COMMENTARY
FEBRUARY IS BLACK HISTORY MONTH
HONOR WILLIAM PARKER AND THE ANTI-SLAVERY FIGHTERS AT THE ‘BATTLE OF CHRISTIANA’, 1851
One of the most heinous acts passed by Congress before the American Civil War was the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Its provisions allowed slaveholders to repossess their ‘property’ anywhere in the United States of the times. More importantly, the authority of the American government could be called upon by individual slaveholders to insure that any found slaves were repatriated through the use of federal marshals to capture them and federal commissioners to determine their status, slave or free. Every black liberation fighter and supporter of black liberation struggles should cringe every time they look at the United States Constitution, its original infamous 3/5 clause and its benign attitude toward chattel slavery. The Fugitive Slave Act merely rubbed everyone’s face constantly and publicly in those dirty little facts until the Civil War.
The Fugitive Slave Act did not, however, go unopposed. Abolitionists in the North rallied against it and in many ‘high’ abolitionist areas like Boston, Massachusetts and Rochester, New York the act became unenforceable. The role of William Parker, farmer, itinerant preacher, fugitive slave, and leader of the ‘Battle of Christiana’ in southern Pennsylvania in 1851 is probably the most dramatic act of resistance to that law. When the slaveholders came north of the Mason-Dixon line to try to reclaim their slave ‘property’ abetted by local hooligans and the federal government they got far more than they had bargained for. What they got was a Parker-organized, mainly black, self-defense organization to protect themselves and any fugitive slaves that came their way. Such self-defense tactics would do black liberation fighters proud today.
As every black liberation fighter and every other kind of liberation fighter since that time knows even small victories will produce ‘blowback’ by the government and its hangers-on. Parker and his cohorts faced just such a situation. As a result of their resistance Parker had to flee to Canada. Moreover, Millard Fillmore, another one of those forgotten accidental presidents, called out troops to stop these anti-slavery actions and place those arrested on trial. Needless to say these were in the nature of show trials in an attempt to ‘chill’ free speech and actions. However, enflamed Northern anti-slavery sentiment insured that there were no convictions. The moral of the story is this- federal Fugitive Slave Act or not the slaveholders stopped pursuing their fugitive slaves when self-defense organizations and others made it too ‘hot’ for them to pursue such actions. We can use some of that same thinking today as we face the outrageous legislation of our own times. HONOR WILLIAM PARKER! REMEMBER THE ‘BATTLE OF CHRISTIANA’.
Monday, January 29, 2007
*GLORY II- THE 1ST SOUTH CAROLINA VOLUNTEERS IN THE CIVIL WAR
Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for stiff-necked abolitionist, Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
BOOK REVIEW
ARMY LIFE IN A BLACK REGIMENT, THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON, BEACON PRESS, BOSTON, 1970
FEBRUARY IS BLACK HISTORY MONTH
Those familiar with the critical role that the recruitment of black troops into the Union Armies in the American Civil War usually think about the famous Massachusetts 54th Regiment under Robert Gould Shaw which has received wide attention in book, film and sculpture. And those heroic fighters deserve those honors. Glory, indeed. However, other units were formed from other regions that are also noteworthy. And none more so than the 1st South Carolina Volunteers commanded by the arch-abolitionist Theodore Higginson one of John Brown’s fervent supporters and an early advocate of arming the slaves during the Civil War. He desperately wanted to lead armed blacks in the battle against slavery and got his wish.
I have remarked elsewhere (in a review of William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner)
that while the slaves in the South, for a host of reasons, did not insurrect with the intensity or frequency of say Haiti, the other West Indian islands or Brazil that when the time came to show discipline, courage and honor under arms that blacks would prove not inferior to whites. And Higginson's book is prima facie evidence for that position.
One should note that, unlike the Massachusetts 54th which was made up primarily of freedman the 1st South Carolina was made up of units of fugitive and abandoned slaves. Thus, one should have assumed that it would have been harder to train and discipline uneducated and much-abused slaves. Not so. After reading a number of books on the trials and tribulations of various Union regiments, including the famous Irish Brigade, the story Higginson tells compares very favorably with those units. While Higginson's use of ‘negro’ dialect in the telling of his story may not be to the liking of some of today’s ‘politically correct’ readers of this book it is nevertheless a story worth reading told by a ‘high’ abolitionist and Civil War hero.
BOOK REVIEW
ARMY LIFE IN A BLACK REGIMENT, THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON, BEACON PRESS, BOSTON, 1970
FEBRUARY IS BLACK HISTORY MONTH
Those familiar with the critical role that the recruitment of black troops into the Union Armies in the American Civil War usually think about the famous Massachusetts 54th Regiment under Robert Gould Shaw which has received wide attention in book, film and sculpture. And those heroic fighters deserve those honors. Glory, indeed. However, other units were formed from other regions that are also noteworthy. And none more so than the 1st South Carolina Volunteers commanded by the arch-abolitionist Theodore Higginson one of John Brown’s fervent supporters and an early advocate of arming the slaves during the Civil War. He desperately wanted to lead armed blacks in the battle against slavery and got his wish.
I have remarked elsewhere (in a review of William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner)
that while the slaves in the South, for a host of reasons, did not insurrect with the intensity or frequency of say Haiti, the other West Indian islands or Brazil that when the time came to show discipline, courage and honor under arms that blacks would prove not inferior to whites. And Higginson's book is prima facie evidence for that position.
One should note that, unlike the Massachusetts 54th which was made up primarily of freedman the 1st South Carolina was made up of units of fugitive and abandoned slaves. Thus, one should have assumed that it would have been harder to train and discipline uneducated and much-abused slaves. Not so. After reading a number of books on the trials and tribulations of various Union regiments, including the famous Irish Brigade, the story Higginson tells compares very favorably with those units. While Higginson's use of ‘negro’ dialect in the telling of his story may not be to the liking of some of today’s ‘politically correct’ readers of this book it is nevertheless a story worth reading told by a ‘high’ abolitionist and Civil War hero.
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
AN EARLY STRUGGLE AGAINST SLAVERY
COMMENTARY
FEBRUARY IS BLACK HISTORY MONTH
HONOR WILLIAM PARKER AND THE ANTI-SLAVERY FIGHTERS AT THE ‘BATTLE OF CHRISTIANA’, 1851
One of the most heinous acts passed by Congress before the American Civil War was the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Its provisions allowed slaveholders to repossess their ‘property’ anywhere in the United States of the times. More importantly, the authority of the American government could be called upon by individual slaveholders to insure that any found slaves were repatriated through the use of federal marshals to capture them and federal commissioners to determine their status, slave or free. Every black liberation fighter and supporter of black liberation struggles should cringe every time they look at the United States Constitution, its original infamous 3/5 clause and its benign attitude toward chattel slavery. The Fugitive Slave Act merely rubbed everyone’s face constantly and publicly in those dirty little facts until the Civil War.
The Fugitive Slave Act did not, however, go unopposed. Abolitionists in the North rallied against it and in many ‘high’ abolitionist areas like Boston, Massachusetts and Rochester, New York the act became unenforceable. The role of William Parker, farmer, itinerant preacher and fugitive slave, and leader of the ‘Battle of Christiana’ in southern Pennsylvania in 1851 is probably the most dramatic act of resistance to that law. When the slaveholders came north of the Mason-Dixon line to try to reclaim their slave ‘property’ abetted by local hooligans and the federal government they got far more than they had bargained for. What they got was a Parker-organized, mainly black, armed self-defense organization to protect themselves and any fugitive slaves that came their way. Such self-defense tactics would do black liberation fighters proud today.
As every black liberation fighter and every other kind of liberation fighter since that time knows even small victories will produce ‘blowback’ by the government and its hangers-on. Parker and his cohorts faced just such a situation. As a result of their resistance Parker had to flee to Canada. Moreover, Millard Fillmore, another one of those forgotten accidental presidents, called out troops to stop these anti-slavery actions and place those arrested on trial. Needless to say these were in the nature of show trials in an attempt to ‘chill’ free speech and actions. However, enflamed Northern anti-slavery sentiment insured that there were no convictions. The moral of the story is this- federal Fugitive Slave Act or not the slaveholders stopped pursuing their fugitive slaves when armed self-defense organizations and others who made it too ‘hot’ for them to pursue such actions. We can use some of that same thinking today as we face the outrageous legislation of our own times. HONOR WILLIAM PARKER! REMEMBER THE ‘BATTLE OF CHRISTIANA’.
FEBRUARY IS BLACK HISTORY MONTH
HONOR WILLIAM PARKER AND THE ANTI-SLAVERY FIGHTERS AT THE ‘BATTLE OF CHRISTIANA’, 1851
One of the most heinous acts passed by Congress before the American Civil War was the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Its provisions allowed slaveholders to repossess their ‘property’ anywhere in the United States of the times. More importantly, the authority of the American government could be called upon by individual slaveholders to insure that any found slaves were repatriated through the use of federal marshals to capture them and federal commissioners to determine their status, slave or free. Every black liberation fighter and supporter of black liberation struggles should cringe every time they look at the United States Constitution, its original infamous 3/5 clause and its benign attitude toward chattel slavery. The Fugitive Slave Act merely rubbed everyone’s face constantly and publicly in those dirty little facts until the Civil War.
The Fugitive Slave Act did not, however, go unopposed. Abolitionists in the North rallied against it and in many ‘high’ abolitionist areas like Boston, Massachusetts and Rochester, New York the act became unenforceable. The role of William Parker, farmer, itinerant preacher and fugitive slave, and leader of the ‘Battle of Christiana’ in southern Pennsylvania in 1851 is probably the most dramatic act of resistance to that law. When the slaveholders came north of the Mason-Dixon line to try to reclaim their slave ‘property’ abetted by local hooligans and the federal government they got far more than they had bargained for. What they got was a Parker-organized, mainly black, armed self-defense organization to protect themselves and any fugitive slaves that came their way. Such self-defense tactics would do black liberation fighters proud today.
As every black liberation fighter and every other kind of liberation fighter since that time knows even small victories will produce ‘blowback’ by the government and its hangers-on. Parker and his cohorts faced just such a situation. As a result of their resistance Parker had to flee to Canada. Moreover, Millard Fillmore, another one of those forgotten accidental presidents, called out troops to stop these anti-slavery actions and place those arrested on trial. Needless to say these were in the nature of show trials in an attempt to ‘chill’ free speech and actions. However, enflamed Northern anti-slavery sentiment insured that there were no convictions. The moral of the story is this- federal Fugitive Slave Act or not the slaveholders stopped pursuing their fugitive slaves when armed self-defense organizations and others who made it too ‘hot’ for them to pursue such actions. We can use some of that same thinking today as we face the outrageous legislation of our own times. HONOR WILLIAM PARKER! REMEMBER THE ‘BATTLE OF CHRISTIANA’.
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
*ON THE QUESTION OF ANTI-WAR SOLDIERS AND SAILORS SOLIDARITY COMMITTEES
Click on the title to link to an "Under The Hood" (Fort Hood G.I. Coffeehouse)Web site online article about the "Oleo Strut" Coffeehouse, an important development in the anti-Vietnam War struggle. Hats off to those bygone anti-war fighters.
COMMENTARY
BUILD ANTI-WAR SOLDIER AND SAILOR SOLIDARITY COMMITTEES NOW!
Readers of this space perhaps already know that this writer has been harping over the last year on the need for the anti-war movement to turn its face to the rank and files troops in order to end the war in Iraq. Recently, the urgency of this need was dramatically brought home by the news that in California troops have petitioned Congress for the redress of grievance. And the subject of that grievance is not about the lousy military food, it is not about the lousy pay and it is not about the lousy equipment, although God knows those are always legitimate issues for all rank and file military personnel. The redress petition is for the immediate withdrawal from Iraq. Despite the small attention it has received in the bourgeois press this is a big political development and a possible harbinger of things to come in the military.
This highly conscious political, and given the circumstances under which they operate, courageous act is in dramatic contrast to the paralysis of will exhibited by a Congress that cannot even vote for a real anti-war resolution much less against the war appropriations. Sure, they can vote all day and night for these non-binding ‘sense of the Congress’ resolutions that tie them to no concrete action. Christ, they live for these kinds of votes to brighten up their rather tarnished and sorry records on Iraq. For my money, we need to address the issue of withdrawal from Iraq where it can mean something by organizing anti-war soldier and sailor solidarity committees in order to fraternize with the troops. As I have mentioned before, in the final analysis, this is shortest route to ending the war in Iraq.
Most of us have organized or been part of organized anti-war demonstrations over the last few years. Organizing civilian demonstrations against the war is as relatively easy as getting a permit (if necessary), making up some posters and banners, writing a leaflet announcing the event and grabbing a bullhorn. Let us be clear this military solidarity committee organizing is much more serious business. Although the military has not been as publicly Draconian toward its military dissenters as in the past, especially anti-war soldiers in the Vietnam era, dealing with the military is a whole different ball of wax, from the ‘justice’ they dispense to the ranks to their reaction to anti-war civilians in front of their bases. Make no mistake the military brass are not among nature’s noblemen.
That said, the bulk of the troops, either those who have served in Iraq or those getting ready to ship out are no mercenary professional soldiers, but rather are citizen-soldiers caught up in a terrible place. This is especially true of the increasing numbers of National Guard and Reserve units that are being deployed as the Bush Administration buries itself deeper in the quagmire of ‘Big Sandy’. Christ, yesterday those soldiers were probably sitting beside you at work. And that, my friends, gives us an opening. While these are not our troops, they most definitely are our sons, daughters and neighbors.
This is not the place to discuss the specifics of organizing anti-war troop support. That can be left to local initiative, for now. What is necessary is to get out to the military bases, naval stations and armories to make contacts, and to listen. That is the first rule of fraternization with the troops. From personal experience I have found that those troops who want to find an outlet for their anti-war sentiments or need legal help to get out of the military or want to talk about a whole range of issues including the above-mentioned lousy food, pay and equipment will find you. And those are all legitimate ways to start out. Nevertheless in the end it is the need to find direct ways to get the immediate, unconditional withdrawal from Iraq that must drive the work. More on this question later.
COMMENTARY
BUILD ANTI-WAR SOLDIER AND SAILOR SOLIDARITY COMMITTEES NOW!
Readers of this space perhaps already know that this writer has been harping over the last year on the need for the anti-war movement to turn its face to the rank and files troops in order to end the war in Iraq. Recently, the urgency of this need was dramatically brought home by the news that in California troops have petitioned Congress for the redress of grievance. And the subject of that grievance is not about the lousy military food, it is not about the lousy pay and it is not about the lousy equipment, although God knows those are always legitimate issues for all rank and file military personnel. The redress petition is for the immediate withdrawal from Iraq. Despite the small attention it has received in the bourgeois press this is a big political development and a possible harbinger of things to come in the military.
This highly conscious political, and given the circumstances under which they operate, courageous act is in dramatic contrast to the paralysis of will exhibited by a Congress that cannot even vote for a real anti-war resolution much less against the war appropriations. Sure, they can vote all day and night for these non-binding ‘sense of the Congress’ resolutions that tie them to no concrete action. Christ, they live for these kinds of votes to brighten up their rather tarnished and sorry records on Iraq. For my money, we need to address the issue of withdrawal from Iraq where it can mean something by organizing anti-war soldier and sailor solidarity committees in order to fraternize with the troops. As I have mentioned before, in the final analysis, this is shortest route to ending the war in Iraq.
Most of us have organized or been part of organized anti-war demonstrations over the last few years. Organizing civilian demonstrations against the war is as relatively easy as getting a permit (if necessary), making up some posters and banners, writing a leaflet announcing the event and grabbing a bullhorn. Let us be clear this military solidarity committee organizing is much more serious business. Although the military has not been as publicly Draconian toward its military dissenters as in the past, especially anti-war soldiers in the Vietnam era, dealing with the military is a whole different ball of wax, from the ‘justice’ they dispense to the ranks to their reaction to anti-war civilians in front of their bases. Make no mistake the military brass are not among nature’s noblemen.
That said, the bulk of the troops, either those who have served in Iraq or those getting ready to ship out are no mercenary professional soldiers, but rather are citizen-soldiers caught up in a terrible place. This is especially true of the increasing numbers of National Guard and Reserve units that are being deployed as the Bush Administration buries itself deeper in the quagmire of ‘Big Sandy’. Christ, yesterday those soldiers were probably sitting beside you at work. And that, my friends, gives us an opening. While these are not our troops, they most definitely are our sons, daughters and neighbors.
This is not the place to discuss the specifics of organizing anti-war troop support. That can be left to local initiative, for now. What is necessary is to get out to the military bases, naval stations and armories to make contacts, and to listen. That is the first rule of fraternization with the troops. From personal experience I have found that those troops who want to find an outlet for their anti-war sentiments or need legal help to get out of the military or want to talk about a whole range of issues including the above-mentioned lousy food, pay and equipment will find you. And those are all legitimate ways to start out. Nevertheless in the end it is the need to find direct ways to get the immediate, unconditional withdrawal from Iraq that must drive the work. More on this question later.
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
THE CALIFORNIA ANTI-WAR SOLDIERS MUST NOT STAND ALONE
COMMENTARY
CALIFORNIA SOLDIERS PETITION CONGRESS FOR REDRESS OF GRIEVANCE-FOR THE IMMEDIATE WITHDRAWL FROM IRAQ
SUPPORT THE SOLDIERS’ DEMAND- IMMEDIATE, UNCONDITIONAL WITHDRAW FROM IRAQ- BUILD ANTI-WAR SOLDIERS AND SAILORS SUPPORT COMMITTEES NOW!
For the past year this writer has been harping on the need for the anti-war movement to turn its face to win the troops over to an anti-war perspective. As put forth in a recent commentary I motivated that turn in the following way which I repost here.
… “Secondly, and more realistically today, the anti-war movement needs to build anti-war soldier and sailor committees. I have been harping on this issue for at least a year now. Let us get serious about the focus of the anti-war fight. We have been aiming in the wrong direction. The Bush Administration is inured to talk, demonstrations or anything else. The military command has led the rank and file troops down the golden path. It should be clear by now that even they do not take the noise about ‘victory’ from the Administration seriously. The loyal governmental opposition, the Democrats, have had nothing to add but confusion. We of the anti-war movement, and I will take my fair share of responsibility on this, have failed in our efforts for immediate, unconditional withdrawal up to now. That leaves the rank and file soldiers and sailors to figure a way out. More than a few are fed up with the war and their useless sacrifice. Our task is to help them out. They must not stand alone. Yes, it is important to go to Washington to protest, but, it is more important to get out to the army, marine and naval bases and talk to and listen to the troops that have fought or preparing to fight in Iraq. That, my friends, in the final analysis is the short way to end this damn war.”
Up until now the anti-war sentiment in the military has generally expressed itself by individual acts of refusal, an increase of AWOL’s, attempts to get out of the military by seeking political asylum, an increase in the number of applications for conscientious objector status and the like. Earlier this fall a petition against the war was signed by a couple of hundred soldiers actually serving in Iraq. Now, however, comes news that about one thousand California soldiers in Reserve and National Guard units has taken all this a step further. They have collectively, as citizen-soldiers, petitioned Congress for the redress of grievance calling for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. As a first step, well done brothers and sisters. This hellish war has finally begun to split the military, just a little for now but with the expected ‘surge’ in Iraq this could very well lead to a groundswell.
If we think about it this situation was almost inevitable. Why? This war has gone on so long and has stretched the military resources so thin that the call up of the citizen-soldier has dramatically increased. While this is not a draft army, like in Vietnam, it is not now made up totally of mercenary professional soldiers. And that is where the action of the California soldiers comes in as an extremely important political development. What do anti-war activists do? As noted in that recent article quoted above. Get out to the military bases. Fraternize with the soldiers, sailors, marines and air personnel. Build those vital soldier and sailor support committees to link up the struggle. THE ANTI-WAR TROOPS MUST NOT STAND ALONE!!!
