Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
February is Black History Month. This presidential year with the rise of Obama and the youth movement is a good time to look back and try to learn the lessons of previous struggles for black rights.
Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 327, 8 April 1983
Neither Nationalism Nor Liberalism, But Revolutionary Integrationism!
SNCC:BLACK POWER" AND THE DEMOCRATS
The 5,000 demonstrators, overwhelmingly black and working-class, who stopped the Ku Klux Klan from marching in the nation's capital last November 27 may have opened a new chapter in the struggle for black liberation in America. Responding to the call of the Labor/Black Mobilization, initiated by the Spartacist League, thousands of anti-racists streamed from the Capitol to the White House, chanting, "1, 2, 3, 4, Time to Finish the Civil War—5, 6, 7, 8, Forward to a Workers State!" Our slogan caught on instantly, expressing the continuity of a century and a half of struggle for black freedom. After a decade of defeats, November 27 pointed the way forward out of the impasse reached in the 1960s when the militant civil rights activists ran headlong into the realities of black oppression in racist, capitalist America.
The spectre of blacks and reds backed up by the power of labor sent shivers down the spine of the bourgeoisie. So their furor against "outside agitators," the "Tarzan Trotskyists," was predictable. Despicably, a "socialist" cult-sect based in Ann Arbor even echoed this with talk of "carpetbaggers." The bourgeois hysteria came not just from Reagan, whose attorney general had vowed to protect the KKK and even brought in the FBI to back up city police. On November 27 Washington's black mayor, Marion Barry, conveniently departed for a "mayor's conference" in Los Angeles, leaving his cops to tear gas and club black youth. The Walter Fauntroys and their reformist hangers-on had their "free food" diversions, their pop-front gab fests at distant sites to try to channel the anger of the masses into "safe" directions. But they failed...and the Klan was stopped.
On November 27, a spokesman for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) asked from the Labor/Black rally podium why Marion Barry wasn't out there with us. Many demonstrators had the same question, and a National Black Network talk show host later asked rally organizers whether we thought Marion Barry had sold out. After all, Marion Barry was the first chairman of the militant Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the early 1960s. And as was pointed out in a recent TV documentary in the Frontline series, "In the Shadow of the Capitol," ex-SNCC activists dominate the D.C. city administration. Ivanhoe Donaldson, Marion Barry's deputy mayor and chief political adviser, was a SNCC organizer in Mississippi. John Wilson, now a city councilman, used to run SNCC's draft resistance program. Courtland Cox is another top Barry aide. Frank Smith was just elected to the City Council, and so on.
So ex-SNCCers are practically running the Washington city government, such as it is. But what has that meant for the quality of life in the Southeast D.C. black ghettos? As ex-SNCC staffer Charlie Cobb, narrator of the TV documentary, noted, "The guys in Anacostia don't really feel like they know Marion Barry anymore." Barry, who once led lunch counter sit-ins in Nashville, now tells the demonstrators who picket outside his office, "I can get more done in five minutes with my signature on a document" than they can with 1,000 people on the street. And just what are those documents he's signing? How is it that these "Movement people" have now become the protectors of the KKK, the administrators of racist budget cuts, the instigators of mass expulsions of black students at the University of the District of Columbia?
Marion Barry did not "sell out." SNCC was heterogeneous, and its "moderate" wing never saw itself going beyond reforms "within the system." They and their seniors in Martin Luther King's SCLC were always looking to become something like the mayors of Atlanta and Washington, D.C. And they did. But what about the radicals like Stokely Carmichael (now Kwame Toure) who fought against the Marion Barrys and whose break from liberal pacifism was expressed by the slogan "black power"? While Carmichael and his "All-African Peoples Revolutionary Party" may not be administering the bourgeois state apparatus, they are totally irrelevant and frequently obstacles to today's black struggles. As the white sheets and burning crosses multiply in Reagan's America, Stokely says, "It's a waste of time" to fight the Klan!
