“Workers of The World Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains”-The Struggle For Trotsky's Fourth (Communist) International-From The Archives-Founding Conference of the Fourth International-1938
This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
Thursday, September 18, 2014
As The 100th
Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars)
Continues ... Some Remembrances-Poet’s Corner-German Poets
German War Poetry
Self-portrait as a Soldier of 1914 by Otto Dix |
Here's some German war poetry in German. These are not the verse of polished poets, that is to say "poets turned soldiers", these poems are the work of front line soldiers, "soldiers turned poets". There's quite a difference between the two art forms. These poems were the soldier's way of coping by expressing their feelings about such topics as fallen comrades and the homeland, which in once sense was so close, but in another, was a million miles away. They may be considered rough by some and lacking in form or content by others, but they do manage to capture the everyday thoughts of the soldier and the mood of the trenches. If anyone out there is more comfortable in their mastery of the German language than I am and would like to translate any of these works, I would be more than happy to create an English language version of this page. |
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Argonnerwald, um Mitternacht,
Ein Pionier stand auf der Wacht.
Ein Sternlein hoch am Himmel stand,
Bringt Grüße ihm aus fernem Heimatland.
Und mit dem Spaten in der Hand,
Er vorne in der Sappe stand.
Mit Sehnsucht denkt er an sein Lieb,
Ob er es wohl noch einmal wiedersieht.
Und donnernd dröhnt die Artill'rie,
Wir stehen vor der Infant'rie,
Granaten schlagen bei uns ein,
Der Franzmann will in uns're Stellung 'rein.
Und droht der Feind uns noch so mehr,
Wir Deutschen fürchten ihn nicht mehr.
Und ob er auch so stark mag sein,
In uns're Stellung kommt er doch nocht 'rein.
Der Sturm bricht los! Die Mine kracht!
Der Pionier gleich vorwärts macht.
Bis an den Feind macht er sich ran
Und zündet dann die Handgranate an.
Die Infant'rie steht auf der Wacht,
Bis daß die Handgranate kracht,
Geht dann mit Sturm bis an den Feind,
Mit Hurra bricht sie in die Stellung ein.
Argonnerwald, Argonnerwald,
Ein stiller Friedhof wirst du bald.
In deiner kühlen Erde ruht
So manches tapfere Soldatenblut
From The Labor History Archives -In
The 80th Anniversary Year Of The Great San Francisco, Minneapolis
And Toledo General Strikes- Lessons In The History Of Class Struggle
From The Archives Of The Socialist
Workers Party (America)- Some Lessons of the Toledo Strike
Frank Jackman comment:
Marxism, no less than other
political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on
roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations.
Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement that in
the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl
Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League. A
recent example of that linkage in this space was when I argued in this space
that, for those who stand in the Trotskyist tradition, one must examine closely
the fate of Marx’s First International, the generic socialist Second
International, Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Revolution-inspired Communist
International, and Trotsky’s revolutionary successor, the Fourth International
before one looks elsewhere for a centralized international working class
organization that codifies the principle –“workers of the world unite.”
On the national terrain in the
Trotskyist movement, and here I am speaking of America where the Marxist roots
are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist
Labor League, Deb’s Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism
for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the
early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that made
up the organization under review, the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Workers
Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive.
Beyond that there are several directions to go in but these are the bedrock of
revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s. If I am asked,
and I have been, this is the material that I suggest young militants should
start of studying to learn about our common political forbears. And that
premise underlines the point of the entries that will posted under this
headline in further exploration of the early days, “the dog days” of the
Socialist Workers Party.
Note: I can just now almost hear some very nice and proper
socialists (descendants of those socialism for dentist-types) just now,
screaming in the night, yelling what about Max Shachtman (and, I presume, his
henchman, Albert Glotzer, as well) and his various organizational formations
starting with the Workers party when he split from the Socialist Workers Party
in 1940? Well, what about old Max and his “third camp” tradition? I said the
Trotskyist tradition not the State Department socialist tradition. If you want
to trace Marxist continuity that way, go to it. That, in any case, is not my
sense of continuity, although old Max knew how to “speak” Marxism early in his
career under Jim Cannon’s prodding. Moreover at the name Max Shachtman I can
hear some moaning, some serious moaning about blackguards and turncoats, from
the revolutionary pantheon by Messrs. Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. I rest
my case.
********************
Trotskyist Work in the Trade Unions
by Chris Knox
Part 3 of 4
The Primacy of Politics
After the formation of the Workers Party (WP) through the fusion of the Musteite American Workers Party with the Trotskyist Communist League of America (CLA) in 1934, the Trotskyists' organizational course took them into the leftward-moving Socialist Party in 1936. After winning a sizeable section of the SP youth they then split off from the Social Democrats to found the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in 1938. During this period of upsurge, the Trotskyists grew and continued to do trade-union work and other mass work, giving the lie to Stalinist assertions that the Minneapolis strikes of 1934 were the only mass work the Trotskyists ever did. The Trotskyists led mass unemployed leagues, conducted mass defense work and worked in the unions in mining, textiles, auto, food workers, maritime, steel and teamsters, among others. Less spectacular than the Minneapolis strikes perhaps, nevertheless this work was of lasting importance and vital to the building of the revolutionary vanguard in the U.S.The Trotskyists' policy of broad united fronts continued to play a vital and useful role as long as the bulk of the reactionary AFL bureaucracy fought the establishment of industrial unions. The Workers Party declared its main goal to be the formation of a "national progressive movement" for militant industrial unionism (NewMilitant, January 1935), and the Trotskyists hoped, with good reason, to win the leadership of important sections of the working class by being the most consistent fighters for this minimum but key immediate need of the working class. At the same time they did not hide their socialist politics, in contrast to the Stalinists who attempted to masquerade as simple pro-Roosevelt militants. As much as possible, the Trotskyists operated as open revolutionists. Gerry Allard, CLA member and a leader of the Progressive Miners of America in southern Illinois, addressed the miners about an approaching strike in the following terms:
"Being a Marxist, a revolutionist, it is my opinion that we should militarize the strike, revamp the Women's Auxiliary along the original lines, augment our forces by seeking the organizational support of the powerful unemployed movement in Illinois, seek allies in the rank and file of the United Mine Workers of America, and go forward once again with the same determination that built this union. This is the road of struggle..."Allard went on to appeal to the miners to see their struggle in the broadest possible context, as the impetus for the organization of auto, steel, rubber, etc.--New Militant, 30 March 1935
Toledo, 1935: Conflagration in Auto
Following up on the work of the Musteites in the great Auto-Lite strike of 1934, the Workers Party played a key role in a strike at the Toledo Chevrolet transmission plant in 1935, being instrumental in getting GM workers in Cincinnati, Cleveland, Norwood and Atlanta to strike simultaneously. Two Trotskyists, Cochran and Beck, leaders of the Workers Party and Spartacus Youth respectively, were arrested while picketing the Flint, Michigan headquarters of Chevrolet in an attempt to spread the strike into the auto capital (New Militant, 11 May 1935).The spreading of this strike throughout the GM empire was prevented only by the relative organizational weakness of the Trotskyists and the diligent, strike-breaking efforts of the AFL's appointed head of the auto union, Francis Dillon. Dillon personally headed off a sympathy strike of Buick workers in Detroit and sabotaged the strike at its base in Toledo by threatening to withdraw the local's charter and splitting the strike leadership at the key point, GM agreed to a wage increase and published a stipulation that it would meet with the union leadership, but because of Dillon's treachery there was no signed contract. The workers went back solidly organized and undefeated, however, since the company had the militant 1934 strike in mind and had made no attempt to operate the plant with scabs. It was the first GM strike the company had failed to smash, and was an inspiration for the later auto sit-down strikes which built the UAW and established the CIO.
