Click on the title to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the 19th century American radicals, Sarah And Angelina Grimke.
February Is Black History Month
March Is Women's History Month
Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.
Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
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Women And Revolution, Volume 29, Spring 1985
The Grimke Sisters:
Pioneers for Abolition and Women's Rights
By Amy Rath
"I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours." —Angelina Grimke', address to Women's Loyal League, May 1863
Angelina and Sarah Grimke' were two of the earliest fighters for black and women's rights in America. Although far from being socialists or revolutionaries, the Grimke' sisters of South Carolina were among the foremost fighters for human equality of their time, the 1830s and the tumultuous era which saw the birth of the abolitionist movement, foreshadowing the great Civil War which freed the slaves. They were also among the the first women to speak publicly on political issues. "Genteel society" objected to the fact of their public appearances—and even more to the content of their speeches. Thus the first serious, widespread discussion of women's rights in the United States was directly linked to the black question and the liberation of the slaves, questions which 25 years later would tear the nation apart in civil war.
Further, the Grimke' sisters' almost visionary commitment to the fight for the liberation of all, exemplified in Angelina's famous statement to the Women's Loyal League, stands in stark contrast not only to early abolitionist anti-women prejudices, but also to the later, shameful betrayal of black rights by feminists during the Reconstruction era. "The discussion of the rights of the slave has opened the way for the discussion of other rights," wrote Angelina to Catherine E.Beecher in 1837, "and the ultimate result will most certainly be the breaking of every yoke, the letting the oppressed of every grade and description go free,—an emancipation far more glorious than any the world has ever yet seen."
The sisters and Theodore Weld published American Slavery As It Is (1840), the most influential anti-slavery document until Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Though they had essentially retired from active politics by the time of John Brown's courageous raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, the actual opening shot of the Civil War, they deeply believed in his cause. Angelina's stirring "Address to the Soldiers of our Second Revolution" (given at the May 1863 Women's Loyal League convention) advocated massive arming of the former slaves as part of the Union Army, and remains today a remarkably radical and prescient analysis of the implications of the Civil War:
"This war is not, as the South falsely pretends, a war of races, nor of sections, nor of political parties, but a war of Principles; a war upon the working classes, whether white or black; a war against Man, the world over. In this war, the black man was the first victim, the workingman of whatever color the next; and now all who contend for the rights of labor, for free speech, free schools, free suffrage, and a free government... are driven to do battle in defense of these or to fall with them, victims of the same violence that for two centuries has held the black man a prisoner of war— The nation is in a death-struggle. It must either become one vast slaveocracy of petty tyrants, or wholly the land of the free."
Pioneers for Abolition and Women's Rights
On February 21,1838, hundreds of people swarmed to the great hall of the Massachusetts State Legislature. Angelina Grimke", the first woman ever to address an American legislative body, would argue for the most controversial subject of the day: the immediate abolition of slavery.
This speech—which continued over three days, despite efforts by pro-slavery forces to stop it—was the culmination of a nine months' tour by Sarah and Angelina Grimke', the first women agents of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), founded in 1833. While their speeches began as "parlor meetings" in private homes or church halls for women only, such was the power and growing fame of Angelina's oratory that men began to slip into the back to listen, and the Grimke' sisters became the first American women to address what were then called "promiscuous" audiences.
Uproar swept genteel society across the nation. The Grimke' sisters were breaking the rules of ladylike decorum by their "unwomanly" displays. Angelina was popularly called "Devilina"; "Fanny Wrightists!" screamed the pro-slavery press. (Fanny Wright was a Scots Utopian socialist who toured the U.S. in 1828 for abolition, public education, women's rights, the ten-hour day and "free love"; she set up an anti-slavery commune and edited a newspaper. When these projects failed, she left the country, having made little impact.) "Why are all the old hens abolitionists?" sneered the New Hampshire Patriot: "Because not being able to obtain husbands they think they may stand some chance for a negro, if they can only make amalgamation [interracial sex] fashionable."
The Congregationalist church, the descendant of the New England Puritans, issued a "Pastoral Letter" condemning the Grimke's for leaving "woman's sphere" and going against the biblical injunction, of Paul: "I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence." Sarah answered this, and other attacks, in the brilliant Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, the first American book on the rights of women, predating Margaret Fuller's more famous work by six years.
In her arguments Sarah relied extensively on biblical sources, for to her it was important to prove that the equality of the sexes should be a Christian belief, and she wanted to show that women had the right and duty to work for the emancipation of the slave. Her concrete solutions to women's oppression were naive: for example, she suggested that husbands should content themselves with baked potatoes and milk for dinner, to give their wives time to educate themselves. She never understood that the institution of the family itself necessarily stands in the way of women's freedom. Indeed, she could not reconcile herself to the idea that divorce should be legalized. But for all these limita¬tions, Sarah's book is the pioneer American work on the subject. She was deeply interested in women workers, and polemicized against unequal wages; she attacked with great bitterness the lack of educational opportunities for women and their total lack of legal rights. "I ask no favors for my sex," she wrote, "All I ask our brethren is, that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright on that ground which God designed us to occupy."
Many fellow abolitionists demanded that the sisters give up their arguments on women's rights, fearing that it would detract from the more important question of the hour: freedom for the slave. But Angelina pointed out that the outcry against women's public lecturing was a tool of the slaveholders: "We cannot push Abolitionism forward with all our might until we take up the stumbling block out of the road.... Can you not see the deep laid scheme of the clergy against us as lecturers?... If we surrender the right to speak in public this year, we must surrender the right to petition next year, and the right to write the year after, and so on. What then can woman do for the slave, when she herself is under the feet of man and shamed into silence?" (emphasis in original; letter to Theodore Weld and John Greenleaf Whittier, 20 August 1837).
The Making of a Southern Abolitionist
The sisters' effectiveness as abolitionist agents had to do not only with the power and sweep of their arguments, but with the fact that they were native-born eyewitnesses to Southern slavery. Yet precisely because they were gently bred daughters of one of South Carolina's most prominent slaveholding families, they had not seen the worst of it, as they themselves were quick to point out. They did not see the slave gangs on the plantations, the brutal whippings, but the "better" treatment of the house and city slaves.
Sarah was born in 1792. The invention of the cotton gin in her infancy led her father, like many others, to expand his plantation holdings and build up his slave force. He was one of the wealthiest men in Charleston, the political capital of the South, and a veteran of the Revolutionary War, a former Speaker in the state House, a judge and author. Sarah grew up with every advantage that wealth and position could offer a woman of her time. But instead of satisfying herself with embroidery, piano and a little French, she studied her brother's lessons in mathematics, history and botany, and declared her wish to become a lawyer. Her family mocked her; her father forbade her to study Latin. Perhaps influenced by her own educational frustrations as well as her childhood revulsion for the slave system, she started to teach her personal maid to read. "I took an almost malicious satisfaction in teaching my little waiting-maid at night, when she was supposed to be occupied in combing and brushing my long locks. The light was put out, the keyhold screened, and flat on our-stomachs, before the fire, with the spelling-book under our eyes, we defied the laws of South Carolina."
As an adult Sarah's aspirations to make something of her life turned in the one direction open to "respectable" women of her day and class: religion. She became a Quaker. Later she converted Angelina, 12 years her junior. Before joining her sister in Philadel¬phia, the Quakers' center, Angelina undertook a personal conversion crusade against slavery among her family and friends. In her gray Quaker dress, she started arguments at tea against the sin of holding slaves, becoming quite unpopular with Charleston's ruling elite. Inquiries were made about her sanity.
Convinced at last that there was no future in this, Angelina went north. But she could not be satisfied with the orthodox Quaker doctrine, which at that time included colonization as a "solution" to slavery. Black "Friends" were made to sit on a separate bench. In the early 1830s Angelina became interested in the growing abolitionist movement, and was horrified at the violence the free North turned against anti-slavery spokesmen. William Lloyd Garrison was barely saved from lynching at the hands of a Boston mob in 1835. Theodore Weld was repeatedly mobbed as he toured the Midwest, as were many others. Early in the decade Prudence Crandall was forced to close her school for black girls in Connecticut when the well was poisoned, doctors refused to treat the students, and finally a mob torched the school building. In 1838 a pro-slavery mob, egged on by the mayor himself, burned down Philadelphia Hall, which had been built by the abolitionists as a partial answer to their difficulty in finding places to meet. An interracial- meeting of abolitionists was in progress there at the time; two days earlier, Angelina and Weld had married, and the attendance of both blacks and whites at their wedding fueled the fury of the race-terrorists.
The abolitionists were part of a broader bourgeois radical movement, the 19th century herrs of the 18th century Enlightenment, Protestant religious ideals, and the American Revolution so dramatically unfulfilled in the "Land of the Free" where four million suffered in slavery. Although opposition to slavery was by no means as widespread in the 1830s as it was to become immediately before the Civil War, nonetheless many prominent men, such as the wealthy Tappan brothers of New York and Gerrit Smith, the biggest landowner in the North, had joined the movement by the middle of the decade. Many of the abolitionists had been part of the religious and intellectual upsurge which swept the United States after 1820. Ralph Waldo Emerson and other Transcendentalists were formulating their philos¬ophy. Religious revivalists such as Charles G. Finney, who converted Weld, preached temperance and that slavery was a sin against god.
Angelina became convinced that god had called her to work actively for the emancipation of the slaves. Defying the Quakers (who later expelled the sisters when Angelina and Weld married in a non-Quaker ceremony), the sisters went to New York where they participated in a conference for the training of abolitionist agents. Thus began the famous speaking tour of 1837-38.
The politics of the Grimke sisters was radical bourgeois egalitarianism profoundly rooted in religion. They believed that slavery was a sin, that as "immortal, moral beings" women and blacks were the equals of white men. They argued that slavery was contrary to the laws of god (the Bible) and of man, as put forth in the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence; they disagreed with Garrison's view of the Constitution as a "pro-slavery" document. Again unlike Garrison, they wrote and spoke for rights of education and property for free blacks as well, and bitterly denounced racism within the abolitionist movement. They were the integrationists of their time.
For many years, however, the sisters agreed with Garrison that slavery could be done away with peacefully by moral persuasion. They preached a boycott of slave-made goods (Angelina's wedding cake was made of "free" sugar by a free black baker). One of Angelina's first writings was "An Appeal to the Christian Women of the Southern States," widely circulated by the AASS, in which she urged Southern women to begin a petition campaign for immediate emancipation, to free their own slaves and to educate them. When copies of this pamphlet reached Charleston, the postmaster publicly burned them and the police informed the Grimke' family that if their daughter ever attempted to set foot in the city, she would be jailed and then sent back on the next ship.
The sisters were also for many years staunch pacifists, as would be expected from their Quaker background. Sarah took this to such an extreme that she denied that abolitionists had the right to arm themselves in defense against pro-slavery mobs. This became a subject of controversy in the abolitionist movement in 1837 when publisher Elijah Lovejoy was murdered in Alton, Illinois by a mob. True to her pacifist idealism, Sarah ques¬tioned his right to bear the gun with which he tried to save his life.
Splits and the Coming Storm
By the 1840s the Grimke'sisters had largely withdrawn from public activity. In part this was due to ill health Angelina suffered as a result of her pregnancies, as well as family financial problems. But much of it was probably political demoralization. In 1840the abolitionist movement split over the issues of women's rights and political action. The Garrisonian wing wanted to include women in the organization, but was opposed to abolitionists voting or running for political office, since Garrison believed the "pro-slavery" U.S. Con¬stitution should be abolished and that the North should expel the South. The other wing, represented by eminent men like the Tappan brothers, excluded women from office within the organization, was against women's rights, and wanted to orient to political work in Congress. Since they agreed with neither side in this split, the Grimke's and Weld retired to private life. In later years Angelina spoke bitterly against "organizations."
Meanwhile, however, on the left wing of the abolitionist movement there were gathering forces which saw the irrepressible and inevitable necessity for a violent assault on the slave system, to end it forever by force of arms. The brilliant black abolitionist Frederick Douglass and John Brown spearheaded this growing conviction. As we noted in our SL pamphlet, "Black History and the Class Struggle," "Douglass' political evolution was not merely from 'non-resistance' to self-defense. Contained in the 'moral suasion' line was a refusal to fight slavery politically and to the wall, by all methods. That is the importance of the Douglass-Brown relationship: together they were planning the Civil War." And it was John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859 which galvanized the nation; abolitionists who the day before were pacifists took the pulpit to proclaim the necessity of a violent end to the slave system.
The Grimke' sisters and especially Theodore Weld had earlier become convinced that only war could end slavery. Sarah believed she had communed with John Brown's spirit the night before his martyrdom at the hands of Colonel Robert E. Lee, acting under command of President Buchanan. "The John Huss of the United States now stands ready... to seal his testimony with his life's blood," she wrote in her diary. Two of the executed men from the Harpers Ferry raid were buried in the commune at Raritan Bay, New Jersey, where the sisters and Weld were living at the time. The graves had to be guarded against a pro-slavery mob.
When the Civil War officially began the Grimke's did emerge briefly from private life. They were staunch Unionists, supported the draft and were critical of Lincoln for not freeing the slaves sooner. They were founding members of the Women's Loyal League. It was at a meeting of this group that Angelina made her famous statement: "I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours."
Reconstruction Betrayed: Finish the Civil War!
Following the end of the Civil War and the beginning of Reconstruction, the most democratic period for blacks in U.S. history, the former abolitionist movement split again. During that period, women suffrage leaders like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony—formerly avowed abolitionists—turned their movement for women's rights into a tool of racist reaction. They organized against passage of the Fifteenth Amendment because it gave votes to blacks and not to women (the Grin-ike sisters were silent on this question, even though this disgusting racism was foreign to everything they had fought for). Stanton and Anthony worked closely with such racist Southern Democrats as James Brooks, because he purported to support women's suffrage. In a letter to the editor of the New York Standard (1865), Stanton wrote,
"...now, as the celestial gate to civil rights is slowly moving on its hinges, it becomes a serious question whether we had better stand aside and see 'Sambo' walk
into the kingdom first In fact, it is better to be the slave
of an educated white man, then of a degraded, ignorant black one."
It was Frederick Douglass who fought this racist assault. Douglass had been a fervent supporter of the infant women's rights movement, which began largely as a result of the chauvinism which women anti-slavery activists encountered from many abolitionists. At the 1869 convention of the Equal Rights Association, Douglass made a final attempt to win the suffragists from their reactionary policy:
"When women, because they are women, are dragged from their homes and hung upon lamp-posts; when their children are torn from their arms and their brains dashed upon the pavement; when they are objects of insult and outrage at every turn; when they are in danger of having their homes burnt down over their heads; when their children are not allowed to enter schools; then they will have [the same] urgency to obtain the ballot."
At this convention Douglass proposed a resolution which called the 15th Amendment the "culmination of one-half of our demands," while imploring a redou¬bling "of our energy to secure the further amendment guaranteeing the same sacred rights without limitation to sex." And for the rest of his life Douglass remained a staunch champion of women's rights.
Though the Civil War freed the slaves, it was not the fulfillment of Angelina's vision of a great, all-encompassing human emancipation. The betrayal of Reconstruction by the counterrevolutionary and triumphant capitalist reaction of the 1870s, in which the bourgeois feminists played their small and dirty part, left unfulfilled those liberating goals to which the Grimke sisters were committed. Yet Angelina's statement—"I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours"—was and is true in a way the Grimke's could not understand. Their social perspective was limited to the bourgeois order: they never identified property as the source of the oppression of both women and blacks. Indeed, as bourgeois egalitarians, the basis of their arguments was that women and blacks should have the same right to acquire property as the white man and that this would liberate them completely. As Marx noted:
"The present struggle between the South and North is, therefore, nothing but a struggle between two social systems, the system of slavery and the system of free labour. The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer live peacefully side by side on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other."
—"The Civil War in the United States," Collected Works, Volume 19, 1861-64
The system of "free labor," capitalism, won out. Radical Reconstruction, enforced by military occupation, sought to impose equality of bourgeois democratic rights in the South. It was defeated by.compromise between the Northern bourgeoisie and the Southern land-owning aristocracy, thus revealing the ultimate incapacity of bourgeois radicalism to finally liberate any sector of the oppressed. This failure and betrayal of Reconstruction perpetuated the oppression of blacks as a color caste at the bottom of American capitalist society. This racial division, with whites on top of blacks, has been and continues to be the main historical obstacle to the development of political class con¬sciousness among the American proletariat. It will take a third American Revolution, led by a multiracial workers party against capitalism itself, to break the fetters of blacks, women and all the oppressed.
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Monday, February 19, 2007
*LABOR AND THE FIGHT AGAINST THE IRAQ WAR
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
LABOR-SUPPORT YOUR CLASS BROTHERS AND SISTERS-BUILD ANTI-WAR SOLDIERS AND SAILORS SOLIDARITY COMMITTEES-IMMEDIATE UNCONDITIONAL WITHDRAWAL FROM IRAQ!
As readers of this space are aware over the last year I have been running a propaganda campaign for the anti-war movement to change its focus and concentrate on winning over the rank and file troops that are fighting the bloody war in Iraq. Readers will also note that these commentaries are part of a byline dedicated to fighting for a workers party here in America. Recently I received a rather surprising communication from a young militant who in essence accused me of having a ‘military’ deviation on the war question. The basis for this comment is the notion that propaganda for a workers party- a political solution to the crisis of leadership in the American labor movement and thus ultimately the question of the war in Iraq- precludes my so-called ‘military’ solution. Needless to say this calls for some commentary, or rather clarification, on my part.
Politics, including left-wing propaganda politics, is about timing as much as any other factor. A realistic look at the political landscape of the organized labor movement today shows no particular movement at the base to defend itself against the onslaught of effective wage and benefit cuts. Nor is there a serious commitment to massively organize the working class into trade unions, particularly the critical Wal-Mart and Southern labor forces that would go a long way to reversing the decline in the power of the organized labor movement. Given those conditions, what is the likelihood today of galvanizing organized labor for meaningful political action in opposition to the Iraq war? While many unions and labor federations, including my union, have gone on record in ‘paper’ opposition to the war, it remains a paper position except for support to bourgeois , mainly Democratic Party, ‘anti-war’ candidates. This abject support is the labor equivalent of those meaningless non-binding resolutions that the Congress is so fond of, and that require no heavy lifting.
A look at the general political scene is even more depressing, if not down right embarrassing to those in the anti-war movement who, unlike me, took the mid-term 2006 elections as good coin. After six years of getting hammered by the likes of Dick Cheney and Karl Rove one would think that those esteemed bourgeois politicians from Hillary “Hawk” to Obama the “Charma” would be able to ratchet up the courage to say no. No, not meaningless non-binding resolutions gently chiding President Bush for his ‘surge’ strategy. No, not trying to have one’s cake and eating it too by supporting the troops and opposing the war policy. The only meaningful anti-war parliamentary maneuver is to vote NO on the war budget. That proposition will come up for a vote (maybe) soon. Watch all the rats deserting ship on that one after the great political courage they summoned up to vote for the non-binding resolution. It will not be pretty and it is not recommended for the faint-hearted.
If one takes a look at the causality lists from the war or reads the seemingly endless local news profiles of those who have died or been severely wounded (a more difficult number to digest) it is plain as day that working people from the cities and small towns of America have taken the brunt of the beating in Iraq. While my appeals to form ant-war solidarity committees have been generic one thing is clear the class brothers and sisters of those soldiers and sailors have a very deep interest in getting their people the hell out of Iraq. Thus, the dragging out of the war, the average citizen’s frustrated desire to get out, the bourgeois political impasse, the anti-war leadership’s parliamentary cretinism strategy and labor’s unwillingness to take decisive action at this time makes it necessary to call for the troops to take action as the short way home. We must not let our anti-war class brothers and sisters in uniform stand alone. Yes, in a beautiful, politically conscious labor movement we should be calling for political strikes against the war and calling on dockworkers and others not handle military goods to Iraq but that is not the case right now (although it might be latter). Until then I can take the heat on my ‘military’ deviation-as long as we get those anti-war solidarity committees up and running.
