgeoisie is the loser.
In fact, no candidate of the workers movement in these elections stands in any way opposed to the EU. Mélenchon and the PCF want the European Central Bank to give money to the poor (to be paid for ultimately by the German capitalists through depreciation of the euro and/or through “euro bonds”). Thus, they spread illusions that the EU and its monetary instrument could be placed at the service of the oppressed. While they’re at it, why not call on the fascist Le Pen to defend immigrants?
But the rest of the “left of the left” are no better. For years the NPA, following its predecessor, the misnamed Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire, has called for a “democratic and social” Europe. In other words, they pretend that there can be a capitalist Europe that is more humane than the existing one. The NPA thus deflects the working class away from struggle to overthrow the entire capitalist system and to establish a Socialist United States of Europe on a revolutionary internationalist basis. These lackeys of their own imperialism admonish the workers in Greece and France that they should remain prisoners of the euro straitjacket, which the NPA presents as protection against one’s own national bourgeoisie. Thus the editorial by Yvan Lemaitre in the January issue of the NPA’s monthly, Tout Est à Nous! La Revue [Everything Is Ours! The Magazine], proclaims, regarding a return to national currencies:
“Such a step backward would lock the workers into the national straitjacket at the mercy of their own implacable national bourgeoisies, each one bitterly defending its own position within the new international division of labor. There is another way out, a democratic and progressive one, within the European framework, which has become the new arena for struggles by workers and by the peoples.”
Since Lemaitre is against socialist revolution, he can only conceive of opposition to the capitalist EU and the euro from the standpoint of right-wing nationalism. He cynically denounces “reactionary, chauvinist and nationalist propaganda that proposes returning to national currencies and withdrawing behind national boundaries.” In fact it is the bankruptcy of the left, the apostles of a “democratic and social” capitalist Europe, that puts wind in the sails of fascist demagogues, allowing them a monopoly on opposing the EU in whose name the workers’ gains are attacked. And it is German workers who are among the main victims of the austerity measures on behalf of “competitiveness” in Europe. The only two announced candidates in this election who oppose the euro are Marine Le Pen of the National Front and Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, an old-style far-right Gaullist politician.
The [Lambertist] Parti Ouvrier Indépendant (POI) has its own chauvinist line of ultra-French delirium. At a February 13 Paris demonstration over the crisis in Greece, its members chanted slogans against the EU as an “American agency” and called for the EU/International Monetary Fund/European Central Bank troika to get out of Paris, presumably to protect “la belle France” from their misdeeds. Thus the POI covers up the role of French imperialism in the oppression of Greece.
Protectionism: Reactionary Response to Capitalist Attacks
Throughout Europe, nationalism is on the rise, an ideological expression of the sharpening of rivalries between the continent’s bourgeoisies. To fight this, it is necessary to break openly with the reactionary fiction of European capitalist unity and to fight for revolutionary proletarian internationalism. Today this particularly means solidarity with our class brothers in Greece who are being crushed under the jackboot of the French BNP bank, the Deutsche Bank and the European Central Bank. It is necessary to oppose the protectionist campaigns to tax imported products and “produce French” or “produce in France,” whether put forward by Sarkozy, Hollande or Mélenchon. It is necessary to oppose the chauvinist poison spewed by those rare “left” ideologues like Jacques Sapir and Jacques Nikonoff, who oppose the euro in the name of a better version of protectionism. In a Le Bolchévik No. 197 (September 2011) article that dealt with Michel Husson, a pro-euro economist fetishized by the NPA, we noted: “The NPA wants people to believe that capitalism can simply be reformed, and by promoting a supposedly ‘good’ protectionism it lends legitimacy to the protectionism of the National Front.”
Ditto for the PCF with its “produce French” slogan, which it just dredged up again a few months ago, and which has been picked up by the National Front. Today the National Front presents essentially a parliamentary package. But at bottom the fascists are paramilitary shock troops who carry out racist terror and whose ultimate target is the working class. The decaying capitalist system is the fertile terrain that nourishes the fascists. In the event of a sharp crisis, the bourgeoisie mobilizes them against the working class as it did in Germany in 1933. This is why the struggle against fascism cannot be separated from the struggle for socialist revolution. To crush them it is necessary to mobilize the working class in defense of Muslims, immigrants, homosexuals and all the designated targets of the fascist scum. It is necessary to fight to overthrow capitalism—a perspective rejected by the union bureaucrats, since they seek to keep the unions chained to the capitalist order.
It is necessary to fight against layoffs, which threaten workers in plants that the capitalists are relocating as they try to maximize profits. But protectionism means seeking agreement with the French capitalists to keep plants located here, against the workers of other countries. It is flatly counterposed to a proletarian internationalist program, which is based on a common class struggle across national borders against these same capitalists, to defend and extend the workers’ gains. To fight against the bourgeoisie’s maneuvers for dividing workers along national lines, there needs to be struggle for wage increases, including at subsidiary companies and subcontractors in other countries. We must fight tooth and nail against layoffs, demanding the sharing of work between all hands, with the corresponding reduction in working hours without loss of pay. We must fight for all temporary workers and those on short-term contracts to get permanent jobs. Equal pay for equal work!
This requires struggle for industrial unions, which bring together in the same fighting organization all the workers at a given location—including those provided by subcontractors—whether it is a French or foreign company. And this in turn requires a fight for a new leadership in the unions, a revolutionary internationalist leadership replacing the bureaucrats, who are content with the division of unionized workers among several competing unions and who even accept the low level of unionization of workers since the bureaucrats’ apparatus is essentially financed by the bosses and the state.
The division of the working class along national lines, accompanied by protectionism, goes hand in hand with the division of the workers within the country along ethnic, racial and sexual lines. Mélenchon, protectionism’s clearest advocate among the candidates of the workers movement, has virtually nothing to say against the government’s racist campaigns in his 96-page platform. What is at stake, however, is nothing less than the unity of the multiethnic and multiracial proletariat of this country. Full citizenship rights for everyone who has made it here! Down with the deportations of undocumented immigrants! The workers movement must defend ghetto youth! Down with the racist campaign against veiled women!
No Vote to LO!
Nathalie Arthaud, Lutte Ouvrière’s candidate, presents herself as the only “communist candidate.” She is trying to take advantage of the hesitancy of a significant number of PCF members about voting for Mélenchon. But Arthaud’s program has nothing to do with communism. Furthermore, LO has always been in favor of the EU and the euro. In their latest conference document (Lutte Ouvrière, December 2011-January 2012), they lament that in recent times “the few steps forward made by the bourgeoisie to overcome national rivalries, as in the field of monetary unification, are now in jeopardy.” They have always celebrated the supposedly “open borders” created by the Schengen Treaty [which ostensibly allows free movement between member states while erecting barriers against non-European immigrants]. Yet at any given time an estimated 100,000 people in the EU are in jail because they lack the required papers, and 140,000 are deported each year. And about 15,000 people have died in the past 20 years trying to penetrate this racist fortress.
LO claims to be “communist” but tramples on the most basic principles of the class struggle by refusing to show the working class that one should not vote for those allied with the bourgeois class enemy. LO decided at its recent congress in December not to take a position on whether to oppose Hollande until the evening of the first round of elections. LO’s candidacy is therefore a candidacy to pressure the popular front so that it will be slightly more to the left once in office. As Nathalie Arthaud’s election platform declared: “Even those among the plebeian electorate who, out of disgust with Sarkozy, will choose to vote for Hollande on the second round should express on the first round the fact that they distrust him, that they are keeping an eye on him and that, even with the left in power, they will impose their demands.” No vote for Nathalie Arthaud!
LO has never made any secret of the reformist character of its municipalism and its trade-union work. They wrote in Lutte de Classe (February 2008): “By definition, municipal activity as well as trade-union activity cannot be revolutionary; they are reformist.” As recently as last month, Jean-Pierre Mercier, a spokesman of Nathalie Arthaud and a member of the municipal majority running Bagnolet [a working-class city outside Paris] signed a special statement of political solidarity with the PCF mayor, Marc Everbecq. Supposedly describing the way Everbecq has been ruling the city, this statement defended “living together and in solidarity” as well as the mayor’s “citizenship building.” “Citizenship building” or racist demolition? The African workers who lived in a squat that was demolished on the orders of the mayor’s office with a backhoe two years ago will have their own opinion about that (see “Lutte Ouvrière’s Municipal Antics,” WV No. 960, 4 June 2010). Voting for the mayor’s budget, as Mercier has been doing for years, means paying for his backhoe.
LO defends its municipal reformism, arguing that this is a long tradition of the labor movement. That this is a tradition of the French workers movement is unfortunately true, but it was not true of Lenin. He fought hard in 1917 against his own comrades who wanted to continue precisely the reformist practice of the Second International in managing municipalities (See “Marxist Principles and Electoral Tactics,” Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 61, Spring 2009). It is not by accident that for the past 50 years the French Constitution has required that candidates for the highest executive post be sponsored by a number of elected officials, the vast majority of whom are mayors who, on a daily basis, exercise just such an executive mandate.
At bottom, LO’s election program boils down to wanting to “impose on the bosses a ban on layoffs,” to “force the state to hire” and to “impose workers control in industry and banking,” along with wage increases and an automatic cost-of-living adjustment for inflation. They want this to be “imposed on the owners and the rulers, whoever they may be.” The problem is that imposing on the capitalists a “ban on layoffs” would mean forcing them to stop running their economy for the purpose of making profits—in other words, making them cease being themselves.
LO thinks that the workers’ vital needs can be “imposed...by a collective working-class struggle that is so massive and so explosive that it really threatens the capitalist class.... The capitalist class will not concede anything without feeling the anger of the working class and the threat to its own profits and wealth.” But when such an explosive struggle occurs, that’s when serious business starts, not where it ends: Either one is satisfied with having obtained these “basic needs” by posing threats or one goes forward to overthrow capitalism. LO clearly limits itself to the former perspective, thereby promising to repeat the PCF’s betrayals in the June 1936 and May 1968 general strikes, when the PCF made the workers return to work with a few economic concessions from the bourgeoisie, betraying the possibilities for socialist revolution. As always in such cases, the concessions achieved were immediately undermined by the capitalists, who are only satisfied when gains are emptied of their content.
Likewise, “workers control of industry and banking” can only be a phase in the workers’ struggle to impose their own organs of power, at the factory level and at the level of society as a whole, and to liquidate capitalist property for good. If such a perspective is not posed from a revolutionary standpoint, which LO does not do, it simply amounts to joint management, in which the union bureaucrats participate in decisions by the shareholders on how to increase the rate of profit on their investment. In this period of sharp capitalist crisis, it also means jointly overseeing layoffs and plant closings. The following words by Trotsky in the Transitional Program (1938) directly apply to LO:
“Classical Social Democracy, functioning in an epoch of progressive capitalism, divided its program into two parts independent of each other: the minimum program which limited itself to reforms within the framework of bourgeois society, and the maximum program which promised substitution of socialism for capitalism in the indefinite future. Between the minimum and the maximum program no bridge existed. And indeed Social Democracy has no need of such a bridge, since the word socialism is used only for holiday speechifying.... Insofar as the old, partial, ‘minimal’ demands of the masses clash with the destructive and degrading tendencies of decadent capitalism—and this occurs at each step—the Fourth International advances a system of transitional demands, the essence of which is contained in the fact that ever more openly and decisively they will be directed against the very bases of the bourgeois regime. The old ‘minimal program’ is superseded by the transitional program, the task of which lies in systematic mobilization of the masses for the proletarian revolution.”
The workers movement has been beset by demoralization for the last 20 years, since the counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and the so-called “death of communism.” This demoralization only sharpens the contradiction between the objective tasks facing the proletariat and its low level of consciousness. But that does not change the fact that the only way to resolve this contradiction is to fight for a revolutionary working-class party. In the course of the class struggle, the working class acquires socialist consciousness not spontaneously (as LO preaches in its holiday speechifying) but through the intervention of a Leninist party.
In these elections there is no choice for the working people. No candidate presents—even on the first round, even in the crudest way—a line of class independence against Hollande and Sarkozy, the two main candidates whom the bourgeoisie is considering for leadership of French imperialism in the period ahead. Whoever is elected, the working class confronts a strengthening of the capitalist offensive against its gains. The workers will be all the better prepared for that confrontation if they refuse to heed the siren song of the popular front or vote for it. Above all, the working class needs a new leadership, a revolutionary leadership. We are fighting to build the Leninist party that will one day lead the workers to the victorious overthrow of capitalism. Reforge the Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution! For the Socialist United States of Europe!
Workers Vanguard No. 999
30 March 2012
For a Multiethnic Revolutionary Workers Party!
French Elections: No Choice for Workers
MARCH 25—Three days ago, a special police unit killed Mohamed Merah, a 23-year-old Frenchman who, police say, had killed three paratroopers of black and North African origin and four Jewish civilians—three children and a rabbi—near Toulouse in Southern France over the previous eleven days. Reportedly, Merah had been in Afghanistan and claimed to be appalled by the crimes of the French military, which led him to target soldiers. Police say that on the morning of March 19, Merah arrived too late to kill another soldier he had picked out and instead decided to go on a killing spree in front of a Jewish school, an abominable anti-Semitic crime.
This has become a central issue in the campaign leading up to the presidential election, the first round of which is scheduled for April 22. In the likely event that no one gets an absolute majority, there will be a runoff on May 6 between the two top-polling candidates. Ramping up his anti-immigrant “security” pitch, President Nicolas Sarkozy seized on the case to immediately announce new measures targeting primarily Salafist Muslims in France, threatening to jail people who “regularly” consult Web sites declared haram (illicit) by the French government. Sarkozy plans to introduce new legislation that would outlaw “propagating and advocating extremist ideologies.” This is an open threat to criminalize the dissemination of all “forbidden” opinions—a weapon historically wielded by capitalist governments against the left and the workers movement.
The “war on terror” is currently being used primarily against Muslims, but all opponents of the racist capitalist system, and ultimately the multiracial working class, are targeted. In this heightened atmosphere of racist witchhunt, dark-skinned youth in the heavily immigrant ghettos of the suburbs (banlieues) who are suspected of having Muslim backgrounds will be targeted more than ever for daily state repression. Down with the racist “war on terror”! The workers movement must defend banlieue youth!
