A Little "Rough Justice"- Lynne Stewart Freed-Grandma Goes Home At Last!

the International Movement to Free Lynne Stewart:
We are elated to announce:

Federal Judge John G. Koeltl ordered Compassionate Release on Tuesday, December 31st, for renowned attorney Lynne Stewart. Judge Koeltl's order was in response to the request from the Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons presented to the court by Preet Bharara, United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

In signing the Order for Lynne Stewart's release, Judge Koeltl stated, "The defendant's terminal medical condition and very limited life expectancy constitute extraordinary and compelling reasons that warrant the requested reduction in sentence to time served."

The Order further states, "Lynne Stewart shall be released as soon as her medical condition permits, the release plan is implemented and travel arrangements can be made."

As we write, Lynne Stewart’s husband Ralph Poynter is at FMC Carswell to accompany Lynne on her long-awaited and jubilant return to New York.

A heartfelt thanks to all who stood by Lynne with letters, emails, petitions and telephone calls to the Federal Medical Center, Carswell, U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons, Attorney General's Office, U.S. Department of Justice, members of Congress, the White House and U.S. Embassies and who organized and participated in vigils, demonstrations, rallies and speak-outs throughout the world.

The enduring global movement for social justice has persevered - ever inspired by Lynne Stewart's steadfast refusal to bend the knee, submit to coercion or official duplicity.

Your enduring support in Defense of Lynne Stewart embodies the injunction of Rosa Luxemburg: "In the beginning, was the deed!"

We are grateful to you all.

***
Message from Lynne earlier in the day before Judge Koeltl had ruled on the motion to free her.

12/31/12 3:24 pm (Carswell, Texas)

My Dears:

Well, the impossible takes a little longer !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! We learned this morning that the US Attorney's office has made the motion for my compassionate release and that the Order was on Judge Koeltl's desk. Since on the last go-round he stated in Court that he would treat it "favorably", we are now just waiting expectantly.

The wonderful thing is that Ralph is here in Ft Worth for a visit and will bring me back to NYC with him. We don't know when but the rules state that the warden has 2 days to let me go after he receives the order so it could be as early as Friday or a few days more. Whatever it is, I can't stop crying tears of Joy !! I can't stop thinking of all the marvelous people worldwide who made this happen … you know because each of you played an integral role. My daughter Z is already lining up Sloan Kettering and we will have to see if there is a probation qualification attached to the Order and how it will affect me. After that Ralph will start making arrangements to rent Yankee Stadium for the Welcome Home. ... Smile

So If this reaches you before midnight tonight raise a glass of bubbly to the joy of all of us that the old girl is OUT!!

Love Struggle,
Lynne

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***The Roots Is The Toots- The Music That Got Them Through The Great Depression And World War II…

 

For Prentice John Markin and Delores Maude Markin (nee Riley) who lived through it all, survived it all, and never drew a blessed break…

 

…Well not quite that was that. The “not quite that was that” referring to the weekly USO morale-building dance held in Hullsville the week before where she eyed him, he eyed her, and she “decided” while he was good-looking, especially in his Marine uniform, that she would pass on this heartbreaker. We pick up the story from there. The very next Friday night, a night she had for some reason not volunteered to do refreshment service, she Agnes, Dorothy, and a couple of other young women from the office pool found their way to that weekly USO dance. And guess who was there in his dress blues doing a double-take when she came into the ballroom lobby (she had not been sure at first that it was a double-take but when he looked her way again a second later she knew). Of course that look did not make him stop his world, his pretty young thing he was talking to world. And did not stop him from taking that pretty young thing out on to the dance floor when that week’s cover band, Dick Glover and The Rovers, played the upbeat Andrews Sister’s tune Rum and Coca-Cola while they danced. She was glad, mostly glad, that she had not succumbed to his charms the previous week.

Then the “not quite that was that ” started as a few dances later he swayed his wiry frame over to her and her crowd to say “hi” and to ask her for a dance (as “their song, ” or what would become their song, If I Didn’t Care, came on). She said yes, and so they danced, danced a couple of dances in a row. Then the rules of the USO dance for hostesses to mix closed in on them and another soldier requested a dance.  Later at intermission he again spoke to her, asked her once again if he could wait for her at the end of the dance. Again she said no. Same thing when he asked her for a date. No. He couldn’t figure her out, couldn’t figure why she seemed to reject him out of hand when he sensed she liked him.

