*The Inside Story of the Paris Commune of 1871- From The Pen Of Prosper Olivier Lissagaray

Click on title to link to an online "History Of The Paris Commune".

Book Review

March 18th is the 137th Anniversary of the Paris Commune. All honor to the men and women who fought to the death to defend this first beacon of working class revolution.

History of the Paris Commune, Prosper Olivier Lissagaray, translated by Eleanor Marx, Black and Red Press, St. Petersburg, Florida, 2007

When one studies the history of the Paris Commune of 1871 one learns something new from it even though from the perspective of revolutionary strategy the Communards made virtually every mistake in the book. This book by a participant and survivor of the Commune has historically been the starting point for any pro-Commune analysis. The original English translation by Eleanor Marx, daughter of Karl Marx, has given the imprimatur of the Marx family to that view.

Through a close study of the Paris Commune one learn its lessons and measure it against the experience acquired by later revolutionary struggles and above all by later revolutions, not only the successful Russian Revolution of October 1917 but the failed German, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Chinese and Spanish revolutions in the immediate aftermath of World War I. More contemporaneously we have the experiences of the partial victories of the later Chinese, Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions.

Notwithstanding the contradictory nature of these later experiences, as if to show that history is not always totally a history of horrors against the fate of the masses we honor the Paris Commune as a beacon of the coming world proletarian revolution. It is just for that reason that Karl Marx fought tooth and nail in the First International to defend it against the rage of capitalist Europe. It is one of our peaks. The Commune also presented in embryo the first post-1848 Revolution instance of what was later characterized by Lenin at the beginning of World War I as the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the international labor movement. So this question that after Lenin’s death preoccupied Trotsky for much of the later part of his life really has a much longer lineage that I had previously recognized. Unfortunately, as we are too painfully aware that question is still to be resolved. Therefore, even at this great remove, it is necessary to learn the lessons of that experience in facing today’s crisis of leadership in the international labor movement.

As a final thought, I note that in the preface to this edition that the editors have given their own view about the lessons to be learned from the experience of the Paris Commune. Although virtually every page of Lissagaray’s account drips with examples of the necessity of a vanguard party their view negates that necessity. While we can argue until hell freezes over, and should, about the form that a future socialist state will take one would think that there should be no dispute on that necessity at this late date in history. In any case read this important work (including the above-mentioned provocative preface) as it tells the tale of an important part of our working class history.

*Once Again, Honor The Heroic Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

Click On Title To Link To Rosenberg Defense Fund For Children

I pass along this commentary from Workers Vanguard as one that may be (and should be) of interest to the radical public. Veteran's Day seems to a right kind of day for honoring the Rosenbergs.

Workers Vanguard No. 923
24 October 2008

Cold War Ideologues Want to Kill Them Again

Hail the Heroic Rosenbergs!

Martyrs of Anti-Soviet Witchhunt

Shortly after 8 p.m., on 19 June 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in the electric chair at New York’s Sing Sing prison. Jewish Communists from New York, the Rosenbergs were framed up on charges of “conspiring” to pass the “secret of the atomic bomb” to the Soviet Union during World War II, when the USSR was allied with the U.S. Their 1951 trial was replete from beginning to end with perjured testimony, concocted evidence, a heavy dose of anti-Semitism and a judge who illegally consulted with the prosecution before meting out a sentence under provisions of a law that didn’t apply to their case—all against a backdrop of bloodcurdling calls to “fry the Reds.”

Around the world, millions raised their voices in an outcry demanding “justice for the Rosenbergs.” But from the White House on down, the American ruling class was united in its determination to make an example of these courageous leftists who never renounced their support to the Soviet Union, and refused to name names to save their lives. The great Soviet spy Kim Philby, in his book, My Silent War, rightly called them “the brave Rosenbergs.”

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed on the altar of Cold War anti-Communism, in which the U.S. rulers saw the USSR as the main obstacle to U.S. imperialist world hegemony. Thus, Julius Rosenberg was arrested three weeks after the outbreak of the Korean War and less than a year after the first Soviet A-bomb test. Setting the tone for the trial, the prosecutor ranted in his opening arguments that the Rosenbergs stole “the key to the survival of this nation and…the peace of the world.” As we explained in our article “In Defense of the Rosenbergs!” (WV No. 86, 21 November 1975), following World War II:

“As the predominant capitalist power, the U.S., planning for an ‘American century,’ tore apart the U.S.-Soviet alliance and prepared the ground for a nationwide anti-red scare. When the Soviet Union exploded its first nuclear bomb in 1949 and later that same year Mao’s Red Army overthrew capitalism in China, politicians like Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy were building their political careers through a crusade to exorcise ‘Communism’ from American life.”

It was against this backdrop the Rosenbergs were put to death.

The Rosenberg Case and the Russian Question

The horrific memory of this case has been nearly impossible to bury. The capitalist rulers—often with liberals and social democrats taking the lead—have found the need to frame up and execute the Rosenbergs again and again. On the one hand they seek to defend the secret police, prosecution, judiciary and highest federal authorities who framed them. On the other, the Rosenberg case was, and still is, the question of the Russian Revolution. The 1917 seizure of power by the Bolshevik-led Russian working class was the greatest event of human history, and its counterrevolutionary destruction in 1991-92, after decades of Stalinist bureaucratic misrule, a world-historic catastrophe. America’s imperialist rulers, the most dangerous in history, would like to wipe out of the consciousness of the proletariat and the oppressed any attachment to the program or ideals of communism—and that means driving a stake through the memory of those martyred in defense of the land of the October Revolution.

Today, with the financial crash leading the international capitalist economy into a freefall, the massive unpopularity of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the floundering occupation of Afghanistan, the U.S. bourgeoisie seized on a chance to fry the Rosenbergs again. The latest exhumation and assassination was sparked by an interview (12 September) by the New York Times’ Sam Roberts with the Rosenbergs’ co-defendant Morton Sobell, who had served over 18 years in prison. Responding to whether he had been a Soviet spy, Sobell, now 91 years old and ill, said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, call it that. I never thought of it in those terms.” Regarding Julius Rosenberg, Sobell offered, “His intentions might have been to be a spy.” Yet Sobell maintained that sketches and other atomic bomb details the government claimed were passed along to Julius Rosenberg by his brother-in-law, David Greenglass, were of little value. “What he gave them was junk.” According to Sobell, Ethel Rosenberg “knew what he [Julius] was doing, but what was she guilty of? Of being Julius’s wife.”

We don’t know if Sobell’s “confession” is true or not—whether his interview was a last grab for attention near the end of his life or merely an expression of his coming to peace with U.S. imperialism. We do know however that every previous effort to “prove” the Rosenbergs’ “guilt”—from Ronald Radosh’s 1983 book, The Rosenberg File, which featured the dubious jailhouse informer Jerome Tartakow, to the Venona papers released in 1995—have had as much credibility as Bush’s tales of “weapons of mass destruction.” The Rosenbergs were legally lynched for political purposes. As the then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) wrote in the Militant (27 October 1952): “The Rosenberg decision above all else was an act of ruling class terror by a state that is preparing a war of world conquest, a war directed primarily against the Soviet Union.”

What is indisputably true is that for the U.S. capitalist masters, guilt or innocence mattered not at all. Nor is guilt or innocence in this case the key question for revolutionaries. The nuclear arms capacity developed by the Soviet Union was an important component to the defense of the gains of the October Revolution. As we wrote 25 years ago, at the height of Carter/Reagan’s Cold War II, in “They’re Trying to Kill the Rosenbergs All Over Again” (WV No. 340, 21 October 1983):

“For revolutionaries, on the contrary, those who helped the Russians achieve nuclear capacity did a great service for humanity. Had U.S. imperialism maintained a nuclear monopoly, it would have meant historic defeats for the international proletariat. It would have meant nuclear destruction from Southeast Asia to Latin America. Who can doubt that U.S. imperialism would have destroyed Vietnam totally with nuclear weapons if they did not fear a retaliatory Soviet strike? Would Cuba exist today if the U.S. had a nuclear monopoly? It is clear that the USSR’s advance to nuclear capacity and then to nuclear parity has thus far been instrumental in staying the nuclear hand of U.S. imperialism.”

The Soviet Union was destroyed by imperialist-backed counterrevolution, but the question posed by the Russian Revolution—that of the proletarian seizure of state power—is as vital as ever. The imperialists seek to rewrite history in order to ensure that the rule of capital is never again challenged. We honor the Rosenbergs’ memory today, not least in our unconditional military defense of the remaining bureaucratically deformed workers states—China, Cuba, Vietnam and North Korea—against imperialist attack and internal counterrevolution.

As always, the Rosenberg case is used to serve the political needs of the day. Sobell’s “confession” was leaped on by the bourgeois press and bloggers. “Case Closed: The Rosenbergs were Soviet Spies,” trumpeted an op-ed piece by Ronald Radosh in the Los Angeles Times (17 September). Written when he was a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, Radosh’s 1983 book was a rallying point for the liberals, rad-libs and social democrats as they joined U.S. imperialism’s efforts to regiment the population during Cold War II against the Soviet Union. Today, Radosh, portrayed as an expert on the Rosenbergs case, is a neocon, a loud voice in support of the “war on terrorism” and a contributing columnist to FrontPage Magazine, mouthpiece of right-wing racist demagogue David Horowitz.

Written shortly after the FBI was given new powers to spy on and terrorize the population in the name of the “war on terrorism,” Radosh’s L.A. Times article declares, “It is time the ranks of the left acknowledge that the United States had (and has) real enemies and that finding and prosecuting them is not evidence of repression.” Meanwhile, his right-wing acolytes have seized on the Sobell statements to argue that death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal—a former Black Panther Party spokesman and supporter of the MOVE organization framed up on charges of killing Police Officer Daniel Faulkner in 1981—is guilty. It is a telling indictment of American capitalist “justice” that from the liberal New York Times to Radosh’s right-wing “fringe,” Sobell’s confession is accepted without question, while the mountains of evidence of Mumia’s innocence, including the confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot Faulkner, is sneered at and barred by court after court.

A Cold War Show Trial

Like many of their generation, the Rosenbergs were inspired by the authority and achievements of the Russian Revolution, which overthrew capitalism on one-sixth of the globe and created a society where those who labored ruled. Within less than two decades, the collectivized and planned economy of the USSR propelled a poor and backward country into a world power, with jobs, housing, education and medical care for all. In the 1930s, the capitalist world was mired in the Great Depression, while the rise of fascism and the buildup for a second interimperialist war further exposed the barbarity of capitalist class rule. As a teenager, Julius became determined to help free labor leader Tom Mooney, and as a college freshman protested against fascist students from Italy visiting CCNY. Ethel helped raise money for refugees fleeing fascist terror during the Spanish Civil War. Both were active trade unionists—Ethel in the clerical workers union and Julius as an organizer for the Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists and Technicians until he was fired from his job in 1945 for membership in the U.S. Communist Party (CP).

The Rosenbergs looked for political leadership to the Stalinized CP, a product of the degeneration of the Soviet workers state and Communist International. Ardent believers in the disastrous Stalinist popular front against fascism, the Rosenbergs were typical of “progressives” who hoped for a U.S.-Soviet alliance to continue after World War II. CP leader Earl Browder declared, “Communism is 20th Century Americanism.” But the U.S. ruling class didn’t see it that way.

On the contrary, the Rosenbergs were political scapegoats tried as “atom spies” because U.S. imperialism lost its nuclear monopoly, and with it the capacity for nuclear blackmail against the Soviets. Two months after Washington dropped A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the Pentagon mapped out a plan to launch a nuclear attack on 20 Soviet cities. Throughout the next few years, the U.S. repeatedly threatened to nuke Russia during early confrontations in the Cold War—in 1946, in 1948 over Berlin, again in 1950 over Korea. FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover seized on the Soviets’ August 1949 atomic test to unleash his army of G-men to hunt down the “atom spies” in the hopes of launching a series of show trials to frame up the CP for espionage. They went on frequent fishing expeditions hoping to force “confessions” and to get the confessors to falsely point the finger at other CPers.

Government prosecutors have since admitted that the arrest and threat of execution of Ethel Rosenberg was intended solely to force Julius to break down and “confess.” In the last minutes of their lives, a U.S. Marshal stood outside the execution chamber, waiting for a nod from either of them indicating that they would “confess” and “name names.” Two FBI agents waited by a special phone with an open line to Attorney General Brownell, ready to call off the execution if the Rosenbergs capitulated and allowed the government to use them as it had other finks and turncoats. But the Rosenbergs refused to bow.

Fully aware that there was no case against the Rosenbergs for espionage, the government got them on the classic frame-up charge—“conspiracy.” The government knew that the Rosenbergs did not “steal the secret of the atomic bomb.” In fact there was no “secret.” J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist in charge of designing the first atomic bomb, pointed out, “There are no unpublished secrets concerning atomic weapons, and no secrets of nature available to a few.” Judge Irving Kaufman, upon pronouncing the death sentence, accused the Rosenbergs of “treason.” It did not matter that according to the U.S. Constitution, “treason,” a capital crime, is defined as giving aid and comfort to the enemy in wartime. The USSR was an ally of the U.S. in 1944 when the “crime” supposedly took place!

It was hardly coincidental that the judge, the lead prosecutor, Irving Saypol, and the key witnesses were Jewish, chosen in a transparent effort to cover up the stench of anti-Semitism surrounding the trial (see “The Political Execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg,” WV No. 626, 28 July 1995). Two self-confessed perjurers sent them to the chair—Ethel Rosenberg’s brother David Greenglass and Philadelphia chemist Harry Gold, supposedly a Soviet spy courier. Gold admitted at the trial to having become “so tangled up in a web of lies...it is a wonder steam didn’t come out of my ears,” and never even testified to having met or known Julius or Ethel Rosenberg.