CALIFORNIA SOLDIERS PETITION CONGRESS FOR REDRESS OF GRIEVANCE-FOR THE IMMEDIATE WITHDRAWL FROM IRAQ
SUPPORT THE SOLDIERS’ DEMAND- IMMEDIATE, UNCONDITIONAL WITHDRAW FROM IRAQ- BUILD ANTI-WAR SOLDIERS AND SAILORS SUPPORT COMMITTEES NOW!
For the past year this writer has been harping on the need for the anti-war movement to turn its face to win the troops over to an anti-war perspective. As put forth in a recent commentary I motivated that turn in the following way which I repost here.
… “Secondly, and more realistically today, the anti-war movement needs to build anti-war soldier and sailor committees. I have been harping on this issue for at least a year now. Let us get serious about the focus of the anti-war fight. We have been aiming in the wrong direction. The Bush Administration is inured to talk, demonstrations or anything else. The military command has led the rank and file troops down the golden path. It should be clear by now that even they do not take the noise about ‘victory’ from the Administration seriously. The loyal governmental opposition, the Democrats, have had nothing to add but confusion. We of the anti-war movement, and I will take my fair share of responsibility on this, have failed in our efforts for immediate, unconditional withdrawal up to now. That leaves the rank and file soldiers and sailors to figure a way out. More than a few are fed up with the war and their useless sacrifice. Our task is to help them out. They must not stand alone. Yes, it is important to go to Washington to protest, but, it is more important to get out to the army, marine and naval bases and talk to and listen to the troops that have fought or preparing to fight in Iraq. That, my friends, in the final analysis is the short way to end this damn war.”
Up until now the anti-war sentiment in the military has generally expressed itself by individual acts of refusal, an increase of AWOL’s, attempts to get out of the military by seeking political asylum, an increase in the number of applications for conscientious objector status and the like. Earlier this fall a petition against the war was signed by a couple of hundred soldiers actually serving in Iraq. Now, however, comes news that about one thousand California soldiers in Reserve and National Guard units has taken all this a step further. They have collectively, as citizen-soldiers, petitioned Congress for the redress of grievance calling for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. As a first step, well done brothers and sisters. This hellish war has finally begun to split the military, just a little for now but with the expected ‘surge’ in Iraq this could very well lead to a groundswell.
If we think about it this situation was almost inevitable. Why? This war has gone on so long and has stretched the military resources so thin that the call up of the citizen-soldier has dramatically increased. While this is not a draft army, like in Vietnam, it is not now made up totally of mercenary professional soldiers. And that is where the action of the California soldiers comes in as an extremely important political development. What do anti-war activists do? As noted in that recent article quoted above. Get out to the military bases. Fraternize with the soldiers, sailors, marines and air personnel. Build those vital soldier and sailor support committees to link up the struggle. THE ANTI-WAR TROOPS MUST NOT STAND ALONE!!!
Saturday, January 13, 2007
*PROTEST THE CONGRESSIONAL ATTACK ON MUMIA ABU-JAMAL!
Click on the title to link to the Partisan Defense Committee Web site.
THIS INFORMATION IS PASSED ON FROM THE PARTISAN DEFENSE COMMITTEE. I NEED ONLY ADD THAT TIME IS CRITICAL IN MUMIA'S CASE. IF THERE WAS ANY REAL JUSTICE IN MUMIA'S CASE THEY WOULD BE NAMING A STREET IN PHILADELPHIA FOR HIM FOR HIS WORK AS THE 'VOICE OF THE VOICELESS'.
Protest Congressional Attack on Mumia Abu-Jamal!
(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)
The following statement was issued by the Partisan Defense Committee on December 8.
The Partisan Defense Committee denounces the U.S. House of Representatives' vote on December 6 which attacked the Parisian suburb of Saint-Denis for naming a street in honor of death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. The resolution, which passed 368 to 31 with support from both Republicans and Democrats, repeats the prosecution's frame-up lies against Mumia. This resolution seeks to pave the way for the legal lynching of an innocent man! The resolution also "commends all police officers in the United States and throughout the world"—and this in the wake of the NYC police killing of Sean Bell in a 50-round fusillade on November 25, and the Atlanta police's gunning down of 88-year-old Kathryn Johnston in her own home.
There are mountains of evidence proving Mumia Abu-Jamal's innocence and the police/prosecution frame-up: there is no ballistics evidence, so-called eyewitnesses were coerced and Mumia's confession was fabricated. In 2001 Rachel Wolkenstein (co-counsel for Mumia from 1995 to 1999) submitted an affidavit to the U.S. District Court detailing that evidence, including Arnold Beverly's confession that he, not Mumia, killed Police Officer Daniel Faulkner. Yet all the courts to which it has been presented have refused to hear the Beverly evidence. The Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Mumia could raise only three issues on his appeal: the racially biased jury selection in his 1982 trial, the D.A.'s prejudicial summary argument that Mumia would have "appeal after appeal," and the grossly biased post-conviction state hearings in the 1990s before Judge Albert Sabo (who a court reporter testified had said at the time of the original trial that he would help "fry the n—r"). These challenges should be heard in court. But the harsh reality is that the Court of Appeals—like every other court in this case—has refused to hear countless other violations of Mumia's rights. Every aspect of Mumia's case shows how much the capitalist rulers want him dead.
The House of Representatives' overwhelming vote further drives home the depth of hatred the entire bourgeois state apparatus has for Mumia Abu-Jamal, a courageous, eloquent and unbroken fighter for black freedom and against racist repression. Mumia was framed up and falsely convicted for the murder of Faulkner because he is a talented journalist known as the "voice of the voiceless," a former Black Panther, a supporter of the MOVE organization and an outspoken opponent of racism.
Partisan Defense Committee spokesman Rachel Wolkenstein was invited to and spoke as part of the delegation at the street-naming in Saint-Denis this past April. That event provoked months of a renewed campaign by police and government officials against Mumia. In a letter to the mayor of Paris dated October 30, Mumia denounced efforts by Philadelphia politicians to retaliate against Saint-Denis, writing that "the merchants of death" have a "campaign to not only kill me, but to wipe my name from the face of the earth. Why else would they care about a small street in St. Denis? Or an award of Citizen of Honor from the City of Light? The Empire thinks it is Master of the World and can tell all what to do".
In response to this vicious campaign, the Comite de Defense Sociale, the PDC's fraternal legal and social defense organization in France, issued a leaflet on November 16 denouncing efforts by Philadelphia politicians to stifle growing support for Mumia: "This attack takes place when the international defense campaign for Mumia is once again gaining steam, a campaign that Philadelphia and its police are seeking to crush in the egg."
More evidence of growing support for Mumia is the statement by the Partisan Defense Committee under the headline, "We Demand the Immediate Freedom of Mumia Abu-Jamal, an Innocent Man" signed by hundreds of labor activists and prominent individuals, including Nobel Prize winners Nadine Gordimer and Dario Fo, Harvard University's Henry Louis Gates Jr., Cindy Sheehan of Gold Star Families for Peace, author Michael Eric Dyson, the poet Sonia Sanchez, New York City councilman Charles Barren and Illinois Congressman Danny K. Davis. That statement was printed as a full-page ad in New York's Amsterdam News (26 October), the Nation (20 November), and also in the Chicago Defender and the San Francisco Bay View.
The House resolution against Mumia comes at a crucial juncture in the legal proceedings. Mumia has submitted the final papers in his appeal of a federal court decision that affirmed his frame-up conviction while overturning the death sentence. After oral argument, the court could decide within months whether to reinstate the death penalty, to condemn him to the living death of life in prison or to grant a new trial. The latest offensive by Congress and the city of Philadelphia against Mumia underlines the need to mobilize now for his freedom.
On December 9 in Philadelphia, the Partisan Defense Committee will join a rally called by the International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal on the 25th anniversary of Mumia's arrest. The PDC understands that the capitalist state and its courts are not neutral institutions but organs of repression against the working class and the oppressed. Mumia's freedom will not be won through reliance on the rigged "justice" system or on capitalist politicians, whether Democratic, Republican or Green. Our PDC contingent will march under the slogans: "For Class-Struggle Defense to Free Mumia Now! There Is No Justice in the Capitalist Courts! Abolish the Racist Death Penalty!"
THIS INFORMATION IS PASSED ON FROM THE PARTISAN DEFENSE COMMITTEE. I NEED ONLY ADD THAT TIME IS CRITICAL IN MUMIA'S CASE. IF THERE WAS ANY REAL JUSTICE IN MUMIA'S CASE THEY WOULD BE NAMING A STREET IN PHILADELPHIA FOR HIM FOR HIS WORK AS THE 'VOICE OF THE VOICELESS'.
Protest Congressional Attack on Mumia Abu-Jamal!
(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)
The following statement was issued by the Partisan Defense Committee on December 8.
The Partisan Defense Committee denounces the U.S. House of Representatives' vote on December 6 which attacked the Parisian suburb of Saint-Denis for naming a street in honor of death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. The resolution, which passed 368 to 31 with support from both Republicans and Democrats, repeats the prosecution's frame-up lies against Mumia. This resolution seeks to pave the way for the legal lynching of an innocent man! The resolution also "commends all police officers in the United States and throughout the world"—and this in the wake of the NYC police killing of Sean Bell in a 50-round fusillade on November 25, and the Atlanta police's gunning down of 88-year-old Kathryn Johnston in her own home.
There are mountains of evidence proving Mumia Abu-Jamal's innocence and the police/prosecution frame-up: there is no ballistics evidence, so-called eyewitnesses were coerced and Mumia's confession was fabricated. In 2001 Rachel Wolkenstein (co-counsel for Mumia from 1995 to 1999) submitted an affidavit to the U.S. District Court detailing that evidence, including Arnold Beverly's confession that he, not Mumia, killed Police Officer Daniel Faulkner. Yet all the courts to which it has been presented have refused to hear the Beverly evidence. The Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Mumia could raise only three issues on his appeal: the racially biased jury selection in his 1982 trial, the D.A.'s prejudicial summary argument that Mumia would have "appeal after appeal," and the grossly biased post-conviction state hearings in the 1990s before Judge Albert Sabo (who a court reporter testified had said at the time of the original trial that he would help "fry the n—r"). These challenges should be heard in court. But the harsh reality is that the Court of Appeals—like every other court in this case—has refused to hear countless other violations of Mumia's rights. Every aspect of Mumia's case shows how much the capitalist rulers want him dead.
The House of Representatives' overwhelming vote further drives home the depth of hatred the entire bourgeois state apparatus has for Mumia Abu-Jamal, a courageous, eloquent and unbroken fighter for black freedom and against racist repression. Mumia was framed up and falsely convicted for the murder of Faulkner because he is a talented journalist known as the "voice of the voiceless," a former Black Panther, a supporter of the MOVE organization and an outspoken opponent of racism.
Partisan Defense Committee spokesman Rachel Wolkenstein was invited to and spoke as part of the delegation at the street-naming in Saint-Denis this past April. That event provoked months of a renewed campaign by police and government officials against Mumia. In a letter to the mayor of Paris dated October 30, Mumia denounced efforts by Philadelphia politicians to retaliate against Saint-Denis, writing that "the merchants of death" have a "campaign to not only kill me, but to wipe my name from the face of the earth. Why else would they care about a small street in St. Denis? Or an award of Citizen of Honor from the City of Light? The Empire thinks it is Master of the World and can tell all what to do".
In response to this vicious campaign, the Comite de Defense Sociale, the PDC's fraternal legal and social defense organization in France, issued a leaflet on November 16 denouncing efforts by Philadelphia politicians to stifle growing support for Mumia: "This attack takes place when the international defense campaign for Mumia is once again gaining steam, a campaign that Philadelphia and its police are seeking to crush in the egg."
More evidence of growing support for Mumia is the statement by the Partisan Defense Committee under the headline, "We Demand the Immediate Freedom of Mumia Abu-Jamal, an Innocent Man" signed by hundreds of labor activists and prominent individuals, including Nobel Prize winners Nadine Gordimer and Dario Fo, Harvard University's Henry Louis Gates Jr., Cindy Sheehan of Gold Star Families for Peace, author Michael Eric Dyson, the poet Sonia Sanchez, New York City councilman Charles Barren and Illinois Congressman Danny K. Davis. That statement was printed as a full-page ad in New York's Amsterdam News (26 October), the Nation (20 November), and also in the Chicago Defender and the San Francisco Bay View.
The House resolution against Mumia comes at a crucial juncture in the legal proceedings. Mumia has submitted the final papers in his appeal of a federal court decision that affirmed his frame-up conviction while overturning the death sentence. After oral argument, the court could decide within months whether to reinstate the death penalty, to condemn him to the living death of life in prison or to grant a new trial. The latest offensive by Congress and the city of Philadelphia against Mumia underlines the need to mobilize now for his freedom.
On December 9 in Philadelphia, the Partisan Defense Committee will join a rally called by the International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal on the 25th anniversary of Mumia's arrest. The PDC understands that the capitalist state and its courts are not neutral institutions but organs of repression against the working class and the oppressed. Mumia's freedom will not be won through reliance on the rigged "justice" system or on capitalist politicians, whether Democratic, Republican or Green. Our PDC contingent will march under the slogans: "For Class-Struggle Defense to Free Mumia Now! There Is No Justice in the Capitalist Courts! Abolish the Racist Death Penalty!"
Friday, January 12, 2007
*NOW THAT WE HAVE SEEN PLAN 'A' ON IRAQ WE NEED TO MOVE ON TO PLAN 'B'
Click on the title to link to an "Under The Hood" (Fort Hood G.I. Coffeehouse)Web site online article about the "Oleo Strut" Coffeehouse, an important development in the anti-Vietnam War struggle. Hats off to those bygone anti-war fighters.
COMMENTARY
OBVIOUSLY, NO TO TROOP ESCALATION- IMMEDIATE,UNCONDITIONAL WITHDRAWAL OF ALL U.S./ALLIED TROOPS FROM IRAQ!-SUPPORT AND BUILD ANTI-WAR SOLDIER AND SAILOR SOLIDARITY COMMITTEES!
This will be one of my shorter blogs. After all, what more needs to be said after President Bush unveiled his Plan "A" for 'victory' in Iraq. They must have spent all of twenty minutes on this plan. Actually, any more time would have been wasted. We have seen this kind of escalation before. They called it Vietnam. But the same mentality is at work. Enough, in fact, more than enough said.
Here is Plan "B", short and sweet. Immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all U.S./Allied troops from Iraq, pronto. Forget the politicians, Democratic or Republican. Forget the military brass. Forget the advisers and the think tank specialists. Let us turn our direction where it counts to fighting for the soul of the troops. Form anti-war soldier and sailor committees now. If the troops in Iraq decide to leave, and in the final analysis they are the only ones who can end this war, we must not let them stand alone.
COMMENTARY
OBVIOUSLY, NO TO TROOP ESCALATION- IMMEDIATE,UNCONDITIONAL WITHDRAWAL OF ALL U.S./ALLIED TROOPS FROM IRAQ!-SUPPORT AND BUILD ANTI-WAR SOLDIER AND SAILOR SOLIDARITY COMMITTEES!
This will be one of my shorter blogs. After all, what more needs to be said after President Bush unveiled his Plan "A" for 'victory' in Iraq. They must have spent all of twenty minutes on this plan. Actually, any more time would have been wasted. We have seen this kind of escalation before. They called it Vietnam. But the same mentality is at work. Enough, in fact, more than enough said.
Here is Plan "B", short and sweet. Immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all U.S./Allied troops from Iraq, pronto. Forget the politicians, Democratic or Republican. Forget the military brass. Forget the advisers and the think tank specialists. Let us turn our direction where it counts to fighting for the soul of the troops. Form anti-war soldier and sailor committees now. If the troops in Iraq decide to leave, and in the final analysis they are the only ones who can end this war, we must not let them stand alone.
STILL HO HUM-THE HOUSE DEMOCRATS PASS A VERY MINIMUM WAGE BILL
COMMENTARY
This week, the week of January 8, 2007, the Democratically-controlled U.S. House of Representatives, passed a new federal minimum wage bill making the new minimum wage standard $7.25/hr.. This bill was hailed as the beginning of the golden age of working people by the organized labor tops and Democratic politicians. Be still my heart-we have reached the promise land! Of course for most Democratic politicans a $7 an hour wage is very far removed from their daily reality. No, that is not exactly true. When they are at home and notice the people, mainly immigrants, who maintain their lawns and clean and repair their houses-that is where they connect with the minimum wage. For a very different take on this question I repost a blog from the summer of 2006 when this issue first surfaced. I stand by the political points made there.
HO-HUM- THE DEMOCRATS WANT TO FIGHT FOR A $7 FEDERAL MINIMUM WAGE
WHAT PLANET ARE THESE PEOPLE ON? FIGHT FOR A LIVING WAGE!
FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
Is there no end to this madness of bourgeois parliamentary politics? This writer has just recently learned that the leader of the House Democrats, Nancy Pelosi, wants to reintroduce legislation that would raise the federal minimum wage standard from $5 to $7 (rounded off)/hour. This is legislation that earlier in the session the Republican-dominated Congress brushed aside without a murmur as an outrage against humankind. This project is supposedly the lynch pin of the Democratic program, and incidentally the road to heaven for working people, for the 2006 election cycle in the fall.
Let’s do the math-rounding off a little. National median household income is about $50,000/yr. $5*40hours*52 weeks= $10,000 /yr. That is very, very, very poor, indeed. Now, let us try $7*40 hours*52 weeks=$15,000/yr. Even Bill Gates and Warren Buffet would agree that still is very, very, very poor, indeed. These numbers speak to “Third World” economic conditions. And it’s no accident that a significant proportion of people at the bottom are blacks, Hispanics and immigrants from “third world” countries. Jesus, with this program this writer has to seriously reconsider his longtime fundamental opposition to capitalist parties and to capitalism. $7/hour minimum wages means we have entered paradise. Forget socialist equality. Forget the classless society. Just vote Democratic in 2006.
Seriously though, this issue brings up what militants must do. Our program is not small, incremental increases of minimum wage levels but a living wage for all. That is the program that a workers party representative in Congress would fight for. However, that is not the end all or be all of our program. Karl Marx long ago argued against the bourgeois and socialist theorists of the Iron Law of Wages (those who thought the struggle for increased wages was Utopian or counterproductive because the capitalists’ wage bills were fixed). He also argued against the trade union reformists that the remedy was not a “fair day’s pay for a far day’s work” but the ultimate abolition of the wage system through societal redistribution of the social surplus generated by labor. That is our ultimate goal.
Nevertheless, the capitalists will argue that raising the minimum wage will eliminate jobs here or send jobs to other countries. No, it will reduce their profits-maybe (they always seem to be able to generate those non-existent funds when pressed to the wall by successful strikes). That is the bottom line. To be honest, it is not the concern of militants if individual capitalists go under. Our immediate fight is for jobs, and jobs with a living wage and some dignity. To stop runaway shops labor has to organize internationally. To stop the 'race to the bottom' here labor has to organize Wal-Mart and the South, of openers. That is the beginning. The end? Remember Karl Marx’s point-ABOLISH THE WAGE SYSTEM.