What he did not know, could not know then was that besides her feeling that he was strictly a “love them and leave them” guy, that Sheik designation whatever his story to the contrary told it all, and that she should not succumb to his charms there was another reason. After mentioning him to her mother, mentioning that he was from the south, her mother warned her off. Reason: Tyrant father, tyrant Irish Catholic father (although barely observant) would raise holy hell, would go crazy if she brought some redneck Protestant around. And so whatever she felt, they would be doomed before they started. Still he…                   

***Out In The 1950s B-Film Noir Night- William Berke’s Treasure Of Monte Christo 

         

DVD Review

 From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 Treasure of Monte Christo, starring Glenn Langan, directed by William Berke, 1949       

 

Not all film noir is created equal and not down among the second string B-film noir either. Recently I reviewed another William Berke- directed noir, Roaring City, which had a passable, if slightly implausible, plot- line centered on framing on private detective Dennis O’Brien for half the murders committed in the city by the bay, Frisco town, in the early 1950s. The effort under review, Treasure of Monte Christo does not measure up to even that low-bar standard because from the start it is extremely hard to do what you have to do with all suspense films, good or bad, suspend disbelief. Here is why I couldn’t.     

  

The main character, Dante, as he later found out, was a descendant of the famed Count of Monte Christo and of his substantial fortune which was at that point in the late 1940s hidden somewhere, somewhere deep in Frisco town. Dante, a sea-faring man by trade, was set up as he went on R&R in that golden bridge town. The set-up was the old blonde honey trap with a twist. The blonde honey pretending to be under some duress from parties unknown but in pursuit, wrangled Dante into marrying her as protection against those unknown evil forces. Yes, it was either the blonde hair, the shape, or that sandalwood perfume but our boy bought into this scheme, bought in hook, line, and sinker.

As it turned out the whole scheme was being engineered by a crooked two-bit has-been lawyer, Brodie, a guy with an office down in some beaten down office building filled with repo-men, failed dentists, and other con men. He sees this treasure hunt as the way out of cheap street. The Brodie-inspired set-up is beautiful-he framed Dante for the murder of his lawyer partner (who had the knowledge about Dante and the treasure) and then “defended” Dante in court. Naturally that defense did not meet the minimum standard for zealous advocacy for a client and Dante was ready to walk for the big-step-off at the Q (San Quentin).

But see this Dante was truly a relative of that long ago swash-buckling count because he was not going to fry for something he did not do. He escaped while in custody on the way to Q, traced the frame-up back to Brodie and along with the forces of law and order who do not want to see yet another miscarriage of justice gave Brodie his just desserts. Oh, and that blond honey trap whom our man Dante was “married to.” Well she changed sides, provided information about the set-up, and the now- in- the- money Dante and she sailed off into the sunset. See what I mean about not all B-noirs being equal.  

         

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Free the Class-War Prisoners!-28th Annual PDC Holiday Appeal-Partisan Defense Committee Workers Vanguard No. 1034

Free the Class-War Prisoners!-28th Annual PDC Holiday Appeal

This year marks the 28th anniversary of the Partisan Defense Committee’s program of sending stipends to class-war prisoners, those behind bars for the “crime” of standing up to the varied expressions of racist capitalist oppression. The PDC’s Holiday Appeal raises funds to send monthly stipends to 21 class-war prisoners and also provides holiday gifts for the prisoners and their families. We do this not just because it’s the right thing to do. The monthly stipends, just increased from $25 to $50, and holiday gifts are not charity. They are vital acts of class solidarity to remind the prisoners that they are not forgotten.

The Holiday Appeals are a stark contrast to the hypocritical appeals of bourgeois charities. Whether it comes from the megachurches of Southern televangelists or the urbane editors of the New York Times, the invocation of “peace on earth and goodwill toward men” at this time of year is nothing more than a public relations scam to obscure the grinding exploitation of workers and the beggar-the-poor policies that are the hallmark of both major parties of American capitalism. The lump of coal in the Christmas stocking for millions of impoverished families this year is a drastic cut in their already starvation food stamp rations. Christmas turkey for many is likely to be sculpted from cans of Spam.

The prisoners generally use the funds for basic necessities, from supplementing the inadequate prison diet to buying stamps and writing materials, or to pursue literary, artistic and musical endeavors that help ameliorate the living hell of prison life. As Tom Manning of the Ohio 7 wrote to the PDC four years ago: “Just so you know, it [the stipend] goes for bags of mackerel and jars of peanut butter, to supplement my protein needs.” In a separate letter, his comrade Jaan Laaman observed: “This solidarity and support is important and necessary for us political prisoners, especially as the years and decades of our captivity grind on.... Being in captivity is certainly harsh, and this includes the sufferings of our children and families and friends. But prison walls and sentences do not and can not stop struggle.”