Greenglass, who had apparently stolen a piece of uranium while working as an army technician at the Los Alamos nuclear facility in 1945, set his sister and her husband up as fall guys. Greenglass testified that, after being recruited to a spy ring by Julius, he had handed sketches of the atomic bomb to Soviet spy courier Gold, claiming to have learned the A-bomb “secret” by overhearing conversations of scientists passing through the machine shop at Los Alamos. Greenglass implicated his sister with testimony that she typed up the notes for Julius. That Greenglass’ testimony was perjured was proven yet again in recently released grand jury testimony of his wife Ruth Greenglass, who testified that she wrote up the notes. The only hard “evidence” against the Rosenbergs introduced at the trial was a contribution box found in their home for Spanish Civil War refugees and Ethel’s signature on a petition for a Communist candidate for New York City Council.

Liberals and Social Democrats Witchhunt Reds

While his name has become a synonym for eviscerating the democratic rights of individuals and organizations based on their political views and associations, Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy was at first a fringe development in the anti-Communist hysteria. The political basis of the post World War II witchhunt was set by the Cold War liberals. As early as 1947, Democratic president Harry Truman put in place a loyalty board to screen all government employees, and the purge of left-wing militants from the CIO began. That same year Congress enacted the strikebreaking Taft-Hartley law, which, in addition to outlawing such labor weapons as secondary strikes, barred Communists from union office. It was the pro-Truman anti-Communists, among them Democrat Hubert Humphrey and United Auto Workers head Walter Reuther who founded the Americans for Democratic Action in 1947 to drive the CP and radicals out of the unions.

Some 25,000 union members, many of them key leaders of the CIO organizing drives of the 1930s, were purged from the labor movement, in some cases leading to the destruction of whole unions. Thousands of others were tracked down by the FBI and driven from their jobs, only to continue to be hounded and witchhunted due to secret employer blacklists. The 1950 McCarran Act, named for the Democratic Senator from Nevada, legitimized secret FBI record keeping on “subversive” individuals and called for the registration of organizations and individuals who purportedly “advocated violent overthrow” of the government. It also provided for the deportation of non-citizens who had been Communists at any time in their lives. Hundreds of Communists were jailed. Nearly 12,000 people were listed on a “Security Index” kept by FBI national headquarters and another 17,000 on the “Communist Index,” while FBI field offices held lists of an additional 200,000 considered to constitute a danger in times of “national emergency.” Humphrey sponsored the 1954 Communist Control Act outlawing the CP, and amended the McCarran Act to set up concentration camps for “subversives” in the U.S.

The liberal Cold Warriors shared the same enemy, Communism, but thought that McCarthy overreached—he went after the “innocent” liberals along with the “guilty.” When the names of Cold War liberals were added to the Attorney General’s Subversives List, the liberals dumped McCarthy. The liberals and social democrats wanted their civil liberties and their witchhunt too.

Playing a parallel role was the Independent Socialist League (ISL) of Max Shachtman, successor to the Workers Party. The founders of the Workers Party had split toward social democracy from the SWP in 1940 over their refusal to defend the Soviet Union against imperialism. The ISL, a precursor to the International Socialist Organization (ISO), supported the expulsions of the CP-led unions from the CIO. Shachtman, clearly expressing the need to join forces with Reuther, declared that workers “should follow the general line, inside the labor movement, of supporting the reformist officialdom against the Stalinist officialdom” (New International, September 1949). Shachtman proclaimed, “Stalinism is the most virulent poison that has ever coursed through the veins of the working class and its movement. The work of eliminating it makes the first claim on the attention of every militant.” The anti-red purge installed a venal pro-imperialist union leadership that abetted the bosses in fostering racial divisions and presided over the decimation of the unions for decades.

Shachtman’s ISL refused to come out for commutation of the Rosenbergs’ sentence until just before the execution. In the Bay Area branch, where a vote to support commutation of the death sentence lost by a single vote, the right-wing “hang the spies” faction was destroyed when confronted with Shachtman’s wire to President Eisenhower asking to commute the sentence. Writing in the name of “an independent socialist organization which has been uncompromising in its struggle against Stalinism,” Shachtman assured Eisenhower that their concern arose only from the death penalty which “gives worldwide Stalinism an effective weapon” (Labor Action, 22 June 1953). Still, there was a hue and cry in the party against the decision, as letters poured in to Labor Action bitterly complaining of Shachtman’s “capitulation” and of “this belated jump into the ‘super-liberal’ bandwagon...that hangs on the Stalinist coattails.”

The Shachtmanites were visceral anti-Communists. But most of the left, including the SWP, failed to immediately rally to the Rosenbergs’ defense for other reasons. This was a time when leftist militants were being tried and sent to prison for long stretches based on nothing but their libraries; Congressmen were calling to make CP membership a capital crime and the government was looking to brand left organizations, particularly the CP, as espionage agents. Civil rights activist Carl Braden was jailed for “state sedition” after he and his wife sold a house to a black family in a white neighborhood of Louisville, Kentucky. Paul Robeson, the acclaimed black actor and vocalist, was one of the many stripped of their passports and banned from leaving the country for years. The renowned filmmaker Charlie Chaplin, a British citizen, was barred from re-entering the U.S.

As for the CP, it did not even mention the case until after the trial was over and the death sentence had already been handed down. When the CP did take up the case, it neither denounced the political frame-up nor defended the Rosenbergs as victims of the capitalist state. It merely accused the government of “bad faith” similar to its refusal “to negotiate peace in Korea” (Daily Worker, 6 April 1951). The CP’s betrayal was not simply one of defense policy over the Rosenbergs’ case. The CP betrayed the working class with its program of class collaboration, its policy of tailing the “progressive” bourgeoisie. By the end of World War II, the CP found itself without allies when it was no longer useful for the bourgeoisie to continue the popular front forged during the “Great Patriotic War Against Fascism.” Years of class collaboration behind Roosevelt—the no-strike pledge, scabbing on strikes and betrayal of the fight for black rights during the Second World War—closed off the possibility of effectively mobilizing the labor movement against repression. As the Cold War McCarthy period ensued, the CP found itself totally abandoned by its “progressive” friends.

Even had the CP moved sooner and with more energy, it is not likely they could have saved the Rosenbergs from a government intent on killing them. Against the Stalinists’ vapid talk of “bad faith” on the part of the U.S. government, it was the SWP that correctly recognized the anti-Soviet centrality of the Rosenberg trial and hailed the USSR’s nuclear capacity—an important act demonstrating considerable political courage in that period. Though the SWP could have recognized the political character of the Rosenberg case sooner and sounded the alarm earlier and louder, the defense record of the SWP was generally excellent. They protested the 1949 Smith Act prosecutions of the CP, undeterred by the vicious sectarianism which led the CP to applaud the first use of the Smith Act in 1941 against the Trotskyists for their principled opposition to their “own” rulers. While unconditionally defending the USSR during the Second World War, the SWP courageously opposed all the imperialist combatants in that carnage.

Today, Sobell’s “confession” has left the Rosenbergs’ few liberal defenders uneasy and defensive. That is because they are hostile to the cause for which the Rosenbergs died. What the liberals care about is the “fairness” of the American “justice” system. For Howard Zinn, “The most important thing was they did not get a fair trial in the atmosphere of cold war hysteria” (New York Times, 21 September). Victor Navasky, former publisher of the Nation, told the Times, “I wish Morty and Ethel and Julius had been open about what they had and hadn’t done, or in Morty’s case, ‘come clean’ before this.” He added, “These guys thought they were helping our ally in wartime, and yes, they broke the law, shouldn’t have done what they did, and should have been proportionally punished for it; but the greater betrayal was by the state.”

Today, Shachtman’s heirs in the ISO have published an article “Executed to Send a Message” (Socialist Worker online, 30 September) that makes no mention of the Democrats’ role in the Cold War witchhunt or in the Rosenbergs’ prosecution. The ISO ludicrously seeks to put distance between the Rosenbergs and the CP, stating, “by 1943, they were no longer active in the party,” and giving not the slightest hint that they went to their deaths as supporters of the Soviet Union. Small wonder: this is a group that was formed in opposition to the defense of the USSR and that hailed its counterrevolutionary destruction.

Against such liberals and renegades, we Trotskyists fought to the end in defense of the Soviet Union and the deformed workers states of East Europe. We hail those, like the Rosenbergs, who gave their lives in defense of the land of October and fight to disarm the rapacious imperialist rulers through socialist revolution. We will not forget—Honor the heroic Rosenbergs! For new October Revolutions!

IN THE TIME OF THE AMERICAN INQUISITION-THE RED SCARE OF THE 1950'S

BOOK REVIEW

RED SCARE-MEMORIES OF THER AMERICAN INQUISITION, GRIFFIN FARIELLO, W.W. NORTON, NEW YORK, 1995

“WASN’T IT A TIME TO TRY MEN’S (AND WOMEN’S) SOULS”
I have always been intrigued by the American Communist Party’s ability up until the period of the “red scare” of the late 1940’s and the 1950’s to draw in and recruit a relatively large number of free-lance intellectuals and cultural workers. The apparent inability of the party to keep them is a separate question. However, if one was to draw up a Who’s Who of those members of the American intelligentsia who passed through the party’s orbit during the first half of the 20th century one would find numbers far greater than would be indicated by the party’s actual influence in American politics. The Red Scare obliterated that connection between the intellectuals and the working class and that connection has never been put back together in any radical form up to the present day. Left-wing political life in particular and political life in general has suffered as a result. Here’s the story, in their own voices, of a cross-section of those who got crushed by the juggernaut-and it ain’t pretty.

At the time of publication the book under review Mr. Fariello simply believed that he was unearthing a period in American history, the Red Scare of the late 1940’s and 1959’s, that had either been conveniently forgotten, dismissed as an important but episodic blemish on American democracy or had been reduced to the ‘ sound bite’ ravings of one man-Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy. Reading this book in the midst of the post 9/11 anti- Islamic, anti-immigrant, anti-foreigner frenzy in America made me realize that the author had rendered much more than a historical narrative of a particularly disturbing period. He has presented, in the form of interviews of the participants on both sides of the issue, a collectively compelling story that parallels the anxieties and fears of contemporary America. Despite differences of time, place and target it is hard to argue against the proposition that there is something endemic in the American experience that exhibits both a xenophobic and cruel streak that the rest of the world has come to fear. Make no mistake- it can and did happen here and it can happen again.

The author, painstakingly and systematically, interviewed whomever of the survivors of the red scare of the late 1940’s and the 1950’s, which in effect was the modern day American version of the Spanish Inquisition, he could round up. This compilation is a grim reminder of effective liquidation of the left-wing of the American working class and its allies in late 1940’s and the 1950’s. What clearly comes through after reading the interviews on both sides of the issue is that after the end of the World War II there was a serious class war going on not only in the Cold War internationally but also domestically in America – and the working class and its allies took a terrible beating. Why?

One can at least understand the motives of those who cleared out of the left–wing movement in order to duck away when the heat came down. One can even understand, while at the same time condemning, those who sold out their friends and relatives under the relentless governmental pressure. One can further understand the actions of the various Roy Cohn-types looking to make a name for himself or herself or just plain make cash over the bodies of their political opponents. This wicked old world has created plenty of those types who appear when THEIR opportunity calls. What is not understandable is the great mass of people who were not directly affected and who volunteered information to the government, who shunned former friends, who formed vigilante squads to root out their friends and neighbors. Their numbers were legion. As that generation, my parents’ generation, the ones who survived the Depression and fought World War II, dies out much ink has been spilled declaring that generation the ‘greatest generation’. No, a thousand times no. That generation sold its heritage out for a mess of pottage. For the most part, if they were not actively involved in the destruction of democratic rights when some people actually tried to use them, they looked away while the nefarious deeds were being done. And for what? To make the world safe for capitalism and capitalists? Read this book to find out what happened to their victims.

*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal- Book Reviews

Markin comment:

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

*********

Reviews


Marshall S. Shatz, Jan Waclaw Machajski: A Radical Critic of the Russian Intelligentsia, University of Pittsburg Press, Pittsburg, 1989, pp251, $29.95

Machajski and the group of ideas called Machaevism, which he brought together and defended from the turn of the century through into the Russian Revolution, played only a very minor rôle in the building of the Russian revolutionary movement. To this reviewer at any rate, the mention of his name merely stirred a vague memory of him being mentioned, although only briefly, by Trotsky in My Life when referring to some long forgotten debate among Tsardom’s Siberian exiles.

The book does not disguise the limitations of its subject matter. And yet ... this very fair and balanced history will undoubtedly leave many with an uneasy feeling. Even today, 64 years after his death, Machajski’s idea about the intelligentsia or middle strata, and its power to dominate the working class movement, will strike many as an advance warning of dangers which became only too real in the ruthless rule of the Stalinist bureaucracy. To others it will seem to explain the reason why the working class movement has, as they see it, been betrayed by so many of its political leaderships.

Machajski was concerned with the growing reformist trends in Social Democracy, and with the untrustworthiness of the Russian intelligentsia. He presented an original and even Marxist-sounding explanation. Just as the bourgeoisie and the proletariat pursued their own class interests, so it must also be regarded as natural and inevitable that the middle class strata, primarily composed of ‘intellectual workers’ would do likewise. Control by these groupings of the knowledge-ideas factors which are essential for commodity production and the administration of modern society, already gives them power and considerable rewards. How much better, however, to ensure that such power became ever more dominant and secure through a centrally planned society? Socialism or Social Democracy were not to be regarded as ideologies in the interests of the working class, but as ideologies founded on the interests of an already relatively favoured section of society, the middle strata or intelligentsia.