THIS IS PART OF A SERIES OF ARTICLES ON THE 2006-2008 ELECTION CYCLE UNDER THE HEADLINE- FORGET THE DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS, GREENS-BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
This week, the week of January 8, 2007, the Democratically-controlled U.S. House of Representatives, passed a new federal minimum wage bill making the new minimum wage standard $7.25/hr.. This bill was hailed as the beginning of the golden age of working people by the organized labor tops and Democratic politicians. Be still my heart-we have reached the promise land! Of course for most Democratic politicans a $7 an hour wage is very far removed from their daily reality. No, that is not exactly true. When they are at home and notice the people, mainly immigrants, who maintain their lawns and clean and repair their houses-that is where they connect with the minimum wage. For a very different take on this question I repost a blog from the summer of 2006 when this issue first surfaced. I stand by the political points made there.
HO-HUM- THE DEMOCRATS WANT TO FIGHT FOR A $7 FEDERAL MINIMUM WAGE
WHAT PLANET ARE THESE PEOPLE ON? FIGHT FOR A LIVING WAGE!
FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
Is there no end to this madness of bourgeois parliamentary politics? This writer has just recently learned that the leader of the House Democrats, Nancy Pelosi, wants to reintroduce legislation that would raise the federal minimum wage standard from $5 to $7 (rounded off)/hour. This is legislation that earlier in the session the Republican-dominated Congress brushed aside without a murmur as an outrage against humankind. This project is supposedly the lynch pin of the Democratic program, and incidentally the road to heaven for working people, for the 2006 election cycle in the fall.
Let’s do the math-rounding off a little. National median household income is about $50,000/yr. $5*40hours*52 weeks= $10,000 /yr. That is very, very, very poor, indeed. Now, let us try $7*40 hours*52 weeks=$15,000/yr. Even Bill Gates and Warren Buffet would agree that still is very, very, very poor, indeed. These numbers speak to “Third World” economic conditions. And it’s no accident that a significant proportion of people at the bottom are blacks, Hispanics and immigrants from “third world” countries. Jesus, with this program this writer has to seriously reconsider his longtime fundamental opposition to capitalist parties and to capitalism. $7/hour minimum wages means we have entered paradise. Forget socialist equality. Forget the classless society. Just vote Democratic in 2006.
Seriously though, this issue brings up what militants must do. Our program is not small, incremental increases of minimum wage levels but a living wage for all. That is the program that a workers party representative in Congress would fight for. However, that is not the end all or be all of our program. Karl Marx long ago argued against the bourgeois and socialist theorists of the Iron Law of Wages (those who thought the struggle for increased wages was Utopian or counterproductive because the capitalists’ wage bills were fixed). He also argued against the trade union reformists that the remedy was not a “fair day’s pay for a far day’s work” but the ultimate abolition of the wage system through societal redistribution of the social surplus generated by labor. That is our ultimate goal.
Nevertheless, the capitalists will argue that raising the minimum wage will eliminate jobs here or send jobs to other countries. No, it will reduce their profits-maybe (they always seem to be able to generate those non-existent funds when pressed to the wall by successful strikes). That is the bottom line. To be honest, it is not the concern of militants if individual capitalists go under. Our immediate fight is for jobs, and jobs with a living wage and some dignity. To stop runaway shops labor has to organize internationally. To stop the 'race to the bottom' here labor has to organize Wal-Mart and the South, of openers. That is the beginning. The end? Remember Karl Marx’s point-ABOLISH THE WAGE SYSTEM.
THIS IS PART OF A SERIES OF ARTICLES ON THE 2006-2008 ELECTION CYCLE UNDER THE HEADLINE- FORGET THE DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS, GREENS-BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
Monday, January 08, 2007
A CENTURY OF REVOLUTION, INDEED
BOOK REVIEW
A CENTURY OF REVOLUTION, 1603-1714, CHIRSTOPHER HILL, W.W. Norton and Co., New York, 1980
The late eminent British Marxist historian Christopher Hill is better known for his pioneer work in the micro-history of the English Revolution and the influences of left-wing political forces such as the Levellers and Diggers and religious forces such the Quakers, Shakers, Ranters and Seekers on it. Here he has written an overview of the entire 17th century as part of this series of books on the history of England to modern times. Needless to say some of his work around the English Revolution seeps into this work as well, which makes his analysis of that period the strongest section of the book.
Professor Hill traces the major social, political, economic and religious trends that culminated in the revolution back to the reign of James I (and some economic trends back to Elizabethan times). He covers such keys areas of conflict as the changes in land use and ownership, agricultural innovations including the highly controversial enclosure policy, governmental foreign policy which tended to have a distinctly Catholic, particularly pro-Spanish, orientation, the embryonic beginnings of the split between court and ‘country’ as a result of Stuart arbitrary rule, the split between landed proprietors and city merchants; the city and the country, the established church and the numerous pro-Puritan (read Calvinist) sects that started to sprout up like wildfire and the rise of a secular democratic movement based in the cities that both the Army and the Levellers would draw from in the Civil War period.
Special note should be taken of the decades between the beginning of the defensive struggle against Charles I in 1640 and 1660 with the restoration of his son Charles II to the throne. At this point the tensions that were merely outlined by the prior policies of the Stuart governments came to the breaking point. Hill does more than merely narrate that story. He shows, based on his well-stocked body of knowledge about the period, the various stages of the revolution from the first defensive struggles of the Parliamentarians to the definitive break with Charles and the establishment of the New Model Army which would usher in a period of military dominance of government and society and with it the rise and fall of the various secular and religious democratic movements. Hill also does a masterful job of showing how the various plebian democratic forces led by the Levellers, and to a much lesser extent the Diggers,in society reacted to governmental policy (and how the government dealt with those forces) and how these various fights sapped the revolutionary energy of the masses.
As more than one historian and sociologist has noted, as a general proposition the study of post-revolutionary periods tends to be rather anti-climatic. That is also the case here with the restoration of Charles II. England, however, exhibited that trend in revolutionary history that notes that even when the revolution runs out of steam there is generally no regression back to the old ways of ruling. Despite the regression in governmental form, Parliament supremacy was essentially assured although not without various intrigues against it and against England. As importantly, the capitalist industrial developmental trends that had been gathering force throughout the century kept expanding after the revolution. That trend would make England the number one power in the world in the next century. For an excellent overview of an important period in English history, which moreover is filled with helpful footnotes on sources for further research, this is your stop.
A CENTURY OF REVOLUTION, 1603-1714, CHIRSTOPHER HILL, W.W. Norton and Co., New York, 1980
The late eminent British Marxist historian Christopher Hill is better known for his pioneer work in the micro-history of the English Revolution and the influences of left-wing political forces such as the Levellers and Diggers and religious forces such the Quakers, Shakers, Ranters and Seekers on it. Here he has written an overview of the entire 17th century as part of this series of books on the history of England to modern times. Needless to say some of his work around the English Revolution seeps into this work as well, which makes his analysis of that period the strongest section of the book.
Professor Hill traces the major social, political, economic and religious trends that culminated in the revolution back to the reign of James I (and some economic trends back to Elizabethan times). He covers such keys areas of conflict as the changes in land use and ownership, agricultural innovations including the highly controversial enclosure policy, governmental foreign policy which tended to have a distinctly Catholic, particularly pro-Spanish, orientation, the embryonic beginnings of the split between court and ‘country’ as a result of Stuart arbitrary rule, the split between landed proprietors and city merchants; the city and the country, the established church and the numerous pro-Puritan (read Calvinist) sects that started to sprout up like wildfire and the rise of a secular democratic movement based in the cities that both the Army and the Levellers would draw from in the Civil War period.
Special note should be taken of the decades between the beginning of the defensive struggle against Charles I in 1640 and 1660 with the restoration of his son Charles II to the throne. At this point the tensions that were merely outlined by the prior policies of the Stuart governments came to the breaking point. Hill does more than merely narrate that story. He shows, based on his well-stocked body of knowledge about the period, the various stages of the revolution from the first defensive struggles of the Parliamentarians to the definitive break with Charles and the establishment of the New Model Army which would usher in a period of military dominance of government and society and with it the rise and fall of the various secular and religious democratic movements. Hill also does a masterful job of showing how the various plebian democratic forces led by the Levellers, and to a much lesser extent the Diggers,in society reacted to governmental policy (and how the government dealt with those forces) and how these various fights sapped the revolutionary energy of the masses.
As more than one historian and sociologist has noted, as a general proposition the study of post-revolutionary periods tends to be rather anti-climatic. That is also the case here with the restoration of Charles II. England, however, exhibited that trend in revolutionary history that notes that even when the revolution runs out of steam there is generally no regression back to the old ways of ruling. Despite the regression in governmental form, Parliament supremacy was essentially assured although not without various intrigues against it and against England. As importantly, the capitalist industrial developmental trends that had been gathering force throughout the century kept expanding after the revolution. That trend would make England the number one power in the world in the next century. For an excellent overview of an important period in English history, which moreover is filled with helpful footnotes on sources for further research, this is your stop.
Saturday, January 06, 2007
*A TALE OF TWO ANTI-WAR MARCHES
Click on the title to link to an "Under The Hood" (Fort Hood G.I. Coffeehouse)Web site online article about the "Oleo Strut" Coffeehouse, an important development in the anti-Vietnam War struggle. Hats off to those bygone anti-war fighters.
A TALE OF TWO MARCHES
COMMENTARY
A NOTE ON THE WINTER/SPRING 2007 ANTI-WAR ‘OFFENSIVE’
IMMEDIATE, UNCONDITIONAL WITHDRAWAL OF U.S./ALLIED TROOPS FROM IRAQ!-NO TROOP ESCALATION!-BUILD ANTI-WAR SOLDIERS AND SAILORS SOLIDARITY COMMITTEES!
As we enter the first week of the New Year 2007 the front pages continue to be full of articles about the quagmire in Iraq. The death toll for American troops reached the 3000 mark. More importantly, the wounded numbers are even grimmer, over 20,000, 10,000 grievously. The number of Iraqis killed and wounded is in dispute but those numbers are vastly greater than the American causalities. The controversy over the hanging of the main villain of the piece, Saddam, if anything seems to have heightened the already inflamed tensions there among Sunnis and Shiites. The civil war rages unabated with the monotonous daily reports of X number of victims found bound, shot in the head and dumped somewhere.
Furthermore, President Bush has apparently decided to ‘purge’ the current American Iraq military command, interestingly enough, a purge of commanders on the ground who did not support an increase in American troops. Why? The news in the coming weeks will not be pretty. This administration has decided that the way to end the Iraq problem is to send in more troops in order to achieve ‘victory’. The highly-touted Iraq Study Group Report (you remember that document, don’t you?) that was supposed to insure a ‘graceful exit’ is in the bottom of some White House wastepaper basket by now. Oh yes, I almost forgot, the Democrats have taken over both Houses in the 110th Congress. It only seems like yesterday that my liberal friends held that this event in itself was enough to end the war. Believe that idea at your peril.
All of the above-mentioned events would seem to point to a ready-made basis for a ‘surge’ of anti-war protest this season based on more political clarity than the movement has exhibited in the past. Not so, unfortunately. Those who are unaware of the organizational fracture that occurred a couple of years ago should be informed here that the two mass umbrella organizations, United for Peace and Justice (UJP, for short) and the Answer Coalition, which have led the anti-war movement thus far have two separate marches scheduled. On the weekend of January 27th the UJP plans to bring its contingents to Washington to rally and then lobby Congress on bended knees to end the war. The Answer Coalition intends to bring its contingents to Washington to rally at the Pentagon on March 17th (the 4th anniversary of the war) and commemorate the 40th Anniversary of the March on the Pentagon in 1967 which signaled an escalation of anti-war tactics at that time. Perhaps the strategy this time, like then, is to ‘levitate’ that building. I wish that political solutions in the fight against imperialist war were so easy.
Please do not get me wrong. I have spent almost my whole political life on the streets at some demonstration for some worthy cause or against some egregious policy. Damn, it is always better to protest some injustice in the streets than remain passive in the face of imperialist governmental policy. That is not the question. The point is that you cannot keep spinning your wheels with the same namby-pamby strategy of assuming that you are dealing with a government made up of rational people. Nor, for that matter, can mere symbolic acts get you very far. Believe me, I have participated in more than my share of symbolic protests. Yes it does make one feel good, for a moment. That, however, is not enough.
What is enough? Readers of this space know my answer- a workers party that fights for a workers government. But today that is merely the music of the future. I make two proposals for immediate action here. The first, which I have been harping on for years, is to fight against the war budget. You know, the money that funds the war. Historically, socialists and their allies have fought for that position. The honored name of German Left Social Democratic leader Karl Liebknecht and his fight against the war budget during World War I comes easily to mind.
By this fight I do not mean some ‘sense of the Congress’ non-binding resolution that liberal Democratic politicians love to vote for, as long as it does not tie them to anything. Nor do I mean a Congressman Kucinch-type proposal withholding funds for future deployments, leaving the current 100 billion war appropriations alone. I mean a straight up YES or NO vote on the appropriations themselves. From the news out of Washington it does not look like that is even on the agenda. Yes, all manner of Democrat are bewailing the President about the correctness of troop escalation but in the end they will vote to fund that increase, probably even ‘socialist’ Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. That, dear reader, will not be a sight for the faint-hearted as the leading presidential candidates and others fall all over themselves to vote yes.
Secondly, and more realistically today, the anti-war movement needs to build anti-war soldier and sailor committees. I have been harping on this issue for at least a year now. Let us get serious about the focus of the anti-war fight. We have been aiming in the wrong direction. The Bush Administration is inured to talk, demonstrations or anything else. The military command has led the rank and file troops down the golden path. It should be clear by now that even they do not take the noise about ‘victory’ from the Administration seriously. The loyal governmental opposition, the Democrats, have had nothing to add but confusion. We of the anti-war movement, and I will take my fair share of responsibility on this, have failed in our efforts for immediate, unconditional withdrawal up to now. That leaves the rank and file soldiers and sailors to figure a way out. More than a few are fed up with the war and their useless sacrifice. Our task is to help them out. They must not face the military brass alone. Yes, it is important to go to Washington to protest, but, it is more important to get out to the army, marine and naval bases and talk to and listen to the troops that have fought or preparing to fight in Iraq. That, my friends, in the final analysis is the short way to end this damn war.
THIS IS PART OF A SERIES OF ARTICLES ON THE 2006-2008 ELECTION CYCLE UNDER THE HEADLINE- FORGET THE DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS, GREENS-BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
A TALE OF TWO MARCHES
COMMENTARY
A NOTE ON THE WINTER/SPRING 2007 ANTI-WAR ‘OFFENSIVE’
IMMEDIATE, UNCONDITIONAL WITHDRAWAL OF U.S./ALLIED TROOPS FROM IRAQ!-NO TROOP ESCALATION!-BUILD ANTI-WAR SOLDIERS AND SAILORS SOLIDARITY COMMITTEES!
As we enter the first week of the New Year 2007 the front pages continue to be full of articles about the quagmire in Iraq. The death toll for American troops reached the 3000 mark. More importantly, the wounded numbers are even grimmer, over 20,000, 10,000 grievously. The number of Iraqis killed and wounded is in dispute but those numbers are vastly greater than the American causalities. The controversy over the hanging of the main villain of the piece, Saddam, if anything seems to have heightened the already inflamed tensions there among Sunnis and Shiites. The civil war rages unabated with the monotonous daily reports of X number of victims found bound, shot in the head and dumped somewhere.
Furthermore, President Bush has apparently decided to ‘purge’ the current American Iraq military command, interestingly enough, a purge of commanders on the ground who did not support an increase in American troops. Why? The news in the coming weeks will not be pretty. This administration has decided that the way to end the Iraq problem is to send in more troops in order to achieve ‘victory’. The highly-touted Iraq Study Group Report (you remember that document, don’t you?) that was supposed to insure a ‘graceful exit’ is in the bottom of some White House wastepaper basket by now. Oh yes, I almost forgot, the Democrats have taken over both Houses in the 110th Congress. It only seems like yesterday that my liberal friends held that this event in itself was enough to end the war. Believe that idea at your peril.
All of the above-mentioned events would seem to point to a ready-made basis for a ‘surge’ of anti-war protest this season based on more political clarity than the movement has exhibited in the past. Not so, unfortunately. Those who are unaware of the organizational fracture that occurred a couple of years ago should be informed here that the two mass umbrella organizations, United for Peace and Justice (UJP, for short) and the Answer Coalition, which have led the anti-war movement thus far have two separate marches scheduled. On the weekend of January 27th the UJP plans to bring its contingents to Washington to rally and then lobby Congress on bended knees to end the war. The Answer Coalition intends to bring its contingents to Washington to rally at the Pentagon on March 17th (the 4th anniversary of the war) and commemorate the 40th Anniversary of the March on the Pentagon in 1967 which signaled an escalation of anti-war tactics at that time. Perhaps the strategy this time, like then, is to ‘levitate’ that building. I wish that political solutions in the fight against imperialist war were so easy.
Please do not get me wrong. I have spent almost my whole political life on the streets at some demonstration for some worthy cause or against some egregious policy. Damn, it is always better to protest some injustice in the streets than remain passive in the face of imperialist governmental policy. That is not the question. The point is that you cannot keep spinning your wheels with the same namby-pamby strategy of assuming that you are dealing with a government made up of rational people. Nor, for that matter, can mere symbolic acts get you very far. Believe me, I have participated in more than my share of symbolic protests. Yes it does make one feel good, for a moment. That, however, is not enough.
What is enough? Readers of this space know my answer- a workers party that fights for a workers government. But today that is merely the music of the future. I make two proposals for immediate action here. The first, which I have been harping on for years, is to fight against the war budget. You know, the money that funds the war. Historically, socialists and their allies have fought for that position. The honored name of German Left Social Democratic leader Karl Liebknecht and his fight against the war budget during World War I comes easily to mind.
By this fight I do not mean some ‘sense of the Congress’ non-binding resolution that liberal Democratic politicians love to vote for, as long as it does not tie them to anything. Nor do I mean a Congressman Kucinch-type proposal withholding funds for future deployments, leaving the current 100 billion war appropriations alone. I mean a straight up YES or NO vote on the appropriations themselves. From the news out of Washington it does not look like that is even on the agenda. Yes, all manner of Democrat are bewailing the President about the correctness of troop escalation but in the end they will vote to fund that increase, probably even ‘socialist’ Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. That, dear reader, will not be a sight for the faint-hearted as the leading presidential candidates and others fall all over themselves to vote yes.
Secondly, and more realistically today, the anti-war movement needs to build anti-war soldier and sailor committees. I have been harping on this issue for at least a year now. Let us get serious about the focus of the anti-war fight. We have been aiming in the wrong direction. The Bush Administration is inured to talk, demonstrations or anything else. The military command has led the rank and file troops down the golden path. It should be clear by now that even they do not take the noise about ‘victory’ from the Administration seriously. The loyal governmental opposition, the Democrats, have had nothing to add but confusion. We of the anti-war movement, and I will take my fair share of responsibility on this, have failed in our efforts for immediate, unconditional withdrawal up to now. That leaves the rank and file soldiers and sailors to figure a way out. More than a few are fed up with the war and their useless sacrifice. Our task is to help them out. They must not face the military brass alone. Yes, it is important to go to Washington to protest, but, it is more important to get out to the army, marine and naval bases and talk to and listen to the troops that have fought or preparing to fight in Iraq. That, my friends, in the final analysis is the short way to end this damn war.
THIS IS PART OF A SERIES OF ARTICLES ON THE 2006-2008 ELECTION CYCLE UNDER THE HEADLINE- FORGET THE DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS, GREENS-BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
Friday, January 05, 2007
*From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-"Abolish The Racist Death Penalty"
Click on the title to link to an on line copy of the "Workers Vanguard" article on the subject mentioned in the headline.
*From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-The 1956 Hungarian Revolution- A Workers Revolution- A Two Part Article
Click on the title to link to an online copy of Part Two of the "Workers Vanguard" article on the subject mentioned in the headline.