After the strike, the Workers Party published a critical assessment of the strike leadership of which it had been a part, denouncing sloppiness, lack of attention to details (such as not calling sufficient strike committee meetings) and the "fundamental error" of allowing the daily strike paper, Strike Truth, to be suppressed (New Militant, 18 May 1935). This performance was in sharp constrast to the Minneapolis truckers' strikes the year previous, in which meticulous attention to tactical and organizational details and the hardhitting regular strike daily had been instrumental in achieving the ultimate victory of the strike. At the same time the Trotskyists were able to recruit the most conscious workers to their organization, with the Minneapolis branch of the CLA increasing from 40 to 100 members and close sympathizers during 1934 alone. Many years later, Cannon analyzed the main weakness of the work in Toledo as the failure to consolidate lasting organizational gains. He blamed this on Muste, who was a "good mass worker" but "tended to adapt himself" to the mass movement too much for a Leninist, at the expense of developing firm nuclei "on a programmatic basis for permanent functioning" (History of American Trotskyism).
First Auto Union Caucus Formed
The Workers Party was still working under the disadvantage in Toledo that the revolutionary leadership of the 1934 strike had been brought in from outside the union, thereby lacking sufficiently deep roots to hold the militants together against Dillon's maneuvering in 1935. Today the Marcusite National Caucus of Labor Committees, a group which has not the faintest idea of what it means to organize the working class, lauds precisely this weakness as the hallmark of revolutionary strategy. Their hero Muste soon thereafter abandoned the WP to return to the church. The deficiencies of the Trotskyists' trade-union tactics were not to be found in "overrating the unions" as the NCLC crackpots would have us believe, but in the failure to organize firm class-struggle nuclei "on a programmatic basis for permanent functioning" within the unions. The struggles in Toledo gave birth to the first auto union caucus, the Progressives of UAW Local 18384, but its program was limited to the militant unionism of the broad united fronts the Trotskyists advocated: for industrial unions, reliance on the power of the ranks as opposed to arbitration or government boards, etc. As such, it had the episodic character of a united front and lacked the clear revolutionary political distinctiveness which became crucial after the establishment of industrial unions under reformist leadership in the late 1930's.Another point made by Cannon in drawing the balance sheet of the Workers Party period should be made elementary reading for the Labor Committee, which fetishizes unemployed organizing. The mass unemployed organizations inherited by the Trotskyists in their fusion with the Musteites were highly unstable:
"We reached thousands of workers through these unemployed organizations. But further experience also taught us an instructive lesson in the field of mass work too. Unemployed organizations can be built and expanded rapidly and it is quite possible for one to get illusory ideas of their stability and revolutionary potentialities. At the very best they are loose and easily scattered formations; they slip through your fingers like sand. The minute the average unemployed worker gets a job, he wants to forget the unemployed organization...."--History of American Trotskyism
The Making of the Modern Teamsters Union
The most lasting achievement of Trotskyist trade-union work in the 1930's was the transformation of the Teamsters from a localiized, federated, craft union into a large industrial union. In the 1930's, while long-distance trucking was becoming more and more important, the Teamsters union was still limited to local drivers, divided by crafts (ice drivers, milk drivers, etc.) and dependent on local conditions. Based in their stronghold in Minneapolis, the Trotskyists spread industrial unionism throughout the Northwest through the Teamsters. An 11-state campaign led by Farrell Dobbs to organize over-the-road drivers included conquest of the all-important hub of Chicago and established the principle of the uniform area-wide contract. The campaign's achievements were solidified through a major strike struggle centered in Omaha, Nebraska in 1938, which was won through the same skillful organization that had succeeded in Minneapolis. As in Minneapolis, the building of the party went hand-in-hand with the strike, resulting in an SWP branch in Omaha.Especially in the mid-1930's, the mass work of the Trotskyists was far-reaching and significant out of proportion to their size. Yet the Trotskyists knew they were not yet a real party and could not become a party leading significant sections of the masses in struggle until the centrist and reformist forces blocking the path were removed. It was for this reason that the Trotskyists entered the SP in 1936: the SP was large, included a rapidly-growing left wing (particularly in the youth) and was attracting militant workers who could be won to Trotskyism. The Trotskyists had to defeat sectarians in their own ranks, led by Oehler, who assumed that the party could be built directly, through the orientation of a propaganda group to the masses. The Cannon-led majority of the WP hardly ignored mass work. It was, in fact, an important part of the entry maneuver. While in the Socialist Party the Trotskyists established new trade-union fractions, notably in maritime (principally the Sailors Union of the Pacific) and auto, meanwhile considerably embarrassing the reformist SP leaders by their class-struggle policies. When they emerged from the SP more than doubled in size in 1938, the Trotskyists, though still small, were in a better position than ever to conduct work in the unions.