Such a theory immediately calls into question any possibility of ever formulating an ideology which conforms to objective reality. According to Machajski’s logic, all attempts at evolving such an ideology would be doomed to distortion by the sectional or class interests of those intellectual workers responsible for producing it. As Shatz points out, Machajski never faced up to this contradiction. His main conclusion was to set up a group called the Workers’ Conspiracy which, according to Shatz, played little practical rôle in its short existence. Presumably it was to contain some intellectuals such as Machajski, although how these were to be identified as trustworthy and unbiased was left unclear.

To this vague idea he added the equally vague concept of a self-led working class in an upsurge that would claim the entire surplus of society after inflicting a massive defeat on both bourgeoisie and intelligentsia. Oddly enough, he also pressed for one relatively simple and almost reformist demand. Workers should ensure that any surplus wealth they appropriated from society be used for the full-time advanced education of all workers’ children. This argument came close to being market based – if everyone were to be intellectually trained, no one would be able to claim the special privileges that the middle strata had always been able to command.

The question of how ideologies, and, in particular, Socialist ideologies do or can arise is not addressed by this book. Shatz is writing about Machaevism and not about such philosophical issues. What the book does do is to report on the debates in Russian society about the nature and functions of their middle strata.

Machajski’s ideas sprang from his analysis and experience of the specific Russian intelligentsia, expressing, as he saw it, the interests of the Russian middle class. This book brings out very well the need to be clear about the exact structures and the continually varying nature of the middle layers of society. The author outlines the diffuse nature of the Russian middle classes, stretching from the remains of the gentry who had been partially dispossessed by the earlier land reforms inaugurated by Tsardom, the small but growing industrial-based sector, to the expanding professions and the restless students. All these groupings were hemmed in by the autocracy. Politically they evolved few ideas of their own beyond the terrorist bomb and slavish legalism. Their incoherence and frustrations were compounded by the flooding in of Western ideologies whether appropriate or inappropriate to their society. Machajski himself, moved from a Polish nationalism tinged with Socialism, through a form of Marxism to a ‘workerist’ criticism of both European Social Democracy and Russia's intelligentsia – and finally moved on to his own anti-Socialist form of Socialist-Anarchism!

The book continually reasserts the Russian based starting point but tentatively explores how far such ideas can be applied to other times and other places. In fact one of Shatz’s most thought provoking sections deals with the near-extermination of the pre-1917 intelligentsia in the purges of the 1930s, and its replacement by a new ex-worker become apparatchik-intelligentsia. Khrushchev perhaps best embodied the nature of the changeover. His personal manners may well have identified his working class origins. They did not define the social function he was actually performing.

This book should be regarded as more than a specialist biography of an obscure Socialist responsible for an even more obscure sect. Marshall Shatz writes clearly and with very few preconceptions. The central ideas of Machajski may well prove to point to yet one more dead end, but in a period when the Marxist movement must face up to a massive self-questioning we have to check and recheck virtually all our ideas to see where the Socialist enterprise started to go so terribly wrong. We may have to go further back than we expect. It was not merely 1917 that was a blind turning. Revolutionary History must increasingly be a history of such ideas rather than of people and groupings.

Planning this review produced 10 pages of notes including a number of awkward questions still to be answered. How, indeed, do we avoid the distortion of Socialist theory by the unconscious bias of the intellectuals, who must of necessity be involved in its evolution? What are the intellectual disciplines needed constantly to check that Socialist ideology both accords with reality and is acceptable to a clear majority of the population? How should intellectual workers and manual workers (if this is a valid dividing line) relate to each other in existing labour movements? How do we break down the unconscious middle class arrogance of a very high proportion of the present labour movement?

This book presents a good starting point for asking some of the right questions and for asking them without the harsh polemical style which unfortunately came to dominate Socialist histories. Getting the answers, however, is going to be more difficult.

Frank Ward





















Note



Name spelling and even people’s initials can vary when anglicised from the Polish or Russian. Machajski can appear as Makhaiski, Machajskii and his initials as KV as well as JW.



*********

THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO-THE FOUNDATION OF MODERN COMMUNISM- A Book Review

THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO-THE FOUNDATION OF MODERN COMMUNISM-A Book Review

BOOK REVIEW

THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO, KARL MARX AND FRIEDRICH ENGELS, PENQUIN CLASSICS: NEW EDITIONS, NEW YORK, 2002

If you are a revolutionary, a radical or merely a liberal activist you must come to terms with the theory outlined in the Communist Manifesto. Today’s political activists are obviously not the first to face this challenge. Radicals, revolutionaries and liberals have had to come to terms with the Manifesto at least since 1848, when it was first published. That same necessity; perhaps surprisingly to some given the changes in the political landscape since then, is true today. Why surprisingly? On the face of it, given the political times, it would appear somewhat absurd to make such a claim about the necessity of coming to terms with the overriding need for the revolutionary overturn of the capitalist order outlined in the Manifesto. It, however, is.

With the collapses of the Soviet Union and the Soviet-influenced Eastern European states about fifteen years ago, which were supposedly based on Marxist concepts, one would think that Marxism was a dead letter. But hear me out. Even the less far-sighted apologists for the international capitalist order are now worrying about the increasing gap between rich and poor, not only between the so-called first and third worlds but also within the imperial metropolitan centers themselves. Nowhere is that more evident that in the United States where that gap has dramatically increased over the last thirty years. Thus, despite the carping of the ‘death of communism’ theorists after the decisive capitulation of international Stalinism in the early 1990’s, an objective criterion exists today to put the question posed by the ongoing class struggle and of the validity of a materialist concept of history back on the front burner.

Whether one agrees with the Marxian premises about the need for revolution and for a dialectical materialist conception of the workings of society or not one still must, if for no other reason that to be smart about the doings of the world, confront the problem of how to break the stalemate over where human history is heading. 'Globalization' has clearly demonstrated only that the 'race to the bottom' inherent in the inner workings of capitalism is continuing at full throttle. Moreover, the contradictions and boom/bust cycles of capitalism have not been resolved. And those results have not been pretty for the peoples of the world.

Experience over the last 160 years has shown that those who are not armed with a materialist concept of history, that is, the ability to see society in all its workings and contradictions, cannot understand the world. All other conceptual frameworks lead to subjectivist idealism and utopian concepts of social change, at best. One may ultimately answer the questions posed by the Manifesto in the negative but the alternatives leave one politically defenseless in the current one-sided international class war.

So what is the shouting over Marxism, pro and con, all about? In the middle of the 19th century, especially in Europe, it was not at all clear where the vast expansion and acceleration of industrial society was heading. All one could observe was that traditional society was being rapidly disrupted and people were being uprooted, mainly from the land, far faster than at any time in previous history. For the most part, political people at that time reacted to the rise of capitalism with small plans to create utopian societies off on the side of society or with plans to smash the industrial machinery in order to maintain an artisan culture (the various forms of Ludditism). Into this chaos a young Karl Marx stepped in, and along with his associate and co-thinker Friedrich Engel, gave a, let us face it, grandiose plan for changing all of society based on the revolutionary overthrow of existing society.

Marx thus did not based himself on creation of some isolated utopian community but rather took the then current level of international capitalist society as a starting point and expanded his thesis from that base. Now that was then, and today still is, a radical notion. Marx, however, did not just come to those conclusions out of the blue. As an intellectual (and frustrated academian) he took the best of German philosophy (basically from Hegel, then the rage of German philosophical academia), French political thought and revolutionary tradition especially the Great French Revolution of the late 1700’and English political economy.

In short, Marx took the various strands of Enlightenment thought and action and grafted those developments onto a theory, not fully formed at the time, of how the proletariat was to arise and take over the reins of society for the benefit of all of society and end class struggle as the motor force of history. Unfortunately, given the rocky road of socialist thought and action over the last 160 years, we are, impatiently, still waiting for that new day.

In recently re-reading the Manifesto this writer was struck by how much of the material in it related, taking into account the technological changes and advances in international capitalist development since 1848, to today’s political crisis of humankind. Some of the predictions and some of the theory are off, no question, particularly on the questions of the relative staying power of capitalism, the relative impoverishment of the masses, the power of the nation-state and nationalism to cut across international working class solidarity and the telescoping of the time frame of capitalist development but the thrust of the material presented clearly speaks to us today. Maybe that is why today the more far-sighted bourgeois commentators are nervous at the reappearance of Marxism in Western society as a small but serious current in the international labor movement. Militant leftists can now argue- Stalinism (the horrendous distortion of Marxism) never again, to the bourgeois commentators' slogan of - socialist revolution, never again.

As a historical document one should read the Manifesto with the need for updating in mind. The reader should nevertheless note the currency of the seemingly archaic third section of the document where Marx polemicized against the leftist political opponents of his time. While the names of the organizations of that time have faded away into the historical mist the political tendencies he argued against seem to very much analogous to various tendencies today. In fact, in my youth I probably argued in favor of every one of those tendencies that Marx opposed before I was finally won over to the Marxian worldview. I suggest that not only does humankind set itself the social tasks that it can reasonably perform but also that when those tasks are not performed there is a tendency to revert to earlier, seemingly defeated ideas, of social change. Thus the resurgent old pre-Marxian conceptions of societal change have to be fought out again by this generation of militant leftists. That said, militant leftists should read and reread this document. It is literarily the foundation document of the modern communist movement. One can still learn much from it. Forward.

Revised September 26, 2006

***Don’t Mourn- Organize (And Maybe Sing A Song Or Two) - In Honor Of Labor Agitator/Songwriter Joe Hill

Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of "Joe Hill's Last Will"

Joe Hill’s Last Will

My will is easy to decide,
For there is nothing to divide,
My kin don’t need to fuss and moan-
“Moss does not cling to a rolling stone.”
My body? Ah, If I could choose,
I would to ashes it reduce,
And let the merry breezes blow
My dust to where some flowers grow.
Perhaps some fading flower then
Would come to life and bloom again.
This is my last and final will,
Good luck to all of you, Joe Hill

Joe Hill was an IWW man. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was, and is a radical union dedicated to abolishing the wage system and replacing it with a democratic system of workplace organization.

Joe Hill was a migrant laborer to the US from Sweden, a poet, musician and union radical. The term “pie in the sky” is believed to come from his satirical song, “The Preacher and the Slave”.

Hill was framed for murder and executed by firing squad in Salt Lake City, Utah on November 19, 1915. His last words were, “Fire!”

Just before his death he wrote to fellow IWW organizer Big Bill Haywood a letter which included the famous words, “Don’t mourn, Organize”.

The poem above was his will. It was set to music and became the basis of a song by Ethel Raim called “Joe Hill’s Last Will”.

A praise poem by Alfred Hayes became the lyrics of the best-known song about Joe Hill, written in 1936 by Earl Robinson. This was sung so beautifully by Joan Baez at Woodstock in 1969:

Joe Hill

words by Alfred Hayes
music by Earl Robinson

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,
Alive as you and me.
Says I “But Joe, you’re ten years dead”
“I never died” said he,
“I never died” said he.

“In Salt Lake, Joe,” says I to him,
him standing by my bed,
“They framed you on a murder charge,”
Says Joe, “But I ain’t dead,”
Says Joe, “But I ain’t dead.”

“The Copper Bosses killed you Joe,
they shot you Joe” says I.
“Takes more than guns to kill a man”
Says Joe “I didn’t die”
Says Joe “I didn’t die”

And standing there as big as life
and smiling with his eyes.
Says Joe “What they can never kill
went on to organize,
went on to organize”

From San Diego up to Maine,
in every mine and mill,
where working-men defend their rights,
it’s there you find Joe Hill,
it’s there you find Joe Hill!

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,
alive as you and me.
Says I “But Joe, you’re ten years dead”
“I never died” said he,
“I never died” said he.

"The Preacher And The Slave"

Long-haired preachers come out every night,
Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right;
But when asked how ’bout something to eat
They will answer in voices so sweet

You will eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay,
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die

And the Starvation Army they play,
And they sing and they clap and they pray,
Till they get all your coin on the drum,
Then they tell you when you’re on the bum

Holy Rollers and Jumpers come out
And they holler, they jump and they shout
Give your money to Jesus, they say,
He will cure all diseases today

If you fight hard for children and wife-
Try to get something good in this life-
You’re a sinner and bad man, they tell,
When you die you will sure go to hell.

Workingmen of all countries, unite
Side by side we for freedom will fight
When the world and its wealth we have gained
To the grafters we’ll sing this refrain

You will eat, bye and bye,
When you’ve learned how to cook and how to fry;
Chop some wood, ’twill do you good
Then you’ll eat in the sweet bye and bye

The chorus is sung in a call and response pattern.

You will eat [You will eat] bye and bye [bye and bye]
In that glorious land above the sky [Way up high]
Work and pray [Work and pray] live on hay [live on hay]
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die [That's a lie!]

You will eat [You will eat] bye and bye [bye and bye]
When you’ve learned how to cook and how to fry [How to fry]
Chop some wood [Chop some wood], ’twill do you good [do you good]
Then you’ll eat in the sweet bye and bye [That's no lie]

THE REBEL GIRL

by Joe Hill /words updated/

There are women of many descriptions
In this cruel world as everyone knows
Some are living in beautiful mansions
And wearing the finest of clothes

There's the blue blooded queen and the princess
Who have charms made of diamonds and pearls
But the only and true kind of lady
Is the Rebel Girl

chorus:
She's a rebel girl, a rebel girl
To the working class she's the strength of this world
From Newfoundland to B.C.
She's fighting for you and for me

Yes she's there by our side
With her courage and pride
She's unequalled anywhere

And I'm proud to fight for freedom
With the rebel girl!


