Markin comment:
I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution that to expect that a constitutional amendment to limit corporate influence in their capitalist system would be effective.
*******
The next meeting of Greater Boston Move To Amend will be April 19, 2012 at 7pm (meet for cookies at 6:30) in the YWCA's Sylvia Room, at 7 Temple Street. Central Square, Cambridge
Help Generate and Demonstrate Public Support For a Constitutional Amendment to Restore Democracy to the People
A Move to Amend Priority Campaign for 2012
In Massachusetts, voters can put what is called a "public policy question" on the state ballot in state representative and senatorial districts. Public policy questions allow voters to show legislators how a majority of voters in their district wants them to vote on an issue. While these votes do not bind the legislator, they are a concrete way to demonstrate voter "will."
Move to Amend (MTA) in Massachusetts has chosen this as a priority activity for 2012 because it enables us to educate large numbers of people and demonstrate wide public support for our goals, so that legislators will eventually vote to amend our constitution and restore our democracy.
We can decide on the number of legislative districts we want to work in, and identify the best ones for educating voters and winning strong majority votes. The strategy will be to choose districts where there is a strong volunteer group to do an effective public education campaign.
Common Cause Massachusetts has also chosen public policy questions as a priority strategy in Massachusetts, and MTA expects to work closely with them on this effort. We hope many other groups
will join in.
State Process and Timeline:
In early April, MTA and Common Cause will submit proposed language to state officials -the language that we want to appear on the ballot. They give advice as to whether it has the correct form to appear on the ballot.
By April 24, the Secretary of the Commonwealth has petition forms ready for the public.
We collect signatures from voters in any district we have chosen. Deadline for submitting signatures to the local registrars is July 3. For state rep. districts we must collect 200 valid voter signatures, therefore we should seek at least 260 signatures. For state senate districts we must
collect 1,200 valid signatures, and therefore should seek 1500-1600 signatures.
The local registrars validate the signatures and submit them to the state by August 1 (this is when we will know for sure that the question will appear on that districts ballot.)
The Secretary of the Commonwealth and Attorney General determine the final language that can go on the ballot and determine which districts have met the required signatures.
The question appears on the ballot on November 6, state and national election day, in every district that qualifies.
To see the Secretary of the Commonwealth web page on this go to: http://www.sec.state.ma.us/ele/eleguide/guidepubpol.htm
The campaign is a vital step toward winning Massachusetts' support for a constitutional amendment to defend democracy from undue corporate influence and unrestrained political spending!
We hope you are willing to participate and we want to put this question to the voters in every district where we can win.
Would you be willing to help with this ballot campaign in your district?
If you're thinking of getting involved, contact us so we can help determine the feasibility of a successful effort in your district. Write to campaign@gbmta.org.
During the campaign, we can provide materials to distribute, fact sheets to explain our goals, training for volunteers and general advice! But we will have to determine whether you have the volunteers to do a successful public education campaign in your district.
Your first step is to gather a group in your district and ask yourselves, whether you have the capability to help with:
Collecting the necessary signatures on the petition (May through July 2)
Raising some funds for materials (by August 1)
Distributing literature throughout the district (events, door to door, etc.)
Conducting a public forum or two (best in September and October)
Placing letters to the editor or other stories in local papers and media
Covering polls on voting day with handouts and signs (November 6)
Ballot Language
Move to Amend and Common Cause in Massachusetts have worked on ballot language that both groups can support and this language is what we expect to put on the ballot.
The state requires that the Public Policy question begin with: "Shall the (senator or representative) from this district be instructed to vote in favor of... " and our expected language is:
Shall the state (senator/representative) from this district he instructed to vote in favor of a resolution calling upon Congress to propose and send to the States for ratification an amendment to the U. S. Constitution stating that 1) corporations are not entitled to the constitutional rights of human beings and 2) both Congress and the States may place limitations on political contributions and political spending.
This language may slightly change upon further consultation with state officials, but we expect this to be very close to final wording.
Showing posts with label socialist revolution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label socialist revolution. Show all posts
Monday, April 16, 2012
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Trayvon Martin: Killed for Being Black in America
Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League website.
***********
Workers Vanguard No. 999
30 March 2012
Capitalist State Fuels Racist Vigilantes
Trayvon Martin: Killed for Being Black in America
MARCH 26—The racist killing one month ago of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin by a vigilante in Sanford, Florida, has touched off a wave of protest that continues in cities and towns coast to coast. Trayvon’s anguished parents have spoken a bitter truth known to all black families: what happened on February 26 could happen to anyone like him—at the hands of either lone-wolf racists or police thugs-in-blue. Nearly 50 years after civil rights legislation established formal legal equality, a young black man had his life stolen simply for being who he was in this sick, racist society. And his killer to this day remains free, his act sanctioned by a state law that gives free rein to such vigilantism.
The basic story is well known. Trayvon departed from his father’s girlfriend’s home in a gated community to purchase Skittles and an iced tea at a 7-Eleven store. He did not return. Trayvon had been spotted by George Zimmerman, a self-appointed Neighborhood Watch enforcer. When Zimmerman called police, he described Trayvon, who had put on his hoodie in the rain, as a “real suspicious guy.” A frightened Trayvon was aware that he was being followed by a white male stranger in a car, a really suspicious guy. So he ran for safety after seeing Zimmerman stop and exit the car. Zimmerman pursued Trayvon, complaining to the police department that “these assholes...always get away.” The cops say that when they arrived, they found Trayvon dead with a gunshot to the chest and Zimmerman armed with a 9mm pistol and splattered with blood.
Trayvon’s parents then faced sheer contempt from Sanford police. Tracy Martin, the father, believed his son was missing after he didn’t return from the store. The following day, he called to report a missing person, to no avail. He then called 911 and was asked to describe his son. Police officers eventually arrived to show him a picture of his dead son with blood dripping from his mouth. Police had listed the slain teen as a “John Doe” and made no attempt to identify his body or locate his family on the day of his death.
Police who were at the crime scene helped build an alibi for Zimmerman, himself a cop wannabe. Zimmerman claimed that he fired in self-defense when Trayvon, three inches shorter and nearly 100 pounds lighter than himself, gained the upper hand in an alleged scuffle. At least three witnesses heard the “desperate wail of a child, a gunshot and then silence.” So the cops “corrected” one witness to claim that the cry for help came not from Trayvon but from Zimmerman. The officer in charge was also in charge in 2010 when cops covered up the assault on a homeless black man by a police lieutenant’s son. (The white assailant was charged only after videotape of the assault appeared on YouTube.) In 2005, a black teenager in Sanford was fatally shot in the back by two white security guards, one of them a police volunteer and the other a cop’s son. A judge dismissed the charges against them for “lack of evidence.”
When the facts of Martin’s killing and the cop cover-up eventually came to light, masses of people demonstrated their outrage, from a student protest at historically black Florida A&M University on March 19 to a “million hoodie march” in New York City two days later and another round of demonstrations today. LeBron James and his Miami Heat basketball teammates made a powerful protest simply by being photographed in hooded sweatshirts with their heads bowed. An editorial in New York’s Amsterdam News (22 March) linked the killing to the everyday hell black people endure in this country:
“We are prejudged every day in almost every way, from the neighborhood watch captain to the rookie cop to the sales clerk who works on commission to the taxi driver who won’t pick us up to the guidance counselor who steers our children away from AP classes because they are not ‘college material.’
“We are prejudged. And that prejudice means all too often the difference between life and death, a future or a grave.”
Black Democrat and TV host Al Sharpton called it a “paradox” that a black man could be elected president while young black men were still viewed with suspicion for wearing hooded sweatshirts. What paradox? For this country’s capitalist rulers, Barack Obama’s election provided a facelift for murderous U.S. imperialism and its capitalist profit system. The day-to-day functioning of American capitalism is measured in mass unemployment, home foreclosures, cop terror and other brutalities that come down heaviest on blacks and other minorities. Putting Obama in the White House meant only that now there is a black overseer for a system that criminalizes young black men in maintaining the racial oppression that has been embedded in this country since the days of slavery. It will take nothing less than a socialist overturn of capitalism by the multiracial working class—a third American Revolution—to finally achieve black freedom and provide a decent life for all.