So here you have the spectacle of two former chairmen of SNCC: one leaves town ordering his cops to protect the Klan, and the other tells the Howard and UDC students who were part of the thousands of black Washingtonians who stopped the KKK November 27 that their action was "a diversion." A recent book, In Struggle—SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s, by Clayborne Carson sheds considerable light on a subject of great interest to communists: how the left wing of the civil rights movement, located mainly in SNCC, broke from liberalism only to disintegrate and become trapped in the dead end of black nationalism.
In Struggle is a comprehensive, vivid description of the crisis in this crucible of black radicalism. What Carson cannot explain is why it happened. To understand the impasse of the civil rights movement, to open the road to the genuine emancipation of black people in America, requires a materialist analysis and Marxist program of revolutionary integrationism.
From Liberal Pacifism to "Black Power"
The appearance of the Southern civil rights movement with the 1956 Montgomery bus boycott opened a new phase in postwar American history, ending the period of Cold War/McCarthyite hysteria. Increasingly American society was polarized along the lines of for-or-against Jim Crow. The young liberal activists, black and white, who threw themselves into the lunch counter sit-ins and freedom rides were not sympathetic to communism, but they were breaking with the anti-Communist prejudices of their parents which had paralyzed the struggle against racism.
SNCC was formed in I960 at the initiative and under the auspices of King's SCLC. Its founding statement of principles began: "We affirm the philosophical or religious ideal of non-violence as the foundation of our purpose...." SNCC at birth was a constituent part of the black liberal establishment in the South, the youth group of what W.E.B. Du Bois earlier termed "the talented tenth." Yet six years later SNCC would infuriate liberal opinion by raising the slogan "black power," and shortly thereafter its new chairman Hubert "Rap" Brown would declare, "the only thing'the man's' going to respect is that .45 or .38 you got." What caused so radical a transformation during those six years?
Through bitter and repeated experience the SNCC activists learned first-hand that the white liberal leaders—the Bobby Kennedys, the Hubert Humphreys and Walter Reuthers—were a lot closer to Dixiecrat racists George Wallace and James Eastland than they were to the civil rights activists. They saw information given in confidence to Justice Department "observers" passed on to cracker sheriffs who naturally used it to victimize SNCC organizers and supporters. There came a moment when a majority of SNCC had rejected liberalism as they knew it, but had not yet embraced black nationalism. Black oppression could not be overcome within the framework of bourgeois democracy, however radical. The conditions weighing upon the impoverished urban masses. South as well as North— terrorized, last hired/first fired, condemned to a life of desperation in the ghettos with their mean streets, lousy schools, rat-infested housing—these could not be solved by a new Civil Rights Act. Genuine equality for blacks is inconceivable without socialist revolution and the massive redistribution of society's wealth, possible only through socialist economic planning.
The SNCC radicals came up against the social revolutionary implications of the struggle against black oppression, but without the intervention of communists they were not able to make the leap to proletarian socialism. When SNCC attempted to go beyond voting rights and access to public facilities (which blacks in the North and a number of Southern cities already had), the organization entered a prolonged crisis of identity. James Forman, SNCC executive secretary in this period, later wrote, "So long as we were working on voter registration and public accommodations, there was a broad consensus under which everyone could move" (The Making of Black Revolutionaries). So long, but no longer.
During the critical period of 1963-66 SNCC militants faced three fundamental political alternatives: reintegration into the liberal establishment, the reactionary utopianism of nationalist separatism, or proletarian socialism (Marxism). Some, like Marion Barry, took the first road via LBJ's "Great Society" poverty programs. However, the most militant elements in SNCC went over to black nationalism, initially a small and isolated current in the organization. Why did these young black radicals opt for nationalist separatism rather than Marxism?
One important factor was their revulsion against the existing organized labor movement, whose liberal face was that of United Auto Workers chief Walter Reuther, a man SNCC cadre had good and personal reasons to despise. In general, the Meany/Reuther-led AFL-CIO was, if anything, more committed to the racist status quo than were many liberal Democratic and even Republican politicians. Typically the children of preachers, schoolteachers and funeral parlor owners, the student radicals in SNCC were isolated from the mass of the black working class and socially above them (despite wearing farmers' coveralls, which became almost a uniform). These petty-bourgeois radicals had no conception at all of setting the base of the labor movement against the top.