Pete Seeger Lyrics

Joe Hill Lyrics

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night
Alive as you or me.
Says I, "But Joe, you're ten years dead."
"I never died," says he,
"I never died," says he

"In Salt Lake, Joe," says I to him,
Him standing by my bed.
"They framed you on a murder charge."
Says Joe, "But I ain't dead,
Says Joe, "But I ain't dead."

"The copper bosses killed you, Joe,
They shot you, Joe," says I.
"Takes more than guns to kill a man."
Says Joe, "I didn't die,"
Says Joe, "I didn't die."

And standing there as big as life,
And smiling with his eyes,
Joe says, "What they forgot to kill
Went on to organize,
Went on to organize."

"Joe Hill ain't dead," he says to me,
"Joe Hill ain't never died.
Where working men are out on strike,
Joe Hill is at their side,
Joe Hill is at their side."

"From San Diego up to Maine
In every mine and mill,
Where workers strike and organize,"
Says he, "You'll find Joe Hill."
Says he, "You'll find Joe Hill."

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night
Alive as you or me.
Says I, "But Joe, you're ten years dead."
"I never died," says he,
"I never died," says he.

Pete Seeger Lyrics

Talking Union Lyrics

If you want higher wages, let me tell you what to do;
You got to talk to the workers in the shop with you;
You got to build you a union, got to make it strong,
But if you all stick together, now, 'twont he long.
You'll get shorter hours,
Better working conditions.
Vacations with pay,
Take your kids to the seashore.

It ain't quite this simple, so I better explain
Just why you got to ride on the union train;
'Cause if you wait for the boss to raise your pay,
We'll all be waiting till Judgment Day;
We'll all he buried - gone to Heaven -
Saint Peter'll be the straw boss then.

Now, you know you're underpaid, hut the boss says you ain't;
He speeds up the work till you're 'bout to faint,
You may he down and out, but you ain't beaten,
Pass out a leaflet and call a meetin'
Talk it over - speak your mind -
Decide to do something about it.

'Course, the boss may persuade some poor damn fool
To go to your meeting and act like a stool;
But you can always tell a stool, though - that's a fact;
He's got a yellow streak running down his back;
He doesn't have to stool - he'll always make a good living
On what he takes out of blind men's cups.

You got a union now; you're sitting pretty;
Put some of the boys on the steering committee.
The boss won't listen when one man squawks.
But he's got to listen when the union talks.
He better -
He'll be mighty lonely one of these days.

Suppose they're working you so hard it's just outrageous,
They're paying you all starvation wages;
You go to the boss, and the boss would yell,
"Before I'd raise your pay I'd see you all in Hell."
Well, he's puffing a big see-gar and feeling mighty slick,
He thinks he's got your union licked.
He looks out the window, and what does he see
But a thousand pickets, and they all agree
He's a bastard - unfair - slave driver -
Bet he beats his own wife.

Now, boy, you've come to the hardest time;
The boss will try to bust your picket line.
He'll call out the police, the National Guard;
They'll tell you it's a crime to have a union card.
They'll raid your meeting, hit you on the head.
Call every one of you a goddamn Red -
Unpatriotic - Moscow agents -
Bomb throwers, even the kids.

But out in Detroit here's what they found,
And out in Frisco here's what they found,
And out in Pittsburgh here's what they found,
And down in Bethlehem here's what they found,
That if you don't let Red-baiting break you up,
If you don't let stool pigeons break you up,
If you don't let vigilantes break you up,
And if you don't let race hatred break you up -
You'll win. What I mean,
Take it easy - but take it!

* The Baptism Of Fire- Norman Mailer's "St. George And The Godfather"

The Baptism Of Fire- Norman Mailer's "St. George And The Godfather"

Click on the headline to link to a "The New York Times" obituary for American writer Norman Mailer article, dated November 10, 2007.

COMMENTARY/BOOK REVIEW

ST. GEORGE AND THE GODFATHER, NORMAN MAILER, THE NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY, NEW YORK, 1972

As I recently noted in this space while reviewing The Presidential Papers and Miami and the Siege of Chicago (hereafter, Miami) at one time, as with Ernest Hemingway, I tried to get my hands on everything that Norman Mailer wrote. In his prime he held out promise to match Hemingway as the preeminent male American prose writer of the 20th century. Mailer certainly has the ambition, ego and skill to do so. Although he wrote several good novels, like The Deer Park, in his time I believe that his journalistic work, as he himself might partially admit, especially his political, social and philosophical musings are what will insure his place in the literary pantheon. With that in mind I recently re-read his work on the 1972 political campaign St. George and the Godfather-the one that pitted the hapless George McGovern against the nefarious President Richard M. Nixon. This work while not as insightful as Miami or as existentially philosophical (except a short screed on the abortion question) or as cosmic as his approach in the Presidential Papers nevertheless only confirms what I mentioned above as his proper place in the literary scheme of things.

As mentioned in those previous reviews Theodore White may have won his spurs breaking down the mechanics of the campaign and made a niche for himself with The Making of a President, 1960 and his later incarnations on that same theme but Mailer in his pithy manner has given us a useful overview of the personalities and the stakes involved for the America in these campaigns. I would also note here that his work on the 1972 campaign represents the efforts of a man deeply immersed in the working of bourgeois politics from the inside. The 1972 campaign however also marked the beginning of new kid on the block ‘gonzo’ journalist Doctor Hunter Thompson’s take on that same process from the outside with Fear and Loathing on the 1972 Campaign Trial. In a shootout Thompson wins this one hands down. Poor Teddy White is over in a corner somewhere, muttering. In Mailer’s defense, as he acknowledged, there was not much to work with in 1972 inside the process and so the only real way to do it was from the outside.

That last statement is kind of an epiphany for my take on these three journalistic works by Mailer. The campaigns of 1960, 1968 and 1972 not only bear commenting on as part of the breakdown of the bourgeois consensus in the last third of the 20th century but represent a parallel personal politic story about my own political trajectory in that period. One clear point that I made in Miami was my undiminished commitment to the defeat of one Richard M. Nixon in the year 1968. As a result I found myself going from critical support for Lyndon Johnson, uncritical adoration for Robert Kennedy and ultimately pounding on doors for Hubert Humphrey. The details of that sorry saga have been commented on in this space last year in Confessions of an Old Militant-A Cautionary Tale. (See archives, October 2006). My main point for reviewing the 1972 campaign is that by that time , although Richard Nixon had not taken himself off my most wanted list and George McGovern was clearly superior to the likes of Hubert Humphrey as an honest bourgeois presidential candidate, I had decisively broken from ‘lesser evil’ politics. Between 1968 and 1972 I had had a socialist ‘conversion’ experience and for me the Democratic Party had become an empty shell. If one takes the time to compare Mailer’s work on the 1968 and 1972 elections one can draw that same contrast between the two without necessarily drawing my political conclusion. In a couple of hundred pages on the campaign 1972 Mailer basically has to make up a story out of whole clothe because the drama on the Democratic side came after the convention with the vice-presidential choice debacle and on the Republican side the convention was so scripted that one could have read the transcripts instead. Again the real action, the real face of the born-again Richard Milhous Nixon came after the convention in the throes of the Watergate explosion.

As I write this commentary it has been 35 years since those conventions and much has politically gone on in that time, mainly for the worst from the perspective of leftist politics. One would think that it is finally time for a shift back to the left. I believe that the right wing has had its time and that indeed the shift is taking place, if slowly. If one seeks to find the genesis for the bad politics of this period then Norman Mailer’s take on these events, as exemplified in the conventional political process, bears close examination. That said, as I noted in the Miami review, and and which bears repeating here, we had better make very good use of any shift to the left and not let the other side off the hook this time. Enough said.

From The 10th Anniversary Archives-Sadly-LABOR DAY SCORECARD 2007

COMMENTARY

CONTINUING TOUGH TIMES FOR THE AMERICAN LABOR MOVEMENT- AND THAT IS NO LIE

FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!


This writer entered the blogosphere in February 2006 so this is the second Labor Day scorecard giving his take on the condition of American labor as we approach Labor Day. And it is not pretty. That, my brothers and sisters, says it all. There was little strike action this year. The only notable action was among the grossly overworked and underpaid naval shipbuilders down in anti-union bastion Mississippi in the spring and that hard fought fight was a draw, at best. Once again there is little to report in the way of unionization to organize labor’s potential strength. American workers continue to have a real decline in their paychecks. The difference between survival and not for most working families is the two job (or more) household. In short, the average family is working more hours to make ends meet. Real inflation in energy and food costs has put many up against the wall. Moreover the bust in the housing market has wrecked havoc on working people as the most important asset in many a household has taken a beating. Once again forget the Federal Reserve Bank’s definition of inflation- one fill up at the pump confounds that noise. One does not have to be a Marxist economist to know that something is desperately wrong when at the beginning of the 21st century with all the technological advances and productivity increases of the past period working people need to work more just to try to stay even. Even the more far-sighted bourgeois thinkers have trouble with that one. In any case, here are some comments on the labor year.

*The key, as it was last year, to a turn-around for American labor is the unionization of Wal-Mart and the South. The necessary class struggle politics that would make such drives successful would act as a huge impetus for other areas of the labor movement. This writer further argues that such struggles against such vicious enemies as Wal-Mart can be the catalyst for the organization of a workers party. Okay, okay let the writer dream a little, won’t you? What has happened this year on this issue is that more organizations have taken up the call for a boycott of Wal-Mart. That is all to the good and must be supported by militant leftists but it is only a very small beginning shot in the campaign (See archives, dated June 10, 2006). National and local unions have taken monies from their coffers not for such a worthy effort as union organizing at Wal-Mart but to support one or another bourgeois electoral candidate. Some things never change.

*The issue of immigration has surfaced strongly again this year, especially in presidential politics. Every militant leftist was supportive of the past May Day actions of the vast immigrant communities to not be pushed around, although one should also note that they were not nearly as extensive as in 2006. Immigration is a labor issue and key to the struggle against the race to the bottom. While May Day and other events were big moments unless there are links to the greater labor movement this very promising movement could fizzle. A central problem is the role of the Democratic Party and the Catholic Church in the organizing effort. I will deal with this question at a latter time but for now know this- these organizations are an obstruction to real progress on the immigration issue. (See archives, dated May 1, 2006)


*If one needed one more example of why the American labor movement is in the condition it is finds itself then yet another article this summer by John Sweeney, punitive President of the AFL-CIO, and therefore one of the titular heads of the organized labor movement brings that point home in gory detail. The gist of the article is that governmental agencies, like the National Labor Relations Board, have over the years (and here he means in reality the Bush years) bent over backwards to help the employers in their fight against unionization. Well, John, surprise, surprise. Needless to say this year his so-called friends in Congress were not able to pass simple legislation to formally, at least, protect the right to unionization, the so-called employees’ bill of rights. That was a non-starter from the get-go. No militant leftist, no forget that, no militant trade unionist has believed in the impartiality of governmental boards, agencies, courts, etc. since about 1936. Yes, that is right, since Roosevelt. Wake up. Again this brings up the question of the leadership of the labor movement. And I do not mean to turn it over to Andy Stein and his Change to Win Coalition. We may be, as some theorists imagine, a post-industrial society, but the conditions of labor seem more like the classic age of rapacious capitalist accumulation in the 19th century. We need a labor leadership based on a program of labor independence and struggle for worker rights- and we need it damn soon.


THIS IS PART OF A SERIES OF ARTICLES ON THE 2006-2008 ELECTION CYCLE UNDER THE HEADLINE- FORGET THE DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS, GREENS-BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!

*SACCO AND VANZETTI- LESSONS FOR LABOR DEFENSE

Click on title to link to Holt Labor Library website for more source information about the Sacco and Vanzetti case. This is also a good source for many other labor issues.

Markin comment:

Here is an article on the Sacco-Vanzetti case that should be of interest to the radical public. Of particular note, for those of us today who call for working class-centered defense actions, is the work of the International Labor Defense in building the united fronts around the Sacco-Vanzetti case. Additionally, note the description of the role played by the by that time reformist Socialist Party in catering to the liberals around a 'retrial' defense for the two rather than a call for freedom. Some things just never change. I would only add that in my experience in labor and civil rights defense cases those liberal 'masses' the reformists are always trying not to offend in order to keep the movement 'growing' would come around the cases on a 'freedom' slogan just as easily as a 'retrial' slogan. As for the rest I ask this question- Is the quest for prominent signatures on a petition, by itself, really going to get anyone out of jail? And the Sacco and Vanzetti defense is really the proof of that. The real problem is catering to the fickle and threadbare 'professional liberals' and their hangers-on. That is when the trouble really begins. Learn that lesson well.

Workers Vanguard No. 897 31 August 2007

80th Anniversary of Legal Lynching

Lessons of the Fight to Free Sacco and Vanzetti

Free Mumia Abu-Jamal! Free All Class-War Prisoners!

Part One

August 23 marked the anniversary of the executions of anarchist workers Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in Massachusetts in 1927. Arrested in May 1920 at the height of the anti-immigrant Red Scare that followed the 1917 Russian Revolution, the two were convicted the next year on frame-up murder and robbery charges. Sacco, a skilled worker in a shoe factory, and Vanzetti, who supported himself as a fish peddler, were singled out because they were Italian immigrants and because they had dedicated their lives to fighting for the emancipation of the working class.