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!
FOR MORE POLITICAL COMMENTARY AND BOOKS REVIEWS CHECK MY BLOG AT- Http://markinbookreview.blogspot.com/
COMMENTARY
LABOR-SUPPORT YOUR CLASS BROTHERS AND SISTERS-BUILD ANTI-WAR SOLDIERS AND SAILORS SOLIDARITY COMMITTEES-IMMEDIATE UNCONDITIONAL WITHDRAWAL FROM IRAQ!
As readers of this space are aware over the last year I have been running a propaganda campaign for the anti-war movement to change its focus and concentrate on winning over the rank and file troops that are fighting the bloody war in Iraq. Readers will also note that these commentaries are part of a byline dedicated to fighting for a workers party here in America. Recently I received a rather surprising communication from a young militant who in essence accused me of having a ‘military’ deviation on the war question. The basis for this comment is the notion that propaganda for a workers party- a political solution to the crisis of leadership in the American labor movement and thus ultimately the question of the war in Iraq- precludes my so-called ‘military’ solution. Needless to say this calls for some commentary, or rather clarification, on my part.
Politics, including left-wing propaganda politics, is about timing as much as any other factor. A realistic look at the political landscape of the organized labor movement today shows no particular movement at the base to defend itself against the onslaught of effective wage and benefit cuts. Nor is there a serious commitment to massively organize the working class into trade unions, particularly the critical Wal-Mart and Southern labor forces that would go a long way to reversing the decline in the power of the organized labor movement. Given those conditions, what is the likelihood today of galvanizing organized labor for meaningful political action in opposition to the Iraq war? While many unions and labor federations, including my union, have gone on record in ‘paper’ opposition to the war, it remains a paper position except for support to bourgeois , mainly Democratic Party, ‘anti-war’ candidates. This abject support is the labor equivalent of those meaningless non-binding resolutions that the Congress is so fond of, and that require no heavy lifting.
A look at the general political scene is even more depressing, if not down right embarrassing to those in the anti-war movement who, unlike me, took the mid-term 2006 elections as good coin. After six years of getting hammered by the likes of Dick Cheney and Karl Rove one would think that those esteemed bourgeois politicians from Hillary “Hawk” to Obama the “Charma” would be able to ratchet up the courage to say no. No, not meaningless non-binding resolutions gently chiding President Bush for his ‘surge’ strategy. No, not trying to have one’s cake and eating it too by supporting the troops and opposing the war policy. The only meaningful anti-war parliamentary maneuver is to vote NO on the war budget. That proposition will come up for a vote (maybe) soon. Watch all the rats deserting ship on that one after the great political courage they summoned up to vote for the non-binding resolution. It will not be pretty and it is not recommended for the faint-hearted.
If one takes a look at the causality lists from the war or reads the seemingly endless local news profiles of those who have died or been severely wounded (a more difficult number to digest) it is plain as day that working people from the cities and small towns of America have taken the brunt of the beating in Iraq. While my appeals to form ant-war solidarity committees have been generic one thing is clear the class brothers and sisters of those soldiers and sailors have a very deep interest in getting their people the hell out of Iraq. Thus, the dragging out of the war, the average citizen’s frustrated desire to get out, the bourgeois political impasse, the anti-war leadership’s parliamentary cretinism strategy and labor’s unwillingness to take decisive action at this time makes it necessary to call for the troops to take action as the short way home. We must not let our anti-war class brothers and sisters in uniform stand alone. Yes, in a beautiful, politically conscious labor movement we should be calling for political strikes against the war and calling on dockworkers and others not handle military goods to Iraq but that is not the case right now (although it might be latter). Until then I can take the heat on my ‘military’ deviation-as long as we get those anti-war solidarity committees up and running.
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!
FOR MORE POLITICAL COMMENTARY AND BOOKS REVIEWS CHECK MY BLOG AT- Http://markinbookreview.blogspot.com/
Sunday, February 18, 2007
***A Saga Of The Spanish Civil War- Andre Malraux's "Man's Hope"
Click on title to link to Wikipedia's sentry for French writer and politician Andre Malraux.
Markin comment:
Leon Trotsky, early on, praised Malraux's literary talents. He was, and would have been, less enamored of Malraux's later career as Stalin admirer and subsequently in the post World II era a minister of culture under France's strongman Charles DeGaulle. Oh, well, everyone familiar with the biographic sketches of past literary figures knows that that milieu is replete with writers who cannot resist being in the circles of power-no matter the political cost. Still, in his prime Malraux could write thoughtful novels and write circles around most of his contemporaries. Trotsky was not wrong on that score, although he also seemed to be aware of certain moral flabbiness in Malraux. He was not wrong there either.
BOOK REVIEW
MAN'S HOPE, ANDRE MALRAUX, EVERGREEN BOOKS, 1979
As I wrote in recent review of Man’s Fate by this same author as a young man, in the late 1920’s, many held out high hopes that French writer Andre Malraux would become an accomplished revolutionary writer, or at least an extraordinary writer of revolutionary sagas. No less a communist literary critic than Leon Trotsky, the consummate man of action and letters, praised his early work. "Man’s Hope" is another prime example of the reason that leftist critics praised his work, although it is a more uneven work which reflects the author’s ambiguity toward the events of the subject of the novel, the Spanish Civil.
Although later events would destroy Malraux’s reputation as a writer and as a man of action on the left this novel takes its place in the pantheon of well written expressions of the dilemma of modern humankind confronted as it is with one half of itself mired in the mundane bourgeois world and the other half striving toward a more just and equitable society. This was a central preoccupation of 20th century leftist literary endeavor, and early Malraux was one of the better exponents of that thesis.
The action of the novel takes place in the throes of the Spanish Civil War, 1936-39, a decisive event in pre-World War II history, especially international working class history. Malraux, himself, had organized an air force squadron of international volunteers on behalf of the Republican forces early on and so this novel benefits from a more realistic interpretation of the action described in the novel. Moreover, like Russia and China before it, everyone knew that the events which led up to 1936 Fascist uprising against the elected Popular Front Republican government in Spain portended a revolutionary outcome. The only question at that point was whether it was to be a fascist counter-revolution like in Germany and Italy or a socialist revolution that would go a long way to helping the Soviet Union of the 1930’s break out of its isolation after various unsuccessful revolutionary attempts in the West had failed. We know the outcome, to our regret. These tensions, and especially the tensions produced among the Communists who were under orders from the Communist International, and hence Moscow, to subordinate themselves to the various Popular Front governments, is what drives the action.
The novel is also a snapshot of what the Communist International’s ‘high policy’ looked like as it was implemented on the ground among the secondary cadre and rank and filers of the Spanish Communist Party, their allies, semi-allies, adversaries and the merely indifferent. But beyond that epic struggle the novel betrays in its dialogue among the leading characters something of Malraux's disillusionment with leftist politics at this time. Hereafter Malraux would become something of a ‘premature’ existentialist and searcher after the ‘great men’ of history like Stalin and DeGaulle.
Yes, war is hell. Yes, war is banal. Yes, war does not bring out the better instincts of humankind, even in just wars like that fought by Republican Spain. Despite the caveat mentioned above, Malraux nevertheless tells that part of the story well, in the tradition of Hemingway and Dos Passos. That is fast company, indeed. Read on.
Markin comment:
Leon Trotsky, early on, praised Malraux's literary talents. He was, and would have been, less enamored of Malraux's later career as Stalin admirer and subsequently in the post World II era a minister of culture under France's strongman Charles DeGaulle. Oh, well, everyone familiar with the biographic sketches of past literary figures knows that that milieu is replete with writers who cannot resist being in the circles of power-no matter the political cost. Still, in his prime Malraux could write thoughtful novels and write circles around most of his contemporaries. Trotsky was not wrong on that score, although he also seemed to be aware of certain moral flabbiness in Malraux. He was not wrong there either.
BOOK REVIEW
MAN'S HOPE, ANDRE MALRAUX, EVERGREEN BOOKS, 1979
As I wrote in recent review of Man’s Fate by this same author as a young man, in the late 1920’s, many held out high hopes that French writer Andre Malraux would become an accomplished revolutionary writer, or at least an extraordinary writer of revolutionary sagas. No less a communist literary critic than Leon Trotsky, the consummate man of action and letters, praised his early work. "Man’s Hope" is another prime example of the reason that leftist critics praised his work, although it is a more uneven work which reflects the author’s ambiguity toward the events of the subject of the novel, the Spanish Civil.
Although later events would destroy Malraux’s reputation as a writer and as a man of action on the left this novel takes its place in the pantheon of well written expressions of the dilemma of modern humankind confronted as it is with one half of itself mired in the mundane bourgeois world and the other half striving toward a more just and equitable society. This was a central preoccupation of 20th century leftist literary endeavor, and early Malraux was one of the better exponents of that thesis.
The action of the novel takes place in the throes of the Spanish Civil War, 1936-39, a decisive event in pre-World War II history, especially international working class history. Malraux, himself, had organized an air force squadron of international volunteers on behalf of the Republican forces early on and so this novel benefits from a more realistic interpretation of the action described in the novel. Moreover, like Russia and China before it, everyone knew that the events which led up to 1936 Fascist uprising against the elected Popular Front Republican government in Spain portended a revolutionary outcome. The only question at that point was whether it was to be a fascist counter-revolution like in Germany and Italy or a socialist revolution that would go a long way to helping the Soviet Union of the 1930’s break out of its isolation after various unsuccessful revolutionary attempts in the West had failed. We know the outcome, to our regret. These tensions, and especially the tensions produced among the Communists who were under orders from the Communist International, and hence Moscow, to subordinate themselves to the various Popular Front governments, is what drives the action.
The novel is also a snapshot of what the Communist International’s ‘high policy’ looked like as it was implemented on the ground among the secondary cadre and rank and filers of the Spanish Communist Party, their allies, semi-allies, adversaries and the merely indifferent. But beyond that epic struggle the novel betrays in its dialogue among the leading characters something of Malraux's disillusionment with leftist politics at this time. Hereafter Malraux would become something of a ‘premature’ existentialist and searcher after the ‘great men’ of history like Stalin and DeGaulle.
Yes, war is hell. Yes, war is banal. Yes, war does not bring out the better instincts of humankind, even in just wars like that fought by Republican Spain. Despite the caveat mentioned above, Malraux nevertheless tells that part of the story well, in the tradition of Hemingway and Dos Passos. That is fast company, indeed. Read on.
Saturday, February 17, 2007
HO HUM-THE HOUSE GENTLY CHIDES BUSH ON HIS IRAQ 'SURGE' STRATEGY
COMMENTARY
HELLO! IT’S THE WAR BUDGET THAT COUNTS-AS THE FIVE BRIGADES DEPLOY
This will be short and sweet. The august House of Representatives of the United States Congress, in its infinite wisdom has gently chided President George W. Bush on his Iraq ‘surge’ strategy with a meaningless non-binding resolution, by a mainly party line vote. Meanwhile the additional five brigades he requested are headed for Iraq unimpeded. In politics timing is important. This vote if it had taken place before the Iraq invasion, even if non-binding, might have sent some kind of message of anti-war parliamentary opposition.
Today it only demonstrates how far the bourgeois politicians are behind the citizenry on this war issue. Well, nobody ever accused these denizens of parliamentary cretinism of being ahead of the curve-on anything. In any case, the real battle will be over the upcoming war budget. That will not be a pretty sight as most of these same pro-non-binding resolution voters will run for cover, and pronto. Enough said.
FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY THAT FIGHTS FOR A WORKERS GOVERNMENT!
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!
HELLO! IT’S THE WAR BUDGET THAT COUNTS-AS THE FIVE BRIGADES DEPLOY
This will be short and sweet. The august House of Representatives of the United States Congress, in its infinite wisdom has gently chided President George W. Bush on his Iraq ‘surge’ strategy with a meaningless non-binding resolution, by a mainly party line vote. Meanwhile the additional five brigades he requested are headed for Iraq unimpeded. In politics timing is important. This vote if it had taken place before the Iraq invasion, even if non-binding, might have sent some kind of message of anti-war parliamentary opposition.
Today it only demonstrates how far the bourgeois politicians are behind the citizenry on this war issue. Well, nobody ever accused these denizens of parliamentary cretinism of being ahead of the curve-on anything. In any case, the real battle will be over the upcoming war budget. That will not be a pretty sight as most of these same pro-non-binding resolution voters will run for cover, and pronto. Enough said.
FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY THAT FIGHTS FOR A WORKERS GOVERNMENT!
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, February 16, 2007
*** A Saga Of The Second Chinese Revolution, 1925-27-Andre Malraux's "Man's Fate"
Click on title to link to Wikipedia's sentry for French writer and politician Andre Malraux.
Markin comment:
Leon Trotsky, early on, praised Malraux's literary talents. He was, and would have been, less enamored of Malraux's later career as Stalin admirer and subsequently in the post World II era a minister of culture under France's strongman Charles DeGaulle. Oh, well, everyone familiar with the biographic sketches of past literary figures knows that that milieu is replete with writers who cannot resist being in the circles of power-no matter the political cost. Still, in his prime Malraux could write thoughtful novels and write circles around most of his contemporaries. Trotsky was not wrong on that score, although he also seemed to be aware of certain moral flabbiness in Malraux. He was not wrong there either.
BOOK REVIEW
MAN'S FATE, ANDRE MALRAUX, VINTAGE BOOKS, NEW YORK, 1990
As a young man many held out high hopes that the French writer Andre Malraux would become an accomplished revolutionary writer, or at least an extraordinary writer of revolutionary sagas. No less a communist literary critic than Leon Trotsky, the consummate man of action and letters, praised his early work. "Man’s Fate" is a prime example of the reason that leftist critics praised his work. Although later events would destroy his reputation as a writer and as a man of action on the left this novel takes its place in the pantheon of well-written expressions of the dilemma of modern humankind confronted as it is with one half of itself mired in the mundane bourgeois,and as is the case in this book also the feudal,world and the other half striving toward a more just and equitable society.
The action of the novel takes place in the throes of the Second Chinese revolution at a point where the alliance between Chiang Kai-Shek’s Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party had broken down and Chiang was ready to butcher the Communists in order to take undisputed control of the Chinese state. Like Russia before it, everyone had known that a second Chinese Revolution was coming. The only question at that point was whether it was to be a bourgeois revolution in the classic Western sense or a socialist revolution that would go a long way to helping the Soviet Union of the 1920’s break out of its isolation after various unsuccessful revolutionary attempts in the West had failed. As it turned out neither event occurred at that time. This tension, and especially the tension of the Communists who were under orders from the Communist International, and hence Moscow, to subordinate themselves to Chiang unconditionally, is what drives the action.
The novel is also a snapshot of what the Communist International's ‘high policy’ of collaboration with Chiang looked like as it was implemented on the ground among the secondary cadre and rank and filers of the Chinese Communist Party, their allies, semi-allies, adversaries and the merely indifferent. In that context, it is additionally an early literary expose of the relationship between those who carry out, even if in small ways, Western imperialist policy in their separate and exclusive colonial enclaves and those ‘natives’ who do the ‘coolie’ work. That tension exists today, as can readily be seen in places like Iraq, so one should pay particular attention to that dynamic. Read on.
Markin comment:
Leon Trotsky, early on, praised Malraux's literary talents. He was, and would have been, less enamored of Malraux's later career as Stalin admirer and subsequently in the post World II era a minister of culture under France's strongman Charles DeGaulle. Oh, well, everyone familiar with the biographic sketches of past literary figures knows that that milieu is replete with writers who cannot resist being in the circles of power-no matter the political cost. Still, in his prime Malraux could write thoughtful novels and write circles around most of his contemporaries. Trotsky was not wrong on that score, although he also seemed to be aware of certain moral flabbiness in Malraux. He was not wrong there either.
BOOK REVIEW
MAN'S FATE, ANDRE MALRAUX, VINTAGE BOOKS, NEW YORK, 1990
As a young man many held out high hopes that the French writer Andre Malraux would become an accomplished revolutionary writer, or at least an extraordinary writer of revolutionary sagas. No less a communist literary critic than Leon Trotsky, the consummate man of action and letters, praised his early work. "Man’s Fate" is a prime example of the reason that leftist critics praised his work. Although later events would destroy his reputation as a writer and as a man of action on the left this novel takes its place in the pantheon of well-written expressions of the dilemma of modern humankind confronted as it is with one half of itself mired in the mundane bourgeois,and as is the case in this book also the feudal,world and the other half striving toward a more just and equitable society.
The action of the novel takes place in the throes of the Second Chinese revolution at a point where the alliance between Chiang Kai-Shek’s Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party had broken down and Chiang was ready to butcher the Communists in order to take undisputed control of the Chinese state. Like Russia before it, everyone had known that a second Chinese Revolution was coming. The only question at that point was whether it was to be a bourgeois revolution in the classic Western sense or a socialist revolution that would go a long way to helping the Soviet Union of the 1920’s break out of its isolation after various unsuccessful revolutionary attempts in the West had failed. As it turned out neither event occurred at that time. This tension, and especially the tension of the Communists who were under orders from the Communist International, and hence Moscow, to subordinate themselves to Chiang unconditionally, is what drives the action.
The novel is also a snapshot of what the Communist International's ‘high policy’ of collaboration with Chiang looked like as it was implemented on the ground among the secondary cadre and rank and filers of the Chinese Communist Party, their allies, semi-allies, adversaries and the merely indifferent. In that context, it is additionally an early literary expose of the relationship between those who carry out, even if in small ways, Western imperialist policy in their separate and exclusive colonial enclaves and those ‘natives’ who do the ‘coolie’ work. That tension exists today, as can readily be seen in places like Iraq, so one should pay particular attention to that dynamic. Read on.
Thursday, February 15, 2007
ONCE AGAIN-HANDS OFF IRAN!!
COMMENTARY
WHEN BUSH DENIES AN INTENTION TO ATTACK IRAN GET SCARED, VERY SCARED.
Over the past couple of weeks, amid the din of these meaningless non-binding resolutions on the Iraq ‘surge’ before both branches of Congress, the Bush Administration has created a ‘surge’ of its own on Iran. The most interesting, if most ominous, aspect of this propaganda campaign for war against Iran is a recent news conference in which Administration officials laid out yet another variant of the ‘smoking gun’ connection between Iran and the insurgency in Iraq.
Since that time they have been backtracking on how high up in the Iranian government this material support for the Iraqi insurgency went. That admission should put even the must obtuse bourgeois politician on notice that this is another one of those flimsy, half-baked ‘cooked’ intelligence schemes made to order for the dictates of American foreign policy. As the pre- Iraq War‘cooked’ intelligence reports confirm a 30 plus billion dollar budget does not buy much in the way of intelligence these days. I am waiting, breathlessly, to have it revealed that the source of this information is the late Shah’s grandson or some other CIA hanger-on looking to get back into power. Then the Iraq comparison would be complete.
Know this, however, when Secretary of War Gates denies any intention of attacking Iran; when Bush denies any intention of invading Iran; when. Laura Bush says ‘no way’; and, Condi Rice says “Are you crazy? we have a full plate already." , you know the final attack plans are being put in order. More ominous, I have not heard a peep out of Dick Cheney on this subject. Someone in the White House has obviously forgotten to read the Iraq Study Group Report (you remember that little chestnut that was suppose to allow a 'graceful'exit from Iraq and recommended that the Administration make 'nice' with Iran).
Know this also-this writer does no support the women-hating, anti-modernist fundamentalist mullahs in Iran and their crazy theocratic ambitions. However, the fight to replace them is the task of the Iranian people, it cannot be outsourced to American imperialism. If, and when, the deal goes down and American imperialism pulls the hammer I say-U.S. HANDS OFF IRAN!! Get the posters and placards ready.