But who could bring them this conception except Marxists? The fate of SNCC was decided, as much as by any other single factor, by the criminal abstentionism of the ostensibly Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Defining itself in effect as a "white party," the SWP refused to involve itself in the Southern civil rights struggles while tailing "the Movement" from the outside. Here a historic but fleeting opportunity was lost to change the course of black struggle in contemporary America. The history of SNCC is the story of the road not taken, the only road leading to black liberation, that of proletarian socialist revolution.
Breaking with the Liberals
SNCC emerged out of the lunch counter sit-in movement which swept the Southern black campuses in the spring of 1960. It began when the North Carolina A&T students sat in at Woolworth's in downtown Greensboro (the city where 20 years later, the KKK/ Nazis would massacre five blacks and leftists in cold blood). The SNCC activists came out of the elite black schools like Morehouse College (Julian Bond), Howard University (Stokely Carmichael). Fisk (Marion Barry) or even Harvard (Bob Moses). An extension of black liberalism, the initial goal was formal, legal equality—civil rights, or "Northernizing the South." The political strategy was to seek the support of, and avoid antagonizing, the liberal establishment, bringing to bear the powers of the federal government which was controlled by this establishment.
But if the SNCC activists at first saw themselves as the future Martin Luther Kings, soon their experience was teaching them different lessons from those taught by the preachers. They had illusions in the federal government, but repeatedly received object lessons in the class nature of the bourgeois state. On the freedom rides, the young activists watched how the FBI "observers" stood by taking notes as the sheriffs' goons bashed demonstrators' heads (the FBI of course was in cahoots with, and often part of, the Klan). Carson tells how, after Bob Moses first went into Amite County, Mississippi in 1961, a black sharecropper who helped him was gunned down by a white state legislator, E.H. Hurst. A black witness then told Moses he would testify at Hurst's trial, if promised federal protection. Moses told this to a Justice Department official who not only refused protection ("Justice" was only there to "observe"), but the identity of this witness was passed on to the local
racists and he was subsequently murdered.
From Albany to the "Farce on Washington"
From Albany, Georgia to Lowndes County, Alabama to the plantation country of Mississippi, SNCC was radicalized by its grassroots organizing of poor black sharecroppers which repeatedly brought it into head-on conflict not just with the Dixiecrats, but the whole racist, capitalist state. Every struggle drove them further away from the liberal premises on which they were founded. The Kennedy White House might be willing to integrate the bus station bathrooms and drinking fountains, but they were not about to make a fundamental change in life in the "Black Belt," where the heirs of slaveowners still lorded over the plantations and the Dixiecrat politics, while the sons and daughters of slaves, the terrorized black majority, scratched out a precarious existence as sharecroppers, day laborers and maids. And as SNCC's organizing among the black masses repeatedly brought the situation to flash point, the government rushed in their black brokers to cool it, their CIA agents to co-opt it, their courts to indict it, their troops to crush it.
Albany, formerly the slave and cotton capital of southeast Georgia, marked the beginning of the open split between SNCC and the black preachers of the SCLC. In Albany SNCC sang "Ain't Gonna Let Chief Pritchett Turn Me 'Round," but after more than a year of sustained struggle, SNCC found all its tactics—mass arrests, flooding the jails, rallies, boycotts, vigils—failed to break the grip of Jim Crow. "We were naive enough to think we could fill up the jails.,.. We ran out of people before [Chief Pritchett] ran out of jails," SNCC staffer Bill Hanson said later.
In Albany, the SNCC workers who had tirelessly stomped the dirt roads, gone door-to-door on the black side of town to win support for the movement, were less than thrilled with King and Abernathy's highly publicized weekend jaunts into town to cool things out and arrange "truces" on their behalf. "Don't get weary. We will wear them down with our capacity to suffer," King told the black masses in Albany. But SNCC was beginning to question King's whole strategy of nonviolent resistance. In midsummer with 3,000 Klansmen massed outside town, Albany's black youth fought back with bricks and bottles when the cops attacked a rally outside a black church. King declared a "day of penance" for the "violence," but SNCC refused to condemn the action.