The Toulouse killings have been an opportunity for the various candidates, including those on the left, to stand by the President in a despicable show of “national unity.” Green candidate (and former judge) Eva Joly, along with Socialist Party (SP) hopeful François Hollande, joined the fascist Marine Le Pen at the memorial service for the paratroopers, where Sarkozy himself delivered the eulogy. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the candidate of the Left Front (mainly composed of the Communist Party and a split from Hollande’s SP), rushed to “congratulate” the cops for the extra-judicial killing of Merah. Mélenchon seized the opportunity to promote his program for hiring more National Police, which he terms a “public service.” The candidate of Lutte Ouvrière (LO), Nathalie Arthaud, claimed to not partake of the “national unity” hype. However, its initial statement on the anti-Semitic crimes in Toulouse and the killing of the French elite forces stationed in nearby Montauban, a March 20 declaration by Arthaud, was published in Lutte Ouvrière (23 March) with the headline: “The Killings in Montauban and Toulouse: Odious Acts.”
For Marxists there is a distinction between the slaying of Jewish children and a teacher on the one hand and the killing of soldiers from the elite paratrooper units, which have a long history of murderous terror on behalf of French imperialism from Algeria to Afghanistan and Indochina, on the other. The second is not a crime from the standpoint of the working class. But such individual terrorist acts are an obstacle to mobilizing the collective struggle of a politically conscious working class against the capitalist system. One thing is certain: the killings will bring fierce repression down on the heads of minorities and others in the state’s crosshairs. Down with the Vigipirate campaign of racist cop terror! U.S./French/NATO troops out of Afghanistan!
The following excerpted article is translated from Le Bolchévik No. 199 (March 2012), newspaper of the Ligue Trotskyste de France, section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist). The LTF explained in its article that “the President of the Republic is the chief executive, that is to say, the executive director of the capitalist state, chief advocate for the interests of the capitalists as a whole.” As the comrades wrote, as Marxist revolutionaries, we refuse in principle to hold executive positions in the capitalist state—president, governor or mayor. From the same standpoint, we refuse to run for such offices, since doing so would only give legitimacy to the reformist notion that a “revolutionary” at the head of the state could advance the interests of the working class.
* * *
Marxists may consider giving critical support to another organization, even in presidential elections, when doing so can in some way raise the class consciousness of the proletariat. But in this election, there is no one to whom Marxists can even contemplate giving critical support because all the candidates who in any way claim to represent the labor movement are at best a left cover for the SP candidacy, thereby helping to sow illusions in the “change” that it would supposedly bring.
The SP candidate, François Hollande, simply promises to pursue the same policies as Nicolas Sarkozy, but without the “bling-bling” (hobnobbing with the rich and famous). Hollande launched his campaign, in the January 26 televised debate, by declaring his opposition to a “windshield wipers” policy—in other words, Hollande will not sweep away the anti-working-class measures that have been enacted during the ten years of right-wing rule. Hollande promises to deprive of a full pension all those who have not actually worked for at least 41 years.
An entire section of the bourgeoisie is irritated by Sarkozy—not so much because of his nouveau riche vulgarity but because he has not fulfilled his promise to break the labor movement and dramatically increase the capitalists’ rate of profit. Since French imperialism continues to lose ground against its German rival, it is imperative that its next Commander-in-Chief carry out even more radical attacks against the working class and the oppressed. For the capitalists, Hollande would have the advantage of receiving the support of the union bureaucrats, whom he promised to “consult” and soft-soap as “social partners” in leading French imperialism. No vote for François Hollande!
Hollande has also promised a “relentless” fight against undocumented immigrants. The “solution” he promised for the Roma (Gypsies) is putting them in “camps” to “avoid this constant moving around” (Le Monde, 18 February). Meanwhile, he promised to hire more cops, criticizing Sarkozy from the right for insufficient results in maintaining “law and order.” He promised to hire 60,000 teachers—thereby perpetuating a third of the 90,000 job cuts made in education by the right-wing government in recent years—by eliminating jobs in other areas of the public sector.
While Hollande has promised to withdraw French troops from Afghanistan—troops that were initially sent by the Socialist government of [Lionel] Jospin and [Jean-Luc] Mélenchon ten years ago, when Hollande himself was the head of the SP—this is from the standpoint of serving the best interests of French imperialism. The current military losses are no longer justified by the “advantage” of being able to train troops to kill real people and enabling France to negotiate with the United States to obtain certain advantages for its own capitalists. Besides, Hollande has personally declared his support for the bloody military interventions of French imperialism organized by Sarkozy in the Ivory Coast and Libya. French troops out of Afghanistan, Africa, Lebanon, the Balkans and the Arabian Peninsula!
Moreover, François Hollande is running as the joint candidate of the SP and the Left Radical Party, a bourgeois party. This kind of coalition is a “popular front,” a bloc between bourgeois parties and bourgeois workers parties—that is, parties like the SP or the Communist Party (PCF), which have ties to the labor movement and claim, in one way or another, to be part of it, even though their leadership and program are totally bourgeois. In such coalitions, it is the bourgeois parties that inevitably determine the class character of the alliance, guaranteeing that it will loyally serve the capitalists.
By tying the workers to their class enemy, popular-front alliances have always paved the way for defeat. That is why it is a matter of principle for Marxists to oppose them. The June 1936 Popular Front led to [the Nazi collaborator] Pétain; the 1936 Popular Front in Spain led to the Franco dictatorship which ruled for nearly 40 years; in Chile it led to Pinochet’s coup in 1973. Beginning with [Socialist Party leader François] Mitterrand in 1981, a succession of popular fronts has each time been followed five years later by a return to power of right-wing reactionaries. Meanwhile, the fascists of the National Front have taken root.
We also refuse to give any support to the candidates of the “left of the left.” The social democrats of the PCF and the Left Party (PG) have united behind Jean-Luc Mélenchon, formerly a longtime Socialist Party leader who had held a minor ministerial post during the last years of the Jospin government. The latter boasted of having performed more privatizations than all of the previous right-wing governments. The PCF and PG are unconditionally determined to “defeat the right” on the second round, which decoded means “vote for Hollande.” They are thus acting simply as vote-getters for the popular front.
This is also the role of the NPA [New Anti-Capitalist Party] of Olivier Besancenot and Philippe Poutou. In fact, much of the NPA has been going over to Mélenchon’s party in order to support the popular front more directly (and have a better chance at getting sinecures if the “left” wins the elections). As for Lutte Ouvrière’s candidate, Nathalie Arthaud, she refuses, for the time being, to oppose voting for Hollande. In the 2007 presidential elections, these opportunists called for a vote for [SP candidate] Ségolène Royal on the second round. We call on workers not to vote in the presidential elections, neither on the first nor the second round.
Workers should also not vote in the coming parliamentary elections. This is how Lenin described parliamentarism:
“To decide once every few years which members of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament—this is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarism, not only in parliamentary-constitutional monarchies, but also in the most democratic republics.”
— The State and Revolution (1917)
However, in parliamentary elections, unlike presidential elections, Marxists may consider running candidates and using the election campaign and, if elected, the parliamentary podium as oppositionists, that is, in opposition to the capitalist executive power, no matter who is running the state. The purpose is to disseminate revolutionary propaganda and act as a tribune of the workers and the oppressed.
Down With the European Union!
The chauvinist and anti-working-class program of the SP appears particularly clearly in regard to the European Union (EU). The EU is an entirely reactionary institution—a consortium of imperialist states and weaker states—led by Germany. The initial purpose of the EU’s predecessors, the European Coal and Steel Community, the Europe of Six, etc., was to strengthen the economic cohesion of capitalist West Europe—mainly France and Germany—in order to consolidate the NATO military alliance against the Soviet Union.
In the 1980s, the SP of Mitterrand and Mélenchon contributed in no small measure to the victory of capitalist counterrevolution in East Europe. We Trotskyists were for the unconditional military defense of the USSR. In 1989-1990, the left in general, from the SP to Lutte Ouvrière, rejoiced at the prospect of a capitalist reunification of Germany. In contrast, we fought against the absorption of the East German deformed workers state by capitalist West Germany and for revolutionary reunification, through a proletarian political revolution against the parasitic Stalinist bureaucracy in East Germany and a socialist revolution in the West to overthrow and expropriate the German bourgeoisie.
With the USSR now destroyed, the EU is merely a trading bloc of competing imperialist powers, mainly Germany, France and Britain, which went to war with each other twice in the last century alone to achieve supremacy in Europe and to seize their rivals’ global market share. Supposedly, the only purpose of the EU is to promote “free and fair competition” (even though capitalism over a century ago entered the era of cartels and monopolies). This is an ideological cover for increasing attacks against the gains that workers were able to wrest through their struggles when the Soviet Union still existed. Thus, the anti-union Bolkestein Directive aims at pitting the workers of the various European countries against each other. As we wrote in a leaflet (reprinted in Le Bolchévik, March 2006), “The Bolkestein Directive gets to the heart of what the European Union is.” More recently, we stressed in the most recent Le Bolchévik (December 2011):
“The EU is a fragile formation exposed to continuous tensions stemming from the disparate national interests of the European imperialists, which are constantly threatening to tear it apart. Nor can it be otherwise. Although the productive forces have long since outgrown a national framework, capitalism is a system that rests essentially on nation-states: each of the various national capitalist classes needs its own state to push through and defend its interests at home and abroad. Hence under capitalism, the goal of political union or a European superstate is necessarily reactionary and an empty utopia.”
— see “Economic Crisis Rips Europe,” WV No. 992, 9 December 2011
The International Communist League has always opposed the EU and its monetary instrument, the euro. In May 1997, as the imperialists’ negotiations for the creation of the euro were being finalized, we wrote a leaflet calling for not voting for the PCF/Jospin popular front, which declared: “If in the future, because of workers’ struggles, the ‘monetary union’ is abandoned or postponed indefinitely, this would be a victory for workers, who throughout Europe have militantly resisted the capitalist offensive.” We explained at the time that a single currency was not viable in the absence of a single European government, and that such a government “can only be achieved by the methods of Adolf Hitler, not by those of Jacques Delors, the French social-democratic architect of Maastricht [treaty establishing the euro]” (see “For a Workers Europe—For Socialist Revolution!” WV No. 670, 13 June 1997).
Hollande’s opposition to Sarkozy on the question of Europe is solely from the standpoint of the interests of French imperialism, not those of the working class. Hollande accuses Sarkozy of capitulating to France’s German rivals. He went to London not only to reassure the financiers of the City that they had nothing to fear from his speech against “the world of finance,” but also to advocate closer ties between France and Britain against Germany. Hollande has, for example, no intention of changing the conditions imposed by [German chancellor Angela] Merkel and Sarkozy on Greece, which are strangling that country and literally driving its people into extreme poverty. Those measures are also laying the groundwork for intensifying attacks on workers in the rest of Europe, including Germany and France.
In France, the social democrats have always played a decisive role regarding the EU and the euro. In December 1989, seeking to maintain some leverage over Germany, Mitterrand negotiated a common currency with Chancellor Kohl in exchange for agreeing to the capitalist reunification of Germany, which inevitably would lead to strengthening the power of Germany relative to France. He had the Maastricht Treaty approved by referendum in 1992. (It was approved only by a narrow margin, thanks in part to Mélenchon’s vote in favor and LO’s abstention.) The euro itself was introduced under Jospin’s SP-PCF-Green government, which Mélenchon was part of from 2000 to 2002. Hollande’s SP later campaigned for the Lisbon Treaty [approving a new EU constitution]. (The treaty was rejected by referendum in 2005, but nevertheless adopted in 2008 thanks to the abstention or “yes” vote of over 150 SP members of parliament.) Recently, by deciding to abstain in parliament, the SP saved the latest scheme by “Merkozy” to asphyxiate Greece, called the “European Stability Mechanism.”
That is the EU’s balance sheet for French imperialism. Thanks to the capitalist counterrevolution in East Europe, and the concomitant wage cuts and loss of workers’ gains, the German bourgeoisie was able to outsource a growing share of the inputs of its industrial products to those countries, which are increasingly its economic hinterland. The strength of the euro against the local currencies has further lowered the cost of these products for German capitalists. In addition, wage cuts in Germany itself, particularly under the social-democratic governments headed by Gerhard Schröder in the 2000s, gave German capitalists an increased competitive advantage over the French. The French reformists, who supported the counterrevolution (in the name of “democracy”) and the European Union, are now very disappointed with the outcome: Their own bourgeoisie is the loser.
In fact, no candidate of the workers movement in these elections stands in any way opposed to the EU. Mélenchon and the PCF want the European Central Bank to give money to the poor (to be paid for ultimately by the German capitalists through depreciation of the euro and/or through “euro bonds”). Thus, they spread illusions that the EU and its monetary instrument could be placed at the service of the oppressed. While they’re at it, why not call on the fascist Le Pen to defend immigrants?
But the rest of the “left of the left” are no better. For years the NPA, following its predecessor, the misnamed Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire, has called for a “democratic and social” Europe. In other words, they pretend that there can be a capitalist Europe that is more humane than the existing one. The NPA thus deflects the working class away from struggle to overthrow the entire capitalist system and to establish a Socialist United States of Europe on a revolutionary internationalist basis. These lackeys of their own imperialism admonish the workers in Greece and France that they should remain prisoners of the euro straitjacket, which the NPA presents as protection against one’s own national bourgeoisie. Thus the editorial by Yvan Lemaitre in the January issue of the NPA’s monthly, Tout Est à Nous! La Revue [Everything Is Ours! The Magazine], proclaims, regarding a return to national currencies:
“Such a step backward would lock the workers into the national straitjacket at the mercy of their own implacable national bourgeoisies, each one bitterly defending its own position within the new international division of labor. There is another way out, a democratic and progressive one, within the European framework, which has become the new arena for struggles by workers and by the peoples.”
Since Lemaitre is against socialist revolution, he can only conceive of opposition to the capitalist EU and the euro from the standpoint of right-wing nationalism. He cynically denounces “reactionary, chauvinist and nationalist propaganda that proposes returning to national currencies and withdrawing behind national boundaries.” In fact it is the bankruptcy of the left, the apostles of a “democratic and social” capitalist Europe, that puts wind in the sails of fascist demagogues, allowing them a monopoly on opposing the EU in whose name the workers’ gains are attacked. And it is German workers who are among the main victims of the austerity measures on behalf of “competitiveness” in Europe. The only two announced candidates in this election who oppose the euro are Marine Le Pen of the National Front and Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, an old-style far-right Gaullist politician.