WHEN BUSH DENIES AN INTENTION TO ATTACK IRAN GET SCARED, VERY SCARED.
Over the past couple of weeks, amid the din of these meaningless non-binding resolutions on the Iraq ‘surge’ before both branches of Congress, the Bush Administration has created a ‘surge’ of its own on Iran. The most interesting, if most ominous, aspect of this propaganda campaign for war against Iran is a recent news conference in which Administration officials laid out yet another variant of the ‘smoking gun’ connection between Iran and the insurgency in Iraq.
Since that time they have been backtracking on how high up in the Iranian government this material support for the Iraqi insurgency went. That admission should put even the must obtuse bourgeois politician on notice that this is another one of those flimsy, half-baked ‘cooked’ intelligence schemes made to order for the dictates of American foreign policy. As the pre- Iraq War‘cooked’ intelligence reports confirm a 30 plus billion dollar budget does not buy much in the way of intelligence these days. I am waiting, breathlessly, to have it revealed that the source of this information is the late Shah’s grandson or some other CIA hanger-on looking to get back into power. Then the Iraq comparison would be complete.
Know this, however, when Secretary of War Gates denies any intention of attacking Iran; when Bush denies any intention of invading Iran; when. Laura Bush says ‘no way’; and, Condi Rice says “Are you crazy? we have a full plate already." , you know the final attack plans are being put in order. More ominous, I have not heard a peep out of Dick Cheney on this subject. Someone in the White House has obviously forgotten to read the Iraq Study Group Report (you remember that little chestnut that was suppose to allow a 'graceful'exit from Iraq and recommended that the Administration make 'nice' with Iran).
Know this also-this writer does no support the women-hating, anti-modernist fundamentalist mullahs in Iran and their crazy theocratic ambitions. However, the fight to replace them is the task of the Iranian people, it cannot be outsourced to American imperialism. If, and when, the deal goes down and American imperialism pulls the hammer I say-U.S. HANDS OFF IRAN!! Get the posters and placards ready.
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
ROSA LUXEMBURG-THE ROSE OF THE REVOLUTION
BOOK REVIEW
ROSA LUXEMBURG, E. ETTINGER, VINTAGE PRESS, 1989
MARCH IS WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH
If you need to know, and you should, what Rosa Luxemburg's contributions to Marxist theory were and about her struggles within various European left-wing socialist parties to fight for her revolutionary perspective then this is not the book for you. You need to read Rosa Luxemburg Speaks or read one of her eminent political biographers like P. Froelich or M. Nettl. If, however, you know Rosa's theories and political struggles then this book can provide some insights about what it was like to be a leading revolutionary socialist woman in early 20th century Europe.
Ms. Ettinger has based her work on various correspondences between Rosa and her political associates, women friends and her lovers, particularly the tempestuous and long time relationship with Leo Jogliches. In that sense this is a more scholarly work than what currently passes for the personal biography of political celebrities, and its shows by keeping speculation about personal motives within some kind of bounds. In short, it is a labor of love, not of political love because the author makes no bones that she is not in sympathy with Rosa's overall political strategy but of deep admiration for someone who listened to her own drummer. And did it in a very much male-dominated political world.
I read political biographies mainly to get a background look at what makes the subject of the biography tick. After reading this book it struck me once again that even revolutionaries, and particularly revolutionary women, cannot fully transcend the facts of their personal upbringing and their times. Clearly, Rosa was a liberated woman by any measure. However, I got the overwhelming feeling that she could never fully transcend the outsider-ness of being Jewish or of the terrible strain of breaking free of the mores of Victorian Europe. It may be a truism of Marxism but true nevertheless that it would take some generations before the `new' man and women would fully take on the attributes of socialist comradeship but after reading this book it is also clear that even the `vanguard' intellectuals of the movement can only go so far in transcending their capitalist environment. Nevertheless Remember Rosa Luxemburg-the Rose of the Revolution.
ROSA LUXEMBURG, E. ETTINGER, VINTAGE PRESS, 1989
MARCH IS WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH
If you need to know, and you should, what Rosa Luxemburg's contributions to Marxist theory were and about her struggles within various European left-wing socialist parties to fight for her revolutionary perspective then this is not the book for you. You need to read Rosa Luxemburg Speaks or read one of her eminent political biographers like P. Froelich or M. Nettl. If, however, you know Rosa's theories and political struggles then this book can provide some insights about what it was like to be a leading revolutionary socialist woman in early 20th century Europe.
Ms. Ettinger has based her work on various correspondences between Rosa and her political associates, women friends and her lovers, particularly the tempestuous and long time relationship with Leo Jogliches. In that sense this is a more scholarly work than what currently passes for the personal biography of political celebrities, and its shows by keeping speculation about personal motives within some kind of bounds. In short, it is a labor of love, not of political love because the author makes no bones that she is not in sympathy with Rosa's overall political strategy but of deep admiration for someone who listened to her own drummer. And did it in a very much male-dominated political world.
I read political biographies mainly to get a background look at what makes the subject of the biography tick. After reading this book it struck me once again that even revolutionaries, and particularly revolutionary women, cannot fully transcend the facts of their personal upbringing and their times. Clearly, Rosa was a liberated woman by any measure. However, I got the overwhelming feeling that she could never fully transcend the outsider-ness of being Jewish or of the terrible strain of breaking free of the mores of Victorian Europe. It may be a truism of Marxism but true nevertheless that it would take some generations before the `new' man and women would fully take on the attributes of socialist comradeship but after reading this book it is also clear that even the `vanguard' intellectuals of the movement can only go so far in transcending their capitalist environment. Nevertheless Remember Rosa Luxemburg-the Rose of the Revolution.
IN DEFENSE OF RALPH NADER'S RIGHT TO RUN FOR PRESIDENT-IN 2000
COMMENTARY
FORGET ELEPHANTS, DONKEYS AND GREENS-BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
A documentary concerning the trials and tribulation of seemingly perennial presidential candidate and bourgeois gadfly Ralph Nader has just come out, oddly titled an “Unreasonable Man”. Ordinarily I would not give a tinker’s damn about reviewing such a film event but a couple of things brought out in the film have gotten me in lather. Those who have been reading this space over the last year should be well aware that I hold not truck with the Green Party or for that matter Ralph Nader’s run as an independent candidate. An alienated leftist (maybe?) candidacy, in either form, acting as a pressure on the Democratic Party to be ‘good’ is not the strategy necessary for the times. That strategy might have at least made a little political sense in about 1912 but, dear readers, that is a very long political time ago (although my candidate then, in any case, would have been the Socialist Party's Eugene V. Debs). But, as for the defense of Nader, fair is fair and besides I have an ulterior motive here-listen up.
One of the themes that come out of the film is a free-for- all retroactive thrashing of Nader, mainly by liberal Democratic gurus, for allegedly getting George Bush elected in 2000. Apparently, Mr. Nader is thus responsible for everything that has happened since then from the invasion of Iraq to global warming to the failure of the Chicago Cubs to win a World Series. Grow up! And get over it! Part of the charm of bourgeois politics is the necessity for political amnesia. The Bush-Gore contest was a yawner. People literally could not tell them apart, at the time. If there are quantitative differences today that does not undermine the central premise of their existence, or Nader’s either for that matter. None of them challenge the central capitalist production system and its profit motive. Of course not, that would be the beginning of wisdom.
Moreover, while we are at it why blame Nader for the debacle in 2000? And here is my real point. Why not blame Bill Clinton for his scandal-ridden second term? Why not blame the flimsy anti-democratic Supreme Court ruling that stopped the count? Why not blame the Constitutional Conventioneers of 1787 who created that albatross anti- plebian Electoral College system? Lastly, why not blame Al Gore himself whose insipid campaign against a ‘light-weight’ Bush candidacy drove even supporters to distraction? The point, although this thought is wasted on the liberal gurus, is that someone outside the two-party system should have the democratic right to run for any elective office he or she chooses. And that is what workers party advocates should take from this trashing of Nader. The two parties and their agents make it tough enough for third parties to have access to the electoral political process. Letting them get away with this cheapjack retro-bashing of Nader’s right to stand for the presidency should not go unopposed. Enough said.
FORGET ELEPHANTS, DONKEYS AND GREENS-BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
A documentary concerning the trials and tribulation of seemingly perennial presidential candidate and bourgeois gadfly Ralph Nader has just come out, oddly titled an “Unreasonable Man”. Ordinarily I would not give a tinker’s damn about reviewing such a film event but a couple of things brought out in the film have gotten me in lather. Those who have been reading this space over the last year should be well aware that I hold not truck with the Green Party or for that matter Ralph Nader’s run as an independent candidate. An alienated leftist (maybe?) candidacy, in either form, acting as a pressure on the Democratic Party to be ‘good’ is not the strategy necessary for the times. That strategy might have at least made a little political sense in about 1912 but, dear readers, that is a very long political time ago (although my candidate then, in any case, would have been the Socialist Party's Eugene V. Debs). But, as for the defense of Nader, fair is fair and besides I have an ulterior motive here-listen up.
One of the themes that come out of the film is a free-for- all retroactive thrashing of Nader, mainly by liberal Democratic gurus, for allegedly getting George Bush elected in 2000. Apparently, Mr. Nader is thus responsible for everything that has happened since then from the invasion of Iraq to global warming to the failure of the Chicago Cubs to win a World Series. Grow up! And get over it! Part of the charm of bourgeois politics is the necessity for political amnesia. The Bush-Gore contest was a yawner. People literally could not tell them apart, at the time. If there are quantitative differences today that does not undermine the central premise of their existence, or Nader’s either for that matter. None of them challenge the central capitalist production system and its profit motive. Of course not, that would be the beginning of wisdom.
Moreover, while we are at it why blame Nader for the debacle in 2000? And here is my real point. Why not blame Bill Clinton for his scandal-ridden second term? Why not blame the flimsy anti-democratic Supreme Court ruling that stopped the count? Why not blame the Constitutional Conventioneers of 1787 who created that albatross anti- plebian Electoral College system? Lastly, why not blame Al Gore himself whose insipid campaign against a ‘light-weight’ Bush candidacy drove even supporters to distraction? The point, although this thought is wasted on the liberal gurus, is that someone outside the two-party system should have the democratic right to run for any elective office he or she chooses. And that is what workers party advocates should take from this trashing of Nader. The two parties and their agents make it tough enough for third parties to have access to the electoral political process. Letting them get away with this cheapjack retro-bashing of Nader’s right to stand for the presidency should not go unopposed. Enough said.
Saturday, February 10, 2007
*PROTEST THE GOVERNMENT ROUNDUP OF FORMER BLACK PANTHERS!
Click on the title to link to the Partisan Defense Commitee Web site.
THE FOLLOWING IS PASSED ON FROM THE PARTISAN DEFENSE COMMITTEE. I WOULD ADD THAT FEBRUARY IS BLACK HISTORY MONTH, A TIME USED TO EMPHASIS BLACK ACHIEVEMENT AND WHAT IS POSITIVE IN THE BLACK EXPERIENCE. THIS ROUNDUP OF FORMER BLACK PANTHERS HIGHLIGHTS THE UNDERSIDE OF THAT EXPERIENCE- THE REPRESSION AND THE MISERY OF JAILS AND PRISONS THAT HAVE ALSO BEEN PART OF THE BLACK EXPERIENCE IN AMERICA, ESPECIALLY FOR BLACK MILITANTS.
JANUARY 27—In early morning raids on January 23 in California, New York and Florida, police arrested former Black Panther Party members on charges including murder and conspiracy in relation to the 1971 death of San Francisco police officer John Young. Two of the eight arrested were already in prison, and one more is being sought. Coming on top of decades of harassment, grand jury investigations and indictments, the racist roundup shows the relentlessness of the state's vendetta against the Black Liberation Army (BLA), an offshoot of the Black Panther Party, and other former Panthers. Fighters for black rights, labor activists and the left must demand: Drop all the charges now!
The San Francisco Chronicle's front pages have been filled with stories in which those charged are smeared as "classic domestic terrorists" carrying out a campaign aimed at "assassinating law enforcement officers." There was a campaign of terror in the 1960s and '70s: the government's murderous COINTELPRO effort to destroy an entire generation of black and leftist militants, in which 38 Panthers were killed. In September 1968, FBI head J. Edgar Hoover called the Black Panthers "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country," Commenting on today's climate defined by the "war on terror," Ray Boudreaux, one of those arrested in the roundup, said, "When I watched on TV the twin towers come down, deep in my heart I knew that someone will come by and visit me as soon as they can get it organized, and they did. Once upon a time, they called me a terrorist too. To expedite something in the system, they put the 'terror' tag on it, and it gets done" (Los Angeles Times, 24 January).
Prosecutors are now claiming new evidence and a secret government witness. Defense attorneys believe that the witness is Ruben Scott, whose "confession" following his arrest in 1973 was coerced through torture, as were those of two others. As Bill Goodman, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, said, "The case against these men was built on torture and serves to remind us that the U.S. government, which recently has engaged in such horrific forms of torture and abuse at places like Bagram, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, has a history of torture and abuse in this country as well, particularly against African Americans."
Two other former BLA members, Assata Shakur and Sundiata Acoli, were victimized in a frame-up following a 1973 ambush by New Jersey state troopers, during which one of the cops was killed in the crossfire with a bullet from a police revolver. While Sundiata Acoli has been in prison for over 30 years, Assata escaped prison hell in 1979 and fled to Cuba, where she still resides. In May 2005, the federal Department of Justice and the State of New Jersey raised the bounty on Assata Shakur's head to $1 million, and the Feds added her name to domestic and international "terrorist" lists. Hands off Assata Shakur! Free Sundiata Acoli!
After being imprisoned for 27 years for a murder the police and state authorities knew he did not commit, former Panther leader Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt) won his freedom in 1997. Dhoruba bin Wahad (formerly known as Richard Moore) won his freedom in 1990. Dhoruba was a leader of the New York Panther 21, who in May 1971, after the longest trial in New York State history, were acquitted of charges of conspiracy to blow up the New York Botanical Gardens and various buildings. He was subsequently railroaded to prison for 17 years.
A key focus of the fight against the state's racist frame-up machinery must be the struggle to free Mumia Abu-Jamal. A leader of the Philadelphia Panthers in his teens and later a renowned journalist and supporter of the MOVE organization, Mumia was falsely convicted in 1982 of killing a Philadelphia policeman and sentenced to death explicitly for his political beliefs as a Black Panther. Free Mumia! Abolish the racist death penalty!
We print below a January 27 protest letter by the Partisan Defense Committee to California Attorney General Jerry Brown.
We vehemently protest the nationally coordinated arrests of former Black Panther Party members who were charged with murder and conspiracy for the unsolved 1971 killing of San Francisco police officer, John Young. Those arrested were Richard Brown, Richard O'Neal, Francisco Torres, Ray Boudreaux, Henry Watson Jones and Harold Taylor. Two men already in jail—Herman Bell and Anthony Bottom—were also charged. The police are still seeking Ronald Bridgeforth who is additionally being charged with aggravated assault. This is a continuation of the decades-long government vendetta against the Black Liberation Army and other former members of the Black Panther Party. The Partisan Defense Committee demands: Drop the charges! Release them now!
This nationwide roundup is part of the state's campaign to paint those who stand up for black rights as "terrorists." For over 30 years the police have tried to pin this murder on these men. Charges brought in 1975 against John Bowman (who just died) and Harold Taylor were obtained through torture by the New Orleans police after they were tracked to New Orleans by two San Francisco police inspectors. According to press accounts, their torture included being stripped naked and beaten with blunt objects, placing electric probes on their genitals and inserting an electric cattle prod in each man's anus. The charges were dismissed because the prosecution had failed to tell the grand jury that the men's confessions had been coerced. Thirty years later, prosecutors were still unsuccessful in obtaining indictments of any of these men despite convening California state and federal grand juries—first in 2003-2004, May and August of 2005.
The State of California is no stranger to locking up Black Panther Party members on bogus murder charges. Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt) spent 27 years in prison for a murder that the FBI and Los Angeles police knew he did not commit. Though the BPP was destroyed thirty years ago, the government vendetta has never ceased. The FBI COINTELPRO terror campaign resulted in the outright killing of 38 key Panther activists by the FBI and local police. Those they couldn't kill were framed up and locked away in America's prison hellholes, including Mumia Abu-Jamal who was sentenced to death on false charges of killing a policeman. Mumia's death sentence was secured by the prosecutor's grotesque lie that his membership in the Panthers as a teenager proved he had been planning to kill a cop for twelve years. Tuesday's arrests are but another instance where the government, having failed in earlier efforts, resorts to extraordinary repressive measures to ensure persecution of those it deems opponents.
Drop the charges! Release them now!
THE FOLLOWING IS PASSED ON FROM THE PARTISAN DEFENSE COMMITTEE. I WOULD ADD THAT FEBRUARY IS BLACK HISTORY MONTH, A TIME USED TO EMPHASIS BLACK ACHIEVEMENT AND WHAT IS POSITIVE IN THE BLACK EXPERIENCE. THIS ROUNDUP OF FORMER BLACK PANTHERS HIGHLIGHTS THE UNDERSIDE OF THAT EXPERIENCE- THE REPRESSION AND THE MISERY OF JAILS AND PRISONS THAT HAVE ALSO BEEN PART OF THE BLACK EXPERIENCE IN AMERICA, ESPECIALLY FOR BLACK MILITANTS.
JANUARY 27—In early morning raids on January 23 in California, New York and Florida, police arrested former Black Panther Party members on charges including murder and conspiracy in relation to the 1971 death of San Francisco police officer John Young. Two of the eight arrested were already in prison, and one more is being sought. Coming on top of decades of harassment, grand jury investigations and indictments, the racist roundup shows the relentlessness of the state's vendetta against the Black Liberation Army (BLA), an offshoot of the Black Panther Party, and other former Panthers. Fighters for black rights, labor activists and the left must demand: Drop all the charges now!
The San Francisco Chronicle's front pages have been filled with stories in which those charged are smeared as "classic domestic terrorists" carrying out a campaign aimed at "assassinating law enforcement officers." There was a campaign of terror in the 1960s and '70s: the government's murderous COINTELPRO effort to destroy an entire generation of black and leftist militants, in which 38 Panthers were killed. In September 1968, FBI head J. Edgar Hoover called the Black Panthers "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country," Commenting on today's climate defined by the "war on terror," Ray Boudreaux, one of those arrested in the roundup, said, "When I watched on TV the twin towers come down, deep in my heart I knew that someone will come by and visit me as soon as they can get it organized, and they did. Once upon a time, they called me a terrorist too. To expedite something in the system, they put the 'terror' tag on it, and it gets done" (Los Angeles Times, 24 January).
Prosecutors are now claiming new evidence and a secret government witness. Defense attorneys believe that the witness is Ruben Scott, whose "confession" following his arrest in 1973 was coerced through torture, as were those of two others. As Bill Goodman, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, said, "The case against these men was built on torture and serves to remind us that the U.S. government, which recently has engaged in such horrific forms of torture and abuse at places like Bagram, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, has a history of torture and abuse in this country as well, particularly against African Americans."
Two other former BLA members, Assata Shakur and Sundiata Acoli, were victimized in a frame-up following a 1973 ambush by New Jersey state troopers, during which one of the cops was killed in the crossfire with a bullet from a police revolver. While Sundiata Acoli has been in prison for over 30 years, Assata escaped prison hell in 1979 and fled to Cuba, where she still resides. In May 2005, the federal Department of Justice and the State of New Jersey raised the bounty on Assata Shakur's head to $1 million, and the Feds added her name to domestic and international "terrorist" lists. Hands off Assata Shakur! Free Sundiata Acoli!