We look to the work of the International Labor Defense (ILD) under its first secretary, James P. Cannon (1925-28), who went on to become the founder of American Trotskyism. As the ILD did, we stand unconditionally on the side of the working people and their allies in struggle against their exploiters and oppressors. We defend, in Cannon’s words, “any member of the workers movement, regardless of his views, who suffered persecution by the capitalist courts because of his activities or his opinion” (First Ten Years of American Communism, 1962).

Initiated in 1986, the PDC stipend program revived an early tradition of the ILD. The mid 1980s were a time of waning class and social struggle but also a time when the convulsive struggles for black rights more than a decade earlier still haunted America’s capitalist rulers, who thirsted for vengeance. Among the early recipients of PDC stipends were members and supporters of the Black Panther Party (BPP), the best of a generation of black radicals who sought a revolutionary solution to black oppression—a bedrock of American capitalism.

Foremost among these was Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt), former leader of the BPP in Los Angeles. Geronimo won his release in 1997 after spending 27 years behind bars for a murder the cops and FBI knew he did not commit. FBI wiretap logs, disappeared by the Feds, showed that Geronimo was 400 miles away in San Francisco at the time of the Santa Monica killing. Other victims of the government’s deadly Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) remain entombed decades later. Absent an upsurge of class and social struggle that transforms the political landscape, they will likely breathe their last breaths behind bars.

Among the dozens of past stipend recipients are Eddie McClelland, a supporter of the Irish Republican Socialist Party who was framed on charges related to the killing of three members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary in Northern Ireland, and Mordechai Vanunu, who helped expose the Israeli nuclear arsenal. At its outset, our program included five British miners imprisoned during the bitter 1984-85 coal strike. State repression of labor struggle in the U.S. added to our program, for a time, other militants railroaded to prison for defending their union against scabs in the course of strike battles: Jerry Dale Lowe of the United Mine Workers in West Virginia, Amador Betancourt of Teamsters Local 912 in California and Bob Buck of Steelworkers Local 5668 in West Virginia. (For more background on the PDC and the stipend program, see “18th Annual Holiday Appeal for Class-War Prisoners,” WV No. 814, 21 November 2003.)

The most recent additions to the stipend program include Lynne Stewart and the Tinley Park 5. Stewart is an attorney who spent four decades fighting to keep black and radical activists out of the clutches of the state, only to find herself joining them behind bars on ludicrous “support to terrorism” charges. The youthful anti-fascist fighters known as the Tinley Park 5 were thrown in prison for heroically dispersing a meeting of fascists in May 2012.

At the time of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, we warned that the enhanced police powers being amassed to go after immigrants from Muslim countries would also be used against the oppressed black population and the working class as a whole. That the “war on terror” takes aim at leftist opponents of this or that government policy is affirmed by the massive “anti-terror” police mobilizations and arrests that have accompanied protest outside every Democratic and Republican national convention, among other gatherings, in recent years. Other recent examples include the FBI-coordinated nationwide crackdown on “Occupy” movement encampments and the state of siege in Chicago during the 2012 NATO summit.

The witchhunt against the Tinley Park 5 coincided with and fed into the hysteria whipped up against the anti-NATO protesters, particularly anarchists and participants in Black Bloc actions. Sitting in jail awaiting trial for 18 months are three protesters set up by a police provocateur. They were arrested and charged under Illinois anti-terrorism statutes, the first time these laws were ever used. Free the anti-NATO protesters! Drop the charges!

Continuing the Legacy of Class-Struggle Defense

The PDC is a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization that champions cases and causes in the interest of the whole of the working people. This purpose is in accordance with the Marxist political views of the Spartacist League, which initiated the PDC in 1974. The PDC’s first major defense effort was the case of Mario Muñoz, the Chilean miners’ leader threatened with death in 1976 by the Argentine military junta. An international campaign of protests by unions and civil libertarians, cosponsored by the Committee to Defend Worker and Sailor Prisoners in Chile, won asylum in France for Muñoz and his family. The PDC has also initiated labor/black mobilizations against provocations by the Ku Klux Klan and Nazis from San Francisco to Atlanta to New York to Springfield, Illinois, and mobilized sections of the integrated labor movement to join these efforts.

Cannon’s ILD, which was affiliated to the early Communist Party, was our model for class-struggle defense. It fused the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) tradition of militant class-struggle, non-sectarian defense and their slogan, “An injury to one is an injury to all,” with the internationalism of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, a revolution made not merely for the workers of Russia but for the workers and oppressed of the world. These principles were embodied in the International Organization for Aid to Fighters of the Revolution (MOPR), a defense organization formed in the Soviet Union in 1922 that was more popularly known as the International Red Aid.

