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Workers Vanguard No. 994
20 January 2012
Egypt: Military and Islamists Target Women, Copts, Workers-For a Workers and Peasants Government!
JANUARY 14—As the beginning of parliamentary elections approached in November, almost a year after the overthrow of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, mass protests demanding an end to military rule broke out in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and across urban Egypt. Police and the army attacked demonstrators with whips, tasers, truncheons and live ammunition, killing dozens. With more rounds of elections scheduled, it is far from clear that the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) has any intention of allowing a civilian government to be established. Ominously, Islamists, the largest organized opposition, have swept the polls, with the reactionary Muslim Brotherhood and the even more hardline Salafists winning some 70 percent of the vote between them.
Last winter’s uprising toppled Mubarak’s hated, military-backed regime, only to result in an even more open dictatorship of the armed forces. At the time, the bourgeois media and almost the entire left internationally hailed this as the Egyptian “revolution.” Since taking power, the SCAF has strengthened the police powers of the capitalist state and cracked down on social unrest. This is precisely what we warned about at the time, in opposition to widespread illusions that “the army and the people are one hand.”
The military’s repressive measures have been aimed centrally at the restive working class. Within months of Mubarak’s ouster, the regime banned strikes and demonstrations. In September, the SCAF expanded the hated emergency law to ban damaging state property, disrupting work and blocking roads with demonstrations. Between February and September, at least 12,000 civilians were tried in military courts, more than under Mubarak’s 30-year rule. With the first anniversary of the outbreak of mass protests approaching, the regime postponed the verdict in the trial of Mubarak for ordering the killing of protesters.
The oppressive conditions of life in neocolonial Egypt have generated enormous popular anger. In a country where 40 percent of the population lives on $2 a day or less, many families spend more than half their income on food. In 2008, when the prices of basic foods doubled, riots broke out across the country. Today the military regime is threatening to slash the bread subsidy. Unemployment is pervasive, affecting a quarter of youth and 60 percent of the rural population. The peasantry, more than 30 percent of Egypt’s population, toils in conditions that have scarcely changed from the time of the pharaohs. Malnutrition and anemia are rampant. Most peasants are either smallholders with less than one acre, tenants or migrant rural laborers. The terrible impoverishment continues to be enforced through police-state repression. As one striking worker explained, there are no jobs, no money, no food, and those who complain about it are thrown in prison.
The leadership of last spring’s protests offered nothing to alleviate the material conditions of life for the majority of the population, instead subordinating everything to the question of electoral democracy and preaching the nationalist lie that Egyptians of all classes had common interests. As we emphasized shortly before Mubarak’s ouster, “What is urgently posed in Egypt today is that the powerful proletariat—the only class with the social power to overturn the brutal and decrepit capitalist order—emerge as the leader of all the oppressed masses” (“Egypt: Mass Upheaval Challenges Dictatorship,” WV No. 973, 4 February 2011).
The industrial working class has amply demonstrated its social power and militancy, particularly in the textile industry. Strike waves continue to sweep the country. Bus drivers, textile workers, government employees and others have fought in defense of their unions and their livelihoods. But for the proletariat to emerge as a contender for power in its own right will require a tremendous leap in political consciousness. It must be broken from nationalist illusions and religious reaction and be won to the defense of all those oppressed in capitalist society. This requires the leadership of a vanguard workers party that opposes all bourgeois forces—from the military and the liberal opposition to reactionary political Islam—in the fight for proletarian revolution.
The Military and the Islamists
In the absence of a revolutionary proletarian alternative capable of addressing the felt needs of the mass of the population, the election returns are giving a measure of the grip that politically organized religion has on the downtrodden. The Muslim Brotherhood’s reactionary purpose is expressed in the slogan “the Koran is our constitution.” Promoting itself as a civilian alternative to military rule, it would dominate any government elected today. Its self-proclaimed “tolerance” for Coptic Christians is belied by its long history of organized terror. The Brotherhood’s historic aim of establishing an Islamic state has often brought it into violent conflict with the Egyptian government; nonetheless, successive regimes have encouraged the Islamists in countless ways and used them as a battering ram against workers, leftists, women and minorities.
The military, police and Islamists have all joined in recent attacks on women and on the Coptic Christian minority, which constitutes some 10 percent of the population. On October 9, protesters rallying against the burning of Coptic churches outside the Maspero state television studio in Cairo were attacked by uniformed military forces and Islamist mobs. In collusion with the army and riot police, armed thugs roamed the streets seeking out Christians, including women and children, killing more than 20 and maiming hundreds.
Women were targeted soon after the military takeover. Thugs who were mobilized around slogans such as “the people want women to step down” and “the Koran is our ruler” violently attacked a March 8 International Women’s Day demonstration in Cairo. In an act of calculated humiliation, women arrested at a protest the next day were forced to undergo “virginity” tests. Now, the image of a young woman, some of her clothing torn off, being dragged through the streets by military thugs in a December protest has become symbolic of the public degradation of women. This earned the regime a slap on the wrist from its U.S. patron, with Hillary Clinton commenting that such conduct “dishonors the revolution.”
Dead-End Reformism
In December, the Islamists launched a vicious campaign against the Revolutionary Socialists (RS) that was seized on by state security forces and propagated in much of the bourgeois media. The Muslim Brotherhood’s newspaper ran a front-page article baiting the RS as violent while the Salafist Al-Nour Party accused the organization of “anarchy” and of being funded by the CIA, setting it up for state repression. It is in the interests of the whole working class to defend the RS and to defeat such slanderous attacks, which are meant to send a message to all leftists and the workers movement as a whole.
Along with its cothinkers of the international tendency founded by the late Tony Cliff, the RS countered the attack by organizing a public defense campaign. At the same time, they were taken aback that the Muslim Brotherhood had joined in the witchhunt against them: “The attack on the Revolutionary Socialists by prominent Brotherhood members sparked outrage because the RS played such a central role in defending the Brotherhood at the height of Mubarak’s campaign against the Islamists” (socialistworker.co.uk, 26 December). In the mass protests last year, the RS embraced the Brotherhood as allies in the struggle against dictatorship, even posting on the RS Web site a statement by the Brotherhood, complete with the Brotherhood’s emblem of crossed swords cradling the Koran. Even when the RS itself is the target, these inveterate tailists have continued to pursue an alliance with the forces of religious reaction.
In March, the military government issued a law regulating the formation of parties. With the pretense of defending secularism against the Islamists, the law targets organizations of the working class as well as those that seek to represent women and oppressed minorities. It reasserts a reactionary 1977 ban on parties that are based on “religion, class, sect, profession or geography” or are established “on account of gender, language, religion or creed” (“The Main Features of the Amended Law on Political Parties 2011,” www.sis.gov.eg).
As we wrote last year in a polemic against the RS and its international cothinkers, we reject the “bankrupt reformist framework, which posits that the only two ‘choices’ for the working class in Egypt are to capitulate either to the ‘secular,’ military-backed bourgeois-nationalist regime or to political Islam. In fact, these are alternative ways of propping up capitalist class rule, the system which ensures vast wealth for its rulers and dire poverty for the urban and rural masses” (“Pandering to Reactionary Muslim Brotherhood,” WV No. 974, 18 February 2011).
The three major electoral blocs—those representing the Muslim Brotherhood, the Salafists and the bourgeois liberals—have all taken aim at the working class in their election campaigns, explicitly condemning strikes. While the widespread strikes and protests of the last year have given leftist organizations an opening to operate more publicly, the situation has also made clear how the reformist organizations act as an obstacle to the fight to build a revolutionary party that champions the working class, poor peasants and all the oppressed.
The Democratic Workers Party (DWP), which is associated with the RS, promotes itself as representing the interests of the working class. Along with other left organizations and prominent figures like feminist author Nawal El-Saadawi, the DWP has called to boycott the elections in protest against the military regime’s brutality. The DWP’s program makes no pretense of socialism, instead demanding “the establishment of a parliamentary republic” (International Socialism, 28 June 2011). This is simply a call for a species of bourgeois government.
In promoting the call for a parliamentary republic, the reformists falsely tie the democratic aspirations of the population to the class rule of the Egyptian bourgeoisie. In Egypt, where successive parliaments have served as fig leaves for military dictatorship, the desires of the masses for political democracy, including freedom of the press and freedom of assembly, are just and deeply felt. However, the burning needs of the Egyptian masses—from fundamental democratic rights to women’s emancipation and eradicating the desperate urban and rural poverty—cannot be addressed except by uprooting the capitalist order and establishing a workers and peasants government. As Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin wrote:
“The dictatorship of the proletariat alone can emancipate humanity from the oppression of capital, from the lies, falsehood and hypocrisy of bourgeois democracy—democracy for the rich—and establish democracy for the poor, that is, make the blessings of democracy really accessible to the workers and poor peasants, whereas now (even in the most democratic—bourgeois—republic) the blessings of democracy are, in fact, inaccessible to the vast majority of working people.
—V.I. Lenin, “‘Democracy’ and Dictatorship” (December 1918)
Imperialism and the Mask of “Human Rights”
The imperialist rulers are past masters at cloaking their bloody depredations in the rhetoric of “human rights” and “democracy.” Bourgeois liberals, the supposedly “non-governmental organizations” (NGOs) and the reformist left have done their bit to embellish this image. In Libya, the imperialists carried out the terror bombing that led to the ouster and assassination of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi under a “humanitarian” banner, with the authorization of the United Nations. Cheerleading for the “Arab revolution” against dictatorship, much of the reformist left internationally fell into line with the imperialists’ campaign, hailing the Libyan “rebels” who were willing tools for the NATO attack. The RS enthused over rebel-controlled “liberated Libya,” where “all the institutions, including the courts, military forces, police and prisons, are under the popular democratic control” (Center for Socialist Studies, 4 March 2011).
The Libyan “rebels” comprised a collection of defectors from the Qaddafi regime, monarchists, Islamic fundamentalists, former CIA assets, tribal chiefs and others. They gave a pretext for the imperialist bombing, acted as the ground troops for the imperialists and carried out pogroms against black African immigrants in the territories they had seized. In a statement issued the day after the imperialist bombing began, the International Communist League put forward a perspective of proletarian internationalism, giving no political support to Qaddafi but calling on “workers around the world to take a stand for military defense of semicolonial Libya.” We added: “From Indochina and the Korean peninsula to the U.S.-led occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan today, the ‘democratic’ imperialist rulers wade in the blood of millions upon millions of their victims” (“Defend Libya Against Imperialist Attack!” WV No. 977, 1 April 2011).
Egypt was and remains a top recipient of U.S. military aid, to the tune of $1.3 billion a year. At the same time, provoking bitter complaints from the SCAF, the imperialists have also cultivated “democratic” opposition groups to give a humanitarian guise to their operations and to influence protest movements. And now that the Islamists are riding high on their electoral victory, the Obama administration has held high-level meetings with the Muslim Brotherhood in an attempt to forge closer ties.
Since Mubarak’s overthrow, the U.S. has given more than $40 million to Egyptian “human rights” groups. In December, Britain announced plans to double the amount of aid it gives to NGOs in the Near East. A major sponsor of NGOs around the world is the United Nations, which itself was set up to give a humanitarian veneer to the depredations of imperialism, particularly American imperialism. The NGOs, sanctioned by and receiving funding from the imperialists, are hardly independent from their bourgeois sponsors.
Showing how little tolerance it has for political activity even when it is backed by its own imperialist patrons, Egypt’s military regime raided the offices of 17 NGOs on December 29. These included the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, linked to German chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic party, as well as the notorious CIA conduit Freedom House. After the U.S. State Department announced it was “deeply concerned” and threatened to cut military aid to Egypt, the regime promised to return all of the seized materials and allow the NGOs to return to normal operations.
A 14 April 2011 article on the “Arab Spring” in the New York Times reported that “the United States’ democracy-building campaigns played a bigger role in fomenting protests than was previously known, with key leaders of the movements having been trained by the Americans.” One vehicle for this is the Center for Applied NonViolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS), which has advised “pro-democracy” activists on overthrowing regimes that are in the imperialists’ crosshairs, from Zimbabwe to Iran to Venezuela. In Egypt, the role of organizations such as CANVAS is to steer mass protests in directions acceptable to the imperialists.
CANVAS describes itself in the vaguest of terms, stating that it does not receive funding from any government and that “our agenda is educational, not political” (www.canvasopedia.org). But CANVAS’s purpose is amply illustrated by its history. It was founded by Slobodan Djinovic, the head of Serbia’s largest private Internet and phone company, and Srdja Popovic, a former member of parliament. Both were leaders of the Serbian student opposition group Otpor, which received funds from imperialist conduits such as the National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA front, and the U.S. Agency for International Development, another CIA conduit. Otpor spearheaded the protests that toppled Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic in the fall of 2000. These protests amounted to a continuation by other means of the 1999 NATO “human rights” bombing campaign against Serbia, carried out under the pretense of defending the Kosovar Albanians. The April 6 Youth Movement, hailed in the bourgeois media for its role in the Egyptian “revolution,” modeled its logo on Otpor’s and used CANVAS’s materials to train its membership.
April 6 is part of the Revolution Youth Council (RYC), a bloc that formed last winter and claimed to speak on behalf of protesters in Tahrir Square. The RYC also includes representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood and supporters of “democratic” oppositionist Mohamed ElBaradei. The U.S. International Socialist Organization, former affiliates of the Cliff tendency, hailed them as “Egypt’s young revolutionaries.” Both April 6 and the RYC have demanded that the SCAF hand power to a “national salvation government” headed by ElBaradei, who announced today that he was withdrawing from the presidential race, saying that the military was not about to hand power to elected rulers. ElBaradei has proved his usefulness to the imperialists: While head of the UN’s nuclear watchdog, he led the charge to investigate Iraq’s supposed “weapons of mass destruction” in the run-up to the U.S. invasion in 2003.
For Trade Unions Independent of the Capitalist State!
In the decade leading to Mubarak’s ouster, the Egyptian proletariat engaged in a wave of struggle that included over two million workers participating in over 3,000 strikes, sit-ins and other actions. These were carried out in defiance of the corrupt leadership of the state-run Egyptian Trade Union Federation (ETUF), the only legally recognized union body, whose predecessor was established by Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1957. For over two decades, it was customary for the federation’s president to serve as the Minister of Labor. Acting as the Egyptian dictatorship’s lieutenants within the labor movement, the ETUF leadership refused to approve strikes, sabotaged workers struggles and informed on militants, setting them up for repression.
Since Mubarak’s fall, a number of new trade unions have flourished. According to historian Joel Beinin, “Some independent unions—like the Cairo Joint Transport Authority union of bus drivers and garage workers and the RETA [Real Estate Tax Authority] workers’ union—are quite large and command the loyalty of a great majority of the potential bargaining unit. Others have only fifty to one hundred members in factories employing hundreds or thousands” (“What Have Workers Gained from Egypt’s Revolution?” Foreign Policy, 20 July 2011). The Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions (EFITU), founded last January, has been feted by the tops of the AFL-CIO and the British Trades Union Congress, labor bureaucrats who act as the agents of their imperialist ruling classes, as well as by reformist “socialists.”
Although the EFITU is not directly run by the Egyptian state, it is not politically independent from the capitalist rulers. Beinin approvingly reports that the EFITU and other organizations filed a court suit calling on the military regime to dissolve the ETUF and seize its assets, which the military did. This was an open invitation for the bosses’ state to attack not only the ETUF unions but the workers movement more broadly, serving to renew labor’s ties to the state. The development of a new, class-struggle leadership in the unions—one that would fight for strong industrial unions independent of the capitalist state—is a crucial part of the struggle to build the revolutionary workers party that is urgently needed.
Bankrupt Nationalism Breeds Religious Reaction
Born of a history of imperialist subjugation, Egyptian nationalism has long served the country’s capitalist rulers by obscuring the class divide between the tiny layer of filthy rich at the top and the brutally exploited and impoverished working class. Rather than struggling to break the working class from these illusions, left organizations including the RS have bolstered them. Harking back to the 1950s-60s, when the left-nationalist strongman Nasser wielded substantial influence in the Near East, the RS proclaimed, “Revolution must restore Egypt’s independence, dignity and leadership in the region” (see “Egypt: Military Takeover Props Up Capitalist Rule,” WV No. 974, 18 February 2011).