Workers Vanguard No. 883
5 January 2007
Workers Political Revolution Against Stalinist Rule
The 1956 Hungarian Revolution
Part One
This past October 23 marked the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. The anniversary was celebrated internationally by bourgeois politicians and ideologues, who cynically portrayed the uprising as a precursor to the counterrevolutions that restored capitalist rule in East Europe and the Soviet Union in 1989-1992. Four months earlier, George W. Bush visited Budapest and laid flowers in honor of “the Hungarian patriots who tore down the statue of Josef Stalin and defied an empire.” Commemorations of the uprising were held in Budapest by the government of former-Communist, now-millionaire Ferenc Gyurcsany as well as by anti-government protesters, including a hefty contingent of fascist skinheads.
The depiction of the 1956 events as an anti-Communist, pro-capitalist rebellion, which has been propagated by reactionary forces for the past half-century, is an outright lie. The Hungarian uprising was an attempt by the working class, in a country where capitalism had been overthrown but political power was in the hands of a Stalinist bureaucracy, to throw off bureaucratic rule and open the road to socialism. Workers seized the factories and mines and set up elected workers councils (soviets), embryonic organs of proletarian political power. For weeks the workers fought courageously—by means of strikes, demonstrations and armed struggle—before this political revolution was suppressed.
The cynical misappropriation by capitalist spokesmen of the uprising was skewered in a 1957 document by Shane Mage, a founder of our political tendency:
“What a cruel, cynical joke of history this seems to be! The Hungarian revolution is hailed lyrically by the rulers of the ‘West,’ the worst enemies of socialism and of the Russian revolution. The men who surrounded the infant Soviet Republic with a ‘cordon sanitaire’ of steel and fire, who hailed Hitler and Mussolini as bulwarks against Bolshevism, who stood by with smiling ‘neutrality’ while Franco murdered freedom in Spain, whose hands are still stained by the crimes of Algeria, Suez, Guatemala—the ‘Free’ world gleefully hands its poisoned bouquets to the freedom fighters of Hungary.”
—“The Meaning of Two Revolutions” (reprinted in the 1959 Young Socialist Forum pamphlet, The Hungarian Revolution)
Bourgeois ideologues focus on isolated expressions of anti-Communism, such as some lumpen gangs calling themselves “freedom fighters” or arch-reactionary Cardinal József Mindszenty addressing the insurgents by radio. (Following the suppression of the revolt, Mindszenty spent the next 15 years holed up in the U.S. Embassy in Budapest.) This is a fundamental distortion, one that was also disseminated by Stalinist spokesmen to justify the brutal repression of the workers. As we stated in “Political Revolution in Hungary—Ten Years After” (Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 8, November-December 1966), the slander that the Hungarian masses embraced fascists and monarchist reactionaries “was demolished not only by the actions of the revolutionaries—including the violent suppression of what anti-Semitic and White Guard threats actually existed—but by the workers’ militantly communist aspirations and their unambiguous hatred for capitalism.”
The Hungarian working class was overwhelmingly committed to socialism and opposed to a return to capitalism. In all of the workers councils and other proletarian bodies that arose in 1956, Communist Party members were elected to positions of leadership. Ferenc Töke, a vice-president of the Central Workers Council of Greater Budapest, later recalled: “No reactionary tendency manifested itself throughout the entire strike. There was never, at any moment, a question of the former owners eventually returning” (Jean-Jacques Marie and Balazs Nagy [eds.], Pologne-Hongrie 1956 [1966]). The Central Workers Council of Budapest declared in a 27 November 1956 appeal to workers councils throughout the country: “Faithful to this mission, we defend, even at the cost of our lives, our factories and our fatherland against any attempt to restore capitalism.”
The 1956 Hungarian Revolution was in fact a powerful confirmation of the Trotskyist understanding of the nature of the deformed and degenerated workers states. In the Soviet Union and East Europe before the restoration of capitalism—as in China, North Korea, Cuba and Vietnam today—capitalist rule was overthrown as a result of social revolutions but political power was/is monopolized by a conservative, anti-working-class bureaucracy. The Hungarian Revolution decisively demonstrated that the Stalinist regime represents a caste parasitically resting upon the collectivized economy, not a new type of social class. Unlike the capitalist ruling class, which in the face of revolution inevitably unites around a program of counterrevolution, the Stalinist bureaucracy in Hungary shattered, with large sections going over to the side of the workers.
These events caused a profound crisis in the Communist parties internationally. In Italy, the Communist Party lost some 200,000 of its members. The French Communist Party, already facing discontent over its support to the Socialist-led government as it pursued the Algerian War, saw its share of the electorate plunge. In Britain, the Communist Party lost a third of its membership. More than 200 CP members and ex-members, including a number of talented intellectuals, were won over by the British Trotskyist group led by Gerry Healy. These former CPers included Brian Pearce, Cliff Slaughter, Tom Kemp and Peter Fryer, the correspondent in Hungary for the Communist Party’s Daily Worker whose first-hand observations of the events were recounted in his 1956 book, Hungarian Tragedy (see article, page 9).
With the formation of workers soviets, Hungary entered into a period of incipient dual power in which local workers councils, defended by the armed masses, confronted what remained of the Stalinist repressive apparatus, which was backed by Soviet troops. Mage noted:
“The first and decisive thing about the Hungarian revolution is that it was a workers revolution, and the leading role of the workers was institutionally formulated by the establishment of workers councils. Except for the Russian army, there was in Hungary not the shadow of a social force capable of preventing the assumption of state power by the workers councils. Thus the objective conditions for the formation of a soviet republic, in the event of revolutionary victory of course, were entirely favorable.
“The actual level of consciousness of the Hungarian workers, however, was not at the level indicated by the objective possibilities of the revolution. In this the Hungarian workers were like the Russian proletariat after the February revolution. The general demand was not for all power to the workers councils, but for ‘free elections’ to a sovereign parliament.
“It would, however, be a disastrous mistake to take the level of consciousness corresponding to the struggle against the Stalinist bureaucracy as the permanent and ultimate political program of the Hungarian proletariat. The Hungarian workers wanted ‘free elections,’ but they also wanted to preserve their own councils and extend their powers. They wanted to move forward to socialism, not backward to capitalism.”
—“The YSL Right Wing and the ‘Crisis of World Stalinism’,”
The Hungarian Revolution; excerpted as “‘Pure Democracy’ or Political Revolution in East Europe” in the Spartacist pamphlet, Solidarność: Polish Company Union for CIA and Bankers (1981)
The Birth of the Hungarian Deformed Workers State
To understand the 1956 Hungarian Revolution requires examining the Russian Revolution of 1917—the only successful revolution as yet carried out by the working class—as well as its later degeneration under the Stalinist bureaucracy. In the October Revolution of 1917, the proletariat, led by Lenin’s Bolshevik Party, took state power, basing its rule on the soviets of workers, soldiers and peasants deputies. The young workers state nationalized the land and went on to expropriate capitalist property. The Bolsheviks understood their revolution as the first step of the world socialist revolution and founded the Third (Communist) International in 1919.
However, the immaturity and indecisiveness of revolutionary leadership outside Russia led to the failure to realize opportunities for proletarian revolution. For example, a proletarian revolution was defeated in Germany in 1918-19, and short-lived soviet republics were crushed in Bavaria and Hungary in 1919. The decisive defeat was the failure of the German Communist Party to consummate a socialist revolution in 1923. The economically backward Soviet workers state—suffering under the devastation wrought by World War I and compounded by the bloody 1918-20 Civil War against imperialist-backed counterrevolution—was left isolated in the face of imperialist encirclement and a general stabilization of the world capitalist order. Together with the decimation of the most conscious layer of the proletariat during the Civil War, these factors set the stage for a political counterrevolution.
While the social foundations of the workers state—above all, the expropriation of the capitalist class and the establishment of a collectivized economy—remained intact, by 1924 political power was transferred from the hands of the proletariat and its revolutionary vanguard into the hands of a conservative bureaucratic caste headed by Stalin. From that point on, the people who ruled the USSR, the way the USSR was ruled, and the purposes for which the USSR was ruled all changed. Under the false dogma of “socialism in one country,” proclaimed by Stalin in December 1924, the bureaucracy accommodated the imperialist order. Correspondingly, the Comintern became transformed over time into an instrument of the bureaucracy’s search for “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism. With the elaboration of the “Popular Front” line at the Comintern’s Seventh (and last) Congress in 1935, the Stalinists explicitly and officially embraced the program of class collaboration with the “democratic” imperialist bourgeoisies.
Leading the fight against the degeneration of the Bolshevik Party, Leon Trotsky’s Left Opposition upheld the revolutionary-internationalist program of the October Revolution. In 1938, Trotsky and his co-thinkers founded the Fourth International. Central to its program was the unconditional military defense of the Soviet degenerated workers state against imperialism and capitalist counterrevolution and the call for proletarian political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracy and restore working-class political power. Such a political revolution would be premised on defense of the socialized property forms. This is in contrast to social revolutions or counterrevolutions, which overturn existing property relations and place a different class in power. The Trotskyist analysis of Stalinism is key to understanding the creation and subsequent development of the bureaucratically deformed workers states of East Europe.
In the closing months of World War II, in Hungary as throughout much of East Europe, large sections of society welcomed the Soviet Red Army as liberators from the nightmare of Nazi occupation and supported the ensuing destruction of the old bourgeois order. Class-conscious workers hated the right-wing dictatorship of Admiral Miklós Horthy, who ruled Hungary during the interwar period and much of World War II. Impoverished agrarian laborers settled huge scores with the landlords in this land of feudal-derived estates.
Initially, the remnants of the bourgeoisies of Soviet-occupied East Europe, which had been discredited and shattered by the war, were not expropriated, either politically or economically. In Hungary, elections in 1945 gave a majority, in what was then a largely peasant country, to the bourgeois-clericalist Smallholders Party, which was allowed to form a coalition government with the social democrats and Stalinists. But, as elsewhere in East Europe, it was the Red Army that held the real power. Under the growing pressure of the anti-Soviet Cold War, the Stalinists in 1947-48 proceeded to expropriate the bourgeoisie in Hungary and elsewhere in East Europe, jettisoning their bourgeois coalition partners, nationalizing industry and establishing deformed workers states, that is, societies qualitatively similar to the Soviet Union under the Stalinist bureaucracy.
Prelude to Political Revolution
The 1945-48 period of the so-called “People’s Independence Front” government had a significant effect on the attitudes of the Hungarian working masses. Many would later view that period favorably in comparison to the harsh Stalinist police state that came afterward, although virtually no one wanted a return of the capitalists and large landowners. The 1945-48 interregnum also created certain left-right tensions among the Stalinists themselves. An incipient left opposition, impatient with the slow pace of social transformation, crystallized around Minister of the Interior Laszlo Rajk, a hero in the eyes of many for having fought in the Spanish Civil War and for having been a leader of the Communist underground under the Horthy dictatorship. At Moscow’s behest, the Hungarian regime adopted a one-sided economic policy concentrated on heavy industry. This served to drive down living standards, further fueling proletarian discontent.
The fact that, with the exception of Tito’s Yugoslavia, the East European Stalinist regimes were imposed from without meant that they had shallower roots than in the Soviet Union. This rendered the social order in the East European deformed workers states relatively volatile and unstable.
Facing social discontent, the East European bureaucracies began to split into Moscow loyalists and national-liberal Stalinists more attuned to popular moods. In 1949 Tito’s Yugoslavia broke from the Kremlin. With its “workers self-management,” Titoism presented itself as a more democratic and authentic form of socialism than Stalin’s Russia. Among East European Communist oppositionists there was a tendency to idealize the Yugoslav “road to socialism,” on the one hand, and Western bourgeois democracy on the other. Fearing further splits, Stalin went into a murderous frenzy, seeking to eliminate any potential Titos elsewhere. The Polish party leader Wladyslaw Gomulka was imprisoned and placed under house arrest. Rajk in Hungary and Rudolf Slánský in Czechoslovakia were subjected to show trials and then executed.
Following Stalin’s death in March 1953, the Kremlin bureaucracy and its counterparts in East Europe embarked on a policy that has been referred to as “de-Stalinization.” Moves in the direction of liberalization throughout East Europe had the effect of simultaneously opening up possibilities for mass struggle while reinforcing illusions that, under the pressure of the masses, the Stalinist bureaucracy could carry out self-reform and become an instrument for building socialism.
On 17 June 1953, the first incipient proletarian political revolution in the deformed workers states broke out in East Germany. Both the Stalinist regimes and West Germany’s capitalist rulers portrayed the uprising as pro-Western. But this was a lie. Workers from the East German Hennigsdorf steel works marched through West Berlin and back to the East demanding a metal workers government. June 17 powerfully demonstrated the potential for the slogan later adopted by the international Spartacist tendency (now the International Communist League) for the revolutionary reunification of Germany through political revolution in the East and socialist revolution in the West. (For more on the 1953 events, see “The East German Workers Uprising of 17 June 1953,” WV No. 332, 17 June 1983.)
The post-1953 crisis of “de-Stalinization” had a particular impact on Hungary. Of all the Stalinist regimes in East Europe, that of Matyas Rakosi was unquestionably the bloodiest: more Communists were killed under Rakosi than under Horthy. Rakosi’s widely despised political police, the AVH, a multitude of highly paid thugs, constituted fully 1 percent of the entire population of Budapest.
In 1953, to head off the pressures building up in Hungary, the Soviet leadership forced Rakosi to step down as prime minister. He was replaced by Imre Nagy, who had a reputation as a liberal Communist. Nagy proclaimed a “New Course” that included easing the pace of industrialization, lessening pressures on the peasantry and relaxing police terror. However, Rakosi, fearing the vengeance of his political opponents, hung onto power and by 1955 managed to oust Nagy. Thus, between 1953 and 1956 the Hungarian Stalinist regime was torn by a severe polarization between the Rakosi clique and the mass of Communist Party members who supported Nagy. One sign of the ferment in the Communist Party was the emergence of the Petofi Circle, a grouping of dissident intellectuals and others that provided a forum for public debate and became a hub of opposition to the Rakosi hardliners.
In February 1956, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev gave a “secret” speech to the Soviet Communist Party’s 20th Congress in which he acknowledged a number of Stalin’s crimes. Four months later, locomotive workers in Poland demonstrating for higher wages and lower prices attacked the city hall, radio station and prison in Poznan. Security forces fired on them, killing over 50 workers. Poland entered into an incipient proletarian political revolution, which was headed off at the last minute by Gomulka’s restoration to power. Subsequently, Khrushchev and his Kremlin colleagues did not move against Gomulka, in large part because in factories throughout the country workers councils organized resistance to any attempt to overturn the “Polish October.” Gomulka granted sweeping concessions, such as wage increases. But once the crisis was defused, he disbanded the workers councils that had helped bring him to power.
Meanwhile in Hungary, 200,000 people turned out in early October for a ceremony marking the regime’s “rehabilitation” of Laszlo Rajk. The mass turnout foreshadowed the revolutionary explosion later that month.
The Hungarian October
The Hungarian Revolution, whose events were broadcast on radio and television internationally, was one of the best-documented revolutions ever. It began on October 23 with a largely student demonstration solidarizing with the victory of Gomulka in Poland and calling for the reinstatement of Nagy as head of the Hungarian government. The Rakosi regime denounced the protest as a counterrevolutionary mobilization, and when the unarmed demonstrators marched to the radio station to protest, the AVH goons fired on them.
Hungary then exploded in a near-universal general strike combined with military resistance to the regime. While the initial agitation was student-based, once the fighting started the core of the insurgency in Budapest and the other main centers was the workers councils and workers militias. Writing about the emergence of the workers soviets, Peter Fryer observed in Hungarian Tragedy:
“In their spontaneous origin, in their composition, in their sense of responsibility, in their efficient organisation of food supplies and of civil order, in the restraint they exercised over the wilder elements among the youth, in the wisdom with which so many of them handled the problem of Soviet troops, and, not least, in their striking resemblance at so many points to the soviets or councils of workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ deputies which sprang up in Russia in the 1905 revolution and again in February 1917, these committees, a network of which now extended over the whole of Hungary, were remarkably uniform. They were at once organs of insurrection—the coming together of delegates elected by factories and universities, mines and Army units—and organs of popular self-government, which the armed people trusted. As such they enjoyed tremendous authority, and it is no exaggeration to say that until the Soviet attack of November 4 the real power in the country lay in their hands.”
Even a 1957 “Report of the Special Committee on the Problem of Hungary” by the United Nations, whose role is to provide a fig leaf for imperialist depredation, noted that the emergence of workers councils “represented the first practical step to restore order and to reorganize the Hungarian economy on a socialist basis, but without rigid Party control or the apparatus of terror.”
The Hungarian army immediately ceased to be an effective force. Some sections went over to the insurgents; many soldiers turned their weapons over to the workers militias. Militarily, the turning point of the revolution was the attempt by the Soviet Army to capture the Kilian barracks, the main stronghold of the Hungarian army within Budapest. The commander of the barracks, Colonel Pal Maleter, a veteran Communist, went over to the revolution and led the forces that repulsed the Soviet attack. Following the subsequent Soviet withdrawal from Budapest, the embryo of an effective revolutionary authority was seen in the newly established National Guard under Maleter’s command, although its authority remained largely limited to the capital. In many press interviews, Maleter insisted that he was a good Communist and would remain so. Maleter’s comments in one such interview are recounted in Hungary 1956 (1976) by Bill Lomax:
“‘If we get rid of the Russians don’t think we’re going back to the old days. And if there’s people who do want to go back, we’ll see!’ To emphasize the last remark, he reached for his revolver holster and repeated, ‘We don’t mean to go back to capitalism. We want socialism in Hungary’.”
Despite attempts to portray the uprising as dominated by anti-Russian nationalism, what stands out is the degree to which the insurgents attempted to fraternize with the Soviet soldiers—and the degree to which they were successful. The workers’ and students’ Council of Miskolc published leaflets in Russian for the Red Army soldiers declaring: “Our interests are identical. We and you are all fighting together for a better socialist life.” On October 28, the Hungarian trade-union newspaper Népszava called for the right of asylum for Soviet soldiers who sided with the workers (François Manuel, La Revolution Hongroise des Conseils Ouvriers [1976]).
There were innumerable cases in which Soviet soldiers refused to fight or sided with the insurgents. In his autobiographical In the Name of the Working Class (1986), Sandor Kopacsi, the Budapest police chief who went over to the insurgents, described a scene that occurred on October 25 when Soviet tanks encountered a crowd of demonstrators:
“A boy, undoubtedly a student—the scene took place just below us—pushed his way through the crowd to the first tank and passed something through the loophole.
“It wasn’t a grenade but a sheet of paper. It was followed by others.
“These sheets, many of which my men would later collect, were tracts in Russian composed by students in the faculty of oriental languages. They reminded the Soviet soldiers of the wishes of the Hungarian nation and of the unfortunate role of policemen in which they had been cast. The tracts started with a citation from Marx: ‘A people that oppresses another cannot itself be free.’
“We counted the minutes. Nothing happened.
“Then the top of the turret of the lead tank opened a little, and the commander, with his leather cap and the gold epaulettes, emerged slowly into the view of the apparently unarmed crowd. Then he flung the turret open and perched himself upon the top of his tank….
“The crowd erupted in a frantic ovation. In this jubilant atmosphere, the commander’s cap was thrown into the middle of the crowd. In exchange, someone plunked a Hungarian Army kepi on his head. The crowd sang ‘Kossuth’s Song’ and then the Hungarian national anthem. And, at the top of their voices, they cried: ‘Long live the Soviet Army!’”
Moments later, Kopacsi received a report from one of his police officers: “The AVO [AVH] is firing from every roof. Now the Soviet tanks are firing on the AVO! They’re defending the crowd.”