With their executions, Sacco and Vanzetti joined a long list of working-class fighters subjected to the barbaric death penalty or entombed in prison by the rulers of "democratic" American capitalism: the Haymarket martyrs, labor organizers and anarchists executed in 1887; Joe Hill, Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) activist framed up on murder charges and killed by a firing squad in Utah in 1915; Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, also framed up on murder charges stemming from a bomb explosion at a 1916 San Francisco "Preparedness" rally that drummed up support for U.S. entry into World War I, an interimperialist war. (Mooney and Billings were released from prison in 1939.) Up to their last breaths, Sacco and Vanzetti remained unbowed. As the guards strapped him in the electric chair, Sacco declared, "Viva 1'anarchia." Moments later, Vanzetti turned to the warden and stated, "I am innocent of all crime, not only of this one, but all. I am an innocent man." He was electrocuted within minutes.

The story of Sacco and Vanzetti is also one of militant struggle for their lives and freedom led by the International Labor Defense (ILD), associated with the early Communist Party (CP). The U.S. affiliate of the International Red Aid (MOPR), which was established by the Communist International, the ILD blazed a trail of class-struggle defense by mobilizing workers across the U.S. on Sacco and Vanzetti's behalf, in conjunction with MOPR's efforts internationally.

Following the executions, ILD secretary James P. Cannon, a leader of the early CP and later of American Trotskyism, drew the lessons of this struggle in an article in the ILD's Labor Defender (October 1927) titled, "A Living Monument to Sacco and Vanzetti." Cannon wrote: "In this act of assassination the ruling class of America shows its real face to the world. The mask of 'democracy' is thrown aside." In appealing for workers solidarity, Cannon pointed out, the ILD "endeavored to link up the fight for them with the general defense of the scores of labor prisoners confined in the penitentiaries today and with the broader fight of the toiling masses for liberation from the yoke of capitalism."

That is the perspective that guides the work of the Partisan Defense Committee—a class-struggle legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League. The work of the ILD provides vital lessons for working-class militants, leftists and radical youth in the struggles of today, in particular the fight for the life and freedom of Mumia Abu-Jamal. A Black Panther Party spokesman in his youth, later an award-winning journalist and supporter of the MOVE organization, Mumia was framed up on false charges for the 9 December 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner and sentenced to death explicitly for his political views. Mumia's case is the racist and political frame-up of an innocent man. As we have stressed since the PDC first took up his cause some 20 years ago, the road to his freedom lies in mobilizing the proletariat in the U.S. and internationally, whose social power lies in its numbers, organization and ability to bring production to a halt.

The similarities between the frame-ups of Sacco and Vanzetti and of Mumia are striking. All three were victimized for their political beliefs and activities. Sacco and Vanzetti were among the anarchists targeted for repression by the federal government; Mumia had been targeted by the FBI and Philadelphia cops from the time he was a 15-year-old spokesman for the Black Panthers, also earning their wrath for his later defense of the MOVE organization against brutal cop attacks. Both cases featured jury-rigging, concealment of evidence, coercion of witnesses and phony ballistics, with trials presided over by judges openly biased against the defendants.

In 1924, after denying a motion for a new trial for Sacco and Vanzetti, Judge Webster Thayer told Dartmouth College professor James Richardson, "Did you see what I did with those anarchistic bastards the other day?" (quoted in Herbert Ehrmann, The Case That Will Not Die [1969]). At the time of Mumia's 1982 trial, Judge Albert Sabo was overheard by a court reporter boasting, "I'm going to help them fry the n—r." In both cases, another man ultimately confessed, absolving the defendants of any involvement, only to have the courts disregard the confessions. And for Mumia as well as for Sacco and Vanzetti, workers and oppressed around the world rallied to their support, seeing their own struggles in the fight for their freedom.

Of crucial importance is that in the Sacco and Vanzetti case—as in Mumia's case today—the policy of class-struggle defense was pitted against illusions sown by bourgeois liberals, trade-union misleaders and reformist leftists in the "fairness" of capitalist justice. Up to the day of Sacco and Vanzetti's execution, the ILD waged a tireless fight for unity in action on their behalf, based on the class struggle. The ILD supported using any legal means available for Sacco and Vanzetti. But as Cannon insisted, the fight for Sacco and Vanzetti had to be taken to the "supreme court of the masses." At every turn of the legal battle—motions for a new trial, appeal before Massachusetts' highest court, petitions for clemency or appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court—the ILD fought against those who undermined the struggle by preaching reliance on the black-robed justices or the Massachusetts governor, a policy accompanied by slanders, exclusions and even physical attacks against the ILD and CP.

A Proletarian Cause

By the time of the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, their cause had been taken up by a wide spectrum of organizations and prominent individuals: from labor unions and socialist organizations in the U.S. to Members of Parliament in Britain and world-renowned writers and artists. Albert Einstein signed a protest to U.S. president Calvin Coolidge. Playwright George Bernard Shaw denounced the frame-up, while Pulitzer prizewinner Edna St. Vincent Millay publicized their cause in her poems. Upton Sinclair, author of The Jungle, the classic muckraking novel about the meatpacking industry, championed their defense as did John Dos Passos in his 1927 pamphlet Facing the Chair. Sacco and Vanzetti were later memorialized in paintings by Ben Shahn, music by Woodie Guthrie, Ennio Morricone and Joan Baez, and in plays and movies.

An article by Harvard law professor and later Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter in the Atlantic Monthly (March 1927), later expanded into the book The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti, laid bare the legal farce to a national and international audience. Frankfurter's book created such a stir that the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, former president William Howard Taft, blasted it as "vicious propaganda" and Frankfurter's phone was tapped.

Support for Sacco and Vanzetti was notable for its breadth, including from liberal figures like Frankfurter who saw in their frame-up a stain on the image of American democracy. But their case belongs to the international proletariat. As early as 1921, there were protests in European capitals like London, Rome and Paris, as well as in Casablanca, Morocco, Mexico City, Caracas, Venezuela and Montevideo, Uruguay. The identification of workers around the world with the two militants was captured by the Syndicate of Truck Drivers of the Port of Veracruz, Mexico, who in a 1921 protest demanded, "Free Sacco and Vanzetti or the proletarian world will rip out your guts!" In the U.S., various unions and even the conservative American Federation of Labor (AFL) tops, along with the Socialist Party (SP), IWW and other leftist and civil libertarian groups, would also add their voices.

Organized defense of Sacco and Vanzetti was initiated by Italian anarchists in Boston and joined shortly after by a number of civil libertarians. But it was the intervention of the International Red Aid and the ILD in the U.S. that played a central role in the proletarian protest movement. And at a time when executions routinely took place shortly after convictions, it was the mobilization of millions that kept Sacco and Vanzetti alive for six years.

The Communist International and the CP in the U.S. issued appeals for a worldwide campaign for Sacco and Vanzetti in the fall of 1921. The first issue of Labor Herald (March 1922), publication of the CP-allied Trade Union Educational League, called for "Labor! Act at Once to Rescue Sacco and Vanzetti!" The CP's Daily Worker reported on each twist and turn in the case and regularly reported on protests internationally. In a front-page appeal, the CP called in the Daily Worker (27 December 1924) for "all organizations of workers in America to join with it in a united front for Sacco and Vanzetti, against their capitalist enemies and for their immediate release."

The Sacco and Vanzetti case was a feature of the founding convention of the ILD in 1925. The ILD grew out of discussions in Moscow between James P. Cannon and ex-"Wobbly" Big Bill Haywood. Non-sectarian labor defense had been a theme of Workers (Communist) Party propaganda since its inception, but the ILD gave it flesh and blood. A former IWW member himself, Cannon had a history of experience in labor defense cases. He recalled, "I came from the background of the old movement when the one thing that was absolutely sacred was unity on behalf of the victims of capitalist justice" (quoted in Bryan Palmer, James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928 [2007]). Seeking to overcome the limitations of past labor defense practices, in which each case would lead to the establishment anew of an ad hoc defense committee, Cannon sought to build a labor-based defense organization for the entire workers movement.

As Cannon described in The First Ten Years of American Communism (1962), the ILD was founded especially to take up the plight of "any member of the working class movement, regardless of his views, who suffered persecution by the capitalist courts because of his activities or his opinions." The ILD fused the IWW tradition of class-struggle, non-sectarian defense—captured in the Wobbly slogan, "An injury to one is an injury to all"—with the internationalism of the Bolshevik Revolution. Upon its founding, the ILD identified 106 class-war prisoners in the U.S. and instituted the policy of financially assisting them and their families. Within a little more than a year, the ILD had branches in 146 cities with 20,000 individual members as well as 75,000 members of unions and other workers organizations collectively affiliated to the ILD.

The ILD publicized Sacco and Vanzetti's struggle and organized rallies and political strikes to demand their freedom. The ILD struggled to prevent the workers' militancy and class solidarity from being dissipated by the liberals, social democrats and AFL tops who preached the inherent justice of the capitalist courts. The ILD mobilized on the basis of the united front, seeking maximum unity in struggle of the various organizations standing for defense of Sacco and Vanzetti while giving a thorough airing of the political differences between the CP/ILD and others. The slogan "march separately, strike together" embodies the two aims of the united-front tactic: class unity and the political fight for a communist program.

The international protest movement wrote a historic page in the textbook of class-struggle defense. The ILD initiated 500 May Day Sacco and Vanzetti meetings in cities across the country and played a key role in organizing labor protests and strikes, from a rally of 20,000 in New York City's Union Square in April 1927 to protests and strikes involving hundreds of thousands on the eve of the executions. The ILD understood that in order to stop the executions and win their freedom, it could rely only on mounting such a powerful wave of labor action that the capitalist rulers would refrain from carrying out their plans.

However, the anti-Communist AFL tops sabotaged the strike movement at decisive moments, abetted by the SP social democrats and others. Countless articles and books have since been written vilifying the CP and ILD—from those that acknowledge a "miscarriage" of justice in the case to others preposterously claiming that either Sacco or both men were guilty. Representative of the former is the newly published Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind by Bruce Watson, which parrots anti-Communist slanders passed on for generations, from the grotesque claim that the CP couldn't have cared less whether Sacco and Vanzetti lived or died to the lie that the ILD pocketed the money they raised for the defense.

The Red Scare

Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested on 5 May 1920 amid a virulent anti-immigrant, anti-Red hysteria. When U.S. imperialism entered the First World War, the government implemented a plethora of repressive measures criminalizing antiwar activity. The 1917 Espionage Act mandated imprisonment for any act deemed to interfere with the recruitment of troops. Haunted by the spectre of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the following year Congress passed the Sedition Act that made criticizing the "U.S. form of government" a felony.

The Red Scare hit full stride in 1919. That year saw the crest of a wave of labor radicalism that swept Europe in response to the carnage of WWI and under the impact of the Russian Revolution. In the U.S., the ranks of the SP swelled to more than 100,000, mostly foreign-born workers, with two-thirds supporting the pro-Bolshevik left wing. The U.S. was hit by the biggest strike wave up to that time, as four million workers walked off their jobs in response to inflation induced by the war. In Seattle, a general strike brought the city to a halt for five days in February 1919, while later that year longshoremen refused to load munitions being sent to counterrevolutionaries seeking to overthrow the young Soviet workers state.

The U.S. bourgeoisie whipped up hysteria over a series of bombings attributed to anarchists. After an attempt to bomb his home in June 1919, U.S. attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer unleashed an additional wave of repression, ranting that revolution was "licking at the altars of the churches, leaping into the belfry of the school bell, crawling into the sacred corners of American homes, seeking to replace marriage vows with libertine laws, burning up the foundation of society." In November the Palmer Raids were launched with the arrests of over 3,000 foreign-born radicals. Ultimately, at least 6,000 would be deported. As the world capitalist order stabilized, the 1920s in the U.S., now the world's chief capitalist power, was a decade of rampant reaction: further anti-immigrant legislation was passed in 1921 and 1924; anti-trust laws were used to break strikes; labor militants and Communists were thrown in jail. Growing by leaps and bounds, the Ku Klux Klan marched 40,000-strong in Washington, D.C.

Sacco and Vanzetti came to symbolize those caught in the web of repression. Each had come to the United States in 1908. Within five years they had become anarchists and subscribers to the Italian-language anarchist newspaper Cronaca Sovversiva (Chronicle of Subversion) of Luigi Galleani. Sacco's name appeared frequently in the paper's column announcing organizing activities, particularly raising money for political prisoners and jailed strikers. Sacco helped raise funds for workers and their arrested leaders during the 1912 textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts. The following year he helped organize strike pickets at the Hopedale Paper Mill and in December 1916 was one of three Massachusetts anarchists arrested for holding a meeting without a permit in solidarity with striking iron workers in Minnesota. Also in 1916, Vanzetti raised funds to support strikers at the giant Plymouth Cordage plant, at which he had previously worked.

Sacco and Vanzetti met for the first time in 1917 in Mexico, where many Galleanists had gone to avoid registering for the draft. Sacco returned to the U.S. after a few months. Vanzetti returned later, at a time of intense repression against Cronaca Sovversiva, including repeated raids on its offices and confiscation of the paper, which was banned from the mails. In February 1918, federal agents raided the Cronaca office in Lynn, Massachusetts, seizing 5,000 addresses of subscribers, including Sacco and Vanzetti. Eighty Galleanists were arrested, and Galleani himself was deported in 1919.