The [Lambertist] Parti Ouvrier Indépendant (POI) has its own chauvinist line of ultra-French delirium. At a February 13 Paris demonstration over the crisis in Greece, its members chanted slogans against the EU as an “American agency” and called for the EU/International Monetary Fund/European Central Bank troika to get out of Paris, presumably to protect “la belle France” from their misdeeds. Thus the POI covers up the role of French imperialism in the oppression of Greece.
Protectionism: Reactionary Response to Capitalist Attacks
Throughout Europe, nationalism is on the rise, an ideological expression of the sharpening of rivalries between the continent’s bourgeoisies. To fight this, it is necessary to break openly with the reactionary fiction of European capitalist unity and to fight for revolutionary proletarian internationalism. Today this particularly means solidarity with our class brothers in Greece who are being crushed under the jackboot of the French BNP bank, the Deutsche Bank and the European Central Bank. It is necessary to oppose the protectionist campaigns to tax imported products and “produce French” or “produce in France,” whether put forward by Sarkozy, Hollande or Mélenchon. It is necessary to oppose the chauvinist poison spewed by those rare “left” ideologues like Jacques Sapir and Jacques Nikonoff, who oppose the euro in the name of a better version of protectionism. In a Le Bolchévik No. 197 (September 2011) article that dealt with Michel Husson, a pro-euro economist fetishized by the NPA, we noted: “The NPA wants people to believe that capitalism can simply be reformed, and by promoting a supposedly ‘good’ protectionism it lends legitimacy to the protectionism of the National Front.”
Ditto for the PCF with its “produce French” slogan, which it just dredged up again a few months ago, and which has been picked up by the National Front. Today the National Front presents essentially a parliamentary package. But at bottom the fascists are paramilitary shock troops who carry out racist terror and whose ultimate target is the working class. The decaying capitalist system is the fertile terrain that nourishes the fascists. In the event of a sharp crisis, the bourgeoisie mobilizes them against the working class as it did in Germany in 1933. This is why the struggle against fascism cannot be separated from the struggle for socialist revolution. To crush them it is necessary to mobilize the working class in defense of Muslims, immigrants, homosexuals and all the designated targets of the fascist scum. It is necessary to fight to overthrow capitalism—a perspective rejected by the union bureaucrats, since they seek to keep the unions chained to the capitalist order.
It is necessary to fight against layoffs, which threaten workers in plants that the capitalists are relocating as they try to maximize profits. But protectionism means seeking agreement with the French capitalists to keep plants located here, against the workers of other countries. It is flatly counterposed to a proletarian internationalist program, which is based on a common class struggle across national borders against these same capitalists, to defend and extend the workers’ gains. To fight against the bourgeoisie’s maneuvers for dividing workers along national lines, there needs to be struggle for wage increases, including at subsidiary companies and subcontractors in other countries. We must fight tooth and nail against layoffs, demanding the sharing of work between all hands, with the corresponding reduction in working hours without loss of pay. We must fight for all temporary workers and those on short-term contracts to get permanent jobs. Equal pay for equal work!
This requires struggle for industrial unions, which bring together in the same fighting organization all the workers at a given location—including those provided by subcontractors—whether it is a French or foreign company. And this in turn requires a fight for a new leadership in the unions, a revolutionary internationalist leadership replacing the bureaucrats, who are content with the division of unionized workers among several competing unions and who even accept the low level of unionization of workers since the bureaucrats’ apparatus is essentially financed by the bosses and the state.
The division of the working class along national lines, accompanied by protectionism, goes hand in hand with the division of the workers within the country along ethnic, racial and sexual lines. Mélenchon, protectionism’s clearest advocate among the candidates of the workers movement, has virtually nothing to say against the government’s racist campaigns in his 96-page platform. What is at stake, however, is nothing less than the unity of the multiethnic and multiracial proletariat of this country. Full citizenship rights for everyone who has made it here! Down with the deportations of undocumented immigrants! The workers movement must defend ghetto youth! Down with the racist campaign against veiled women!
No Vote to LO!
Nathalie Arthaud, Lutte Ouvrière’s candidate, presents herself as the only “communist candidate.” She is trying to take advantage of the hesitancy of a significant number of PCF members about voting for Mélenchon. But Arthaud’s program has nothing to do with communism. Furthermore, LO has always been in favor of the EU and the euro. In their latest conference document (Lutte Ouvrière, December 2011-January 2012), they lament that in recent times “the few steps forward made by the bourgeoisie to overcome national rivalries, as in the field of monetary unification, are now in jeopardy.” They have always celebrated the supposedly “open borders” created by the Schengen Treaty [which ostensibly allows free movement between member states while erecting barriers against non-European immigrants]. Yet at any given time an estimated 100,000 people in the EU are in jail because they lack the required papers, and 140,000 are deported each year. And about 15,000 people have died in the past 20 years trying to penetrate this racist fortress.
LO claims to be “communist” but tramples on the most basic principles of the class struggle by refusing to show the working class that one should not vote for those allied with the bourgeois class enemy. LO decided at its recent congress in December not to take a position on whether to oppose Hollande until the evening of the first round of elections. LO’s candidacy is therefore a candidacy to pressure the popular front so that it will be slightly more to the left once in office. As Nathalie Arthaud’s election platform declared: “Even those among the plebeian electorate who, out of disgust with Sarkozy, will choose to vote for Hollande on the second round should express on the first round the fact that they distrust him, that they are keeping an eye on him and that, even with the left in power, they will impose their demands.” No vote for Nathalie Arthaud!
LO has never made any secret of the reformist character of its municipalism and its trade-union work. They wrote in Lutte de Classe (February 2008): “By definition, municipal activity as well as trade-union activity cannot be revolutionary; they are reformist.” As recently as last month, Jean-Pierre Mercier, a spokesman of Nathalie Arthaud and a member of the municipal majority running Bagnolet [a working-class city outside Paris] signed a special statement of political solidarity with the PCF mayor, Marc Everbecq. Supposedly describing the way Everbecq has been ruling the city, this statement defended “living together and in solidarity” as well as the mayor’s “citizenship building.” “Citizenship building” or racist demolition? The African workers who lived in a squat that was demolished on the orders of the mayor’s office with a backhoe two years ago will have their own opinion about that (see “Lutte Ouvrière’s Municipal Antics,” WV No. 960, 4 June 2010). Voting for the mayor’s budget, as Mercier has been doing for years, means paying for his backhoe.
LO defends its municipal reformism, arguing that this is a long tradition of the labor movement. That this is a tradition of the French workers movement is unfortunately true, but it was not true of Lenin. He fought hard in 1917 against his own comrades who wanted to continue precisely the reformist practice of the Second International in managing municipalities (See “Marxist Principles and Electoral Tactics,” Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 61, Spring 2009). It is not by accident that for the past 50 years the French Constitution has required that candidates for the highest executive post be sponsored by a number of elected officials, the vast majority of whom are mayors who, on a daily basis, exercise just such an executive mandate.
At bottom, LO’s election program boils down to wanting to “impose on the bosses a ban on layoffs,” to “force the state to hire” and to “impose workers control in industry and banking,” along with wage increases and an automatic cost-of-living adjustment for inflation. They want this to be “imposed on the owners and the rulers, whoever they may be.” The problem is that imposing on the capitalists a “ban on layoffs” would mean forcing them to stop running their economy for the purpose of making profits—in other words, making them cease being themselves.
LO thinks that the workers’ vital needs can be “imposed...by a collective working-class struggle that is so massive and so explosive that it really threatens the capitalist class.... The capitalist class will not concede anything without feeling the anger of the working class and the threat to its own profits and wealth.” But when such an explosive struggle occurs, that’s when serious business starts, not where it ends: Either one is satisfied with having obtained these “basic needs” by posing threats or one goes forward to overthrow capitalism. LO clearly limits itself to the former perspective, thereby promising to repeat the PCF’s betrayals in the June 1936 and May 1968 general strikes, when the PCF made the workers return to work with a few economic concessions from the bourgeoisie, betraying the possibilities for socialist revolution. As always in such cases, the concessions achieved were immediately undermined by the capitalists, who are only satisfied when gains are emptied of their content.
Likewise, “workers control of industry and banking” can only be a phase in the workers’ struggle to impose their own organs of power, at the factory level and at the level of society as a whole, and to liquidate capitalist property for good. If such a perspective is not posed from a revolutionary standpoint, which LO does not do, it simply amounts to joint management, in which the union bureaucrats participate in decisions by the shareholders on how to increase the rate of profit on their investment. In this period of sharp capitalist crisis, it also means jointly overseeing layoffs and plant closings. The following words by Trotsky in the Transitional Program (1938) directly apply to LO:
“Classical Social Democracy, functioning in an epoch of progressive capitalism, divided its program into two parts independent of each other: the minimum program which limited itself to reforms within the framework of bourgeois society, and the maximum program which promised substitution of socialism for capitalism in the indefinite future. Between the minimum and the maximum program no bridge existed. And indeed Social Democracy has no need of such a bridge, since the word socialism is used only for holiday speechifying.... Insofar as the old, partial, ‘minimal’ demands of the masses clash with the destructive and degrading tendencies of decadent capitalism—and this occurs at each step—the Fourth International advances a system of transitional demands, the essence of which is contained in the fact that ever more openly and decisively they will be directed against the very bases of the bourgeois regime. The old ‘minimal program’ is superseded by the transitional program, the task of which lies in systematic mobilization of the masses for the proletarian revolution.”
The workers movement has been beset by demoralization for the last 20 years, since the counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and the so-called “death of communism.” This demoralization only sharpens the contradiction between the objective tasks facing the proletariat and its low level of consciousness. But that does not change the fact that the only way to resolve this contradiction is to fight for a revolutionary working-class party. In the course of the class struggle, the working class acquires socialist consciousness not spontaneously (as LO preaches in its holiday speechifying) but through the intervention of a Leninist party.
In these elections there is no choice for the working people. No candidate presents—even on the first round, even in the crudest way—a line of class independence against Hollande and Sarkozy, the two main candidates whom the bourgeoisie is considering for leadership of French imperialism in the period ahead. Whoever is elected, the working class confronts a strengthening of the capitalist offensive against its gains. The workers will be all the better prepared for that confrontation if they refuse to heed the siren song of the popular front or vote for it. Above all, the working class needs a new leadership, a revolutionary leadership. We are fighting to build the Leninist party that will one day lead the workers to the victorious overthrow of capitalism. Reforge the Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution! For the Socialist United States of Europe!
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Trayvon Martin: Killed for Being Black in America
Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League website.
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Workers Vanguard No. 999
30 March 2012
Capitalist State Fuels Racist Vigilantes
Trayvon Martin: Killed for Being Black in America
MARCH 26—The racist killing one month ago of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin by a vigilante in Sanford, Florida, has touched off a wave of protest that continues in cities and towns coast to coast. Trayvon’s anguished parents have spoken a bitter truth known to all black families: what happened on February 26 could happen to anyone like him—at the hands of either lone-wolf racists or police thugs-in-blue. Nearly 50 years after civil rights legislation established formal legal equality, a young black man had his life stolen simply for being who he was in this sick, racist society. And his killer to this day remains free, his act sanctioned by a state law that gives free rein to such vigilantism.
The basic story is well known. Trayvon departed from his father’s girlfriend’s home in a gated community to purchase Skittles and an iced tea at a 7-Eleven store. He did not return. Trayvon had been spotted by George Zimmerman, a self-appointed Neighborhood Watch enforcer. When Zimmerman called police, he described Trayvon, who had put on his hoodie in the rain, as a “real suspicious guy.” A frightened Trayvon was aware that he was being followed by a white male stranger in a car, a really suspicious guy. So he ran for safety after seeing Zimmerman stop and exit the car. Zimmerman pursued Trayvon, complaining to the police department that “these assholes...always get away.” The cops say that when they arrived, they found Trayvon dead with a gunshot to the chest and Zimmerman armed with a 9mm pistol and splattered with blood.
Trayvon’s parents then faced sheer contempt from Sanford police. Tracy Martin, the father, believed his son was missing after he didn’t return from the store. The following day, he called to report a missing person, to no avail. He then called 911 and was asked to describe his son. Police officers eventually arrived to show him a picture of his dead son with blood dripping from his mouth. Police had listed the slain teen as a “John Doe” and made no attempt to identify his body or locate his family on the day of his death.
Police who were at the crime scene helped build an alibi for Zimmerman, himself a cop wannabe. Zimmerman claimed that he fired in self-defense when Trayvon, three inches shorter and nearly 100 pounds lighter than himself, gained the upper hand in an alleged scuffle. At least three witnesses heard the “desperate wail of a child, a gunshot and then silence.” So the cops “corrected” one witness to claim that the cry for help came not from Trayvon but from Zimmerman. The officer in charge was also in charge in 2010 when cops covered up the assault on a homeless black man by a police lieutenant’s son. (The white assailant was charged only after videotape of the assault appeared on YouTube.) In 2005, a black teenager in Sanford was fatally shot in the back by two white security guards, one of them a police volunteer and the other a cop’s son. A judge dismissed the charges against them for “lack of evidence.”
When the facts of Martin’s killing and the cop cover-up eventually came to light, masses of people demonstrated their outrage, from a student protest at historically black Florida A&M University on March 19 to a “million hoodie march” in New York City two days later and another round of demonstrations today. LeBron James and his Miami Heat basketball teammates made a powerful protest simply by being photographed in hooded sweatshirts with their heads bowed. An editorial in New York’s Amsterdam News (22 March) linked the killing to the everyday hell black people endure in this country:
“We are prejudged every day in almost every way, from the neighborhood watch captain to the rookie cop to the sales clerk who works on commission to the taxi driver who won’t pick us up to the guidance counselor who steers our children away from AP classes because they are not ‘college material.’
“We are prejudged. And that prejudice means all too often the difference between life and death, a future or a grave.”