Though the Stalinist apparatus had disintegrated, a short-lived government was cobbled together under Nagy. On October 28, the Nagy government announced an agreement that Soviet troops would immediately leave Budapest. Indeed, one of the reasons that the Kremlin pulled troops out of Budapest was fear of the effect of fraternization with the insurgent Hungarian masses. But the Kremlin quickly reneged on the agreement. And on November 1, Nagy protested to Soviet Ambassador Yuri Andropov (who would become head of the Soviet Union in the early 1980s) against the entry of new Soviet troops into Hungary without his government’s assent.
The new troops were not only lied to about what was happening; they were lied to about where they were being sent. A leader of the insurgents in a village in eastern Hungary recalled his encounter with the troops (Melvin J. Lasky, ed., The Hungarian Revolution [1957]): “Some of the Russians thought they were in East Germany and that they would soon meet American ‘fascists’ who had invaded the country. Other troops thought they were in the Suez Canal zone.” (The Suez Canal had just been nationalized by Nasser’s Egypt, which was then attacked by British, French and Israeli forces.)
At dawn on November 4, Soviet troops attacked Budapest. Despite stiff resistance, the insurrection was soon crushed. Nevertheless, the general strike continued well into December—the longest nationwide general strike in history. In this way, the proletarian centrality of the uprising was even more evident in its aftermath than during the anarchic period of the revolution itself.
The Significance of Hungary 1956
During his brief tenure, Nagy moved steadily to the right. He brought into his government bourgeois politicians from the “People’s Independence Front” period. Nagy also declared Hungary’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact and appealed to the United Nations to defend Hungarian neutrality. The logic of Nagy’s policies, had they succeeded in running their course, was to strangle the revolution and enormously strengthen the forces of capitalist counterrevolution. However, Nagy, who spent his greatest efforts trying to get the workers to lay down their arms, utterly lacked control over events. While the revolutionary workers had their fair share of political confusion, their representative organs were in practice counterposed not only to the old hardline Stalinist butchers like Rakosi but to the Nagy regime as well.
In the industrial city of Miskolc, one of the main centers of the revolution, the workers council sent a delegation to Nagy demanding that a new government be formed based on the existing workers councils, not through elections to a new parliament. The Budapest Parliament of Workers Councils adopted as its first programmatic principles that “the factory belongs to the workers” and that “the supreme controlling body of the factory is the Workers’ Council” (see Lomax, Hungary 1956). While that statement did not express the Marxist program for central economic planning combined with genuine soviet democracy, it was nevertheless incompatible with a capitalist order and bourgeois parliamentarism.
On the available evidence, the Hungarian workers looked toward an idealized version of Titoist Yugoslavia. Tito, however, along with Mao Zedong, supported the crushing of the 1956 Revolution. Tito and Mao were quite aware of the ramifications for their own bureaucratic regimes if the Hungarian workers succeeded in taking and securing political power. Nagy had taken refuge in the Yugoslav Embassy in Budapest on November 4. But despite an agreement for safe passage out, Nagy was arrested by Soviet forces later that month. He was eventually handed over to the Hungarian Stalinist regime under János Kádár, which executed Nagy as well as Maleter and other leaders of the revolution in 1958.
The repression directed at the workers, however, was relatively mild. The Kádár government announced in early November that it “will not tolerate the persecution of workers on any pretext, for having taken part in recent events.” But Kádár was not in control of events, and Soviet troops conducted searches for those suspected of having participated in the uprising. For the most part, the Kádár regime attempted to piece off the population by raising consumption levels under a policy that came to be known as “goulash communism.”
What was lacking above all in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was a Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard party rooted in the working class. Such a party would have had the task of winning the workers to a program of transforming the soviets from being organs of insurrection to becoming the sole basis for political power in the workers state. It would have fought to extend the struggle for political revolution to neighboring East European countries and crucially to the Soviet Union, linking these efforts with the fight for socialist revolution in the capitalist countries. This would have required politically combatting the views of Maleter, Kopacsi and others whose outlook at the time remained within the framework of Stalinist nationalism and “peaceful coexistence” with the imperialist world order.
Had even a small Trotskyist propaganda group been able to intervene in this situation, it could have rapidly won an initial base among the tens of thousands of workers and radical intellectuals who saw themselves as authentic communists. These lessons have profound significance for the remaining deformed workers states, in particular China, which experienced an incipient political revolution in May-June 1989 and, more recently, a massive growth in defensive struggles by both workers and peasants.
What Leon Trotsky foresaw in outlining the course that a political revolution would take in the Soviet degenerated workers state was amply confirmed by the 1956 events in Hungary:
“When the proletariat springs into action, the Stalinist apparatus will remain suspended in midair. Should it still attempt to resist, it will then be necessary to apply against it not the measures of civil war but rather the measures of a police character….
“A real civil war could develop not between the Stalinist bureaucracy and the resurgent proletariat but between the proletariat and the active forces of the counterrevolution…. The victory of the revolutionary camp, in any case, is conceivable only under the leadership of a proletarian party, which would naturally be raised to power by victory over the counterrevolution.”
—“The Class Nature of the Soviet State” (October 1933)
[TO BE CONTINUED]
Click on headline to link to Part Two
Workers Vanguard No. 883
5 January 2007
Workers Political Revolution Against Stalinist Rule
The 1956 Hungarian Revolution
Part One
This past October 23 marked the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. The anniversary was celebrated internationally by bourgeois politicians and ideologues, who cynically portrayed the uprising as a precursor to the counterrevolutions that restored capitalist rule in East Europe and the Soviet Union in 1989-1992. Four months earlier, George W. Bush visited Budapest and laid flowers in honor of “the Hungarian patriots who tore down the statue of Josef Stalin and defied an empire.” Commemorations of the uprising were held in Budapest by the government of former-Communist, now-millionaire Ferenc Gyurcsany as well as by anti-government protesters, including a hefty contingent of fascist skinheads.
The depiction of the 1956 events as an anti-Communist, pro-capitalist rebellion, which has been propagated by reactionary forces for the past half-century, is an outright lie. The Hungarian uprising was an attempt by the working class, in a country where capitalism had been overthrown but political power was in the hands of a Stalinist bureaucracy, to throw off bureaucratic rule and open the road to socialism. Workers seized the factories and mines and set up elected workers councils (soviets), embryonic organs of proletarian political power. For weeks the workers fought courageously—by means of strikes, demonstrations and armed struggle—before this political revolution was suppressed.
The cynical misappropriation by capitalist spokesmen of the uprising was skewered in a 1957 document by Shane Mage, a founder of our political tendency:
“What a cruel, cynical joke of history this seems to be! The Hungarian revolution is hailed lyrically by the rulers of the ‘West,’ the worst enemies of socialism and of the Russian revolution. The men who surrounded the infant Soviet Republic with a ‘cordon sanitaire’ of steel and fire, who hailed Hitler and Mussolini as bulwarks against Bolshevism, who stood by with smiling ‘neutrality’ while Franco murdered freedom in Spain, whose hands are still stained by the crimes of Algeria, Suez, Guatemala—the ‘Free’ world gleefully hands its poisoned bouquets to the freedom fighters of Hungary.”
—“The Meaning of Two Revolutions” (reprinted in the 1959 Young Socialist Forum pamphlet, The Hungarian Revolution)
Bourgeois ideologues focus on isolated expressions of anti-Communism, such as some lumpen gangs calling themselves “freedom fighters” or arch-reactionary Cardinal József Mindszenty addressing the insurgents by radio. (Following the suppression of the revolt, Mindszenty spent the next 15 years holed up in the U.S. Embassy in Budapest.) This is a fundamental distortion, one that was also disseminated by Stalinist spokesmen to justify the brutal repression of the workers. As we stated in “Political Revolution in Hungary—Ten Years After” (Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 8, November-December 1966), the slander that the Hungarian masses embraced fascists and monarchist reactionaries “was demolished not only by the actions of the revolutionaries—including the violent suppression of what anti-Semitic and White Guard threats actually existed—but by the workers’ militantly communist aspirations and their unambiguous hatred for capitalism.”
The Hungarian working class was overwhelmingly committed to socialism and opposed to a return to capitalism. In all of the workers councils and other proletarian bodies that arose in 1956, Communist Party members were elected to positions of leadership. Ferenc Töke, a vice-president of the Central Workers Council of Greater Budapest, later recalled: “No reactionary tendency manifested itself throughout the entire strike. There was never, at any moment, a question of the former owners eventually returning” (Jean-Jacques Marie and Balazs Nagy [eds.], Pologne-Hongrie 1956 [1966]). The Central Workers Council of Budapest declared in a 27 November 1956 appeal to workers councils throughout the country: “Faithful to this mission, we defend, even at the cost of our lives, our factories and our fatherland against any attempt to restore capitalism.”
The 1956 Hungarian Revolution was in fact a powerful confirmation of the Trotskyist understanding of the nature of the deformed and degenerated workers states. In the Soviet Union and East Europe before the restoration of capitalism—as in China, North Korea, Cuba and Vietnam today—capitalist rule was overthrown as a result of social revolutions but political power was/is monopolized by a conservative, anti-working-class bureaucracy. The Hungarian Revolution decisively demonstrated that the Stalinist regime represents a caste parasitically resting upon the collectivized economy, not a new type of social class. Unlike the capitalist ruling class, which in the face of revolution inevitably unites around a program of counterrevolution, the Stalinist bureaucracy in Hungary shattered, with large sections going over to the side of the workers.
These events caused a profound crisis in the Communist parties internationally. In Italy, the Communist Party lost some 200,000 of its members. The French Communist Party, already facing discontent over its support to the Socialist-led government as it pursued the Algerian War, saw its share of the electorate plunge. In Britain, the Communist Party lost a third of its membership. More than 200 CP members and ex-members, including a number of talented intellectuals, were won over by the British Trotskyist group led by Gerry Healy. These former CPers included Brian Pearce, Cliff Slaughter, Tom Kemp and Peter Fryer, the correspondent in Hungary for the Communist Party’s Daily Worker whose first-hand observations of the events were recounted in his 1956 book, Hungarian Tragedy (see article, page 9).
With the formation of workers soviets, Hungary entered into a period of incipient dual power in which local workers councils, defended by the armed masses, confronted what remained of the Stalinist repressive apparatus, which was backed by Soviet troops. Mage noted:
“The first and decisive thing about the Hungarian revolution is that it was a workers revolution, and the leading role of the workers was institutionally formulated by the establishment of workers councils. Except for the Russian army, there was in Hungary not the shadow of a social force capable of preventing the assumption of state power by the workers councils. Thus the objective conditions for the formation of a soviet republic, in the event of revolutionary victory of course, were entirely favorable.
“The actual level of consciousness of the Hungarian workers, however, was not at the level indicated by the objective possibilities of the revolution. In this the Hungarian workers were like the Russian proletariat after the February revolution. The general demand was not for all power to the workers councils, but for ‘free elections’ to a sovereign parliament.
“It would, however, be a disastrous mistake to take the level of consciousness corresponding to the struggle against the Stalinist bureaucracy as the permanent and ultimate political program of the Hungarian proletariat. The Hungarian workers wanted ‘free elections,’ but they also wanted to preserve their own councils and extend their powers. They wanted to move forward to socialism, not backward to capitalism.”
—“The YSL Right Wing and the ‘Crisis of World Stalinism’,”
The Hungarian Revolution; excerpted as “‘Pure Democracy’ or Political Revolution in East Europe” in the Spartacist pamphlet, Solidarność: Polish Company Union for CIA and Bankers (1981)
The Birth of the Hungarian Deformed Workers State
To understand the 1956 Hungarian Revolution requires examining the Russian Revolution of 1917—the only successful revolution as yet carried out by the working class—as well as its later degeneration under the Stalinist bureaucracy. In the October Revolution of 1917, the proletariat, led by Lenin’s Bolshevik Party, took state power, basing its rule on the soviets of workers, soldiers and peasants deputies. The young workers state nationalized the land and went on to expropriate capitalist property. The Bolsheviks understood their revolution as the first step of the world socialist revolution and founded the Third (Communist) International in 1919.
However, the immaturity and indecisiveness of revolutionary leadership outside Russia led to the failure to realize opportunities for proletarian revolution. For example, a proletarian revolution was defeated in Germany in 1918-19, and short-lived soviet republics were crushed in Bavaria and Hungary in 1919. The decisive defeat was the failure of the German Communist Party to consummate a socialist revolution in 1923. The economically backward Soviet workers state—suffering under the devastation wrought by World War I and compounded by the bloody 1918-20 Civil War against imperialist-backed counterrevolution—was left isolated in the face of imperialist encirclement and a general stabilization of the world capitalist order. Together with the decimation of the most conscious layer of the proletariat during the Civil War, these factors set the stage for a political counterrevolution.
While the social foundations of the workers state—above all, the expropriation of the capitalist class and the establishment of a collectivized economy—remained intact, by 1924 political power was transferred from the hands of the proletariat and its revolutionary vanguard into the hands of a conservative bureaucratic caste headed by Stalin. From that point on, the people who ruled the USSR, the way the USSR was ruled, and the purposes for which the USSR was ruled all changed. Under the false dogma of “socialism in one country,” proclaimed by Stalin in December 1924, the bureaucracy accommodated the imperialist order. Correspondingly, the Comintern became transformed over time into an instrument of the bureaucracy’s search for “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism. With the elaboration of the “Popular Front” line at the Comintern’s Seventh (and last) Congress in 1935, the Stalinists explicitly and officially embraced the program of class collaboration with the “democratic” imperialist bourgeoisies.
Leading the fight against the degeneration of the Bolshevik Party, Leon Trotsky’s Left Opposition upheld the revolutionary-internationalist program of the October Revolution. In 1938, Trotsky and his co-thinkers founded the Fourth International. Central to its program was the unconditional military defense of the Soviet degenerated workers state against imperialism and capitalist counterrevolution and the call for proletarian political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracy and restore working-class political power. Such a political revolution would be premised on defense of the socialized property forms. This is in contrast to social revolutions or counterrevolutions, which overturn existing property relations and place a different class in power. The Trotskyist analysis of Stalinism is key to understanding the creation and subsequent development of the bureaucratically deformed workers states of East Europe.
In the closing months of World War II, in Hungary as throughout much of East Europe, large sections of society welcomed the Soviet Red Army as liberators from the nightmare of Nazi occupation and supported the ensuing destruction of the old bourgeois order. Class-conscious workers hated the right-wing dictatorship of Admiral Miklós Horthy, who ruled Hungary during the interwar period and much of World War II. Impoverished agrarian laborers settled huge scores with the landlords in this land of feudal-derived estates.
Initially, the remnants of the bourgeoisies of Soviet-occupied East Europe, which had been discredited and shattered by the war, were not expropriated, either politically or economically. In Hungary, elections in 1945 gave a majority, in what was then a largely peasant country, to the bourgeois-clericalist Smallholders Party, which was allowed to form a coalition government with the social democrats and Stalinists. But, as elsewhere in East Europe, it was the Red Army that held the real power. Under the growing pressure of the anti-Soviet Cold War, the Stalinists in 1947-48 proceeded to expropriate the bourgeoisie in Hungary and elsewhere in East Europe, jettisoning their bourgeois coalition partners, nationalizing industry and establishing deformed workers states, that is, societies qualitatively similar to the Soviet Union under the Stalinist bureaucracy.
Prelude to Political Revolution
The 1945-48 period of the so-called “People’s Independence Front” government had a significant effect on the attitudes of the Hungarian working masses. Many would later view that period favorably in comparison to the harsh Stalinist police state that came afterward, although virtually no one wanted a return of the capitalists and large landowners. The 1945-48 interregnum also created certain left-right tensions among the Stalinists themselves. An incipient left opposition, impatient with the slow pace of social transformation, crystallized around Minister of the Interior Laszlo Rajk, a hero in the eyes of many for having fought in the Spanish Civil War and for having been a leader of the Communist underground under the Horthy dictatorship. At Moscow’s behest, the Hungarian regime adopted a one-sided economic policy concentrated on heavy industry. This served to drive down living standards, further fueling proletarian discontent.
The fact that, with the exception of Tito’s Yugoslavia, the East European Stalinist regimes were imposed from without meant that they had shallower roots than in the Soviet Union. This rendered the social order in the East European deformed workers states relatively volatile and unstable.
Facing social discontent, the East European bureaucracies began to split into Moscow loyalists and national-liberal Stalinists more attuned to popular moods. In 1949 Tito’s Yugoslavia broke from the Kremlin. With its “workers self-management,” Titoism presented itself as a more democratic and authentic form of socialism than Stalin’s Russia. Among East European Communist oppositionists there was a tendency to idealize the Yugoslav “road to socialism,” on the one hand, and Western bourgeois democracy on the other. Fearing further splits, Stalin went into a murderous frenzy, seeking to eliminate any potential Titos elsewhere. The Polish party leader Wladyslaw Gomulka was imprisoned and placed under house arrest. Rajk in Hungary and Rudolf Slánský in Czechoslovakia were subjected to show trials and then executed.
Following Stalin’s death in March 1953, the Kremlin bureaucracy and its counterparts in East Europe embarked on a policy that has been referred to as “de-Stalinization.” Moves in the direction of liberalization throughout East Europe had the effect of simultaneously opening up possibilities for mass struggle while reinforcing illusions that, under the pressure of the masses, the Stalinist bureaucracy could carry out self-reform and become an instrument for building socialism.
On 17 June 1953, the first incipient proletarian political revolution in the deformed workers states broke out in East Germany. Both the Stalinist regimes and West Germany’s capitalist rulers portrayed the uprising as pro-Western. But this was a lie. Workers from the East German Hennigsdorf steel works marched through West Berlin and back to the East demanding a metal workers government. June 17 powerfully demonstrated the potential for the slogan later adopted by the international Spartacist tendency (now the International Communist League) for the revolutionary reunification of Germany through political revolution in the East and socialist revolution in the West. (For more on the 1953 events, see “The East German Workers Uprising of 17 June 1953,” WV No. 332, 17 June 1983.)
The post-1953 crisis of “de-Stalinization” had a particular impact on Hungary. Of all the Stalinist regimes in East Europe, that of Matyas Rakosi was unquestionably the bloodiest: more Communists were killed under Rakosi than under Horthy. Rakosi’s widely despised political police, the AVH, a multitude of highly paid thugs, constituted fully 1 percent of the entire population of Budapest.
In 1953, to head off the pressures building up in Hungary, the Soviet leadership forced Rakosi to step down as prime minister. He was replaced by Imre Nagy, who had a reputation as a liberal Communist. Nagy proclaimed a “New Course” that included easing the pace of industrialization, lessening pressures on the peasantry and relaxing police terror. However, Rakosi, fearing the vengeance of his political opponents, hung onto power and by 1955 managed to oust Nagy. Thus, between 1953 and 1956 the Hungarian Stalinist regime was torn by a severe polarization between the Rakosi clique and the mass of Communist Party members who supported Nagy. One sign of the ferment in the Communist Party was the emergence of the Petofi Circle, a grouping of dissident intellectuals and others that provided a forum for public debate and became a hub of opposition to the Rakosi hardliners.
In February 1956, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev gave a “secret” speech to the Soviet Communist Party’s 20th Congress in which he acknowledged a number of Stalin’s crimes. Four months later, locomotive workers in Poland demonstrating for higher wages and lower prices attacked the city hall, radio station and prison in Poznan. Security forces fired on them, killing over 50 workers. Poland entered into an incipient proletarian political revolution, which was headed off at the last minute by Gomulka’s restoration to power. Subsequently, Khrushchev and his Kremlin colleagues did not move against Gomulka, in large part because in factories throughout the country workers councils organized resistance to any attempt to overturn the “Polish October.” Gomulka granted sweeping concessions, such as wage increases. But once the crisis was defused, he disbanded the workers councils that had helped bring him to power.