After being imprisoned for 27 years for a murder the police and state authorities knew he did not commit, former Panther leader Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt) won his freedom in 1997. Dhoruba bin Wahad (formerly known as Richard Moore) won his freedom in 1990. Dhoruba was a leader of the New York Panther 21, who in May 1971, after the longest trial in New York State history, were acquitted of charges of conspiracy to blow up the New York Botanical Gardens and various buildings. He was subsequently railroaded to prison for 17 years.
A key focus of the fight against the state's racist frame-up machinery must be the struggle to free Mumia Abu-Jamal. A leader of the Philadelphia Panthers in his teens and later a renowned journalist and supporter of the MOVE organization, Mumia was falsely convicted in 1982 of killing a Philadelphia policeman and sentenced to death explicitly for his political beliefs as a Black Panther. Free Mumia! Abolish the racist death penalty!
We print below a January 27 protest letter by the Partisan Defense Committee to California Attorney General Jerry Brown.
We vehemently protest the nationally coordinated arrests of former Black Panther Party members who were charged with murder and conspiracy for the unsolved 1971 killing of San Francisco police officer, John Young. Those arrested were Richard Brown, Richard O'Neal, Francisco Torres, Ray Boudreaux, Henry Watson Jones and Harold Taylor. Two men already in jail—Herman Bell and Anthony Bottom—were also charged. The police are still seeking Ronald Bridgeforth who is additionally being charged with aggravated assault. This is a continuation of the decades-long government vendetta against the Black Liberation Army and other former members of the Black Panther Party. The Partisan Defense Committee demands: Drop the charges! Release them now!
This nationwide roundup is part of the state's campaign to paint those who stand up for black rights as "terrorists." For over 30 years the police have tried to pin this murder on these men. Charges brought in 1975 against John Bowman (who just died) and Harold Taylor were obtained through torture by the New Orleans police after they were tracked to New Orleans by two San Francisco police inspectors. According to press accounts, their torture included being stripped naked and beaten with blunt objects, placing electric probes on their genitals and inserting an electric cattle prod in each man's anus. The charges were dismissed because the prosecution had failed to tell the grand jury that the men's confessions had been coerced. Thirty years later, prosecutors were still unsuccessful in obtaining indictments of any of these men despite convening California state and federal grand juries—first in 2003-2004, May and August of 2005.
The State of California is no stranger to locking up Black Panther Party members on bogus murder charges. Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt) spent 27 years in prison for a murder that the FBI and Los Angeles police knew he did not commit. Though the BPP was destroyed thirty years ago, the government vendetta has never ceased. The FBI COINTELPRO terror campaign resulted in the outright killing of 38 key Panther activists by the FBI and local police. Those they couldn't kill were framed up and locked away in America's prison hellholes, including Mumia Abu-Jamal who was sentenced to death on false charges of killing a policeman. Mumia's death sentence was secured by the prosecutor's grotesque lie that his membership in the Panthers as a teenager proved he had been planning to kill a cop for twelve years. Tuesday's arrests are but another instance where the government, having failed in earlier efforts, resorts to extraordinary repressive measures to ensure persecution of those it deems opponents.
Drop the charges! Release them now!
Monday, February 05, 2007
*From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-Black Freedom, Women's Rights and the Civil War
Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for black abolitionist Sojourner Truth.
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Spring 1989 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
**********
Black Freedom, Women's Rights
and the Civil War
This article is based on a talk given by W&R associate editor Amy Rath at a public forum held 5 April 1988 at Howard University. For additional historical material on women in the anti-slavery struggle, see "The Grimke Sisters: Pioneers for Abolition and Women's Rights" (W&R No. 29, Spring 1985) and "Harriet Tubman: Fighter for Black Freedom" (W&R No. 32, Winter 1986).
The talk discusses the movement for women's rights in the U.S. prior to the Civil War, its link through the radical abolition movement with the fight against black slavery, and the destruction of that link to produce the antecedents of the present "feminists." It centers on the ideology of the antebellum abolitionists, the most far-sighted of whom saw that all democratic struggles were vitally linked and that deeply revolutionary changes would be required to establish equality. These men and women were not Marxists but bourgeois radicals of their time; for many, the primary political motivation was religion.
Northern anti-slavery activists espoused "free labor" and accepted the idea that if legal barriers to equality were removed, the American dream would be possible for anyone, given talent and hard work. In antebellum America, in the context of steady immigration and an expanding frontier, a propertyless farmhand could perhaps acquire land of his own, while a (white) laborer might look to becoming a small-scale employer of labor in a generation. But if the "free labor" ideology imagined a democratic political system of economic equals based on a society of skilled artisans and yeoman farmers, this model rapidly became a fiction. A capitalist class of Northern industrial, finance and railroad capitalists had the ascendancy. Though still a predominantly agricultural country, America was the fastest-growing industrial power (with the second-highest industrial output, after Britain). America was already the world's technological leader, very much feared as a competitor by Britain, birthplace of the Industrial Revolution.
The slave society of the South existed in the framework of a powerful Northern industrial sector which purchased staple crops from the South, first of all cotton. The rich plantations which possessed the South's best land and dominated the region politically were built on a pre-capitalist class relationship of black chattel slavery; at the same time they were part of a money economy in the world's most dynamic capitalist country. The conflict of social systems between the ever more powerful North and the backward South was a profound contradiction heading for collision, exacerbated by America's undemocratic "states' rights" political system which had given the South disproportionate control of the national government (especially the presidency and Supreme Court) since Independence.
The Progressive Bourgeoisie and the Limits of Reconstruction
The "irrepressible conflict" exploded in the Civil War, in the course of which Lincoln, the Northern bourgeoisie's ablest political leader, found himself obliged to go much further than he had intended in the direction of adopting the emancipation program of the abolitionists. Fifteen years before, abolitionists had been viewed as an isolated, if noisy, crew of radical fanatics.
The Civil War smashed slavery and left behind in the South a chaotic situation and four million ex-slaves who had been promised "freedom." But the war and its aftermath underlined that a truly egalitarian radical vision of social reconstruction already could not be promoted by a capitalist ruling class.
In her talk, comrade Rath emphasized the birth of a "feminist" women's movement as a rightward split at a crucial moment in American history: the era of "Reconstruction." Reconstruction posed a possibility of socially revolutionary transformations in the South: the regional ruling class, based on the ownership of land and slaves, had been militarily defeated; under the occupying Northern power, political rights were exercised by the former slaves and those willing to be allied with them.
Reconstruction brought not only black enfranchisement but significant democratic reforms: the 1868 South Carolina constitutional convention drafted the state's first divorce law, while Reconstruction legislatures established the South's first public schools and went to work on liberalizing the South's draconian penal codes and reforming the planters' property tax system (which had taxed the farmer's mule and the workman's tools while all but exempting the real wealth—land). But the Northern capitalists betrayed the promise of Reconstruction, allowing it to be physically smashed by forces such as the Ku Klux Klan, even though that meant the destruction of the Republican Party in the South.
Replacing slavery, a new system of racial subordination took shape: a refurbished system of labor discipline through such measures as one-year labor contracts and "vagrancy" laws to bind ex-slaves to the plantations, and a rigid system of Jim Crow segregation. The defeat of Reconstruction shaped the postwar South into modern times: the sharecropping, the poll taxes, convict labor (the chain gang), the "separate but equal" unequal facilities.
While the woman suffrage leaders described in comrade Rath's talk took a stand against the great democratic gains that hung in the balance, many women mobilized by the anti-slavery movement served honorably in Reconstruction, for example as freedmen's schoolteachers who risked their lives to participate in freeing black people from the chains of bondage.
During Reconstruction, debate raged over the agrarian question: the radical demand raised by the freed-men and destitute white Unionist Southerners that the secessionists' estates be confiscated and distributed to them. Some abolitionists saw that racial democracy could not be achieved if a class of whites continued to own the land where a class of blacks were laborers. They argued for justice to those who had been slaves (who created the wealth of the plantations, beginning by clearing the wilderness).
But the tide had turned: the triumphant Northern rulers would not permit such an attack on "property rights" (especially as Northerners directly and Northern banks were coming to own a good deal of Southern property). Fundamentally, the federal power reinvested political power in the hands of the former "best people" of the old Confederacy. In the sequel, intensive exploitation of black agricultural labor, rather than industrial development or capital investment in the modernization of agriculture, remained the basis of the Southern economy.
What was the alternative? Working-class power was shown by the 1848 and 1871 upheavals in Europe to be the alternative to bourgeois rule, as Marx and Engels explained from the Communist Manifesto onward, but conditions were not mature even in Europe for the small proletariat to seize and wield state power. In mid-19th century America, the Northern bourgeoisie under the pressure of a revolutionary Civil War possessed a genuinely progressive side, the basis for the abolitionists' support for the Republican Party. The abolitionists' great debates revolved around how far out in front of the progressive bourgeoisie they should be. There were "radicals" and those with a more "realistic" appraisal of what the Republican Party would support. Today, more than a century after Reconstruction, that debate is transcended. The ruling class long since passed firmly over to the side of reaction; the federal government is no defender of the oppressed. Those who look to find support for an egalitarian program in any wing of the ruling class are doomed to disappointment. To complete the unfinished democratic tasks of the bourgeois revolution is a responsibility of the modern working class.
When the post-Civil War suffragettes chose to focus on the narrowest political rights for middle-class women and turn their backs on the rights and survival of the most desperately oppressed, they prefigured all of today's "constituency" and "reform" politics which refuse to attack the profound class inequalities ingrained in capitalist society. Sojourner Truth's classic "Ain't I a Woman" speech (see below) today stands as a powerful indictment of these ladies as much as of the outright sexists she was debating. Those who renounce the revolutionary content of the demand for women's liberation so as to advance their schemes for election of female politicians or advancement of women in academia are direct descendants of those first "feminists" who refused to challenge the power structure of their time on behalf of justice for two million of their sisters who were freed slaves.
But there is another women's movement: the women who have joined in the front ranks of every revolutionary struggle on this planet, from the 19th-century radical abolitionists to the women workers who sparked the Russian Revolution to the communist women of today. When the October Revolution of 1917 smashed the old tsarist society in Russia, militant women were among the first recruits to communism in dozens of countries where women were oppressed by semi-feudal conditions and "customs." Young women radicalized around questions like women's education, the veil, wife-beating, religious obscurantism, arranged marriages, etc., recognized a road forward to uprooting social reaction and building a society freed from sexual, racial and class inequality. Our heroes are the revolutionary women who have shared in making all of revolutionary history, from the first moment that slaves rose up against the Roman Empire to the great struggles of today.
It was 1863, and the bloodiest war ever fought by the U.S. was raging. Abraham Lincoln had finally realized he must pronounce the destruction of slavery as the North's goal in this civil war. On 22 September 1862, his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation declared that on the first of January, 1863, all slaves in the Confederacy "shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free." Although the Emancipation Proclamation did not free the slaves in the border states loyal to the Union, it turned the tide of battle. The war was now indisputably a war to end slavery, not simply to repair the Union. Soon thereafter, the government began to enlist blacks into the army; these ex-slaves and sons of ex-slaves tipped the military balance in favor of the Union. It was a matter of time until black soldiers singing "John Brown's Body" marched into Charleston, South Carolina—the "soul of secession," as Karl Marx called it-after Sherman's march through Georgia to the sea.
In May of the revolutionary year 1863, the first convention of the Women's Loyal National League met in New York City. Its most eminent speaker was a woman whose name is little known today: Angelina Grimke" Weld. As part of her address she gave a keen analysis of the war:
"This war is not, as the South falsely pretends, a war of races, nor of sections, nor of political parties, but a war of Principles; a war upon the working classes, whether
white or black; a war against Man, the world over. In this war, the black man was the first victim, the workingman of whatever color the next; and now all who contend for the rights of labor, for free speech, free schools, free suffrage, and a free government...are
driven to do battle in defense of these or to fall with them, victims of the same violence that for two centuries has held the black man a prisoner of war "The nation is in a death-struggle. It must either become one vast slaveocracy of petty tyrants, or wholly the land of the free."
—Gerda Lerner, The Grimke Sisters from South Carolina
A resolution was presented: "There can never be a true peace in this Republic until the civil and political rights of all citizens of African descent and all women are practically established." Angelina Grimke' defended it against those who thought it too radical:
"I rejoice exceedingly that that resolution would combine us with the negro. I feel that we have been with him— True, we have not felt the slaveholder's lash; true, we have not had our hands manacled, but our hearts have been crushed I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours."
It was only after the Civil War that an ideology arose which was later named "feminism": the idea that the main division in society is sex. In response to the debate over the role of the newly freed slaves in U.S. society, the leaders of the woman suffrage movement—Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony—sided with the counterrevolutionary assault on Reconstruction. The birth of bourgeois feminism was part of a right-wing process which shattered the vision of the left wing of the revolutionary democracy into separate, feeble bourgeois reform movements.
The Second American Revolution
The Civil War was one of the great social revolutions in the history of the world, destroying the slaveholding class in the South and freeing the black slaves. Not only Marxists saw that. The best fighters of the day—the Grimke sisters, the great black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, the Radical Republican Congressman Thaddeus Stevens—knew that the war would have to become a revolution against slavery before the North could win. They hated the feudalistic society of the South, with its degraded slaves, its cruelty, its arrogant, leisurely gentlemen planters, its impoverished rural whites, its lack of education, industry and general culture. The radical abolitionists wanted to wipe away that society, and also saw much wrong in the North, such as the subservience of women, and legal and social discrimination against blacks. Their ideology was to create a new order based on free labor and "equality before the law," a concept brought to the U.S. by the Radical Republican Charles Sumner out of his study of the 1789 French Revolution.
In Europe after the French Revolution the status of women was the most visible expression of the contradiction between capitalist society and its own ideals. But in the U.S. that was not so true, because of chattel slavery. The United States—the first country to proclaim itself a democratic republic—was the largest slaveholding country in the world, a huge historical contradiction which had to be resolved.
The Industrial Revolution
It was the Industrial Revolution, fundamentally, that generated what William Seward called the "Irrepressible Conflict." In broad historical terms the Industrial Revolution had created the material conditions for the elimination of slavery in society. Technological and social advances made possible a much more productive capitalist agriculture and industry. In 1854 the abolitionist clergyman Theodore Parker described slavery as "the foe to Northern Industry—to our mines, our manufactures, and our commerce...to our democratic politics in the State, our democratic culture in the school, our democratic work in the community" (quoted in James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom).
The Industrial Revolution had a contradictory effect on the condition of women. Production of goods had been primarily through cottage industry, but with the invention of the spinning jenny, the power loom and the steam engine, cottage industry was ended. The men left home to go to the factory, while women stayed home to do the housework, raise the children and to buy at the local store what once they had made at home.
Women's labor ceased to be productive labor in the strict Marxist sense. This is the material basis for the 19th-century ideology of the "women's sphere." While the material advances of the Industrial Revolution made life easier for women, it also locked them into the stifling confines of domesticity in the isolated nuclear family. Women also worked in factories, but even in the industries in which they were concentrated (in textile production they made up two-thirds of the labor force) generally they worked only for a few years before getting married.
The Fight for Women's Legal Rights
Slaves were a class, but women are a specially oppressed group dispersed through all social classes. Although all women were oppressed to some extent because of their position in the family, the class differences were fundamental between the black slave woman and the slave plantation mistress, or the Northern German-speaking laundress and the wife of the owner of the Pennsylvania iron mill. "Sisterhood" was as much a myth then as it is now. Women identified first with the class to which they belonged, determined by who their husbands or fathers were.
Before the Civil War, women were basically without any civil rights. They couldn't sue or be sued, they couldn't be on juries, all their property and earnings went to their husband or father. Although women did have the vote for a few years in New Jersey and Virginia after the American Revolution, this advance was quickly eliminated. (This was part of a general right-wing turn after the Revolution, when suffrage was restricted gradually through property qualifications. In New York State, for example, with some restrictions blacks could vote up to about 1821.) For the wealthy upper-class woman, this lack of legal rights loomed as a terrible injustice because it prevented her from functioning as a full member of the ruling class (Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the mother of American feminism and the daughter of a judge, felt this keenly). For the working-class or slave woman, if her property legally belonged to her husband it didn't seem a problem— she didn't have any property.
Though the legal question was a small matter for poor and slave women, nevertheless legal injustice is not insignificant for Marxists, and it is bound up with multi-layered social oppression. This was true for the position of women in pre-Civil War society. Until the 1850s wife-beating was legal in most states. Divorce was almost impossible, and when it was obtained children went with the husband. The accepted attitude toward women was assumption of their "inferiority," and the Bible was considered an authority. When anesthesia was discovered in the 1840s, doctors opposed its use for childbirth, because that suffering was women's punishment for Eve's sin.
The Anti-Slavery Struggle and Democratic Rights
But how were women to fight for equal rights in this society divided between slave and free? Angelina Grimke' was precisely correct when she said, "until the negro gets his rights, we will never have ours." It was necessary to destroy chattel slavery, which was retarding the development of the whole society. The movement for women's rights developed in the North out of the struggle to abolish slavery. It could hardly have developed in the South. In the decades before the war, in response to the growing Northern anti-slavery agitation, the South was becoming more reactionary than ever: more fanatical in defense of the ideology of slavery and more openly repressive. There were wholesale assaults on basic democratic rights, from attacks on the rights of the small layer of free blacks, who were seen as a source of agitation and insurrection, to a ban on the distribution of abolitionist literature.
In the South, there were no public schools. It was illegal to teach slaves to read, and almost half of the entire Southern population was illiterate. But in the North over 90 percent of the residents could read and write. Girls and boys went to school in about the same proportions, the only country in the world where this was true. So while in the North women teachers were paid less than men, and women factory hands received one-quarter the wage of men, in the South there were few teachers at all, and few industrial workers.
As a young slave in Maryland, and later while he was trying to earn a living as a refugee in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Frederick Douglass came to understand the common interests of all working people in the South, slaves and free blacks and whites. He learned a trade on the docks, where he experienced racist treatment from white workmen, who saw black labor as a threat to their jobs. But Douglass realized that the position of the workmen, too, against their boss was eroded and weakened by slavery and racism. As Marx said, "Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded." And indeed, the working-class movement met with little success in the antebellum U.S., whereas after the war there was an upsurge in unionism and labor struggle.
The vanguard of the abolitionist movement—the radical insurrectionist wing—believed in the identity of the interests of all the oppressed. John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, the great activist of the Underground Railroad, and the Grimke sisters were all inspired by a vision of human equality based in revolutionary democracy. Although their egalitarian principle was based on a religious view and ours is based on a Marxist understanding of society, we honor their essential work in leading the anti-slavery struggle. The abolition of slavery did profoundly alter the United States, it did open the road to liberation by making possible the development of the proletariat and its revolutionary vanguard, which will establish justice by abolishing the exploitation of man by man.
The Grimke Sisters of South Carolina
Penetrating insights into the situation of women in pre-Civil War America came from women who were committed abolitionists. Sarah and Angelina Grimke are examples, as is Sojourner Truth who is better known today. The Grimke sisters were unusual members of the ruling class who defected to the other side. As daughters of one of South Carolina's most powerful slave-holding families, they had grown up in luxury, but left the South because of their revulsion for slavery. The Grimke sisters became famous in 1837-1838 as agents of the American Anti-Slavery Society. The power of their personal witness of the atrocities of the slave system drew huge audiences. The sisters were quick to point out that as upper-class white women, they had seen only the "better" treatment of the house and city slaves, and not the more brutal treatment of plantation hands in the fields. But one of the things they did know about was the sexual exploitation of women slaves and the brutal breakup of black families through the slave trade.