Black Democrat and TV host Al Sharpton called it a “paradox” that a black man could be elected president while young black men were still viewed with suspicion for wearing hooded sweatshirts. What paradox? For this country’s capitalist rulers, Barack Obama’s election provided a facelift for murderous U.S. imperialism and its capitalist profit system. The day-to-day functioning of American capitalism is measured in mass unemployment, home foreclosures, cop terror and other brutalities that come down heaviest on blacks and other minorities. Putting Obama in the White House meant only that now there is a black overseer for a system that criminalizes young black men in maintaining the racial oppression that has been embedded in this country since the days of slavery. It will take nothing less than a socialist overturn of capitalism by the multiracial working class—a third American Revolution—to finally achieve black freedom and provide a decent life for all.
Vigilantism in Racist America
Zimmerman’s Neighborhood Watch was organized in September 2011 by a homeowners association under the auspices of the Sanford Police Department. Zimmerman, who was studying to be a cop, was its sole volunteer. He was well known to the cops, having made 46 calls to 911 this year. As one of his black neighbors described it, it was always: “A black guy this. A black guy that.” A Zimmerman supporter claimed with sheer racist contempt that problems in the area began when foreclosures forced homeowners to rent out property to “low-lifes and gangsters,” so that the housing complex now has a slight majority of non-whites. The Sanford police chief declared that cops working with Neighborhood Watch types must determine “who in that community is not supposed to be there.”
Zimmerman’s claim of self-defense is based on a Florida “Stand Your Ground” law, an open invitation to racist vigilantism. The law was passed in 2005 amid a “get tough on crime” campaign—code for targeting black people. The 2005 law supplanted an earlier Florida law that, like those in many other states, traced its roots to English Common Law. That standard held that self-defense is justified if a person faced with attack first tries to remove himself, if feasible, from immediate danger before using deadly force. Florida’s 2005 law allows for the use of deadly force by anyone who claims a “reasonable belief” that such force is necessary, without even attempting to disengage. And in racist America, a black kid in a hoodie is enough to claim “reasonable belief” of danger. The law also promises criminal and civil immunity for people who claim to have acted in self-defense.
As Marxists, we oppose gun control laws, which are most often promoted by Democratic Party liberals and black politicians, and uphold the right to armed self-defense. But we oppose the “stand your ground” law, which, in removing retreat as a criterion for self-defense, sanctions vigilantism, including murder.
The working class and the black population must zealously defend the Constitutional right to bear arms, a product of the Revolutionary War against British colonial rule. Gun control kills, and it kills blacks in particular. It is a means to enforce a monopoly of violence in the hands of the capitalist state. Gun control leaves guns in the hands of cops, criminals and Klansmen while making the country’s black, poor and working people defenseless. Trayvon Martin might be alive today if he had been carrying a gun. But as the Martin family’s attorney said, had Trayvon been the shooter, “he would have been arrested day one, hour one, and wouldn’t have been given bail.”
In capitalist America, black self-defense against racist terror has historically been met with frenzied state repression. The earliest 20th-century gun control laws were passed in states like South Carolina, Tennessee and Mississippi as a way to disarm blacks in the face of KKK terror. In 1965, the New York City Council passed a bill especially to keep Malcolm X from carrying a carbine for his protection; he was assassinated shortly afterward. In 1967, the California legislature banned the carrying of a loaded gun after legally armed Black Panthers began patrolling ghettos where police terror was rampant. The state’s ban was followed by gun control laws nationwide, especially after the ghetto upheavals that broke out following Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968.
From day one, liberal political spokesmen have tried to steer the outrage over Trayvon Martin’s killing into the timeworn call for the federal government to step in to make things right. At a town hall meeting in Sanford on March 21, dozens of black residents told of being profiled, humiliated and physically assaulted by the cops. National NAACP leader Ben Jealous took that occasion to say that the local police department had “gone a bit rogue” and that’s why they needed to bring in the Department of Justice. The Justice Department are the top cops of a system where daily racist terror is meted out by police in the ghettos and barrios—from NYC’s “stop and frisk” dragnet to L.A.’s “anti-gang” crackdowns. When the Feds step in, at most they enact some meaningless “reforms” or get rid of some “bad apples.” Their purpose in doing so is to clean up the cops’ image to make them more effective, and to get angry people off the streets.
Along with the military, the police, courts and prisons form the core of the capitalist state, an instrument of coercion and organized violence for the suppression of one class, the working class, by another class, the capitalists. While even many Florida state authorities say that Zimmerman went beyond his mandate in gunning down an unarmed 17-year-old, the fact is that the cops’ constant drumbeat of cracking down on crime and pursuing the “war on drugs” fosters the growth of such vigilante scum. And the police themselves feed off of vigilante violence. In promoting Neighborhood Watch outfits, the cops are building up auxiliaries to their enforcement of the murderous racist status quo. The role of such racist vigilantes was seen in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, as armed white patrols, along with the cops, forcibly blocked blacks from evacuating as the flood waters rose, including through outright murder.
Central Florida: Racist, Anti-Labor Bastion
Sanford is located in central Florida, whose history is indelibly marked by bloody racist terror—legal and extralegal. A center of the citrus industry, this region was developed in the aftermath of the North’s victory over the South in the Civil War that smashed slavery. Northern capitalists, such as the town’s namesake, Henry Shelton Sanford, grabbed up real estate, developing orange groves and tourism as well as winter homes. When black laborers were brought in to work the orange groves, a campaign of race-terror soon followed that attacked them as competitors for “white jobs.”
In the early 1930s, the bosses struck with bloody vengeance against a union organizing drive by the United Citrus Workers (UCW). KKK nightriders terrorized organizers, crushing the UCW. In 1935, Joseph Shoemaker, a Socialist, was abducted by the Klan assisted by Tampa police. He was castrated, tarred and feathered, dying of his injuries after two weeks of suffering. In the face of such brutal terror, the Communist Party-led United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America, a CIO affiliate, soon arose and led a heroic fight for unionization. But it also faced a devastating wave of Klan terror, employer scabherding and government repression.
Florida has the distinction of being among the most brutal of Southern lynching states, as exemplified by the 1934 lynching of Claude Neal, a 23-year-old sharecropper. Neal was arrested by the Jackson County Sheriff and charged with the murder of a white woman. The illiterate man was forced to sign a written confession with an X. He ended up in the hands of a mob, tortured for hours and then lynched, his body parts distributed as “souvenirs.” Liberal icon Franklin D. Roosevelt steadfastly refused to support federal anti-lynching laws because that would have posed a break with the segregationist Dixiecrat components of his 1930s New Deal coalition.
Sanford, Florida, is itself branded in racist infamy. Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, a study of the Great Migration of blacks out of the South, recounts the story of George Swanson Starling, who barely escaped the town with his life in 1945 after attempting to organize black tangerine pickers to demand higher wages. The following year, Jackie Robinson was run out of town when the Montreal Royals, part of the Brooklyn Dodgers’ farm system, went there for spring training. In response, Dodgers’ owner Branch Rickey packed up and moved the team to Daytona Beach.
It took the tumultuous struggles for black rights in the 1950s and ’60s to break the back of official Jim Crow segregation in the South. The success of the liberal-led civil rights struggles was in bringing the South into alignment with the bourgeois-democratic norms in the rest of the country. This development did not—and could not—address the poverty, unemployment, rotten housing, segregated education and rampant cop terror that afflict the bulk of the black population. These conditions are deeply rooted in U.S. capitalism, whether or not they are officially codified in the legal sanctions of the bourgeois state. While today blacks possess formal equality under the law, this is pervasively violated in practice. And there could be no sharper example of that than the gunning down of Trayvon Martin.
The enduring color bar is the greatest obstacle to working-class unity in the U.S., serving to obscure the fundamental class divide in society by providing an illusion of common interest between white workers and their class enemy, the white capitalist exploiters. As Karl Marx declared in Volume I of Capital (1867): “Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.” It is through united class struggle that the workers can and must overcome these divisions, promoting their interests as a class against their common enemy. What is crucially needed is to forge a workers party that emblazons on its banners: Black liberation through socialist revolution!
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Workers Vanguard No. 999
30 March 2012
Capitalist State Fuels Racist Vigilantes
Trayvon Martin: Killed for Being Black in America
MARCH 26—The racist killing one month ago of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin by a vigilante in Sanford, Florida, has touched off a wave of protest that continues in cities and towns coast to coast. Trayvon’s anguished parents have spoken a bitter truth known to all black families: what happened on February 26 could happen to anyone like him—at the hands of either lone-wolf racists or police thugs-in-blue. Nearly 50 years after civil rights legislation established formal legal equality, a young black man had his life stolen simply for being who he was in this sick, racist society. And his killer to this day remains free, his act sanctioned by a state law that gives free rein to such vigilantism.
The basic story is well known. Trayvon departed from his father’s girlfriend’s home in a gated community to purchase Skittles and an iced tea at a 7-Eleven store. He did not return. Trayvon had been spotted by George Zimmerman, a self-appointed Neighborhood Watch enforcer. When Zimmerman called police, he described Trayvon, who had put on his hoodie in the rain, as a “real suspicious guy.” A frightened Trayvon was aware that he was being followed by a white male stranger in a car, a really suspicious guy. So he ran for safety after seeing Zimmerman stop and exit the car. Zimmerman pursued Trayvon, complaining to the police department that “these assholes...always get away.” The cops say that when they arrived, they found Trayvon dead with a gunshot to the chest and Zimmerman armed with a 9mm pistol and splattered with blood.
Trayvon’s parents then faced sheer contempt from Sanford police. Tracy Martin, the father, believed his son was missing after he didn’t return from the store. The following day, he called to report a missing person, to no avail. He then called 911 and was asked to describe his son. Police officers eventually arrived to show him a picture of his dead son with blood dripping from his mouth. Police had listed the slain teen as a “John Doe” and made no attempt to identify his body or locate his family on the day of his death.
Police who were at the crime scene helped build an alibi for Zimmerman, himself a cop wannabe. Zimmerman claimed that he fired in self-defense when Trayvon, three inches shorter and nearly 100 pounds lighter than himself, gained the upper hand in an alleged scuffle. At least three witnesses heard the “desperate wail of a child, a gunshot and then silence.” So the cops “corrected” one witness to claim that the cry for help came not from Trayvon but from Zimmerman. The officer in charge was also in charge in 2010 when cops covered up the assault on a homeless black man by a police lieutenant’s son. (The white assailant was charged only after videotape of the assault appeared on YouTube.) In 2005, a black teenager in Sanford was fatally shot in the back by two white security guards, one of them a police volunteer and the other a cop’s son. A judge dismissed the charges against them for “lack of evidence.”
When the facts of Martin’s killing and the cop cover-up eventually came to light, masses of people demonstrated their outrage, from a student protest at historically black Florida A&M University on March 19 to a “million hoodie march” in New York City two days later and another round of demonstrations today. LeBron James and his Miami Heat basketball teammates made a powerful protest simply by being photographed in hooded sweatshirts with their heads bowed. An editorial in New York’s Amsterdam News (22 March) linked the killing to the everyday hell black people endure in this country:
“We are prejudged every day in almost every way, from the neighborhood watch captain to the rookie cop to the sales clerk who works on commission to the taxi driver who won’t pick us up to the guidance counselor who steers our children away from AP classes because they are not ‘college material.’
“We are prejudged. And that prejudice means all too often the difference between life and death, a future or a grave.”
Black Democrat and TV host Al Sharpton called it a “paradox” that a black man could be elected president while young black men were still viewed with suspicion for wearing hooded sweatshirts. What paradox? For this country’s capitalist rulers, Barack Obama’s election provided a facelift for murderous U.S. imperialism and its capitalist profit system. The day-to-day functioning of American capitalism is measured in mass unemployment, home foreclosures, cop terror and other brutalities that come down heaviest on blacks and other minorities. Putting Obama in the White House meant only that now there is a black overseer for a system that criminalizes young black men in maintaining the racial oppression that has been embedded in this country since the days of slavery. It will take nothing less than a socialist overturn of capitalism by the multiracial working class—a third American Revolution—to finally achieve black freedom and provide a decent life for all.
Vigilantism in Racist America
Zimmerman’s Neighborhood Watch was organized in September 2011 by a homeowners association under the auspices of the Sanford Police Department. Zimmerman, who was studying to be a cop, was its sole volunteer. He was well known to the cops, having made 46 calls to 911 this year. As one of his black neighbors described it, it was always: “A black guy this. A black guy that.” A Zimmerman supporter claimed with sheer racist contempt that problems in the area began when foreclosures forced homeowners to rent out property to “low-lifes and gangsters,” so that the housing complex now has a slight majority of non-whites. The Sanford police chief declared that cops working with Neighborhood Watch types must determine “who in that community is not supposed to be there.”
Zimmerman’s claim of self-defense is based on a Florida “Stand Your Ground” law, an open invitation to racist vigilantism. The law was passed in 2005 amid a “get tough on crime” campaign—code for targeting black people. The 2005 law supplanted an earlier Florida law that, like those in many other states, traced its roots to English Common Law. That standard held that self-defense is justified if a person faced with attack first tries to remove himself, if feasible, from immediate danger before using deadly force. Florida’s 2005 law allows for the use of deadly force by anyone who claims a “reasonable belief” that such force is necessary, without even attempting to disengage. And in racist America, a black kid in a hoodie is enough to claim “reasonable belief” of danger. The law also promises criminal and civil immunity for people who claim to have acted in self-defense.
As Marxists, we oppose gun control laws, which are most often promoted by Democratic Party liberals and black politicians, and uphold the right to armed self-defense. But we oppose the “stand your ground” law, which, in removing retreat as a criterion for self-defense, sanctions vigilantism, including murder.
The working class and the black population must zealously defend the Constitutional right to bear arms, a product of the Revolutionary War against British colonial rule. Gun control kills, and it kills blacks in particular. It is a means to enforce a monopoly of violence in the hands of the capitalist state. Gun control leaves guns in the hands of cops, criminals and Klansmen while making the country’s black, poor and working people defenseless. Trayvon Martin might be alive today if he had been carrying a gun. But as the Martin family’s attorney said, had Trayvon been the shooter, “he would have been arrested day one, hour one, and wouldn’t have been given bail.”
In capitalist America, black self-defense against racist terror has historically been met with frenzied state repression. The earliest 20th-century gun control laws were passed in states like South Carolina, Tennessee and Mississippi as a way to disarm blacks in the face of KKK terror. In 1965, the New York City Council passed a bill especially to keep Malcolm X from carrying a carbine for his protection; he was assassinated shortly afterward. In 1967, the California legislature banned the carrying of a loaded gun after legally armed Black Panthers began patrolling ghettos where police terror was rampant. The state’s ban was followed by gun control laws nationwide, especially after the ghetto upheavals that broke out following Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968.