CIO Victories Pose Question of Politics
The rise of the CIO through the massive struggles of 1936-37 transformed the labor movement and altered the terms of class struggle in favor of the workers. The organized workers were in a better position to resist the onslaughts of capitalism; however, the new unions were controlled by a bureaucratic layer which shared the pro-capitalist, class-collaborationist politics of the old AFL bureaucracy. Having reluctantly presided over the militant struggles which established the CIO, these new bureaucrats desired nothing more than to establish "normal" trade-union relations with the capitalists, gain influence in capitalist politics, etc. As inter-imperialist war drew closer, the ruling class was gradually forced to temporarily lay aside its attempt to destroy the unions and accept the coalition which the bureaucracy readily offered. Thus the trade-union bureaucracy was qualitatively expanded and consolidated as the chief agency for disciplining the work force, replacing for the most part the Pinkertons and bloody strikebreaking as the principal means of capitalist rule in the hitherto unorganized mass production industries. This process was completed during the Second World War, when the ruling class allowed the completion of union organizing in key areas in exchange for full partnership of the trade-union bureaucracy in the imperialist war effort (the no-strike pledge, endorsement of the anti-labor wage controls, strikebreaking, etc.).Besides displacing organization of the unorganized as the key immediate issue, this transformation placed the question of politics in the foreground. The industrial unions had been built, but they alone were clearly insufficient to deal with the outstanding social questions--unemployment, war, etc.--which determined the conditions under which they struggled. With the renewal of depression conditions in mid-1937-38, accompanied by increased employer resistance to union demands, opposition to Roosevelt burgeoned and mass sentiment for a labor party developed, expressed through such agencies as Labor's Non-Partisan Political League (LNPL), the CIO political arm and the Farmer-Labor Party of Minnesota. In order to head off this movement, the bureaucracy invented the myth of Roosevelt as a "friend of labor" and used the Stalinist Communist Party, closely integrated into the CIO bureaucracy, to pass off this warmed-over Gompers policy as a "working-class" strategy--the popular front. The CP unceremoniously dropped its earlier calls for a labor party.
The Trotskyist Transitional Program
The primary task of revolutionists in the labor movement had shifted, therefore, from leading the struggle for industrial unions to providing a political pole of opposition to the class-collaborationist bureaucracy. The Transitional Program ("Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International"), adopted by the SWP in 1938, was written by Trotsky largely to provide the basis for such a struggle. It contained demands designed to meet the immediate felt needs and problems of the workers ("wages, unemployment, working conditions, approaching war and fascism) with alternatives leading directly to a struggle against the capitalist system itself: a sliding scale of wages and hours, workers control of industry, expropriation of industry without compensation, workers militias, etc. Most importantly, the program proposed transitional organizational forms and measures designed to advance the workers' ability to struggle for these demands and to provide the basis for the overthrow of capitalism: factory committees, Soviets, arming of the proletariat and workers and farmers government (as a popular designation of the dictatorship of the proletariat). Also in 1938, Trotsky urged his American followers to enter formations such as the LNPL and fight for a labor party based on the trade unions, armed with the Transitional Program as the political alternative to the class collaborationism of the Stalinists and trade-union bureaucrats. This reversed the Trotskyists' earlier position of opposing the call for a labor party on the grounds that the utterly reactionary character of the Gompersite labor bureaucracy could allow the organizing of mass industrial unions directly under the leadership of the revolutionary party. This would have effectively bypassed the need for the transitional demand of a labor party. With the organization of the CIO on the basis of militant trade-union reformism, the balance of power between the revolutionaries and the labor bureaucrats was shifted in favor of the latter. But as the strike struggles achieved the original goal of union organization, and as Roosevelt's policies led to economic downturn, the newly organized and highly combative rank and file of the CIO unions began to come into direct political conflict with their pro-Roosevelt leaders. The call for a labor party became a crucial programmatic weapon to mobilize a class-struggle opposition to the Lewis bureaucracy.Though politically armed to meet the new situation, the American Trotskyists nevertheless failed to find a consistent form of expression for their program within the unions. While they propagandized for the Transitional Program, in their press and conducted campaigns for specific demands such as workers defense guards, labor party, struggle against approaching war, etc., their day-to-day trade-union work continued on the old basis of united fronts around immediate issues. As the organization of the unions proceeded and the opposition of the bureaucracy to organizing industrial unions receded, this united-front policy turned into a bloc around simple trade-union militancy with "whole sections of the non-Stalinist, "progressive" trade-union bureaucracy. Criticism of these bureaucrats tended to take the form of pushing for consistent trade-union militancy rather than building a revolutionary political alternative, so that when the "progressive" bureaucracy lined up with Roosevelt for war in 1940, an embarrassing lack of political distinction between the Trotskyists in the trade unions and these "progressives" was revealed.
The Northwest Organizer, the newspaper of the Minneapolis Teamsters Joint Council, was written by the Trotskyists, who led Local 574. SWP trade-union work in the 1930's relied too much on broad united fronts for immediate demands. Trotsky commented: "You propose a trade union policy, not a Bolshevik policy....I notice that in the Northwest Organizer this is true...The danger--a terrible danger--is adaptation to the pro-Rooseveltian trade unionists." |
The 1936-37 strike struggles had finally rendered pure craft unionism obsolete even within the AFL, and old-line craft unionists began to tail the CIO both in order to enhance their organizational power and because the bourgeoisie itself was less resistant and more willing to accept organization of the workers in exchange for the use of the bureaucracy as its labor lieutenant. Throughout the entire area of Dobbs' 11-state campaign, the only serious challenge mounted by the bosses was in Omaha.