The ILD was born out of discussions in 1925 between Cannon and Big Bill Haywood, who had been a leader of the Western Federation of Miners and then the IWW. The venue was Moscow, where Haywood had fled in 1921 after jumping bond while awaiting appeal of his conviction for having called a strike during wartime, an activity deemed a violation of the federal Espionage and Sedition Act. Haywood died in Moscow in 1928. Half his ashes were buried in the Kremlin, the other half in Chicago near the monument to the Haymarket martyrs, leaders of the fight for the eight-hour day who were executed in 1887.

The ILD was founded especially to take up the plight of class-war prisoners in the United States. Initially, the ILD adopted 106 prisoners for its stipend program, including California labor leaders Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, framed up for a bombing at the Preparedness Day parade in San Francisco in 1916, and Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, immigrant anarchist workers executed in 1927 for a robbery/murder they did not commit. The number grew rapidly: Zeigler miners in Illinois whose fights over wages and working conditions pitted them head-on against the KKK; striking textile workers in Passaic, New Jersey. The ILD monthly, Labor Defender, educated tens of thousands of workers about the struggles of their class brothers and carried letters from prisoners describing their cases and the importance of ILD support.

Many of the imprisoned militants were IWW members. After a brief membership in the Socialist Party (SP), Cannon himself had been an IWW organizer and a writer for its press. Witnessing the anarcho-syndicalist IWW crushed by the bourgeois state while a disciplined Marxist party led a successful proletarian revolution in Russia, Cannon rejoined the SP in order to hook up with its developing pro-Bolshevik left wing. In 1919, that left wing exited the SP, with Cannon becoming a founding leader of the American Communist movement. He brought a wealth of experience in labor defense. As Cannon later recalled, “I came from the background of the old movement when the one thing that was absolutely sacred was unity on behalf of the victims of capitalist justice.”

In the year preceding the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, the ILD and sections of the International Red Aid led mass actions in their defense, including protests and strikes of tens of thousands on the eve of the executions. The SP and pro-capitalist union tops undermined the growing workers mobilization by looking to the political agencies of the class enemy, a policy accompanied by a vicious anti-Communist campaign of slander and exclusion. Cannon addressed the two conflicting policies:

“One policy is the policy of the class struggle. It puts the center of gravity in the protest movement of the workers of America and the world. It puts all faith in the power of the masses and no faith whatever in the justice of the courts. While favoring all possible legal proceedings, it calls for agitation, publicity, demonstrations—organized protest on a national and international scale.... The other policy is the policy of ‘respectability,’ of the ‘soft pedal’ and of ridiculous illusions about ‘justice’ from the courts of the enemy. It relies mainly on legal proceedings. It seeks to blur the issue of the class struggle.”

— “Who Can Save Sacco and Vanzetti?” (Labor Defender, January 1927)

The principle of non-sectarian, class-struggle defense has guided our work, in particular our more than two-decade struggle to free Mumia Abu-Jamal. As a small organization, we don’t pretend that we are able to mobilize the type of hard class struggle that not only built the unions in this country but also harnessed the social power of the working class to the defense of labor’s imprisoned soldiers in the class war. Such struggles are today a very faint memory. Nor do we want to distribute rose-colored glasses through which even the most minimal stirrings against particular atrocities by the racist capitalist rulers appear as sea changes in the political climate—a practice that is common fare for sundry proclaimed socialists.

Instead, we are dedicated to educating a new generation of fighters in the best traditions of the early Communist defense work before it was poisoned by Stalinist degeneration. As Cannon wrote for the ILD’s second annual conference: “The procession that goes in and out of the prison doors is not a new one. It is the result of an old struggle under new forms and under new conditions. All through history those who have fought against oppression have constantly been faced with the dungeons of a ruling class.” He added, “The class-conscious worker accords to the class-war prisoners a place of singular honor and esteem.” Keeping the memory of their struggles alive helps politically arm a new generation of fighters against the prison that is capitalist society. We urge WV readers to honor the prisoners by supporting the Holiday Appeal.

The 21 class-war prisoners receiving stipends from the PDC are listed below.

*   *   *

Mumia Abu-Jamal is a former Black Panther Party spokesman, a well-known supporter of the MOVE organization and an award-winning journalist known as “the voice of the voiceless.” Framed up for the 1981 killing of a Philadelphia police officer, Mumia was sentenced to death explicitly for his political views. Federal and state courts have repeatedly refused to consider evidence proving Mumia’s innocence, including the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed the policeman. In 2011 the Philadelphia district attorney’s office dropped its longstanding effort to legally lynch America’s foremost class-war prisoner. Mumia remains condemned to life in prison with no chance of parole.