From day one, liberal political spokesmen have tried to steer the outrage over Trayvon Martin’s killing into the timeworn call for the federal government to step in to make things right. At a town hall meeting in Sanford on March 21, dozens of black residents told of being profiled, humiliated and physically assaulted by the cops. National NAACP leader Ben Jealous took that occasion to say that the local police department had “gone a bit rogue” and that’s why they needed to bring in the Department of Justice. The Justice Department are the top cops of a system where daily racist terror is meted out by police in the ghettos and barrios—from NYC’s “stop and frisk” dragnet to L.A.’s “anti-gang” crackdowns. When the Feds step in, at most they enact some meaningless “reforms” or get rid of some “bad apples.” Their purpose in doing so is to clean up the cops’ image to make them more effective, and to get angry people off the streets.
Along with the military, the police, courts and prisons form the core of the capitalist state, an instrument of coercion and organized violence for the suppression of one class, the working class, by another class, the capitalists. While even many Florida state authorities say that Zimmerman went beyond his mandate in gunning down an unarmed 17-year-old, the fact is that the cops’ constant drumbeat of cracking down on crime and pursuing the “war on drugs” fosters the growth of such vigilante scum. And the police themselves feed off of vigilante violence. In promoting Neighborhood Watch outfits, the cops are building up auxiliaries to their enforcement of the murderous racist status quo. The role of such racist vigilantes was seen in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, as armed white patrols, along with the cops, forcibly blocked blacks from evacuating as the flood waters rose, including through outright murder.
Central Florida: Racist, Anti-Labor Bastion
Sanford is located in central Florida, whose history is indelibly marked by bloody racist terror—legal and extralegal. A center of the citrus industry, this region was developed in the aftermath of the North’s victory over the South in the Civil War that smashed slavery. Northern capitalists, such as the town’s namesake, Henry Shelton Sanford, grabbed up real estate, developing orange groves and tourism as well as winter homes. When black laborers were brought in to work the orange groves, a campaign of race-terror soon followed that attacked them as competitors for “white jobs.”
In the early 1930s, the bosses struck with bloody vengeance against a union organizing drive by the United Citrus Workers (UCW). KKK nightriders terrorized organizers, crushing the UCW. In 1935, Joseph Shoemaker, a Socialist, was abducted by the Klan assisted by Tampa police. He was castrated, tarred and feathered, dying of his injuries after two weeks of suffering. In the face of such brutal terror, the Communist Party-led United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America, a CIO affiliate, soon arose and led a heroic fight for unionization. But it also faced a devastating wave of Klan terror, employer scabherding and government repression.
Florida has the distinction of being among the most brutal of Southern lynching states, as exemplified by the 1934 lynching of Claude Neal, a 23-year-old sharecropper. Neal was arrested by the Jackson County Sheriff and charged with the murder of a white woman. The illiterate man was forced to sign a written confession with an X. He ended up in the hands of a mob, tortured for hours and then lynched, his body parts distributed as “souvenirs.” Liberal icon Franklin D. Roosevelt steadfastly refused to support federal anti-lynching laws because that would have posed a break with the segregationist Dixiecrat components of his 1930s New Deal coalition.
Sanford, Florida, is itself branded in racist infamy. Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, a study of the Great Migration of blacks out of the South, recounts the story of George Swanson Starling, who barely escaped the town with his life in 1945 after attempting to organize black tangerine pickers to demand higher wages. The following year, Jackie Robinson was run out of town when the Montreal Royals, part of the Brooklyn Dodgers’ farm system, went there for spring training. In response, Dodgers’ owner Branch Rickey packed up and moved the team to Daytona Beach.
It took the tumultuous struggles for black rights in the 1950s and ’60s to break the back of official Jim Crow segregation in the South. The success of the liberal-led civil rights struggles was in bringing the South into alignment with the bourgeois-democratic norms in the rest of the country. This development did not—and could not—address the poverty, unemployment, rotten housing, segregated education and rampant cop terror that afflict the bulk of the black population. These conditions are deeply rooted in U.S. capitalism, whether or not they are officially codified in the legal sanctions of the bourgeois state. While today blacks possess formal equality under the law, this is pervasively violated in practice. And there could be no sharper example of that than the gunning down of Trayvon Martin.
The enduring color bar is the greatest obstacle to working-class unity in the U.S., serving to obscure the fundamental class divide in society by providing an illusion of common interest between white workers and their class enemy, the white capitalist exploiters. As Karl Marx declared in Volume I of Capital (1867): “Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.” It is through united class struggle that the workers can and must overcome these divisions, promoting their interests as a class against their common enemy. What is crucially needed is to forge a workers party that emblazons on its banners: Black liberation through socialist revolution!
Wednesday, April 04, 2012
From The Boston May Day Coalition-All Out For May-Day International Workers Day 2012!
Click on the headline to link to the Boston May Day Coalition website.
All Out For May 1st-International Workers Day 2012!
Boston May Day 2012 at City Hall Plaza!
Join us on Tuesday May 1st to celebrate International Workers Day this year with a rally at 12 noon at City Hall Plaza!
This year, there will be a full schedule of events throughout the day - truly making this 'A Day Without the 99%!"
WE demand:
• Stop the attacks on workers!
• Stop the detention and deportation of migrant workers and their families!
• Immediate permanent residency for all undocumented workers!
• Say NO to racial profiling and police brutality!
• Money for jobs and education, not for war and occupation!
• Unity of all workers to defend our rights!
Say it loud, say it proud! We are workers, we have rights!
Sponsored by the Boston May Day Committee (Mass. Global Action, ANSWER Coalition, Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Alternative, Socialist Party, July 26 Coalition, Tecschange, Latinos for Social Change).
(Endorsers list in formation)
http://www.bostonmayday.org
Greater Boston Area May 1st Activities
Chelsea:
Chelsea City Hall
500 Broadway (& Hawthorne St.)
Gather at 12:noon march at 2:pm
For More information please contact
La Colaborativa (617) 889-6097
East Boston:
LoPresti Park
Summer & New Streets (Maverick Square )
Gather at 12:noon begin march at 2:30pm
For more information please contact
Dominic at City life/Vida Urbana
(617) 710-7176
Everett:
Glendale Park
Ferry & Elm Streets
Gathering and rally at 4:pm
For more information please contact
La Comunidad (617) 387-9996
Block Party
In the Boston Financial District:
(corner of Federal and Franklin Streets)
Gather at 7:AM
For more information please go to www.occupymay1st.org
Boston evening Funeral March:
Copley Square Park (steps of Trinity Church)
Gather at 7:pm begin march at 8:pm
For more information please go to
www.occupymay1st.org
All Out For May 1st-International Workers Day 2012!
Boston May Day 2012 at City Hall Plaza!
Join us on Tuesday May 1st to celebrate International Workers Day this year with a rally at 12 noon at City Hall Plaza!
This year, there will be a full schedule of events throughout the day - truly making this 'A Day Without the 99%!"
WE demand:
• Stop the attacks on workers!
• Stop the detention and deportation of migrant workers and their families!
• Immediate permanent residency for all undocumented workers!
• Say NO to racial profiling and police brutality!
• Money for jobs and education, not for war and occupation!
• Unity of all workers to defend our rights!
Say it loud, say it proud! We are workers, we have rights!
Sponsored by the Boston May Day Committee (Mass. Global Action, ANSWER Coalition, Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Alternative, Socialist Party, July 26 Coalition, Tecschange, Latinos for Social Change).
(Endorsers list in formation)
http://www.bostonmayday.org
Greater Boston Area May 1st Activities
Chelsea:
Chelsea City Hall
500 Broadway (& Hawthorne St.)
Gather at 12:noon march at 2:pm
For More information please contact
La Colaborativa (617) 889-6097
East Boston:
LoPresti Park
Summer & New Streets (Maverick Square )
Gather at 12:noon begin march at 2:30pm
For more information please contact
Dominic at City life/Vida Urbana
(617) 710-7176
Everett:
Glendale Park
Ferry & Elm Streets
Gathering and rally at 4:pm
For more information please contact
La Comunidad (617) 387-9996
Block Party
In the Boston Financial District:
(corner of Federal and Franklin Streets)
Gather at 7:AM
For more information please go to www.occupymay1st.org
Boston evening Funeral March:
Copley Square Park (steps of Trinity Church)
Gather at 7:pm begin march at 8:pm
For more information please go to
www.occupymay1st.org
Thursday, March 29, 2012
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Bourgeois Hypocrisy on Women’s Equality
Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League website.
Workers Vanguard No. 998
16 March 2012
Bourgeois Hypocrisy on Women’s Equality
(Quote of the Week)
When the U.S. launched its occupation of Afghanistan in 2001, feminists joined government spokesmen in covering this imperialist depredation with cynical platitudes concerning Afghan women who are horribly oppressed by Islamic fundamentalist forces. Those forces were themselves recipients of U.S. money and arms in the 1980s. Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin punctured such bourgeois hypocrisy in an article marking the advances made toward women’s emancipation in the two years following the October Revolution of 1917.
In words bourgeois democracy promises equality and freedom, but in practice not a single bourgeois republic, even the more advanced, has granted women (half the human race) and men complete equality in the eyes of the law, or delivered women from dependence on and the oppression of the male.
Bourgeois democracy is the democracy of pompous phrases, solemn words, lavish promises and high-sounding slogans about freedom and equality, but in practice all this cloaks the lack of freedom and the inequality of women, the lack of freedom and the inequality for the working and exploited people.
Soviet or socialist democracy sweeps away these pompous but false words and declares ruthless war on the hypocrisy of “democrats,” landowners, capitalists and farmers with bursting bins who are piling up wealth by selling surplus grain to the starving workers at profiteering prices.
Down with this foul lie! There is no “equality,” nor can there be, of oppressed and oppressor, exploited and exploiter. There is no real “freedom,” nor can there be, so long as women are handicapped by men’s legal privileges, so long as there is no freedom for the worker from the yoke of capital, no freedom for the labouring peasant from the yoke of the capitalist, landowner and merchant.
—V.I. Lenin, “Soviet Power and the Status of Women,” November 1919
Workers Vanguard No. 998
16 March 2012
Bourgeois Hypocrisy on Women’s Equality
(Quote of the Week)
When the U.S. launched its occupation of Afghanistan in 2001, feminists joined government spokesmen in covering this imperialist depredation with cynical platitudes concerning Afghan women who are horribly oppressed by Islamic fundamentalist forces. Those forces were themselves recipients of U.S. money and arms in the 1980s. Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin punctured such bourgeois hypocrisy in an article marking the advances made toward women’s emancipation in the two years following the October Revolution of 1917.
In words bourgeois democracy promises equality and freedom, but in practice not a single bourgeois republic, even the more advanced, has granted women (half the human race) and men complete equality in the eyes of the law, or delivered women from dependence on and the oppression of the male.
Bourgeois democracy is the democracy of pompous phrases, solemn words, lavish promises and high-sounding slogans about freedom and equality, but in practice all this cloaks the lack of freedom and the inequality of women, the lack of freedom and the inequality for the working and exploited people.
Soviet or socialist democracy sweeps away these pompous but false words and declares ruthless war on the hypocrisy of “democrats,” landowners, capitalists and farmers with bursting bins who are piling up wealth by selling surplus grain to the starving workers at profiteering prices.
Down with this foul lie! There is no “equality,” nor can there be, of oppressed and oppressor, exploited and exploiter. There is no real “freedom,” nor can there be, so long as women are handicapped by men’s legal privileges, so long as there is no freedom for the worker from the yoke of capital, no freedom for the labouring peasant from the yoke of the capitalist, landowner and merchant.
—V.I. Lenin, “Soviet Power and the Status of Women,” November 1919
Friday, March 23, 2012
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Protest State Vendetta Against Longview ILWU and Its Allies!
Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League website.
Workers Vanguard No. 998
16 March 2012
Protest State Vendetta Against Longview ILWU and Its Allies!
In our article “Lessons of the Battle of Longview” (WV No. 996, 17 February), we addressed the fight by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 21 against an all-out union-busting attack by the giant multinational grain conglomerate EGT in Longview, Washington. Backed by forces ranging from the local police to the federal courts and the armed might of the U.S. Coast Guard, EGT’s aim was to drive ILWU Local 21 out of jobs at the port the union has worked for 80 years. The union held the line against this union-busting offensive. But the struggle is far from over. ILWU members and their supporters continue to be subjected to a relentless campaign of persecution by the courts, cops and Cowlitz County District Attorney’s office. The union itself is facing more than $300,000 in fines leveled at the behest of the National Labor Relations Board.
In the course of their battle against EGT, ILWU members and their allies engaged in the kind of militant labor struggle not seen in this country in years. In retaliation, leaders and members of ILWU Local 21 were met by a campaign of police violence, detentions and surveillance. More than 200 arrests were made, including several on felony counts. These workers are being dragged through the courts with many being pressured to plead guilty to misdemeanors or face more serious felony charges.
Even now, after a settlement has been reached between the ILWU and EGT, Cowlitz County prosecutor Susan Baur, working hand in glove with the county sheriff’s department and local police, continues to escalate the anti-union vendetta. New charges, including felonies, are being manufactured over events that occurred many months ago. This vindictive prosecution is a shot at all of labor, aimed at creating a chilling effect on trade unionists who were inspired by the power ILWU members brought to bear during their fight against EGT’s union-busting in Longview.
These longshoremen and their supporters fought with courage and determination. Now we must fight for them! The Partisan Defense Committee, a non-sectarian, class-struggle legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League, has written a protest letter to the Cowlitz County prosecutor demanding that all charges be dropped immediately. We urge unions, both nationally and internationally, as well as all opponents of the bosses’ war against the unions, to do the same.