Nasser’s bourgeois regime, which continues to be idealized by the Egyptian left today, came to power in a military coup during a period of mass protests and strikes that followed World War II. Military forces led by Colonel Nasser overthrew the monarchy of King Farouk in 1952, followed shortly afterward by the departure of British troops. While Nasser won wide recognition as an “anti-imperialist,” especially with the nationalization of the Suez Canal, Egypt remained an impoverished country ultimately subordinated to imperialism.
Nasser succeeded in stabilizing the rule of the capitalist class, in part through concessions—such as a partial land redistribution, raising wages and expanding access to health care and education—but most characteristically through brutal repression. To consolidate his rule, Nasser suppressed the Communists, imprisoning, torturing and killing them. But even as he brutalized them, the Stalinist Communist Party continued its class-collaborationist support to Nasser, liquidating into his Arab Socialist Union in 1965. The Soviet Union provided economic and military aid to Nasser’s regime, allowing him a degree of independence from imperialist control that would not be possible today.
The bankruptcy of both secular nationalism and Stalinism, forces that were once dominant among the poor and oppressed in the region, fed the dramatic rise of political Islam. Generously funded by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, the Islamists, even while nominally banned, built a mass base in large part by providing charity and social services to masses of people to whom the bourgeois state has nothing to offer except abject poverty and police repression. American journalist Mary Anne Weaver described her experience in Cairo’s Imbaba slum:
“The Islamists, led by the Brotherhood, had built their own social and welfare system here, rivalling that of the state. [The hardline Islamist] Gama’a-controlled ‘popular’ mosques had set up discount health clinics and schools, day-care centers, and furniture factories to employ the unemployed, and they provided meat, at wholesale prices, to the poor. Despite an aggressive $10 million social program launched by the government at the end of 1994, the Islamists’ institutions remained generally far more efficient and far superior to run-down government facilities.”
—A Portrait of Egypt (1999)
Today the Islamists are once again trying to establish a base among the organized working class, where they historically have had little support. In 1946, when they did have a hearing among a layer of industrial workers, they played a strikebreaking role. The Muslim Brotherhood opposed major strikes in the Shubra al-Khayama textile plant while its newspaper spread anti-Communist and anti-Semitic poison. When the strike leaders were arrested during a strike in January of that year, the Brotherhood condemned them, saying they were “members of communist cells headed by Jews.” During a June strike in the same plant, the Brotherhood “informed the police of the names and addresses of the strike committee” (Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman, Workers on the Nile [1998]).
Cliffites and Islam: Feeding the Hand That Bites Them
The RS and its cothinkers in the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP) have gone out of their way to bolster illusions in the Muslim Brotherhood, promoting it as a potential ally of the working class in the fight against imperialism and capitalist oppression. In an article titled “Comrades and Brothers” published in Middle East Report (Spring 2007), RS spokesman Hossam El-Hamalawy boasted that his organization “pushed for close coordination” with the Brotherhood and praised its “brotherly spirit.” Half a year ago, in an article printed in the SWP’s Socialist Review (June 2011) titled “The Islamists and the Egyptian Revolution,” Egyptian Cliffite Sameh Naguib complained about the “state of hysteria” among the left and liberals over the resurgent Islamist movement. Naguib went so far as to denounce those “lured into debates over Article 2 of the constitution, which enshrines Islam as ‘the religion of the state…and Islamic law as the principal source of legislation’.”
Long before that, in the seminal International Socialism (Autumn 1994) article “The Prophet and the Proletariat,” SWP leader Chris Harman went to some lengths to present political Islam favorably for seeking “to transform society, not to conserve it in the old way” and for “anti-imperialist slogans and some anti-imperialist actions which have embarrassed very important national and international capitalist interests.” This was the criminal line taken by the bulk of the left internationally in supporting Ayatollah Khomeini’s forces in the mass upsurge in Iran in the late 1970s against the bloody, U.S.-backed Shah. The result was the beheading of the militant working class, as Communists and other leftists were butchered, women were further enslaved, and national and other minorities were brutally repressed by the new Islamic regime.
While the SWP can fill reams of paper with nonsense about the Brotherhood’s “anti-imperialist stance,” Islamists, including the Brotherhood, have historically been the willing tool of imperialism against Communists, modernizing nationalists and secular liberals. Following World War II, U.S. imperialism promoted and funded the Brotherhood as part of its Cold War drive against Communism. This was one expression of the policy described in 1950 by John Foster Dulles, who would later serve as Eisenhower’s Secretary of State: “The religions of the East are deeply rooted and have many precious values. Their spiritual beliefs cannot be reconciled with Communist atheism and materialism. That creates a common bond between us, and our task is to find it and develop it.”
The Cliff tendency has a long history of siding with the forces of Islamic reaction, including cheering the mujahedin—anti-Soviet “holy warriors”—in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The imperialists funneled vast quantities of arms and money to these Islamist terrorists in the largest CIA operation in history. The Muslim Brotherhood provided a major contingent of the mujahedin, whose jihad against a Soviet-backed, modernizing nationalist government was sparked when the regime introduced such reforms as lowering the bride price. In the first war in modern history in which the status of women was a central issue, the Soviet Red Army battled Islamic fundamentalists who threw acid in the faces of unveiled women and killed teachers who taught young girls to read.
We hailed the Red Army in Afghanistan. Its presence opened the possibility of extending the gains of the 1917 Russian Revolution to Afghanistan, just as those parts of Central Asia that were incorporated into the Soviet Union progressed centuries beyond the medieval conditions that prevailed in Afghanistan. The withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1988-89 was a betrayal by the Moscow Stalinist bureaucracy that left the country mired in backwardness and internecine bloodletting. The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan was the precursor to the collapse of the Soviet Union itself.
Although deformed by the parasitic rule of a bureaucratic caste, the Soviet Union represented the dictatorship of the working class. When the USSR was destroyed through capitalist counterrevolution in 1991-92, the SWP welcomed this, proclaiming “Communism has collapsed” and adding “It is a fact that should have every socialist rejoicing” (Socialist Worker [Britain], 31 August 1991). A grave defeat for working people and the oppressed internationally, the end of the Soviet Union has meant a more dangerous world, where U.S. imperialism has a free hand and forces of religious and social reaction have grown stronger.
Permanent Revolution
The Bolshevik Revolution was a defining event of the 20th century. The working class took state power, leading the peasantry, national minorities and all of the oppressed in overthrowing bourgeois rule, sweeping away as well the tsarist autocracy and the state church. It established the dictatorship of the proletariat, liberating the working people from capitalist exploitation. The Revolution confirmed the theory of permanent revolution developed by Leon Trotsky in 1904-1906. Trotsky had projected that, despite its economic and social backwardness, Russia was already part of a world capitalist economy that was ripe for socialist transformation, requiring proletarian revolution not only in backward countries like Russia but especially in the advanced capitalist states. The workers in Russia, who were small in number but strategically concentrated in large industry, could come to power before the country had undergone an extended period of capitalist development. Moreover, the workers in Russia would have to come to power if Russia was to be liberated from the yoke of its feudal past.
As Trotsky wrote in 1929 in The Permanent Revolution:
“With regard to countries with a belated bourgeois development, especially the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the theory of the permanent revolution signifies that the complete and genuine solution of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation, above all of its peasant masses....
“The dictatorship of the proletariat which has risen to power as the leader of the democratic revolution is inevitably and very quickly confronted with tasks, the fulfillment of which is bound up with deep inroads into the rights of bourgeois property.”
In the same work, Trotsky stressed that “the socialist revolution begins on the national arena, it unfolds on the international arena, and is completed on the world arena. Thus, the socialist revolution becomes a permanent revolution in a newer and broader sense of the word; it attains completion only in the final victory of the new society on our entire planet.”
In articles on the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt a year ago, we raised the call for a revolutionary constituent assembly along with a series of democratic demands while centrally stressing the need for the working class to establish factory committees and other organs of dual power. As a result of subsequent discussion, the ICL rejected on principle the call for a constituent assembly, which can be nothing other than a form of bourgeois state. As we wrote in “Tunisian Elections: Victory for Islamic Reactionaries” (WV No. 993, 6 January): “Our understanding of the reactionary character of the bourgeoisie, in the semicolonial countries as well as the advanced capitalist states, means that there can be no revolutionary bourgeois parliament. The call for a constituent assembly consequently runs counter to the permanent revolution.”
Permanent revolution provides the only program for resolving the fundamental questions posed in Egypt and throughout the Near East today. The region is marked by abject poverty, benighted enslavement of women, the dispossession of the Palestinian people by Israel and the oppression of numerous other national and religious minorities by the Arab-nationalist and Islamist regimes. This legacy of social backwardness and oppression is reinforced by domination by the imperialist powers, whose overriding concern is control of the supply of oil. Egypt, the most populous Arab nation and site of the strategically important Suez Canal, is ruled by a venal bourgeoisie that has been a willing pawn of U.S. imperialism and, since 1979, a stalwart ally of Israel. In recent years, Egypt’s capitalist rulers have aided in the starvation blockade of the Palestinians in Gaza, including by sealing the border in Sinai.
Today, almost 60 years after the withdrawal of the last British colonial troops, Egypt is mired in some $35 billion of foreign debt. Over the past ten years, $24 billion in debt servicing payments has been bled from the country, while its debt burden has increased by 15 percent. Under the “structural adjustment programs” imposed by the International Monetary Fund, Nasser-era state control of industry has been progressively rolled back and factories sold off below cost to Mubarak’s cronies and foreign investors. At the same time, the military has retained extensive holdings, although their extent is kept secret. Journalist Joshua Hammer described them: “The military controls a labyrinth of companies that manufacture everything from medical equipment to laptops to television sets, as well as vast tracts of real estate…with command of as much as 40 percent of the Egyptian economy” (New York Review of Books, 18 August 2011).
The neoliberal “reforms” that led the World Bank to declare Egyptian agriculture a “fully privatized sector” by 2001 have vastly increased the misery of the rural population. Since the mid ’90s, tenant farmers’ rents have shot up from an equivalent of about $4 an acre annually to as high as $60, the equivalent of three months’ earnings. Some five million peasants and their families have been forced into penury after having been evicted because they were unable to pay their rent or because of state-sanctioned land grabs. Dispossessed peasants were driven into the slums and shantytowns of major cities, where they became a fertile recruiting ground for the Islamic reactionaries. Resistance to the land “reform” has continued over the years: peasants have marched in demonstrations, blocked main roads, set landlords’ houses on fire and attacked government offices. The government has responded with severe repression, with police and armed gangs attacking peasants, seizing crops and occupying fields by force.
The end of legal protections on land tenure opened the way for foreign companies to purchase huge tracts. The past two decades saw a tenfold rise in agricultural exports as production shifted away from staples for domestic consumption to high-cash produce for sale in Europe. Once capable of producing enough food to feed its population, Egypt is now the world’s biggest importer of wheat, leaving the impoverished population at the mercy of the world market, which is dominated by U.S. agribusiness.
In a country where more than 90 percent of women, both Muslim and Christian, are subjected to genital mutilation, courts run under Islamic law adjudicate family disputes and “honor killing” runs rampant. For Marxists, the question of women’s liberation cannot be separated from the struggle to emancipate the whole of the working class. Women workers are a vital part of the Egyptian proletariat. They have been prominent in the wave of strikes that has swept Egypt over the past decade, especially in the textile industry. Won to a revolutionary program, they will have a leading role to play in breaking the chains of social backwardness and religious obscurantism. As Trotsky stressed in his 1924 speech “Perspectives and Tasks in the East,” “There will be no better communist in the East, no better fighter for the ideas of the revolution and for the ideas of communism than the awakened woman worker.”
For Proletarian Internationalism!
The liberation of the Egyptian masses requires the overthrow not simply of the military but of the capitalists, landlords, Islamic clergy and imperialists who profit from the grinding oppression of the populace. The power to do this lies in the hands of the working class, whose consciousness must be transformed from that of a class in itself, fighting to improve its status within the framework of capitalism, to a class for itself, realizing its historic potential to lead all the oppressed in a revolutionary struggle against the capitalist system. Crucially, this includes the mobilization of the working class in the imperialist centers to overthrow their “own” exploiters. The capitalist economic crisis that has ravaged the lives and livelihoods of working people from North Africa and the Near East to Europe, North America and Japan only further underscores the necessity for a perspective that is at once revolutionary, proletarian and internationalist.
In Egypt, the struggle of the proletariat must be welded to the defense of the many oppressed layers in the society, including women, youth and Coptic Christians as well as Bedouins, Nubians and other minority groups. A workers and peasants government would expropriate the capitalist class, including the landlords, and establish a planned, collectivized economy. A planned economy on an international scale would open the way to develop industry at the highest level, providing jobs for the impoverished urban masses and applying the most advanced technology to agriculture.
The struggle against imperialist domination and the oppressive rule of the sheiks, kings, colonels, ayatollahs, nationalist and Zionist rulers throughout the region cannot be resolved under capitalism. There will be no end to ethnic and national oppression, no emancipation of women, no end to the exploitation of working people short of a thoroughgoing proletarian revolution that opens the road to the establishment of a socialist federation of the Near East, as part of the struggle for world proletarian revolution. To bring this perspective to the working class requires the construction of a Leninist vanguard party, which will be forged in combat against the reformist “socialists” and others who seek to subordinate the working class to the imperialists, nationalists and forces of Islamic reaction. The International Communist League is dedicated to forging such parties.
Thursday, January 26, 2012
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Defend the Unions Through Class Struggle!-Indiana: Battle Against “Right to Work” Hitched to Democrats
Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League website.
Workers Vanguard No. 994
20 January 2012
Defend the Unions Through Class Struggle!-Indiana: Battle Against “Right to Work” Hitched to Democrats
JANUARY 16—More than 17,000 unionists and their supporters have rallied in Indianapolis over the last two weeks to protest an anti-union “right to work” bill making its way through the state legislature. On January 10, protesters packed the statehouse during the “State of the State” address by Republican governor Mitch Daniels, a notorious union-buster who on his first day in office in 2005 abolished collective bargaining for 25,000 state employees. As of 2011, dues-paying union membership plummeted 90 percent among these workers. Now aiming his fire at all unions, Daniels has taken up the “right to work” crusade to outlaw the union shop in Indiana, which lies in the middle of the manufacturing belt stretching across the Great Lakes region.
The entire purpose of the legislation, which is disguised as a job-creation measure, is to financially and otherwise cripple unions by making union dues payments optional. States with the lowest levels of unionization are overwhelmingly concentrated in the 22 with “right to work” laws. These include practically the entire South and a number of Great Plains and Rocky Mountain states. The average income for workers in such states is $1,500 a year less than in other states, to say nothing of the lower percentage of workers who have health coverage and pensions. All this represents billions of dollars in additional profits annually for the capitalists. In advance of next month’s Super Bowl in Indianapolis, the NFL Players Association issued a statement denouncing the Indiana bill as a “political ploy designed to destroy basic workers’ rights.”
The 2005 decertification of the Indiana state employee unions was a template for attacks on public workers in Wisconsin, Ohio and elsewhere last year, as state governments nationwide pled poverty amid the capitalist economic downturn. Feeling wind in their sails, “right to work” forces are gunning for the private-sector unions as well in Indiana, a historic center of industrial unionism. In the face of this offensive, Indiana labor bureaucrats are following the same losing playbook as their counterparts did in Wisconsin last year: channeling workers’ anger over union-busting into the dead end of support to the “lesser evil” capitalist Democratic Party. In Wisconsin, tens of thousands of working people repeatedly turned out at the state capitol to fight a massive anti-labor assault on public workers by the Republican-led state government. But union officials were dead set against using labor’s strike weapon, diverting workers’ militancy into a campaign to recall Republican officeholders. As a result, the public employees unions were clobbered.
When the Indiana “right to work” bill was on the floor last February, state Democrats followed the example of their Wisconsin colleagues by fleeing to Illinois to prevent a quorum for a vote. “They knocked out right to work,” pronounced AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka at the time. Trumka to the contrary, the bill is now advancing in the legislature. In response, the labor tops have joined hands with the Democrats in pleading that this measure be made a statewide referendum on election day in November, putting the unions’ existence at the mercy of voters. While a referendum in Ohio last year succeeded in overturning a newly enacted law limiting collective bargaining for public workers, union officials used the campaign to further tie labor to the Democrats.