Leonard Peltier is an internationally renowned class-war prisoner. Peltier’s incarceration for his activism in the American Indian Movement has come to symbolize this country’s racist repression of its native peoples, the survivors of centuries of genocidal oppression. Peltier was framed up for the 1975 deaths of two FBI agents marauding in what had become a war zone on the South Dakota Pine Ridge Reservation. Although the lead government attorney has admitted, “We can’t prove who shot those agents,” and the courts have acknowledged blatant prosecutorial misconduct, the 69-year-old Peltier is not scheduled to be reconsidered for parole for another eleven years! Peltier suffers from multiple serious medical conditions and is incarcerated far from his people and family.

Eight MOVE members—Chuck Africa, Michael Africa, Debbie Africa, Janet Africa, Janine Africa, Delbert Africa, Eddie Africa and Phil Africa—are in their 36th year of prison. After the 8 August 1978 siege of their Philadelphia home by over 600 heavily armed cops, they were sentenced to 30-100 years having been falsely convicted of killing a police officer who died in the cops’ own cross fire. In 1985, eleven of their MOVE family members, including five children, were massacred by Philly cops when a bomb was dropped on their living quarters. After more than three decades of unjust incarceration, these innocent prisoners are routinely turned down at parole hearings. None have been released.

WRITE LYNNE!

Lynne Stewart is a lawyer imprisoned in 2009 for defending her client, a blind Egyptian cleric convicted for an alleged plot to blow up New York City landmarks in the early 1990s. Stewart is a well-known advocate who defended Black Panthers, radical leftists and others reviled by the capitalist state. She was originally sentenced to 28 months; a resentencing pursued by the Obama administration more than quadrupled her prison time to ten years. As she is 74 years old and suffers from Stage IV breast cancer that has spread to her lungs and back, this may well be a death sentence. Stewart qualifies for immediate compassionate release, but Obama’s Justice Department refuses to make such a motion before the resentencing judge, who has all but stated that he would grant her release!

 

Jaan Laaman of the Ohio 7

 

Jaan Laaman and Thomas Manning are the two remaining anti-imperialist activists known as the Ohio 7 still in prison, convicted for their roles in a radical group that took credit for bank “expropriations” and bombings of symbols of U.S. imperialism, such as military and corporate offices, in the late 1970s and ’80s. Before their arrests in 1984 and 1985, the Ohio 7 were targets of massive manhunts. The Ohio 7’s politics were once shared by thousands of radicals, but, like the Weathermen before them, the Ohio 7 were spurned by the “respectable” left. From a proletarian standpoint, the actions of these leftist activists against imperialism and racist injustice are not a crime. They should not have served a day in prison.

Ed Poindexter and Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa are former Black Panther supporters and leaders of the Omaha, Nebraska, National Committee to Combat Fascism. They are victims of the FBI’s deadly COINTELPRO operation, under which 38 Black Panther Party members were killed and hundreds more imprisoned on frame-up charges. Poindexter and Mondo were railroaded to prison and sentenced to life for a 1970 explosion that killed a cop, and they have now spent more than 40 years behind bars. Nebraska courts have repeatedly denied Poindexter and Mondo new trials despite the fact that a crucial piece of evidence excluded from the original trial, a 911 audio tape long suppressed by the FBI, proved that testimony of the state’s key witness was perjured.

 

Hugo Pinell, the last of the San Quentin 6 still in prison, has been in solitary isolation for more than four decades. He was a militant anti-racist leader of prison rights organizing along with George Jackson, his comrade and mentor, who was gunned down by prison guards in 1971. Despite numerous letters of support and no disciplinary write-ups for over 28 years, Pinell was again denied parole in 2009. Now in his late 60s, Pinell continues to serve a life sentence at the notorious torture chamber Pelican Bay SHU in California, a focal point for hunger strikes against grotesque inhuman conditions.

Jason Sutherlin, Cody Lee Sutherlin, Dylan Sutherlin, John Tucker and Alex Stuck were among some 18 anti-racist militants who, in the Chicago suburb of Tinley Park in May 2012, broke up a gathering of fascists called to organize a “White Nationalist Economic Summit.” Among the vermin sent scurrying were some with links to the Stormfront Web site run by a former Ku Klux Klan grand dragon. Such fascist meetings are not merely right-wing discussion clubs but organizing centers for race-terror against black people, Jews, immigrants, gays and anyone else the white-supremacists consider subhuman. For their basic act of social sanitation, these five were sentenced by a Cook County court to prison terms of three and a half to six years on charges of “armed violence.”