In Albany, SNCC started referring to King contemptuously as "De Lawd."
At the August 1963 March on Washington, SNCC saw how the whole liberal establishment and particularly the liberal wing of the trade-union bureaucracy was used by the government to put the lid on the exploding black movement. The civil rights leaders had initially called the march to put the heat on Kennedy who was dragging his heels on the passage of the civil rights bill. But when the president called them into conference they quickly changed their tune, agreeing to change the march location from the White House to the Lincoln Memorial, deny participation to all "subversive" groups and censor all speeches. So, orchestrated straight from the White House, the march would be a giant liberal prayer fest to channel the masses safely back into liberal Democratic politics. King's "1 Have a Dream" speech celebrated "non-violence," while the USIA filmed the whole event for foreign consumption to prove how "peaceful change" was still possible in America. Disgusted SNCC staffers took to wearing "I Have a Nightmare" buttons, and Malcolm X dubbed it the "Farce on Washington."
While the popular front stretching from Kennedy to Reuther to King could all comfortably rail against the Southern Dixiecrats, at the march SNCC's bitter fury against the federal government had to be kept in check. There would be no "communist" words like "masses" or "revolution" in Washington that day, the "official" black leaders vowed. They censored SNCC chairman John Lewis' speech, deleting his conclusion that:
"The party of Kennedy is the party of Eastland.... We cannot depend on any political party lor both Democrats and Republicans have betrayed the basic principles of the Declaration of Independence."
The labor bureaucrats Walter Reuther and A. Philip Randolph took the lead in pressuring Lewis (who was far from a radical within SNCC) to tone down his language and criticism of the Kennedy administration.
MFDP vs. Lowndes County Black Panther Party
As the culmination of SNCC's voter registration projects in Mississippi, 80,000 blacks who had been prevented from registering as Democrats signed "protest ballots" as members of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). At the 1964 Democratic Party convention, the MFDP hoped their 68-member alternate delegation would unseat the "regular" Jim Crow slate. With the Dixiecrats already vowing to bolt to Goldwater in '64, the MFDP was making a bid to the liberals for the Democratic Party franchise. As Carson put it, "The hopes of the MFDP delegation were based on the belief that they, rather than the regular, all-white delegation, represented the expressed principles of the national Democratic party." Surprise, they didn't.
The MFDP was based in Ruleville, Mississippi, where Dixiecrat boss Senator James Eastland had his plantation. Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Eastland launched a personal vendetta against SNCC for registering the blacks off his estate. The story of Fannie Lou Hamer, who became the MFDP's Congressional
candidate, was typical—the youngest of 20 children of black sharecroppers, she was evicted from the plantation where she had worked for 18 years because she registered to vote. When she moved in with a friend in Ruleville, their house was firebombed.
The MFDP was really an outgrowth of the 1964 "Mississippi Summer Project," braintrusted and financed through Allard Lowenstein, the sinister operative of Cold War liberalism. (As the New York Times wrote upon his assassination in 1980, "Most of the New Left labeled Mr. Lowenstein as a CIA agent.") Working closely with Bob Moses, Lowenstein brought thousands of Northern white college kids to the South for the summer, hoping to "restore faith in the system" by forcing a confrontation in which the federal government would have to intervene.
Going into Atlantic City, the MFDP had considerable support from Northern state delegations. But Lyndon Johnson, still determined to keep the Southern white vote, offered Hubert Humphrey the vice-presidency on the condition that he get the MFDP to back down. They lined up the whole liberal entourage—from Reuther to King to Lowenstein—to put the squeeze on the MFDP to accept the "compromise" by which they would get two "at large" seats, while the entire Dixiecrat delegation would be seated. Despite the pressure, the SNCC leadership rejected the "compromise" and the racists were seated. As Forman wrote, "Atlantic City was a powerful lesson, not only for the black people from Mississippi but for all of SNCC and many other people as well. No longer was there any hope, among those who still had it, that the federal government would change the situation in the Deep South."