No less than the Republicans, the Democratic Party is a party of the capitalist class enemy and will not hesitate to savage workers and their organizations. Following a record effort by the union tops to put him into the White House, Barack Obama spearheaded the gutting of the United Auto Workers (UAW), with the obliging help of the UAW bureaucracy, as part of bailing out the auto companies. He also launched a war against teachers unions and imposed a two-year wage freeze on federal employees. Just last October, Obama banned a potential strike by tens of thousands of freight rail workers. Meanwhile, Democratic governors have wrenched massive concessions from public workers in New York and California.
Posturing as “friends of labor,” the Democrats may not favor getting rid of unions altogether, preferring instead to keep them docile through the agency of the union officialdom, which provides them with union money and manpower for election campaigns. Much of the labor bureaucracy is itself a component part of the Democratic Party. In Republican-dominated Indiana, since 2005 AFL-CIO affiliates have contributed more than $1.2 million to capitalist politicians, almost all Democrats, while the SEIU has spent $2.7 million.
The labor bureaucrats long ago abandoned the class-struggle methods that built the unions—mass pickets, sit-down strikes, secondary boycotts—in favor of reliance on the capitalist government and its political parties. Their class-collaborationist policies have sapped the fighting strength of the unions and demoralized workers, setting the stage for the current anti-labor assault. Indiana is a case in point. The state was the site of countless pitched labor battles that made it a stronghold of the Steelworkers, the UAW and other unions. But in recent decades Indiana has seen a steep decline in union membership, to 10.9 percent of the workforce in 2010. Despite the ongoing deindustrialization of the Rust Belt, there remains a concentration of manufacturing in the state. But increasingly these jobs are non-union, including at auto plants owned by Toyota, Honda and Subaru. Barely paying lip service to the need to organize the unorganized, the prostrate union officialdom has only further whetted the appetites of those trying to drive unions out of the state.
Providing cover for the labor tops is the reformist International Socialist Organization (ISO), whose January 4 article on Indiana on its Web site raised not even a perfunctory word of caution against reliance on the Democrats. At the time of the showdown in Wisconsin, the ISO disparaged the call for a statewide strike as “unlikely to get very far.” Indeed, for the ISO and its ilk the purpose of labor protest is to pressure the Democratic Party representatives of capital to “fight” for a few more crumbs for working people.
In its Indiana article, the ISO praises such New Deal legislation as the 1935 Wagner Act, which supposedly “codified the legal rights of workers to organize for unionization and challenge the often-violent resistance of employers.” In fact, the Wagner Act was passed to head off and regulate the unions in the aftermath of victorious general strikes in Minneapolis, San Francisco and Toledo in 1934, all of which were led by reds. Those strikes paved the way for the founding of the CIO industrial unions. Along with other laws, the Wagner Act was designed to wrest control of organizing drives from union militants and to set up a government mechanism for putting the unions under the thumb of the capitalist state.
To cover its tracks, the ISO offers that “legislation on its own has never built the labor movement.” In fact, all of labor history shows that no decisive gain for the working class has ever been won through Congress, the courts, government agencies or the ballot box. It has taken hard and bitter class struggle to wrest anything of value from the capitalist exploiters. For the ISO to warn against relying on legislation is sheer hypocrisy. For years, this outfit promoted the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), which helped shackle that union’s power by, for example, using the courts to bring the government into the union’s internal affairs. The TDU did so under the Landrum-Griffin Act, a legal sledgehammer against unions that the ISO conveniently disappears in its narrative.
The Wagner Act was amended in 1947 by the union-busting Taft-Hartley Act, which outlawed labor solidarity actions like secondary boycotts and sympathy strikes. Enacted following the post-World War II strike wave, the largest in U.S. history, Taft-Hartley passed Congress with the support of a majority of Democrats. Its provisions demanding loyalty oaths from union officials were used to purge all manner of reds from the unions, consolidating the hold of the anti-Communist labor bureaucracy. Now, taking a page from the Cold War, when anti-Communism was wielded to bash the unions, a lurid full-page ad in the New York Times (5 January) equates unions with North Korea’s Stalinist regime on the grounds that workers in union shops are not given the option to stop paying dues. The ad was paid for by lobbyist Richard Berman’s “Center for Union Facts,” a shadowy outfit funded by corporate money committed to pushing “right to work” laws and otherwise attacking labor.
Taft-Hartley also banned closed shop contracts, which prohibit companies from employing non-union workers, and empowered states to pass “right to work” laws. Most of those statutes were adopted shortly after Taft-Hartley was enacted, overwhelmingly in the Jim Crow South, where the color bar had long served to divide workers and keep unions out. They were supplemented by “anti-violence” bills aimed at curbing picketing. The Indiana Chamber of Commerce’s first “right to work” campaign got its start in 1955 after scabs opened fire on striking UAW workers at a piston ring plant in New Castle, sparking an armed confrontation that left several wounded.
Two years later, Indiana became the first Northern industrial state to join the “right to work” fold. A bastion of racist bigotry, the state was a natural fit for organizations that combined vicious anti-unionism with virulent racism in pushing for these laws. In the 1920s, Indiana was a center of Ku Klux Klan terror and murder. By the middle of that decade, over half the General Assembly, the governor and other high-ranking government officials were Klansmen. In 1965, amid the social ferment of the civil rights movement, the “right to work” statute was repealed, after struggles in defense of the union shop by the UAW and other unions had largely rendered it a dead letter.
With vicious racism a fault line in the U.S. to this day, black rights and union rights will either go forward together or fall back separately. It is crucial for the working class to defend every gain it has won, beginning with the very existence of the unions. Turning back the ruling-class war against labor, black people and other minorities requires breaking the labor movement from its political subservience to the Democrats. The fight for a class-struggle leadership of the unions is an integral part of forging a revolutionary workers party, the necessary instrument to lead all the exploited and the oppressed in overthrowing the decaying capitalist system and replacing it with a planned economy under a workers government.
Workers Vanguard No. 994
20 January 2012
Defend the Unions Through Class Struggle!-Indiana: Battle Against “Right to Work” Hitched to Democrats
JANUARY 16—More than 17,000 unionists and their supporters have rallied in Indianapolis over the last two weeks to protest an anti-union “right to work” bill making its way through the state legislature. On January 10, protesters packed the statehouse during the “State of the State” address by Republican governor Mitch Daniels, a notorious union-buster who on his first day in office in 2005 abolished collective bargaining for 25,000 state employees. As of 2011, dues-paying union membership plummeted 90 percent among these workers. Now aiming his fire at all unions, Daniels has taken up the “right to work” crusade to outlaw the union shop in Indiana, which lies in the middle of the manufacturing belt stretching across the Great Lakes region.
The entire purpose of the legislation, which is disguised as a job-creation measure, is to financially and otherwise cripple unions by making union dues payments optional. States with the lowest levels of unionization are overwhelmingly concentrated in the 22 with “right to work” laws. These include practically the entire South and a number of Great Plains and Rocky Mountain states. The average income for workers in such states is $1,500 a year less than in other states, to say nothing of the lower percentage of workers who have health coverage and pensions. All this represents billions of dollars in additional profits annually for the capitalists. In advance of next month’s Super Bowl in Indianapolis, the NFL Players Association issued a statement denouncing the Indiana bill as a “political ploy designed to destroy basic workers’ rights.”
The 2005 decertification of the Indiana state employee unions was a template for attacks on public workers in Wisconsin, Ohio and elsewhere last year, as state governments nationwide pled poverty amid the capitalist economic downturn. Feeling wind in their sails, “right to work” forces are gunning for the private-sector unions as well in Indiana, a historic center of industrial unionism. In the face of this offensive, Indiana labor bureaucrats are following the same losing playbook as their counterparts did in Wisconsin last year: channeling workers’ anger over union-busting into the dead end of support to the “lesser evil” capitalist Democratic Party. In Wisconsin, tens of thousands of working people repeatedly turned out at the state capitol to fight a massive anti-labor assault on public workers by the Republican-led state government. But union officials were dead set against using labor’s strike weapon, diverting workers’ militancy into a campaign to recall Republican officeholders. As a result, the public employees unions were clobbered.
When the Indiana “right to work” bill was on the floor last February, state Democrats followed the example of their Wisconsin colleagues by fleeing to Illinois to prevent a quorum for a vote. “They knocked out right to work,” pronounced AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka at the time. Trumka to the contrary, the bill is now advancing in the legislature. In response, the labor tops have joined hands with the Democrats in pleading that this measure be made a statewide referendum on election day in November, putting the unions’ existence at the mercy of voters. While a referendum in Ohio last year succeeded in overturning a newly enacted law limiting collective bargaining for public workers, union officials used the campaign to further tie labor to the Democrats.
No less than the Republicans, the Democratic Party is a party of the capitalist class enemy and will not hesitate to savage workers and their organizations. Following a record effort by the union tops to put him into the White House, Barack Obama spearheaded the gutting of the United Auto Workers (UAW), with the obliging help of the UAW bureaucracy, as part of bailing out the auto companies. He also launched a war against teachers unions and imposed a two-year wage freeze on federal employees. Just last October, Obama banned a potential strike by tens of thousands of freight rail workers. Meanwhile, Democratic governors have wrenched massive concessions from public workers in New York and California.
Posturing as “friends of labor,” the Democrats may not favor getting rid of unions altogether, preferring instead to keep them docile through the agency of the union officialdom, which provides them with union money and manpower for election campaigns. Much of the labor bureaucracy is itself a component part of the Democratic Party. In Republican-dominated Indiana, since 2005 AFL-CIO affiliates have contributed more than $1.2 million to capitalist politicians, almost all Democrats, while the SEIU has spent $2.7 million.
The labor bureaucrats long ago abandoned the class-struggle methods that built the unions—mass pickets, sit-down strikes, secondary boycotts—in favor of reliance on the capitalist government and its political parties. Their class-collaborationist policies have sapped the fighting strength of the unions and demoralized workers, setting the stage for the current anti-labor assault. Indiana is a case in point. The state was the site of countless pitched labor battles that made it a stronghold of the Steelworkers, the UAW and other unions. But in recent decades Indiana has seen a steep decline in union membership, to 10.9 percent of the workforce in 2010. Despite the ongoing deindustrialization of the Rust Belt, there remains a concentration of manufacturing in the state. But increasingly these jobs are non-union, including at auto plants owned by Toyota, Honda and Subaru. Barely paying lip service to the need to organize the unorganized, the prostrate union officialdom has only further whetted the appetites of those trying to drive unions out of the state.
Providing cover for the labor tops is the reformist International Socialist Organization (ISO), whose January 4 article on Indiana on its Web site raised not even a perfunctory word of caution against reliance on the Democrats. At the time of the showdown in Wisconsin, the ISO disparaged the call for a statewide strike as “unlikely to get very far.” Indeed, for the ISO and its ilk the purpose of labor protest is to pressure the Democratic Party representatives of capital to “fight” for a few more crumbs for working people.
In its Indiana article, the ISO praises such New Deal legislation as the 1935 Wagner Act, which supposedly “codified the legal rights of workers to organize for unionization and challenge the often-violent resistance of employers.” In fact, the Wagner Act was passed to head off and regulate the unions in the aftermath of victorious general strikes in Minneapolis, San Francisco and Toledo in 1934, all of which were led by reds. Those strikes paved the way for the founding of the CIO industrial unions. Along with other laws, the Wagner Act was designed to wrest control of organizing drives from union militants and to set up a government mechanism for putting the unions under the thumb of the capitalist state.
To cover its tracks, the ISO offers that “legislation on its own has never built the labor movement.” In fact, all of labor history shows that no decisive gain for the working class has ever been won through Congress, the courts, government agencies or the ballot box. It has taken hard and bitter class struggle to wrest anything of value from the capitalist exploiters. For the ISO to warn against relying on legislation is sheer hypocrisy. For years, this outfit promoted the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), which helped shackle that union’s power by, for example, using the courts to bring the government into the union’s internal affairs. The TDU did so under the Landrum-Griffin Act, a legal sledgehammer against unions that the ISO conveniently disappears in its narrative.
The Wagner Act was amended in 1947 by the union-busting Taft-Hartley Act, which outlawed labor solidarity actions like secondary boycotts and sympathy strikes. Enacted following the post-World War II strike wave, the largest in U.S. history, Taft-Hartley passed Congress with the support of a majority of Democrats. Its provisions demanding loyalty oaths from union officials were used to purge all manner of reds from the unions, consolidating the hold of the anti-Communist labor bureaucracy. Now, taking a page from the Cold War, when anti-Communism was wielded to bash the unions, a lurid full-page ad in the New York Times (5 January) equates unions with North Korea’s Stalinist regime on the grounds that workers in union shops are not given the option to stop paying dues. The ad was paid for by lobbyist Richard Berman’s “Center for Union Facts,” a shadowy outfit funded by corporate money committed to pushing “right to work” laws and otherwise attacking labor.
Taft-Hartley also banned closed shop contracts, which prohibit companies from employing non-union workers, and empowered states to pass “right to work” laws. Most of those statutes were adopted shortly after Taft-Hartley was enacted, overwhelmingly in the Jim Crow South, where the color bar had long served to divide workers and keep unions out. They were supplemented by “anti-violence” bills aimed at curbing picketing. The Indiana Chamber of Commerce’s first “right to work” campaign got its start in 1955 after scabs opened fire on striking UAW workers at a piston ring plant in New Castle, sparking an armed confrontation that left several wounded.
Two years later, Indiana became the first Northern industrial state to join the “right to work” fold. A bastion of racist bigotry, the state was a natural fit for organizations that combined vicious anti-unionism with virulent racism in pushing for these laws. In the 1920s, Indiana was a center of Ku Klux Klan terror and murder. By the middle of that decade, over half the General Assembly, the governor and other high-ranking government officials were Klansmen. In 1965, amid the social ferment of the civil rights movement, the “right to work” statute was repealed, after struggles in defense of the union shop by the UAW and other unions had largely rendered it a dead letter.
With vicious racism a fault line in the U.S. to this day, black rights and union rights will either go forward together or fall back separately. It is crucial for the working class to defend every gain it has won, beginning with the very existence of the unions. Turning back the ruling-class war against labor, black people and other minorities requires breaking the labor movement from its political subservience to the Democrats. The fight for a class-struggle leadership of the unions is an integral part of forging a revolutionary workers party, the necessary instrument to lead all the exploited and the oppressed in overthrowing the decaying capitalist system and replacing it with a planned economy under a workers government.
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-NYC Holiday Appeal-Remembering the Life and Struggle of Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt)
Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League website.
Workers Vanguard No. 994
20 January 2012
NYC Holiday Appeal-Remembering the Life and Struggle of Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt)
(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)
On January 6, 125 people packed the Communications Workers Local 1180 union hall in lower Manhattan to take part in a fund-raiser with live jazz for the 26th annual Partisan Defense Committee Holiday Appeal. Along with benefits in other cities, this event helped support the PDC’s program of annual stipends and holiday gifts to 16 class-war prisoners—former Black Panther Party (BPP) members, MOVE supporters and others singled out and thrown behind bars for standing up to racist capitalist oppression. Our support to these prisoners is an expression of non-sectarian, class-struggle defense: it is the duty of the workers movement to defend such victims of capitalist repression irrespective of their particular political viewpoints.
The New York fund-raiser took place just days after President Obama signed into law the prerogative of the Commander-in-Chief to “disappear” into a military brig, here or anywhere else in the world, any U.S. citizen or foreign national whom the government deems a supporter of “terrorism.” In the fourth year of a world capitalist economic crisis that is pounding the working class and the poor, the government is intent on expanding its repressive powers, knowing that the massive and growing inequality sows the seeds of class and social struggle.
The audience heard taped greetings from “slow Death Row” by Mumia Abu-Jamal (see below). Prosecutors recently dropped their decades-long drive to execute Mumia, who had already spent 30 years on death row, falsely convicted for the December 1981 killing of Philly police officer Daniel Faulkner (see “Drive to Execute Mumia Halted,” WV No. 993, 6 January). Now Mumia—a BPP leader in his youth and later a MOVE supporter and renowned journalist known as the “Voice of the Voiceless”—is condemned to life in prison without parole despite massive evidence of innocence. The chants of “Free Mumia!” that followed his greetings were a sign of our determination that he not be forgotten and that the struggle on his behalf goes on.
Ralph Poynter read greetings from his wife, Lynne Stewart, a 72-year-old radical attorney who is imprisoned in Fort Worth, Texas, for vigorously defending her client, a blind Egyptian cleric convicted for an alleged plot to blow up NYC landmarks in the early 1990s. Stewart, who has cancer, is appealing the quadrupling of her sentence to ten years. Her resentencing was pushed by the Obama administration to make her an example in the capitalist rulers’ concocted “war on terror.”