Contribute now! All proceeds from the Holiday Appeals will go to the Class-War Prisoners Stipend Fund. This is not charity but an elementary act of solidarity with those imprisoned for their opposition to racist capitalism and imperialist depredations. Send your contributions to: PDC, P.O. Box 99, Canal Street Station, New York, NY 10013; (212) 406-4252.

************

Note that this image is PVT Manning’s preferred photo.

Reposted from the American Left Historyblog, dated December 1, 2010.

Markin comment:

I like to think of myself as a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the international working class. And an organization committed, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program through the annual Holiday Appeal drive. Unfortunately having to raise these funds in support of political prisoners for many years now, too many years, as the American and international capitalist class and their hangers-on have declared relentless war, recently a very one-sided war, against those who would cry out against the monster. Attempting to silence voices from zealous lawyers, articulate death row prisoners, anti-fascist street fighters to black liberation fighters who ended up on the wrong side of a cop and state vendetta and anti-imperialist fighters who took Che’s admonition to wage battle inside the “belly of the beast” seriously. Others, other militant fighters as well, too numerous to mention here but remembered.

Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year, however, in light of the addition of Attorney Lynne Stewart* (yes, I know, she has been disbarred but that does not make her less of a people’s attorney in my eyes) to the stipend program, I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class-struggle defense of all our political prisoners in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).

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

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

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

HONOR THE THREE L’S-LENIN, LUXEMBURG, LIEBKNECHT-HONOR ROSA LUXEMBURG-THE ROSE OF THE REVOLUTION

COMMENTARY 

Every January leftists honor three revolutionaries who died in that month, V.I. Lenin of Russia in 1924, Karl Liebknecht of Germany and Rosa Luxemburg of Poland in 1919 murdered after leading the defeated Spartacist uprising in Berlin. Lenin needs no special commendation.  I made my political points about the heroic Karl Liebknecht and his parliamentary fight against the German war budget in World War I in this space earlier so I would like to make some points here about the life of Rosa Luxemburg. These comments come at a time when the question of a woman President is the buzz in the political atmosphere in the United States in the lead up to the upcoming 2016 elections. Rosa, who died almost a century ago, puts all such pretenders to so-called ‘progressive’ political leadership in the shade.   

The early Marxist movement, like virtually all progressive political movements in the past, was heavily dominated by men. I say this as a statement of fact and not as something that was necessarily intentional or good. It is only fairly late in the 20^th century that the political emancipation of women, mainly through the granting of the vote earlier in the century, led to mass participation of women in politics as voters or politicians. Although, socialists, particularly revolutionary socialists, have placed the social, political and economic emancipation of women at the center of their various programs from the early days that fact was honored more in the breech than the observance.

All of this is by way of saying that the political career of the physically frail but intellectually robust Rosa Luxemburg was all the more remarkable because she had the capacity to hold her own politically and theoretically with the male leadership of the international social democratic movement in the pre-World War I period. While the writings of the likes of then leading German Social Democratic theoretician Karl Kautsky are safely left in the basket Rosa’s writings today still retain a freshness, insightfulness and vigor that anti-imperialist militants can benefit from by reading. Her book Accumulation of Capital alone would place her in the select company of important Marxist thinkers.

But Rosa Luxemburg was more than a Marxist thinker. She was also deeply involved in the daily political struggles pushing for left-wing solutions. Yes, the more bureaucratic types, comfortable in their party and trade union niches, hated her for it (and she, in turn, hated them) but she fought hard for her positions on an anti-class collaborationist, anti-militarist and anti-imperialist left-wing of the international of the social democratic movement throughout this period. And she did this not merely as an adjunct leader of a women’s section of a social democratic party but as a fully established leader of left-wing men and women, as a fully socialist leader. One of the interesting facts about her life is how little she wrote on the women question as a separate issue from the broader socialist question of the emancipation of women. Militant women today take note.

One of the easy ways for leftists, particularly later leftists influenced by Stalinist ideology, to denigrate the importance of Rosa Luxemburg’s thought and theoretical contributions to Marxism was to write her off as too soft on the question of the necessity of a hard vanguard revolutionary organization to lead the socialist revolution. Underpinning that theme was the accusation that she relied too much on the spontaneous upsurge of the masses as a corrective to the lack of hard organization or the impediments that  reformist socialist elements threw up to derail the revolutionary process. A close examination of her own organization, The Socialist Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, shows that this was not the case; this was a small replica of a Bolshevik-type organization. That organization, moreover, made several important political blocs with the Bolsheviks in the aftermath of the defeat of the Russian revolution of 1905. Yes, there were political differences between the organizations, particularly over the critical question for both the Polish and Russian parties of the correct approach to the right of national self-determination, but the need for a hard organization does not appear to be one of them.