Meanwhile in Hungary, 200,000 people turned out in early October for a ceremony marking the regime’s “rehabilitation” of Laszlo Rajk. The mass turnout foreshadowed the revolutionary explosion later that month.
The Hungarian October
The Hungarian Revolution, whose events were broadcast on radio and television internationally, was one of the best-documented revolutions ever. It began on October 23 with a largely student demonstration solidarizing with the victory of Gomulka in Poland and calling for the reinstatement of Nagy as head of the Hungarian government. The Rakosi regime denounced the protest as a counterrevolutionary mobilization, and when the unarmed demonstrators marched to the radio station to protest, the AVH goons fired on them.
Hungary then exploded in a near-universal general strike combined with military resistance to the regime. While the initial agitation was student-based, once the fighting started the core of the insurgency in Budapest and the other main centers was the workers councils and workers militias. Writing about the emergence of the workers soviets, Peter Fryer observed in Hungarian Tragedy:
“In their spontaneous origin, in their composition, in their sense of responsibility, in their efficient organisation of food supplies and of civil order, in the restraint they exercised over the wilder elements among the youth, in the wisdom with which so many of them handled the problem of Soviet troops, and, not least, in their striking resemblance at so many points to the soviets or councils of workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ deputies which sprang up in Russia in the 1905 revolution and again in February 1917, these committees, a network of which now extended over the whole of Hungary, were remarkably uniform. They were at once organs of insurrection—the coming together of delegates elected by factories and universities, mines and Army units—and organs of popular self-government, which the armed people trusted. As such they enjoyed tremendous authority, and it is no exaggeration to say that until the Soviet attack of November 4 the real power in the country lay in their hands.”
Even a 1957 “Report of the Special Committee on the Problem of Hungary” by the United Nations, whose role is to provide a fig leaf for imperialist depredation, noted that the emergence of workers councils “represented the first practical step to restore order and to reorganize the Hungarian economy on a socialist basis, but without rigid Party control or the apparatus of terror.”
The Hungarian army immediately ceased to be an effective force. Some sections went over to the insurgents; many soldiers turned their weapons over to the workers militias. Militarily, the turning point of the revolution was the attempt by the Soviet Army to capture the Kilian barracks, the main stronghold of the Hungarian army within Budapest. The commander of the barracks, Colonel Pal Maleter, a veteran Communist, went over to the revolution and led the forces that repulsed the Soviet attack. Following the subsequent Soviet withdrawal from Budapest, the embryo of an effective revolutionary authority was seen in the newly established National Guard under Maleter’s command, although its authority remained largely limited to the capital. In many press interviews, Maleter insisted that he was a good Communist and would remain so. Maleter’s comments in one such interview are recounted in Hungary 1956 (1976) by Bill Lomax:
“‘If we get rid of the Russians don’t think we’re going back to the old days. And if there’s people who do want to go back, we’ll see!’ To emphasize the last remark, he reached for his revolver holster and repeated, ‘We don’t mean to go back to capitalism. We want socialism in Hungary’.”
Despite attempts to portray the uprising as dominated by anti-Russian nationalism, what stands out is the degree to which the insurgents attempted to fraternize with the Soviet soldiers—and the degree to which they were successful. The workers’ and students’ Council of Miskolc published leaflets in Russian for the Red Army soldiers declaring: “Our interests are identical. We and you are all fighting together for a better socialist life.” On October 28, the Hungarian trade-union newspaper Népszava called for the right of asylum for Soviet soldiers who sided with the workers (François Manuel, La Revolution Hongroise des Conseils Ouvriers [1976]).
There were innumerable cases in which Soviet soldiers refused to fight or sided with the insurgents. In his autobiographical In the Name of the Working Class (1986), Sandor Kopacsi, the Budapest police chief who went over to the insurgents, described a scene that occurred on October 25 when Soviet tanks encountered a crowd of demonstrators:
“A boy, undoubtedly a student—the scene took place just below us—pushed his way through the crowd to the first tank and passed something through the loophole.
“It wasn’t a grenade but a sheet of paper. It was followed by others.
“These sheets, many of which my men would later collect, were tracts in Russian composed by students in the faculty of oriental languages. They reminded the Soviet soldiers of the wishes of the Hungarian nation and of the unfortunate role of policemen in which they had been cast. The tracts started with a citation from Marx: ‘A people that oppresses another cannot itself be free.’
“We counted the minutes. Nothing happened.
“Then the top of the turret of the lead tank opened a little, and the commander, with his leather cap and the gold epaulettes, emerged slowly into the view of the apparently unarmed crowd. Then he flung the turret open and perched himself upon the top of his tank….
“The crowd erupted in a frantic ovation. In this jubilant atmosphere, the commander’s cap was thrown into the middle of the crowd. In exchange, someone plunked a Hungarian Army kepi on his head. The crowd sang ‘Kossuth’s Song’ and then the Hungarian national anthem. And, at the top of their voices, they cried: ‘Long live the Soviet Army!’”
Moments later, Kopacsi received a report from one of his police officers: “The AVO [AVH] is firing from every roof. Now the Soviet tanks are firing on the AVO! They’re defending the crowd.”
Though the Stalinist apparatus had disintegrated, a short-lived government was cobbled together under Nagy. On October 28, the Nagy government announced an agreement that Soviet troops would immediately leave Budapest. Indeed, one of the reasons that the Kremlin pulled troops out of Budapest was fear of the effect of fraternization with the insurgent Hungarian masses. But the Kremlin quickly reneged on the agreement. And on November 1, Nagy protested to Soviet Ambassador Yuri Andropov (who would become head of the Soviet Union in the early 1980s) against the entry of new Soviet troops into Hungary without his government’s assent.
The new troops were not only lied to about what was happening; they were lied to about where they were being sent. A leader of the insurgents in a village in eastern Hungary recalled his encounter with the troops (Melvin J. Lasky, ed., The Hungarian Revolution [1957]): “Some of the Russians thought they were in East Germany and that they would soon meet American ‘fascists’ who had invaded the country. Other troops thought they were in the Suez Canal zone.” (The Suez Canal had just been nationalized by Nasser’s Egypt, which was then attacked by British, French and Israeli forces.)
At dawn on November 4, Soviet troops attacked Budapest. Despite stiff resistance, the insurrection was soon crushed. Nevertheless, the general strike continued well into December—the longest nationwide general strike in history. In this way, the proletarian centrality of the uprising was even more evident in its aftermath than during the anarchic period of the revolution itself.
The Significance of Hungary 1956
During his brief tenure, Nagy moved steadily to the right. He brought into his government bourgeois politicians from the “People’s Independence Front” period. Nagy also declared Hungary’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact and appealed to the United Nations to defend Hungarian neutrality. The logic of Nagy’s policies, had they succeeded in running their course, was to strangle the revolution and enormously strengthen the forces of capitalist counterrevolution. However, Nagy, who spent his greatest efforts trying to get the workers to lay down their arms, utterly lacked control over events. While the revolutionary workers had their fair share of political confusion, their representative organs were in practice counterposed not only to the old hardline Stalinist butchers like Rakosi but to the Nagy regime as well.
In the industrial city of Miskolc, one of the main centers of the revolution, the workers council sent a delegation to Nagy demanding that a new government be formed based on the existing workers councils, not through elections to a new parliament. The Budapest Parliament of Workers Councils adopted as its first programmatic principles that “the factory belongs to the workers” and that “the supreme controlling body of the factory is the Workers’ Council” (see Lomax, Hungary 1956). While that statement did not express the Marxist program for central economic planning combined with genuine soviet democracy, it was nevertheless incompatible with a capitalist order and bourgeois parliamentarism.
On the available evidence, the Hungarian workers looked toward an idealized version of Titoist Yugoslavia. Tito, however, along with Mao Zedong, supported the crushing of the 1956 Revolution. Tito and Mao were quite aware of the ramifications for their own bureaucratic regimes if the Hungarian workers succeeded in taking and securing political power. Nagy had taken refuge in the Yugoslav Embassy in Budapest on November 4. But despite an agreement for safe passage out, Nagy was arrested by Soviet forces later that month. He was eventually handed over to the Hungarian Stalinist regime under János Kádár, which executed Nagy as well as Maleter and other leaders of the revolution in 1958.
The repression directed at the workers, however, was relatively mild. The Kádár government announced in early November that it “will not tolerate the persecution of workers on any pretext, for having taken part in recent events.” But Kádár was not in control of events, and Soviet troops conducted searches for those suspected of having participated in the uprising. For the most part, the Kádár regime attempted to piece off the population by raising consumption levels under a policy that came to be known as “goulash communism.”
What was lacking above all in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was a Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard party rooted in the working class. Such a party would have had the task of winning the workers to a program of transforming the soviets from being organs of insurrection to becoming the sole basis for political power in the workers state. It would have fought to extend the struggle for political revolution to neighboring East European countries and crucially to the Soviet Union, linking these efforts with the fight for socialist revolution in the capitalist countries. This would have required politically combatting the views of Maleter, Kopacsi and others whose outlook at the time remained within the framework of Stalinist nationalism and “peaceful coexistence” with the imperialist world order.
Had even a small Trotskyist propaganda group been able to intervene in this situation, it could have rapidly won an initial base among the tens of thousands of workers and radical intellectuals who saw themselves as authentic communists. These lessons have profound significance for the remaining deformed workers states, in particular China, which experienced an incipient political revolution in May-June 1989 and, more recently, a massive growth in defensive struggles by both workers and peasants.
What Leon Trotsky foresaw in outlining the course that a political revolution would take in the Soviet degenerated workers state was amply confirmed by the 1956 events in Hungary:
“When the proletariat springs into action, the Stalinist apparatus will remain suspended in midair. Should it still attempt to resist, it will then be necessary to apply against it not the measures of civil war but rather the measures of a police character….
“A real civil war could develop not between the Stalinist bureaucracy and the resurgent proletariat but between the proletariat and the active forces of the counterrevolution…. The victory of the revolutionary camp, in any case, is conceivable only under the leadership of a proletarian party, which would naturally be raised to power by victory over the counterrevolution.”
—“The Class Nature of the Soviet State” (October 1933)
[TO BE CONTINUED]
Click on headline to link to Part Two
Tuesday, January 02, 2007
A NOTE ON THE WORKERS PARTY QUESTION-CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS
COMMENTARY
TRADE UNIONISTS-NO PAC/COPE MONIES FOR CAPITALIST PARTY CANDIDATES
FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY THAT FIGHTS FOR A WORKERS GOVERNMENT!
Let is get one thing straight as we enter the seemingly never-ending 2008 election cycle here in America-the question of a workers party to fight for the just and equitable needs of working people is a more pressing question than ever before. This writer has spent a good portion of his political life propagandizing for such a party so that it is no surprise that he feels this urgency. Nevertheless, he also is savvy enough to know that this question in this electoral cycle will continue to be a propaganda task. So be it. However not all political work on this issue has to be of a propaganda nature. And here is my point.
Trade unions- the organized expression of working class power and the organizational nucleus for any workers party, as almost every political person knows, have at least since President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s second presidential campaign in 1936 poured vast monies, energies and human resources into supporting capitalist parties, mainly the Democratic Party. A shorthand expression for this policy by the trade union tops can be stated as rewarding the ‘friends of labor’. As the state of the organized labor movement in this country demonstrates those ‘friends of labor’ have come up a little short on their end of the deal. As witnessed by the more than 50 million dollars spent in the 2006 election campaigns by organized labor and one may presume for the 2008 election cycle as well this policy continues in full force. This is where trade union militants and their allies have a wedge issue. Here is my proposition for militants to fight around during this election cycle.
Labor organizations, like almost all political associations these days, give their monies, endorsements and make available human resources through Political Action Committees (PAC’s) or Committees on Political Education (COPE’s). I have witnessed this process first hand in my own union local. Basically, it works like this- some candidate, usually a Democrat, comes to the monthly union meeting, asks for support, smiles and after a perfunctory vote gets the support. Oh I forgot, he or she promises to be the best ‘friend of labor’ the movement ever had. Sometimes, however, he or she doesn’t even need to go that far. And still gets the support. But you get the drift. This time let us say no to that business as usual.
Don’t get me wrong. I LIKE the idea of trade unions having the resources to support a service structure for its members and promote political ideas. Nobody wants to go back to the old days on this issue. What militants should fight for is to stop funding our enemies. And when the deal goes down that is what these capitalist politicians are. If you want a recent example just look at the December 2005 transit workers strike in New York City. Every politician from Hillary “Hawk”, Elliot Spitzer and Michael Bloomberg on down cried for the blood of the transit workers. And in the end, got it. That, my friends, should be etched forever in every militant’s brain. Thus, every time one of these enemies comes knocking at the door, say no way. When the labor bureaucrats inevitably say- but what should we do with our resources? Here’s our answer- use the monies to fund organizing drives at Wal-Mart and in the South. Hell, those efforts need all the resources they can get. If you want organized labor to have influence that is where OUR ‘friends of labor’ are. This is where a future workers party gets its start.
TRADE UNIONISTS-VOTE AGAINST YOUR UNION FUNDING CAPITALIST CANDIDATES. BRING MOTIONS TO PUT YOUR UNION ON RECORD ON THIS ISSUE. BRING ALTERNATIVE MOTIONS TO USE COPE FUNDS FOR ORGANIZING DRIVES AT WAL-MART AND IN THE SOUTH.
THIS IS PART OF A SERIES OF ARTICLES ON THE 2006-2008 ELECTION CYCLE UNDER THE HEADLINE- FORGET THE DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS, GREENS-BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
TRADE UNIONISTS-NO PAC/COPE MONIES FOR CAPITALIST PARTY CANDIDATES
FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY THAT FIGHTS FOR A WORKERS GOVERNMENT!
Let is get one thing straight as we enter the seemingly never-ending 2008 election cycle here in America-the question of a workers party to fight for the just and equitable needs of working people is a more pressing question than ever before. This writer has spent a good portion of his political life propagandizing for such a party so that it is no surprise that he feels this urgency. Nevertheless, he also is savvy enough to know that this question in this electoral cycle will continue to be a propaganda task. So be it. However not all political work on this issue has to be of a propaganda nature. And here is my point.
Trade unions- the organized expression of working class power and the organizational nucleus for any workers party, as almost every political person knows, have at least since President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s second presidential campaign in 1936 poured vast monies, energies and human resources into supporting capitalist parties, mainly the Democratic Party. A shorthand expression for this policy by the trade union tops can be stated as rewarding the ‘friends of labor’. As the state of the organized labor movement in this country demonstrates those ‘friends of labor’ have come up a little short on their end of the deal. As witnessed by the more than 50 million dollars spent in the 2006 election campaigns by organized labor and one may presume for the 2008 election cycle as well this policy continues in full force. This is where trade union militants and their allies have a wedge issue. Here is my proposition for militants to fight around during this election cycle.
Labor organizations, like almost all political associations these days, give their monies, endorsements and make available human resources through Political Action Committees (PAC’s) or Committees on Political Education (COPE’s). I have witnessed this process first hand in my own union local. Basically, it works like this- some candidate, usually a Democrat, comes to the monthly union meeting, asks for support, smiles and after a perfunctory vote gets the support. Oh I forgot, he or she promises to be the best ‘friend of labor’ the movement ever had. Sometimes, however, he or she doesn’t even need to go that far. And still gets the support. But you get the drift. This time let us say no to that business as usual.
Don’t get me wrong. I LIKE the idea of trade unions having the resources to support a service structure for its members and promote political ideas. Nobody wants to go back to the old days on this issue. What militants should fight for is to stop funding our enemies. And when the deal goes down that is what these capitalist politicians are. If you want a recent example just look at the December 2005 transit workers strike in New York City. Every politician from Hillary “Hawk”, Elliot Spitzer and Michael Bloomberg on down cried for the blood of the transit workers. And in the end, got it. That, my friends, should be etched forever in every militant’s brain. Thus, every time one of these enemies comes knocking at the door, say no way. When the labor bureaucrats inevitably say- but what should we do with our resources? Here’s our answer- use the monies to fund organizing drives at Wal-Mart and in the South. Hell, those efforts need all the resources they can get. If you want organized labor to have influence that is where OUR ‘friends of labor’ are. This is where a future workers party gets its start.
TRADE UNIONISTS-VOTE AGAINST YOUR UNION FUNDING CAPITALIST CANDIDATES. BRING MOTIONS TO PUT YOUR UNION ON RECORD ON THIS ISSUE. BRING ALTERNATIVE MOTIONS TO USE COPE FUNDS FOR ORGANIZING DRIVES AT WAL-MART AND IN THE SOUTH.
THIS IS PART OF A SERIES OF ARTICLES ON THE 2006-2008 ELECTION CYCLE UNDER THE HEADLINE- FORGET THE DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS, GREENS-BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
Thursday, December 28, 2006
DEMOCRATIC CONGRESSMAN DENNIS KUCINICH THROWS HIS HAT INTO THE PRESIDENTIAL RING
COMMENTARY
BREAK WITH THE DEMOCRATS-AND A CAUTIONARY TALE
In the normal course of events I do not give a tinker’s damn about what bourgeois politician, Democratic, Republican or Green, throws his or her hat into the presidential ring. Whether Evan Bayh is out or Bill Frist is out or Hillary “Hawk” or Obama the “Charma” is in or out or John Kerry is in and out takes more time and effort than it is worth. While I do confess to a sporting interest in the odds on such candidacies and will even wager a small bet on such propositions there is more than enough work for this writer to do propagandizing for a workers party that fights for a workers government. However, during the week of December 12th 2006, Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich once again threw his hat into the presidential ring. That interests me, but not for the reasons the reader of these lines might think.
Congressman Kucinich is now an old hand at being the extreme left Democratic Party candidate for President, having made the same run in 2004. With about the same chances. That is, unfortunately, about the same chance as our having a viable workers party candidate for President in 2008. But that is another question for another time. Congressman Kucinich represents, as mentioned about, the most extreme left of the Democratic Party. If we are ever to get a chance for a workers party in this country we will have to peel off those elements of the Democratic Party that the Congressman appeals to. Does anyone really think that our fight today is to peel off those people attracted to Hillary? Or even better, from the Republicans? Grow up, please!
So what are our prospects today? This is the real reason that I am interested in the Congressman. Moreover, I have personal experience with the pressure from the Democratic Party we are up against in our struggle for a workers party. If you will recall the 2004 Democratic Convention was staged here in Boston that summer. Congressman Kucinich did not, for his own personal reasons, withdraw his candidacy until the eve of that Convention so that he was freely accessible at various political functions in the city. At one such function I was able to speak about the need to break with the Democratic Party and develop a programmatic- based party centered on the needs of working people. His response and the response of those around him, not unexpected by me, was that it was necessary to remain ‘viable’ in the Democratic Party if all the good things that working people need are to have any chance of success. I also remember some looks of disbelief as if I was proposing that the Congressman break with the Democrats to lead some revolutionary communist party out in the hills. And that is the rub.
Congressman Kucinich is, as I am, a son of the working class, the dirt-poor part of it, to boot. He is also my near contemporary so that he knows some of the same feelings that I had about being left out of the “American Dream” in the so-called golden days of America in the 1950’s when we were growing up. However, our paths depart at that point. Well, that is politics and such things happen. The point is that if there had been a viable workers party in those days I would not be writing about the Congressman’s marginal Democratic Party campaign today. And in the final analysis that is what this commentary is all about. If we do not fight for a workers party now then the next generation’s Democratic Kucinich will be giving some future workers party advocate the same run around. Let us get serious now.