Vigilantism in Racist America
Zimmerman’s Neighborhood Watch was organized in September 2011 by a homeowners association under the auspices of the Sanford Police Department. Zimmerman, who was studying to be a cop, was its sole volunteer. He was well known to the cops, having made 46 calls to 911 this year. As one of his black neighbors described it, it was always: “A black guy this. A black guy that.” A Zimmerman supporter claimed with sheer racist contempt that problems in the area began when foreclosures forced homeowners to rent out property to “low-lifes and gangsters,” so that the housing complex now has a slight majority of non-whites. The Sanford police chief declared that cops working with Neighborhood Watch types must determine “who in that community is not supposed to be there.”
Zimmerman’s claim of self-defense is based on a Florida “Stand Your Ground” law, an open invitation to racist vigilantism. The law was passed in 2005 amid a “get tough on crime” campaign—code for targeting black people. The 2005 law supplanted an earlier Florida law that, like those in many other states, traced its roots to English Common Law. That standard held that self-defense is justified if a person faced with attack first tries to remove himself, if feasible, from immediate danger before using deadly force. Florida’s 2005 law allows for the use of deadly force by anyone who claims a “reasonable belief” that such force is necessary, without even attempting to disengage. And in racist America, a black kid in a hoodie is enough to claim “reasonable belief” of danger. The law also promises criminal and civil immunity for people who claim to have acted in self-defense.
As Marxists, we oppose gun control laws, which are most often promoted by Democratic Party liberals and black politicians, and uphold the right to armed self-defense. But we oppose the “stand your ground” law, which, in removing retreat as a criterion for self-defense, sanctions vigilantism, including murder.
The working class and the black population must zealously defend the Constitutional right to bear arms, a product of the Revolutionary War against British colonial rule. Gun control kills, and it kills blacks in particular. It is a means to enforce a monopoly of violence in the hands of the capitalist state. Gun control leaves guns in the hands of cops, criminals and Klansmen while making the country’s black, poor and working people defenseless. Trayvon Martin might be alive today if he had been carrying a gun. But as the Martin family’s attorney said, had Trayvon been the shooter, “he would have been arrested day one, hour one, and wouldn’t have been given bail.”
In capitalist America, black self-defense against racist terror has historically been met with frenzied state repression. The earliest 20th-century gun control laws were passed in states like South Carolina, Tennessee and Mississippi as a way to disarm blacks in the face of KKK terror. In 1965, the New York City Council passed a bill especially to keep Malcolm X from carrying a carbine for his protection; he was assassinated shortly afterward. In 1967, the California legislature banned the carrying of a loaded gun after legally armed Black Panthers began patrolling ghettos where police terror was rampant. The state’s ban was followed by gun control laws nationwide, especially after the ghetto upheavals that broke out following Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968.
From day one, liberal political spokesmen have tried to steer the outrage over Trayvon Martin’s killing into the timeworn call for the federal government to step in to make things right. At a town hall meeting in Sanford on March 21, dozens of black residents told of being profiled, humiliated and physically assaulted by the cops. National NAACP leader Ben Jealous took that occasion to say that the local police department had “gone a bit rogue” and that’s why they needed to bring in the Department of Justice. The Justice Department are the top cops of a system where daily racist terror is meted out by police in the ghettos and barrios—from NYC’s “stop and frisk” dragnet to L.A.’s “anti-gang” crackdowns. When the Feds step in, at most they enact some meaningless “reforms” or get rid of some “bad apples.” Their purpose in doing so is to clean up the cops’ image to make them more effective, and to get angry people off the streets.
Along with the military, the police, courts and prisons form the core of the capitalist state, an instrument of coercion and organized violence for the suppression of one class, the working class, by another class, the capitalists. While even many Florida state authorities say that Zimmerman went beyond his mandate in gunning down an unarmed 17-year-old, the fact is that the cops’ constant drumbeat of cracking down on crime and pursuing the “war on drugs” fosters the growth of such vigilante scum. And the police themselves feed off of vigilante violence. In promoting Neighborhood Watch outfits, the cops are building up auxiliaries to their enforcement of the murderous racist status quo. The role of such racist vigilantes was seen in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, as armed white patrols, along with the cops, forcibly blocked blacks from evacuating as the flood waters rose, including through outright murder.
Central Florida: Racist, Anti-Labor Bastion
Sanford is located in central Florida, whose history is indelibly marked by bloody racist terror—legal and extralegal. A center of the citrus industry, this region was developed in the aftermath of the North’s victory over the South in the Civil War that smashed slavery. Northern capitalists, such as the town’s namesake, Henry Shelton Sanford, grabbed up real estate, developing orange groves and tourism as well as winter homes. When black laborers were brought in to work the orange groves, a campaign of race-terror soon followed that attacked them as competitors for “white jobs.”
In the early 1930s, the bosses struck with bloody vengeance against a union organizing drive by the United Citrus Workers (UCW). KKK nightriders terrorized organizers, crushing the UCW. In 1935, Joseph Shoemaker, a Socialist, was abducted by the Klan assisted by Tampa police. He was castrated, tarred and feathered, dying of his injuries after two weeks of suffering. In the face of such brutal terror, the Communist Party-led United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America, a CIO affiliate, soon arose and led a heroic fight for unionization. But it also faced a devastating wave of Klan terror, employer scabherding and government repression.
Florida has the distinction of being among the most brutal of Southern lynching states, as exemplified by the 1934 lynching of Claude Neal, a 23-year-old sharecropper. Neal was arrested by the Jackson County Sheriff and charged with the murder of a white woman. The illiterate man was forced to sign a written confession with an X. He ended up in the hands of a mob, tortured for hours and then lynched, his body parts distributed as “souvenirs.” Liberal icon Franklin D. Roosevelt steadfastly refused to support federal anti-lynching laws because that would have posed a break with the segregationist Dixiecrat components of his 1930s New Deal coalition.
Sanford, Florida, is itself branded in racist infamy. Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, a study of the Great Migration of blacks out of the South, recounts the story of George Swanson Starling, who barely escaped the town with his life in 1945 after attempting to organize black tangerine pickers to demand higher wages. The following year, Jackie Robinson was run out of town when the Montreal Royals, part of the Brooklyn Dodgers’ farm system, went there for spring training. In response, Dodgers’ owner Branch Rickey packed up and moved the team to Daytona Beach.
It took the tumultuous struggles for black rights in the 1950s and ’60s to break the back of official Jim Crow segregation in the South. The success of the liberal-led civil rights struggles was in bringing the South into alignment with the bourgeois-democratic norms in the rest of the country. This development did not—and could not—address the poverty, unemployment, rotten housing, segregated education and rampant cop terror that afflict the bulk of the black population. These conditions are deeply rooted in U.S. capitalism, whether or not they are officially codified in the legal sanctions of the bourgeois state. While today blacks possess formal equality under the law, this is pervasively violated in practice. And there could be no sharper example of that than the gunning down of Trayvon Martin.
The enduring color bar is the greatest obstacle to working-class unity in the U.S., serving to obscure the fundamental class divide in society by providing an illusion of common interest between white workers and their class enemy, the white capitalist exploiters. As Karl Marx declared in Volume I of Capital (1867): “Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.” It is through united class struggle that the workers can and must overcome these divisions, promoting their interests as a class against their common enemy. What is crucially needed is to forge a workers party that emblazons on its banners: Black liberation through socialist revolution!
***********
Workers Vanguard No. 999
30 March 2012
Capitalist State Fuels Racist Vigilantes
Trayvon Martin: Killed for Being Black in America
MARCH 26—The racist killing one month ago of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin by a vigilante in Sanford, Florida, has touched off a wave of protest that continues in cities and towns coast to coast. Trayvon’s anguished parents have spoken a bitter truth known to all black families: what happened on February 26 could happen to anyone like him—at the hands of either lone-wolf racists or police thugs-in-blue. Nearly 50 years after civil rights legislation established formal legal equality, a young black man had his life stolen simply for being who he was in this sick, racist society. And his killer to this day remains free, his act sanctioned by a state law that gives free rein to such vigilantism.