Letters demanding that all charges be dropped and fines and other penalties rescinded should be sent to:
Susan Baur
Cowlitz County Prosecuting Attorney
Hall of Justice, Room 105
312 SW 1st Avenue
Kelso, WA 98626
Fax: (360) 414-9121
Copies should be sent to:
Governor Christine Gregoire
P.O. Box 40002
Olympia, WA 98504-0002
Fax: (360) 753-4110
Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna
1125 Washington Street SE
P.O. Box 40100
Olympia, WA 98504-0100
Fax: (360) 664-0228
Additional copies should be sent to:
President Dan Coffman, Executive Board and Members of ILWU Local 21
617 14th Avenue
Longview, WA 98632
Fax: (360) 423-0642
E-mail: ilwu21@iinet.com
President Robert McEllrath, IEB and Coast Committeemen
ILWU International
1188 Franklin Street, 4th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94109-6800
Fax: (415) 775-1302
E-mail: Info@ilwu.org
Partisan Defense Committee
P.O. Box 99, Canal Street Station
New York, NY 10013-0099
Fax: (212) 406-2210
E-mail: partisandefense@earthlink.net
Workers Vanguard No. 998
16 March 2012
Protest State Vendetta Against Longview ILWU and Its Allies!
In our article “Lessons of the Battle of Longview” (WV No. 996, 17 February), we addressed the fight by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 21 against an all-out union-busting attack by the giant multinational grain conglomerate EGT in Longview, Washington. Backed by forces ranging from the local police to the federal courts and the armed might of the U.S. Coast Guard, EGT’s aim was to drive ILWU Local 21 out of jobs at the port the union has worked for 80 years. The union held the line against this union-busting offensive. But the struggle is far from over. ILWU members and their supporters continue to be subjected to a relentless campaign of persecution by the courts, cops and Cowlitz County District Attorney’s office. The union itself is facing more than $300,000 in fines leveled at the behest of the National Labor Relations Board.
In the course of their battle against EGT, ILWU members and their allies engaged in the kind of militant labor struggle not seen in this country in years. In retaliation, leaders and members of ILWU Local 21 were met by a campaign of police violence, detentions and surveillance. More than 200 arrests were made, including several on felony counts. These workers are being dragged through the courts with many being pressured to plead guilty to misdemeanors or face more serious felony charges.
Even now, after a settlement has been reached between the ILWU and EGT, Cowlitz County prosecutor Susan Baur, working hand in glove with the county sheriff’s department and local police, continues to escalate the anti-union vendetta. New charges, including felonies, are being manufactured over events that occurred many months ago. This vindictive prosecution is a shot at all of labor, aimed at creating a chilling effect on trade unionists who were inspired by the power ILWU members brought to bear during their fight against EGT’s union-busting in Longview.
These longshoremen and their supporters fought with courage and determination. Now we must fight for them! The Partisan Defense Committee, a non-sectarian, class-struggle legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League, has written a protest letter to the Cowlitz County prosecutor demanding that all charges be dropped immediately. We urge unions, both nationally and internationally, as well as all opponents of the bosses’ war against the unions, to do the same.
Letters demanding that all charges be dropped and fines and other penalties rescinded should be sent to:
Susan Baur
Cowlitz County Prosecuting Attorney
Hall of Justice, Room 105
312 SW 1st Avenue
Kelso, WA 98626
Fax: (360) 414-9121
Copies should be sent to:
Governor Christine Gregoire
P.O. Box 40002
Olympia, WA 98504-0002
Fax: (360) 753-4110
Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna
1125 Washington Street SE
P.O. Box 40100
Olympia, WA 98504-0100
Fax: (360) 664-0228
Additional copies should be sent to:
President Dan Coffman, Executive Board and Members of ILWU Local 21
617 14th Avenue
Longview, WA 98632
Fax: (360) 423-0642
E-mail: ilwu21@iinet.com
President Robert McEllrath, IEB and Coast Committeemen
ILWU International
1188 Franklin Street, 4th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94109-6800
Fax: (415) 775-1302
E-mail: Info@ilwu.org
Partisan Defense Committee
P.O. Box 99, Canal Street Station
New York, NY 10013-0099
Fax: (212) 406-2210
E-mail: partisandefense@earthlink.net
5th ANNUAL NEW ENGLAND SOCIALIST CONFERENCE APRIL 14TH-15TH SATURDAY AND SUNDAY)-IN CAMBRIDGE
5th ANNUAL NEW ENGLAND SOCIALIST CONFERENCE APRIL 14TH-15TH SATURDAY AND SUNDAY)-IN CAMBRIDGE
The Democracy Center
45 Mt Auburn Street, Cambridge MA
Short Walk from Harvard Sq T Stop
* FEATURED EVENTS *
DISCUSSION • SHOULD THE LEFT SUPPORT DEMOCRATS?
FORUM • INTERNATIONAL CRISIS AND THE FIGHT AGAINST THE 1%
FORUM - SOCIALISM FAQS
-Labor Donated-
WORKSHOPS INCLUDE:
Dismantling Sexist Culture
Racism, Prisons and Police Brutality
Book Launch: Lessons of Wisconsin
For further details, see
Boston.SocialistAlternative.org
as the event approaches.
Call: 774-454-9060
Email: Boston@SocialistAlternative.org Visit: SocialistWorld.net or
SocialistAlternative.org
The Democracy Center
45 Mt Auburn Street, Cambridge MA
Short Walk from Harvard Sq T Stop
* FEATURED EVENTS *
DISCUSSION • SHOULD THE LEFT SUPPORT DEMOCRATS?
FORUM • INTERNATIONAL CRISIS AND THE FIGHT AGAINST THE 1%
FORUM - SOCIALISM FAQS
-Labor Donated-
WORKSHOPS INCLUDE:
Dismantling Sexist Culture
Racism, Prisons and Police Brutality
Book Launch: Lessons of Wisconsin
For further details, see
Boston.SocialistAlternative.org
as the event approaches.
Call: 774-454-9060
Email: Boston@SocialistAlternative.org Visit: SocialistWorld.net or
SocialistAlternative.org
Friday, March 16, 2012
5th ANNUAL NEW ENGLAND SOCIALIST CONFERENCE APRIL 14TH-15TH (SATURDAY AND SUNDAY)-IN CAMBRIDGE
5th ANNUAL NEW ENGLAND SOCIALIST CONFERENCE APRIL 14TH-15TH (SATURDAY AND SUNDAY)-IN CAMBRIDGE
The Democracy Center
45 Mt Auburn Street, Cambridge MA
Short Walk from Harvard Sq T Stop
* FEATURED EVENTS *
DISCUSSION • SHOULD THE LEFT SUPPORT DEMOCRATS?
FORUM • INTERNATIONAL CRISIS AND THE FIGHT AGAINST THE 1%
FORUM - SOCIALISM FAQS
-Labor Donated-
WORKSHOPS INCLUDE:
Dismantling Sexist Culture
Racism, Prisons and Police Brutality
Book Launch: Lessons of Wisconsin
For further details, see
Boston.SocialistAlternative.org
as the event approaches.
Call: 774-454-9060
Email: Boston@SocialistAlternative.org Visit: SocialistWorld.net or
SocialistAlternative.org
The Democracy Center
45 Mt Auburn Street, Cambridge MA
Short Walk from Harvard Sq T Stop
* FEATURED EVENTS *
DISCUSSION • SHOULD THE LEFT SUPPORT DEMOCRATS?
FORUM • INTERNATIONAL CRISIS AND THE FIGHT AGAINST THE 1%
FORUM - SOCIALISM FAQS
-Labor Donated-
WORKSHOPS INCLUDE:
Dismantling Sexist Culture
Racism, Prisons and Police Brutality
Book Launch: Lessons of Wisconsin
For further details, see
Boston.SocialistAlternative.org
as the event approaches.
Call: 774-454-9060
Email: Boston@SocialistAlternative.org Visit: SocialistWorld.net or
SocialistAlternative.org
Saturday, March 03, 2012
From The Anti- "Citizens United" Front- The Struggle Against Corporate Personhood- A Call To Class War?
Markin comment:
As I have noted on other occasions many times I will place material in this space that I do not agree with. I will place it here as a matter of historical record or to give a more complete picture of the contemporary liberal-leftist scene "for those who come after". Sometimes I will comment, as here, sometimes not. I feel compelled to comment here because if
those who support this amendment business were really serious about social change rather than "band-aids" they would see that to eliminate corporate personhood would necessitate the need to run to the barricades of revolution. I will stick with my fuddie-duddie old fight for our communist future-thank you. We will get there faster.
***********
PLEDGE TO AMEND
MAKING CORPORATE PERSONHOOD A CAMPAIGN ISSUE
A PROJECT OF TAKE BACK AMERICA FOR THE PEOPLE AND ABOLISH CORPORATE PERSONHOOD NOW
httpi//www^ojdjersfprpeaceinternational.org/
http://www.abolishcorporatepersonhoodnow.org/
To make politicians accountable, we propose the following:
Ask all members of Congress and congressional candidates to pledge their support for constitutional amendment to abolish all corporate "rights" created under the doctrine of corporate personhood.
HERE IS HOW YOU CAN HELP:
Approach your members of Congress in public and private to ask if
they will take the pledge.
Circulate paper petitions calling on them to take the pledge. Let
them know they will have your support.
Help educate politicians and voters on the difference between an
amendment to strip corporations of "rights" that should belong
exclusively to We the People and amendments that would only
give Congress the power to regulate what should be illegal:
Corporate campaign donations.
Work with local groups to help people understand that all
progress toward social justice, environmental responsibility and
general prosperity depend on their working to end corporate
influence over the US government.
Pass resolutions in your political, social, church or other groups calling on your members of Congress to take the pledge.
If you receive a written pledge to amend, please notify us at staqqenborq4senate@hotmail.com. As nonprofit organizations, neither TBA nor ACPN endorse or support any candidates.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Q: Wouldn't any amendment be an improvement?
A: NO! Giving Congress the power to regulate will NOT lead them to cut off the source of their campaign funding. Worse, it will implicitly enshrine corporate personhood in the constitution by acknowledging the "right" of corporations to contribute to campaigns.
Q: What other "rights" would be eliminated?
A: Corporations could not claim the right to avoid inspections by the FDA, EPA or other agencies charged with protecting the public, among other things. They would still have the privilege of limited liability.
Q: Why should we expect this amendment to pass?
A: By making support for a proper amendment a campaign issue, we can force incumbents and candidates to tell us whether they are working for us or corporations. If they don't support the amendment we can vote for candidates who will.
Q: Isn't campaign finance reform enough?
A: The Supreme Court gutted Arizona's model public financing law using the same twisted "free speech" argument that Citizens United was decided upon.
The only way to effectively introduce campaign finance reform is to abolish corporate personhood. The same amendment can establish the basis for public financing by abolishing all forms of bundled money and placing restrictions on individual donors.
As I have noted on other occasions many times I will place material in this space that I do not agree with. I will place it here as a matter of historical record or to give a more complete picture of the contemporary liberal-leftist scene "for those who come after". Sometimes I will comment, as here, sometimes not. I feel compelled to comment here because if
those who support this amendment business were really serious about social change rather than "band-aids" they would see that to eliminate corporate personhood would necessitate the need to run to the barricades of revolution. I will stick with my fuddie-duddie old fight for our communist future-thank you. We will get there faster.
***********
PLEDGE TO AMEND
MAKING CORPORATE PERSONHOOD A CAMPAIGN ISSUE
A PROJECT OF TAKE BACK AMERICA FOR THE PEOPLE AND ABOLISH CORPORATE PERSONHOOD NOW
httpi//www^ojdjersfprpeaceinternational.org/
http://www.abolishcorporatepersonhoodnow.org/
To make politicians accountable, we propose the following:
Ask all members of Congress and congressional candidates to pledge their support for constitutional amendment to abolish all corporate "rights" created under the doctrine of corporate personhood.
HERE IS HOW YOU CAN HELP:
Approach your members of Congress in public and private to ask if
they will take the pledge.
Circulate paper petitions calling on them to take the pledge. Let
them know they will have your support.
Help educate politicians and voters on the difference between an
amendment to strip corporations of "rights" that should belong
exclusively to We the People and amendments that would only
give Congress the power to regulate what should be illegal:
Corporate campaign donations.
Work with local groups to help people understand that all
progress toward social justice, environmental responsibility and
general prosperity depend on their working to end corporate
influence over the US government.
Pass resolutions in your political, social, church or other groups calling on your members of Congress to take the pledge.
If you receive a written pledge to amend, please notify us at staqqenborq4senate@hotmail.com. As nonprofit organizations, neither TBA nor ACPN endorse or support any candidates.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Q: Wouldn't any amendment be an improvement?
A: NO! Giving Congress the power to regulate will NOT lead them to cut off the source of their campaign funding. Worse, it will implicitly enshrine corporate personhood in the constitution by acknowledging the "right" of corporations to contribute to campaigns.
Q: What other "rights" would be eliminated?
A: Corporations could not claim the right to avoid inspections by the FDA, EPA or other agencies charged with protecting the public, among other things. They would still have the privilege of limited liability.
Q: Why should we expect this amendment to pass?
A: By making support for a proper amendment a campaign issue, we can force incumbents and candidates to tell us whether they are working for us or corporations. If they don't support the amendment we can vote for candidates who will.
Q: Isn't campaign finance reform enough?
A: The Supreme Court gutted Arizona's model public financing law using the same twisted "free speech" argument that Citizens United was decided upon.
The only way to effectively introduce campaign finance reform is to abolish corporate personhood. The same amendment can establish the basis for public financing by abolishing all forms of bundled money and placing restrictions on individual donors.
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Victory To The Greek Workers- Build Workers Councils Now-Fight For A Workers Government!
Click on the headline to link to an International Marxist Tendency website analysis of the pre-revolutionary situation in Greece.
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
*Avenge The Communist Defeat In The Greek Civil War Of 1946-49- The Lessons Of History
Markin comment:
Politics is sometimes a strange business. We all recognize that history does not exactly repeat itself. And it is also true that humankind makes its own history- although not always to its liking. Some things though, like the communist defeat in the Greek Civil War, despite our disagreements with its Stalinist leadership, were definitely not to our liking, but may be capable of reversal. Or at least of a modicum of historical justice. That is the backdrop of today's fight by the working class in the streets of Greece. May they win, and win big.
Avenge the lost in the 1946-49 civil war!
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
*Avenge The Communist Defeat In The Greek Civil War Of 1946-49- The Lessons Of History
Markin comment:
Politics is sometimes a strange business. We all recognize that history does not exactly repeat itself. And it is also true that humankind makes its own history- although not always to its liking. Some things though, like the communist defeat in the Greek Civil War, despite our disagreements with its Stalinist leadership, were definitely not to our liking, but may be capable of reversal. Or at least of a modicum of historical justice. That is the backdrop of today's fight by the working class in the streets of Greece. May they win, and win big.