In the summer of 2006 I wrote a commentary about writing in workers party candidates based on a program for the fall 2006 elections. With the hoopla already starting for the 2008 election cycle I repost that commentary below with that same intention of getting thoughtful leftists to use the 2008 campaign to further our propaganda needs.
A MODEST PROPOSAL-RECRUIT, RUN INDEPENDENT LABOR MILITANTS IN FOR THE 2006 ELECTIONS.
IN THIS TIME OF THE ‘GREAT FEAR’ WE NEED CANDIDATES TO FIGHT FOR A WORKERS GOVERNMENT.
FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
All “anti-parliamentarian”, “anti-state”, “non-political” anarchist or anarcho-syndicalist brothers and sisters need read no further. This writer does not want to sully the purity of your politics with the taint of parliamentary electoral politics. Although I might remind you, as we remember the 70th anniversary of the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, that your political forbears in Spain were more than willing to support the state and enter the government when they got the chance- the bourgeois state and the bourgeois government. But, we can fight that issue out later. We will, hopefully, see you on the barricades.
As for other militants- here is my modest proposal. Either recruit fellow labor militants or present yourselves as candidates to run for public office, especially for Congress, during the 2006 election cycle. Why? Even a quick glance at the news of the day is calculated to send the most hardened politico screaming into the night. The quagmire in Iraq, immigration walls, flag-burning amendments, anti same-sex marriage amendments, the threat to separation of church state raised by those who would impose a fundamentalist Christian theocracy on the rest of us, and the attacks on the hard fought gains of the Enlightenment posed by bogus theories such as ‘intelligent design’. And that is just an average day. Therefore, this election cycle provides militants, at a time when the dwindling electorate is focused on politics, a forum to raise our program and our ideas. We use this as a tool, like leaflets, petitions, meetings, demonstrations, etc. to get our message across. Why should the Donkeys, Elephants, and Greens have a monopoly on the public square?
I mentioned in the last paragraph the idea of program. Let us face it if we do not have a program to run on then it makes no sense for militants to run for public office. Given the political climate our task at this time is to fight an exemplary propaganda campaign. Our program is our banner in that fight. The Democrats and Republicans DO NOT RUN on a program. The sum of their campaigns is to promise not to steal from the public treasury (or at least not too much), beat their husbands or wives or grossly compromise themselves in any manner. On second thought, given today’s political climate, they may not promise not to beat their husbands or wives. You get the point. Damn, even the weakest neophyte labor militant can make a better presentation before working people that that. In any case, this writer presents a five point program that labor militants can run on (you knew this was coming, right?). As point five makes clear this is not a ‘minimum’ program but a program based on our need to fight for power.
1. FIGHT FOR THE IMMEDIATE AND UNCONDITIONAL WITHDRAWAL OF U.S. TROOPS FROM THE MIDDLE EAST NOW (OR BETTER YET, YESTERDAY)! U.S. HANDS OFF THE WORLD! VOTE NO ON THE WAR BUDGET! The quagmire in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East (Palestine, Iran) is the fault line of American politics today. Every bourgeois politician has to have his or her feet put to the fire on this one. Not on some flimsy ‘sense of the Congress’ softball motion for withdrawal next, year, in two years, or (my favorite) when the situation is stable. Moreover, on the parliamentary level the only real vote that matters is the vote on the war budget. All the rest is fluff. Militants should make a point of trying to enter Congressional contests where there are so-called anti-war Democrats or Republicans (an oxymoron, I believe) running to make that programmatic contrast vivid.
But, one might argue, that would split the ‘progressive’ forces. Grow up, please! That argument has grown stale since it was first put forth in the ‘popular front’ days of the 1930’s. If you want to end the war in Iraq fight for this position on the war budget. Otherwise the same people (ya, those progressive Democrats) who unanimously voted for the last war budget get a free ride on the cheap. Senator Hillary “Hawk” Clinton desperately needs to be opposed by labor militants. Closet Republican, Democratic Senator Lieberman of Connecticut should not take his richly deserved beating on the war issue from a dissident Democrat. By rights this is our issue. Let us take it back.
2. FIGHT FOR A LIVING WAGE AND WORKING CONDITIONS-UNIVERSAL FREE HEALTH CARE FOR ALL. It is a ‘no-brainer’ that no individual, much less families, can live on the minimum wage of $5/hr. (or proposed $7/hr). What planet do these politicians live on? We need an immediate fight for a living wage, full employment and decent working conditions. We need universal free health care for all. End of story. The organized labor movement must get off its knees and fight to organize Wal-Mart and the South. A boycott of Wal-Mart is not enough. A successful organizing drive will, like in the 1930’s, go a long way to turning the conditions of labor around.
3. FIGHT THE ATTACKS ON THE ENLIGHTENMENT. Down with the Death Penalty! Full Citizenship Rights for All Immigrants who make it here! Stop the Deportations! For the Separation of Church and State! Defend abortion rights! Down with ant-same sex marriage legislation! Full public funding of education! Stop the ‘war on drugs’, basically a war on blacks and minority youth-decriminalize drugs! Defend political prisoners!
This list of demands hardly exhausts the “culture war” issues we defend. It is hard to believe that in the year 2006 over 200 years after the American Revolution and the French Revolution we are fighting desperately to preserve many of the same principles that militants fought for in those revolutions. But, so be it.
4. FIGHT FOR A WORKERS PARTY. The Donkeys, Elephants and Greens have had their chance. Now is the time to fight for our own party and for the interests of our own class, the working class. Any campaigns by independent labor militants must highlight this point. And any campaigns can also become the nucleus of a workers party network until we get strong enough to form at least a small party. None of these other parties, and I mean none, are working in the interests of working people and their allies. The following great lesson of politic today must be hammered home. Break with the Democrats, Republicans and Greens!
5. FIGHT FOR A WORKERS AND XYZ GOVERNMENT. THIS IS THE DEMAND THAT SEPARATES THE MILITANTS FROM THE FAINT-HEARTED REFORMISTS. We need our own form of government. In the old days the bourgeois republic was a progressive form of government. Not so any more. That form of government ran out of steam about one hundred years ago. We need a Workers Republic. We need a government based on workers councils with a ministry (I do not dare say commissariat in case any stray anarchists are still reading this) responsible to it. Let us face it if we really want to get any of the good and necessary things listed above accomplished we are not going to get it with the current form of government.
Why the XYZ part? What does that mean? No, it is not part of an algebra lesson. What it reflects is that while society is made up mainly of workers (of one sort or another) there are other classes (and parts of classes) in society that we seek as allies and could benefit from a workers government. Examples- small independent contractors, intellectuals, the dwindling number of small farmers, and some professionals like dentists. Ya, I like the idea of a workers and dentists government. The point is you have got to fight for it.
Obviously any campaign based on this program will be an exemplary propaganda campaign for the foreseeable future. But we have to start now. Continuing to support or not challenging the bourgeois parties does us no good now. That is for sure. While bourgeois electoral laws do not favor independent candidacies at this late date write-in campaigns are possible. ROLL UP YOUR SHEEVES! GET THOSE PETITIONS SIGNED! PRINT OUT THE LEAFLETS! PAINT THOSE BANNERS! GET READY TO SHAKE HANDS AND KISS BABIES.
THIS IS PART OF A SERIES OF ARTICLES ON THE 2006-2008 ELECTION CYCLE UNDER THE HEADLINE- FORGET THE DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS, GREENS-BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
BREAK WITH THE DEMOCRATS-AND A CAUTIONARY TALE
In the normal course of events I do not give a tinker’s damn about what bourgeois politician, Democratic, Republican or Green, throws his or her hat into the presidential ring. Whether Evan Bayh is out or Bill Frist is out or Hillary “Hawk” or Obama the “Charma” is in or out or John Kerry is in and out takes more time and effort than it is worth. While I do confess to a sporting interest in the odds on such candidacies and will even wager a small bet on such propositions there is more than enough work for this writer to do propagandizing for a workers party that fights for a workers government. However, during the week of December 12th 2006, Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich once again threw his hat into the presidential ring. That interests me, but not for the reasons the reader of these lines might think.
Congressman Kucinich is now an old hand at being the extreme left Democratic Party candidate for President, having made the same run in 2004. With about the same chances. That is, unfortunately, about the same chance as our having a viable workers party candidate for President in 2008. But that is another question for another time. Congressman Kucinich represents, as mentioned about, the most extreme left of the Democratic Party. If we are ever to get a chance for a workers party in this country we will have to peel off those elements of the Democratic Party that the Congressman appeals to. Does anyone really think that our fight today is to peel off those people attracted to Hillary? Or even better, from the Republicans? Grow up, please!
So what are our prospects today? This is the real reason that I am interested in the Congressman. Moreover, I have personal experience with the pressure from the Democratic Party we are up against in our struggle for a workers party. If you will recall the 2004 Democratic Convention was staged here in Boston that summer. Congressman Kucinich did not, for his own personal reasons, withdraw his candidacy until the eve of that Convention so that he was freely accessible at various political functions in the city. At one such function I was able to speak about the need to break with the Democratic Party and develop a programmatic- based party centered on the needs of working people. His response and the response of those around him, not unexpected by me, was that it was necessary to remain ‘viable’ in the Democratic Party if all the good things that working people need are to have any chance of success. I also remember some looks of disbelief as if I was proposing that the Congressman break with the Democrats to lead some revolutionary communist party out in the hills. And that is the rub.
Congressman Kucinich is, as I am, a son of the working class, the dirt-poor part of it, to boot. He is also my near contemporary so that he knows some of the same feelings that I had about being left out of the “American Dream” in the so-called golden days of America in the 1950’s when we were growing up. However, our paths depart at that point. Well, that is politics and such things happen. The point is that if there had been a viable workers party in those days I would not be writing about the Congressman’s marginal Democratic Party campaign today. And in the final analysis that is what this commentary is all about. If we do not fight for a workers party now then the next generation’s Democratic Kucinich will be giving some future workers party advocate the same run around. Let us get serious now.
In the summer of 2006 I wrote a commentary about writing in workers party candidates based on a program for the fall 2006 elections. With the hoopla already starting for the 2008 election cycle I repost that commentary below with that same intention of getting thoughtful leftists to use the 2008 campaign to further our propaganda needs.
A MODEST PROPOSAL-RECRUIT, RUN INDEPENDENT LABOR MILITANTS IN FOR THE 2006 ELECTIONS.
IN THIS TIME OF THE ‘GREAT FEAR’ WE NEED CANDIDATES TO FIGHT FOR A WORKERS GOVERNMENT.
FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
All “anti-parliamentarian”, “anti-state”, “non-political” anarchist or anarcho-syndicalist brothers and sisters need read no further. This writer does not want to sully the purity of your politics with the taint of parliamentary electoral politics. Although I might remind you, as we remember the 70th anniversary of the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, that your political forbears in Spain were more than willing to support the state and enter the government when they got the chance- the bourgeois state and the bourgeois government. But, we can fight that issue out later. We will, hopefully, see you on the barricades.
As for other militants- here is my modest proposal. Either recruit fellow labor militants or present yourselves as candidates to run for public office, especially for Congress, during the 2006 election cycle. Why? Even a quick glance at the news of the day is calculated to send the most hardened politico screaming into the night. The quagmire in Iraq, immigration walls, flag-burning amendments, anti same-sex marriage amendments, the threat to separation of church state raised by those who would impose a fundamentalist Christian theocracy on the rest of us, and the attacks on the hard fought gains of the Enlightenment posed by bogus theories such as ‘intelligent design’. And that is just an average day. Therefore, this election cycle provides militants, at a time when the dwindling electorate is focused on politics, a forum to raise our program and our ideas. We use this as a tool, like leaflets, petitions, meetings, demonstrations, etc. to get our message across. Why should the Donkeys, Elephants, and Greens have a monopoly on the public square?
I mentioned in the last paragraph the idea of program. Let us face it if we do not have a program to run on then it makes no sense for militants to run for public office. Given the political climate our task at this time is to fight an exemplary propaganda campaign. Our program is our banner in that fight. The Democrats and Republicans DO NOT RUN on a program. The sum of their campaigns is to promise not to steal from the public treasury (or at least not too much), beat their husbands or wives or grossly compromise themselves in any manner. On second thought, given today’s political climate, they may not promise not to beat their husbands or wives. You get the point. Damn, even the weakest neophyte labor militant can make a better presentation before working people that that. In any case, this writer presents a five point program that labor militants can run on (you knew this was coming, right?). As point five makes clear this is not a ‘minimum’ program but a program based on our need to fight for power.
1. FIGHT FOR THE IMMEDIATE AND UNCONDITIONAL WITHDRAWAL OF U.S. TROOPS FROM THE MIDDLE EAST NOW (OR BETTER YET, YESTERDAY)! U.S. HANDS OFF THE WORLD! VOTE NO ON THE WAR BUDGET! The quagmire in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East (Palestine, Iran) is the fault line of American politics today. Every bourgeois politician has to have his or her feet put to the fire on this one. Not on some flimsy ‘sense of the Congress’ softball motion for withdrawal next, year, in two years, or (my favorite) when the situation is stable. Moreover, on the parliamentary level the only real vote that matters is the vote on the war budget. All the rest is fluff. Militants should make a point of trying to enter Congressional contests where there are so-called anti-war Democrats or Republicans (an oxymoron, I believe) running to make that programmatic contrast vivid.
But, one might argue, that would split the ‘progressive’ forces. Grow up, please! That argument has grown stale since it was first put forth in the ‘popular front’ days of the 1930’s. If you want to end the war in Iraq fight for this position on the war budget. Otherwise the same people (ya, those progressive Democrats) who unanimously voted for the last war budget get a free ride on the cheap. Senator Hillary “Hawk” Clinton desperately needs to be opposed by labor militants. Closet Republican, Democratic Senator Lieberman of Connecticut should not take his richly deserved beating on the war issue from a dissident Democrat. By rights this is our issue. Let us take it back.
2. FIGHT FOR A LIVING WAGE AND WORKING CONDITIONS-UNIVERSAL FREE HEALTH CARE FOR ALL. It is a ‘no-brainer’ that no individual, much less families, can live on the minimum wage of $5/hr. (or proposed $7/hr). What planet do these politicians live on? We need an immediate fight for a living wage, full employment and decent working conditions. We need universal free health care for all. End of story. The organized labor movement must get off its knees and fight to organize Wal-Mart and the South. A boycott of Wal-Mart is not enough. A successful organizing drive will, like in the 1930’s, go a long way to turning the conditions of labor around.
3. FIGHT THE ATTACKS ON THE ENLIGHTENMENT. Down with the Death Penalty! Full Citizenship Rights for All Immigrants who make it here! Stop the Deportations! For the Separation of Church and State! Defend abortion rights! Down with ant-same sex marriage legislation! Full public funding of education! Stop the ‘war on drugs’, basically a war on blacks and minority youth-decriminalize drugs! Defend political prisoners!
This list of demands hardly exhausts the “culture war” issues we defend. It is hard to believe that in the year 2006 over 200 years after the American Revolution and the French Revolution we are fighting desperately to preserve many of the same principles that militants fought for in those revolutions. But, so be it.
4. FIGHT FOR A WORKERS PARTY. The Donkeys, Elephants and Greens have had their chance. Now is the time to fight for our own party and for the interests of our own class, the working class. Any campaigns by independent labor militants must highlight this point. And any campaigns can also become the nucleus of a workers party network until we get strong enough to form at least a small party. None of these other parties, and I mean none, are working in the interests of working people and their allies. The following great lesson of politic today must be hammered home. Break with the Democrats, Republicans and Greens!
5. FIGHT FOR A WORKERS AND XYZ GOVERNMENT. THIS IS THE DEMAND THAT SEPARATES THE MILITANTS FROM THE FAINT-HEARTED REFORMISTS. We need our own form of government. In the old days the bourgeois republic was a progressive form of government. Not so any more. That form of government ran out of steam about one hundred years ago. We need a Workers Republic. We need a government based on workers councils with a ministry (I do not dare say commissariat in case any stray anarchists are still reading this) responsible to it. Let us face it if we really want to get any of the good and necessary things listed above accomplished we are not going to get it with the current form of government.
Why the XYZ part? What does that mean? No, it is not part of an algebra lesson. What it reflects is that while society is made up mainly of workers (of one sort or another) there are other classes (and parts of classes) in society that we seek as allies and could benefit from a workers government. Examples- small independent contractors, intellectuals, the dwindling number of small farmers, and some professionals like dentists. Ya, I like the idea of a workers and dentists government. The point is you have got to fight for it.
Obviously any campaign based on this program will be an exemplary propaganda campaign for the foreseeable future. But we have to start now. Continuing to support or not challenging the bourgeois parties does us no good now. That is for sure. While bourgeois electoral laws do not favor independent candidacies at this late date write-in campaigns are possible. ROLL UP YOUR SHEEVES! GET THOSE PETITIONS SIGNED! PRINT OUT THE LEAFLETS! PAINT THOSE BANNERS! GET READY TO SHAKE HANDS AND KISS BABIES.
THIS IS PART OF A SERIES OF ARTICLES ON THE 2006-2008 ELECTION CYCLE UNDER THE HEADLINE- FORGET THE DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS, GREENS-BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
Thursday, December 14, 2006
YES,THE WAR NEWS FROM IRAQ IS GRIM-BUT THE WAR NEWS FROM WASHINGTON IS EVEN WORST
COMMENTARY
THE TROOPS ARE NOT COMING HOME FOR THIS CHRISTMAS OR ANY CHRISTMAS SOON! NO TROOP ESCALATION IN IRAQ!
FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY THAT FIGHTS FOR A WORKERS GOVERNMENT
Yes, the subject is Iraq, again. Yes, I have been something of a Johnny-one note on the subject since last spring. But hear me out. Every time I try to move away from the subject and onto more satisfying matters like a book review on some aspect of revolutionary history something unpleasant happens in Washington to upset my well laid plans. This time it is the apparent ‘victory’ of the “hawks” among the military brass and the neo-cons for the willing ear of George W. Bush over future Iraq War strategy. What we are prepared to get in that direction is not troop withdrawal but troop escalation. Moreover, there is serious talk in military circles of going after Sadr’s Madhi Army.
This by the way is the army that has bloodied the American Army in the past, especially in Fallujah. If the Madhi Army’s backs are again the wall, as projected, who knows what hell is in store. Moreover, as Sadr is a major prop of the current Iraqi government, such as it is, the smell of ‘regime change’ in Iraq is also in the air. Apparently the smell of ‘victory’ has once again gotten the better of rationality in Washington. Christ, will this madness never stop. I have noted, a little sarcastically, more than once before that in the quest for ‘stability’ in Iraq the grandchildren of the troops fighting in Iraq now will be joining grandfather and mother over there. With the current news I may not be that far off the mark.
In the wake of the publication of the Iraq Study Group Report (remember that little 'sure fire' plan) I have been raked over the coals by my liberal friends for being rather mean-spirited about the recommendations, or rather the chances of implementation by the Bush Administration. I have even, half-jokingly, stated that they will probably find President Bush’s copy of this document under some couch in the White House when he leaves office. Well, those liberal friends have had a whole week to savor their victory. Apparently I am not so far off on the eventual fate of that plan. And if one thinks about it why would the Bush Administration render more than lip-service to that report.