The basic story is well known. Trayvon departed from his father’s girlfriend’s home in a gated community to purchase Skittles and an iced tea at a 7-Eleven store. He did not return. Trayvon had been spotted by George Zimmerman, a self-appointed Neighborhood Watch enforcer. When Zimmerman called police, he described Trayvon, who had put on his hoodie in the rain, as a “real suspicious guy.” A frightened Trayvon was aware that he was being followed by a white male stranger in a car, a really suspicious guy. So he ran for safety after seeing Zimmerman stop and exit the car. Zimmerman pursued Trayvon, complaining to the police department that “these assholes...always get away.” The cops say that when they arrived, they found Trayvon dead with a gunshot to the chest and Zimmerman armed with a 9mm pistol and splattered with blood.
Trayvon’s parents then faced sheer contempt from Sanford police. Tracy Martin, the father, believed his son was missing after he didn’t return from the store. The following day, he called to report a missing person, to no avail. He then called 911 and was asked to describe his son. Police officers eventually arrived to show him a picture of his dead son with blood dripping from his mouth. Police had listed the slain teen as a “John Doe” and made no attempt to identify his body or locate his family on the day of his death.
Police who were at the crime scene helped build an alibi for Zimmerman, himself a cop wannabe. Zimmerman claimed that he fired in self-defense when Trayvon, three inches shorter and nearly 100 pounds lighter than himself, gained the upper hand in an alleged scuffle. At least three witnesses heard the “desperate wail of a child, a gunshot and then silence.” So the cops “corrected” one witness to claim that the cry for help came not from Trayvon but from Zimmerman. The officer in charge was also in charge in 2010 when cops covered up the assault on a homeless black man by a police lieutenant’s son. (The white assailant was charged only after videotape of the assault appeared on YouTube.) In 2005, a black teenager in Sanford was fatally shot in the back by two white security guards, one of them a police volunteer and the other a cop’s son. A judge dismissed the charges against them for “lack of evidence.”
When the facts of Martin’s killing and the cop cover-up eventually came to light, masses of people demonstrated their outrage, from a student protest at historically black Florida A&M University on March 19 to a “million hoodie march” in New York City two days later and another round of demonstrations today. LeBron James and his Miami Heat basketball teammates made a powerful protest simply by being photographed in hooded sweatshirts with their heads bowed. An editorial in New York’s Amsterdam News (22 March) linked the killing to the everyday hell black people endure in this country:
“We are prejudged every day in almost every way, from the neighborhood watch captain to the rookie cop to the sales clerk who works on commission to the taxi driver who won’t pick us up to the guidance counselor who steers our children away from AP classes because they are not ‘college material.’
“We are prejudged. And that prejudice means all too often the difference between life and death, a future or a grave.”
Black Democrat and TV host Al Sharpton called it a “paradox” that a black man could be elected president while young black men were still viewed with suspicion for wearing hooded sweatshirts. What paradox? For this country’s capitalist rulers, Barack Obama’s election provided a facelift for murderous U.S. imperialism and its capitalist profit system. The day-to-day functioning of American capitalism is measured in mass unemployment, home foreclosures, cop terror and other brutalities that come down heaviest on blacks and other minorities. Putting Obama in the White House meant only that now there is a black overseer for a system that criminalizes young black men in maintaining the racial oppression that has been embedded in this country since the days of slavery. It will take nothing less than a socialist overturn of capitalism by the multiracial working class—a third American Revolution—to finally achieve black freedom and provide a decent life for all.
Vigilantism in Racist America
Zimmerman’s Neighborhood Watch was organized in September 2011 by a homeowners association under the auspices of the Sanford Police Department. Zimmerman, who was studying to be a cop, was its sole volunteer. He was well known to the cops, having made 46 calls to 911 this year. As one of his black neighbors described it, it was always: “A black guy this. A black guy that.” A Zimmerman supporter claimed with sheer racist contempt that problems in the area began when foreclosures forced homeowners to rent out property to “low-lifes and gangsters,” so that the housing complex now has a slight majority of non-whites. The Sanford police chief declared that cops working with Neighborhood Watch types must determine “who in that community is not supposed to be there.”
Zimmerman’s claim of self-defense is based on a Florida “Stand Your Ground” law, an open invitation to racist vigilantism. The law was passed in 2005 amid a “get tough on crime” campaign—code for targeting black people. The 2005 law supplanted an earlier Florida law that, like those in many other states, traced its roots to English Common Law. That standard held that self-defense is justified if a person faced with attack first tries to remove himself, if feasible, from immediate danger before using deadly force. Florida’s 2005 law allows for the use of deadly force by anyone who claims a “reasonable belief” that such force is necessary, without even attempting to disengage. And in racist America, a black kid in a hoodie is enough to claim “reasonable belief” of danger. The law also promises criminal and civil immunity for people who claim to have acted in self-defense.
As Marxists, we oppose gun control laws, which are most often promoted by Democratic Party liberals and black politicians, and uphold the right to armed self-defense. But we oppose the “stand your ground” law, which, in removing retreat as a criterion for self-defense, sanctions vigilantism, including murder.
The working class and the black population must zealously defend the Constitutional right to bear arms, a product of the Revolutionary War against British colonial rule. Gun control kills, and it kills blacks in particular. It is a means to enforce a monopoly of violence in the hands of the capitalist state. Gun control leaves guns in the hands of cops, criminals and Klansmen while making the country’s black, poor and working people defenseless. Trayvon Martin might be alive today if he had been carrying a gun. But as the Martin family’s attorney said, had Trayvon been the shooter, “he would have been arrested day one, hour one, and wouldn’t have been given bail.”
In capitalist America, black self-defense against racist terror has historically been met with frenzied state repression. The earliest 20th-century gun control laws were passed in states like South Carolina, Tennessee and Mississippi as a way to disarm blacks in the face of KKK terror. In 1965, the New York City Council passed a bill especially to keep Malcolm X from carrying a carbine for his protection; he was assassinated shortly afterward. In 1967, the California legislature banned the carrying of a loaded gun after legally armed Black Panthers began patrolling ghettos where police terror was rampant. The state’s ban was followed by gun control laws nationwide, especially after the ghetto upheavals that broke out following Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968.
From day one, liberal political spokesmen have tried to steer the outrage over Trayvon Martin’s killing into the timeworn call for the federal government to step in to make things right. At a town hall meeting in Sanford on March 21, dozens of black residents told of being profiled, humiliated and physically assaulted by the cops. National NAACP leader Ben Jealous took that occasion to say that the local police department had “gone a bit rogue” and that’s why they needed to bring in the Department of Justice. The Justice Department are the top cops of a system where daily racist terror is meted out by police in the ghettos and barrios—from NYC’s “stop and frisk” dragnet to L.A.’s “anti-gang” crackdowns. When the Feds step in, at most they enact some meaningless “reforms” or get rid of some “bad apples.” Their purpose in doing so is to clean up the cops’ image to make them more effective, and to get angry people off the streets.
Along with the military, the police, courts and prisons form the core of the capitalist state, an instrument of coercion and organized violence for the suppression of one class, the working class, by another class, the capitalists. While even many Florida state authorities say that Zimmerman went beyond his mandate in gunning down an unarmed 17-year-old, the fact is that the cops’ constant drumbeat of cracking down on crime and pursuing the “war on drugs” fosters the growth of such vigilante scum. And the police themselves feed off of vigilante violence. In promoting Neighborhood Watch outfits, the cops are building up auxiliaries to their enforcement of the murderous racist status quo. The role of such racist vigilantes was seen in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, as armed white patrols, along with the cops, forcibly blocked blacks from evacuating as the flood waters rose, including through outright murder.
Central Florida: Racist, Anti-Labor Bastion
Sanford is located in central Florida, whose history is indelibly marked by bloody racist terror—legal and extralegal. A center of the citrus industry, this region was developed in the aftermath of the North’s victory over the South in the Civil War that smashed slavery. Northern capitalists, such as the town’s namesake, Henry Shelton Sanford, grabbed up real estate, developing orange groves and tourism as well as winter homes. When black laborers were brought in to work the orange groves, a campaign of race-terror soon followed that attacked them as competitors for “white jobs.”