The Frame-Up

On 24 December 1919, an attempt was made to rob a payroll truck as it approached the L. Q. White shoe factory in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. When payroll guards fired back, the two gunmen fled to a waiting black car which drove off. Witnesses described the gunmen as "foreigners." One who fired a shotgun was said to have a dark complexion and black moustache. On 15 April 1920, two employees of the Slater & Morrill shoe company in South Braintree, outside of Boston, were attacked by two men as they carried the factory payroll. Paymaster Frederick Parmenter and his assistant Alessandro Berardelli were shot and killed, and the bandits escaped with others in a dark-colored car.

Three weeks later, on May 5, Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested in a trap set by Bridgewater police chief Michael Stewart, who sought to pin both robberies on anarchists. The two anarchists, along with their comrades Ricardo Orciani and Mike Boda, had sought to retrieve Boda's car from a West Bridgewater garage where it was being repaired. As prearranged with Chief Stewart, the owner refused to turn over the car, and his wife called the cops. After the anarchists left the garage, Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested on a streetcar to Boston.

Never told that they were robbery suspects, Sacco and Vanzetti believed that they were being arrested for their political activities. In his court testimony, Vanzetti described the questioning by Stewart: "He asked me why we were in Bridgewater, how long I know Sacco, if I am a Radical, if I am an anarchist or Communist, and he asked me if I believe in the government of the United States."

The immediate backdrop to their arrests was the death two days before of fellow anarchist Andrea Salsedo, who had plunged 14 floors from the Department of Justice office in New York City. Arrested in February,Salsedo and Roberto Elia had been held incommunicado. In late April, Grupo Autonomo, a cell of Italian anarchists, had sent Vanzetti to New York to obtain information about the two. There he was advised by the Italian Defense Committee to dump any radical literature as more raids were anticipated. For that purpose, on May 5 they went to retrieve Boda's car. When arrested, they did not tell the cops the purpose of their visit to the garage.

Vanzetti was first tried on frame-up charges for the failed robbery in Bridgeport in an attempt by the state to stick either him or Sacco with a criminal record before trial on the Braintree murder charges. Felix Frankfurter described the farce in The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti (1927):

"The evidence of identification of Vanzetti in the Bridgewater case bordered on the frivolous, reaching its climax in the testimony of a little newsboy who, from behind the telegraph pole to which he had run for refuge during the shooting, had caught a glimpse of the criminal and 'knew by the way he ran he was a foreigner.' Vanzetti was a foreigner, so of course it was Vanzetti!"

Despite the testimony of 18 witnesses that he was in Plymouth selling eels at the time, Vanzetti was convicted of assault charges. Vanzetti and Sacco were then immediately indicted for the Braintree murders.

The murder trial began on 31 May 1921 in Dedham, Massachusetts, with a platoon of cops armed with riot guns stationed on the courthouse steps. Even a federal agent noted that "the feeling in Dedham against Italians is very strong, and will probably get stronger as the trial progresses" (quoted in William Young and David E. Kaiser, Postmortem: New Evidence in the Case of Sacco and Vanzetti [1985]). Five of the jurors were chosen from a pool of personal acquaintances of a sheriff's deputy. Jury foreman Walter Ripley was a former police chief who began every court session by ostentatiously standing and saluting the flag. When a friend told Ripley before the trial that he didn't believe Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty, Ripley snapped back, "Damn them, they ought to hang them anyway!"

In his opening remarks, Judge Thayer called on the jurors to render service "with the same spirit of patriotism, courage and devotion to duty as was exhibited by our soldier boys across the seas." With Thayer's support, prosecutor Frederick Katzmann cross-examined Sacco as to whether his collection of anarchist and socialist literature was "in the interests of the United States." To inflame the jury, Katzmann asked repeated questions about their avoiding the draft by going to Mexico, and in his jury instructions Judge Thayer repeatedly referred to Sacco and Vanzetti as "slackers."

As in Mumia's 1982 frame-up trial, there was a total lack of evidence. None of the stolen loot was ever found on or near them. Thirteen alibi witnesses placed Vanzetti in Plymouth selling fish. Witnesses also testified that Sacco was in Boston at the time of the killing. Among them was a clerk from the Italian consulate, where on the day of the killing Sacco had gone to get a passport.

Eyewitnesses initially told the cops that they had not seen enough to identify the gunman; they were coerced to change their accounts. Two of them initially identified a photo of New York bank robber Anthony Palmisano, who was in prison at the time, as that of the shooter. Witness Lola Andrews, a part-time nurse with a history of prostitution and insurance fraud, identified Sacco as a man whom she asked for directions shortly before the shooting. On cross-examination, Andrews conceded that she was pressured by Katzmann to say that Sacco was that man. Other eyewitnesses testified that Sacco was not the killer. Barbara Liscomb testified that the gunman she saw standing over Berardelli looked directly at her, and it wasn't Sacco. Additional witnesses were concealed by the prosecution, such as Roy Gould, who was crossing the street when he was shot at by someone in the getaway car. The description of the shooter Gould gave to the cops could not have been that of either Sacco or Vanzetti.

Equally specious was the ballistics evidence. Six .32 calibre bullets were removed from Parmenter and Berardelli, ruling out the .38 revolver Vanzetti had on him when arrested. There was no formal record of custody for the bullets to document who handled them and when. All of the witnesses testified that there was only one gunman and only one pistol used. This was confirmed by the doctor performing the autopsy, George McGrath, who testified to the grand jury that all of the bullets "looked exactly alike," with the same markings. Nevertheless, the prosecution came up with a "Bullet III" that, unlike the others, had a left twist, claiming that this was from Sacco's .32.

In a post-trial affidavit submitted by the defense in 1923, the state's chief ballistics expert, Captain Proctor, noted that he had told the prosecutor that if asked specifically whether tests showed that Bullet III passed through Sacco's gun, he would have answered no. But after repeated badgering by the D.A., Proctor agreed to testify that the bullet was consistent with one from Sacco's gun. Proctor later stated that he never believed the bullet passed through Sacco's gun.
Despite the utter lack of evidence, the jury returned with guilty verdicts after only five hours of deliberation. In December 1921, Judge Thayer turned down a motion for a new trial. Though conceding the weakness of the prosecution's case, Thayer ruled that "the evidence that convicted these defendants was circumstantial and was evidence that is known in law as 'consciousness of guilt'," supposedly manifested by the lies Sacco and Vanzetti told when arrested in order to protect themselves and their comrades. As the 1927 ILD pamphlet Labor's Martyrs written by Max Shachtman put it, "The consciousness of guilt attributed to Sacco and Vanzetti was nothing but a healthy consciousness of the class struggle and the methods of the enemies of the working class."

Parallels with Frame-Up of Mumia

Everything used to convict Sacco and Vanzetti—phony ballistics, terrorization of witnesses, use of the defendants' political background to inflame the jury—would be replicated in Mumia's trial 60 years later. Prosecutor Joseph McGill argued to the nearly all-white jury that Mumia's Black Panther Party membership 12 years earlier proved that he had been planning to kill a cop. The prosecutors' two main witnesses were coerced into changing their testimony, and witnesses who could exonerate Mumia were terrorized into not coming forward.

As documented in the PDC pamphlet The Fight to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal—Mumia Is Innocent!, a ballistics expert testified that the fatal bullet was "consistent" with Mumia's gun—but there is no evidence that Mumia's gun, a .38 calibre, was even fired that night, or even what gun was used! The Medical Examiner's report states that Faulkner was shot with a .44 calibre bullet. A witness to the shooting, William Singletary, said that the killer used a .22 calibre. Years later, Arnold Beverly came forward to confess to the killing and said that the gun he used was a .22. As part of a broad-ranging concealment and doctoring of evidence, there is a missing bullet fragment from Faulkner's wound and a missing Medical Examiner's X-ray of Faulkner's body.

The most spectacular evidence that Sacco and Vanzetti and later Mumia did not commit the crimes for which they were sentenced to death consisted of the confessions of professional criminals exonerating them. And in both cases, the courts threw out the evidence.

In November 1925, Celestino Madeiros, in Dedham prison awaiting an appeal for his 1924 conviction for murdering a bank guard, passed a note to Sacco stating, "I hear by confess to being in the south Braintree shoe company crime and Sacco and Vanzetti was not in said crime" (The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti). Medeiros subsequently swore an affidavit stating that the robbery was carried out by a group fitting the description of the Morelli gang, which was wanted for a series of freight train robberies, and that five others were involved. Shortly after the robbery, Medeiros had $2,800 in the bank, which would represent his share of the stolen payroll. Two friends of Medeiros later confirmed that he had described to them the role he and the Morellis played. Many years later, in his book My Life in the Mafia, Vincent Teresa described a meeting with Frank Morelli in the 1950s during which Morelli complained about a Boston Globe article accusing his gang of involvement in the Braintree murders. Morelli told him, "What they said was true, but it's going to hurt my kid."

In 2001, Marlene Kamish and Eliot Grossman, attorneys for Mumia at the time, submitted to state and federal courts the affidavit of Arnold Beverly that he, and not Mumia, shot officer Faulkner. According to Beverly, he was hired, along with someone else, to do so by cops and the mob because Faulkner was a problem for corrupt cops, interfering with rackets, bribery, drug dealing, etc. Beverly's testimony is supported by a mountain of evidence and ties together loose threads previously unexplained. Beverly had sworn his confession in 1999 to PDC counsel Rachel Wolkenstein, who was on Mumia's legal team at that time but who resigned that year when his lead attorney, Leonard Weinglass, along with Dan Williams, suppressed Beverly's confession.

The ILD waged a hard political battle against those who threw up obstacles to class-struggle defense of Sacco and Vanzetti. Today we face similar obstacles, and then some, in our effort to mobilize labor-centered protest to demand Mumia's freedom on the basis that he is an innocent man. The Sacco and Vanzetti case occurred in a period marked by the October Revolution, which inspired militant fighters around the world and drew a sharp dividing line between those who defended the Soviet Union and those who sided with the capitalist rulers. Today's world is profoundly shaped by the impact of the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet workers state in 1991-92, following decades of Stalinist betrayal. As the bourgeois rulers proclaim the lie of the "death of communism," the bulk of the left, which in the main joined in the imperialists' anti-Soviet campaigns, places its political activity solidly within the framework of the "democratic" capitalist order.

Whereas in Sacco and Vanzetti's case it was the prosecution who vilified the Medeiros confession, today many liberals and reformist leftists among Mumia's defenders sling mud at the Beverly confession and even cast doubt on Mumia's own 2001 statement that he did not shoot Daniel Faulkner. Representative of these types is David Lindorff, whose book Killing Time: An Investigation Into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (2003) is dedicated to trashing the Beverly evidence. Lindorff states, "I'm not convinced that Mumia Abu-Jamal was simply an innocent bystander" and concludes that Mumia may have shot Faulkner (see "David Lindorff, Michael Schiffmann: Undermining Mumia's Fight for Freedom," WVNo. 892, 11 May).

Why would Mumia's ostensible defenders attack the Beverly confession? The Beverly evidence makes clear that the injustice to Mumia was not the action of one rogue cop, prosecutor or judge but the entire functioning of the capitalist system of injustice. This understanding is directly contrary to the liberal framework of Lindorff & Co., who embrace the very "justice" system that at every level has declared, as in the infamous Dred Scott case, that Mumia has no rights that it is bound to respect. Imbibing bourgeois liberalism, Socialist Action, Workers World Party and other reformist groups helped demobilize what had been a powerful protest movement by subordinating the call for Mumia's freedom to the call for a new trial. In so doing, they have sought to appeal to those in the "mainstream" who see the legal hell that Mumia has been put through as a stain on the image of American "justice."

The political battle against such illusions in capitalist "justice" must be won if labor's social power is to be wielded on Mumia's behalf. Many unions and union organizations have voiced their support for Mumia. But to turn this sentiment into labor protest and strike action requires fighting against the policies of the pro-capitalist union leaders, who see "friends" in the bosses' government and political parties. We fight for a class-struggle defense strategy that places no faith in the justice of the courts and all faith in the power of the workers. In doing this, we honor the memory of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.
[TO BE CONTINUED]

Workers Vanguard No. 898 14 September 2007

80th Anniversary of Legal Lynching

Lessons of the Fight to Free Sacco and Vanzetti

Free Mumia Abu-Jamal! Free All Class-War Prisoners!

Part Two

Part One of this article, which we conclude below, appeared in WV No. 897 (31 August).

Caught up in the anti-immigrant hysteria and Red Scare that swept the U.S. in the aftermath of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, anarchist workers Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were arrested in May 1920 and framed up on murder and robbery charges of which they were manifestly innocent. In an article written after their execution in the Massachusetts electric chair on 23 August 1927, James P. Cannon, at the time a leader of the Workers (Communist) Party (CP) and secretary of the International Labor Defense (ILD) and later the founder of American Trotskyism, declared:

"The electric flames that consumed the bodies of Sacco and Vanzetti illuminated for tens of thousands of workers, in all its stark brutality, the essential nature of capitalist justice in America. The imprisonment, torture and murder of workers is seen more clearly now as part of an organized system of class persecution."
—"A Living Monument to Sacco and Vanzetti," Labor Defender (October 1927)

Pointing to the ILD's role as the leading and organizing center of a protest movement that had rallied millions of workers around the world behind Sacco and Vanzetti's cause, Cannon called for building "a stronger, more united and determined movement for labor defense on a class basis." He noted that "the industrial masters of America" who had carried out the execution to deal a blow to the entire labor movement "were not without allies, both conscious and unconscious, in the camp of the workers themselves." "Sacco and Vanzetti will have died in vain," he wrote, "if the real meaning and the causes of their martyrdom are not understood in all their implications." These lessons are indeed of crucial importance in the struggle against capitalist repression today and are posed with particular urgency in the fight to free Mumia Abu-Jamal who, despite massive evidence of his innocence, was railroaded to death row for his political beliefs and lifetime of struggle against black oppression.