The united front to organize the over-the-road drivers was not wrong, but the Trotskyists lacked the means to distinguish themselves politically from the bureaucracy. This could have been done through a caucus based on the Transitional Program. The Northwest Organizer was founded in 1935 as the organ of a pan-union caucus formation, the Northwest Labor Unity Conference, but the NLUC's program was limited to militant, class-struggle union organizing, under the slogan, "All workers into the unions and all unions into the struggle." Eventually the Northwest Organizer became the organ of the Minneapolis Teamsters Joint Council and the NLUC lapsed, since its oppositional role was liquidated. When Tobin began to line up behind the war effort, the Trotskyists in Minneapolis opposed the war and won over the Central Labor Union, but they lacked the basis for a factional struggle in the union as a whole that a political caucus orientation might have provided. Dobbs simply submitted his resignation as organizer in 1940, without waging a political fight. A few years later, Tobin finally was able to crush the Trotskyist leadership in Minneapolis, with the aid of the government's first Smith Act anti-communist trial of the leading militants.
The Two-Class Party
The bloc with "progressive" trade-unionists was reflected politically in the Trotskyists' orientation to the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party, with which most of the local trade unions were affiliated. Left-leaning FLP supporters were an important component of the Trotskyists' united front. In 1929, the excellent document, Platform of the Communist Opposition, had pointed out:"The organization of two classes in one party, a Farmer-Labor Party, must be rejected in principle in favor of the separate organization of the workers, and the formation of a political alliance with the poor farmers under the leadership of the former. The opportunist errors of the [Communist] Party comrades in the Farmer-Labor Party of Minnesota and other states [in 1924] flowed inevitably from and were secondary to the basically false policy of a two-class party, in which the farmer and worker are ostensibly on an 'equal basis,' but where in reality the petty-bourgeois ideology of the former actually dominates."Written by the American Trotskyists, this statement thus carried forth in hard political terms the criticisms made by Trotsky of the Pepper leadership of the CP in 1924. Pepper had blithely made a fundamental revision of Marxism in order to tail the radical farmers of the FLP into the third capitalist party movement of LaFolette. The Minneapolis Trotskyists, however, failed to implement this policy in their orientation to the FLP. In 1935 they critically supported the FLP candidate for mayor of Minneapolis (despite the current Workers Party position against labor party formations), and in 1938 they supported FLP Governor Benson in the primaries as well as in the general election, without in either case mentioning the need for the "separate organization of the workers." The SWP's September 1938 program for the FLP endorses the adherence of both mass workers' and mass farmers' organizations to the FLP and complains only of the inordinate power of the ward clubs, through which the Stalinists eventually wielded the dominant influence in the FLP. This necessarily blurred the SWP's campaign for a working-class labor party based on the Transitional Program, since in their program for the FLP they were forced to emphasize demands for the petty-bourgeois farmers (loans, easing tax burdens, etc.) which watered down the working-class content of their program and was the inevitable result of the petty-bourgeois nature of the FLP as a two-class party. While not politically fatal in itself, this lack of clarity was a reflection of an accommodationist bloc with the left wing of the trade-union bureaucracy.--Militant, 15 February 1929
Furthermore, the Trotskyists compounded their inflexible united-front trade-union tactics with an over-reaction to Stalinism. The 1938 SWP trade-union resolution stated categorically:
"While always expanding our program independently and maintaining our right of criticism, our Party in a certain sense supports the 'lesser evil' within the unions. The Stalinists are the main enemy.... We unite with all serious elements to exclude the Stalinists from control of the unions."The Stalinist CP, many times larger than the Trotskyists, was indeed a key political enemy in the unions. Having shifted to the right from a destructive policy of self-isolation during the "Third Period" (1929-35), the CP had become intimate advisers to the CIO bureaucracy and hard right-wingers in the unions, doing whatever possible to crush and expel the Trotskyists. Its main aim was to preserve links to the liberals and the collaboration of the labor movement with Roosevelt and U.S. imperialism. The CP participated directly in the bourgeoisie's attempt to militarize the labor movement for the war. Thus in maritime, while, the CP and its allies were busy weakening the 1936 West Coast longshore strike, wrecking the militant Maritime Federation of the Pacific and giving backhanded support to the government's' effort to break the seamen's union hiring halls through the Copeland Act, the Trotskyists made a correct united-front bloc with the militant but "anti-political" Lundberg leadership of the SUP.--Socialist Appeal, 26 November 1938
Nevertheless, the determination of the SWP to unite with the politically undefined "all serious elements" against the Stalinists in all cases reflected trade-union adaptationism. The SWP's reasoning was that, unlike standard trade-union reformists, the Stalinists were the agency of an alien force outside the unions--the bureaucratic ruling elite of the Soviet Union--and therefore willing to destroy the unions to achieve their ends. This was an implicit "third campist" denial of Stalinism as a tendency within the labor movement. That the Trotskyists never drew this logical conclusion from their position and pulled back from it later did not prevent them from falling into errors as a result of it even while the CP was at its worst during the popular-front period (1935-39).
The worst such error was the SWP's "auto crisis" which peaked in January 1939. The UAW was a key battleground between Trotskyists, Stalinists and social democrats in the CIO. Wielding power with a bureaucratic heavy hand, UAW President Homer Martin, a left-leaning trade-union reformist, went so far in his battle against the Stalinists that he eventually lost all authority. To the left of the Stalinists on some issues, he was at base reactionary and made a concerted effort to smash wildcat strikes. The SWP, however, extended critical support to Martin to stop the Stalinists. The crisis came while Cannon was in Europe following the founding conference of the Fourth International in Fall 1938. The SWP Political Committee was being run by Shachtman and Burnham, who were soon to draw the full conclusions from their Stalinophobia and lead a faction out of the SWP (in 1940) denying that the Soviet Union was any kind of workers state and refusing to defend it, and likewise denying that the Stalinists were a tendency within the workers movement. With their own measure of bureaucratic highhandedness, Shachtman and Burnham tried to ram a pro-Martin policy down the throats of the auto fraction in 1938 just as Martin was leading a rump convention of the UAW out of the CIO, back into the AFL and eventually to oblivion. The bulk of the auto union dumped Martin and held its own pro-CIO convention. The SWP had to do an abrupt and embarrassing about-face entailing two issues of Socialist Appeal which contradicted each other, for which Shachtman and Burnham refused to acknowledge responsibility.