In the early 1930s, the bosses struck with bloody vengeance against a union organizing drive by the United Citrus Workers (UCW). KKK nightriders terrorized organizers, crushing the UCW. In 1935, Joseph Shoemaker, a Socialist, was abducted by the Klan assisted by Tampa police. He was castrated, tarred and feathered, dying of his injuries after two weeks of suffering. In the face of such brutal terror, the Communist Party-led United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America, a CIO affiliate, soon arose and led a heroic fight for unionization. But it also faced a devastating wave of Klan terror, employer scabherding and government repression.
Florida has the distinction of being among the most brutal of Southern lynching states, as exemplified by the 1934 lynching of Claude Neal, a 23-year-old sharecropper. Neal was arrested by the Jackson County Sheriff and charged with the murder of a white woman. The illiterate man was forced to sign a written confession with an X. He ended up in the hands of a mob, tortured for hours and then lynched, his body parts distributed as “souvenirs.” Liberal icon Franklin D. Roosevelt steadfastly refused to support federal anti-lynching laws because that would have posed a break with the segregationist Dixiecrat components of his 1930s New Deal coalition.
Sanford, Florida, is itself branded in racist infamy. Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, a study of the Great Migration of blacks out of the South, recounts the story of George Swanson Starling, who barely escaped the town with his life in 1945 after attempting to organize black tangerine pickers to demand higher wages. The following year, Jackie Robinson was run out of town when the Montreal Royals, part of the Brooklyn Dodgers’ farm system, went there for spring training. In response, Dodgers’ owner Branch Rickey packed up and moved the team to Daytona Beach.
It took the tumultuous struggles for black rights in the 1950s and ’60s to break the back of official Jim Crow segregation in the South. The success of the liberal-led civil rights struggles was in bringing the South into alignment with the bourgeois-democratic norms in the rest of the country. This development did not—and could not—address the poverty, unemployment, rotten housing, segregated education and rampant cop terror that afflict the bulk of the black population. These conditions are deeply rooted in U.S. capitalism, whether or not they are officially codified in the legal sanctions of the bourgeois state. While today blacks possess formal equality under the law, this is pervasively violated in practice. And there could be no sharper example of that than the gunning down of Trayvon Martin.
The enduring color bar is the greatest obstacle to working-class unity in the U.S., serving to obscure the fundamental class divide in society by providing an illusion of common interest between white workers and their class enemy, the white capitalist exploiters. As Karl Marx declared in Volume I of Capital (1867): “Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.” It is through united class struggle that the workers can and must overcome these divisions, promoting their interests as a class against their common enemy. What is crucially needed is to forge a workers party that emblazons on its banners: Black liberation through socialist revolution!
Saturday, February 25, 2012
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Black Liberation: A Key Task of Proletarian Revolution
Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League website.
Workers Vanguard No. 996
17 February 2012
Black Liberation: A Key Task of Proletarian Revolution
(Quote of the Week)
To celebrate Black History Month, we print below an excerpt from a 1933 document by Max Shachtman, then a leader of the U.S. Trotskyist movement. Addressing the central importance of the fight against black oppression, the document was written a few years before the explosive class battles by black and white workers that built industrial unions in this country. What Shachtman stressed at a time of Jim Crow segregation in the South is just as true today: the liberation of black people in the U.S. can be achieved only through the overthrow of capitalism by the revolutionary proletariat.
The Civil War and the Reconstruction Period, so far as the bourgeoisie was concerned, completed the bourgeois democratic revolution commenced in 1776 with the declaration of independence from England. For the Negro masses, this second revolution—to destroy the stranglehold of slavocracy over the unfoldment of industrial capitalism—yielded all that the democratic revolution in this country will ever yield them. It gave them “legal” rights; it freed them from chattel slavery. It ended with their betrayal: the “legal” rights were confined to paper; the emancipation ended with the partial restitution in parts of the South of semi-serfdom instead of with converting the plantation slaves into free landed peasants, as the French bourgeois revolution did. More than this, the bourgeoisie could not give. Since that time, these outdated economic forms have been merged into the general capitalist economy of a decadent, parasitic imperialism.…
There is only one correct way of formulating the problem of the remnants of slavery and serfdom under which hundreds of thousands of southern Negroes live to this day, and it gives the key to the whole problem: the Negro was liberated from chattel slavery as a by-product of the military-political struggle of the progressive northern bourgeoisie to consolidate the nation on a modern capitalist basis, free from the fetters of a reactionary slavocracy. The Negro will not only be liberated from the wage slavery of today but the survivals of feudalism and slavery will be exterminated, as a “by-product” of the military-political struggle of the last progressive class in American society—the class of black and white proletarian—to establish a socialist nation by means of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The historical aims of the imperialist bourgeoisie are not incompatible with the preservation of social and caste inequality for oppressed peoples, or with the preservation of antiquated modes of production and exchange. The historical aims of the socialist proletariat are incompatible with the maintenance of any anti-democratic institutions, of any capitalist or pre-capitalist modes of production. In this fact lies the only guarantee that the victorious working class will truly and completely emancipate the Negro masses by emancipating itself.
—Max Shachtman, “Communism and the Negro” (1933), reprinted as Race and Revolution (Verso, 2003)
Workers Vanguard No. 996
17 February 2012
Black Liberation: A Key Task of Proletarian Revolution
(Quote of the Week)
To celebrate Black History Month, we print below an excerpt from a 1933 document by Max Shachtman, then a leader of the U.S. Trotskyist movement. Addressing the central importance of the fight against black oppression, the document was written a few years before the explosive class battles by black and white workers that built industrial unions in this country. What Shachtman stressed at a time of Jim Crow segregation in the South is just as true today: the liberation of black people in the U.S. can be achieved only through the overthrow of capitalism by the revolutionary proletariat.
The Civil War and the Reconstruction Period, so far as the bourgeoisie was concerned, completed the bourgeois democratic revolution commenced in 1776 with the declaration of independence from England. For the Negro masses, this second revolution—to destroy the stranglehold of slavocracy over the unfoldment of industrial capitalism—yielded all that the democratic revolution in this country will ever yield them. It gave them “legal” rights; it freed them from chattel slavery. It ended with their betrayal: the “legal” rights were confined to paper; the emancipation ended with the partial restitution in parts of the South of semi-serfdom instead of with converting the plantation slaves into free landed peasants, as the French bourgeois revolution did. More than this, the bourgeoisie could not give. Since that time, these outdated economic forms have been merged into the general capitalist economy of a decadent, parasitic imperialism.…
There is only one correct way of formulating the problem of the remnants of slavery and serfdom under which hundreds of thousands of southern Negroes live to this day, and it gives the key to the whole problem: the Negro was liberated from chattel slavery as a by-product of the military-political struggle of the progressive northern bourgeoisie to consolidate the nation on a modern capitalist basis, free from the fetters of a reactionary slavocracy. The Negro will not only be liberated from the wage slavery of today but the survivals of feudalism and slavery will be exterminated, as a “by-product” of the military-political struggle of the last progressive class in American society—the class of black and white proletarian—to establish a socialist nation by means of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The historical aims of the imperialist bourgeoisie are not incompatible with the preservation of social and caste inequality for oppressed peoples, or with the preservation of antiquated modes of production and exchange. The historical aims of the socialist proletariat are incompatible with the maintenance of any anti-democratic institutions, of any capitalist or pre-capitalist modes of production. In this fact lies the only guarantee that the victorious working class will truly and completely emancipate the Negro masses by emancipating itself.
—Max Shachtman, “Communism and the Negro” (1933), reprinted as Race and Revolution (Verso, 2003)
Saturday, June 18, 2011
From The Pages of "Workers Vanguard"-"Economic Crisis and the Tunisia Uprising"
Markin comment:
Perhaps the most important point made by this article concerning the Arab Spring, Arab Revolution, Arab 1848 or the other myriad expressions of the democratic revolutionary outcome in the Near and Middle East comes near the end of the article. There the speaker notes that socialists, communists, and even those who call themselves Trotskyists speak, at most, only of a democratic revolution, no extension now or in the future to a socialist revolution like in the old days. Yet only Leon Trotsky’s strategic concept of the theory of permanent revolution in the year 2011 points the way forward in this area. Christ, this is one time it is practically a no-brainer to evoke the solution of a socialist revolution and still the reformists want to parse the thing down to something that might have been revolutionary, barely revolutionary, in the real 1848.