Furthermore, no less a stalwart Bolshevik revolutionary than Leon Trotsky, writing in her defense in the 1930’s, dismissed charges of Rosa’s supposed ‘spontaneous uprising’ fetish as so much hot air. Her tragic fate, murdered with the complicity of her former Social Democratic comrades, after the defeated Spartacist uprising in Berlin in 1919 (at the same time as her comrade, Karl Liebknecht), had causes related to the smallness of the group, its  political immaturity and indecisiveness than in its spontaneousness. If one is to accuse Rosa Luxemburg of any political mistake it is in not pulling the Spartacist group out of Kautsky’s Independent Social Democrats (itself a split from the main Social Democratic party during the war, over the war issue ) sooner than late 1918. However, as the future history of the communist movement would painfully demonstrate revolutionaries have to take advantage of the revolutionary opportunities that come their way, even if not the most opportune or of their own making.

All of the above controversies aside, let me be clear, Rosa Luxemburg did not then need nor does she now need a certificate of revolutionary good conduct from today’s leftists, the reader of this space or this writer. For her revolutionary opposition to World War I when it counted, at a time when many supposed socialists had capitulated to their respective ruling classes including her comrades in the German Social Democratic Party, she holds a place of honor. Today, as we face the fourth year of the war in Iraq we could use a few more Rosas, and a few less tepid, timid parliamentary opponents.  For this revolutionary opposition she went to jail like her comrade Karl Liebknecht. For revolutionaries it goes with the territory. And in jail she wrote, she always wrote, about the fight against the ongoing imperialist war (especially in the Junius pamphlets about the need for a Third International).  Yes, Rosa was at her post then. And she died at her post later in the Spartacist fight doing her internationalist duty trying to lead the German socialist revolution the success of which would have  gone a long way to saving the Russian Revolution. This is a woman leader I could follow who, moreover, places today’s bourgeois women parliamentary politicians in the shade. As the political atmosphere gets heated up over the next couple years, remember what a real fighting revolutionary woman politician looked like. Remember Rosa Luxemburg, the Rose of the Revolution.      

 

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News came yesterday of releases of 4 political prisoners held by the United States for far too long. Three men of the Uighur nationality are reported by the U.S. Defense Department to have been relocated to Slovakia. This means nine prisoners have been released in the last few months, and for them and their loved ones, we can celebrate. No thanks are due to the Obama administration for finally letting men go who were cleared for released back into the Bush administration.  The Guardian reports: “Twelve years of detention without trial have ended for three Uighur men who have left Guantánamo Bay for Slovakia, the US Department of Defense announced on Tuesday, ending a clear mistake of the 9/11 era. “The three men – Yusef Abbas, Hajiakbar Abdulghuper and Saidullah Khalik – did not pose any terrorist threat to the US, a recognition the Defense Department came to during the Bush administration. A federal judge ordered them freed in 2008, and a 2009 panel appointed by President Barack Obama concurred. Their continuing detention was the result of a snarled political, bureaucratic and diplomatic process that underscored the continuing difficulty of closing the notorious detention center.” In a photo from June 2009, Chinese Uighur Guantánamo detainees show a note to members of the media. Photograph: Brennan Linsley/AP Our friend and advisor Lynne Stewart was finally granted compassionate release from a federal prison where she should never have been sent to.  She flew home to New York City this morning, and will live with her son, an attorney who has also defended political activists.  We celebrate with Ralph Poynter, her devoted partner of decades, children and grandchildren, with her former clients, some of whom are still political prisoners.  Judge Koetl promised to free her last August, but the Federal Bureau of Prisons took five months to grant what she was entitled to: a chance to die at home of terminal cancer, surrounded by loved ones.  From Lynne: 12/31/12 3:24 pm My Dears: Well, the impossible takes a little longer !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  We learned this morning that the US Attorney’s office has made the motion for my compassionate release and that the Order was on Judge Koeltl’s desk.  Since on the last go-round he stated in Court that he would treat it “favorably”, we are now just waiting expectantly. The wonderful thing is that Ralph is here in Ft Worth for a visit and will bring me back to NYC with him.  We don’t know when but the rules state that the warden has 2 days to let me go after he receives the order so it could be as early as Friday or a few days more. Whatever it is, I can’t stop crying tears of Joy !!  I can’t stop thinking of all the marvelous people worldwide who made this happen ..you know because each of you played an integral role. My daughter  Z is already lining up Sloan Kettering and we will have to see if there is a probation qualification attached to the Order and how it will affect me.  After that Ralph will start making arrangements to rent Yankee Stadium for the Welcome Home… Smile Lynne arriving at LaGuardia airport this afternoon. Listen to the interview with Bob Boyle, one of Lynne's attorneys, on Democracy Now yesterday. Watch video interview with Lynne from the airport. Fight on, says Lynne: "Power from the people." Find out more at lynnestewart.org. Share this message: Thanks to all who made end of year donations to World Can't Wait's work.  We had a surge of incoming online and check donations Monday & Tuesday, and great messages, too. IF you didn't have a chance to donate, it's not too late.  Many World Can't Wait supporters volunteer by spreading our messages.  There are other volunteer needs. Write me. We have a campaign running on Indiegogo through January 18.  Donations from $5 up make a difference in funding visible protest & information aimed at closing Guantanamo and ending U.S. indefinite detention. 12 Years of Guantanamo: Close It Down NOW! Debra Sweet, Director, The World Can't Wait