During the Hitler-Stalin Pact period (1939-41), the beginning of World War II, a general reversal of positions took place. Reflecting Stalin's deal with Hitler and turn away from the earlier alliance with France, Britain and the U.S., the CP conducted a grudging but definite turn to the left, denouncing the "imperialist" war, alienating its liberal allies and reinvigorating its working-class base. The "progressive" trade unionists with whom the Trotskyists had been blocking on trade-union issues meanwhile became central in the pro-war, patriotic lineup. As a result of this switch, in discussions between the SWP leadership and Trotsky in Mexico in 1940, all the inadequacies of the Trotskyists' trade-union work then became manifest (see "Discussions with Trotsky," in his Writing 1939-40). "The Stalinists are the problem," pointed out Cannon: "By their change in line they dealt us a heavy blow. We were forging ahead when they made the switch, paralyzing our work." Despite this damaging admission, the SWP leaders were opposed to a policy of maneuver to take advantage of the new situation. Trotsky proposed critical support to the CP candidates in the 1940 elections. He had to reiterate that this was theoretically possible, since the Stalinists had made a sharp, though temporary, left turn and were just as much part of the labor movement as the equally reactionary forces in the unions with whom the Trotskyists had until then been blocking. The SWP leaders objected, saying that it would disrupt the work in the trade unions, in which what were admittedly blocs at the top with "progressives" had been necessary in order for a small force of revolutionists to come forward and begin political work in the unions. Criticizing his followers for lack of initiative, Trotsky went to the core of the problem:
"I believe we have the critical point very clear. We are in a block with the so-called progressives--not only fakers but honest rank and file. Yes, they are honest and progressive but from time to time they vote for Roosevelt--once in four years. This is decisive. You propose a trade union policy, not a Bolshevik policy. Bolshevik policies begin outside the unions....You are afraid to become compromised in the eyes of the Rooseveltian trade-unionists."To the American leaders' protestations that their forces were too small to preserve an independent course, Trotsky said, "Our real role is that of third competitor," distinct from both Stalinists and "progressives," stating that his proposal for maneuver "presupposes that we are an independent party." Thus the discussions uncovered the fact that the Trotskyists' lack of an independent political pole in the unions, distinct from episodic blocs and united fronts around immediate issues, had compromised their general ability to maneuver and their independence as a party. They had become over-identified with their bloc partners.
In his report of these discussion to the party, Cannon agreed with most of Trotsky's points in some revealing passages, while continuing to oppose the proposal for critical support to the CP in the elections:
"...our work in the trade unions up till now has been largely a day-to-day affair based upon the daily problems and has lacked a general political orientation and perspective. This has tended to blur the distinction between us and pure and simple trade unionists. In many cases, at times, they appeared to be one with us. It was fair weather and good fellows were together....
"Then all of a sudden, this whole peaceful routine Of the trade union movement is disrupted by overpowering issues of war, patriotism, the national elections, etc. And these trade unionists, who looked so good in ordinary times, are all turning up as patriots and Rooseveltians."Thus the primacy of politics in trade-union work had snuck up on the SWP and clubbed it over the head. The problem had not been caused by lack of a principled struggle for the program, nor primarily by blocs which were unprincipled in character. Criticism of bureaucratic allies in the public press had sometimes been weak, but the SWP had vigorously struggled in the public domain for its program, while raising key agitational demands in the unions. The main lack had been a consistent pole, in the unions, for the struggle for the Transitional Program and against the bureaucracy in all its manifestations, i.e., a struggle for revolutionary leadership of and in the unions. Instead of developing such caucus formations as the Progressives of the UAW and the Northwest Labor Unity Conference into political formations in opposition to the bureaucracy, as the early Communists' Trade Union Educational League had been, the Trotskyists allowed these formations to be limited politically to the character of united fronts: episodic alliances based on immediate issues. As such, not only did they not last, but the Trotskyists themselves, in the unions, became politically identified almost exclusively through these united fronts, rather than through the struggle to build the vanguard party.--Socialist Appeal, 10 October 1940
Size was not a factor, since in some, ways the problem was at its worst where the Trotskyists were strongest, in the Northwest Teamsters. Rather, the SWP demonstrated a lack of flexibility of tactics and an unwillingness to upset its policy of continual blocs with "progressive" trade unionists on day-today issues by a hard, political drive for power based on revolutionary answers to the larger issues. But the larger issues dominated the day-to-day issues, and as imperialist world war drew closer the Trotskyists had to pay the price of isolation for their earlier failure to appear as an independent force in the unions. Unfortunately, they were unable to absorb the lessons of this period sufficiently to prevent the repetition of these characteristic errors. The Trotskyists continued, especially after World War II, to rely on a policy of united fronts on trade-union issues, rather than the construction of political formations within the unions-caucuses to mount a comprehensive fight for a full revolutionary program.
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Veterans Group in Response to President Obama’s Plan to Confront ISIL Says They are Disappointed But Not Surprised.
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Veterans For Peace has released a response to President Obama’s strategy to confront ISIL calling on the president to use diplomacy and to follow his own advice that there is not a military solution to the problems in Iraq. The organization of veterans, spanning from WWII to the current string of U.S. wars,warns that the president’s plan continues to make the U.S. the “greatest purveyor of violence” on earth and places service members in harm’s way when there are other solutions. They call on the president to take six non-military actions to avoid the slippery slope of sending troops to Iraq as well as to stop sending weapons that fuel all sides of the conflict. The group calls for diplomacy to be the number one priority and to include Iran as a partner to help pressure the Iraqi government to be more inclusive of Sunni leaders. Veterans For Peace points out that there cannot be success in confronting ISIL in Iraq without Sunni help and that bombing these communities, who up to now are supporting ISIL because of bad relations with the central government in Baghdad, will not help mend fences.
Veterans For Peace President Patrick McCann commented, “We are disappointed because President Obama’s so called plan is more of the same. Nothing really different than waging war like the U.S. has done for thirteen years. Never mind that according to a State Department report, global terrorism has increased by 43% in 2014.” He went on to say, “Who really benefits from these failed policies? Clearly not the American people who pay for it in money and blood.”
“We are not surprised by the president’s military solution because for the past thirteen years our political leaders have not put forward any other kind of solution. It seems all they know is war and have no concept of how to work for peace,” states Michael McPhearson, Interim Executive Director. “Just as meeting violence with violence in our communities here at home does not solve economic and social problems, more violence in Syria and Iraq will not solve the conflicts or diminish the political challenges there.”