Avenge the lost in the 1946-49 civil war!
Tuesday, February 07, 2012
A Call To Action In The Greater Boston Area-Say NO to MBTA Fare Hikes and Service Cuts!
A Call To Action In The Greater Boston Area-Say NO to MBTA Fare Hikes and Service Cuts!
No MBTA Layoffs! Help Stop T Fare Hikes and Service Cuts
Riders, Unions, Community Groups:Build a Mass Movement to
Stop Attacks on our Living Standards!
Tax the Corporations, Private Universities and the super-Rich for more revenue to Expand Service!
The MBTA board states that 30% of its yearly budget goes to debt servicing. This debt was created by Massachusetts during the Big Dig when the MBTA was legally mandated to upgrade stations and was given no Big Dig money to do it, instead being forced into massive debt.
Then in 2000, the State Legislature stopped funding the MBTA directly from the State budget, instead relying on fare increases and a portion of the sales tax - both are taxes on the working people who use public transit!
Now the MBTA board wants to eliminate bus routes, eliminate weekend service for the commuter rail, Mattapan line and E-line, eliminate The Ride (a service that many elderly and disabled people need to go about their daily routine), make the subway more dangerous by going to one conductor per train instead of two, and, in this terrible economy, eliminate over 500 good union jobs!
These cuts will hurt all working people. We should not be made to pay for the greed and short-sightedness of the corporate-dominated MBTA Board and State Legislature. Corporations and private universities could not exist without public transportation bringing their workforces to and from work on time every day, including weekends. Many corporations already pay nothing in taxes. The big universities, including Harvard, the richest university in the world, are "non-profits" and pay no taxes. The universities, who could not operate without T service, should drastically increase "in kind" payments in lieu of taxes. This would create added revenue that could expand T service and lower fares.
In order to defeat the fare hikes and service cuts, we will need to build a movement that reaches out into all affected communities. We need to do "Mic Checks" on morning and evening commutes - on the subway, commuter rail, and buses. We should engage with the MBTA unions and ask them to publicly support their jobs, wages, health care and pensions in solidarity with T riders and other unions. We need more good jobs for our communities. Union members who rely on the T to get to work should bring this movement to their union meetings and co-workers because T fare hike and service cuts mean a cut in disposable income, and hurt all union members. We should reach out to elderly communities who would have to pay the largest percentage fare increases.
Socialist Alternative calls for the building of an organized mass day of non-payment which would put massive pressure on the unelected MBTA board and Beacon Hill to consider other options such as use of the State's "Rainy Day Fund," taxing the corporations and private universities, bringing T funding back into the State budget and other alternatives that would not further erode the T and our living standards.
******
We Say:
• No Fare Hike, No Service Cuts, No
MBTA Layoffs!
• For an extension of MBTA hours and
services to create more union, living
wage jobs!
• Fund public transportation by taxing the
big corporations and rich private
universities.-
• Fund the contracts of the union MBTA
workers, our communities need more
jobs, not less.
• Organize mass demonstrations and
occupations of our public transit as part
of a movement that can stop the fare-
hikes.
• Set elections for the MBTA board within
a month. All positions should be elected
and subject to recall.
• Repeal the "Forward Funding'' law!
Bring back direct funding for the MBTA
by putting T spending back into the
regular State budget as it was before
2000.
Contact: boston.@SocialistAltcrnattve.org 774-454-9060 - "Boston Socialist Alternative" on Facebook
Labor Donated
No MBTA Layoffs! Help Stop T Fare Hikes and Service Cuts
Riders, Unions, Community Groups:Build a Mass Movement to
Stop Attacks on our Living Standards!
Tax the Corporations, Private Universities and the super-Rich for more revenue to Expand Service!
The MBTA board states that 30% of its yearly budget goes to debt servicing. This debt was created by Massachusetts during the Big Dig when the MBTA was legally mandated to upgrade stations and was given no Big Dig money to do it, instead being forced into massive debt.
Then in 2000, the State Legislature stopped funding the MBTA directly from the State budget, instead relying on fare increases and a portion of the sales tax - both are taxes on the working people who use public transit!
Now the MBTA board wants to eliminate bus routes, eliminate weekend service for the commuter rail, Mattapan line and E-line, eliminate The Ride (a service that many elderly and disabled people need to go about their daily routine), make the subway more dangerous by going to one conductor per train instead of two, and, in this terrible economy, eliminate over 500 good union jobs!
These cuts will hurt all working people. We should not be made to pay for the greed and short-sightedness of the corporate-dominated MBTA Board and State Legislature. Corporations and private universities could not exist without public transportation bringing their workforces to and from work on time every day, including weekends. Many corporations already pay nothing in taxes. The big universities, including Harvard, the richest university in the world, are "non-profits" and pay no taxes. The universities, who could not operate without T service, should drastically increase "in kind" payments in lieu of taxes. This would create added revenue that could expand T service and lower fares.
In order to defeat the fare hikes and service cuts, we will need to build a movement that reaches out into all affected communities. We need to do "Mic Checks" on morning and evening commutes - on the subway, commuter rail, and buses. We should engage with the MBTA unions and ask them to publicly support their jobs, wages, health care and pensions in solidarity with T riders and other unions. We need more good jobs for our communities. Union members who rely on the T to get to work should bring this movement to their union meetings and co-workers because T fare hike and service cuts mean a cut in disposable income, and hurt all union members. We should reach out to elderly communities who would have to pay the largest percentage fare increases.
Socialist Alternative calls for the building of an organized mass day of non-payment which would put massive pressure on the unelected MBTA board and Beacon Hill to consider other options such as use of the State's "Rainy Day Fund," taxing the corporations and private universities, bringing T funding back into the State budget and other alternatives that would not further erode the T and our living standards.
******
We Say:
• No Fare Hike, No Service Cuts, No
MBTA Layoffs!
• For an extension of MBTA hours and
services to create more union, living
wage jobs!
• Fund public transportation by taxing the
big corporations and rich private
universities.-
• Fund the contracts of the union MBTA
workers, our communities need more
jobs, not less.
• Organize mass demonstrations and
occupations of our public transit as part
of a movement that can stop the fare-
hikes.
• Set elections for the MBTA board within
a month. All positions should be elected
and subject to recall.
• Repeal the "Forward Funding'' law!
Bring back direct funding for the MBTA
by putting T spending back into the
regular State budget as it was before
2000.
Contact: boston.@SocialistAltcrnattve.org 774-454-9060 - "Boston Socialist Alternative" on Facebook
Labor Donated
A Call To Action-1st Mass Occupy General Assembly-Occupy Groups in the Greater Boston Area-UNITE!
A Call To Action-1st Mass Occupy General Assembly-Occupy Groups in the Greater Boston Area-UNITE!
When: Saturday, February 18, 2012 Time: 12:00pm until 4:00pm
Where: Boston Teachers Union Hall, 180 Mount Vernon Street, Dorchester, Massachusetts
Child Care will be provided.
Fight MBTA Fare Hikes and Cuts!
Other proposals on the proposed agenda include:
• International Women's Day action
• March 1st Solidarity actions for public education
• May 1st General strike actions
• Time will be allotted for all proposals.
Facebook link: htrps://www.facebook.com/events/177231922382590/
When: Saturday, February 18, 2012 Time: 12:00pm until 4:00pm
Where: Boston Teachers Union Hall, 180 Mount Vernon Street, Dorchester, Massachusetts
Child Care will be provided.
Fight MBTA Fare Hikes and Cuts!
Other proposals on the proposed agenda include:
• International Women's Day action
• March 1st Solidarity actions for public education
• May 1st General strike actions
• Time will be allotted for all proposals.
Facebook link: htrps://www.facebook.com/events/177231922382590/
Thursday, January 26, 2012
From The Pages Of The Socialist Alternative Press-Answering Common Questions - Socialism FAQs
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!
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!
Monday, January 23, 2012
From The “West Coast Port Shutdown” Website-This Is Class War, We Say No More!- Support The Late January EGT Ship Blockade Action In Defense Of The Longview, Washington Longshoremen!
Click on the headline to link to the West Coast Port Shutdown website.
Markin comment:
We know that we are only at the very start of an upsurge in the labor movement as witness the stellar exemplary actions by the West Coast activists on December 12, 2011. As I have pointed out in remarks previously made elsewhere as part of the Boston solidarity rally with the West Coast Port Shutdown this is the way forward as we struggle against the ruling class for a very different, more equitable society. Not everything went as well, or as well-attended, as expected including at our rally in solidarity in Boston but we are still exhibiting growing pains in the post-Occupy encampment era which will get sorted out in the future.
******
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
*******
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was this high in the American labor force. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work. Work that would be divided through local representative workers’ councils which would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work. Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing as implement “30 for 40” so that it will, in the end, be necessary to fight for and win a workers government to implement this demand.
Organize the unorganized is a demand that cries out for solution today now that the organized sectors of the labor movement, both public and private, in America are at historic lows, just over ten percent of the workforce. Part of the task is to reorganize some of the old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. The other sector that desperately need to be organized is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the service industries, hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that have become a dominant aspect of the American economy.
Organize the South-this low wage area, this consciously low-wage area, where many industries land before heading off-shore to even lower wage places cries out for organizing, especially among black and Hispanic workers who form the bulk of this industrial workforce. A corollary to organizing the South is obviously to organize internationally to keep the “race to the bottom” from continually occurring short of being resolved in favor of an international commonwealth of workers’ governments. Nobody said it was going to be easy.
Organize Wal-Mart- millions of workers, thousands of trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A victory here would be the springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement just as auto and steel lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant. Well, that’s a thought.
Defend the right of public and private workers to unionize. Simple-No more Wisconsins, no more attacks on collective bargaining the hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, or bourgeois recall elections either. Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.
Guest Commentary
From The Transitional Program Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International In 1938Sliding Scale of Wages and Sliding Scale of Hours
Under the conditions of disintegrating capitalism, the masses continue to live the meagerized life of the oppressed, threatened now more than at any other time with the danger of being cast into the pit of pauperism. They must defend their mouthful of bread, if they cannot increase or better it. There is neither the need nor the opportunity to enumerate here those separate, partial demands which time and again arise on the basis of concrete circumstances – national, local, trade union. But two basic economic afflictions, in which is summarized the increasing absurdity of the capitalist system, that is, unemployment and high prices, demand generalized slogans and methods of struggle.
The Fourth International declares uncompromising war on the politics of the capitalists which, to a considerable degree, like the politics of their agents, the reformists, aims to place the whole burden of militarism, the crisis, the disorganization of the monetary system and all other scourges stemming from capitalism’s death agony upon the backs of the toilers. The Fourth International demands employment and decent living conditions for all.
Neither monetary inflation nor stabilization can serve as slogans for the proletariat because these are but two ends of the same stick. Against a bounding rise in prices, which with the approach of war will assume an ever more unbridled character, one can fight only under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages. This means that collective agreements should assure an automatic rise in wages in relation to the increase in price of consumer goods.
Under the menace of its own disintegration, the proletariat cannot permit the transformation of an increasing section of the workers into chronically unemployed paupers, living off the slops of a crumbling society. The right to employment is the only serious right left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is being shorn from him at every step. Against unemployment, “structural” as well as “conjunctural,” the time is ripe to advance along with the slogan of public works, the slogan of a sliding scale of working hours. Trade unions and other mass organizations should bind the workers and the unemployed together in the solidarity of mutual responsibility. On this basis all the work on hand would then be divided among all existing workers in accordance with how the extent of the working week is defined. The average wage of every worker remains the same as it was under the old working week. Wages, under a strictly guaranteed minimum, would follow the movement of prices. It is impossible to accept any other program for the present catastrophic period.
Property owners and their lawyers will prove the “unrealizability” of these demands. Smaller, especially ruined capitalists, in addition will refer to their account ledgers. The workers categorically denounce such conclusions and references. The question is not one of a “normal” collision between opposing material interests. The question is one of guarding the proletariat from decay, demoralization and ruin. The question is one of life or death of the only creative and progressive class, and by that token of the future of mankind. If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. “Realizability” or “unrealizability” is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.
* Defend the independence of the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. In 2008 labor, organized labor, spent around 450 million dollars trying to elect Barack Obama and other Democrats (mainly). The results speak for themselves. For those bogus efforts the labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea then was (and is, as we come up to another presidential election cycle) that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of labor.” The past period of cuts-backs, cut-in-the back give backs should put paid to that notion. Although anyone who is politically savvy at all knows that is not true, not true for the labor skates at the top of the movement.
The hard reality is that the labor skates, not used to any form of class struggle or any kind of struggle, know no other way than class-collaboration, arbitration, courts, and every other way to avoid the appearance of strife, strife in defense of the bosses’ profits. The most egregious recent example- the return of the Verizon workers to work after two weeks last summer when they had the company on the run and the subsequent announcement by the company of record profits. That sellout strategy may have worked for the bureaucrats, or rather their “fathers” for a time back in the 1950s “golden age” of labor, but now we are in a very hard and open class war. The rank and file must demand an end to using their precious dues payments period for bourgeois candidates all of whom have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor from Obama on down.
This does not mean not using union dues for political purposes though. On the contrary we need to use them now more than ever in the class battles ahead. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized, organizing the South, organizing Wal-Mart, and other pro-labor causes. Think, for example, of the dough spent on the successful November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio. That type of activity is where labor’s money and other resources should go.
*End the endless wars!- As the so-called draw-down of American and Allied troops in Iraq reaches it final stages, the draw down of non-mercenary forces anyway, we must recognize that we anti-warriors failed, and failed rather spectacularly, to affect that withdrawal after a promising start to our opposition in late 2002 and early 2003 (and a little in 2006). As the endless American-led wars (even if behind the scenes, as in Libya) continue we had better straighten out our anti-war, anti-imperialist front quickly if we are to have any effect on the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan!