******
Workers Vanguard No. 982
10 June 2011
Economic Crisis and the Tunisia Uprising
The following is based on a report given by a comrade of the Ligue Trotskyste de France to a recent gathering of International Communist League members in Europe.
The reason the various uprisings that have been shaking the Arab world have taken place now and not five, ten or 20 years ago has, in my opinion, economic origins. The devastation of the world depression has added to a situation that had caused steady deterioration in the living conditions for the working masses of North Africa in the last 15 years or so, as seen especially in the huge rise in food prices and the slashing back of government food subsidies. The worsening of their conditions was caused by the adoption of IMF-dictated structural measures beginning in the 1980s and then various agreements, mainly between the European Union (EU) and North African countries, in the second part of the 1990s. This development needs to be traced in part to the capitalist counterrevolution that destroyed the Soviet Union.
The bottom line of the agreements was based on the imperialists’ promise that the European capitalists would outsource part of their industry to the countries of the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia). In reality, the domestic markets of these Arab countries are too small to draw massive foreign investment. Furthermore, industrial production outsourced from the European Union for export back to Europe was moved in large part to the capitalist sector in the Chinese deformed workers state. There is some spare parts production for the auto and aerospace industry in Tunisia, but the bulk of the export-oriented industry is cheap textile production with little value added.
The aim of the agreements was to dismantle tariff barriers between both sides of the Mediterranean and to do away with whatever minimal labor legislation had been in place. In fact, this process started first in Tunisia, and this is the country where it went furthest. So it is not a coincidence that the uprisings started in Tunisia.
This “neoliberalism” has left a devastated economy in North Africa. Of course, there are variations depending in particular on the presence or not of an important oil industry. Algeria is a major producer of oil and gas with significant production potential. However, heavy industry in Algeria, which had been built in the 1970s, has been largely dismantled. Steel production was downsized and then sold to Mittal Steel, among others. In general, from Morocco to Syria between 12 and 15 percent of the population is employed in industry, including light industry. The one exception is Tunisia, where the figure is above 20 percent.
The question of the impact of outsourcing on the strength of the working class and the trade unions is very relevant to North Africa. Labor regulations have been largely dismantled. There is a growing number of workers employed informally, through labor contractors, etc., including in the so-called “formal sector.” The head of the Tunisian high school teachers union told Informations Ouvrières (21 April), newspaper of the Lambertist Parti Ouvrier Indépendant:
“The great majority of the mobilizations demand a solution to the fundamental problem, which is employment and was a central demand of the revolution. There are very few strikes which raise the question of wage increases, even though this problem is far from negligible in many companies which do not respect any regulations and laws and underpay their workers. Most mobilizations want to end two plagues: outsourcing and temporary work.”
Representative of the growth of the informal sector proper was Mohamed Bouazizi, the street vendor who set himself on fire in Sidi Bouzid in December, sparking the revolt.
There are also demographic reasons, which have come to a head in this period. After independence in the 1950s and 1960s, there was an explosive population growth due to the improvement of health systems. From around 1974 on, mass emigration to Europe was cut off as the European countries tightened their borders. While the life expectancy of the working class increased, the mass influx of youth provoked an explosion of the population able to work and consequently an explosion in structural mass unemployment rates.
This has been aggravated for college-educated youth. The governments in the Maghreb, particularly Tunisia, made a major effort to educate their youth. In the years after independence, when the development of national capitalism was based on a strong state sector and a significant teaching and health apparatus, the natural employment perspectives for college-educated youth were centered on the civil service. This has been increasingly reversed in the last 15 years or so, particularly as a result of IMF- and EU-dictated measures to reduce the public sector. As a result, the unemployment rate increases with the level of education. Even before the recent uprisings, it was due to reach catastrophic proportions in the next two or three years. Some 70,000 additional college graduates are scheduled to enter the labor market this fall, a large part of whom will be unemployed.
Since January, the situation in Tunisia has been made worse by the return of 20,000 Tunisians who had jobs in Libya and by foreign refugees from Libya, and has been aggravated as well by the catastrophic situation of the tourist industry, which is a major employer. People have tried to cross the sea and get to France, with hundreds of youth drowned (see “Refugees Drown as Imperialists Step Up War on Libya,” WV No. 981, 27 May). Now there are concentrations of Tunisian youth in the streets of Paris and Marseilles desperately looking for housing and jobs and trying to avoid police roundups. The IMF and World Bank have started to draw circles around Tunisia, with promises of loans to supposedly bridge the currently dire situation. As always in such circumstances, and as cruelly experienced right now by Greek, Irish and Portuguese workers, these schemes amount to channeling more fresh money into bank coffers and imposing more drastic austerity measures on workers.
In the last 15 years, the social security and unemployment compensation systems, which were basic at best, have been partially dismantled, so that insecurity at all levels has increased. In this context, it is quite remarkable that the working class has managed to appear as a factor at all in Tunisia, although of course not as a class for itself—i.e., conscious of its role as the gravedigger of capitalism. The working class remains chained to its own bourgeoisie by the trade-union bureaucracy and the small left groups that have emerged out of it lately, particularly the former Communist Party, called Ettajdid, the ex-Maoist Workers Communist Party of Tunisia (PCOT) and the ex-Pabloite League of the Workers Left (see “For Permanent Revolution Across North Africa! Tunisia: Dictator Flees, Protests Continue,” WV No. 973, 4 February).
Tunisia is supposedly the most advanced country in the Arab world when it comes to the status of women. The wives of both the late Habib Bourguiba, the country’s first ruler after independence from France, and the ousted dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali played important political roles, which is unique. People came from all over North Africa and the Arabian peninsula because prostitution in Tunisia was not illegal. Prostitutes were said to fink on their customers for the files of the political police. Polygamy was illegal, unlike abortion and contraception.
But the reality is of course quite grim. Arranged marriages are frequent, at least in the bourgeoisie. They still have magic rituals called the tasfih to supposedly protect the virginity of pubescent girls, particularly in the more backward interior of the country but also in Tunis. Hymenoplasty (surgical restoration of the hymen to give the appearance of virginity) and the like seem to be common among the more petty-bourgeois layers. Sexual harassment at work is frequent.
However, it appears that the ICL has been the only organization that has been prominently raising the woman question. In Egypt, the left capitulates to the Muslim Brotherhood. In Tunisia, left groups are also into class-collaborationist alliances with the Islamists. They portray them as “good guy” Islamists like Turkey’s ruling bourgeois Justice and Development Party. But I believe that a more important part of the reason why the Tunisian left has been silent on the woman question is because they are at bottom left-Bourguibists, and it was Bourguiba who established the family code immediately after independence. They believe that Tunisia is truly a progressive country regarding the woman question. They believe, as Obama would say, that 90 percent of the road has been traveled already toward the final emancipation of women. Skillfully, the government has announced compulsory sexual parity in the lists for elections to the constituent assembly. Slates not complying with this rule would be automatically eliminated.
This brings me to the pervasiveness of bourgeois nationalism. From the meetings of the Tunisian left in Paris that we have attended to the mass rallies in downtown Tunis, the national anthem has been sung and the national flag waved. The opportunist left has built illusions in the army, even without the Egyptian mythology of defense of the fatherland against Zionist Israel. As we have said, the ideology of the reformist left used to be the class-collaborationist line of “two stages” toward socialism, which has always ended in bloody defeat for the working class. Now it is one stage, toward a “democratic republic,” i.e., bourgeois democracy full stop. As we wrote regarding North Africa and the Near East in the February WV article on Tunisia:
“What is essential is the forging of revolutionary workers parties like the Bolshevik Party that led the working class of Russia to power in the 1917 October Revolution—parties committed to the program of permanent revolution, addressing the burning needs of the masses and unalterably leading them to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat. This is the program of the International Communist League. For a socialist federation of North Africa!”