Veterans For Peace response to the president’s plan states, in part: President Obama outlined a strategy no different from what the U.S. has done for the past thirteen years. It is not a plan for success, it is a gamble that war will work this time when it has spectacularly failed thus far. We at Veterans For Peace challenge the American people to ask whose interests does endless war serve? Who is paying for these wars, whose children are dying in these wars and who is getting paid to finance and provide weapons for these wars? We the people are being driven by manipulated fear to support polices that are not in our interest. Peace is harder than war, but it is cheaper in blood and treasure. After thirteen years it is time to take another path, the path of peace. | Download VFP Handout: Six Ways to Confront ISIL Short of War Handout by clicking image below |
***In
The Time Of The Book-Burnings-Brain Percival’s The Book Thief
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/72/The-Book-Thief_poster.jpg
DVD
Review
From
The Pen Of Frank Jackman
The
Book Thief, Geoffrey Rush, Emma Watson, Sophie Nelisse, directed by Brian
Percival, 2013
When
one thinks about Nazi Germany and books in the late 1930s and 1940s one almost
always thinks about those frenzied crowds of ordinary citizens, flames flickering
in their faces to create an even more
disturbing picture, hovering over a
bonfire as a group, maybe the Nazi youth, or some local SS troops keep adding book
fuel to the fire. Tossing all those Jew books, those Enlightenment books, those
modernist books to the fires as if an idea once planted can be burned out in
such a way. And of course in the film under review, the adaptation from the book,
The Book Thief, there is just such
scene. But that is only prologue here because what this film is about, or one
of the things that it is about, is “stealing” books in order to learn more about
the world, or just for the pleasure of reading.
The
plotline here is pretty straight forward once you get past the fact that the
grim reaper is the narrator of this one, a narrator who will unfortunately have
plenty of close-at hand business before the story is done between the round-up
of the local Jews, the deaths of soldiers on the various fronts, and the
retaliation bombings by the Allies later in the film. But what interests
Brother Death is this one story, this story of a young illiterate orphan girl, Liesel,
whose mother, a communist, another group targeted for extinction by the Nazis,
has to leave her behind. Leaves her with foster parents, Hans (a good guy from
the beginning) and Rosa (who starts out as a grump but warms up to Liesel over
time). The main problem early on is for Hans to teach Liesel how to read and
thus opening up her universe during the “night of the long knives.”
Along
the way Liesel meets a neighborhood boy, Rudy, and they become fast friends
just at that awkward boy meets girl stage with all the puppy love stuff thrown
in. During the film Liesel and Rudy become close, close enough for Liesel to eventually
tell Rudy about a young Jewish man who Hans and Rosa are hiding in order to
repay an old debt (and who is forced to leave after a couple of years in the
basement as the authorities start looking for air-raid shelters and whom Liesel
will meet again after the war since he survived); who takes Rudy on her
adventures to the mayor’s house to “steal” books for her reading pleasure; and
helps him overcome the fears of the air-raid shelters when the Allies start their
bombing runs to break the German civilian population’s support for Hitler by
telling stories. In the end though Brother Death works in strange ways since
everybody who Liesel cared about, her foster-parents, Rudy, and other neighborhood
people, were killed in an miscalculated bombing attack toward the end of the
war. As the film closes and Brother Death sums up his work, work eventually including
Liesel who lived to be 90 and to have prospered after the war moving to New
York City, he is still baffled by the human experiment. As are we I would add.
Wednesday, September 17, 2014
Public Education Under Nationwide Assault
California Ruling Pits Minorities Against Teachers Unions
Workers Vanguard No. 1051 | 5 September 2014 |
Public Education Under Nationwide Assault
California Ruling Pits Minorities Against Teachers Unions
The fight to defend union jobs and working conditions for teachers goes hand in hand with the fight for quality, integrated education. But instead of mobilizing on this basis, which would win wide support from working people and the black masses, the California teachers union tops have played into the anti-union smear campaign, joining with Governor Brown’s efforts to “streamline” the firing process. The California Teachers Association even praised Brown for signing AB 215, a state law expediting the process of firing teachers accused of “egregious misconduct.” The allegiance of the labor officialdom to the capitalist Democratic Party is a recipe for defeat.
The woeful state of public education is a searing indictment of racist American capitalism, which is incapable of meeting the basic needs of the exploited and oppressed. It will take socialist revolution to sweep away this rotten system and usher in a society that provides decent jobs, quality education and other necessities for everyone.
The following presentation, given by comrade Reuben Samuels at a Bay Area Spartacist League meeting in late June, has been edited for publication.
* * *
I joined the Spartacist League amidst the 1968 New York City teachers strike. As Mayor John Lindsay slashed the school budget, he pitted the barrios, ghettos and black teachers against the mainly white and disproportionately Jewish teachers union through a scam called “community control.” Devised by the Ford Foundation, the Lindsay administration and the federal Office of Economic Opportunity—which ran Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty”—the “community control” scam broke up the administration of New York public schools into at least 30 independent, community-based school boards. Each board would set its own budget, pitting community against community in a relentless competition over shrinking resources. And each would have the right to hire and fire, thereby breaking the collective bargaining power of the citywide United Federation of Teachers under Albert Shanker.
The teachers strike was provoked when the newly minted school administrator of the mostly black Ocean Hill-Brownsville district summarily fired 13 teachers. One teacher was fired for allegedly losing control over his class; it was claimed students were even throwing chairs at one another. Upon review, however, it was demonstrated that the chairs were bolted to the floor.
An unholy alliance of civil rights and black nationalist leaders, the “old” left and the New Left, and the liberal establishment united to break the strike, crossing picket lines and setting up so-called “liberation schools.” As you can surmise from “Beware Liberal Union-Busters!”, our ’68 strike leaflet [reprinted in WV No. 956, 9 April 2010], we were uniquely unpopular for defending the strike while denouncing the Shanker leadership. The union leaders’ narrow-minded “business union” approach and callous indifference to the plight of minority youth undermined the strike, isolated the union and further fueled racial polarization. No wonder a character in Woody Allen’s Sleeper (1973) quips that civilization was destroyed when “a man by the name of Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead.”