The NYC event also heard from Francisco Torres, a supporter of Puerto Rican independence and one of the San Francisco 8 (SF8). These were former BPP members whom the government attempted to frame up for the 1971 killing of a cop, finally stopping its efforts after no less than 40 years. “So we had it all,” Torres said of the SF8 case, “the torture, the waterboarding, the electronic torture. Prior to them talking about it happening in the Middle East and Abu Ghraib and so forth…it actually started with the Native Americans here in America and prior to that, of course, with the enslavement of Africans.” As Torres said, “Torture is in the DNA of America.”
Since the PDC stipends program began, it has provided support to more than 30 prisoners on three continents, trade-union militants and others; in the U.S., a large proportion of the prisoners have been black activists. Both Rosie Gonzalez of the NYC Spartacus Youth Club and Ed Jarvis, speaking for the Spartacist League, linked defense of class-war prisoners to the fight to sweep away the entire apparatus of capitalist repression and replace it with a workers state. As Jarvis said, “Capitalist society as a prison for working people is also literally a prison for the millions who have been thrown behind bars primarily in the ‘war on drugs,’ which targets poor black and Latino ghettos.” He continued, “It will take a revolution that finishes the historic tasks of the Civil War to end black inequality—that is to say, it will take a socialist revolution.”
A highlight of the evening was a tribute by the PDC’s Valerie West to the life of Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt), a former Black Panther leader who died last year. West’s remarks, printed below as edited for publication, were based on her work with attorney Stuart Hanlon in the legal defense of Geronimo, who spent 27 years in California prisons for a crime the government knows he did not commit.
* * *
I think I’m more upset about Geronimo’s death than I’ve been willing to concede so far. So bear with me. I do want to say that we were all really saddened. But for me, who knew Geronimo pretty well for about a decade, it was really an unexpected personal blow. He died in Tanzania on June 2. Stuart Hanlon, who I spoke to and who was close to his family, didn’t know whether he died of a heart attack or a stroke but said that he had contracted malaria and was hospitalized. I want to try to recount some of my experiences with Geronimo.
I first met him as a kind of still young attorney, and I remember being very nervous going to San Quentin. It was my first trip to a California prison and my first meeting of Geronimo, so I was pretty nervous. Right away Geronimo had a big smile. He was very welcoming and really set me at ease. Over the years I visited him many, many times and he was great company. Of course, we also had disagreements. But we spent many hours chatting, laughing, playing Scrabble, as well as tackling how to increase exposure of his frame-up conviction and establish his innocence. He always willingly endorsed our anti-Klan mobilizations and defense campaigns. And, likewise, he always asked me about my aging mother and told me that I smoked too much. At the end of each visit inevitably came this horrible moment when you had to leave, and Geronimo solved that with big hugs.
He was a really easy person to get to know and to visit. And in the course of getting to know him I learned quite a bit about his history. You can’t understand Geronimo’s case without knowing about the Black Panther Party. So I want to say a bit about that.
They were for sure the best of a generation of black militants. But they were also a deeply contradictory radical formation, genuinely seeking black liberation but lacking the working-class perspective that could show them the road. Their militant, organized stand for black rights made J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, truly apoplectic. So in the late 1960s the FBI declared war on the Panthers. And I mean war. As part of the infamous Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), Panther offices across the country were raided and 38 Panthers were mowed down in the streets. Many of the remaining leaders were jailed. Not for short little stints either.
On December 4, 1969, two Chicago Panthers, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, were murdered in their sleep. Four days after that, the LAPD conducted an hours-long, Gestapo-type raid on the L.A. Panther office. It was meant to get Geronimo but it didn’t. As a highly decorated paratrooper who had served two tours in Vietnam (he was wounded there as well), and as a dynamic black leader, Geronimo stood out as a particular target for “neutralization” by the FBI. That’s the word they used. Geronimo told me once that there were so many cases against him in the late 1960s that it was hard for him to even keep them straight.
In the end, the FBI concocted an elaborate frame-up that charged Geronimo with robbery and the murder of Caroline Olsen at a Santa Monica tennis court on December 18, 1968. Kenneth Olsen, her husband, was wounded in the incident but did not die. The charges rested on the lying accusation by one Julio Butler—a former sheriff’s deputy, onetime Panther and also an FBI/LAPD informer—who claimed Geronimo had confessed the murder to him. This was backed up by police-orchestrated ID testimony (now acknowledged to be generally unreliable in any case) from Olsen’s husband and a Santa Monica storeowner and finally coupled with phony ballistics evidence backed up again by Julio Butler. Geronimo maintained his innocence from the beginning. He was over 400 miles away in Oakland, California, attending Panther meetings at the time the murder took place.
At the time of his 1972 trial, Geronimo knew he had been framed up but he did not know that the FBI had orders to “neutralize” him in collusion with the LAPD. To make matters worse, his trial took place months after the 1971 split in the Panthers. That split was a result of murderous internal factionalism fueled by FBI COINTELPRO dirty tricks. One wing of the Panthers, the Huey Newton wing, would openly embrace pro-Democratic Party politics, while the Eldridge Cleaver wing adopted the dead-end program of urban guerrillaism.
Geronimo sided with the Cleaver wing and was abandoned, therefore, by the Newton wing. Kathleen Cleaver was the sole Panther leader who backed up Geronimo at trial. Our comrade Don A. attended portions of that trial in Los Angeles and wrote about it last year to WV (see “Geronimo Pratt Refused to Bow,” WV No. 988, 14 October 2011). This is what he said: “Without exaggeration I can say that, more than any single individual then, it was seeing how Pratt refused to bow down in that court that made me want to stay in the struggle. He knew the purpose of his conviction and that it was bigger than him.”
Geronimo was also abandoned by much of the reformist left as the influence of the Panthers waned. We in the Spartacist League and PDC, applying our policy of non-sectarian defense for those cases and causes in the interests of the whole of the working people, stood in defense of all these militants against state repression despite our many political differences. And we should be clear that we had many political differences. Unlike much of the reformist left, who initially simply cheered the Panthers, we wrote articles sharply criticizing their radical nationalist politics in contrast to our revolutionary Marxist perspective. Later, both Geronimo and Emory Douglas, who some may remember was the cartoonist for The Black Panther, acknowledged that they remembered our sharp polemical criticisms. Despite the depth of our differences, Geronimo welcomed our support and defended us when we were attacked or excluded by political opponents, particularly those who shared his views. Importantly, Geronimo offered key assistance in defense of Mumia.
After his conviction, through a series of partial Freedom of Information Act disclosures and a lawsuit to get a few more disclosures, Geronimo began to be able to assemble proof of his frame-up. In 1985, WV did an interview with him in which he talked about his hearing in federal court, where a former FBI agent, Wesley Swearingen, testified that “Pratt was set up” and that he, Swearingen, had seen wiretap logs for Panther headquarters in Oakland showing that Geronimo was there. The FBI, on the other hand, claimed that those logs were mysteriously missing, and Geronimo got no relief.
In 1986, after the denial of Geronimo’s federal petition, the PDC began a campaign to build support for him in the labor movement. For many years, PDC and Labor Black League representatives spoke at trade-union executive boards and local meetings to garner support for Geronimo. We were actually quite successful in getting endorsements and support, particularly from unions with a significant black membership that identified with Geronimo’s struggle. We would explain that our fight to free Geronimo and all class-war prisoners flowed from our program to build a multiracial revolutionary party that serves as a tribune of the people and fights all forms of social repression.
Of course, COINTELPRO harassment did not stop even after Geronimo was sentenced to life; it followed Geronimo to prison and caused him to spend the first eight years in solitary. His only company was a dictionary during those eight years, and he memorized it. Geronimo used to joke that as a result he was terrific at Scrabble. I can attest to this because we played many games, and once in a while he let me win.
It is almost impossible to convey, simultaneously, the deadly nature and the absurdity of the COINTELPRO lies that made their way into Geronimo’s prison file. They claimed that he participated in a scheme to kill guards with poison darts and to kidnap guards’ children and hold them hostage. But these lies greatly inflamed guards and endangered his life, so he had to fight the lies, and he did so vigilantly.
It had taken a federal case to gain his release from solitary, but that did not stop the lies and the vendetta. Beginning in 1989, as PDC staff counsel, I represented Geronimo, along with his longtime counsel Stuart Hanlon (who also represented one of the SF8) in a federal suit. The suit was aimed at stopping the retaliation against Geronimo for his fighting to expose COINTELPRO, and also at literally keeping him alive. The suit was against officials of the California Department of Corrections (CDC), who got in the habit not only of lying about Geronimo but of transferring him from prison to prison, away from his family, as a prime tool of retaliation. From 1989 until his release in 1997, I traveled up and down the state, from the Sierra foothills to the Tehachapi Mountains to the Mexican border, visiting Geronimo and fighting the CDC. Stuart Hanlon and I were kicked out of Tehachapi Prison for eating potato chips, routinely permitted, because such a vindictive atmosphere had been whipped up against Geronimo.
We in the PDC, LBL and SL publicized the suit against the CDC and gained an ever-widening circle of labor support to free Geronimo. By about 1994, unions representing hundreds of thousands were on record on his behalf. That support, together with the very important assistance of several particularly friendly journalists, was critical in keeping Geronimo’s case in the public eye. Geronimo kept at it, and we kept at it. We hoped for a break, and finally one came in 1996. At the time, many of the frame-up perpetrators were either dead or retired, and the D.A.’s office in L.A. was in much need of a facelift after the Rodney King debacle. Some of you may not know what that is but you can ask later. It was bad for the Los Angeles D.A. A lower court judge in L.A. granted Geronimo a hearing, which ultimately led to his release in June 1997 when the conviction was overturned, unfortunately on the narrowest possible grounds. A dismissal of the charges followed a couple of years later.
Through 27 years of California prison hell Geronimo remained unbroken and unbowed. He fought the prison officials who regularly endangered his life, he fought to prove his innocence, and he fought to assist other victims of capitalist injustice. Now I want to say to all of you out there: As you know, we live in a period of increased state repression, and the state has pretty much unlimited resources. We need your help to continue the fight to free the class-war prisoners and to defend those cases and causes in the interest of the whole of the working people. A small but fitting tribute to Geronimo would be for those of you who aren’t PDC sustainers to become sustainers tonight. I hope that you will consider that.
Workers Vanguard No. 994
20 January 2012
NYC Holiday Appeal-Remembering the Life and Struggle of Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt)
(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)
On January 6, 125 people packed the Communications Workers Local 1180 union hall in lower Manhattan to take part in a fund-raiser with live jazz for the 26th annual Partisan Defense Committee Holiday Appeal. Along with benefits in other cities, this event helped support the PDC’s program of annual stipends and holiday gifts to 16 class-war prisoners—former Black Panther Party (BPP) members, MOVE supporters and others singled out and thrown behind bars for standing up to racist capitalist oppression. Our support to these prisoners is an expression of non-sectarian, class-struggle defense: it is the duty of the workers movement to defend such victims of capitalist repression irrespective of their particular political viewpoints.
The New York fund-raiser took place just days after President Obama signed into law the prerogative of the Commander-in-Chief to “disappear” into a military brig, here or anywhere else in the world, any U.S. citizen or foreign national whom the government deems a supporter of “terrorism.” In the fourth year of a world capitalist economic crisis that is pounding the working class and the poor, the government is intent on expanding its repressive powers, knowing that the massive and growing inequality sows the seeds of class and social struggle.
The audience heard taped greetings from “slow Death Row” by Mumia Abu-Jamal (see below). Prosecutors recently dropped their decades-long drive to execute Mumia, who had already spent 30 years on death row, falsely convicted for the December 1981 killing of Philly police officer Daniel Faulkner (see “Drive to Execute Mumia Halted,” WV No. 993, 6 January). Now Mumia—a BPP leader in his youth and later a MOVE supporter and renowned journalist known as the “Voice of the Voiceless”—is condemned to life in prison without parole despite massive evidence of innocence. The chants of “Free Mumia!” that followed his greetings were a sign of our determination that he not be forgotten and that the struggle on his behalf goes on.
Ralph Poynter read greetings from his wife, Lynne Stewart, a 72-year-old radical attorney who is imprisoned in Fort Worth, Texas, for vigorously defending her client, a blind Egyptian cleric convicted for an alleged plot to blow up NYC landmarks in the early 1990s. Stewart, who has cancer, is appealing the quadrupling of her sentence to ten years. Her resentencing was pushed by the Obama administration to make her an example in the capitalist rulers’ concocted “war on terror.”
The NYC event also heard from Francisco Torres, a supporter of Puerto Rican independence and one of the San Francisco 8 (SF8). These were former BPP members whom the government attempted to frame up for the 1971 killing of a cop, finally stopping its efforts after no less than 40 years. “So we had it all,” Torres said of the SF8 case, “the torture, the waterboarding, the electronic torture. Prior to them talking about it happening in the Middle East and Abu Ghraib and so forth…it actually started with the Native Americans here in America and prior to that, of course, with the enslavement of Africans.” As Torres said, “Torture is in the DNA of America.”
Since the PDC stipends program began, it has provided support to more than 30 prisoners on three continents, trade-union militants and others; in the U.S., a large proportion of the prisoners have been black activists. Both Rosie Gonzalez of the NYC Spartacus Youth Club and Ed Jarvis, speaking for the Spartacist League, linked defense of class-war prisoners to the fight to sweep away the entire apparatus of capitalist repression and replace it with a workers state. As Jarvis said, “Capitalist society as a prison for working people is also literally a prison for the millions who have been thrown behind bars primarily in the ‘war on drugs,’ which targets poor black and Latino ghettos.” He continued, “It will take a revolution that finishes the historic tasks of the Civil War to end black inequality—that is to say, it will take a socialist revolution.”
A highlight of the evening was a tribute by the PDC’s Valerie West to the life of Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt), a former Black Panther leader who died last year. West’s remarks, printed below as edited for publication, were based on her work with attorney Stuart Hanlon in the legal defense of Geronimo, who spent 27 years in California prisons for a crime the government knows he did not commit.
* * *
I think I’m more upset about Geronimo’s death than I’ve been willing to concede so far. So bear with me. I do want to say that we were all really saddened. But for me, who knew Geronimo pretty well for about a decade, it was really an unexpected personal blow. He died in Tanzania on June 2. Stuart Hanlon, who I spoke to and who was close to his family, didn’t know whether he died of a heart attack or a stroke but said that he had contracted malaria and was hospitalized. I want to try to recount some of my experiences with Geronimo.
I first met him as a kind of still young attorney, and I remember being very nervous going to San Quentin. It was my first trip to a California prison and my first meeting of Geronimo, so I was pretty nervous. Right away Geronimo had a big smile. He was very welcoming and really set me at ease. Over the years I visited him many, many times and he was great company. Of course, we also had disagreements. But we spent many hours chatting, laughing, playing Scrabble, as well as tackling how to increase exposure of his frame-up conviction and establish his innocence. He always willingly endorsed our anti-Klan mobilizations and defense campaigns. And, likewise, he always asked me about my aging mother and told me that I smoked too much. At the end of each visit inevitably came this horrible moment when you had to leave, and Geronimo solved that with big hugs.
He was a really easy person to get to know and to visit. And in the course of getting to know him I learned quite a bit about his history. You can’t understand Geronimo’s case without knowing about the Black Panther Party. So I want to say a bit about that.
They were for sure the best of a generation of black militants. But they were also a deeply contradictory radical formation, genuinely seeking black liberation but lacking the working-class perspective that could show them the road. Their militant, organized stand for black rights made J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, truly apoplectic. So in the late 1960s the FBI declared war on the Panthers. And I mean war. As part of the infamous Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), Panther offices across the country were raided and 38 Panthers were mowed down in the streets. Many of the remaining leaders were jailed. Not for short little stints either.
On December 4, 1969, two Chicago Panthers, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, were murdered in their sleep. Four days after that, the LAPD conducted an hours-long, Gestapo-type raid on the L.A. Panther office. It was meant to get Geronimo but it didn’t. As a highly decorated paratrooper who had served two tours in Vietnam (he was wounded there as well), and as a dynamic black leader, Geronimo stood out as a particular target for “neutralization” by the FBI. That’s the word they used. Geronimo told me once that there were so many cases against him in the late 1960s that it was hard for him to even keep them straight.