In Lowndes County, Alabama Stokely Carmichael and the other SNCC staffers who stayed on to organize after the Selma demonstrations of April 1965 drew their conclusions from the bitter experiences of the MFDP. In George Wallace's Alabama where the words "white supremacy" were part of the Democratic ballot designation, SNCC decided to register blacks for an independent party. As Carmichael said, it was "as ludicrous for Negroes to join [the Democratic Party] as it would have been for Jews to join the Nazi party in the 1930s." The local residents agreed. One recalled, "SNCC mentioned about the third party and we decided we would do it, because it didn't make sense for us to go join the Democratic party when they were the people who had done the killing in the county and had beat our heads." The new organization took a snarling black panther as its symbol, and soon came to be called the Black Panther Party.
Although narrowly based on a single impoverished rural Black Belt county, Lowndes was important because it was organized in opposition to the Democrats. The Lowndes Black Panther Party was also important for its open advocacy of armed self-defense. Armed self-defense was a burning necessity for the black movement in the South. In Monroe, North Carolina beginning in 1959 local NAACP chapter head Robert Williams' courageous battle against KKK terror and his book Negroes With Guns became a beacon to militant blacks throughout the South. Indeed, James Forman, then a young Chicago Defender reporter, visited with Williams just before Williams was forced into exile in Cuba in 1961. In Lowndes the SNCC workers were influenced by and defended the militant black sharecroppers who owned guns and were willing to use them against racist attack. By 1965 the Louisiana-based Deacons for Defense and Justice had spread to Alabama; black rallies in the county were often defended by these armed self-defense squads.
The Ghettos Explode
But it was above all the Northern ghetto explosions which marked the end of the civil rights period and had a profound effect on the SNCC militants.
This is something Carson doesn't understand—the main weakness of his account is its SNCC-centricity, barely touching on factors such as the ghetto "riots" or the influence of Malcolm X, except insofar as they directly intersected SNCC. But "non-violence" died in Harlem in the summer of 1964 and Watts a year later. Until then the civil rights leaders could plausibly claim that their policies and outlook were supported by the black masses, actively in the South and at least passively in the North. But after Harlem and Watts, when it was clear that the explosions were no isolated event, but part of a pattern, it was clear that the whole "turn the other cheek" ethos had no relevance to the embittered urban black masses.
There was enormous pressure on the official black leaders to denounce the "riots." So in '64 it was only the reds who defended the Harlem ghetto masses against what was in fact a police riot. Bill Epton of the Progressive Labor Party, organizer of the militant Harlem Defense Council, was witchhunted by a bourgeois hysteria campaign which included all the black establishment figures. The Spartacist group vigorously defended Epton and the Harlem youth. On the eve of the "riots" we had noted that the mass character of the black struggle in the North was posing a direct threat to the capitalist system and predicted that the cops would soon crack down hard. Spartacist (No. 2, July-August 1964) called for block councils as a "basis for the organization of self-defense." At a mass rally in the New York garment center, called by the Spartacist-initiated Harlem Solidarity Committee, we called for removal of the rioting cops from the ghettos and recognition of the ghetto masses' right to defend themselves against police occupation.
In contrast, in Watts in the summer of 1965 King declared, "It was necessary that as powerful a police force as possible be brought in to check them [the ghetto masses]" (New York Times, 16 August 1965). The Black Muslims' famous cartoon captured King's spirit: "If there is any blood spilled on the streets, let it be our blood." King's defense of cop terror to smash the ghetto explosions was the ultimate proof of what his one-sided "non-violence" really amounted to. For the SNCC radicals this provoked a sharp break with King and the whole liberal civil rights movement. For up until that point the young militants, although many were never committed pacifists, had accepted "non-violence" as a tactic. They had fought for "one man, one vote." But how did "non-violence" and voter registration answer the oppression of Northern ghetto blacks? As Forman later wrote:
"The basic question, 'What is SNCC?' had not yet been answered. Our long-range goals had called for redefinition ever since Atlantic City, and especially since the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights acts—which made obsolete many aspects of our early organizing work. Watts had exploded in August, 1965; could we still call ourselves 'nonviolent' and remain in the vanguard of black militancy? If we were revolutionaries, what was it that we sought to overthrow?"