Because the sisters addressed the issues of sexual exploitation frankly and often, it was one of the issues the opposition used to try to shut them up. The clergy complained that the Grimke's brought up a subject "which ought not to be named"—how dare these delicate .blossoms of Southern womanhood talk about sex! The very idea of women speaking publicly represented an attack on the proper relationship between the sexes and would upset "women's place" in the home. Contemporary observers were shocked by the sight of women participating actively in the debates of the anti-slavery movement, as they did especially in New England, the birthplace of radical abolitionism. The Grimkes replied by pointing out that the same argument was used against abolition itself: it would upset the established order of social relations. They effectively linked up women's rights and emancipation of the slaves.
Sojourner Truth: "Ain't I a Woman?"
Black women got it from both sides, as the life of Sojourner Truth shows. She was born a slave around 1797 in New York State and was not freed until 1827, under the "gradual emancipation" provisions of the state law. As a slave she was prevented from marrying the man she loved, who was brutally beaten for daring to visit her (they were owned by different masters). They were both forcibly married to other slaves. Her son was sold South as a small child, away from her. After she was freed, she lived a backbreaking existence in New York City, one of the more racist cities in the North and a center for the slave trade.
Sojourner Truth went to all the women's rights conventions. The famous story about her dates from 1853. The usual crowd of male hecklers had almost shut down the proceedings. The women were unable to answer their sneers of how delicate and weak women were. Sojourner Truth asked for the floor and got it, despite the opposition of a lot of the delegates to the presence of a black abolitionist. You have to keep in mind what this woman looked like in this gathering of ladies: she was six feet tall, nearly 60 years old, very tough and work-worn. She said:
"The man over there says women need to be helped into carriages and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages or over puddles, or gives me the best place—and ain't I a woman?
"Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted and gathered into barns, and no man could head me—and ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have born...children, and seen most of 'em sold into slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me—and ain't I a woman?"
—Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle
Sojourner Truth put her finger on the heart of the contradiction between the stifling idealization of women and their oppression as housewives and mothers and exploitation as slaves and workers.
Women's Rights and the Abolitionist Movement
Support for women's rights was tenuous within the politically diverse anti-slavery movement. Many free-soilers were not anti-racist; some opposed slavery because they didn't want blacks around. Even some of the most dedicated abolitionists argued that "women's rights" could harm the anti-slavery cause, and in 1840 a split in the American Anti-Slavery Society was precipitated by the election of a woman to the leading body.
That same year at an international anti-slavery meeting in London, women members of the American delegation were denied their seats. In the audience was the young Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Out of this experience she decided to begin organizing for women's rights. Eight years later, in 1848, at Seneca Falls, New York the first women's rights convention in the world was held. At first Stanton wasn't going to put forward the vote as a demand—she was afraid it was too extreme. She had to be argued into it by Frederick Douglass. It was the only demand that didn't get unanimous support at the meeting; it was considered too radical.
The role of Douglass was not an accident. The best fighters for women's rights were not the Elizabeth Cady Stantons and the Susan B. Anthonys—the ones who "put women first"—but the left-wing abolitionists. The most militant advocates of black equality, the insurrectionist wing, the prophets of the Civil War, were also the most consistent fighters for women's rights, because they saw no division of interest between blacks and women. Frederick Douglass not only attended all the women's meetings, arguing effectively for full equality for women, but he brought the message elsewhere. He put forward resolutions for women's rights at black conventions, and they were passed. He used to advertise the meetings in his paper and print reports on the proceedings. His paper's motto was, "Right is of no Sex—Truth is of no Color—God is the Father of us all, and we are all Brethren."
The Fight Over the 14th Amendment
Stanton and Anthony had suspended their woman suffrage campaign for the duration of the war. They circulated petitions for a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery, which became the 13th Amendment. After the war Stanton and Anthony set up an Equal Rights Association to agitate for the vote for both blacks and women. They thought because of the broad social upheaval the time was ripe for woman suffrage. But this proved not to be the case.
The question here was citizenship rights under capitalist law, specifically voting. Compare it with how voting rights and citizenship were looked at in another revolution at the same time: the 1871 Paris Commune, the first proletarian revolution (whose example dramatically reinforced ideological conservatism among the American bourgeoisie). The Commune subsumed nationality and citizenship to class considerations. Anybody who got elected from the working class, whatever country they were born in, sat on the legislative body of the Commune, while the industrialists and the bourgeois parliamentarians fled the city and were "disenfranchised" as their property was expropriated.
This was not on the agenda in the United States in the 1860s. The historical tasks of the Civil War and Reconstruction were to complete the unfinished bourgeois revolution, to resolve questions like slave versus free, national sovereignty and democratic rights. In his novel Gore Vidal calls Lincoln the Bismarck of his country, and this is justified. For example, before the Civil War, each state printed its own money. Greenbacks were first made by the Union to finance the war. The Supreme Court regularly said, "the United States are." Only after the war did this country's name become a singular noun—one national government.
But the big question was what to do with the newly emancipated slaves, and this question focused on two things: land and the vote. The debate over the vote represented, in legal terms, a struggle to determine what "citizenship" meant in relation to the state. Many Northern states did not allow blacks to vote, either. The 14th Amendment, which was passed to answer this question, says that all persons born or naturalized in the U.S. are citizens of the nation and of the state in which they live, and that states can't abridge their "privileges and immunities" or deprive them of life, liberty, or property without "due process of law" or deny them "equal protection of the laws."
The Republican Party, which was founded as an anti-slavery party, contained within it many shades of political opinion. It has been argued that the only reason the Republicans gave the vote to blacks was to maintain political control over the states in the conquered Confederacy. This was true of some Republicans, but the men who politically dominated Congress during the period of Radical Reconstruction were committed revolutionary democrats, as observers of the time said of Thaddeus Stevens, who was called the "Robespierre, Danton, and Marat of America." There were good reasons for Douglass' loyalty to the Republicans, given after much early hesitation and sometimes combined with scathing criticism.
But there were a lot of contradictions. The party that was trying to implement black rights was also the party that was massacring the Indians in the West, breaking workers' strikes in the North, presiding over a new scale of graft and corruption, and trying to annex Santo Domingo. In the fight to replace slavery with something other than a peonage system which mimicked bondage, the land question was key. And the robber barons—the moneylords, the triumphant ruling class-rapidly got pretty nervous about the campaign to confiscate the plantations and give them to the blacks. It was an assault on property rights, in line with what those uppity workers in the North were demanding: the eight-hour day, unions, higher wages. The ruling class was quite conscious about this; an 1867 New York Times editorial stated:
"If Congress is to take cognizance of the claims of labor against capital...there can be no decent pretense for confining the task to the slave-holder of the South. It is a question, not of humanity, not of loyalty, but of the fundamental relation of industry to capital; and sooner or later, if begun at the South, it will find its way into the cities of the North.... An attempt to justify the confiscation of Southern land under the pretense of doing justice to the freedmen, strikes at the root of all property rights in both sections. It concerns Massachusetts quite as much as Mississippi."
—Eric Foner, Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War
This question was not resolved quickly, but over a couple of decades. But to collapse a lot of complex history, the revolutionary tide receded under the weight of triumphant capitalism. In 1877 Union troops were withdrawn from Southern occupation as part of the compromise making Rutherford B. Hayes president. The Civil War did not establish black equality, and the 14th and 15th Amendments which codified in law the war's revolutionary gains were turned into virtual dead letters. Nor did the Civil War liberate women, not even in a limited, legalistic sense. They continued to be denied even the simple right to vote (although in some districts in South Carolina in 1870, under the encouragement of black election officials, black women exercised the franchise for a brief time).
From the defeat of Reconstruction was spawned the kind of society we have now. On top of the fundamental class divisions in the U.S. is pervasive and institutionalized racial oppression. The black slaves were liberated from bondage only to become an oppressed race/color caste, segregated at the bottom of society— although today, unlike the immediate aftermath of Reconstruction, blacks also constitute a key component of the American proletariat.
The Birth of American Feminism
Many Radical Republicans were critical of the 14th Amendment, which was a true child of compromise. Sumner called it "uncertain, loose, cracked, and rickety." Opposition centered on a loophole that allowed a state to opt for losing some representation in Congress if it chose to restrict black suffrage—and Southern states exploited this concession. But what Elizabeth Cady Stanton didn't like about it was that for the first time, the word "male" appeared in the Constitution. And this fight was the birth of American feminism.
Of course the 14th Amendment should have given women the vote, and the importance of suffrage for black women was not inconsiderable. But a Civil War had just been fought on the question of black freedom, and it was indeed the "Negro's Hour," as many abolitionists argued. The biggest benefit for women's rights would have been to struggle for the biggest expansion possible in black freedom—to campaign for the land, for black participation in government on the state and federal level, to crush racism in the North, to integrate blacks in housing, education, jobs—to push to the limit the revolutionary possibilities of the period. But Stanton and Anthony sided with the right-wing
assault on the revolutionary opening that existed. They wrote:
"Think of Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Ung Tung who do not know the difference between a Monarchy and a Republic, who never read the Declaration of Independence or Webster's spelling book, making laws for [white abolitionists] Lydia Maria Child, Lucretia Mott, or Fanny Kemble."
Stanton and Anthony embraced race-hatred and anti-immigrant bigotry against the Irish, blacks, Germans and Asians, grounded in class hostility.
They took this position at a time when blacks in the South faced escalating race-terror. The Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1866 to terrorize Southern blacks; hundreds were murdered. Republicans of both colors were targeted, and a special object of Klan hatred was the schoolhouse and the schoolteacher (many of them Northern women). In the North as well there was a struggle over the vote, over integrated schools. There was a fight to end Jim Crow in the Washington, D.C. trolley system (after the law desegregating streetcars was passed there in 1865, Sojourner Truth herself went around the capital boarding the cars of companies that were refusing to seat blacks). The freedmen's struggles for a fundamental transformation of race relations triggered in the North what some historians have called the first racist backlash. Frederick Douglass' home in Rochester, New York was burned to the ground; Republican and abolitionist leaders routinely received death threats.
So in this period of violent struggle over the race question, the feminists joined forces with the Democrats, the political party of the Klan and the Confederacy, who hoped to exploit the women's issue against blacks. Henry Blackwell (Lucy Stone's husband) argued that white women voting in the South would cancel out the black vote. Stanton and Anthony teamed up with George Train, a notorious racist, who financed their newspaper, Revolution. They adopted the slogan "educated suffrage"—that is, a literacy test for voters—which was deliberately formulated against non-English-speaking immigrants and ex-slaves.
Frederick Douglass made a valiant attempt to win the feminists over to support for the amendments at a meeting of the Equal Rights Association in 1869, where he argued for the urgency of the vote for blacks:
"When women, because they are women, are dragged from their homes and hung upon lamp-posts; when their children are torn from their arms and their brains dashed to the pavement; when they are objects of insult and outrage at every turn; when they are in danger of having their homes burnt down over their heads; when their children are not allowed to enter schools; then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot."
—Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle
At this convention Douglass proposed a resolution which called the 15th Amendment the "culmination of one-half of our demands" while imploring a redoubling of "our energy to secure the further amendment guaranteeing the same sacred rights without limitation to sex." But by this point, a split was inevitable. The feminists blamed the Republican Party and the abolitionists for the defeat in Kansas of an 1867 referendum on woman suffrage. They decided that "men" could not be trusted, and for the first time argued that women must organize separately for their own rights. They even flirted with male exclusionism. The movement split in two, one maintaining a formally decent posture on the race question as a cover for doing nothing. The main wing led by Stanton and Anthony wanted to address broad issues, but their capitulation to racist reaction defined them.
They claimed the ballot would solve everything. Their paper was printed in a "rat" office (below union scale). Anthony urged women to be scabs to "better" their condition, then whined when the National Labor Congress refused to admit her as a delegate! Stanton said it proved the worst enemy of women's rights was the working man.
After Reconstruction went down to defeat, the first "feminists" dedicated themselves to the reactionary attempt to prove woman suffrage wouldn't rock the Jim Crow boat. But in the South, the restabilization of a system of overt racist injustice set the context for all social questions. In the South, any extension of the franchise was feared as a threat to "white supremacy" stability. By 1920, when woman suffrage was passed nationally— largely because of World War I which brought women into industry and social life—not a single Southern state had passed the vote for women, although almost every other state had some form of it.
Today, the bourgeois feminists like to hark back to the struggle over the 14th Amendment as proof there must be a separatist women's movement. They claim Stanton and Anthony as their political mothers. Let them have them! We stand in a different tradition: the heritage of Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Harriet Tubman, the Grimke sisters, of revolutionary insurrectionism against the class enemy. Today, to complete the unfinished tasks of the Civil War and emancipate women and blacks from social slavery requires a communist women's movement, part of a multiracial vanguard party fighting for workers power in the interests of all the oppressed.
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Spring 1989 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
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Black Freedom, Women's Rights
and the Civil War
This article is based on a talk given by W&R associate editor Amy Rath at a public forum held 5 April 1988 at Howard University. For additional historical material on women in the anti-slavery struggle, see "The Grimke Sisters: Pioneers for Abolition and Women's Rights" (W&R No. 29, Spring 1985) and "Harriet Tubman: Fighter for Black Freedom" (W&R No. 32, Winter 1986).
The talk discusses the movement for women's rights in the U.S. prior to the Civil War, its link through the radical abolition movement with the fight against black slavery, and the destruction of that link to produce the antecedents of the present "feminists." It centers on the ideology of the antebellum abolitionists, the most far-sighted of whom saw that all democratic struggles were vitally linked and that deeply revolutionary changes would be required to establish equality. These men and women were not Marxists but bourgeois radicals of their time; for many, the primary political motivation was religion.
Northern anti-slavery activists espoused "free labor" and accepted the idea that if legal barriers to equality were removed, the American dream would be possible for anyone, given talent and hard work. In antebellum America, in the context of steady immigration and an expanding frontier, a propertyless farmhand could perhaps acquire land of his own, while a (white) laborer might look to becoming a small-scale employer of labor in a generation. But if the "free labor" ideology imagined a democratic political system of economic equals based on a society of skilled artisans and yeoman farmers, this model rapidly became a fiction. A capitalist class of Northern industrial, finance and railroad capitalists had the ascendancy. Though still a predominantly agricultural country, America was the fastest-growing industrial power (with the second-highest industrial output, after Britain). America was already the world's technological leader, very much feared as a competitor by Britain, birthplace of the Industrial Revolution.
The slave society of the South existed in the framework of a powerful Northern industrial sector which purchased staple crops from the South, first of all cotton. The rich plantations which possessed the South's best land and dominated the region politically were built on a pre-capitalist class relationship of black chattel slavery; at the same time they were part of a money economy in the world's most dynamic capitalist country. The conflict of social systems between the ever more powerful North and the backward South was a profound contradiction heading for collision, exacerbated by America's undemocratic "states' rights" political system which had given the South disproportionate control of the national government (especially the presidency and Supreme Court) since Independence.
The Progressive Bourgeoisie and the Limits of Reconstruction
The "irrepressible conflict" exploded in the Civil War, in the course of which Lincoln, the Northern bourgeoisie's ablest political leader, found himself obliged to go much further than he had intended in the direction of adopting the emancipation program of the abolitionists. Fifteen years before, abolitionists had been viewed as an isolated, if noisy, crew of radical fanatics.
The Civil War smashed slavery and left behind in the South a chaotic situation and four million ex-slaves who had been promised "freedom." But the war and its aftermath underlined that a truly egalitarian radical vision of social reconstruction already could not be promoted by a capitalist ruling class.
In her talk, comrade Rath emphasized the birth of a "feminist" women's movement as a rightward split at a crucial moment in American history: the era of "Reconstruction." Reconstruction posed a possibility of socially revolutionary transformations in the South: the regional ruling class, based on the ownership of land and slaves, had been militarily defeated; under the occupying Northern power, political rights were exercised by the former slaves and those willing to be allied with them.
Reconstruction brought not only black enfranchisement but significant democratic reforms: the 1868 South Carolina constitutional convention drafted the state's first divorce law, while Reconstruction legislatures established the South's first public schools and went to work on liberalizing the South's draconian penal codes and reforming the planters' property tax system (which had taxed the farmer's mule and the workman's tools while all but exempting the real wealth—land). But the Northern capitalists betrayed the promise of Reconstruction, allowing it to be physically smashed by forces such as the Ku Klux Klan, even though that meant the destruction of the Republican Party in the South.
Replacing slavery, a new system of racial subordination took shape: a refurbished system of labor discipline through such measures as one-year labor contracts and "vagrancy" laws to bind ex-slaves to the plantations, and a rigid system of Jim Crow segregation. The defeat of Reconstruction shaped the postwar South into modern times: the sharecropping, the poll taxes, convict labor (the chain gang), the "separate but equal" unequal facilities.
While the woman suffrage leaders described in comrade Rath's talk took a stand against the great democratic gains that hung in the balance, many women mobilized by the anti-slavery movement served honorably in Reconstruction, for example as freedmen's schoolteachers who risked their lives to participate in freeing black people from the chains of bondage.
During Reconstruction, debate raged over the agrarian question: the radical demand raised by the freed-men and destitute white Unionist Southerners that the secessionists' estates be confiscated and distributed to them. Some abolitionists saw that racial democracy could not be achieved if a class of whites continued to own the land where a class of blacks were laborers. They argued for justice to those who had been slaves (who created the wealth of the plantations, beginning by clearing the wilderness).
But the tide had turned: the triumphant Northern rulers would not permit such an attack on "property rights" (especially as Northerners directly and Northern banks were coming to own a good deal of Southern property). Fundamentally, the federal power reinvested political power in the hands of the former "best people" of the old Confederacy. In the sequel, intensive exploitation of black agricultural labor, rather than industrial development or capital investment in the modernization of agriculture, remained the basis of the Southern economy.
What was the alternative? Working-class power was shown by the 1848 and 1871 upheavals in Europe to be the alternative to bourgeois rule, as Marx and Engels explained from the Communist Manifesto onward, but conditions were not mature even in Europe for the small proletariat to seize and wield state power. In mid-19th century America, the Northern bourgeoisie under the pressure of a revolutionary Civil War possessed a genuinely progressive side, the basis for the abolitionists' support for the Republican Party. The abolitionists' great debates revolved around how far out in front of the progressive bourgeoisie they should be. There were "radicals" and those with a more "realistic" appraisal of what the Republican Party would support. Today, more than a century after Reconstruction, that debate is transcended. The ruling class long since passed firmly over to the side of reaction; the federal government is no defender of the oppressed. Those who look to find support for an egalitarian program in any wing of the ruling class are doomed to disappointment. To complete the unfinished democratic tasks of the bourgeois revolution is a responsibility of the modern working class.
When the post-Civil War suffragettes chose to focus on the narrowest political rights for middle-class women and turn their backs on the rights and survival of the most desperately oppressed, they prefigured all of today's "constituency" and "reform" politics which refuse to attack the profound class inequalities ingrained in capitalist society. Sojourner Truth's classic "Ain't I a Woman" speech (see below) today stands as a powerful indictment of these ladies as much as of the outright sexists she was debating. Those who renounce the revolutionary content of the demand for women's liberation so as to advance their schemes for election of female politicians or advancement of women in academia are direct descendants of those first "feminists" who refused to challenge the power structure of their time on behalf of justice for two million of their sisters who were freed slaves.
But there is another women's movement: the women who have joined in the front ranks of every revolutionary struggle on this planet, from the 19th-century radical abolitionists to the women workers who sparked the Russian Revolution to the communist women of today. When the October Revolution of 1917 smashed the old tsarist society in Russia, militant women were among the first recruits to communism in dozens of countries where women were oppressed by semi-feudal conditions and "customs." Young women radicalized around questions like women's education, the veil, wife-beating, religious obscurantism, arranged marriages, etc., recognized a road forward to uprooting social reaction and building a society freed from sexual, racial and class inequality. Our heroes are the revolutionary women who have shared in making all of revolutionary history, from the first moment that slaves rose up against the Roman Empire to the great struggles of today.