In the end, the FBI concocted an elaborate frame-up that charged Geronimo with robbery and the murder of Caroline Olsen at a Santa Monica tennis court on December 18, 1968. Kenneth Olsen, her husband, was wounded in the incident but did not die. The charges rested on the lying accusation by one Julio Butler—a former sheriff’s deputy, onetime Panther and also an FBI/LAPD informer—who claimed Geronimo had confessed the murder to him. This was backed up by police-orchestrated ID testimony (now acknowledged to be generally unreliable in any case) from Olsen’s husband and a Santa Monica storeowner and finally coupled with phony ballistics evidence backed up again by Julio Butler. Geronimo maintained his innocence from the beginning. He was over 400 miles away in Oakland, California, attending Panther meetings at the time the murder took place.
At the time of his 1972 trial, Geronimo knew he had been framed up but he did not know that the FBI had orders to “neutralize” him in collusion with the LAPD. To make matters worse, his trial took place months after the 1971 split in the Panthers. That split was a result of murderous internal factionalism fueled by FBI COINTELPRO dirty tricks. One wing of the Panthers, the Huey Newton wing, would openly embrace pro-Democratic Party politics, while the Eldridge Cleaver wing adopted the dead-end program of urban guerrillaism.
Geronimo sided with the Cleaver wing and was abandoned, therefore, by the Newton wing. Kathleen Cleaver was the sole Panther leader who backed up Geronimo at trial. Our comrade Don A. attended portions of that trial in Los Angeles and wrote about it last year to WV (see “Geronimo Pratt Refused to Bow,” WV No. 988, 14 October 2011). This is what he said: “Without exaggeration I can say that, more than any single individual then, it was seeing how Pratt refused to bow down in that court that made me want to stay in the struggle. He knew the purpose of his conviction and that it was bigger than him.”
Geronimo was also abandoned by much of the reformist left as the influence of the Panthers waned. We in the Spartacist League and PDC, applying our policy of non-sectarian defense for those cases and causes in the interests of the whole of the working people, stood in defense of all these militants against state repression despite our many political differences. And we should be clear that we had many political differences. Unlike much of the reformist left, who initially simply cheered the Panthers, we wrote articles sharply criticizing their radical nationalist politics in contrast to our revolutionary Marxist perspective. Later, both Geronimo and Emory Douglas, who some may remember was the cartoonist for The Black Panther, acknowledged that they remembered our sharp polemical criticisms. Despite the depth of our differences, Geronimo welcomed our support and defended us when we were attacked or excluded by political opponents, particularly those who shared his views. Importantly, Geronimo offered key assistance in defense of Mumia.
After his conviction, through a series of partial Freedom of Information Act disclosures and a lawsuit to get a few more disclosures, Geronimo began to be able to assemble proof of his frame-up. In 1985, WV did an interview with him in which he talked about his hearing in federal court, where a former FBI agent, Wesley Swearingen, testified that “Pratt was set up” and that he, Swearingen, had seen wiretap logs for Panther headquarters in Oakland showing that Geronimo was there. The FBI, on the other hand, claimed that those logs were mysteriously missing, and Geronimo got no relief.
In 1986, after the denial of Geronimo’s federal petition, the PDC began a campaign to build support for him in the labor movement. For many years, PDC and Labor Black League representatives spoke at trade-union executive boards and local meetings to garner support for Geronimo. We were actually quite successful in getting endorsements and support, particularly from unions with a significant black membership that identified with Geronimo’s struggle. We would explain that our fight to free Geronimo and all class-war prisoners flowed from our program to build a multiracial revolutionary party that serves as a tribune of the people and fights all forms of social repression.
Of course, COINTELPRO harassment did not stop even after Geronimo was sentenced to life; it followed Geronimo to prison and caused him to spend the first eight years in solitary. His only company was a dictionary during those eight years, and he memorized it. Geronimo used to joke that as a result he was terrific at Scrabble. I can attest to this because we played many games, and once in a while he let me win.
It is almost impossible to convey, simultaneously, the deadly nature and the absurdity of the COINTELPRO lies that made their way into Geronimo’s prison file. They claimed that he participated in a scheme to kill guards with poison darts and to kidnap guards’ children and hold them hostage. But these lies greatly inflamed guards and endangered his life, so he had to fight the lies, and he did so vigilantly.
It had taken a federal case to gain his release from solitary, but that did not stop the lies and the vendetta. Beginning in 1989, as PDC staff counsel, I represented Geronimo, along with his longtime counsel Stuart Hanlon (who also represented one of the SF8) in a federal suit. The suit was aimed at stopping the retaliation against Geronimo for his fighting to expose COINTELPRO, and also at literally keeping him alive. The suit was against officials of the California Department of Corrections (CDC), who got in the habit not only of lying about Geronimo but of transferring him from prison to prison, away from his family, as a prime tool of retaliation. From 1989 until his release in 1997, I traveled up and down the state, from the Sierra foothills to the Tehachapi Mountains to the Mexican border, visiting Geronimo and fighting the CDC. Stuart Hanlon and I were kicked out of Tehachapi Prison for eating potato chips, routinely permitted, because such a vindictive atmosphere had been whipped up against Geronimo.
We in the PDC, LBL and SL publicized the suit against the CDC and gained an ever-widening circle of labor support to free Geronimo. By about 1994, unions representing hundreds of thousands were on record on his behalf. That support, together with the very important assistance of several particularly friendly journalists, was critical in keeping Geronimo’s case in the public eye. Geronimo kept at it, and we kept at it. We hoped for a break, and finally one came in 1996. At the time, many of the frame-up perpetrators were either dead or retired, and the D.A.’s office in L.A. was in much need of a facelift after the Rodney King debacle. Some of you may not know what that is but you can ask later. It was bad for the Los Angeles D.A. A lower court judge in L.A. granted Geronimo a hearing, which ultimately led to his release in June 1997 when the conviction was overturned, unfortunately on the narrowest possible grounds. A dismissal of the charges followed a couple of years later.
Through 27 years of California prison hell Geronimo remained unbroken and unbowed. He fought the prison officials who regularly endangered his life, he fought to prove his innocence, and he fought to assist other victims of capitalist injustice. Now I want to say to all of you out there: As you know, we live in a period of increased state repression, and the state has pretty much unlimited resources. We need your help to continue the fight to free the class-war prisoners and to defend those cases and causes in the interest of the whole of the working people. A small but fitting tribute to Geronimo would be for those of you who aren’t PDC sustainers to become sustainers tonight. I hope that you will consider that.
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-From the International Communist League Archives-Honor Lenin, Liebknecht, Luxemburg!
Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League website.
Workers Vanguard No. 994
20 January 2012
From the International Communist League Archives-Honor Lenin, Liebknecht, Luxemburg!
This month we honor the memory of the “Three L’s”: Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin, who died on 21 January 1924, and Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, who were assassinated on 15 January 1919 by reactionary Freikorps officers at the behest of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) government of Friedrich Ebert, Philipp Scheidemann and Gustav Noske. Liebknecht and Luxemburg were revolutionary Marxists who upheld proletarian internationalism against Ebert & Co.’s support for German imperialism in World War I. After belatedly splitting from the SPD and its centrist spin-off, the Independent Socialist Party, Liebknecht and Luxemburg went on to play leading roles in the founding of the German Communist Party (KPD) in December 1918-January 1919. Their murders were part of the Ebert government’s suppression of the proletarian Spartakist uprising of January 1919.
We reprint below a call by the Spartakist Groups and the Trotzkistische Liga Deutschlands for a revolutionary contingent at a 1990 Berlin demonstration honoring Liebknecht and Luxemburg. This call was part of the International Communist League’s intervention into the incipient proletarian political revolution in the bureaucratically deformed workers state of East Germany (DDR). From November 1989 on, we mobilized all the resources at our disposal in an attempt to give revolutionary leadership to the DDR’s working people, many of whom desperately wanted to replace the collapsing Stalinist regime with an egalitarian socialist order. We uniquely fought against capitalist counterrevolution and for the revolutionary reunification of Germany—for proletarian political revolution in the East and socialist revolution in the West. Our comrades emphasized the tradition of revolutionary internationalist solidarity between the German, Polish and Russian proletariats, which the “Three L’s” embodied.
An important component of our intervention in the DDR in 1989-90 was our warning that the West German SPD—the heirs of Ebert, Scheidemann and Noske—represented the Trojan horse of counterrevolution. This was in sharp contrast to the DDR’s Stalinist ruling party, the Socialist Unity Party (SED, renamed SED-PDS in December 1989), whose leaders increasingly embraced social democracy. This included upholding the heritage of Eduard Bernstein, notorious for his anti-revolutionary revisionism, and Karl Kautsky, a centrist renegade who bitterly opposed the Bolshevik Revolution. In late January 1990, under the pressure of a counterrevolutionary onslaught led by the imperialists, the SED-PDS followed the lead of Kremlin leader Mikhail Gorbachev in embracing capitalist reunification and going on to sell out the DDR workers state to West German imperialism.
The following is translated from the 10 January 1990 issue of Arbeiterpressekorrespondenz (Workers Press Correspondence), which was initiated by the TLD and published, sometimes on a daily basis, as a collective organizer of the Spartakist Groups in the heat of the battle against capitalist counterrevolution. In January 1990, the TLD and Spartakist Groups fused to form the Spartakist Workers Party, the ICL’s German section.
* * *
There will be a mass demonstration Saturday, January 14, starting at 9 a.m. at the memorial site in Berlin Friedrichsfelde, in honor of the revolutionary workers’ leaders Liebknecht and Luxemburg on the 71st anniversary of their murder. Following in the footsteps of early Communist tradition, the Spartakist Groups and the Trotzkistische Liga will pay tribute to Luxemburg, Liebknecht and also Lenin. We call on all who wish to honor the “Three L’s” of Bolshevism to assemble around our banner and attend the Spartakist public forum.
In the demonstration call of the SED-PDS, Karl and Rosa are characterized as “outstanding leaders of the German Social Democrats and Communists.” This is closely connected to the SED’s current notion equating Liebknecht and Luxemburg with Kautsky and Bernstein. In this way the SED conceals the fact that it was precisely officers deployed by Social Democrat Gustav Noske who killed these Communists so as to smash the Spartakist uprising of January 1919. Noske (“Someone has to be the bloodhound”) acted on behalf of the government of the Social Democrat Friedrich Ebert, who proudly declared in 1918, “I hate the revolution like the plague!”
For decades, the leaders of the Social Democracy have attempted to cover up their bloody crime, the birthmark of the Weimar Republic. To that end, they have done their all to transform our revolutionary martyrs into social-democratic reformists. Stalin, who was equally fearful of proletarian revolution, similarly tried to rob Luxemburg of her revolutionary honor and greatness. We Spartakists, who fight for communism in the spirit of Lenin and Trotsky, stand for the revolutionary heritage of the two cofounders of the German Communist Party.
Social democrats, now including those in the SED-PDS as well, speak of “unambiguous warnings” by Rosa Luxemburg (as well as by Kautsky and Bernstein!) about the possibility of “a dictatorial-terroristic development in the Soviet Union,” not under the Stalinist bureaucracy but during Lenin’s time! Here they invoke an article she wrote in prison, without any access to accurate reports on the events in Russia, and never published. In doing so, they disregard what Rosa stated at the founding congress of the KPD on December 31 [1918]:
“...when people approach us with calumnies against the Russian Bolsheviks, we should never forget to reply: Where did you learn the ABCs of your current revolution? You got them from the Russians: the workers and soldiers councils.”
The social democrats seek to present Karl as a petty-bourgeois pacifist. But Karl was raised by his father Wilhelm as a “soldier of the revolution.” Speaking on May Day 1916, he counterposed to the Wilhelminian slogan “The war is preferable to insurrection” the socialist slogan “Insurrection, revolution are preferable to the war!” And against both the SPD’s warmongering social patriotism and Kautsky’s and Bernstein’s pacifism, Karl Liebknecht took Lenin’s side when he declared at his court-martial: “Not civil peace but civil war is my slogan!”
Above all, Karl and Rosa were internationalists. Karl—who courageously refused to vote for the war credits on 2 December 1914, saying: “Proletarians of all countries, unite again, despite everything!” Rosa—who was despised by the reactionaries of all countries as a Polish woman, a Jew and a Communist. In combating reformism for decades, both embraced the program of world socialist revolution. This was the cornerstone of the Communist International founded by Lenin and Trotsky, feared by Kautsky and Bernstein, buried by Stalin.
Today the International Communist League is fighting for the rebirth of the Trotskyist Fourth International. We are well aware of the mistakes committed by the leaders of the revolutionary socialists in Germany, in particular their failure to split early enough from the reformists and centrists. It was necessary to forge an independent revolutionary party as the Bolsheviks did, an act that was decisive for the victory of the 1917 October Revolution. But when Lenin applied to Rosa Luxemburg the old Russian couplet, “Eagles may at times fly lower than hens, but hens can never rise to the height of eagles,” he was passing judgment on the hens Kautsky and Bernstein.
In the third week of January 1933, shortly before Hitler came to power and while the Stalinized KPD was still battling “the remnants of Luxemburgism,” the German Trotskyists wrote:
“Outlawed, hunted, Lenin, Liebknecht and Luxemburg stood in battle against a host of enemies during the World War. Nevertheless, the power of their idea vanquished reformism, tsarism and the Hohenzollern [dynasty]. Like them, the International Left Opposition finds itself involved in an unequal struggle: here, with us, the power of the idea—there, the might of the apparatus. For us Bolshevik-Leninists as well, swimming against the stream, Liebknecht’s words remain true: Victory will be ours—despite everything!”
—from Permanente Revolution, third week of January 1933
— For a Leninist-communist party! Return to the road of Lenin and Trotsky!
— Stop the Nazis through workers united-front action!
— Full citizenship rights for foreign workers!
— Down with NATO! Defend the DDR, Soviet Union!
— For a planned economy under a government of workers and soldiers councils!
— No sellout of the DDR! For a red soviet Germany as part of the socialist states of Europe!
Workers Vanguard No. 994
20 January 2012
From the International Communist League Archives-Honor Lenin, Liebknecht, Luxemburg!
This month we honor the memory of the “Three L’s”: Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin, who died on 21 January 1924, and Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, who were assassinated on 15 January 1919 by reactionary Freikorps officers at the behest of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) government of Friedrich Ebert, Philipp Scheidemann and Gustav Noske. Liebknecht and Luxemburg were revolutionary Marxists who upheld proletarian internationalism against Ebert & Co.’s support for German imperialism in World War I. After belatedly splitting from the SPD and its centrist spin-off, the Independent Socialist Party, Liebknecht and Luxemburg went on to play leading roles in the founding of the German Communist Party (KPD) in December 1918-January 1919. Their murders were part of the Ebert government’s suppression of the proletarian Spartakist uprising of January 1919.
We reprint below a call by the Spartakist Groups and the Trotzkistische Liga Deutschlands for a revolutionary contingent at a 1990 Berlin demonstration honoring Liebknecht and Luxemburg. This call was part of the International Communist League’s intervention into the incipient proletarian political revolution in the bureaucratically deformed workers state of East Germany (DDR). From November 1989 on, we mobilized all the resources at our disposal in an attempt to give revolutionary leadership to the DDR’s working people, many of whom desperately wanted to replace the collapsing Stalinist regime with an egalitarian socialist order. We uniquely fought against capitalist counterrevolution and for the revolutionary reunification of Germany—for proletarian political revolution in the East and socialist revolution in the West. Our comrades emphasized the tradition of revolutionary internationalist solidarity between the German, Polish and Russian proletariats, which the “Three L’s” embodied.
An important component of our intervention in the DDR in 1989-90 was our warning that the West German SPD—the heirs of Ebert, Scheidemann and Noske—represented the Trojan horse of counterrevolution. This was in sharp contrast to the DDR’s Stalinist ruling party, the Socialist Unity Party (SED, renamed SED-PDS in December 1989), whose leaders increasingly embraced social democracy. This included upholding the heritage of Eduard Bernstein, notorious for his anti-revolutionary revisionism, and Karl Kautsky, a centrist renegade who bitterly opposed the Bolshevik Revolution. In late January 1990, under the pressure of a counterrevolutionary onslaught led by the imperialists, the SED-PDS followed the lead of Kremlin leader Mikhail Gorbachev in embracing capitalist reunification and going on to sell out the DDR workers state to West German imperialism.