Separate and Unequal
Today, American public education is more segregated than any time since the civil rights movement. The Civil Rights Project coined the term “apartheid schools” to describe schools with 1 percent or less white student enrollment. In Chicago one-half of schools meet this criterion. In the Los Angeles metropolitan area, roughly 30 percent of Latinos attend schools in which whites make up 1 percent or less of enrollment.
Prior to large-scale deindustrialization in this country, back when American capitalism required more of an educated workforce, California ranked among the top ten states in per-student expenditure. Student academic performance was reputed to be excellent. In 1978, the state’s Proposition 13 ballot initiative put a cap on the property taxes used to fund public schools. Prop 13 represented a racist backlash by homeowners against having their taxes fund social programs particularly benefiting poor people and minorities. Today, California ranks 39th in per-pupil spending. Adjusted for cost of living, California ranks 46th. In math and English skills, the state’s fourth- and eighth-graders rank between 42nd and 47th.
Between 2008 and 2013, the K-12 student-per-teacher ratio in the “Golden State” increased from 21-to-1 to 25-to-1, the highest in the nation—the national average being 15-to-1. An important measure of public education resources is the student-to-librarian ratio. In California in 2011-12, that ratio was 7,374 students for every librarian, also the highest in the nation. The Oakland Unified School District only funds two full-time and two part-time librarians for 37,000 students. As a consequence, one-third of Oakland’s school libraries have been shut down.
In California, 80 percent of students graduate from high school. But just 63 percent of Oakland Unified students graduate, including only 51 percent of black males. With concentrations of black men literally locked up and out of the labor force, unemployment levels among black youth resemble those of young people in Spain, Italy and Greece. A 2009 Northeastern University study found that across the country on any given day, nearly one out of four black male dropouts were in prison or jail, as opposed to one out of 14 non-black males.
Twenty-three percent of California students are English learners, also the highest rate in the nation. Los Angeles Unified not only has more English learners than any other school district—about one-third of its 600,000 students—but more than 80 percent of its students live in poverty. Twenty percent will have dropped out by senior year.
Anti-Union Assault on Public Education
The background to the court decision in Vergara v. California is the increasing privatization of public education along with systemic racial segregation. Quality schools prepare the exceptional and the wealthy for Stanford while urban holding pens prepare poor black and Latino students for Pelican Bay state prison. Nobody is talking about privatizing schools in Palo Alto, although Silicon Valley is the cockpit of the privateers.
Privatization is a way for the capitalist government to slash the cost of educating poor and minority youth. But for individual capitalists, there is money to be made. K-12 education in America is a $500 billion-plus market. Including higher ed and career training, the education sector represents 9 percent of the U.S. GDP, more than either energy or technology.
Why is Silicon Valley the cockpit of education privatization? Testing, text books, teaching apps and software are growth industries. Replace teachers with iPads and apps, and you can test, direct and monitor what the little devils are doing every minute of the day. The Silicon Valley-based Rocketship chain of charter schools says it saves half a million dollars a year by using fewer teachers, replacing them with non-certified instructors at $15 per hour. These instructors monitor up to 130 kids at a time in cubicles in the schools’ computer labs. L.A. Unified has no money to fix crumbling schools or to hire enough teachers at a decent salary, but it found money to give every student an iPad.
Teachers unions are the biggest obstacle to privatization. So the Bush and Obama administrations teamed up with philanthropists like the Gates Foundation, Los Angeles billionaire Eli Broad and Walmart’s Walton Family Foundation to bust or eviscerate teachers unions under the watchword of “reform.” Rocketship shows one way to replace teachers with Walmart-style associates, Teach for America another. That program recruits students from elite universities for a brief passage through ghetto schools.
What does school “reform” look like on the ground? In 2004, Oakland launched a “small schools” campaign backed, in part, by a $9.5 million Gates Foundation grant. The city closed a dozen large schools and opened 48 small ones in their place. Fremont High, one of Oakland’s worst-performing schools, with 1,862 students, was broken into five high schools. Result: an exponential increase in administrative bureaucracy and costs, no noticeable change in academic performance. In 2009, after spending $2 billion on its “small schools” experiment, with poor and minority students as guinea pigs, Gates admitted failure.
In 2013, then-superintendent Tony Smith reconsolidated Oakland’s three worst high schools, including Fremont, turning them into—you guessed it—“community schools.” This meant firing all the teachers, who could only be selectively hired back as “teachers on special assignment” with eleven-month contracts that had to be renewed annually. One teacher “reconsolidated” out of a job was Oakland Unified veteran Michael Jackson. He had put in 27 years at Fremont, founding its Media Academy in 1986, a bright spot in those fenced-in grounds of concentrated desolation. One Media Academy student told the lively campus newspaper Green and Gold (12 June 2013) that even before she got to Fremont “my sisters and her friends were talking about Jackson and how he bailed a student out of jail so he could walk the stage.” Jackson was close to retirement anyway, but now he was forced out, gone.
The L.A. schools also experimented with a variation of Smith’s “community schools.” In 2008, L.A. mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a Democrat and former teachers union organizer, spearheaded the “Partnership for Los Angeles Schools.” Under this initiative, eleven poorly resourced public schools were placed in a “turnaround” program. All school staff were fired and told to reapply for their jobs. Typical was Markham Middle School in Watts, which replaced its veteran teachers with “Teach for America” freshmen. The following year, the “Terminator” governor Arnold Schwarzenegger cut education funding by some $10 billion, resulting in the loss of more than 2,000 L.A. teachers. Markham saw a 72 percent reduction in teaching staff. The following school year, these vacancies were covered by a rotating pool of substitutes.
In response, the Southern California ACLU recruited students from three of L.A.’s poorest middle schools, including Markham, as plaintiffs for a 2010 lawsuit, Reed v. State of California. In the name of protecting students’ rights to equal and adequate public education, the suit targeted teacher seniority, blaming the policy of “last hired, first fired” for the disproportionate impact of the 2009 layoffs on the poorest schools. As if shredding seniority would attract better teachers to under-resourced ghetto and barrio schools! Rather than fighting layoffs or fighting for more resources for poor schools and their teachers, the ACLU attacked the teachers.