Perhaps the most important point made by this article concerning the Arab Spring, Arab Revolution, Arab 1848 or the other myriad expressions of the democratic revolutionary outcome in the Near and Middle East comes near the end of the article. There the speaker notes that socialists, communists, and even those who call themselves Trotskyists speak, at most, only of a democratic revolution, no extension now or in the future to a socialist revolution like in the old days. Yet only Leon Trotsky’s strategic concept of the theory of permanent revolution in the year 2011 points the way forward in this area. Christ, this is one time it is practically a no-brainer to evoke the solution of a socialist revolution and still the reformists want to parse the thing down to something that might have been revolutionary, barely revolutionary, in the real 1848.
******
Workers Vanguard No. 982
10 June 2011
Economic Crisis and the Tunisia Uprising
The following is based on a report given by a comrade of the Ligue Trotskyste de France to a recent gathering of International Communist League members in Europe.
The reason the various uprisings that have been shaking the Arab world have taken place now and not five, ten or 20 years ago has, in my opinion, economic origins. The devastation of the world depression has added to a situation that had caused steady deterioration in the living conditions for the working masses of North Africa in the last 15 years or so, as seen especially in the huge rise in food prices and the slashing back of government food subsidies. The worsening of their conditions was caused by the adoption of IMF-dictated structural measures beginning in the 1980s and then various agreements, mainly between the European Union (EU) and North African countries, in the second part of the 1990s. This development needs to be traced in part to the capitalist counterrevolution that destroyed the Soviet Union.
The bottom line of the agreements was based on the imperialists’ promise that the European capitalists would outsource part of their industry to the countries of the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia). In reality, the domestic markets of these Arab countries are too small to draw massive foreign investment. Furthermore, industrial production outsourced from the European Union for export back to Europe was moved in large part to the capitalist sector in the Chinese deformed workers state. There is some spare parts production for the auto and aerospace industry in Tunisia, but the bulk of the export-oriented industry is cheap textile production with little value added.
The aim of the agreements was to dismantle tariff barriers between both sides of the Mediterranean and to do away with whatever minimal labor legislation had been in place. In fact, this process started first in Tunisia, and this is the country where it went furthest. So it is not a coincidence that the uprisings started in Tunisia.
This “neoliberalism” has left a devastated economy in North Africa. Of course, there are variations depending in particular on the presence or not of an important oil industry. Algeria is a major producer of oil and gas with significant production potential. However, heavy industry in Algeria, which had been built in the 1970s, has been largely dismantled. Steel production was downsized and then sold to Mittal Steel, among others. In general, from Morocco to Syria between 12 and 15 percent of the population is employed in industry, including light industry. The one exception is Tunisia, where the figure is above 20 percent.
The question of the impact of outsourcing on the strength of the working class and the trade unions is very relevant to North Africa. Labor regulations have been largely dismantled. There is a growing number of workers employed informally, through labor contractors, etc., including in the so-called “formal sector.” The head of the Tunisian high school teachers union told Informations Ouvrières (21 April), newspaper of the Lambertist Parti Ouvrier Indépendant:
“The great majority of the mobilizations demand a solution to the fundamental problem, which is employment and was a central demand of the revolution. There are very few strikes which raise the question of wage increases, even though this problem is far from negligible in many companies which do not respect any regulations and laws and underpay their workers. Most mobilizations want to end two plagues: outsourcing and temporary work.”
Representative of the growth of the informal sector proper was Mohamed Bouazizi, the street vendor who set himself on fire in Sidi Bouzid in December, sparking the revolt.
There are also demographic reasons, which have come to a head in this period. After independence in the 1950s and 1960s, there was an explosive population growth due to the improvement of health systems. From around 1974 on, mass emigration to Europe was cut off as the European countries tightened their borders. While the life expectancy of the working class increased, the mass influx of youth provoked an explosion of the population able to work and consequently an explosion in structural mass unemployment rates.
This has been aggravated for college-educated youth. The governments in the Maghreb, particularly Tunisia, made a major effort to educate their youth. In the years after independence, when the development of national capitalism was based on a strong state sector and a significant teaching and health apparatus, the natural employment perspectives for college-educated youth were centered on the civil service. This has been increasingly reversed in the last 15 years or so, particularly as a result of IMF- and EU-dictated measures to reduce the public sector. As a result, the unemployment rate increases with the level of education. Even before the recent uprisings, it was due to reach catastrophic proportions in the next two or three years. Some 70,000 additional college graduates are scheduled to enter the labor market this fall, a large part of whom will be unemployed.
Since January, the situation in Tunisia has been made worse by the return of 20,000 Tunisians who had jobs in Libya and by foreign refugees from Libya, and has been aggravated as well by the catastrophic situation of the tourist industry, which is a major employer. People have tried to cross the sea and get to France, with hundreds of youth drowned (see “Refugees Drown as Imperialists Step Up War on Libya,” WV No. 981, 27 May). Now there are concentrations of Tunisian youth in the streets of Paris and Marseilles desperately looking for housing and jobs and trying to avoid police roundups. The IMF and World Bank have started to draw circles around Tunisia, with promises of loans to supposedly bridge the currently dire situation. As always in such circumstances, and as cruelly experienced right now by Greek, Irish and Portuguese workers, these schemes amount to channeling more fresh money into bank coffers and imposing more drastic austerity measures on workers.
In the last 15 years, the social security and unemployment compensation systems, which were basic at best, have been partially dismantled, so that insecurity at all levels has increased. In this context, it is quite remarkable that the working class has managed to appear as a factor at all in Tunisia, although of course not as a class for itself—i.e., conscious of its role as the gravedigger of capitalism. The working class remains chained to its own bourgeoisie by the trade-union bureaucracy and the small left groups that have emerged out of it lately, particularly the former Communist Party, called Ettajdid, the ex-Maoist Workers Communist Party of Tunisia (PCOT) and the ex-Pabloite League of the Workers Left (see “For Permanent Revolution Across North Africa! Tunisia: Dictator Flees, Protests Continue,” WV No. 973, 4 February).
Tunisia is supposedly the most advanced country in the Arab world when it comes to the status of women. The wives of both the late Habib Bourguiba, the country’s first ruler after independence from France, and the ousted dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali played important political roles, which is unique. People came from all over North Africa and the Arabian peninsula because prostitution in Tunisia was not illegal. Prostitutes were said to fink on their customers for the files of the political police. Polygamy was illegal, unlike abortion and contraception.
But the reality is of course quite grim. Arranged marriages are frequent, at least in the bourgeoisie. They still have magic rituals called the tasfih to supposedly protect the virginity of pubescent girls, particularly in the more backward interior of the country but also in Tunis. Hymenoplasty (surgical restoration of the hymen to give the appearance of virginity) and the like seem to be common among the more petty-bourgeois layers. Sexual harassment at work is frequent.
However, it appears that the ICL has been the only organization that has been prominently raising the woman question. In Egypt, the left capitulates to the Muslim Brotherhood. In Tunisia, left groups are also into class-collaborationist alliances with the Islamists. They portray them as “good guy” Islamists like Turkey’s ruling bourgeois Justice and Development Party. But I believe that a more important part of the reason why the Tunisian left has been silent on the woman question is because they are at bottom left-Bourguibists, and it was Bourguiba who established the family code immediately after independence. They believe that Tunisia is truly a progressive country regarding the woman question. They believe, as Obama would say, that 90 percent of the road has been traveled already toward the final emancipation of women. Skillfully, the government has announced compulsory sexual parity in the lists for elections to the constituent assembly. Slates not complying with this rule would be automatically eliminated.