The following is translated from the 10 January 1990 issue of Arbeiterpressekorrespondenz (Workers Press Correspondence), which was initiated by the TLD and published, sometimes on a daily basis, as a collective organizer of the Spartakist Groups in the heat of the battle against capitalist counterrevolution. In January 1990, the TLD and Spartakist Groups fused to form the Spartakist Workers Party, the ICL’s German section.
* * *
There will be a mass demonstration Saturday, January 14, starting at 9 a.m. at the memorial site in Berlin Friedrichsfelde, in honor of the revolutionary workers’ leaders Liebknecht and Luxemburg on the 71st anniversary of their murder. Following in the footsteps of early Communist tradition, the Spartakist Groups and the Trotzkistische Liga will pay tribute to Luxemburg, Liebknecht and also Lenin. We call on all who wish to honor the “Three L’s” of Bolshevism to assemble around our banner and attend the Spartakist public forum.
In the demonstration call of the SED-PDS, Karl and Rosa are characterized as “outstanding leaders of the German Social Democrats and Communists.” This is closely connected to the SED’s current notion equating Liebknecht and Luxemburg with Kautsky and Bernstein. In this way the SED conceals the fact that it was precisely officers deployed by Social Democrat Gustav Noske who killed these Communists so as to smash the Spartakist uprising of January 1919. Noske (“Someone has to be the bloodhound”) acted on behalf of the government of the Social Democrat Friedrich Ebert, who proudly declared in 1918, “I hate the revolution like the plague!”
For decades, the leaders of the Social Democracy have attempted to cover up their bloody crime, the birthmark of the Weimar Republic. To that end, they have done their all to transform our revolutionary martyrs into social-democratic reformists. Stalin, who was equally fearful of proletarian revolution, similarly tried to rob Luxemburg of her revolutionary honor and greatness. We Spartakists, who fight for communism in the spirit of Lenin and Trotsky, stand for the revolutionary heritage of the two cofounders of the German Communist Party.
Social democrats, now including those in the SED-PDS as well, speak of “unambiguous warnings” by Rosa Luxemburg (as well as by Kautsky and Bernstein!) about the possibility of “a dictatorial-terroristic development in the Soviet Union,” not under the Stalinist bureaucracy but during Lenin’s time! Here they invoke an article she wrote in prison, without any access to accurate reports on the events in Russia, and never published. In doing so, they disregard what Rosa stated at the founding congress of the KPD on December 31 [1918]:
“...when people approach us with calumnies against the Russian Bolsheviks, we should never forget to reply: Where did you learn the ABCs of your current revolution? You got them from the Russians: the workers and soldiers councils.”
The social democrats seek to present Karl as a petty-bourgeois pacifist. But Karl was raised by his father Wilhelm as a “soldier of the revolution.” Speaking on May Day 1916, he counterposed to the Wilhelminian slogan “The war is preferable to insurrection” the socialist slogan “Insurrection, revolution are preferable to the war!” And against both the SPD’s warmongering social patriotism and Kautsky’s and Bernstein’s pacifism, Karl Liebknecht took Lenin’s side when he declared at his court-martial: “Not civil peace but civil war is my slogan!”
Above all, Karl and Rosa were internationalists. Karl—who courageously refused to vote for the war credits on 2 December 1914, saying: “Proletarians of all countries, unite again, despite everything!” Rosa—who was despised by the reactionaries of all countries as a Polish woman, a Jew and a Communist. In combating reformism for decades, both embraced the program of world socialist revolution. This was the cornerstone of the Communist International founded by Lenin and Trotsky, feared by Kautsky and Bernstein, buried by Stalin.
Today the International Communist League is fighting for the rebirth of the Trotskyist Fourth International. We are well aware of the mistakes committed by the leaders of the revolutionary socialists in Germany, in particular their failure to split early enough from the reformists and centrists. It was necessary to forge an independent revolutionary party as the Bolsheviks did, an act that was decisive for the victory of the 1917 October Revolution. But when Lenin applied to Rosa Luxemburg the old Russian couplet, “Eagles may at times fly lower than hens, but hens can never rise to the height of eagles,” he was passing judgment on the hens Kautsky and Bernstein.
In the third week of January 1933, shortly before Hitler came to power and while the Stalinized KPD was still battling “the remnants of Luxemburgism,” the German Trotskyists wrote:
“Outlawed, hunted, Lenin, Liebknecht and Luxemburg stood in battle against a host of enemies during the World War. Nevertheless, the power of their idea vanquished reformism, tsarism and the Hohenzollern [dynasty]. Like them, the International Left Opposition finds itself involved in an unequal struggle: here, with us, the power of the idea—there, the might of the apparatus. For us Bolshevik-Leninists as well, swimming against the stream, Liebknecht’s words remain true: Victory will be ours—despite everything!”
—from Permanente Revolution, third week of January 1933
— For a Leninist-communist party! Return to the road of Lenin and Trotsky!
— Stop the Nazis through workers united-front action!
— Full citizenship rights for foreign workers!
— Down with NATO! Defend the DDR, Soviet Union!
— For a planned economy under a government of workers and soldiers councils!
— No sellout of the DDR! For a red soviet Germany as part of the socialist states of Europe!
From The Pages Of The Socialist Alternative Press-Answering Common Questions - Socialism FAQs
Click on the headline to link to the Socialist Alternative (CWI) website.
Jan 24, 2012
By Brandon Madsen
With the rise of the Occupy movement, opposition to the existing political and economic order has gone mainstream. It’s hard to imagine that the bandana-clad woman on the cover of Time magazine – representing “The Protestor,” Time's “Person of the Year” – has many nice things to say about capitalism, and the ubiquity of the Guy Fawkes mask – popularized by “V for Vendetta” – further underscores how widespread the idea of revolution has become.
However, this growing support for system change has not yet been matched by a serious public dialogue about what an alternative might look like. A new Pew poll published 12/28/2011 indicated that people who are under 30 or black are more likely to favor socialism than capitalism, but this does not correspond to clear ideas of what socialism is or how a socialist economic and political system would work. We offer up this FAQ as a contribution to the discussion.
How would a socialist economy work?
Under capitalism, institutions where immense wealth is concentrated (corporations) run the economy, exploiting working people to increase their own concentrated wealth. The essence of a socialist economy is to flip this relationship upside-down, with working people running the economy, utilizing the enormous wealth and productivity of society to enrich their lives. To do this, we would have to take over all the biggest banks and corporations and put their resources into public ownership and democratic control.
Employing those out of work and reallocating investment and jobs towards social priorities – healthcare, education, clean energy, etc. – would give a huge boost to productivity and wealth in society. Democratic planning of the economy would allow us to make sure everyone had a good-paying job, high-quality health care, free education at all levels, and, of course, basic physical necessities like food and housing. It wouldn’t be limited to just the basics, though; we could choose to invest in empowering people to make music, art, writing, film, fashion, and all sorts of other forms of cultural development.
This type of economic system would require conscious planning, but this is already true to a large extent under capitalism. Corporations larger than entire countries are able to plan out their levels of production, spread of distribution, pricing schemes and so on without falling to pieces, so there’s no reason working people shouldn’t be able to do the same.
The difference is that planning under capitalism is fractured, incomplete and undemocratic, with the goal of maximizing profit for the individual firm. Under socialism, we could structure investment of the world’s wealth with a big picture, bird’s eye view of the whole economy, with the goal of fulfilling human needs, sustaining the environment and enabling a liberated human existence.
A socialist economic system would have to be globally integrated. This is also the case already under capitalism, where we live in a globally interdependent world. Right now globalization on a capitalist basis means brutal exploitation of the weaker economies, and a race to the bottom for workers everywhere. Under socialism, global economic integration would be part of the plan to enrich people’s lives on a global scale.
A socialist economy would handle the environment very differently. Today, companies don’t care about environmental costs because they are able to externalize them onto the public. The costs associated with contaminated air and drinking water are real, but they don’t show up as a red number on Monsanto’s balance sheet. That is why no corporation will ever undertake the necessary steps to save the environment on the basis of “free market” principles.
Democratic planning of the economy would eliminate the profit motive behind externalizing the costs of pollution. Instead, efficiency, environmental sustainability and meeting the basic needs of all would form the core principles of economic decision-making. Instead of inadequate measures like energy-efficient light bulbs and recycling-awareness programs, a socialist economy could invest in completely overhauling the way everything is produced, utilizing all the latest green technologies for maximum sustainability and creating millions of jobs in the process.
How would a socialist democracy work?
As most of us currently experience it, “democracy” boils down to voting once every couple years for which wealthy career politician will make all the decisions for us. Of course, there’s nothing democratic about this at all, especially when the whole process is corrupted by corporate money.
In contrast, socialist democracy would take place day to day, week to week, in every workplace, school and community. Workers would rotate management tasks, and elected managers would be subject to recall and replacement whenever the workers saw fit. All decisions could be overturned by majority vote.
School curriculum and policy would be jointly agreed upon by parents, teachers and students, rather than imposed by distant administrators and bureaucrats. Neighborhood assemblies would decide who is and is not empowered with policing authority and instruct elected officers how to prioritize their efforts.
All investment and economic decisions should be made democratically. Workplace and neighborhood assemblies would elect representatives to massively expanded local and regional councils, which in turn would elect national representatives. Elected representatives should have no special privileges or pay above their electorate, and they should be subject to instant recall.
In order to facilitate this process of democratic decision-making, there should be space roped off in regular work and school schedules for decision-making meetings and discussions. With the increased wealth created, the work-week could be shortened without loss of pay to allow people time and energy to become engaged politically, and to pursue their other life goals outside work and school.
Wouldn’t a bureaucratic elite just take over?
Undoubtedly, in the first stages of a socialist society, a struggle against careerists and corruption within the system would be necessary. The poisonous ideological baggage inherited from centuries of class rule would not just fade away overnight. However, by establishing public ownership of society’s productive resources, eliminating privileges, and creating bottom-up structures of democratic management and control, the obstacles to prevent aspiring bureaucrats seizing power would be immense.
The main example driving fear of a bureaucratic takeover is Stalin seizing power in the Soviet Union only a few years after Russia’s working-class revolution in 1917. This tragic degeneration of the Russian Revolution is something Marxists have grappled with in numerous books. The basic conclusion supported by a serious historical analysis is that this degeneration was neither natural nor inevitable, but the result of particular circumstances.
Russia was among the poorest countries in the world at the time of its revolution, and it was even further devastated when the deposed capitalist rulers, backed by 21 foreign armies, tried to violently retake power from the democratic workers’ movement, resulting in a bloody civil war. Though revolutions took place elsewhere across Europe, most notably Germany, they were all defeated, leaving Russia poor, broken and alone.
This was not a healthy ground upon which socialism could be built. The whole basis of socialism is having enough to go around, but Russia didn’t have that. In this context, the democratic structures in the Soviets (workers’ assemblies) ceased to function. Who wants to go to political meetings when you’re worried about where your next meal is going to come from?
It was this vacuum of workers’ power from below, fueled by the isolation and economic starvation of the country, that spawned the bureaucratization of Russian society and the rise of Stalin as this bureaucracy’s dictatorial figurehead. Even then, it was not a natural progression. Stalin had to jail, murder, exile, or otherwise force into submission literally millions of people whose only crime was adherence to the democratic principles of the 1917 revolution.
This experience shows the importance of building the fight for socialism as a global movement. Because of imperialist plundering of resources around the world, some countries may lack a stable economic basis for socialism, and will need to trade with and get help from the richer countries. If Russia had been joined by a successful revolution in even one other country, such as Germany, history would have turned out very differently.
Wouldn’t it be easier to reform capitalism?
Unfortunately, contrary to official accounts, the history of capitalism is not one of consistent progress towards ever loftier heights of democracy and prosperity. Rather, every serious reform has required mass struggle, often shaking the system to its core.
Reforms are not granted out of the kind hearts of well-meaning politicians, but are concessions grudgingly granted to appease or distract rising movements of working people hungry for real change. Whether we’re talking about civil rights, the weekend off, or the right to organize a union, every one of these required an all-out fight against the profit-driven logic of capitalism, where countless innocents were murdered by elites desperate to put down their struggles.
Under capitalism, even these partial reforms are not permanent, not a foothold or new baseline to work from. As we have seen in the last few decades, the capitalists and their politicians will roll back reforms as soon as they think they can get away with it.
Social programs that people fought tooth and nail for in the past are being dismantled or undermined via budget cuts. After almost destroying unions in the private sector already – where less than 7% of workers are in a union – corporate politicians in state after state are now going after the public sector, where over a third of workers are still unionized.
A stable basis for ongoing reforms will require working people to take political power out of the hands of the capitalists and wield it themselves – that is, overthrow capitalism and establish socialism. There’s no way around it; the fight for reforms and the struggle for socialist transformation are one and the same.
Socialism sounds great on paper, but is it realistic?
The only constant in history is uninterrupted change. From ancient slave states to the feudal landowner lordships to the global capitalist system of today, people have repeatedly overthrown old systems after they became a brake on progressive development. The truly unrealistic and utopian idea is that problems like war, poverty and environmental devastation will be solved on the basis of capitalism.
Though socialism is realistic, it’s not inevitable. Again and again, crisis-ridden capitalism has forced workers and the oppressed into revolutionary uprisings. Several have happened in the last year, most prominently in Egypt and Tunisia. But while many revolutions succeed in toppling governments, few have achieved system change. Capitalism will always find a way out on the backs of workers, youth and the poor if we fail to replace it with something better.
That’s where socialists come in: We take seriously the study of history, learning from both defeats and successes of revolutions and mass movements. We aim to spread these lessons widely so that future revolutions succeed in establishing socialism. That doesn’t just mean reading a lot of books. It means actively building and engaging with the movements that exist right now, boldly bringing in socialist ideas while learning from others in struggle, working out the way forward together.
If you agree with these ideas, consider joining Socialist Alternative!
Jan 24, 2012
By Brandon Madsen
With the rise of the Occupy movement, opposition to the existing political and economic order has gone mainstream. It’s hard to imagine that the bandana-clad woman on the cover of Time magazine – representing “The Protestor,” Time's “Person of the Year” – has many nice things to say about capitalism, and the ubiquity of the Guy Fawkes mask – popularized by “V for Vendetta” – further underscores how widespread the idea of revolution has become.
However, this growing support for system change has not yet been matched by a serious public dialogue about what an alternative might look like. A new Pew poll published 12/28/2011 indicated that people who are under 30 or black are more likely to favor socialism than capitalism, but this does not correspond to clear ideas of what socialism is or how a socialist economic and political system would work. We offer up this FAQ as a contribution to the discussion.
How would a socialist economy work?
Under capitalism, institutions where immense wealth is concentrated (corporations) run the economy, exploiting working people to increase their own concentrated wealth. The essence of a socialist economy is to flip this relationship upside-down, with working people running the economy, utilizing the enormous wealth and productivity of society to enrich their lives. To do this, we would have to take over all the biggest banks and corporations and put their resources into public ownership and democratic control.
Employing those out of work and reallocating investment and jobs towards social priorities – healthcare, education, clean energy, etc. – would give a huge boost to productivity and wealth in society. Democratic planning of the economy would allow us to make sure everyone had a good-paying job, high-quality health care, free education at all levels, and, of course, basic physical necessities like food and housing. It wouldn’t be limited to just the basics, though; we could choose to invest in empowering people to make music, art, writing, film, fashion, and all sorts of other forms of cultural development.
This type of economic system would require conscious planning, but this is already true to a large extent under capitalism. Corporations larger than entire countries are able to plan out their levels of production, spread of distribution, pricing schemes and so on without falling to pieces, so there’s no reason working people shouldn’t be able to do the same.
The difference is that planning under capitalism is fractured, incomplete and undemocratic, with the goal of maximizing profit for the individual firm. Under socialism, we could structure investment of the world’s wealth with a big picture, bird’s eye view of the whole economy, with the goal of fulfilling human needs, sustaining the environment and enabling a liberated human existence.
A socialist economic system would have to be globally integrated. This is also the case already under capitalism, where we live in a globally interdependent world. Right now globalization on a capitalist basis means brutal exploitation of the weaker economies, and a race to the bottom for workers everywhere. Under socialism, global economic integration would be part of the plan to enrich people’s lives on a global scale.
A socialist economy would handle the environment very differently. Today, companies don’t care about environmental costs because they are able to externalize them onto the public. The costs associated with contaminated air and drinking water are real, but they don’t show up as a red number on Monsanto’s balance sheet. That is why no corporation will ever undertake the necessary steps to save the environment on the basis of “free market” principles.