First, it was congressionally-mandated and not a doctored job coming from the administration. Second, it came from “Poppy’s" crowd. Third, it makes ugly reading for any President six years into his term who is concerned with his place in history. Fourth, and this is the kicker, this is George W. Bush we are talking about. When he says he wants victory in Iraq, that he wants to ‘stay the course’ that is literally what he means. Moreover, his place in history is already being etched in stone as one of the most dim-witted experiments bourgeois democracy has faced in its long and shady presidential history. However, unlike Lyndon Johnson and the effect of the Vietnam War escalations Bush faces no more elections. So why the hell not throw the dice for ‘victory’. After all they are HIS troops. What good is it being Commander-in-Chief if you can't keep your troops gainfully employed. Anti-war activists better know this and act, and I do mean act, accordingly. The only escalation we support is the increase in number of troop transport drivers, humvee drivers, pilots and sailors it takes to get the troops the hell out of Iraq now.
Below I am reposting a blog, written in the week of September 18, 2006 which more fully addresses the question of troop escalation. I stand by its political thrust today. Believe me I would rather have political victories than fortunetelling clairvoyance.
THE TROOPS ARE NOT COMING HOME FOR THIS CHRISTMAS OR ANY CHRISTMAS SOON!
COMMENTARY
IRAQ LOOKS MORE AND MORE LIKE VIETNAM EVERY DAY-IMMEDIATE WITHDRAWAL OF ALL UNITED STATES/ALLIED TROOPS!
FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY
This writer for a long time has resisted the facile task route of comparing the situation in Iraq today to the Vietnam of some forty years ago. But it is getting harder and harder to do so. On the face of it the differences are obvious. In Vietnam revolutionary leftist forces were attempting to unify into one state that which by international diplomacy abetted by previous bouts of international Stalinist treachery had been artificial split. Furthermore, the defining concept behind the revolutionary forces there to resolve the agrarian question and the fight for what those forces conceived to be the road to socialism. Today in Iraq there are nationalist/sectarian forces which want to take revenge on the results of the European- derived Treaty of Versailles after World War I and divide this artificially created state-gun in hands. The fact that in Kurdish-controlled areas only the Kurdish flag can fly really says it all. Additionally, as far as this writer can tell, from the little known about murky underworld of radical Islamic politics there are no forces fighting for anything like a secular- democratic, much less, socialist solution to the problems there. Rather something like an Islamic Republic under repressive and anti-women Sharia law appears to be the favored political solution.
However, those differences between the domestic forces in Iraq and Vietnam aside the real way Iraq today looks like Vietnam is the similarities in the role of American imperialism on the ground. The latest news this week, the week of September 18, 2006, coming from the central military command is there will be no draw down of troops any time soon. LET ME REPEAT- THERE WILL NOT BE ANY DRAW DOWN ANY TIME SOON. All those who foolishly believed that draw down would occur and did not take the Bush Administration at its word when it declared empathically that troops would not be withdrawn as long as it drew breathe should ponder this. More on this below.
There are starting to be voices heard, dormant for a while, spearheaded by the editors of National Review and other neo-con sources that the lesson to be learned from Iraq is that to really win in Iraq the Americans must sent in more troops. How much such sentiments are worth from these previous supporters of a quick and cheap airpower strategy is beside the point. What is noteworthy is that this premise is not an isolated sentiment and even finds support among alleged opponents of the war. And that, in a nutshell, is where the comparison to Vietnam comes into play. The hubris which led the Bush Administration into the quagmire of Iraq is still very much in play. The notion that in order rectify the original mistake of invasion more mistakes, such as increased troop levels, can solve the problem and bring victory where none is possible is the same mentality that led to all the escalations of the Vietnam era. Against all reason the Bushies of America and the world cannot believe that the situation is lost. Well, hell that is their problem. Militant leftists have other problems like organizing the opposition to worry over.
Additionally, President Bush himself is getting a little testy at the Prime Minister of Iraq. He cannot believe that at this late stage the wholly-owned American puppet government in Iraq hasn’t stepped up to its tasks of creating domestic tranquility. One should remember the names Diem and Thieu from Vietnamese history who got the same kinds of dressing-downs from previous American administrations. With that thought in mind let me ask this question. Is there anyone today on the planet outside the immediate Bush family that believes that the writ of the Iraqi government runs outside the Green Zone (and even that premise might be shaky)? These guys (and they are overwhelmingly men) never led anything, went into exile under Saddam rather than go underground and build a resistance movement and represent no one but themselves.
But, enough of that. The real question is what are we anti-war, anti-imperialist activists going to do about the situation. President Bush has been rightly accused of upping the security alerts during election time to highlight the security question that he has (successfully) used as a trump card to swing the electoral balance in his favor. The lesser well-known fact is that during the fall of election years, including this year, the leaderships of the reformist anti-war movements close down the nationally- centered demonstrations campaign which are the lynchpins of their politics. It is no secret that this is done to help so-called anti-war Democratic politicians or at least not be a source of embarrassment to their weak parliamentary opposition to the war. In a blog written this summer I wrote an open letter to the troops in Iraq. The thrust of the letter was that the conventional politicians, their own military leadership and the anti-war movement had left the troops in Iraq hanging in the wind. As we enter the fall electoral campaign this is truer than ever. I will repeat here what I stated there- if the troops are to withdraw from Iraq it will have to be on their own hook. Start forming the soldiers and sailors committees now. Militant leftists here must support those efforts. Unfortunately today there is no other way to end the war. FORWARD.
THIS IS PART OF A SERIES OF ARTICLES OF COMMENTARY ON THE 2006-2008 ELECTION CYCLE UNDER THE HEADLINE- FORGET THE DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS, GREENS-BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
THE TROOPS ARE NOT COMING HOME FOR THIS CHRISTMAS OR ANY CHRISTMAS SOON! NO TROOP ESCALATION IN IRAQ!
FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY THAT FIGHTS FOR A WORKERS GOVERNMENT
Yes, the subject is Iraq, again. Yes, I have been something of a Johnny-one note on the subject since last spring. But hear me out. Every time I try to move away from the subject and onto more satisfying matters like a book review on some aspect of revolutionary history something unpleasant happens in Washington to upset my well laid plans. This time it is the apparent ‘victory’ of the “hawks” among the military brass and the neo-cons for the willing ear of George W. Bush over future Iraq War strategy. What we are prepared to get in that direction is not troop withdrawal but troop escalation. Moreover, there is serious talk in military circles of going after Sadr’s Madhi Army.
This by the way is the army that has bloodied the American Army in the past, especially in Fallujah. If the Madhi Army’s backs are again the wall, as projected, who knows what hell is in store. Moreover, as Sadr is a major prop of the current Iraqi government, such as it is, the smell of ‘regime change’ in Iraq is also in the air. Apparently the smell of ‘victory’ has once again gotten the better of rationality in Washington. Christ, will this madness never stop. I have noted, a little sarcastically, more than once before that in the quest for ‘stability’ in Iraq the grandchildren of the troops fighting in Iraq now will be joining grandfather and mother over there. With the current news I may not be that far off the mark.
In the wake of the publication of the Iraq Study Group Report (remember that little 'sure fire' plan) I have been raked over the coals by my liberal friends for being rather mean-spirited about the recommendations, or rather the chances of implementation by the Bush Administration. I have even, half-jokingly, stated that they will probably find President Bush’s copy of this document under some couch in the White House when he leaves office. Well, those liberal friends have had a whole week to savor their victory. Apparently I am not so far off on the eventual fate of that plan. And if one thinks about it why would the Bush Administration render more than lip-service to that report.
First, it was congressionally-mandated and not a doctored job coming from the administration. Second, it came from “Poppy’s" crowd. Third, it makes ugly reading for any President six years into his term who is concerned with his place in history. Fourth, and this is the kicker, this is George W. Bush we are talking about. When he says he wants victory in Iraq, that he wants to ‘stay the course’ that is literally what he means. Moreover, his place in history is already being etched in stone as one of the most dim-witted experiments bourgeois democracy has faced in its long and shady presidential history. However, unlike Lyndon Johnson and the effect of the Vietnam War escalations Bush faces no more elections. So why the hell not throw the dice for ‘victory’. After all they are HIS troops. What good is it being Commander-in-Chief if you can't keep your troops gainfully employed. Anti-war activists better know this and act, and I do mean act, accordingly. The only escalation we support is the increase in number of troop transport drivers, humvee drivers, pilots and sailors it takes to get the troops the hell out of Iraq now.
Below I am reposting a blog, written in the week of September 18, 2006 which more fully addresses the question of troop escalation. I stand by its political thrust today. Believe me I would rather have political victories than fortunetelling clairvoyance.
THE TROOPS ARE NOT COMING HOME FOR THIS CHRISTMAS OR ANY CHRISTMAS SOON!
COMMENTARY
IRAQ LOOKS MORE AND MORE LIKE VIETNAM EVERY DAY-IMMEDIATE WITHDRAWAL OF ALL UNITED STATES/ALLIED TROOPS!
FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY
This writer for a long time has resisted the facile task route of comparing the situation in Iraq today to the Vietnam of some forty years ago. But it is getting harder and harder to do so. On the face of it the differences are obvious. In Vietnam revolutionary leftist forces were attempting to unify into one state that which by international diplomacy abetted by previous bouts of international Stalinist treachery had been artificial split. Furthermore, the defining concept behind the revolutionary forces there to resolve the agrarian question and the fight for what those forces conceived to be the road to socialism. Today in Iraq there are nationalist/sectarian forces which want to take revenge on the results of the European- derived Treaty of Versailles after World War I and divide this artificially created state-gun in hands. The fact that in Kurdish-controlled areas only the Kurdish flag can fly really says it all. Additionally, as far as this writer can tell, from the little known about murky underworld of radical Islamic politics there are no forces fighting for anything like a secular- democratic, much less, socialist solution to the problems there. Rather something like an Islamic Republic under repressive and anti-women Sharia law appears to be the favored political solution.
However, those differences between the domestic forces in Iraq and Vietnam aside the real way Iraq today looks like Vietnam is the similarities in the role of American imperialism on the ground. The latest news this week, the week of September 18, 2006, coming from the central military command is there will be no draw down of troops any time soon. LET ME REPEAT- THERE WILL NOT BE ANY DRAW DOWN ANY TIME SOON. All those who foolishly believed that draw down would occur and did not take the Bush Administration at its word when it declared empathically that troops would not be withdrawn as long as it drew breathe should ponder this. More on this below.
There are starting to be voices heard, dormant for a while, spearheaded by the editors of National Review and other neo-con sources that the lesson to be learned from Iraq is that to really win in Iraq the Americans must sent in more troops. How much such sentiments are worth from these previous supporters of a quick and cheap airpower strategy is beside the point. What is noteworthy is that this premise is not an isolated sentiment and even finds support among alleged opponents of the war. And that, in a nutshell, is where the comparison to Vietnam comes into play. The hubris which led the Bush Administration into the quagmire of Iraq is still very much in play. The notion that in order rectify the original mistake of invasion more mistakes, such as increased troop levels, can solve the problem and bring victory where none is possible is the same mentality that led to all the escalations of the Vietnam era. Against all reason the Bushies of America and the world cannot believe that the situation is lost. Well, hell that is their problem. Militant leftists have other problems like organizing the opposition to worry over.
Additionally, President Bush himself is getting a little testy at the Prime Minister of Iraq. He cannot believe that at this late stage the wholly-owned American puppet government in Iraq hasn’t stepped up to its tasks of creating domestic tranquility. One should remember the names Diem and Thieu from Vietnamese history who got the same kinds of dressing-downs from previous American administrations. With that thought in mind let me ask this question. Is there anyone today on the planet outside the immediate Bush family that believes that the writ of the Iraqi government runs outside the Green Zone (and even that premise might be shaky)? These guys (and they are overwhelmingly men) never led anything, went into exile under Saddam rather than go underground and build a resistance movement and represent no one but themselves.
But, enough of that. The real question is what are we anti-war, anti-imperialist activists going to do about the situation. President Bush has been rightly accused of upping the security alerts during election time to highlight the security question that he has (successfully) used as a trump card to swing the electoral balance in his favor. The lesser well-known fact is that during the fall of election years, including this year, the leaderships of the reformist anti-war movements close down the nationally- centered demonstrations campaign which are the lynchpins of their politics. It is no secret that this is done to help so-called anti-war Democratic politicians or at least not be a source of embarrassment to their weak parliamentary opposition to the war. In a blog written this summer I wrote an open letter to the troops in Iraq. The thrust of the letter was that the conventional politicians, their own military leadership and the anti-war movement had left the troops in Iraq hanging in the wind. As we enter the fall electoral campaign this is truer than ever. I will repeat here what I stated there- if the troops are to withdraw from Iraq it will have to be on their own hook. Start forming the soldiers and sailors committees now. Militant leftists here must support those efforts. Unfortunately today there is no other way to end the war. FORWARD.
THIS IS PART OF A SERIES OF ARTICLES OF COMMENTARY ON THE 2006-2008 ELECTION CYCLE UNDER THE HEADLINE- FORGET THE DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS, GREENS-BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
Thursday, December 07, 2006
ON THE IRAQ STUDY GROUP REPORT- A NEO-CON'S WORST NIGHTMARE
COMMENTARY
FORGET THE 79 RECOMMENDATIONS- HERE'S THE 80TH ONE- THE ONE THAT COUNTS-THAT IS OUR FIGHT
A look at the number of blogs on the subject of Iraq by this writer will convince any reader that I have spent no few words on the question of Iraq. In fact I have been something of a Johnny-one note on the subject. Thus, few words are needed here.
When the neo-con cowboys were riding high in Washington this Iraq Study Group document would have been the work of some under-employed State Department Deputy Secretary for Middle Eastern Affairs and been buried. Or ordered publicly burned at the stake on the Washington Mall. But that was then. Now it is the considered wisdom of the liberal Democratic Party foreign policy establishment and what today passes for the old Yankee Eastern Republican branch of that establishment. I am sure that they will find President Bush's copy under some couch in the White House when he leaves office. In any case it can only be described as a policy wonk’s delight. And should be read, if only as a historical document. The picture it paints of Iraq is grim-but it is already dated. As I write this the civil war rages unabated. This is my reaction, as posted elsewhere, to the work.
“On the subject of the recently released and breathlessly awaited Iraq Study Group it is my considered opinion, arrived at after a painstaking, methodical, reflective, thoughtful and deep analysis that the following conclusion can be drawn from the report. Forget the 79 recommendations. Here is the missing 80th one that the ‘Grandees’ did not have space for-the only one that counts now. IMMEDIATE, UNCONDITIONAL WITHDRAWAL OF ALL UNITED STATES/ALLIED TROOPS FROM IRAQ-START REVVING UP THE TROOP TRANSPORTS NOW! Enough said.”
FORGET THE 79 RECOMMENDATIONS- HERE'S THE 80TH ONE- THE ONE THAT COUNTS-THAT IS OUR FIGHT
A look at the number of blogs on the subject of Iraq by this writer will convince any reader that I have spent no few words on the question of Iraq. In fact I have been something of a Johnny-one note on the subject. Thus, few words are needed here.
When the neo-con cowboys were riding high in Washington this Iraq Study Group document would have been the work of some under-employed State Department Deputy Secretary for Middle Eastern Affairs and been buried. Or ordered publicly burned at the stake on the Washington Mall. But that was then. Now it is the considered wisdom of the liberal Democratic Party foreign policy establishment and what today passes for the old Yankee Eastern Republican branch of that establishment. I am sure that they will find President Bush's copy under some couch in the White House when he leaves office. In any case it can only be described as a policy wonk’s delight. And should be read, if only as a historical document. The picture it paints of Iraq is grim-but it is already dated. As I write this the civil war rages unabated. This is my reaction, as posted elsewhere, to the work.
“On the subject of the recently released and breathlessly awaited Iraq Study Group it is my considered opinion, arrived at after a painstaking, methodical, reflective, thoughtful and deep analysis that the following conclusion can be drawn from the report. Forget the 79 recommendations. Here is the missing 80th one that the ‘Grandees’ did not have space for-the only one that counts now. IMMEDIATE, UNCONDITIONAL WITHDRAWAL OF ALL UNITED STATES/ALLIED TROOPS FROM IRAQ-START REVVING UP THE TROOP TRANSPORTS NOW! Enough said.”
Tuesday, December 05, 2006
WHEN THE COWBOYS WERE RIDING HIGH ON IRAQ
CHRIST, IT WAS EVEN WORST THAT WE THOUGHT-HELL-RUMSFELD’S RESIGNATION WAS NOT NEARLY ENOUGH-HEADS SHOULD ROLL AND THE U.S.HOSTAGE-TROOPS IN IRAQ SHOULD DO THE ROLLING
In all the recent hoopla over Iraq Study Group reports, Pentagon Middle East strategy reassessments, Secretary of War Rumford’s resignation, the Robert Gates confirmation hearings for that same post and, to many commentators, the seemingly mythical results of the midterm 2006 elections one should not forget how this disaster got started and who started it. With that thought in mind I would like to recommend Mark Danner’s article IRAQ: THE WAR OF THE IMAGINATION in the December 21, 2006 issue of THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS(starting on page 81).
Mr. Danner is actually reviewing several books about the subject-Bob Woodward's State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III (Simon and Schuster); Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11 (Simon and Schuster);and, James Risen's State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration (Free Press). The article is also liberally sprinkled with Mr. Danner's own insights, based on several trips to Iraq and a vast knowledge of the subject, into the situation. None of this reportage is pretty. But it is nevertheless worth the read in case you cannot get to the books under review. Moreover, it may just help, if only a little, a few thoughtful people from obediently giving carte blanche to the next American imperialist adventure with blinkers on.
Christ, as cynical about bourgeosis politics as this writer is, and with good reason, it is hard to believe that a modern bourgeois democracy and the leading military power the world has ever known, to boot, turns out to have been run by guys (and it is mainly guys) who a thoughtful person would not hire to mow the lawn. Never mind let within 1000 yards of a government office. No, as I mentioned in the headline to this commentary and have done for months the resignation of one Donald Rumsfeld is not nearly enough. If there is any justice in this world the American hostage-troops, among many others in Iraq, should get first crack at their old boss’s butt. And move up and down the chain of command from there. Mr. Danner and I disagree about what needs to be done in Iraq. But for right now let Mr. Danner give you some of the details of the why Iraq is a quagmire and in the now fashionable 'state of civil war'.
In all the recent hoopla over Iraq Study Group reports, Pentagon Middle East strategy reassessments, Secretary of War Rumford’s resignation, the Robert Gates confirmation hearings for that same post and, to many commentators, the seemingly mythical results of the midterm 2006 elections one should not forget how this disaster got started and who started it. With that thought in mind I would like to recommend Mark Danner’s article IRAQ: THE WAR OF THE IMAGINATION in the December 21, 2006 issue of THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS(starting on page 81).
Mr. Danner is actually reviewing several books about the subject-Bob Woodward's State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III (Simon and Schuster); Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11 (Simon and Schuster);and, James Risen's State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration (Free Press). The article is also liberally sprinkled with Mr. Danner's own insights, based on several trips to Iraq and a vast knowledge of the subject, into the situation. None of this reportage is pretty. But it is nevertheless worth the read in case you cannot get to the books under review. Moreover, it may just help, if only a little, a few thoughtful people from obediently giving carte blanche to the next American imperialist adventure with blinkers on.
Christ, as cynical about bourgeosis politics as this writer is, and with good reason, it is hard to believe that a modern bourgeois democracy and the leading military power the world has ever known, to boot, turns out to have been run by guys (and it is mainly guys) who a thoughtful person would not hire to mow the lawn. Never mind let within 1000 yards of a government office. No, as I mentioned in the headline to this commentary and have done for months the resignation of one Donald Rumsfeld is not nearly enough. If there is any justice in this world the American hostage-troops, among many others in Iraq, should get first crack at their old boss’s butt. And move up and down the chain of command from there. Mr. Danner and I disagree about what needs to be done in Iraq. But for right now let Mr. Danner give you some of the details of the why Iraq is a quagmire and in the now fashionable 'state of civil war'.
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