The Defense Movement

With little known about their arrests outside the Boston area, the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti was initially limited to a local group of Italian anarchists who founded the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee. The defense committee won the support of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a well-known radical, and her companion Carlo Tresca, an anarcho-syndicalist who edited the newspaper 77 Martello in New York. The two members of the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) helped line up Fred Moore, who had a long record of defending union militants and radicals, to be lead attorney in the case.

Moore appealed to IWW members, union leaders and socialists to mobilize in defense of Sacco and Vanzetti. The American Civil Liberties Union, of which Flynn was a founding member, and its New England affiliate voiced their support as did a number of prominent liberals, notably the journalists Elizabeth Glendower Evans and Gardner Jackson. Various unions and even the conservative American Federation of Labor (AFL) tops came out in defense of the two workers. As Sacco and Vanzetti faced trial in May 1921, some 64 union locals from across the country contributed to the defense, and a flood of labor support swept in following their conviction in July. As we noted in Part One of this article, in the fall of 1921 the CP and Communist International (CI) called for a worldwide campaign of protest centered on the working class. The AFL passed a resolution in 1922 calling for a new trial and two years later declared Sacco and Vanzetti "victims of race and national prejudice and class hatred."

In a 1927 ILD pamphlet, Max Shachtman described the wide range of support for Sacco and Vanzetti in the workers movement and observed:

"With many of these it was because they realized the class nature of the issues involved in the case; that it was not merely an incident of an accidental 'miscarriage of justice' but that the judge, jury and prosecutor were striking as severe a blow at the labor movement as was struck thirty-five years before in the trial of the Haymarket martyrs. With the others, it was the result of the feelings and pressure from the mass, who felt, however vaguely, a working class kinship with the two agitators."

—Sacco and Vanzetti: Labor's Martyrs

According to Massachusetts court procedure at the time, sentencing was postponed until all post-trial motions and appeals were decided. Although it was clear to everyone that the murder conviction could only mean a death sentence, that sentence was not pronounced until 1927. Sacco and Vanzetti's lawyers, meanwhile, attempted to overturn the conviction with a series of motions before the same biased Judge Webster Thayer who presided over the kangaroo trial and appeals before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court that rubber-stamped Thayer's every move.

Thayer denied the first post-conviction motion for a new trial on Christmas Eve 1921. Beginning the month before and throughout the next two years, a series of six supplemental motions were filed by the defense. In July 1924, with those motions pending, Moore resigned as attorney in the case. With his replacement by William Thompson, the tactics of the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee changed as well. As recounted in Bruce Watson's Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind (2007), Thompson flatly declared that he did not believe "the government was actuated by any ulterior purpose in bringing the charge against them." Despising the mass protest movement, Thompson appealed instead to the legal and business establishment to use its influence on the courts and state house.

In turn, the Boston defense committee called for a stop to the workers' protest actions. As Shachtman described in his pamphlet, for the next two years this strategy "helped to discredit the honest and powerful class support of the toilers.... They demanded the substitution of the movement of the masses by the movement of the lawyers." Shachtman pointed out, "The defense turned more and more towards reliance upon those false friends concerned more with the vindication of 'confidence in our institutions and their capacity to rectify errors,' and 'those high standards which are the pride of Massachusetts justice' than with the vindication of two unknown immigrants."

Based on the Marxist understanding that the courts, cops, prisons and armed forces are core components of the capitalist state—a machinery of organized violence to protect the rule and profits of the exploiting class— the CP and ILD tirelessly fought against illusions in the capitalists' rigged legal system. They fought instead for workers to rely only on their class power, derived from the fact that it is their labor that creates the wealth of society. In his important new biography, James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928 (2007), Bryan Palmer includes a thorough account of Cannon's leadership of the ILD, not least in regard to its efforts in defense of Sacco and Vanzetti.

The CP and ILD were determined that Sacco and Vanzetti would not be added to the long list of labor's martyrs. They understood that mobilizing labor's power in protest and strike action could compel the bourgeois rulers to relent in fear of the social costs that executing or imprisoning the two men for life would bring. They fought as well to imbue militants with the consciousness that to tear down the walls imprisoning fighters against exploitation and oppression once and for all requires a socialist revolution that destroys the capitalist state and replaces it with a workers state, where those who labor rule. In this, they were following the path laid out by Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin, who wrote in his 1902 work What Is To Be Done? that the communist's ideal

"should not be the trade-union secretary, but the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects; who is able to generalise all these manifestations and produce a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation; who is able to take advantage of every event, however small, in order to set forth before all his socialist convictions and his democratic demands, in order to clarify for all and everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat."

Battle of Class Forces

In October 1924, Judge Thayer denied all motions presented by Sacco and Vanzetti's lawyers. In December, the Communist International issued an appeal "To the workers of all countries! To all trade union organizations!" calling to "Organize mass demonstrations! Demand the liberation of Sacco and Vanzetti!" The Daily Worker, newspaper of the Workers (Communist) Party, continued to publicize this struggle, and the party organized a Chicago labor rally for Sacco and Vanzetti on 1 March 1925 and mobilized heavily for rallies in Boston and other cities that day. Shortly after its inception that year, the ILD issued a call for workers internationally to demonstrate solidarity with Sacco and Vanzetti. In a 23 May 1926 letter to the ILD, Vanzetti wrote, "The echo of your campaign in our behalf has reached my heart."

Thayer's 1924 decision was appealed to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, which sat on the case before affirming the convictions on 12 May 1926. Two weeks later, lawyers filed another motion for a new trial based on the affidavit of Celestino Medeiros confessing his involvement in the robbery that led to the murder charges against Sacco and Vanzetti, exonerating the two men. In October, Thayer rejected the Medeiros confession along with affidavits of two federal agents documenting the government's involvement in the frame-up and confirming that the two were targeted for their political activities. This was appealed to the Supreme Judicial Court.

The court proceedings touched off renewed protest activity. Labor Defender published a special "Save Sacco and Vanzetti" issue in July 1926 featuring "An Appeal to American Labor" by Eugene V. Debs, historic spokesman of the Socialist Party. Resolutions on behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti were adopted by the Washington Federation of Labor and the New York Socialist Party.

The ILD initiated Sacco-Vanzetti committees and conferences throughout the U.S. that drew IWW militants, anarchists and delegates from the AFL and other union bodies around the call "Life and Freedom for Sacco and Vanzetti!" These meetings were an application of the tactic of the united front, through which a wide range of workers organizations unite in action around a common call while engaging in political debate based on their own programs. Through this means, the ILD sought to lay the basis for mass labor protest and strikes. The ILD also participated in rallies called by the Boston defense committee and other organizations. Cannon wrote to a wide array of public figures seeking statements in support of Sacco and Vanzetti. But the ILD's primary focus was unleashing labor strikes and protests.

In New York City, the ILD-initiated Sacco-Vanzetti Emergency Committee encompassed individuals and organizations representing nearly half a million workers. Rallies organized by the committee drew over 15,000 in New York's Madison Square Garden on 17 November 1926 and another 25,000 in Union Square the following April. Equally large gatherings were organized by ILD-led committees in Milwaukee, San Jose, Boston, Denver, Seattle and Chicago. Across the country, a network of two to three million workers was enlisted in the committees. The International Red Aid mobilized its organizations around the world, forming united-front committees in hundreds of cities and organizing mass protests. Millions throughout the entirety of the Soviet Union demonstrated in solidarity with the two class-war prisoners.

Thayer's rulings opened up a period of sharpening political struggle over the way forward in this fight that would last up through the executions. The Socialist Party, AFL tops and anarchists organized some working-class protest, at times mobilizing significant forces. But such efforts were in the service of appeals for Sacco and Vanzetti to get their "fair day in court," to be accomplished by tapping into liberal public opinion that hoped to spare the men's lives for the sake of America's "democratic" image. As for the national AFL leadership, rather than issuing a call for labor mobilizations, it pushed a resolution through the October 1926 AFL convention appealing to Congress to investigate the case. The SP and AFL tops undermined the growing mobilization of the workers by looking to the political agencies of the class enemy, a policy accompanied by a vicious anti-Communist campaign of slander and exclusion.

Throughout the 1920s, the SP leadership under Morris Hillquit, which in 1919 had purged the left-wing Socialists who supported the Bolshevik Revolution, waged a campaign against Communist influence in the labor movement that was particularly fierce in the needle trades in New York City. For his part, Matthew Woll, a member of the AFL Executive Council, ranted that the AFL was "the first object of attack by the Communist movement." The same Woll was acting president of the National Civic Federation, an anti-union business group that viciously opposed the campaign for Sacco and Vanzetti's freedom.

In November 1926, the Ohio State Socialist Party refused to join in a rally called by the ILD-initiated Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee, and the SP's New Leader (IS December 1926) retailed lying charges by the Boston defense committee that the CP and ILD had solicited funds for legal defense that were not forwarded and for which no accounting was made. In response to these slanders, Labor Defender (January 1927) published the ILD's accounts and copies of checks forwarded to the Boston committee. The article pointed out that an earlier Labor Defender (September 1926) had printed, as part of its regular practice, an accounting of its receipts and ILD campaign expenses and had called for contributions for legal defense to be sent directly to the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee in Boston rather than to the ILD.

The smears against the ILD were gleefully seized upon by the bourgeois press at the time and are repeated to this day. In answering the blatantly false charge that the ILD had pocketed $500,000 raised for Sacco and Vanzetti's defense, Labor Defender (October 1927) remarked that this slander only aided "the Department of Justice and other agencies which consummated the murder of Sacco and Vanzetti" and now hope to prevent the protest movement from "being drawn into the fight in behalf of the other victims of the frame-up system now in prison or facing trial."

Class-Struggle Defense

With the case again before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, Cannon alluded to the sectarian exclusions and counterposed a class-struggle defense perspective in "Who Can Save Sacco and Vanzetti?" (Labor Defender, January 1927):

"The Sacco-Vanzetti case is no private monopoly, but an issue of the class struggle in which the decisive word will be spoken by the masses who have made this fight their own. It is therefore, necessary to discuss openly the conflicting policies which are bound up with different objectives.

"One policy is the policy of the class struggle. It puts the center of gravity in the protest movement of the workers of America and the world. It puts all faith in the power of the masses and no faith whatever in the justice of the courts. While favoring all possible legal proceedings, it calls for agitation, publicity, demonstrations—organized protest on a national and international scale. It calls for unity and solidarity of all workers on this burning issue, regardless of conflicting views on other questions. This is what has prevented the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti so far. Its goal is nothing less than their triumphant vindication and liberation.

"The other policy is the policy of 'respectability,' of the 'soft pedal' and of ridiculous illusions about 'justice' from the courts of the enemy. It relies mainly on legal proceedings. It seeks to blur the issue of the class struggle. It shrinks from the 'vulgar and noisy' demonstrations of the militant workers and throws the mud of slander on them. It tries to represent the martyrdom of Sacco and Vanzetti as an 'unfortunate' error which can be rectified by the 'right' people proceeding in the 'right' way. The objective of this policy is a whitewash of the courts of Massachusetts and 'clemency' for Sacco and Vanzetti in the form of a commutation to life imprisonment for a crime of which the world knows they are innocent."

The battle between these counterposed strategies took center stage following a 5 April 1927 decision by the Supreme Judicial Court again upholding Judge Thayer. Four days later, the front page of the Daily Worker carried an appeal by Cannon, "From Supreme Court of Capital to Supreme Court of the Masses," in which he wrote, "The New England bourbons want the blood of innocent men. This was decided from the first, only fools expected otherwise. Only fools put faith in the courts of the enemy." Cannon added, "It is time now to appeal finally to the masses. It is time for the workers to say their word."

On April 9, Sacco and Vanzetti were called into Thayer's courtroom for sentence to be pronounced. The two men spoke defiantly. Sacco told the judge, "I know the sentence will be between two classfes, the oppressed class and the rich class, and there will always be collision between one and the other." When Vanzetti got his turn, he stated: "I am suffering because I am a radical and indeed I am a radical; I have suffered because I was an Italian, and indeed I am an Italian;...but I am so convinced to be right that if you could execute me two times, and if I could be reborn two other times, I would live again to do what I have done already" (quoted in Herbert P. Ehrmann, The Case That Will Not Die: Commonwealth vs. Sacco and Vanzetti [1969]). They were sentenced to die in three months.

Following the sentencing, the ILD issued a call for a national conference "of all elements willing to unite to demand and force freedom for Sacco and Vanzetti." On April 16, 20,000 workers filled New York's Union Square in a protest called by the ILD-led Sacco-Vanzetti Emergency Committee. As part of an intensive effort over the next several weeks, more than 500 May Day meetings were organized by the ILD across the U.S and Canada.

The SP's response to the sentencing was to further promote false hopes in bourgeois politicians. The New Leader (16 April 1927) wrote, "The next move is up to Governor Fuller, and there seems to be no doubt that he will have to accede to the world-wide demand that he act to save the lives of the two men." The SP declared the scheduled execution date of July 10 as "a day of national mourning for the death of American justice," while Hillquit called upon "the government and the governor of the State of Massachusetts to order a full and impartial investigation of the whole case" (New Leader, 23 April 1927).