Democratic planning of the economy would eliminate the profit motive behind externalizing the costs of pollution. Instead, efficiency, environmental sustainability and meeting the basic needs of all would form the core principles of economic decision-making. Instead of inadequate measures like energy-efficient light bulbs and recycling-awareness programs, a socialist economy could invest in completely overhauling the way everything is produced, utilizing all the latest green technologies for maximum sustainability and creating millions of jobs in the process.
How would a socialist democracy work?
As most of us currently experience it, “democracy” boils down to voting once every couple years for which wealthy career politician will make all the decisions for us. Of course, there’s nothing democratic about this at all, especially when the whole process is corrupted by corporate money.
In contrast, socialist democracy would take place day to day, week to week, in every workplace, school and community. Workers would rotate management tasks, and elected managers would be subject to recall and replacement whenever the workers saw fit. All decisions could be overturned by majority vote.
School curriculum and policy would be jointly agreed upon by parents, teachers and students, rather than imposed by distant administrators and bureaucrats. Neighborhood assemblies would decide who is and is not empowered with policing authority and instruct elected officers how to prioritize their efforts.
All investment and economic decisions should be made democratically. Workplace and neighborhood assemblies would elect representatives to massively expanded local and regional councils, which in turn would elect national representatives. Elected representatives should have no special privileges or pay above their electorate, and they should be subject to instant recall.
In order to facilitate this process of democratic decision-making, there should be space roped off in regular work and school schedules for decision-making meetings and discussions. With the increased wealth created, the work-week could be shortened without loss of pay to allow people time and energy to become engaged politically, and to pursue their other life goals outside work and school.
Wouldn’t a bureaucratic elite just take over?
Undoubtedly, in the first stages of a socialist society, a struggle against careerists and corruption within the system would be necessary. The poisonous ideological baggage inherited from centuries of class rule would not just fade away overnight. However, by establishing public ownership of society’s productive resources, eliminating privileges, and creating bottom-up structures of democratic management and control, the obstacles to prevent aspiring bureaucrats seizing power would be immense.
The main example driving fear of a bureaucratic takeover is Stalin seizing power in the Soviet Union only a few years after Russia’s working-class revolution in 1917. This tragic degeneration of the Russian Revolution is something Marxists have grappled with in numerous books. The basic conclusion supported by a serious historical analysis is that this degeneration was neither natural nor inevitable, but the result of particular circumstances.
Russia was among the poorest countries in the world at the time of its revolution, and it was even further devastated when the deposed capitalist rulers, backed by 21 foreign armies, tried to violently retake power from the democratic workers’ movement, resulting in a bloody civil war. Though revolutions took place elsewhere across Europe, most notably Germany, they were all defeated, leaving Russia poor, broken and alone.
This was not a healthy ground upon which socialism could be built. The whole basis of socialism is having enough to go around, but Russia didn’t have that. In this context, the democratic structures in the Soviets (workers’ assemblies) ceased to function. Who wants to go to political meetings when you’re worried about where your next meal is going to come from?
It was this vacuum of workers’ power from below, fueled by the isolation and economic starvation of the country, that spawned the bureaucratization of Russian society and the rise of Stalin as this bureaucracy’s dictatorial figurehead. Even then, it was not a natural progression. Stalin had to jail, murder, exile, or otherwise force into submission literally millions of people whose only crime was adherence to the democratic principles of the 1917 revolution.
This experience shows the importance of building the fight for socialism as a global movement. Because of imperialist plundering of resources around the world, some countries may lack a stable economic basis for socialism, and will need to trade with and get help from the richer countries. If Russia had been joined by a successful revolution in even one other country, such as Germany, history would have turned out very differently.
Wouldn’t it be easier to reform capitalism?
Unfortunately, contrary to official accounts, the history of capitalism is not one of consistent progress towards ever loftier heights of democracy and prosperity. Rather, every serious reform has required mass struggle, often shaking the system to its core.
Reforms are not granted out of the kind hearts of well-meaning politicians, but are concessions grudgingly granted to appease or distract rising movements of working people hungry for real change. Whether we’re talking about civil rights, the weekend off, or the right to organize a union, every one of these required an all-out fight against the profit-driven logic of capitalism, where countless innocents were murdered by elites desperate to put down their struggles.
Under capitalism, even these partial reforms are not permanent, not a foothold or new baseline to work from. As we have seen in the last few decades, the capitalists and their politicians will roll back reforms as soon as they think they can get away with it.
Social programs that people fought tooth and nail for in the past are being dismantled or undermined via budget cuts. After almost destroying unions in the private sector already – where less than 7% of workers are in a union – corporate politicians in state after state are now going after the public sector, where over a third of workers are still unionized.
A stable basis for ongoing reforms will require working people to take political power out of the hands of the capitalists and wield it themselves – that is, overthrow capitalism and establish socialism. There’s no way around it; the fight for reforms and the struggle for socialist transformation are one and the same.
Socialism sounds great on paper, but is it realistic?
The only constant in history is uninterrupted change. From ancient slave states to the feudal landowner lordships to the global capitalist system of today, people have repeatedly overthrown old systems after they became a brake on progressive development. The truly unrealistic and utopian idea is that problems like war, poverty and environmental devastation will be solved on the basis of capitalism.
Though socialism is realistic, it’s not inevitable. Again and again, crisis-ridden capitalism has forced workers and the oppressed into revolutionary uprisings. Several have happened in the last year, most prominently in Egypt and Tunisia. But while many revolutions succeed in toppling governments, few have achieved system change. Capitalism will always find a way out on the backs of workers, youth and the poor if we fail to replace it with something better.
That’s where socialists come in: We take seriously the study of history, learning from both defeats and successes of revolutions and mass movements. We aim to spread these lessons widely so that future revolutions succeed in establishing socialism. That doesn’t just mean reading a lot of books. It means actively building and engaging with the movements that exist right now, boldly bringing in socialist ideas while learning from others in struggle, working out the way forward together.
If you agree with these ideas, consider joining Socialist Alternative!
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Out In The 1940s Crime Noir Night- A Pre-Miranda Nightmare- Dana Andrew’s “Boomerang”- A Review
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the crime noir Boomerang.
DVD Review
Boomerang, starring Dana Andrews, Jane Wyatt, Lee J. Cobb, Ed Begley, directed by Elia Kazan, 1947
Most crime noir is NOT a lesson in plebeian civil virtue, good republican police procedure, or wavy grey area moral dilemmas. The best crime noir is where, sure, the bad guys has it coming and by fair means or foul the good guys, cops, privates dicks, or just guys and gals caught in the middle of something, made sure they got it, got in spades, right up to the chair. No quarter given, none taken and we, the audience we, were happy with the result, or at least were not going waste good mother-washed and ironed handkerchiefs over their fate. Or, alternatively, alternatively, best crime noir, that is, occurred when some femme fatale, good or bad, and, we, the male part of the we audience anyway, were not all that choosey which as long as she was fetching, wrapped up a guy so bad he couldn’t think straight, and led him, maybe led him right up to that aforementioned chair. Gladly, or half gladly anyway.
In the film under review, Boomerang, neither of these conditions exists yet this is still an interesting crime noir despite its sometimes cloying moral certitudes and raw virtuous civics lesson overhang. Moreover, watching this thing in a post-Miranda (1964) world made this reviewer finally realize what the fuss was all about when the Warren Court brought the wild west boys cop justice under a little control. A little I said, so don’t make too much of it. Let’s just get to the plot and you can figure out why, okay.
As the film opens a man of the cloth, a padre, gets dead-aim stone-cold killer shot out in the mean 1940s Middle America Connecticut streets by a someone, some guy. Back then, and maybe today too, this gangster-style or psycho-driven execution rated big 24/7 news and howls of protest, especially since the padre was on the way to neighborhood sainthood. So like any high profile murder case the cops and the DA are pressing, and being pressed, and pressed hard to find this killer who is still walking free to maybe do murder and mayhem again.
And here is where the Miranda part comes in. The cops, the newly anointed town reform civil leaders, the recently thrown-out corrupt city leaders, the newspapers, and the DA’s office are all crying for vengeance and a quick solution to the murder (and their PR problems). The cops, the pre-Miranda cops, led by Lee J. Cobb, are more than happy to oblige them when after a massive manhunt they turn up one drifter, grifter, down at the heels guy, played by Arthur Kennedy, as the fall guy. The frame is on, on big time. Of course, he is the fall guy after a little off-hand by the book, the unwritten book, rough stuff down sans lawyer at the precinct house and some very tricky footwork around the evidence bin, the human witness and murder weapon evidence bin. They have poor Brother Kennedy screaming “uncle” before long and he is tailor-made for the big house, and the chair. Open and shut.
But hold on a minute, a very long minute, the DA, played by Dana Andrews, has second thought qualms about this railroad job and despite every possible corrupt effort to derail him from the compliant judge, to the cops, to some newspaper guys, to those virtuous civic-minded city fathers, he is after all a truth-seeker. He plods on supported only by wifey, played by Jane Wyatt, who knowing her man, sticks by him through thick and thin. Natch. But, jesus, justice in this case was a close thing, and only came off because our DA boy actually listened up that day they had the ethics class in law school. So you see what I mean about this being an okay film even with no drop-dead bad guys, or drop-dead beautiful femme fatales.
Note behind the camera: Looking at the credits here you will note at least two names that deserve special mention, the director Elia Kazan and the actor Lee J. Cobb. No, not for their well-known cinematic efforts then, or later (films such as On The Waterfront, Viva Zapata, Death Of A Salesman, etc. between them), but for their less that stellar (I am being kind here considering we are dealing with classic “finks” and stoolies.”) performances before various congressional committees in high 1950s cold war, red scare times “dropping dimes, (hell, quarters and half dollars)” on their communist fellows (mostly one-time pinkish fellow-travelers but the effect was the same) in the entertainment industry. Obviously these two guys didn’t “get” the point in Boomerang after all. The hell with them.
DVD Review
Boomerang, starring Dana Andrews, Jane Wyatt, Lee J. Cobb, Ed Begley, directed by Elia Kazan, 1947
Most crime noir is NOT a lesson in plebeian civil virtue, good republican police procedure, or wavy grey area moral dilemmas. The best crime noir is where, sure, the bad guys has it coming and by fair means or foul the good guys, cops, privates dicks, or just guys and gals caught in the middle of something, made sure they got it, got in spades, right up to the chair. No quarter given, none taken and we, the audience we, were happy with the result, or at least were not going waste good mother-washed and ironed handkerchiefs over their fate. Or, alternatively, alternatively, best crime noir, that is, occurred when some femme fatale, good or bad, and, we, the male part of the we audience anyway, were not all that choosey which as long as she was fetching, wrapped up a guy so bad he couldn’t think straight, and led him, maybe led him right up to that aforementioned chair. Gladly, or half gladly anyway.
In the film under review, Boomerang, neither of these conditions exists yet this is still an interesting crime noir despite its sometimes cloying moral certitudes and raw virtuous civics lesson overhang. Moreover, watching this thing in a post-Miranda (1964) world made this reviewer finally realize what the fuss was all about when the Warren Court brought the wild west boys cop justice under a little control. A little I said, so don’t make too much of it. Let’s just get to the plot and you can figure out why, okay.
As the film opens a man of the cloth, a padre, gets dead-aim stone-cold killer shot out in the mean 1940s Middle America Connecticut streets by a someone, some guy. Back then, and maybe today too, this gangster-style or psycho-driven execution rated big 24/7 news and howls of protest, especially since the padre was on the way to neighborhood sainthood. So like any high profile murder case the cops and the DA are pressing, and being pressed, and pressed hard to find this killer who is still walking free to maybe do murder and mayhem again.
And here is where the Miranda part comes in. The cops, the newly anointed town reform civil leaders, the recently thrown-out corrupt city leaders, the newspapers, and the DA’s office are all crying for vengeance and a quick solution to the murder (and their PR problems). The cops, the pre-Miranda cops, led by Lee J. Cobb, are more than happy to oblige them when after a massive manhunt they turn up one drifter, grifter, down at the heels guy, played by Arthur Kennedy, as the fall guy. The frame is on, on big time. Of course, he is the fall guy after a little off-hand by the book, the unwritten book, rough stuff down sans lawyer at the precinct house and some very tricky footwork around the evidence bin, the human witness and murder weapon evidence bin. They have poor Brother Kennedy screaming “uncle” before long and he is tailor-made for the big house, and the chair. Open and shut.
But hold on a minute, a very long minute, the DA, played by Dana Andrews, has second thought qualms about this railroad job and despite every possible corrupt effort to derail him from the compliant judge, to the cops, to some newspaper guys, to those virtuous civic-minded city fathers, he is after all a truth-seeker. He plods on supported only by wifey, played by Jane Wyatt, who knowing her man, sticks by him through thick and thin. Natch. But, jesus, justice in this case was a close thing, and only came off because our DA boy actually listened up that day they had the ethics class in law school. So you see what I mean about this being an okay film even with no drop-dead bad guys, or drop-dead beautiful femme fatales.
Note behind the camera: Looking at the credits here you will note at least two names that deserve special mention, the director Elia Kazan and the actor Lee J. Cobb. No, not for their well-known cinematic efforts then, or later (films such as On The Waterfront, Viva Zapata, Death Of A Salesman, etc. between them), but for their less that stellar (I am being kind here considering we are dealing with classic “finks” and stoolies.”) performances before various congressional committees in high 1950s cold war, red scare times “dropping dimes, (hell, quarters and half dollars)” on their communist fellows (mostly one-time pinkish fellow-travelers but the effect was the same) in the entertainment industry. Obviously these two guys didn’t “get” the point in Boomerang after all. The hell with them.
Out Of The 1940s Crime Noir Night-Have Gun Will Travel- “Gun Crazy”- A Film Review
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the crime noir Gun Crazy.
DVD Review
Gun Crazy, starring Peggy Cummins, John Dall, screenplay by Dalton Trumbo and MacKinlay Kantor, 1949
Personally I like my crime noir femme fatales on the kind of good side, not too good but maybe good like Lauren Bacall in To Have or Have Not or The Big Sleep. Or Rita Hayworth when the dust settled in Gilda. No way do I want a dame that I have to watch out over my shoulder on like the same Rita Hayworth in The Lady From Shang-hia or Jane Greer in Out Of The Past. That company is just a little too fast for me. And, no I ain’t no Walter Mitty, or no fading, wilting flower but a guy has enough troubles in this world without some frail turning him over, turning him over bad. And no way, no way in hell, do I want some femme fatale, good, bad, or indifference who is kind of trigger-happy. Jesus, no way. So needless to say I am staying far, far away from Ms. Laurie (played by Peggy Cummins), the twist that has our guy Bart (played by John Dall) all wired up in the film under review, Gun Crazy.
And this is a good place to run the plot line in this little 1949 sleeper of a film. While the dialogue gets thin in spots and it’s just a little too didactic in the "don’t play with guns" department the adventures of this pair and the fast pace they need to travel at makes this an enjoyable one and one half hour see. As you can tell from the film’s title and as I have already tipped you to this is about guns, or rather about a pair of young, post-World War II modern alienated youth who have a yearning, a lust, for guns. And each other, make of that what you will. As for Bart the gun thing is more a fascination, a feel good thing . And as for Laurie, well let’s just say she has problems, serious problems every time she gets within two feet of a gun, and the slightest smell of danger.
What hold this thing together is that Bart is dizzy, dizzier that he is about guns, for the dame, unlike sensible guys like you and me. Laurie wants to live the high life and in order to do so she needs a guy who can step with her. And shooting the stars out of the rubes in a two-bit back road carnival where she meets up with Bart is not going to do it. So they run away, off-handedly get married (this is 1949 after all), and try their luck at this and that. But like many young footloose couples then, and now, this and that didn’t work out. So a little career change was in order, say armed robbery to get a stake together and then on to easy street down in some south of the border lamster village.
But, see, here is where the “moral” that drives all of these crime noirs, crime doesn’t pay, kicks in, kicks in big time. Crime and guns don’t pay for good guys, or bad, or even young footloose couples trying to make a stake, especially when wifey has that loose trigger-finger. So you know without me telling you that this pair, out of luck, on the lam, and friendless can’t ever, ever see that white picket fence day just ahead. No way.