U.S. Hands Off Iran!- American (and world) imperialists are ratcheting up their propaganda war (right now) and increased economic sanctions that are a prelude to war well before the dust has settled on the now unsettled situation in Iraq and well before they have even sniffed at an Afghan withdrawal of any import. We will hold our noses, as we did with the Saddam leadership in Iraq and on other occasions, and call for the defense of Iran against the American imperial monster. A victory for the Americans (and their junior partner, Israel) in Iran is not in the interests of the international working class. Especially here in the “belly of the beast” we are duty-bound to call not just for non-intervention but for defense of Iran. We will, believe me we will, deal with the mullahs, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Islamic fundamentalist in our own way in our own time.
U.S. Hands Off The World!- With the number of “hot spots” that the American imperialists, or one or another of their junior allies, have their hands on in this wicked old world this generic slogan would seem to fill the bill.
Down With The War Budget! Not One Penny, Not One Person For The Wars! Honor World War I German Social-Democratic Party MP, Karl Liebknecht, who did just that. The litmus test for every political candidate must be first opposition to the war budgets (let’s see, right now winding up Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran preparations, China preparations, etc. you get my drift). Then that big leap. The whole damn imperialist military budget. Again, no one said it would be simple. Revolution may be easier that depriving the imperialists of their military money. Well….okay.
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Free Quality Healthcare For All! This would be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The health and welfare of any society’s citizenry is the simple glue that holds that society together. It is no accident that one of the prime concerns of workers states like Cuba, whatever their other political problems, has been to place health care and education front and center and to provide to the best of their capacity for free, quality healthcare and education for all. Even the hide-bound social-democratic-run capitalist governments of Europe have, until recently anyway, placed the “welfare state” protections central to their programs.
Free, quality higher education for all! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! One Hundred, Two Hundred, Many Harvards!
This would again be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The struggle to increase the educational level of a society’s citizenry is another part of the simple glue that holds that society together. Today higher education is being placed out of reach for many working-class and minority families. Hell, it is getting tough for the middle class as well.
Moreover the whole higher educational system is increasing skewed toward those who have better formal preparation and family lives leaving many deserving students in the wilderness. Take the resources of the private institutions and spread them around, throw in hundreds of billions from the government (take from the military budget and the bank bail-out money), get rid of the top heavy and useless college administration apparatuses, mix it up, and let students, teachers, and campus workers run the thing through councils on a democratic basis.
Forgive student debt! The latest reports indicate that college student debt is something like a trillion dollars, give or take a few billion but who is counting. The price of tuition and expenses has gone up dramatically while services have not kept pace. What has happened is that the future highly educated workforce that a modern society, and certainly a socialist society, desperately needs is going to be cast in some form of indentured servitude to the banks or other lending agencies for much of their young working lives. Let the banks take a “hit” for a change!
Stop housing foreclosures now! Hey, everybody, everywhere in the world not just in America should have a safe, clean roof over their heads. Hell, even a single family home that is part of the “American dream,” if that is what they want. We didn’t make the housing crisis in America (or elsewhere, like in Ireland, where the bubble has also burst). The banks did. Their predatory lending practices and slip-shot application processes were out of control. Let them take the “hit” here as well.
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Karl Marx was right way back in the 19th century on his labor theory of value, the workers do produce the social surplus appropriated by the capitalists. Capitalism tends to immiserate the mass of society for the few. Most importantly capitalism, a system that at one time was historically progressive in the fight against feudalism and other ancient forms of production, has turned into its opposite and now is a fetter on production. The current multiple crises spawned by this system show there is no way forward, except that unless we push them out, push them out fast, they will muddle through, again.
Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Socialism is the only serious answer to the human crisis we face economically, socially, culturally and politically. This socialist system is the only one calculated to take one of the great tragedies of life, the struggle for daily survival in a world that we did not create, and replace it with more co-operative human endeavors.
Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. None of the nice things mentioned above can be accomplished without as serious struggle for political power. We need to struggle for an independent working-class-centered political party that we can call our own and where our leaders act as “tribunes of the people” not hacks. The creation of that workers party, however, will get us nowhere unless it fights for a workers government to begin the transition to the next level of human progress on a world-wide scale.
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
Guest Commentary from the IWW (Industrial Workers Of The World, Wobblies) website http://www.iww.org/en/culture/official/preamble.shtml
Preamble to the IWW Constitution (1905)
Posted Sun, 05/01/2005 - 8:34am by IWW.org Editor
The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.
Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.
We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.
These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.
Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."
It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.
Markin comment:
We know that we are only at the very start of an upsurge in the labor movement as witness the stellar exemplary actions by the West Coast activists on December 12, 2011. As I have pointed out in remarks previously made elsewhere as part of the Boston solidarity rally with the West Coast Port Shutdown this is the way forward as we struggle against the ruling class for a very different, more equitable society. Not everything went as well, or as well-attended, as expected including at our rally in solidarity in Boston but we are still exhibiting growing pains in the post-Occupy encampment era which will get sorted out in the future.
******
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
*******
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was this high in the American labor force. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work. Work that would be divided through local representative workers’ councils which would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work. Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing as implement “30 for 40” so that it will, in the end, be necessary to fight for and win a workers government to implement this demand.
Organize the unorganized is a demand that cries out for solution today now that the organized sectors of the labor movement, both public and private, in America are at historic lows, just over ten percent of the workforce. Part of the task is to reorganize some of the old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. The other sector that desperately need to be organized is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the service industries, hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that have become a dominant aspect of the American economy.
Organize the South-this low wage area, this consciously low-wage area, where many industries land before heading off-shore to even lower wage places cries out for organizing, especially among black and Hispanic workers who form the bulk of this industrial workforce. A corollary to organizing the South is obviously to organize internationally to keep the “race to the bottom” from continually occurring short of being resolved in favor of an international commonwealth of workers’ governments. Nobody said it was going to be easy.
Organize Wal-Mart- millions of workers, thousands of trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A victory here would be the springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement just as auto and steel lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant. Well, that’s a thought.
Defend the right of public and private workers to unionize. Simple-No more Wisconsins, no more attacks on collective bargaining the hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, or bourgeois recall elections either. Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.
Guest Commentary
From The Transitional Program Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International In 1938Sliding Scale of Wages and Sliding Scale of Hours
Under the conditions of disintegrating capitalism, the masses continue to live the meagerized life of the oppressed, threatened now more than at any other time with the danger of being cast into the pit of pauperism. They must defend their mouthful of bread, if they cannot increase or better it. There is neither the need nor the opportunity to enumerate here those separate, partial demands which time and again arise on the basis of concrete circumstances – national, local, trade union. But two basic economic afflictions, in which is summarized the increasing absurdity of the capitalist system, that is, unemployment and high prices, demand generalized slogans and methods of struggle.
The Fourth International declares uncompromising war on the politics of the capitalists which, to a considerable degree, like the politics of their agents, the reformists, aims to place the whole burden of militarism, the crisis, the disorganization of the monetary system and all other scourges stemming from capitalism’s death agony upon the backs of the toilers. The Fourth International demands employment and decent living conditions for all.
Neither monetary inflation nor stabilization can serve as slogans for the proletariat because these are but two ends of the same stick. Against a bounding rise in prices, which with the approach of war will assume an ever more unbridled character, one can fight only under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages. This means that collective agreements should assure an automatic rise in wages in relation to the increase in price of consumer goods.
Under the menace of its own disintegration, the proletariat cannot permit the transformation of an increasing section of the workers into chronically unemployed paupers, living off the slops of a crumbling society. The right to employment is the only serious right left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is being shorn from him at every step. Against unemployment, “structural” as well as “conjunctural,” the time is ripe to advance along with the slogan of public works, the slogan of a sliding scale of working hours. Trade unions and other mass organizations should bind the workers and the unemployed together in the solidarity of mutual responsibility. On this basis all the work on hand would then be divided among all existing workers in accordance with how the extent of the working week is defined. The average wage of every worker remains the same as it was under the old working week. Wages, under a strictly guaranteed minimum, would follow the movement of prices. It is impossible to accept any other program for the present catastrophic period.
Property owners and their lawyers will prove the “unrealizability” of these demands. Smaller, especially ruined capitalists, in addition will refer to their account ledgers. The workers categorically denounce such conclusions and references. The question is not one of a “normal” collision between opposing material interests. The question is one of guarding the proletariat from decay, demoralization and ruin. The question is one of life or death of the only creative and progressive class, and by that token of the future of mankind. If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. “Realizability” or “unrealizability” is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.
* Defend the independence of the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. In 2008 labor, organized labor, spent around 450 million dollars trying to elect Barack Obama and other Democrats (mainly). The results speak for themselves. For those bogus efforts the labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea then was (and is, as we come up to another presidential election cycle) that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of labor.” The past period of cuts-backs, cut-in-the back give backs should put paid to that notion. Although anyone who is politically savvy at all knows that is not true, not true for the labor skates at the top of the movement.
The hard reality is that the labor skates, not used to any form of class struggle or any kind of struggle, know no other way than class-collaboration, arbitration, courts, and every other way to avoid the appearance of strife, strife in defense of the bosses’ profits. The most egregious recent example- the return of the Verizon workers to work after two weeks last summer when they had the company on the run and the subsequent announcement by the company of record profits. That sellout strategy may have worked for the bureaucrats, or rather their “fathers” for a time back in the 1950s “golden age” of labor, but now we are in a very hard and open class war. The rank and file must demand an end to using their precious dues payments period for bourgeois candidates all of whom have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor from Obama on down.
This does not mean not using union dues for political purposes though. On the contrary we need to use them now more than ever in the class battles ahead. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized, organizing the South, organizing Wal-Mart, and other pro-labor causes. Think, for example, of the dough spent on the successful November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio. That type of activity is where labor’s money and other resources should go.
*End the endless wars!- As the so-called draw-down of American and Allied troops in Iraq reaches it final stages, the draw down of non-mercenary forces anyway, we must recognize that we anti-warriors failed, and failed rather spectacularly, to affect that withdrawal after a promising start to our opposition in late 2002 and early 2003 (and a little in 2006). As the endless American-led wars (even if behind the scenes, as in Libya) continue we had better straighten out our anti-war, anti-imperialist front quickly if we are to have any effect on the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan!
U.S. Hands Off Iran!- American (and world) imperialists are ratcheting up their propaganda war (right now) and increased economic sanctions that are a prelude to war well before the dust has settled on the now unsettled situation in Iraq and well before they have even sniffed at an Afghan withdrawal of any import. We will hold our noses, as we did with the Saddam leadership in Iraq and on other occasions, and call for the defense of Iran against the American imperial monster. A victory for the Americans (and their junior partner, Israel) in Iran is not in the interests of the international working class. Especially here in the “belly of the beast” we are duty-bound to call not just for non-intervention but for defense of Iran. We will, believe me we will, deal with the mullahs, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Islamic fundamentalist in our own way in our own time.
U.S. Hands Off The World!- With the number of “hot spots” that the American imperialists, or one or another of their junior allies, have their hands on in this wicked old world this generic slogan would seem to fill the bill.
Down With The War Budget! Not One Penny, Not One Person For The Wars! Honor World War I German Social-Democratic Party MP, Karl Liebknecht, who did just that. The litmus test for every political candidate must be first opposition to the war budgets (let’s see, right now winding up Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran preparations, China preparations, etc. you get my drift). Then that big leap. The whole damn imperialist military budget. Again, no one said it would be simple. Revolution may be easier that depriving the imperialists of their military money. Well….okay.
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Free Quality Healthcare For All! This would be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The health and welfare of any society’s citizenry is the simple glue that holds that society together. It is no accident that one of the prime concerns of workers states like Cuba, whatever their other political problems, has been to place health care and education front and center and to provide to the best of their capacity for free, quality healthcare and education for all. Even the hide-bound social-democratic-run capitalist governments of Europe have, until recently anyway, placed the “welfare state” protections central to their programs.
Free, quality higher education for all! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! One Hundred, Two Hundred, Many Harvards!
This would again be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The struggle to increase the educational level of a society’s citizenry is another part of the simple glue that holds that society together. Today higher education is being placed out of reach for many working-class and minority families. Hell, it is getting tough for the middle class as well.
Moreover the whole higher educational system is increasing skewed toward those who have better formal preparation and family lives leaving many deserving students in the wilderness. Take the resources of the private institutions and spread them around, throw in hundreds of billions from the government (take from the military budget and the bank bail-out money), get rid of the top heavy and useless college administration apparatuses, mix it up, and let students, teachers, and campus workers run the thing through councils on a democratic basis.
Forgive student debt! The latest reports indicate that college student debt is something like a trillion dollars, give or take a few billion but who is counting. The price of tuition and expenses has gone up dramatically while services have not kept pace. What has happened is that the future highly educated workforce that a modern society, and certainly a socialist society, desperately needs is going to be cast in some form of indentured servitude to the banks or other lending agencies for much of their young working lives. Let the banks take a “hit” for a change!
Stop housing foreclosures now! Hey, everybody, everywhere in the world not just in America should have a safe, clean roof over their heads. Hell, even a single family home that is part of the “American dream,” if that is what they want. We didn’t make the housing crisis in America (or elsewhere, like in Ireland, where the bubble has also burst). The banks did. Their predatory lending practices and slip-shot application processes were out of control. Let them take the “hit” here as well.
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Karl Marx was right way back in the 19th century on his labor theory of value, the workers do produce the social surplus appropriated by the capitalists. Capitalism tends to immiserate the mass of society for the few. Most importantly capitalism, a system that at one time was historically progressive in the fight against feudalism and other ancient forms of production, has turned into its opposite and now is a fetter on production. The current multiple crises spawned by this system show there is no way forward, except that unless we push them out, push them out fast, they will muddle through, again.
Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Socialism is the only serious answer to the human crisis we face economically, socially, culturally and politically. This socialist system is the only one calculated to take one of the great tragedies of life, the struggle for daily survival in a world that we did not create, and replace it with more co-operative human endeavors.
Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. None of the nice things mentioned above can be accomplished without as serious struggle for political power. We need to struggle for an independent working-class-centered political party that we can call our own and where our leaders act as “tribunes of the people” not hacks. The creation of that workers party, however, will get us nowhere unless it fights for a workers government to begin the transition to the next level of human progress on a world-wide scale.
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
Guest Commentary from the IWW (Industrial Workers Of The World, Wobblies) website http://www.iww.org/en/culture/official/preamble.shtml
Preamble to the IWW Constitution (1905)
Posted Sun, 05/01/2005 - 8:34am by IWW.org Editor
The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.
Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.
We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.
These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.
Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."
It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.
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