After SP organizers of Sacco-Vanzetti meetings in Philadelphia and Cleveland refused to seat delegates from the ILD and other organizations, Cannon issued a statement printed in the Daily Worker (4 May 1927) condemning the disruption of the "labor reactionaries," noting that "their aim is to isolate the militants and then sabotage the movement." With the social democrats, anarchists and labor tops working to undermine the ILD's efforts, the plan to hold a national Sacco-Vanzetti conference fell through. The Boston defense committee sought to head off growing sentiment in the unions for such a conference by appealing instead for Governor Fuller to appoint a commission to review the case. On June 1, they got their wish, as Fuller announced the appointment of a three-man panel to advise him on Vanzetti's petition for clemency filed the previous month.

The panel was led by Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell, a patrician reactionary who had campaigned for the draconian 1921 Immigration Quota Act, banned black students from living in Harvard dorms, restricted Jewish enrollment at Harvard and opposed legislation reducing child labor in the textile industry. This record did not stop the Boston committee from lauding the commission as "men reputed to be scholarly, of high intelligence and intellectual probity, with minds unswayed by prejudice." The committee advised the governor to implement the power of commutation because that would be "far less likely to undermine public faith in the courts of the Commonwealth." The SP affirmed its faith that "while the members of this commission are conservatives, it is generally believed that their high professional standing gives fair assurance that they will make a report justified by all the facts in the case" (New Leader, 9 July 1927).

Rumors swirled that Fuller would respond to the growing international protests by commuting the death sentences. Recalling how an earlier movement on behalf of class-war prisoners Tom Mooney, who faced execution, and Warren Billings had been sapped by the commutation of Mooney's death sentence to life imprisonment, Cannon cautioned in "Death, Commutation or Freedom?" (Labor Defender, July 1927): "The great movement for Sacco and Vanzetti, which now embraces millions of workers, must not allow itself to be dissolved by a similar subterfuge." Calling a life sentence "a living death," he warned, "The hearts of the Massachusetts executioners have not softened with kindness, and their desire to murder our comrades has not changed.... The working class must reply: Not the chair of death, but life for Sacco and Vanzetti! Not the imprisonment of death, but freedom to Sacco and Vanzetti!"

Political Battle Comes to a Boil

As the scheduled execution date of July 10 neared, the social democrats brought their anti-Communist campaign to a fever pitch, regurgitating the slander about the ILD's fundraising and stepping up their divisive attempts to exclude CP and ILD militants. This came to a head at a mass rally of 25,000 workers in Union Square on July 7. Called by the labor-based Sacco-Vanzetti Liberation Committee (SVLC), some 30 unions joined in the call for a one-hour protest strike that day, bringing out half a million workers. The ILD and its Emergency Committee built heavily for the protest, distributing 200,000 leaflets. The rally went ahead despite the granting of a one-month reprieve by Governor Fuller. In negotiations before the rally, the SVLC had agreed that there would be four platforms, with two allotted to the Emergency Committee. But the SP had other plans, and only two platforms were set up, both controlled by the SP. After a number of Socialist speakers addressed the crowd, a contingent of workers hoisted Ben Gold, a CP member who had led a successful Furriers strike, onto their shoulders. As they approached the podium demanding that Gold speak, SP honcho Abraham Weinberg kicked Gold in the chest, sending him reeling into the crowd. When the workers carried Gold to the other platform, SP bigwig August Claessens attacked him as well.

Claessens and Weinberg then called in the police, who charged the crowd on horseback and broke up the rally. After the attack, SP spokesmen made absolutely clear that driving out the reds took priority over carrying out a united action in defense of Sacco and Vanzetti. The SP's Samuel Friedman baldly stated, "We would rather have the meeting broken up than allow a faker like Gold speak" (Daily Worker, 8 July 1927). The New Leader (16 July 1927) declared that due to "known antagonism" and "charges of misconduct...it had been decided that the Communists were not to be permitted to co-operate in the meetings."

The SP's exclusionism only served to weaken the movement in the face of a furious onslaught by the bourgeois state. As the new execution date of August 10 approached, the ILD helped build a July 31 protest at Boston Common called by the Boston defense committee. As described in the New Leader (13 August 1927), after the cops broke up the SP-led rally at one end of the Common, most of the demonstrators moved to another part of the park, where the Communists held a permit. That rally, too, was dispersed by the cops. Around the country, cops broke up protest meetings with clubs, guns and tear gas.

Governor Fuller denied clemency on August 3. The next day, the ILD's Emergency Committee issued a call for a half-day strike of New York labor on August 9. The labor tops tried their best to sabotage the strike, with the AFL leadership spurning calls from numerous unions and other workers organizations to take action while many local union officials announced in the capitalist press that they opposed the strike. Nonetheless, 50,000 turned out in Union Square, and another 50,000 struck in Philadelphia. A Chicago protest of 20,000 the same day was fired on by the cops. Fuller's denial had finally spurred AFL head William Green to "action," writing Fuller to ask for "executive clemency." As the Daily Worker (10 August) commented, an appeal by Green to AFL unions "would aid tremendously in staying the hand of the executioner! But an appeal to Fuller couched in such honeyed words as Green uses only enhances that vile enemy of labor in the eyes of his class and indirectly sanctions the murders."

As the hour of execution neared, a wave of protests took place around the world. In the U.S., police forces brutally moved against the protesters: offices were raided in New York, Detroit and San Francisco, and meetings were broken up. On the night of August 10, cars of heavily armed cops roamed through Chicago, breaking up every gathering of more than a dozen workers. Earlier that same day, U.S. Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a liberal icon, had turned down a habeas corpus petition for Sacco and Vanzetti, and shortly before midnight they were brought to the death house. A half hour before the time set for execution, Fuller announced a reprieve until midnight, August 22, to allow their attorney to argue a new motion before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.

On August 16, the day of the hearing, the ILD announced plans for protests in 200 cities. The 18 August Daily Worker carried a front-page appeal by Cannon, titled "No Illusions," that warned the "working masses not to be fooled with false hopes and false security." He stressed:

"The great task, therefore, in the few fateful days remaining, up to the last minute of the last hour, is to put all energy, courage and militancy into the organization of mass demonstrations and protest strikes. All brakes upon this movement must be regarded as the greatest danger. All illusions which paralyze the movement must be overcome. All agents of the bosses who try to sabotage and discredit the protest and strike movement must be given their proper name."

Another front-page appeal by Cannon the following day declared: "Put no faith in capitalist justice! Organize the protest movement on a wider scale and with a more determined spirit! Demonstrate and strike for Sacco and Vanzetti!" When the Massachusetts high court turned down another appeal on the 19th, the Emergency Committee called for a mass protest strike on August 22.

On August 20, Oliver Wendell Holmes refused to stay the execution, and a similar request was turned down by Supreme Court Justice Harlan Stone on August 22. Millions took to the streets worldwide. But Sacco and Vanzetti were executed shortly after midnight.

A Mountain of Slander

Eighty years after this legal lynching, various bourgeois journalists and academics continue to regurgitate long-disproved lies about the case. Some portray that the two worker militants were common criminals guilty of coldblooded murder. Others rehash the lie that unlike Vanzetti, Sacco never declared his innocence of the murders. Not only did he do just that in numerous letters that have been published, but his declaration of innocence was carried out of prison by a spy the Feds planted in the cell next to his!

On 24 December 2005, the Los Angeles Times reported the "discovery" of a 1929 letter from Upton Sinclair written after he finished Boston, his novel about the case. Sinclair wrote that he met with Fred Moore, who told him that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty and that he had concocted alibis for them. News of the Sinclair letter was picked up by Jonah Goldberg, an editor of the right-wing National Review, and found a home on various blogs. This was, in fact, old news. Sinclair had written about the discussion in 1953, when he pointed out that Moore had made clear that neither Sacco nor Vanzetti confessed to him and that he had no proof of their guilt. According to Moore's ex-wife, he became embittered after he left the case. In 1963, Sinclair wrote, "Those who believe or declare Sacco was guilty get no support from me" (quoted in Watson, Sacco and Vanzetti).

The primary source of the slanders against Sacco and Vanzetti and those who fought for them is a cabal of Cold Warriors around the National Review, which was founded in 1955 by William F. Buckley Jr. and whose longtime senior editor was renegade ex-Trotskyist James Burnham. At a time when it was generally acknowledged that Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent frame-up victims, a 1961 National Review article by Max Eastman claimed that in 1942 he was told by anarchist Carlo Tresca, "Sacco was guilty, but Vanzetti was not." Eastman had earlier been editor of the left-wing Masses but by the time of his purported conversation with Tresca had become a virulent anti-Communist. In the 1950s, Eastman was a strong supporter of the witchhunting Senator Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

A year after Eastman's article came the book Tragedy in Dedham by Francis Russell, a regular contributor to National Review. Russell claimed that "after his expulsion from the party, James Cannon...was to admit privately—much as Moore did—that he felt Sacco was guilty." (Cannon was expelled from the CP in 1928 along with Max Shachtman and Martin Abern for supporting Leon Trotsky's criticisms of the Stalin-Bukharin leadership of the degenerating Communist International.) Russell would later identify Burnham as his source for that tale.

Cannon responded in a letter to the New Republic (27 April 1963): "The truth is that I have never felt or thought that Sacco was guilty. I have always thought they were innocent, and have never expressed a different thought or feeling, privately or publicly, anywhere at any time." Defending "the memory of Carlo Tresca," a friend of Cannon's who worked closely with him in the Sacco and Vanzetti campaign, he added, "Never, at any time, did I ever hear him express or even intimate any doubt about the innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti. And I never heard any report, or rumor, or gossip, from anyone else who ever heard such a thing about Tresca until Mr. Russell's statement hit me in the eye."

There can be no mistaking that the point to rewriting the history of this case is not just to trash the memory of the two anarchists but to smear labor militancy and revolutionary proletarian opposition to the bloodsoaked capitalist system—i.e., communism. Liberal "defenders" of Sacco and Vanzetti have joined in rehashing the attacks on the ILD and early CP. In her 1977 book The Never-Ending Wrong, Katherine Anne Porter claimed that shortly before the execution she was told by one Communist, "Who wants them saved? What earthly good would they do us alive?" Along with the lies about money and other anti-Communist slanders, this is passed as good coin in Watson's Sacco and Vanzetti. Watson writes of the critical last weeks, "As party members grew increasingly shrill, their callousness appalled sincere supporters. Communists flocking to Boston, Gardner Jackson remembered, unquestionably 'preferred Sacco and Vanzetti dead [rather] than alive'." Watson proclaims, "Sacco and Vanzetti were far more useful to Communists than Communists would be to them."

At the height of the fight to save Sacco and Vanzetti, the CP argued against any in the movement who argued that their execution would ultimately redound in the favor of the working class: "The workers holding to such an opinion must be made to realize that martyrs are a confession of weakness on the part of the laboring masses. The fact that the bosses can railroad to prison or put to death our leaders with impunity becomes a weapon of intimidation in their hand and does help to cow and keep in submission the less militant mass.... The more powerful labor becomes, the more effective it is in making its demands heeded, the less will it have martyrs" (Daily Worker Magazine, 28 May 1927).

Mumia and Class-Struggle Defense

The case of Sacco and Vanzetti contains powerful lessons for the fight to free class-war prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was sentenced to death after being falsely convicted of the 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. As we noted in Part One, the overwhelming evidence of Mumia's innocence includes the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot Faulkner. As with the Medeiros confession exonerating Sacco and Vanzetti, the courts have refused to hear the Beverly confession and its supporting evidence.

The Partisan Defense Committee has secured statements from hundreds of prominent individuals and labor leaders and organizations internationally demanding that Mumia be freed on the basis that he is an innocent man and the victim of a racist, political frame-up. As Mumia's case enters its final stages, it is crucially important that such statements be turned into labor action. But to make that happen requires conducting the kind of hard political struggle that the CP and ILD waged against the reactionary labor tops as well as those "socialists" who obstruct class-struggle defense by sowing illusions in the capitalist injustice system. Among Mumia's ostensible defenders are several left groups that replicate the reformist outlook and strategy of the SP of the 1920s but lack the kind of base it had in the working class. A typical example is Jeff Mackler's Socialist Action (SA), which represents nothing so much as the New Leader of today.

Where Cannon warned against illusions in the black-robed justices, Mackler hailed the December 2005 announcement by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals that it would hear only three of Mumia's two dozen issues on appeal as a "decision that will likely stun the Pennsylvania legal establishment" and opined that there was little likelihood that the court would reinstate the death sentence (Socialist Action, December 2005). Echoing the New Leader's praise for the "high professional standing" of the Lowell Commission, Mackler wrote in Socialist Action (June 2007) about the oral argument before the Third Circuit the previous month that several decisions on other matters relevant to Mumia's case "marked this court as among the few remaining 'liberal' juridical institutions in the country." Mackler is co-coordinator of the Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, which offers a sample letter to send to Democratic Pennsylvania governor Edward Rendell that concludes, "We urge your intervention to guarantee that justice is done." This is the same Ed Rendell who as Philly D.A. in 1981-82 prosecuted Mumia!

We honor Sacco and Vanzetti by fighting for the life and freedom of Mumia Abu-Jamal in the class-struggle tradition of the ILD. When Mumia faced an August 1995 execution date, an international wave of protest that crucially included trade unionists played a major role in the court's decision to grant a stay of execution. At the same time, liberals and reformists sought to steer that struggle into relying on the racist bourgeois legal system to secure "justice" for Mumia. And it was that liberal strategy of reliance on the capitalist courts that demobilized Mumia's army of supporters around the world. Today the need to revitalize the movement for Mumia's freedom is posed pointblank. As we wrote in "Class-Struggle Defense vs. Faith in Capitalist 'Justice'" (WV No. 892, 11 May): "Indeed, labor's power must be brought to bear on behalf of Mumia. But it is self-evident that this can only be done by mobilizing independently of the forces of the capitalist state that framed up this innocent man."