Note: Of course 1949 was the heart of the cold war, red scare, commie under every bed, and behind every film, Hollywood Ten before congressional subpoena committees, dark cultural blizzard night. So don’t be fooled by the screenplay writer credits. This joint effort had one red scare Hollywood Ten writer, Dalton Trumbo, using that old time devise, the front. Hollywood, this country, and future generations should remember that black time, that dark night when some vaunted cultural freedoms got short shrift. And remember too a guy name Kirk Douglas who said the hell with all that later and gave Hollywood Ten-types like Trumbo and John Howard Lawson screen credit when he made Spartacus.
DVD Review
Gun Crazy, starring Peggy Cummins, John Dall, screenplay by Dalton Trumbo and MacKinlay Kantor, 1949
Personally I like my crime noir femme fatales on the kind of good side, not too good but maybe good like Lauren Bacall in To Have or Have Not or The Big Sleep. Or Rita Hayworth when the dust settled in Gilda. No way do I want a dame that I have to watch out over my shoulder on like the same Rita Hayworth in The Lady From Shang-hia or Jane Greer in Out Of The Past. That company is just a little too fast for me. And, no I ain’t no Walter Mitty, or no fading, wilting flower but a guy has enough troubles in this world without some frail turning him over, turning him over bad. And no way, no way in hell, do I want some femme fatale, good, bad, or indifference who is kind of trigger-happy. Jesus, no way. So needless to say I am staying far, far away from Ms. Laurie (played by Peggy Cummins), the twist that has our guy Bart (played by John Dall) all wired up in the film under review, Gun Crazy.
And this is a good place to run the plot line in this little 1949 sleeper of a film. While the dialogue gets thin in spots and it’s just a little too didactic in the "don’t play with guns" department the adventures of this pair and the fast pace they need to travel at makes this an enjoyable one and one half hour see. As you can tell from the film’s title and as I have already tipped you to this is about guns, or rather about a pair of young, post-World War II modern alienated youth who have a yearning, a lust, for guns. And each other, make of that what you will. As for Bart the gun thing is more a fascination, a feel good thing . And as for Laurie, well let’s just say she has problems, serious problems every time she gets within two feet of a gun, and the slightest smell of danger.
What hold this thing together is that Bart is dizzy, dizzier that he is about guns, for the dame, unlike sensible guys like you and me. Laurie wants to live the high life and in order to do so she needs a guy who can step with her. And shooting the stars out of the rubes in a two-bit back road carnival where she meets up with Bart is not going to do it. So they run away, off-handedly get married (this is 1949 after all), and try their luck at this and that. But like many young footloose couples then, and now, this and that didn’t work out. So a little career change was in order, say armed robbery to get a stake together and then on to easy street down in some south of the border lamster village.
But, see, here is where the “moral” that drives all of these crime noirs, crime doesn’t pay, kicks in, kicks in big time. Crime and guns don’t pay for good guys, or bad, or even young footloose couples trying to make a stake, especially when wifey has that loose trigger-finger. So you know without me telling you that this pair, out of luck, on the lam, and friendless can’t ever, ever see that white picket fence day just ahead. No way.
Note: Of course 1949 was the heart of the cold war, red scare, commie under every bed, and behind every film, Hollywood Ten before congressional subpoena committees, dark cultural blizzard night. So don’t be fooled by the screenplay writer credits. This joint effort had one red scare Hollywood Ten writer, Dalton Trumbo, using that old time devise, the front. Hollywood, this country, and future generations should remember that black time, that dark night when some vaunted cultural freedoms got short shrift. And remember too a guy name Kirk Douglas who said the hell with all that later and gave Hollywood Ten-types like Trumbo and John Howard Lawson screen credit when he made Spartacus.
The Latest From The “Occupy May 1st” Website- March Separately, Strike Together –International General Strike- Down Tools! Down Computers! Down Books!- All Out On May Day 2012- Why You, Your Union, Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 General Strike In Boston-Stand Up!-Fight Back!
Click on the headline to link to updates from the Occupy May 1st website. Occupy May Day which has called for an international General Strike on May Day 2012. I will post important updates as they appear on that site.
******
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
*******
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
OB Endorses Call for General Strike
January 8th, 2012 • mhacker •
Passed Resolutions No comments The following proposal was passed by the General Assembly on Jan 7, 2012:
Occupy Boston supports the call for an international General Strike on May 1, 2012, for immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. We recognize housing, education, health care, LGBT rights and racial equality as human rights; and thus call for the building of a broad coalition that will ensure and promote a democratic standard of living for all peoples.
*******
Why You, Your Union, Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 General Strike In Boston-Stand Up!-Fight Back!
Last fall there were waves of politically-motivated repressive police attacks on, and evictions of, various Occupy camp sites throughout the country including where the movement started in Zucotti (Liberty) Park. But even before the evictions and
repression escalated, questions were being asked: what is the way forward for the movement? And, from friend and foe alike, the ubiquitous what do we want. We have seen since then glimpses of organizing and action that are leading the way for the rest of us to follow: the Oakland General Strike on November 2nd, the West Coast Port Shutdown actions of December 12th, Occupy Foreclosures, including, most recently, renewed support for the struggles of the hard-pressed longshoremen in Longview, Washington. These actions show that, fundamentally, all of the strategic questions revolve around the question of power. The power, put simply, of the 99% vs. the power of the 1%.
Although the 99% holds enormous power -all wealth is generated, and the
current society is built and maintained through, the collective labor
(paid and unpaid) of the 99%-, we seldom exercise this vast collective power in our own interests. Too often, abetted and egged on by the 1%, we fruitlessly fight among ourselves driven by racism, patriarchy, xenophobia, occupational elitism, geographical prejudice, heterosexism, and other forms of division, oppression and prejudice.
This consciously debilitating strategy on its part is necessary, along with its control of politics, the courts, the prisons, the cops, and the military in order for the 1% to maintain control over us in order not to have to worry about their power and wealth. Their ill-gotten power is only assured by us, actively or passively, working against ours our best interests. Moreover many of us are not today fully aware of, nor organized to utilize, the vast collective power we have. The result is that many of us - people of color, women, GLBTQ, immigrants, those with less formal educational credentials, those in less socially respected occupations or unemployed, the homeless, and the just plain desperate- deal with double and triple forms of oppression and societal prejudice.
Currently the state of the economy has hit all of us hard, although as usual the less able to face the effects are hit the hardest like racial minorities, the elderly, the homeless and those down on their luck due to prolonged un and under- employment. In short, there are too many people out of work; wage rates have has barely kept up with rising costs or gone backwards to near historic post-World War II lows in real time terms; social services like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security have continued to be cut; our influence on their broken, broken for us, government has eroded; and our civil liberties have been seemingly daily attacked en masse. These trends have has been going on while the elites of this country, and of the world, have captured an increasing share of wealth; have had in essence a tax holiday for the past few decades; have viciously attacked our organizations of popular defense such as our public and private unions and community organizations; and have increase their power over us through manipulating their political system even more in their favor than previously.
The way forward, as we can demonstrate by building for the May Day actions, must involve showing our popular power against that of the entrenched elite. But the form of our power, reflecting our different concepts of governing, must be different from the elite’s. Where they have created powerful capitalist profit-driven top down organizations in order to dominate, control, exploit and oppress we must build and exercise bottom-up power in order to cooperate, liberate and collectively empower each other. We need to organize ourselves collectively and apart from these top down power relationships in our communities, schools and workplaces in order to to fight for our real interests. This must include a forthright rejection of the 1%’s attempts, honed after long use, to divide and conquer in order to rule us. A rejection of racism, patriarchy, xenophobia, elitism and other forms of oppression, and, importantly, a rejection of attempts by their electoral parties, mainly the Democrats and Republicans but others as well, powerful special interest groups, and others to co-opt and control our movement.
The Occupy freedom of assembly-driven encampments initially built the mass movement and brought a global spotlight to the bedrock economic and social concerns of the 99%. They inspired many of us, including those most oppressed, provided a sense of hope and solidarity with our fellow citizens and the international 99%, and brought the question of economic justice and the problems of inequality and political voiceless-ness grudgingly back into mainstream political conversation. Moreover they highlighted the need for the creation of cultures, societies, and institutions of direct democracy based on "power with"- not "power over"- each other; served as convivial spaces for sharing ideas and planning action; and in some camps, they even provided a temporary space for those who needed a home. Last fall the camp occupations served a fundamental role in the movement, but it is now time to move beyond the camp mentality and use our energies to struggle to start an offensive against the power of the 1%. On our terms.
Show Power
We demand:
*Hands Off Our Public Worker Unions! Hands Off All Our Unions!
* Put the unemployed to work! Billions for public works projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure (bridges, roads, sewer and water systems, etc.)!
*End the endless wars!
* Full citizenship rights for all those who made it here no matter how they got here!
* A drastic increase in the minimum wage and big wage increases for all workers!
* A moratorium on home foreclosures! No evictions!
* A moratorium on student loan debt! Free, quality higher education for all! Create 100, 200, many publicly-supported Harvards!
*No increases in public transportation fares! No transportation worker lay-offs! Free public transportation!
To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1, 2012 we will be organizing a wide-ranging series of mass collective participatory actions:
*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where there is no union - a one-day general strike.
*We will be organizing where a strike is not possible to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out.”
*We will be organizing students to walk-out of their schools (or not show up in the first place), set up campus picket lines, or to rally at a central location, probably Boston Common.
*We will be calling in our communities for a mass consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to make purchases on that day.
These actions, given the ravages of the capitalist economic system on individual lives, the continuing feelings of hopelessness felt by many, the newness of many of us to collective action, and the slender ties to past class and social struggles will, in many places, necessarily be a symbolic show of power. But let us take and use the day as a wake up call by a risen people.
And perhaps just as important as this year’s May Day itself , the massive organizing and outreach efforts in the months leading up to May 1st will allow us the opportunity to talk to our co-workers, families, neighbors, communities, and friends about the issues confronting us, the source of our power, the need for us to stand up to the attacks we are facing, the need to confront the various oppressions that keep most of us down in one way or another and keep all of us divided, and the need for us to stand in solidarity with each other in order to fight for our collective interests. In short, as one of the street slogans of movement says –“they say cut back, we say fight back.” We can build our collective consciousness, capacity, and confidence through this process; and come out stronger because of it.
Watch this website and other social media sites for further specific details of events and actions.
All out in Boston on May Day 2012.
******
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
*******
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
OB Endorses Call for General Strike
January 8th, 2012 • mhacker •
Passed Resolutions No comments The following proposal was passed by the General Assembly on Jan 7, 2012:
Occupy Boston supports the call for an international General Strike on May 1, 2012, for immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. We recognize housing, education, health care, LGBT rights and racial equality as human rights; and thus call for the building of a broad coalition that will ensure and promote a democratic standard of living for all peoples.
*******
Why You, Your Union, Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 General Strike In Boston-Stand Up!-Fight Back!
Last fall there were waves of politically-motivated repressive police attacks on, and evictions of, various Occupy camp sites throughout the country including where the movement started in Zucotti (Liberty) Park. But even before the evictions and
repression escalated, questions were being asked: what is the way forward for the movement? And, from friend and foe alike, the ubiquitous what do we want. We have seen since then glimpses of organizing and action that are leading the way for the rest of us to follow: the Oakland General Strike on November 2nd, the West Coast Port Shutdown actions of December 12th, Occupy Foreclosures, including, most recently, renewed support for the struggles of the hard-pressed longshoremen in Longview, Washington. These actions show that, fundamentally, all of the strategic questions revolve around the question of power. The power, put simply, of the 99% vs. the power of the 1%.
Although the 99% holds enormous power -all wealth is generated, and the
current society is built and maintained through, the collective labor
(paid and unpaid) of the 99%-, we seldom exercise this vast collective power in our own interests. Too often, abetted and egged on by the 1%, we fruitlessly fight among ourselves driven by racism, patriarchy, xenophobia, occupational elitism, geographical prejudice, heterosexism, and other forms of division, oppression and prejudice.
This consciously debilitating strategy on its part is necessary, along with its control of politics, the courts, the prisons, the cops, and the military in order for the 1% to maintain control over us in order not to have to worry about their power and wealth. Their ill-gotten power is only assured by us, actively or passively, working against ours our best interests. Moreover many of us are not today fully aware of, nor organized to utilize, the vast collective power we have. The result is that many of us - people of color, women, GLBTQ, immigrants, those with less formal educational credentials, those in less socially respected occupations or unemployed, the homeless, and the just plain desperate- deal with double and triple forms of oppression and societal prejudice.
Currently the state of the economy has hit all of us hard, although as usual the less able to face the effects are hit the hardest like racial minorities, the elderly, the homeless and those down on their luck due to prolonged un and under- employment. In short, there are too many people out of work; wage rates have has barely kept up with rising costs or gone backwards to near historic post-World War II lows in real time terms; social services like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security have continued to be cut; our influence on their broken, broken for us, government has eroded; and our civil liberties have been seemingly daily attacked en masse. These trends have has been going on while the elites of this country, and of the world, have captured an increasing share of wealth; have had in essence a tax holiday for the past few decades; have viciously attacked our organizations of popular defense such as our public and private unions and community organizations; and have increase their power over us through manipulating their political system even more in their favor than previously.
The way forward, as we can demonstrate by building for the May Day actions, must involve showing our popular power against that of the entrenched elite. But the form of our power, reflecting our different concepts of governing, must be different from the elite’s. Where they have created powerful capitalist profit-driven top down organizations in order to dominate, control, exploit and oppress we must build and exercise bottom-up power in order to cooperate, liberate and collectively empower each other. We need to organize ourselves collectively and apart from these top down power relationships in our communities, schools and workplaces in order to to fight for our real interests. This must include a forthright rejection of the 1%’s attempts, honed after long use, to divide and conquer in order to rule us. A rejection of racism, patriarchy, xenophobia, elitism and other forms of oppression, and, importantly, a rejection of attempts by their electoral parties, mainly the Democrats and Republicans but others as well, powerful special interest groups, and others to co-opt and control our movement.
The Occupy freedom of assembly-driven encampments initially built the mass movement and brought a global spotlight to the bedrock economic and social concerns of the 99%. They inspired many of us, including those most oppressed, provided a sense of hope and solidarity with our fellow citizens and the international 99%, and brought the question of economic justice and the problems of inequality and political voiceless-ness grudgingly back into mainstream political conversation. Moreover they highlighted the need for the creation of cultures, societies, and institutions of direct democracy based on "power with"- not "power over"- each other; served as convivial spaces for sharing ideas and planning action; and in some camps, they even provided a temporary space for those who needed a home. Last fall the camp occupations served a fundamental role in the movement, but it is now time to move beyond the camp mentality and use our energies to struggle to start an offensive against the power of the 1%. On our terms.
Show Power
We demand:
*Hands Off Our Public Worker Unions! Hands Off All Our Unions!
* Put the unemployed to work! Billions for public works projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure (bridges, roads, sewer and water systems, etc.)!
*End the endless wars!
* Full citizenship rights for all those who made it here no matter how they got here!
* A drastic increase in the minimum wage and big wage increases for all workers!
* A moratorium on home foreclosures! No evictions!
* A moratorium on student loan debt! Free, quality higher education for all! Create 100, 200, many publicly-supported Harvards!
*No increases in public transportation fares! No transportation worker lay-offs! Free public transportation!
To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1, 2012 we will be organizing a wide-ranging series of mass collective participatory actions:
*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where there is no union - a one-day general strike.
*We will be organizing where a strike is not possible to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out.”
*We will be organizing students to walk-out of their schools (or not show up in the first place), set up campus picket lines, or to rally at a central location, probably Boston Common.
*We will be calling in our communities for a mass consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to make purchases on that day.
These actions, given the ravages of the capitalist economic system on individual lives, the continuing feelings of hopelessness felt by many, the newness of many of us to collective action, and the slender ties to past class and social struggles will, in many places, necessarily be a symbolic show of power. But let us take and use the day as a wake up call by a risen people.
And perhaps just as important as this year’s May Day itself , the massive organizing and outreach efforts in the months leading up to May 1st will allow us the opportunity to talk to our co-workers, families, neighbors, communities, and friends about the issues confronting us, the source of our power, the need for us to stand up to the attacks we are facing, the need to confront the various oppressions that keep most of us down in one way or another and keep all of us divided, and the need for us to stand in solidarity with each other in order to fight for our collective interests. In short, as one of the street slogans of movement says –“they say cut back, we say fight back.” We can build our collective consciousness, capacity, and confidence through this process; and come out stronger because of it.
Watch this website and other social media sites for further specific details of events and actions.
All out in Boston on May Day 2012.
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