This brings me to the pervasiveness of bourgeois nationalism. From the meetings of the Tunisian left in Paris that we have attended to the mass rallies in downtown Tunis, the national anthem has been sung and the national flag waved. The opportunist left has built illusions in the army, even without the Egyptian mythology of defense of the fatherland against Zionist Israel. As we have said, the ideology of the reformist left used to be the class-collaborationist line of “two stages” toward socialism, which has always ended in bloody defeat for the working class. Now it is one stage, toward a “democratic republic,” i.e., bourgeois democracy full stop. As we wrote regarding North Africa and the Near East in the February WV article on Tunisia:
“What is essential is the forging of revolutionary workers parties like the Bolshevik Party that led the working class of Russia to power in the 1917 October Revolution—parties committed to the program of permanent revolution, addressing the burning needs of the masses and unalterably leading them to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat. This is the program of the International Communist League. For a socialist federation of North Africa!”
Friday, June 18, 2010
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard" -Once Again On Running For The Executive Offices Of The Bourgeois State
Click on the headline to link to an "American Left History" entry on the subject of this writer's mea culpa on running for the executive offices of the bourgeois state.
Markin comment:
Will this political blushing I am forced to undergo for my old position on this issue of running for the executive offices of the bourgeois state at any level never end? (See above linked post.) Of course, as pointed out in the article below, the local executive offices of the bourgeois state (in alleged contrast to the national state) is a key "hotbed" for sliding from revolution to reformism on this question.
Workers Vanguard No. 960
4 June 2010
Lutte Ouvrière’s Municipal Antics
The following article is translated from Le Bolchévik No. 192 (June 2010).
In 2007, [the reformist group] Lutte Ouvrière (LO) mobilized its members for the following year’s municipal elections, insisting on the importance of getting some municipal representatives. At the end of 2007, by a majority of 97 percent, LO’s party congress adopted a resolution stating:
“Getting some municipal councillors elected is extremely important for our political influence. These elected officials are a means of rooting ourselves in a city and the axis that our local activities can orbit around….
“The conclusion is that we should try to field slates in the maximum number of localities. However, that will not stop us from examining and being open to all proposals for alliances, which we will consider depending on the situation, the local relationship of forces and the possibilities for getting elected that these alliances could really open up to us. Indeed, we have no interest in making alliances on a program of agreements with possible allies if that does not get us some people elected, or even prevents us from getting people elected, and all the more so since we have the means to run independently.”
—Lutte de Classe No. 109, December 2007
In other words, LO was ready for any dirty deal to obtain positions on municipal councils and told its members that it was going to try to negotiate for positions on “left” slates. LO went to beg the Socialist Party [SP], which in most cases said flatly no. But the PCF [French Communist Party] often accepted them on its slates, after making sure that LO would be loyal to the future municipal majority. LO eventually ran on the slates of the bourgeois mayor of Belfort, a fiefdom of [bourgeois politician Jean-Pierre] Chevènement, who served as minister of police under [former SP prime minister Lionel] Jospin.
So far, LO has more than proven that it is a reliable partner for a municipal popular front. We don’t know of any instances when LO voted against a budget. LO national spokesman Nathalie Arthaud, a member of the CP-led municipal majority running Vaulx-en-Velin (in the Lyon suburbs), justified voting for the budget “in the name of LO” during the municipal council meeting on 25 March 2009:
“Of course we are going to vote for the budget presented by the municipal majority, because we are in solidarity with the proposed orientations and choices, whether they are expressed in educational policy, support to associations, rates applied to services rendered or general orientation. The municipal majority is concerned about responding to the needs of the population and especially the underprivileged population, and for us that is essential. Beyond some disagreements on details, we share this majority’s basic choices.”
—Minutes of the Vaulx-en-Velin Municipal Council,
25 March 2009
In spite of LO’s concerns that having municipal councillors was “extremely important for our political influence,” the political influence of these municipal councillors did not reach the pages of the weekly Lutte Ouvrière, which has barely breathed a word about their performance: to our knowledge, LO wrote about them briefly three times in the space of two years. That’s why a 19 February article mentioning them takes on a very particular importance for judging their municipal politics.
The article is about Bagnolet—a municipality in the Paris suburbs—which has been controlled by the CP for decades. Bagnolet is also where an LO regional leader, Jean-Pierre Mercier (also a union bureaucrat in the PSA automobile factory at Aulnay), was elected on the slates of CP mayor Marc Everbecq in 2008. The article recounts the forcible eviction, on the mayor’s orders and in the middle of winter, of the tenants of an apartment building occupied in part by African workers. This time LO condemned the racist eviction, contrary to what they did in 2005 in a similar case in the town of Aubervilliers, which was run at the time by the CP (see our article in Le Bolchévik No. 173 [September 2005]). LO solidarizes with the victims of the Bagnolet eviction and denounces the propaganda of the town administration, which, indeed, does not hesitate to use every racist cliché in order to justify its action, calling the victims smugglers, drug dealers and pimps.
A naive reader, taking LO’s recent hypocritical rhetoric about “communism” at face value, might expect LO to denounce all its past capitulations to the PCF mayor and break its pact with the devil of bourgeois municipalism. Absolutely not! On the contrary, LO’s article states:
“A support committee was set up for the evicted people, with the Right to Housing Committee and other organizations. LO’s municipal councillors in the town participated in its creation. And the evictees were quite happy to find members of the municipal majority at their side, able to condemn the dirty tricks, even when they came from City Hall.”
In other words, LO went to the victims of the municipal government, openly declaring itself part of the very municipal council majority that was evicting them! Under these conditions, LO’s support amounted to reassuring the evictees that they really should not infer from this that the administration of capitalism is necessarily racist (whether in the hands of the PCF and LO or not). It is precisely for this kind of thing that LO is useful to the PCF mayors. The message that LO thus helps to get across is that of course you cannot run a town administration without breaking a few eggs, but in the last analysis there is always somebody in the municipal majority who will come and warm your heart (if nothing else) when you are out on the street and it’s snowing.
LO itself accurately described its conception of municipal work as reformist: “By definition, neither municipal work nor trade-union activity can be revolutionary; they are reformist” (Lutte de Classe No. 110, February 2008). LO deliberately confuses two things. One is the question of administering capitalism at the municipal level by taking part in a municipal council majority—and thus taking responsibility for what running capitalism entails, i.e., inevitably, racist discrimination in public housing; “personnel management,” including the mayor’s office laying off city workers; reducing the number of elementary school classes; cutting back childcare; raising local taxes; setting up “neighborhood police” and police stations; etc. The other is winning an election as a revolutionary proletarian opposition in order to denounce administering capitalism.
For Marxists, however, this is a fundamental difference—a difference of principle. More than 150 years ago, Karl Marx insisted that you cannot take hold of the capitalist state—which is an apparatus of oppression made up of armed bodies whose role is to maintain the dictatorship of capital—in order to make it serve the interest of the working class. This is true for the central government, and it is equally true at the lowest level of the state, the municipal level. Thus, the mayor has police powers within his territory; mayors, including PCF mayors, are the direct representatives of the capitalist state at the municipal level.
That is why Lenin always opposed municipalism, notably during the elections to the local (municipal) dumas in April 1917 in Russia. We recommend to our readers the article in the current issue of our international journal Spartacist [English-language edition No. 61, Spring 2009]. The article documents Lenin’s intransigent struggle, even though the Third International itself had come to questionable conclusions on the question of municipalism at its [1920] Second Congress. Denouncing the bourgeoisie’s institutions of local government, the resolution on parliamentarism stipulated that “to counterpose them to the organs of the state is theoretically incorrect. They are in reality organizations similar to the mechanism of the bourgeois state.” However, the resolution wrongly allowed Communist parties to hold municipal executive office.
The bourgeois state must be destroyed by a workers revolution based on new organs of power—workers councils—unconditionally opposed to the bourgeois order at all levels, national, regional and municipal. So it should be evident that the working class cannot reach this understanding if its revolutionary element itself participates in the institutions of bourgeois power, even municipal ones. From this principled opposition to executive offices of the bourgeois state flows the fact that Marxists cannot run for such posts without risking conferring legitimacy upon them in the eyes of the workers. Therefore we refuse on principle to run for executive office, be it the election of the mayor and his deputies by the municipal council or the election of the president of the republic by universal suffrage. We also refuse to seek to be a part of a parliamentary or municipal majority that takes on executive responsibility.