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***The Roots Is The Toots- The Music That Got Them Through The Great Depression And World War II…

 

 For Prentice John Markin and Delores Maude Markin (nee Riley) who lived through it all, survived it all, and never drew a blessed break…

…some guys, some guys like him, just though they were God’s gift to women. Maybe it was the wavy black hair and fierce brown eyes in a blue-eyed world, maybe it was the swaggering wiry figure behind the walk, maybe it was the soft-edged curlicue wisp of a southern drawl when he spoke, maybe it was the Marine dress blues set off against the Pacific island-hopping tan earned from the blistering sun but he had the girls turning their heads as he entered the USO dance that night. Some of the guys in the barracks, half-kidding, had named him the Sheik out of envy or out of respect for his full-blown prowess with the women, the cold  yankee women who helped people the weekly dances. Dances held each Friday night after the week’s work was done at the Hullsville Naval Depot (and hence the Marine contingent presence).

The idea of the dance, simplicity itself when one thought about it,   was to keep up the morale of those like him, like the Sheik and his comrades stationed at Hullsville and other local military installations, who had returned from hard island-hopping battle, those whose numbers had been called, and those ready to board the troop transports being built just up the road at the Centerville Shipyard. And that morale was kept up best, as it has been since man first started fighting his fellow man for good reasons or bad, by enlisting the aid of all the eligible young women around the Depot and those who worked in the civilian office buildings across the road. And that was how the “Sheik” met her, met his match.

Funny she had noticed him, like every other girl in the room had, when he walked in from her position behind the refreshment table which she had volunteered to cover on the sign-up sheet the week before. Then she had been distracted by the needs of a customer and had dismissed him from her mind as just another “love them and leave them” Marine looking to cash in on his war hero status among the man-starved females on the ballroom floor.  And he gave no indication, not so much as a glance, as he slid across the floor with Agnes, Gladys, Doris, Martha, from work and some other good-looking girl whom she did not know but who was dressed to the nines, that he was interested in her.

But as soon as Jimmy Mack and The Pack, the local cover band performing that night, finished up the first set after playing I’ll Get By to close the set and took an intermission break he appeared right behind her out of the blue. And began without as much as a hello, except to call out her name, to start what turned out to be his courting while she was busy serving donuts and coffee to the gathering crowds in front of her. (It was not until later, much later, that she realized how clever he had been to make his play at that time and in that way  when she could not abandon her duties and where to leave would require her to try to go around him. She thought as well that with that look in his fierce brown eyes she had as much chance of getting by him that night as an enemy soldier did out on some isolated desolate Pacific atoll.)

She secretly thrilled to his soft southern drawl as he told her that one of his dance partners, Agnes, he thought, had told him her name and he had asked whether she was going with a fellow.  No, and so here he was the Sheik at her beck and call. (That sheik thing had nothing to do with being a lady’s man, as least that is what he told her then, but was taken from the name of a group of good old boys that he played music with up and down the Ohio River before the war who named themselves the Kentucky Shieks after the fashion down south in the 1930s for groups playing old time country and mountain music.) So she talked to him, or rather he laid out his case, while she poured coffee and yessed him to death, until she could hear Jimmy and the guys warming up for the final set. He asked her if it was alright for him to wait for her after the dance. She said no. He asked for a date. She said no. No way, as much as she wanted to leave her family house and get married to get away from her tyrant father, was she going to allow herself to fall into the clutches of this good-looking, soft- spoken “love them and leave them” Marine. And that was that …