The Vergara Cabal
The Vergara suit expanded Reed and took it statewide. Aimed at five provisions of the California Education Code governing teacher job protection and seniority, Vergara argued that by making the firing of “grossly ineffective teachers” difficult, these laws made the concentration of bad teachers at poor and minority schools inevitable, thereby violating the constitutional right of students attending those schools to equal access to quality education.
Let’s be clear. California teachers do not have tenure as you might understand it—lifetime employment. During a two-year probation period, teachers can be fired without cause; after two years, a cause must be given and is subject to review by an arbiter, just as in any union job and many non-union jobs. This provides certified teachers with partial protection against arbitrary firings for such things as skin pigment, sexual orientation, political views or criticizing the administration.
Vergara was initiated in 2010 by Silicon Valley fiber optics entrepreneur David Welch and his nonprofit Students Matter. The defendants were Governor Brown and his state superintendent of public instruction, Tom Torlakson. The two state teachers unions, the California Teachers Association and California Federation of Teachers, joined the suit as codefendants so they would have standing.
Welch, who has no background in education or education policy, modeled his Students Matter on Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst. During her brief tenure as Washington, D.C., schools chancellor, Rhee trashed union rights for teachers. The high-pressure, teach-to-the-test regime she imposed generated a correspondingly massive cheating scandal before she was run out of town. Students Matter supporters include not only Rhee’s StudentsFirst but also the California Charter Schools Association, Oakland’s Tony Smith and Los Angeles Unified superintendent John Deasy. Deasy, a former deputy director at the Gates Foundation, was both plaintiff and defendant in the Vergara suit.
In L.A., Deasy implemented the so-called Value-Added Model (VAM) for assessing teachers based on test scores. VAM comes straight out of corporate American culture à la Silicon Valley. There employees are assessed on how much “value” each contributes to the bottom line. Every year the bottom 5 percent are cut, stimulating performance through cutthroat competition. Nothing succeeds like fear itself. During the Vergara trial, Deasy denied any connection between student performance and poverty. “I believe the statistics correlate,” he said, “but I don’t believe in causality.”
In an article on VAM titled “The Harm Behind the Hype,” Stanford education professor Linda Darling-Hammond explained: “Test scores largely reflect whom a teacher teaches, not how well they teach. In particular, teachers show lower gains when they have large numbers of new English-learners and students with disabilities than when they teach other students. This is true even when statistical methods are used to ‘control’ for student characteristics” (Education Weekly, 5 March 2012). Bottom line: The most precise determinant of student success is the student’s zip code.
Misinformation Campaign
The Vergara suit originally recruited three white and five Latino students as plaintiffs. (A black student was only added later.) The three white plaintiffs and one Latina did not testify or make any submissions at all. Education writer Alan Singer reported in the Huffington Post (24 August): “The father of one of the white students is president of a coffee and tea company with between $10 and $25 million in annual revenue and over fifty employees. The father of the second white student is vice-president of Wilshire Associates, an investment management company. The parents of the third white student are wealthy real estate developers specializing in the affluent Encino market.” Such were the (silent) spokesmen for the dispossessed and downtrodden.
Beatriz and Elizabeth Vergara, after whom the suit is named, both attended a “pilot school” in L.A. that is free to fire teachers at the end of the school year for any reason. Plaintiffs Monterroza and Martinez both attended charter schools that do not recognize teacher seniority or job protection. One teacher accused by the suit of being very bad was Pasadena’s 2013 teacher of the year, a 2011 Pasadena Educational Foundation grant recipient and a 2008 recipient of the Star of Education Award from the NAACP’s Altadena chapter. Another teacher had never received a negative evaluation in her 28-year career.
The defendants made a number of motions challenging whether the plaintiffs had any legal standing whatsoever, i.e., whether they could demonstrate personal harm from teacher seniority and job protection. The unions complacently thought that the case would be thrown out. Instead, higher courts threw out the challenges. The case went to trial in January. Judge Rolf Treu of the California Superior Court for the County of Los Angeles, obscenely citing Brown v. Board of Education, ruled:
“Evidence has been elicited in this trial of the specific effect of grossly ineffective teachers on students. The evidence is compelling. Indeed, it shocks the conscience.... There is also no dispute that there are a significant number of grossly ineffective teachers currently active in California classrooms.”
How did Judge Treu uncover the shocking “number of grossly ineffective teachers?” The ruling declared: “Dr. Berliner, an expert called by State Defendants, testified that 1-3% of teachers in California are grossly ineffective. Given that the evidence showed roughly 275,000 active teachers in this state, the extrapolated number of grossly ineffective teachers ranges from 2,750 to 8,250.” But Berliner told the Los Angeles Daily News (13 June): “I never said that.” He added, “I’m on record as saying I’ve visited hundreds of classrooms and I’ve never seen a ‘grossly ineffective teacher’.” Berliner had testified about flaws in VAM. Asked to estimate the percentage of teachers who might fall into VAM’s low-performance category for four straight years, he guessed it was 1 to 3 percent. The Daily News reported, “He was alarmed, he said, when he read the ruling and saw how his ‘guesstimate’ was used.”
If you hadn’t heard of the Vergara case, despite its importance, don’t blame yourself. The California Teachers Association and California Federation of Teachers have done nothing to take the case out of the courtroom and into the streets, except a modest protest in L.A. on the day of the decision. Instead, their response to the decision is to appeal to the very courts that denied their earlier motions. In contrast, the union-busters and school-privateers behind Students Matter have not restricted their cause to the courthouse. They went public with a high-powered PR campaign, and are going national.
The two national teachers unions, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, represent about a quarter of all union members nationally, with 4.6 million members. No wonder this bastion of unionization has been in the crosshairs of Wall Street and the White House. Despite their numbers, teachers alone wield little social power. But as we argued in “Beware Liberal Union Busters!”, teachers can and must be a bridge between the communities they serve, especially the ghettos and barrios, and organized labor in this country.
One last point: The kids locked up in classrooms seven hours a day, nine months a year for 12-13 years, are our future. What happens to them there affects the transmission of culture, science and history to the next generation, or lack thereof.
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