In contrast, for nearly 40 years LO has never failed to run a candidate for president. In 2008, they took a further step by “getting their hands dirty” at the municipal level. In fact, it is the logic of reformism to set about administering capitalism starting at the municipal level. Our perspective, on the other hand, is international socialist revolution. That perspective begins by opposing LO’s bourgeois municipalism and must end with the dictatorship of the proletariat, which will eliminate the organs of bourgeois repression at all levels, including the municipal. Down with executive offices of the capitalist state!
Markin comment:
Will this political blushing I am forced to undergo for my old position on this issue of running for the executive offices of the bourgeois state at any level never end? (See above linked post.) Of course, as pointed out in the article below, the local executive offices of the bourgeois state (in alleged contrast to the national state) is a key "hotbed" for sliding from revolution to reformism on this question.
Workers Vanguard No. 960
4 June 2010
Lutte Ouvrière’s Municipal Antics
The following article is translated from Le Bolchévik No. 192 (June 2010).
In 2007, [the reformist group] Lutte Ouvrière (LO) mobilized its members for the following year’s municipal elections, insisting on the importance of getting some municipal representatives. At the end of 2007, by a majority of 97 percent, LO’s party congress adopted a resolution stating:
“Getting some municipal councillors elected is extremely important for our political influence. These elected officials are a means of rooting ourselves in a city and the axis that our local activities can orbit around….
“The conclusion is that we should try to field slates in the maximum number of localities. However, that will not stop us from examining and being open to all proposals for alliances, which we will consider depending on the situation, the local relationship of forces and the possibilities for getting elected that these alliances could really open up to us. Indeed, we have no interest in making alliances on a program of agreements with possible allies if that does not get us some people elected, or even prevents us from getting people elected, and all the more so since we have the means to run independently.”
—Lutte de Classe No. 109, December 2007
In other words, LO was ready for any dirty deal to obtain positions on municipal councils and told its members that it was going to try to negotiate for positions on “left” slates. LO went to beg the Socialist Party [SP], which in most cases said flatly no. But the PCF [French Communist Party] often accepted them on its slates, after making sure that LO would be loyal to the future municipal majority. LO eventually ran on the slates of the bourgeois mayor of Belfort, a fiefdom of [bourgeois politician Jean-Pierre] Chevènement, who served as minister of police under [former SP prime minister Lionel] Jospin.
So far, LO has more than proven that it is a reliable partner for a municipal popular front. We don’t know of any instances when LO voted against a budget. LO national spokesman Nathalie Arthaud, a member of the CP-led municipal majority running Vaulx-en-Velin (in the Lyon suburbs), justified voting for the budget “in the name of LO” during the municipal council meeting on 25 March 2009:
“Of course we are going to vote for the budget presented by the municipal majority, because we are in solidarity with the proposed orientations and choices, whether they are expressed in educational policy, support to associations, rates applied to services rendered or general orientation. The municipal majority is concerned about responding to the needs of the population and especially the underprivileged population, and for us that is essential. Beyond some disagreements on details, we share this majority’s basic choices.”
—Minutes of the Vaulx-en-Velin Municipal Council,
25 March 2009
In spite of LO’s concerns that having municipal councillors was “extremely important for our political influence,” the political influence of these municipal councillors did not reach the pages of the weekly Lutte Ouvrière, which has barely breathed a word about their performance: to our knowledge, LO wrote about them briefly three times in the space of two years. That’s why a 19 February article mentioning them takes on a very particular importance for judging their municipal politics.
The article is about Bagnolet—a municipality in the Paris suburbs—which has been controlled by the CP for decades. Bagnolet is also where an LO regional leader, Jean-Pierre Mercier (also a union bureaucrat in the PSA automobile factory at Aulnay), was elected on the slates of CP mayor Marc Everbecq in 2008. The article recounts the forcible eviction, on the mayor’s orders and in the middle of winter, of the tenants of an apartment building occupied in part by African workers. This time LO condemned the racist eviction, contrary to what they did in 2005 in a similar case in the town of Aubervilliers, which was run at the time by the CP (see our article in Le Bolchévik No. 173 [September 2005]). LO solidarizes with the victims of the Bagnolet eviction and denounces the propaganda of the town administration, which, indeed, does not hesitate to use every racist cliché in order to justify its action, calling the victims smugglers, drug dealers and pimps.
A naive reader, taking LO’s recent hypocritical rhetoric about “communism” at face value, might expect LO to denounce all its past capitulations to the PCF mayor and break its pact with the devil of bourgeois municipalism. Absolutely not! On the contrary, LO’s article states:
“A support committee was set up for the evicted people, with the Right to Housing Committee and other organizations. LO’s municipal councillors in the town participated in its creation. And the evictees were quite happy to find members of the municipal majority at their side, able to condemn the dirty tricks, even when they came from City Hall.”
In other words, LO went to the victims of the municipal government, openly declaring itself part of the very municipal council majority that was evicting them! Under these conditions, LO’s support amounted to reassuring the evictees that they really should not infer from this that the administration of capitalism is necessarily racist (whether in the hands of the PCF and LO or not). It is precisely for this kind of thing that LO is useful to the PCF mayors. The message that LO thus helps to get across is that of course you cannot run a town administration without breaking a few eggs, but in the last analysis there is always somebody in the municipal majority who will come and warm your heart (if nothing else) when you are out on the street and it’s snowing.
LO itself accurately described its conception of municipal work as reformist: “By definition, neither municipal work nor trade-union activity can be revolutionary; they are reformist” (Lutte de Classe No. 110, February 2008). LO deliberately confuses two things. One is the question of administering capitalism at the municipal level by taking part in a municipal council majority—and thus taking responsibility for what running capitalism entails, i.e., inevitably, racist discrimination in public housing; “personnel management,” including the mayor’s office laying off city workers; reducing the number of elementary school classes; cutting back childcare; raising local taxes; setting up “neighborhood police” and police stations; etc. The other is winning an election as a revolutionary proletarian opposition in order to denounce administering capitalism.
For Marxists, however, this is a fundamental difference—a difference of principle. More than 150 years ago, Karl Marx insisted that you cannot take hold of the capitalist state—which is an apparatus of oppression made up of armed bodies whose role is to maintain the dictatorship of capital—in order to make it serve the interest of the working class. This is true for the central government, and it is equally true at the lowest level of the state, the municipal level. Thus, the mayor has police powers within his territory; mayors, including PCF mayors, are the direct representatives of the capitalist state at the municipal level.
That is why Lenin always opposed municipalism, notably during the elections to the local (municipal) dumas in April 1917 in Russia. We recommend to our readers the article in the current issue of our international journal Spartacist [English-language edition No. 61, Spring 2009]. The article documents Lenin’s intransigent struggle, even though the Third International itself had come to questionable conclusions on the question of municipalism at its [1920] Second Congress. Denouncing the bourgeoisie’s institutions of local government, the resolution on parliamentarism stipulated that “to counterpose them to the organs of the state is theoretically incorrect. They are in reality organizations similar to the mechanism of the bourgeois state.” However, the resolution wrongly allowed Communist parties to hold municipal executive office.
The bourgeois state must be destroyed by a workers revolution based on new organs of power—workers councils—unconditionally opposed to the bourgeois order at all levels, national, regional and municipal. So it should be evident that the working class cannot reach this understanding if its revolutionary element itself participates in the institutions of bourgeois power, even municipal ones. From this principled opposition to executive offices of the bourgeois state flows the fact that Marxists cannot run for such posts without risking conferring legitimacy upon them in the eyes of the workers. Therefore we refuse on principle to run for executive office, be it the election of the mayor and his deputies by the municipal council or the election of the president of the republic by universal suffrage. We also refuse to seek to be a part of a parliamentary or municipal majority that takes on executive responsibility.
In contrast, for nearly 40 years LO has never failed to run a candidate for president. In 2008, they took a further step by “getting their hands dirty” at the municipal level. In fact, it is the logic of reformism to set about administering capitalism starting at the municipal level. Our perspective, on the other hand, is international socialist revolution. That perspective begins by opposing LO’s bourgeois municipalism and must end with the dictatorship of the proletariat, which will eliminate the organs of bourgeois repression at all levels, including the municipal. Down with executive offices of the capitalist state!
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