It was 1863, and the bloodiest war ever fought by the U.S. was raging. Abraham Lincoln had finally realized he must pronounce the destruction of slavery as the North's goal in this civil war. On 22 September 1862, his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation declared that on the first of January, 1863, all slaves in the Confederacy "shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free." Although the Emancipation Proclamation did not free the slaves in the border states loyal to the Union, it turned the tide of battle. The war was now indisputably a war to end slavery, not simply to repair the Union. Soon thereafter, the government began to enlist blacks into the army; these ex-slaves and sons of ex-slaves tipped the military balance in favor of the Union. It was a matter of time until black soldiers singing "John Brown's Body" marched into Charleston, South Carolina—the "soul of secession," as Karl Marx called it-after Sherman's march through Georgia to the sea.
In May of the revolutionary year 1863, the first convention of the Women's Loyal National League met in New York City. Its most eminent speaker was a woman whose name is little known today: Angelina Grimke" Weld. As part of her address she gave a keen analysis of the war:
"This war is not, as the South falsely pretends, a war of races, nor of sections, nor of political parties, but a war of Principles; a war upon the working classes, whether
white or black; a war against Man, the world over. In this war, the black man was the first victim, the workingman of whatever color the next; and now all who contend for the rights of labor, for free speech, free schools, free suffrage, and a free government...are
driven to do battle in defense of these or to fall with them, victims of the same violence that for two centuries has held the black man a prisoner of war "The nation is in a death-struggle. It must either become one vast slaveocracy of petty tyrants, or wholly the land of the free."
—Gerda Lerner, The Grimke Sisters from South Carolina
A resolution was presented: "There can never be a true peace in this Republic until the civil and political rights of all citizens of African descent and all women are practically established." Angelina Grimke' defended it against those who thought it too radical:
"I rejoice exceedingly that that resolution would combine us with the negro. I feel that we have been with him— True, we have not felt the slaveholder's lash; true, we have not had our hands manacled, but our hearts have been crushed I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours."
It was only after the Civil War that an ideology arose which was later named "feminism": the idea that the main division in society is sex. In response to the debate over the role of the newly freed slaves in U.S. society, the leaders of the woman suffrage movement—Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony—sided with the counterrevolutionary assault on Reconstruction. The birth of bourgeois feminism was part of a right-wing process which shattered the vision of the left wing of the revolutionary democracy into separate, feeble bourgeois reform movements.
The Second American Revolution
The Civil War was one of the great social revolutions in the history of the world, destroying the slaveholding class in the South and freeing the black slaves. Not only Marxists saw that. The best fighters of the day—the Grimke sisters, the great black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, the Radical Republican Congressman Thaddeus Stevens—knew that the war would have to become a revolution against slavery before the North could win. They hated the feudalistic society of the South, with its degraded slaves, its cruelty, its arrogant, leisurely gentlemen planters, its impoverished rural whites, its lack of education, industry and general culture. The radical abolitionists wanted to wipe away that society, and also saw much wrong in the North, such as the subservience of women, and legal and social discrimination against blacks. Their ideology was to create a new order based on free labor and "equality before the law," a concept brought to the U.S. by the Radical Republican Charles Sumner out of his study of the 1789 French Revolution.
In Europe after the French Revolution the status of women was the most visible expression of the contradiction between capitalist society and its own ideals. But in the U.S. that was not so true, because of chattel slavery. The United States—the first country to proclaim itself a democratic republic—was the largest slaveholding country in the world, a huge historical contradiction which had to be resolved.
The Industrial Revolution
It was the Industrial Revolution, fundamentally, that generated what William Seward called the "Irrepressible Conflict." In broad historical terms the Industrial Revolution had created the material conditions for the elimination of slavery in society. Technological and social advances made possible a much more productive capitalist agriculture and industry. In 1854 the abolitionist clergyman Theodore Parker described slavery as "the foe to Northern Industry—to our mines, our manufactures, and our commerce...to our democratic politics in the State, our democratic culture in the school, our democratic work in the community" (quoted in James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom).
The Industrial Revolution had a contradictory effect on the condition of women. Production of goods had been primarily through cottage industry, but with the invention of the spinning jenny, the power loom and the steam engine, cottage industry was ended. The men left home to go to the factory, while women stayed home to do the housework, raise the children and to buy at the local store what once they had made at home.
Women's labor ceased to be productive labor in the strict Marxist sense. This is the material basis for the 19th-century ideology of the "women's sphere." While the material advances of the Industrial Revolution made life easier for women, it also locked them into the stifling confines of domesticity in the isolated nuclear family. Women also worked in factories, but even in the industries in which they were concentrated (in textile production they made up two-thirds of the labor force) generally they worked only for a few years before getting married.
The Fight for Women's Legal Rights
Slaves were a class, but women are a specially oppressed group dispersed through all social classes. Although all women were oppressed to some extent because of their position in the family, the class differences were fundamental between the black slave woman and the slave plantation mistress, or the Northern German-speaking laundress and the wife of the owner of the Pennsylvania iron mill. "Sisterhood" was as much a myth then as it is now. Women identified first with the class to which they belonged, determined by who their husbands or fathers were.
Before the Civil War, women were basically without any civil rights. They couldn't sue or be sued, they couldn't be on juries, all their property and earnings went to their husband or father. Although women did have the vote for a few years in New Jersey and Virginia after the American Revolution, this advance was quickly eliminated. (This was part of a general right-wing turn after the Revolution, when suffrage was restricted gradually through property qualifications. In New York State, for example, with some restrictions blacks could vote up to about 1821.) For the wealthy upper-class woman, this lack of legal rights loomed as a terrible injustice because it prevented her from functioning as a full member of the ruling class (Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the mother of American feminism and the daughter of a judge, felt this keenly). For the working-class or slave woman, if her property legally belonged to her husband it didn't seem a problem— she didn't have any property.
Though the legal question was a small matter for poor and slave women, nevertheless legal injustice is not insignificant for Marxists, and it is bound up with multi-layered social oppression. This was true for the position of women in pre-Civil War society. Until the 1850s wife-beating was legal in most states. Divorce was almost impossible, and when it was obtained children went with the husband. The accepted attitude toward women was assumption of their "inferiority," and the Bible was considered an authority. When anesthesia was discovered in the 1840s, doctors opposed its use for childbirth, because that suffering was women's punishment for Eve's sin.
The Anti-Slavery Struggle and Democratic Rights
But how were women to fight for equal rights in this society divided between slave and free? Angelina Grimke' was precisely correct when she said, "until the negro gets his rights, we will never have ours." It was necessary to destroy chattel slavery, which was retarding the development of the whole society. The movement for women's rights developed in the North out of the struggle to abolish slavery. It could hardly have developed in the South. In the decades before the war, in response to the growing Northern anti-slavery agitation, the South was becoming more reactionary than ever: more fanatical in defense of the ideology of slavery and more openly repressive. There were wholesale assaults on basic democratic rights, from attacks on the rights of the small layer of free blacks, who were seen as a source of agitation and insurrection, to a ban on the distribution of abolitionist literature.
In the South, there were no public schools. It was illegal to teach slaves to read, and almost half of the entire Southern population was illiterate. But in the North over 90 percent of the residents could read and write. Girls and boys went to school in about the same proportions, the only country in the world where this was true. So while in the North women teachers were paid less than men, and women factory hands received one-quarter the wage of men, in the South there were few teachers at all, and few industrial workers.
As a young slave in Maryland, and later while he was trying to earn a living as a refugee in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Frederick Douglass came to understand the common interests of all working people in the South, slaves and free blacks and whites. He learned a trade on the docks, where he experienced racist treatment from white workmen, who saw black labor as a threat to their jobs. But Douglass realized that the position of the workmen, too, against their boss was eroded and weakened by slavery and racism. As Marx said, "Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded." And indeed, the working-class movement met with little success in the antebellum U.S., whereas after the war there was an upsurge in unionism and labor struggle.
The vanguard of the abolitionist movement—the radical insurrectionist wing—believed in the identity of the interests of all the oppressed. John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, the great activist of the Underground Railroad, and the Grimke sisters were all inspired by a vision of human equality based in revolutionary democracy. Although their egalitarian principle was based on a religious view and ours is based on a Marxist understanding of society, we honor their essential work in leading the anti-slavery struggle. The abolition of slavery did profoundly alter the United States, it did open the road to liberation by making possible the development of the proletariat and its revolutionary vanguard, which will establish justice by abolishing the exploitation of man by man.
The Grimke Sisters of South Carolina
Penetrating insights into the situation of women in pre-Civil War America came from women who were committed abolitionists. Sarah and Angelina Grimke are examples, as is Sojourner Truth who is better known today. The Grimke sisters were unusual members of the ruling class who defected to the other side. As daughters of one of South Carolina's most powerful slave-holding families, they had grown up in luxury, but left the South because of their revulsion for slavery. The Grimke sisters became famous in 1837-1838 as agents of the American Anti-Slavery Society. The power of their personal witness of the atrocities of the slave system drew huge audiences. The sisters were quick to point out that as upper-class white women, they had seen only the "better" treatment of the house and city slaves, and not the more brutal treatment of plantation hands in the fields. But one of the things they did know about was the sexual exploitation of women slaves and the brutal breakup of black families through the slave trade.
Because the sisters addressed the issues of sexual exploitation frankly and often, it was one of the issues the opposition used to try to shut them up. The clergy complained that the Grimke's brought up a subject "which ought not to be named"—how dare these delicate .blossoms of Southern womanhood talk about sex! The very idea of women speaking publicly represented an attack on the proper relationship between the sexes and would upset "women's place" in the home. Contemporary observers were shocked by the sight of women participating actively in the debates of the anti-slavery movement, as they did especially in New England, the birthplace of radical abolitionism. The Grimkes replied by pointing out that the same argument was used against abolition itself: it would upset the established order of social relations. They effectively linked up women's rights and emancipation of the slaves.
Sojourner Truth: "Ain't I a Woman?"
Black women got it from both sides, as the life of Sojourner Truth shows. She was born a slave around 1797 in New York State and was not freed until 1827, under the "gradual emancipation" provisions of the state law. As a slave she was prevented from marrying the man she loved, who was brutally beaten for daring to visit her (they were owned by different masters). They were both forcibly married to other slaves. Her son was sold South as a small child, away from her. After she was freed, she lived a backbreaking existence in New York City, one of the more racist cities in the North and a center for the slave trade.
Sojourner Truth went to all the women's rights conventions. The famous story about her dates from 1853. The usual crowd of male hecklers had almost shut down the proceedings. The women were unable to answer their sneers of how delicate and weak women were. Sojourner Truth asked for the floor and got it, despite the opposition of a lot of the delegates to the presence of a black abolitionist. You have to keep in mind what this woman looked like in this gathering of ladies: she was six feet tall, nearly 60 years old, very tough and work-worn. She said:
"The man over there says women need to be helped into carriages and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages or over puddles, or gives me the best place—and ain't I a woman?
"Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted and gathered into barns, and no man could head me—and ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have born...children, and seen most of 'em sold into slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me—and ain't I a woman?"
—Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle
Sojourner Truth put her finger on the heart of the contradiction between the stifling idealization of women and their oppression as housewives and mothers and exploitation as slaves and workers.
Women's Rights and the Abolitionist Movement
Support for women's rights was tenuous within the politically diverse anti-slavery movement. Many free-soilers were not anti-racist; some opposed slavery because they didn't want blacks around. Even some of the most dedicated abolitionists argued that "women's rights" could harm the anti-slavery cause, and in 1840 a split in the American Anti-Slavery Society was precipitated by the election of a woman to the leading body.
That same year at an international anti-slavery meeting in London, women members of the American delegation were denied their seats. In the audience was the young Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Out of this experience she decided to begin organizing for women's rights. Eight years later, in 1848, at Seneca Falls, New York the first women's rights convention in the world was held. At first Stanton wasn't going to put forward the vote as a demand—she was afraid it was too extreme. She had to be argued into it by Frederick Douglass. It was the only demand that didn't get unanimous support at the meeting; it was considered too radical.
The role of Douglass was not an accident. The best fighters for women's rights were not the Elizabeth Cady Stantons and the Susan B. Anthonys—the ones who "put women first"—but the left-wing abolitionists. The most militant advocates of black equality, the insurrectionist wing, the prophets of the Civil War, were also the most consistent fighters for women's rights, because they saw no division of interest between blacks and women. Frederick Douglass not only attended all the women's meetings, arguing effectively for full equality for women, but he brought the message elsewhere. He put forward resolutions for women's rights at black conventions, and they were passed. He used to advertise the meetings in his paper and print reports on the proceedings. His paper's motto was, "Right is of no Sex—Truth is of no Color—God is the Father of us all, and we are all Brethren."
The Fight Over the 14th Amendment
Stanton and Anthony had suspended their woman suffrage campaign for the duration of the war. They circulated petitions for a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery, which became the 13th Amendment. After the war Stanton and Anthony set up an Equal Rights Association to agitate for the vote for both blacks and women. They thought because of the broad social upheaval the time was ripe for woman suffrage. But this proved not to be the case.
The question here was citizenship rights under capitalist law, specifically voting. Compare it with how voting rights and citizenship were looked at in another revolution at the same time: the 1871 Paris Commune, the first proletarian revolution (whose example dramatically reinforced ideological conservatism among the American bourgeoisie). The Commune subsumed nationality and citizenship to class considerations. Anybody who got elected from the working class, whatever country they were born in, sat on the legislative body of the Commune, while the industrialists and the bourgeois parliamentarians fled the city and were "disenfranchised" as their property was expropriated.
This was not on the agenda in the United States in the 1860s. The historical tasks of the Civil War and Reconstruction were to complete the unfinished bourgeois revolution, to resolve questions like slave versus free, national sovereignty and democratic rights. In his novel Gore Vidal calls Lincoln the Bismarck of his country, and this is justified. For example, before the Civil War, each state printed its own money. Greenbacks were first made by the Union to finance the war. The Supreme Court regularly said, "the United States are." Only after the war did this country's name become a singular noun—one national government.
But the big question was what to do with the newly emancipated slaves, and this question focused on two things: land and the vote. The debate over the vote represented, in legal terms, a struggle to determine what "citizenship" meant in relation to the state. Many Northern states did not allow blacks to vote, either. The 14th Amendment, which was passed to answer this question, says that all persons born or naturalized in the U.S. are citizens of the nation and of the state in which they live, and that states can't abridge their "privileges and immunities" or deprive them of life, liberty, or property without "due process of law" or deny them "equal protection of the laws."
The Republican Party, which was founded as an anti-slavery party, contained within it many shades of political opinion. It has been argued that the only reason the Republicans gave the vote to blacks was to maintain political control over the states in the conquered Confederacy. This was true of some Republicans, but the men who politically dominated Congress during the period of Radical Reconstruction were committed revolutionary democrats, as observers of the time said of Thaddeus Stevens, who was called the "Robespierre, Danton, and Marat of America." There were good reasons for Douglass' loyalty to the Republicans, given after much early hesitation and sometimes combined with scathing criticism.
But there were a lot of contradictions. The party that was trying to implement black rights was also the party that was massacring the Indians in the West, breaking workers' strikes in the North, presiding over a new scale of graft and corruption, and trying to annex Santo Domingo. In the fight to replace slavery with something other than a peonage system which mimicked bondage, the land question was key. And the robber barons—the moneylords, the triumphant ruling class-rapidly got pretty nervous about the campaign to confiscate the plantations and give them to the blacks. It was an assault on property rights, in line with what those uppity workers in the North were demanding: the eight-hour day, unions, higher wages. The ruling class was quite conscious about this; an 1867 New York Times editorial stated:
"If Congress is to take cognizance of the claims of labor against capital...there can be no decent pretense for confining the task to the slave-holder of the South. It is a question, not of humanity, not of loyalty, but of the fundamental relation of industry to capital; and sooner or later, if begun at the South, it will find its way into the cities of the North.... An attempt to justify the confiscation of Southern land under the pretense of doing justice to the freedmen, strikes at the root of all property rights in both sections. It concerns Massachusetts quite as much as Mississippi."
—Eric Foner, Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War
This question was not resolved quickly, but over a couple of decades. But to collapse a lot of complex history, the revolutionary tide receded under the weight of triumphant capitalism. In 1877 Union troops were withdrawn from Southern occupation as part of the compromise making Rutherford B. Hayes president. The Civil War did not establish black equality, and the 14th and 15th Amendments which codified in law the war's revolutionary gains were turned into virtual dead letters. Nor did the Civil War liberate women, not even in a limited, legalistic sense. They continued to be denied even the simple right to vote (although in some districts in South Carolina in 1870, under the encouragement of black election officials, black women exercised the franchise for a brief time).
From the defeat of Reconstruction was spawned the kind of society we have now. On top of the fundamental class divisions in the U.S. is pervasive and institutionalized racial oppression. The black slaves were liberated from bondage only to become an oppressed race/color caste, segregated at the bottom of society— although today, unlike the immediate aftermath of Reconstruction, blacks also constitute a key component of the American proletariat.
The Birth of American Feminism
Many Radical Republicans were critical of the 14th Amendment, which was a true child of compromise. Sumner called it "uncertain, loose, cracked, and rickety." Opposition centered on a loophole that allowed a state to opt for losing some representation in Congress if it chose to restrict black suffrage—and Southern states exploited this concession. But what Elizabeth Cady Stanton didn't like about it was that for the first time, the word "male" appeared in the Constitution. And this fight was the birth of American feminism.
Of course the 14th Amendment should have given women the vote, and the importance of suffrage for black women was not inconsiderable. But a Civil War had just been fought on the question of black freedom, and it was indeed the "Negro's Hour," as many abolitionists argued. The biggest benefit for women's rights would have been to struggle for the biggest expansion possible in black freedom—to campaign for the land, for black participation in government on the state and federal level, to crush racism in the North, to integrate blacks in housing, education, jobs—to push to the limit the revolutionary possibilities of the period. But Stanton and Anthony sided with the right-wing
assault on the revolutionary opening that existed. They wrote:
"Think of Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Ung Tung who do not know the difference between a Monarchy and a Republic, who never read the Declaration of Independence or Webster's spelling book, making laws for [white abolitionists] Lydia Maria Child, Lucretia Mott, or Fanny Kemble."
Stanton and Anthony embraced race-hatred and anti-immigrant bigotry against the Irish, blacks, Germans and Asians, grounded in class hostility.
They took this position at a time when blacks in the South faced escalating race-terror. The Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1866 to terrorize Southern blacks; hundreds were murdered. Republicans of both colors were targeted, and a special object of Klan hatred was the schoolhouse and the schoolteacher (many of them Northern women). In the North as well there was a struggle over the vote, over integrated schools. There was a fight to end Jim Crow in the Washington, D.C. trolley system (after the law desegregating streetcars was passed there in 1865, Sojourner Truth herself went around the capital boarding the cars of companies that were refusing to seat blacks). The freedmen's struggles for a fundamental transformation of race relations triggered in the North what some historians have called the first racist backlash. Frederick Douglass' home in Rochester, New York was burned to the ground; Republican and abolitionist leaders routinely received death threats.
So in this period of violent struggle over the race question, the feminists joined forces with the Democrats, the political party of the Klan and the Confederacy, who hoped to exploit the women's issue against blacks. Henry Blackwell (Lucy Stone's husband) argued that white women voting in the South would cancel out the black vote. Stanton and Anthony teamed up with George Train, a notorious racist, who financed their newspaper, Revolution. They adopted the slogan "educated suffrage"—that is, a literacy test for voters—which was deliberately formulated against non-English-speaking immigrants and ex-slaves.
Frederick Douglass made a valiant attempt to win the feminists over to support for the amendments at a meeting of the Equal Rights Association in 1869, where he argued for the urgency of the vote for blacks:
"When women, because they are women, are dragged from their homes and hung upon lamp-posts; when their children are torn from their arms and their brains dashed to the pavement; when they are objects of insult and outrage at every turn; when they are in danger of having their homes burnt down over their heads; when their children are not allowed to enter schools; then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot."
—Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle
At this convention Douglass proposed a resolution which called the 15th Amendment the "culmination of one-half of our demands" while imploring a redoubling of "our energy to secure the further amendment guaranteeing the same sacred rights without limitation to sex." But by this point, a split was inevitable. The feminists blamed the Republican Party and the abolitionists for the defeat in Kansas of an 1867 referendum on woman suffrage. They decided that "men" could not be trusted, and for the first time argued that women must organize separately for their own rights. They even flirted with male exclusionism. The movement split in two, one maintaining a formally decent posture on the race question as a cover for doing nothing. The main wing led by Stanton and Anthony wanted to address broad issues, but their capitulation to racist reaction defined them.
They claimed the ballot would solve everything. Their paper was printed in a "rat" office (below union scale). Anthony urged women to be scabs to "better" their condition, then whined when the National Labor Congress refused to admit her as a delegate! Stanton said it proved the worst enemy of women's rights was the working man.
After Reconstruction went down to defeat, the first "feminists" dedicated themselves to the reactionary attempt to prove woman suffrage wouldn't rock the Jim Crow boat. But in the South, the restabilization of a system of overt racist injustice set the context for all social questions. In the South, any extension of the franchise was feared as a threat to "white supremacy" stability. By 1920, when woman suffrage was passed nationally— largely because of World War I which brought women into industry and social life—not a single Southern state had passed the vote for women, although almost every other state had some form of it.
Today, the bourgeois feminists like to hark back to the struggle over the 14th Amendment as proof there must be a separatist women's movement. They claim Stanton and Anthony as their political mothers. Let them have them! We stand in a different tradition: the heritage of Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Harriet Tubman, the Grimke sisters, of revolutionary insurrectionism against the class enemy. Today, to complete the unfinished tasks of the Civil War and emancipate women and blacks from social slavery requires a communist women's movement, part of a multiracial vanguard party fighting for workers power in the interests of all the oppressed.
Friday, February 02, 2007
*From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-"On Military vs. Political Support"-An Exchange
Click on the title to link to an on line copy of the "Workers Vanguard" article on the subject mentioned in the headline.
Thursday, February 01, 2007
HONOR COLONEL SHAW AND THE MASSACHUSETTS 54TH
HONOR THE MEMORY OF COLONEL ROBERT GOULD SHAW AND THE FIGHTING MASSACHUSETTS 54TH BLACK REGIMENT IN THE CIVIL WAR
COMMENTARY
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 know about the famous Massachusetts 54th Regiment under Colonel Robert Gould Shaw which has received wide attention in book, film and sculpture. Those heroic black fighters and their fallen leader deserve those honors. Glory, indeed.
Although Shaw was hesitant to take command of those troops after suffering wounds at Antietam, when he accepted, he took full charge of the training and discipline of the regiment. Moreover, as the regiment marched into Boston to cheering crowds before embarking on ships to take them South each trooper knew the score. Any blacks captured (or their white officers, for that matter) were subject to Southern ‘justice’, summary execution. Not one trooper flinched. Arms in hands, they fought bravely at the defeat of Fort Wagner and other Deep South battles, taking many causalities.
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 the history of the Massachusetts 54th is prima facie evidence for that position.
I should also note that the Massachusetts 54th was made up primarily of better educated and skilled freedman and escaped slaves unlike the black troops recruited from the plantations in the Deep South in the 1st and 2nd South Carolina Volunteer black regiments. Thus, one might have suspected that they would not be up to the rigors of Southern duty. Not so. After reading a number of books on the trials and tribulations of various Union regiments, including the famous Irish Brigade, the story of the 54th compares very favorably with those units.
However, so as not to get carried away with the ‘liberalism’ of the Union political and military commands in granting permission for black recruitment it is necessary to point out some of the retrograde racial attitudes of the time. It took a major propaganda thrust by Frederick Douglass and other revolutionary abolitionists to get Lincoln to even consider arming blacks for their own emancipation. Only after several severe military reversals was permission granted to recruit black troops, although some maverick generals were already using them, particularly General Hunter. As mentioned above there were qualms about the ability of blacks to fight in disciplined units. Moreover, until 1864 black troops were paid less than their white counterparts. The Massachusetts 54th is also rightly famous for refusing pay until that disparity was corrected.
One should not forget that the North in its own way was as deeply racist as the South (think of the treacherous role of the Southern-sympathying Northern Copperheads and the Irish-led anti-black Draft Riots in New York City, for examples). This reflected itself in the racial attitudes of some commanding officers and enlisted men as well as the general paternalism of even the best white commanding officers, including Colonel Higginson of the 2nd South Carolina. It was further reflected in the disproportionately few blacks that became officers in the Civil War, despite the crying need for officers in those black regiments and elsewhere. Yet, all of these negatives notwithstanding, every modern black liberation fighter takes his or her hat off to the gallant 54th, arms in hand, and its important role in the struggle for black liberation
COMMENTARY
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 know about the famous Massachusetts 54th Regiment under Colonel Robert Gould Shaw which has received wide attention in book, film and sculpture. Those heroic black fighters and their fallen leader deserve those honors. Glory, indeed.
Although Shaw was hesitant to take command of those troops after suffering wounds at Antietam, when he accepted, he took full charge of the training and discipline of the regiment. Moreover, as the regiment marched into Boston to cheering crowds before embarking on ships to take them South each trooper knew the score. Any blacks captured (or their white officers, for that matter) were subject to Southern ‘justice’, summary execution. Not one trooper flinched. Arms in hands, they fought bravely at the defeat of Fort Wagner and other Deep South battles, taking many causalities.
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 the history of the Massachusetts 54th is prima facie evidence for that position.
I should also note that the Massachusetts 54th was made up primarily of better educated and skilled freedman and escaped slaves unlike the black troops recruited from the plantations in the Deep South in the 1st and 2nd South Carolina Volunteer black regiments. Thus, one might have suspected that they would not be up to the rigors of Southern duty. Not so. After reading a number of books on the trials and tribulations of various Union regiments, including the famous Irish Brigade, the story of the 54th compares very favorably with those units.
However, so as not to get carried away with the ‘liberalism’ of the Union political and military commands in granting permission for black recruitment it is necessary to point out some of the retrograde racial attitudes of the time. It took a major propaganda thrust by Frederick Douglass and other revolutionary abolitionists to get Lincoln to even consider arming blacks for their own emancipation. Only after several severe military reversals was permission granted to recruit black troops, although some maverick generals were already using them, particularly General Hunter. As mentioned above there were qualms about the ability of blacks to fight in disciplined units. Moreover, until 1864 black troops were paid less than their white counterparts. The Massachusetts 54th is also rightly famous for refusing pay until that disparity was corrected.
One should not forget that the North in its own way was as deeply racist as the South (think of the treacherous role of the Southern-sympathying Northern Copperheads and the Irish-led anti-black Draft Riots in New York City, for examples). This reflected itself in the racial attitudes of some commanding officers and enlisted men as well as the general paternalism of even the best white commanding officers, including Colonel Higginson of the 2nd South Carolina. It was further reflected in the disproportionately few blacks that became officers in the Civil War, despite the crying need for officers in those black regiments and elsewhere. Yet, all of these negatives notwithstanding, every modern black liberation fighter takes his or her hat off to the gallant 54th, arms in hand, and its important role in the struggle for black liberation
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
AN ENGLISH RADICAL WOMAN-SYLVIA PANKHURST
AN ENGLISH RADICAL WOMAN-SYLVIA PANKHURST
BOOK REVIEW
SYLVIA PANKHURST; POTRAIT OF A RADICAL, PATRICA W. ROMERO, YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, NEW HAVEN, 1990
MARCH IS WOMEN’S HISTORY MONTH
More than one commentator has noted that one of the reasons for the failure of the Communist Party of Great Britain to take root in the early part of the 20th century was the sterile political life of the pre-World War I British left. Between doctrinaire hairsplitting on one side and the cretin-like reformist strategy of the likes of the Fabian Society on the other there was little room to encourage serious revolutionary struggle, although the British working class was one of the most class-conscious in Europe. There is merit to that argument and the politics of Sylvia Pankhurst, a vocal woman’s suffragette, pacifist, ersatz communist and advocate for other causes add ammunition to that thesis.
The biography under review chronicles Ms. Pankhurst’s life adequately, if not particularly sympathically. The sections of the book that deal with her work in obtaining the vote for women and particularly working class women, her opposition to World War I and her chaotic association with the early Communist International highlight the positive aspects of her fight for social justice, as she understood it. Her later career as publicist for the feudal monarchy in Ethiopia stands as just another of a seemingly endless string of examples on the demise of radicals who are not firmly rooted theoretically as an anchor to their work.
It is hard to understand what all the hoopla was about now but at the turn of the 20th century the fight to gain votes for women in England (and the United States, as well) required a titanic struggle involving mass demonstrations, petitions, parliamentary action and civil disobedience. And at the center of the British fight were Sylvia’s upper middle class mother, older sister and herself. However, as has been noted in other fights for other democratic rights the question of enfranchisement of working class women drew a class line in the family, as in politics. Sylvia branched off to form her own working class organization in London’s East End. This break is the decisive point where her pro-working class politics kept getting pushed to the left both on the issue of the vote for women and in 1914 in opposition to Britain’s participation in World War I.
By most accounts Ms. Pankhurst was otherworldly, arrogant, persevering, personally disinterested and when necessary, obnoxious. Just the qualities that are necessary if one wants to change the world-as long as one has a philosophical anchor in order to fight effectively over the long haul. Ms. Pankhurst’s trials and tribulations, however, were guided by no such philosophy-she seems to have been the consummate pragmatist that British progressives (as well as American) have attempted to make into a world historic politcal virtue. This biography, as well as others on the period concerning the Bloomsbury literary scene and still others on the middle class fight for “English” socialism, demonstrates all the weak points of that British radicalism. This whole world is peopled with do-gooders and others who want social change but only if it does not interfere with high tea. And everyone, friend or foe, is ‘clubby’. It appears they all knew, or knew of, each other from high governmental officers to the literary set. This is the kind of society that can flourish at a time when you are the number one imperialist power, even if in decline. American radical readers take note.
The 1917 October Revolution in Russia was a decisive event in 20th century world history. In its wake it gain supporters from all over the world who were looking for the working class to rule. Ms. Pankhurst and her East End group got caught up in this wake and tried to win the Communist International franchise for England. Her efforts failed but not before becoming a footnote in Communist history as one of Lenin’s foils in his fight against those who did not want to fight reformist organizations, like the British Labor Party, for the loyalty of the working class and who were afraid to lost their ‘principles’ in parliamentary struggle, when necessary.
That Ms. Pankhurst could wield such influence and realistically hope to gain the franchise tells a lot about the British milieu of the time. Ms. Pankhurst could not or would not go all the way to communist commitment but her stops along the way give her as least an honorable mention for her early work. Read this book and see if you agree.
BOOK REVIEW
SYLVIA PANKHURST; POTRAIT OF A RADICAL, PATRICA W. ROMERO, YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, NEW HAVEN, 1990
MARCH IS WOMEN’S HISTORY MONTH
More than one commentator has noted that one of the reasons for the failure of the Communist Party of Great Britain to take root in the early part of the 20th century was the sterile political life of the pre-World War I British left. Between doctrinaire hairsplitting on one side and the cretin-like reformist strategy of the likes of the Fabian Society on the other there was little room to encourage serious revolutionary struggle, although the British working class was one of the most class-conscious in Europe. There is merit to that argument and the politics of Sylvia Pankhurst, a vocal woman’s suffragette, pacifist, ersatz communist and advocate for other causes add ammunition to that thesis.
The biography under review chronicles Ms. Pankhurst’s life adequately, if not particularly sympathically. The sections of the book that deal with her work in obtaining the vote for women and particularly working class women, her opposition to World War I and her chaotic association with the early Communist International highlight the positive aspects of her fight for social justice, as she understood it. Her later career as publicist for the feudal monarchy in Ethiopia stands as just another of a seemingly endless string of examples on the demise of radicals who are not firmly rooted theoretically as an anchor to their work.
It is hard to understand what all the hoopla was about now but at the turn of the 20th century the fight to gain votes for women in England (and the United States, as well) required a titanic struggle involving mass demonstrations, petitions, parliamentary action and civil disobedience. And at the center of the British fight were Sylvia’s upper middle class mother, older sister and herself. However, as has been noted in other fights for other democratic rights the question of enfranchisement of working class women drew a class line in the family, as in politics. Sylvia branched off to form her own working class organization in London’s East End. This break is the decisive point where her pro-working class politics kept getting pushed to the left both on the issue of the vote for women and in 1914 in opposition to Britain’s participation in World War I.
By most accounts Ms. Pankhurst was otherworldly, arrogant, persevering, personally disinterested and when necessary, obnoxious. Just the qualities that are necessary if one wants to change the world-as long as one has a philosophical anchor in order to fight effectively over the long haul. Ms. Pankhurst’s trials and tribulations, however, were guided by no such philosophy-she seems to have been the consummate pragmatist that British progressives (as well as American) have attempted to make into a world historic politcal virtue. This biography, as well as others on the period concerning the Bloomsbury literary scene and still others on the middle class fight for “English” socialism, demonstrates all the weak points of that British radicalism. This whole world is peopled with do-gooders and others who want social change but only if it does not interfere with high tea. And everyone, friend or foe, is ‘clubby’. It appears they all knew, or knew of, each other from high governmental officers to the literary set. This is the kind of society that can flourish at a time when you are the number one imperialist power, even if in decline. American radical readers take note.
The 1917 October Revolution in Russia was a decisive event in 20th century world history. In its wake it gain supporters from all over the world who were looking for the working class to rule. Ms. Pankhurst and her East End group got caught up in this wake and tried to win the Communist International franchise for England. Her efforts failed but not before becoming a footnote in Communist history as one of Lenin’s foils in his fight against those who did not want to fight reformist organizations, like the British Labor Party, for the loyalty of the working class and who were afraid to lost their ‘principles’ in parliamentary struggle, when necessary.
That Ms. Pankhurst could wield such influence and realistically hope to gain the franchise tells a lot about the British milieu of the time. Ms. Pankhurst could not or would not go all the way to communist commitment but her stops along the way give her as least an honorable mention for her early work. Read this book and see if you agree.
SINN FEIN AND THE POLICE QUESTION IN THE NORTH
ENGLAND AND THEIR TROOPS OUT OF THE NORTH-NO CONFIDENCE IN THE NORTHERN IRISH POLICE FORCE!
The recent decision by Sinn Fein to give political support to the current police forces in Northern Ireland should cause every militant some anger. One does not have to a partisan of Republican Sinn Fein to realize that Sinn Fein (and its adjunct, the Irish Republican Army) has moved a long way away from the dreams that reinvigorated the organization in the 'time of troubles' starting in 1969. Of course for non-nationalist militants that anger should be tempered by the realization that nationalists forces in the age of imperialism cannot resolve the the national question in an equtible way. Damn, it is always at someone’s expense, and in this case it is at the expense of the historic interests of the long suffering Catholic minority in the North.
Of course, any serious commentator on the struggle in the North could have seen this capitulation coming a mile away. That slippery slope started with the 1998 Peace Accords and Sinn Fein leaders Gerry Adams and Martin McGuiness have been backsliding ever since. Yes, we are in a post-9/11 world where political struggle against oppression by national minorities in Europe have real problems attached to it. But that does not mean that an organization had to give up its political program for the sake of-what is it, exactly? More on this later. By the way- whatever happen to the historic demand- British Troops Out of the North? Last I looked they were still there, as well as the British-imposed bureaucracy.
The recent decision by Sinn Fein to give political support to the current police forces in Northern Ireland should cause every militant some anger. One does not have to a partisan of Republican Sinn Fein to realize that Sinn Fein (and its adjunct, the Irish Republican Army) has moved a long way away from the dreams that reinvigorated the organization in the 'time of troubles' starting in 1969. Of course for non-nationalist militants that anger should be tempered by the realization that nationalists forces in the age of imperialism cannot resolve the the national question in an equtible way. Damn, it is always at someone’s expense, and in this case it is at the expense of the historic interests of the long suffering Catholic minority in the North.
Of course, any serious commentator on the struggle in the North could have seen this capitulation coming a mile away. That slippery slope started with the 1998 Peace Accords and Sinn Fein leaders Gerry Adams and Martin McGuiness have been backsliding ever since. Yes, we are in a post-9/11 world where political struggle against oppression by national minorities in Europe have real problems attached to it. But that does not mean that an organization had to give up its political program for the sake of-what is it, exactly? More on this later. By the way- whatever happen to the historic demand- British Troops Out of the North? Last I looked they were still there, as well as the British-imposed bureaucracy.
ONCE AGAIN-HANDS OFF IRAN!
COMMENTARY
U.S. IMPERIALISM-HANDS OFF THE WORLD!
As a complement to his failed Iraq policy apparently President Bush has started to again seriously consider military action against Iran. Despite his disclaimers in a National Public Radio interview, ordering an additional aircraft carrier into the Mediterranean and permitting military carte blanche handling of any Iranian found in Iraq has all the earmarks of a policy of laying the groundwork for a ‘surge’ into Iran.
Funny, I do not believe that this is what the Iraq Study Group (you remember them, don’t you? Those out-of-power Grandees with the ‘graceful’ exit strategy out of the problems in the Middle East) had in mind when they encouraged a dialogue with Iran as one of their recommendation. I suggest to all those who have a copy of the Report that they keep it in a safe place-it will be a collector’s item and worth money, some day.
In the spring of 2006, after a now seemingly prophetic Seymour Hersh article on the Bush Administrations's intentions toward Iran appeared in the New Yorker, I posted a commentary about the coming American showdown with Iran. I repost that commentary here. Needless to say I continue to stand by the political arguments presented there. Stay tuned, unfortunately there is going to be much more on Iran over the coming period
APRIL 2006
THE WILD BOYS ARE ON THE LOOSE AGAIN- U.S. HANDS OFF IRAN!!
YOU DON’T NEED SEYMOUR HERSH TO KNOW WHICH WAY THE WIND BLOWS.
FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
In the wake of Seymour Hersh’s revelations in the New Yorker concerning the Bush administration’s potential military plans, including a possible nuclear option, toward Iran there has been a hue and cry in political circles against some of the rasher aspects of such action. From the traditional opponents of such an action plan -the Left? No! From liberal politicians? No! If anything those types have been more belligerent and to the right on the issue of Iran than the Bush administration. The cry has come from conservative think tank magazines and hawkish political commentators like New York Times writer Thomas Friedman. After the disastrous consequences of their support for the adventure in Iraq as least a few of the more rational conservatives have learned something. Whether they continue to hold out once the onslaught of patriotism and so-called national interest comes into play remains to be seen. However, their self-made dilemma is not what interests me.
As I write these lines the paint has not even dried on my poster in opposition to the continuing Iraq occupation for an anti-war rally. Now that the newest plans of the 'Wild Boys' in the basements of the White House, Pentagon and State Department have been “leaked” I have to add another slogan to that banner- Hands Off Iran! Overreacting one might say. No!! If we have learned anything in the last few years from the Bush Administration it is that the distance from “war games” and “zero sum game theory” to front page newspaper and television screen casualty counts is a very, very short elevator ride away.
That, however, begs the question of whether the current Islamic leadership in Iran is a threat. Damn right it is a threat. This writer opposed the Shah of Iran when he was an agent of American imperialist interests in the Persian Gulf. This writer also opposed the rise and takeover by the Islamic fundamentalists in 1979 when many Western leftists were, overtly or covertly, supporting these elements as ‘anti-imperialist’ agents of change. Unfortunately, many Iranian militants also supported these same fundamentalists. That did not stop the mullahs from rounding up and executing or imprisoning every leftist or militant worker they could get their hands on. The fate of the Western leftist supporters of the ‘anti-imperialist’ mullahs was almost as tragic. They, at great personal sacrifice, mainly went on to careers in the academy, media or parliament.
So let us have no illusions about the women- hating, anti-Enlightenment, anti- post 8th century hating regime in Teheran (Except apparently, nuclear technology. Did anyone else find it surreal when a recent photograph showed several thousand heavily-veiled Iranian women demonstrating in defense of a nuclear facility?). However, do we really want to outsource “regime change” there to the Bush Administration (or any administration in Washington)? No!!! Just as working people cannot outsource “regime change” in Washington to the liberals here this job of ousting the mullahs belongs to the Iranian workers, students, poor slum dwellers and peasants.
Let’s be clear here though. If the United States, or an agent of the United States, moves militarily against Iran all militants, here and worldwide, are duty bound to defend Iran against such imperialist aggression. Even with the current mullah leadership? Yes. We will hold our noses and do our duty. Their ouster is a separate political battle. We will settle accounts with them in due course.
The anarchists and others have it all wrong when they confine their slogan to Class Against Class in a conflict between capitalist states. Yes, in the final analysis it will come down to that. The problem is today we are dealing with the most powerful military power, relatively and absolutely, the world has ever known against a smaller, almost militarily defenseless country. A victory for American imperialism is not in the interest of the international working class and its allies. Thus, we have a side under those circumstances. And we certainly do not take some ‘third camp’ pacifist position of a plague on both your houses. IMMEDIATE UNCONDITIONAL WITHDRAWAL FROM IRAQ! U.S.HANDS OFF IRAN!! BETTER YET- HANDS OFF THE WORLD!!!
U.S. IMPERIALISM-HANDS OFF THE WORLD!
As a complement to his failed Iraq policy apparently President Bush has started to again seriously consider military action against Iran. Despite his disclaimers in a National Public Radio interview, ordering an additional aircraft carrier into the Mediterranean and permitting military carte blanche handling of any Iranian found in Iraq has all the earmarks of a policy of laying the groundwork for a ‘surge’ into Iran.
Funny, I do not believe that this is what the Iraq Study Group (you remember them, don’t you? Those out-of-power Grandees with the ‘graceful’ exit strategy out of the problems in the Middle East) had in mind when they encouraged a dialogue with Iran as one of their recommendation. I suggest to all those who have a copy of the Report that they keep it in a safe place-it will be a collector’s item and worth money, some day.
In the spring of 2006, after a now seemingly prophetic Seymour Hersh article on the Bush Administrations's intentions toward Iran appeared in the New Yorker, I posted a commentary about the coming American showdown with Iran. I repost that commentary here. Needless to say I continue to stand by the political arguments presented there. Stay tuned, unfortunately there is going to be much more on Iran over the coming period
APRIL 2006
THE WILD BOYS ARE ON THE LOOSE AGAIN- U.S. HANDS OFF IRAN!!
YOU DON’T NEED SEYMOUR HERSH TO KNOW WHICH WAY THE WIND BLOWS.
FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
In the wake of Seymour Hersh’s revelations in the New Yorker concerning the Bush administration’s potential military plans, including a possible nuclear option, toward Iran there has been a hue and cry in political circles against some of the rasher aspects of such action. From the traditional opponents of such an action plan -the Left? No! From liberal politicians? No! If anything those types have been more belligerent and to the right on the issue of Iran than the Bush administration. The cry has come from conservative think tank magazines and hawkish political commentators like New York Times writer Thomas Friedman. After the disastrous consequences of their support for the adventure in Iraq as least a few of the more rational conservatives have learned something. Whether they continue to hold out once the onslaught of patriotism and so-called national interest comes into play remains to be seen. However, their self-made dilemma is not what interests me.
As I write these lines the paint has not even dried on my poster in opposition to the continuing Iraq occupation for an anti-war rally. Now that the newest plans of the 'Wild Boys' in the basements of the White House, Pentagon and State Department have been “leaked” I have to add another slogan to that banner- Hands Off Iran! Overreacting one might say. No!! If we have learned anything in the last few years from the Bush Administration it is that the distance from “war games” and “zero sum game theory” to front page newspaper and television screen casualty counts is a very, very short elevator ride away.
That, however, begs the question of whether the current Islamic leadership in Iran is a threat. Damn right it is a threat. This writer opposed the Shah of Iran when he was an agent of American imperialist interests in the Persian Gulf. This writer also opposed the rise and takeover by the Islamic fundamentalists in 1979 when many Western leftists were, overtly or covertly, supporting these elements as ‘anti-imperialist’ agents of change. Unfortunately, many Iranian militants also supported these same fundamentalists. That did not stop the mullahs from rounding up and executing or imprisoning every leftist or militant worker they could get their hands on. The fate of the Western leftist supporters of the ‘anti-imperialist’ mullahs was almost as tragic. They, at great personal sacrifice, mainly went on to careers in the academy, media or parliament.
So let us have no illusions about the women- hating, anti-Enlightenment, anti- post 8th century hating regime in Teheran (Except apparently, nuclear technology. Did anyone else find it surreal when a recent photograph showed several thousand heavily-veiled Iranian women demonstrating in defense of a nuclear facility?). However, do we really want to outsource “regime change” there to the Bush Administration (or any administration in Washington)? No!!! Just as working people cannot outsource “regime change” in Washington to the liberals here this job of ousting the mullahs belongs to the Iranian workers, students, poor slum dwellers and peasants.
Let’s be clear here though. If the United States, or an agent of the United States, moves militarily against Iran all militants, here and worldwide, are duty bound to defend Iran against such imperialist aggression. Even with the current mullah leadership? Yes. We will hold our noses and do our duty. Their ouster is a separate political battle. We will settle accounts with them in due course.
The anarchists and others have it all wrong when they confine their slogan to Class Against Class in a conflict between capitalist states. Yes, in the final analysis it will come down to that. The problem is today we are dealing with the most powerful military power, relatively and absolutely, the world has ever known against a smaller, almost militarily defenseless country. A victory for American imperialism is not in the interest of the international working class and its allies. Thus, we have a side under those circumstances. And we certainly do not take some ‘third camp’ pacifist position of a plague on both your houses. IMMEDIATE UNCONDITIONAL WITHDRAWAL FROM IRAQ! U.S.HANDS OFF IRAN!! BETTER YET- HANDS OFF THE WORLD!!!
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
*A SOLDIER'S STORY- The Anti-War G.I. Struggle Against The War
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.
“THE WAR IN IRAQ IS WRONG, WAY WRONG, BUT I HAVE TO PROTECT MY BUDDIES.”
COMMENTARY
THE HELL WITH MEANINGLESS NON-BINDING CONGRESSIONAL RESOLUTIONS –BUILD ANTI-WAR SOLDIERS AND SAILORS SOLIDARITY COMMITTEES!
Sometimes just a little incident or an impromptu remark brings home a point much better than paragraph after paragraph of journalistic commentary. To cut to the chase the subject is, as almost always these days, Iraq. Recently a non-commissioned soldier, a squad leader, I have known for a long time came back home from Iraq. As it turns out his unit is heading back for a second tour in the near future. That, however, is neither here nor there. What is important is that he knows, and knows very well, that I have been a long time opponent of the war in Iraq in particular and American imperialism in general. When we met after a quick greeting of hello he, before I could get a word out, emotionally made the above quoted statement- "The war in Iraq is wrong, way wrong but I have to protect my buddies."
So this is what Iraq has come to. Forget the weapons of mass destruction. Forget getting rid of Saddam. Forget liberating Iraq. Forget bringing democracy to the Middle East. Forget the thousand and one geo-political reasons handed out by governmental policy makers and think tank wizards. What Iraq comes down to in the year 2007 is the need to take care of and protect the rank and file soldiers who are the cannon fodder for this bloody war, your 'buddies'. Every thoughtful person, revolutionary opponents of the war and imperialism included, can relate to the concept of honor, quiet courage and sense of duty to one’s fellows implicit in that short statement. Damn, we of the anti-war movement better change our focus quickly.
We are looking in the wrong places to end this war.
In light of the above remarks it is almost embarrassing to have to report on the question of what is being done about this situation in Congress. Today, the Senate has begun taking up discussion on a meaningless non-binding resolution to express displeasure that the Bush Administration has implemented its 'surge' policy despite the Congressional chatter against it. The cat was let out of the bag weeks ago on this, however, when Vice President Cheney dismissed the buildup to the resolution fight as so much hot air when he remarked "we will do what we want, despite the resolution". Of course I never tire of questioning the political courage of those who support these empty resolutions. Every bourgeois politician lives to vote for these things in order to refurbish their tarnished images, especially on Iraq. Forget Washington-look to the troops.
As readers of this space may perhaps be aware I have been harping on the idea of building anti-war soldiers and sailors solidarity committees for about a year now. According to the polls that echo that young soldier's statement above the discontent against the war in the military is there. We have to tap into it. But as the activities surrounding the January 27th weekend of anti-war demonstrations graphically illustrate the bulk of anti-war activists are looking in the wrong place. I have said before, and will continue to say, in the final analysis the short way to end the war is through the troops. Then that soldier will not have to worry over the fate of his buddies. IMMEDIATE, UNCONDITIONAL U.S./ALLIED WITHDRAWAL U.S. /ALLIED FROM IRAQ!-'BUDDIES' OUT OF IRAQ NOW!
“THE WAR IN IRAQ IS WRONG, WAY WRONG, BUT I HAVE TO PROTECT MY BUDDIES.”
COMMENTARY
THE HELL WITH MEANINGLESS NON-BINDING CONGRESSIONAL RESOLUTIONS –BUILD ANTI-WAR SOLDIERS AND SAILORS SOLIDARITY COMMITTEES!
Sometimes just a little incident or an impromptu remark brings home a point much better than paragraph after paragraph of journalistic commentary. To cut to the chase the subject is, as almost always these days, Iraq. Recently a non-commissioned soldier, a squad leader, I have known for a long time came back home from Iraq. As it turns out his unit is heading back for a second tour in the near future. That, however, is neither here nor there. What is important is that he knows, and knows very well, that I have been a long time opponent of the war in Iraq in particular and American imperialism in general. When we met after a quick greeting of hello he, before I could get a word out, emotionally made the above quoted statement- "The war in Iraq is wrong, way wrong but I have to protect my buddies."
So this is what Iraq has come to. Forget the weapons of mass destruction. Forget getting rid of Saddam. Forget liberating Iraq. Forget bringing democracy to the Middle East. Forget the thousand and one geo-political reasons handed out by governmental policy makers and think tank wizards. What Iraq comes down to in the year 2007 is the need to take care of and protect the rank and file soldiers who are the cannon fodder for this bloody war, your 'buddies'. Every thoughtful person, revolutionary opponents of the war and imperialism included, can relate to the concept of honor, quiet courage and sense of duty to one’s fellows implicit in that short statement. Damn, we of the anti-war movement better change our focus quickly.
We are looking in the wrong places to end this war.
In light of the above remarks it is almost embarrassing to have to report on the question of what is being done about this situation in Congress. Today, the Senate has begun taking up discussion on a meaningless non-binding resolution to express displeasure that the Bush Administration has implemented its 'surge' policy despite the Congressional chatter against it. The cat was let out of the bag weeks ago on this, however, when Vice President Cheney dismissed the buildup to the resolution fight as so much hot air when he remarked "we will do what we want, despite the resolution". Of course I never tire of questioning the political courage of those who support these empty resolutions. Every bourgeois politician lives to vote for these things in order to refurbish their tarnished images, especially on Iraq. Forget Washington-look to the troops.
As readers of this space may perhaps be aware I have been harping on the idea of building anti-war soldiers and sailors solidarity committees for about a year now. According to the polls that echo that young soldier's statement above the discontent against the war in the military is there. We have to tap into it. But as the activities surrounding the January 27th weekend of anti-war demonstrations graphically illustrate the bulk of anti-war activists are looking in the wrong place. I have said before, and will continue to say, in the final analysis the short way to end the war is through the troops. Then that soldier will not have to worry over the fate of his buddies. IMMEDIATE, UNCONDITIONAL U.S./ALLIED WITHDRAWAL U.S. /ALLIED FROM IRAQ!-'BUDDIES' OUT OF IRAQ NOW!
Monday, January 29, 2007
*FREE THE LAST OF THE OHIO SEVEN-SUPPORT THE CLASS-WAR PRISONERS-SUPPORT THE PARTISAN DEFENSE COMMITTEE!
Click on the title to link to the Partisan Defense Committee Web site.
COMMENTARY
JAAN LAAMAN AND TOM MANNING-THE LAST OF THE OHIO SEVEN MUST NOT DIE IN PRISON!
The posting below is passed on from the Partisan Defense Committee. I need only add that the sentiments expressed in the letters by two member of the Ohio Seven should be taken to heart by all militants. Furthermore, we should redouble the efforts to get the last the Ohio Seven militants who are still in prison-Jaan Laaman and Tom Manning-out. They must not be allowed to die in prison. Enough said.
Support the Class-War Prisoners!
(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)
The Partisan Defense Committee received the following letters from class-war prisoner Jaan Laaman and Ray Luc Levasseur, who was released from prison in 2004. Laaman and Levasseur were imprisoned in the mid 1980s after they and five others—the Ohio 7—were convicted for their roles in a radical group that took credit for bank "expropriations" and bombings against such symbols of U.S. imperialism as military and corporate offices. From a proletarian standpoint, the actions of these leftist activists against imperialism and racist injustice are not a crime. These courageous fighters should not have served a day in prison.
The PDC is grateful for these letters, which were sent in support of its December 2006 Holiday Appeal. The annual Holiday Appeal, which raises money for the PDC's Class-War Prisoners Stipend Fund, was focused this time on the urgent fight to free death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. The PDC's program of regular stipends is a concrete expression of solidarity with those imprisoned for standing up to racist capitalist repression. To support the work of the Partisan Defense Committee, send contributions to: PDC, P.O. Box 99, Canal Street Station, NY, NY 10013; call (212) 406-4252.
Nov. 28, 2006
Let me wish everyone Happy Holidays and warm RED Season's Greetings!
The Partisan Defense Committee needs, wants and deserves your support. 2006 marks the PDC's 21st straight year of concretely supporting some of America's long held political prisoners. I myself have been a PDC class war prisoner receiving a regular bi-monthly stipend of support, year after year for I think, 20 years now. Additionally in moments of specific need (in my case for legal expenses this past year and for educational expenses some years ago), the PDC stepped forward also.
Material support is important in a real day to day, do I have enough stamps or toothpaste, sense. Political support and informing the public about political prisoner events and issues, is also very important. The PDC under its own banner and through the Workers Vanguard, is an important source of support for us. As political prisoners we need and want this support, so your support of the Partisan Defense Committee is an important and meaningful political statement.
To learn more about and interact with political prisoners in the U.S., and to hear our thoughts on ongoing world events, you can check out 4strugglemag, which I edit, at: http://www.4strugglemag.org. Issue 8 is just out.
FREEDOM IS A CONSTANT STRUGGLE! RED SEASON'S GREETINGS
Jaan Laaman,
Ohio 7 anti-imperialist
political prisoner
10 December 2006
My grandmother began working in textile mills when she was 13 years old. My grandfather went into those mills when he was 14 years of age. My parents left school at 16 to work in the mills. My turn came when I was 17. I didn't know about class war back then, I only knew about survival and that my people—the French Canadian workers—were being shortchanged. We had no political nor economic power and we paid for it by operating the machines that enriched others.
Two years ago I was released after 20 years in prison. For 20 years the government kept me in their worst cages for political offenses—actions taken against imperialism's obscene manifestations of violence and exploitation.
While in prison it was always a challenge to marshal support among the left, the Partisan Defense Committee stepped up when others faltered. The PDC, for many long years, provided needed funds to me and my family, for which I will always be grateful.
I encourage you to donate what you can, large or small, to enable the PDC to continue its solidarity work. Any donation translates to direct support for our political prisoners.
Free Mumia Abu-Jamal & all political prisoners. Ray Luc Levasseur
COMMENTARY
JAAN LAAMAN AND TOM MANNING-THE LAST OF THE OHIO SEVEN MUST NOT DIE IN PRISON!
The posting below is passed on from the Partisan Defense Committee. I need only add that the sentiments expressed in the letters by two member of the Ohio Seven should be taken to heart by all militants. Furthermore, we should redouble the efforts to get the last the Ohio Seven militants who are still in prison-Jaan Laaman and Tom Manning-out. They must not be allowed to die in prison. Enough said.
Support the Class-War Prisoners!
(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)
The Partisan Defense Committee received the following letters from class-war prisoner Jaan Laaman and Ray Luc Levasseur, who was released from prison in 2004. Laaman and Levasseur were imprisoned in the mid 1980s after they and five others—the Ohio 7—were convicted for their roles in a radical group that took credit for bank "expropriations" and bombings against such symbols of U.S. imperialism as military and corporate offices. From a proletarian standpoint, the actions of these leftist activists against imperialism and racist injustice are not a crime. These courageous fighters should not have served a day in prison.
The PDC is grateful for these letters, which were sent in support of its December 2006 Holiday Appeal. The annual Holiday Appeal, which raises money for the PDC's Class-War Prisoners Stipend Fund, was focused this time on the urgent fight to free death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. The PDC's program of regular stipends is a concrete expression of solidarity with those imprisoned for standing up to racist capitalist repression. To support the work of the Partisan Defense Committee, send contributions to: PDC, P.O. Box 99, Canal Street Station, NY, NY 10013; call (212) 406-4252.
Nov. 28, 2006
Let me wish everyone Happy Holidays and warm RED Season's Greetings!
The Partisan Defense Committee needs, wants and deserves your support. 2006 marks the PDC's 21st straight year of concretely supporting some of America's long held political prisoners. I myself have been a PDC class war prisoner receiving a regular bi-monthly stipend of support, year after year for I think, 20 years now. Additionally in moments of specific need (in my case for legal expenses this past year and for educational expenses some years ago), the PDC stepped forward also.
Material support is important in a real day to day, do I have enough stamps or toothpaste, sense. Political support and informing the public about political prisoner events and issues, is also very important. The PDC under its own banner and through the Workers Vanguard, is an important source of support for us. As political prisoners we need and want this support, so your support of the Partisan Defense Committee is an important and meaningful political statement.
To learn more about and interact with political prisoners in the U.S., and to hear our thoughts on ongoing world events, you can check out 4strugglemag, which I edit, at: http://www.4strugglemag.org. Issue 8 is just out.
FREEDOM IS A CONSTANT STRUGGLE! RED SEASON'S GREETINGS
Jaan Laaman,
Ohio 7 anti-imperialist
political prisoner
10 December 2006
My grandmother began working in textile mills when she was 13 years old. My grandfather went into those mills when he was 14 years of age. My parents left school at 16 to work in the mills. My turn came when I was 17. I didn't know about class war back then, I only knew about survival and that my people—the French Canadian workers—were being shortchanged. We had no political nor economic power and we paid for it by operating the machines that enriched others.
Two years ago I was released after 20 years in prison. For 20 years the government kept me in their worst cages for political offenses—actions taken against imperialism's obscene manifestations of violence and exploitation.
While in prison it was always a challenge to marshal support among the left, the Partisan Defense Committee stepped up when others faltered. The PDC, for many long years, provided needed funds to me and my family, for which I will always be grateful.
I encourage you to donate what you can, large or small, to enable the PDC to continue its solidarity work. Any donation translates to direct support for our political prisoners.
Free Mumia Abu-Jamal & all political prisoners. Ray Luc Levasseur
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