—James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (1972)
Crisis of Identity
SNCC radicals had broken with liberalism as they knew it. But where did they go from here? Although he cannot explain it, Carson graphically describes the prolonged crisis which broke out after the MFDP debacle—the malaise, the complaints of "loss of will," the endless conferences, the debates, the therapy sessions. Psychiatrists came in and diagnosed it as "battle fatigue" after the grueling Mississippi summer. Sociologists chalked it up to the problems of elite black students "relating" to ghetto youth. It was not a sociological question. SNCC had run head-on into the black question in capitalist America.
The Waveland Retreat in November 1964 was symptomatic. For this conference 37 papers were written analyzing SNCC's failure to act decisively after the "freedom summer." The ensuing debates took up everything from Forman's position to turn SNCC into a professional cadre organization to Bob Moses' "anti-leadership" bent for local community work. But around what program? There was massive dissatisfaction with SNCC's penny-ante projects. What good was integrating the lunch counters, if you couldn't afford to buy lunch, they argued. Instead,of "stopgap measures which buy off revolution," SNCC should "take all the Negroes from the rural areas into the cities and force the revolution," one member proposed. At Waveland, a women's workshop was held protesting the relegation of SNCC women to office chores and their exclusion from leadership roles. The workshop was generally ridiculed; Carmichael notoriously responded that the proper position of women in SNCC was "prone."
Basically SNCC was, within its own terms, effective so long as it was fighting institutionalized Jim Crow and could unite the entire black community around the most elementary democratic demands, such as voter rights or access to public facilities. But in places like Atlanta or Montgomery, they found that the kind of things they were doing had been done, and done better, by the Democratic Party lobby, or the churches, and somewhat later by the poverty programs. They had to develop a social revolutionary program. In the absence of this, those who did not want to be merely co-opted into the liberal Democratic mainstream were drawn to nationalism.
The first nationalist locus in SNCC was a circle around Bill Ware, a Pan-Africanist who only entered the organization in 1964 and set up his own operation, the Atlanta Project. Ware worked briefly building support for the Julian Bond Democratic election campaign in Atlanta's Vine City ghetto. (Bond, who had won election to the Georgia state legislature, was refused seating by die-hard white supremacists.) But the Atlanta Project soon split off to work Vine City on a hard nationalist basis. The Atlanta separatists argued that whites could not "relate to the black experience," that their presence "diluted" SNCC and intimidated blacks from expressing themselves, etc. But to most SNCC cadre, white staffers like Bob Zellner and Jack Minnis were seen as an integral part of the group. The Ware faction's motion at the March 1966 staff meeting to expel all whites was defeated by a majority which then included Carmichael. (Although he's disappeared it now, Stokely, from Bronx High School of Science, was around YPSL and the social-democratic Howard University Non-Violent Action Group and for years had some of the closest ties to white leftists.)
Although the nationalists were initially isolated, they quickly gained ground for they were the only ones with a coherent anti-liberal ideology. SNCC hated in their guts the treacherous white liberals, the trade-union bureaucrats, the government agents with their crocodile tears and their money, their connections, all tantalizingly held out to wrap a net around the struggle and draw it back under their control. The black militants rejected integrationism which they identified with the ideological hegemony of the Bobby Kennedys and Allard Lowensteins. They never became aware of the program of revolutionary integrationism—integration into egalitarian socialist society.
SNCC knew who they hated. But it was a negative program. In the absence of a revolutionary alternative, the nationalists won out in their call to break all ties with the "white Establishment" in which they lumped together the communists with the liberals, the unions with the bureaucrats, thus cutting off the road to socialist revolution for the black working masses in America. It is a historic crime of the Socialist Workers Party that it refused to go in and do battle for people who were quite openly groping for a radical alternative to the liberalism of the Hubert Humphreys and Martin Luther Kings. Inside the SWP the Revolutionary Tendency (RT)—the core of the future Spartacist League—fought for the party to seize this opportunity to win black Trotskyist cadres. An RT motion to the convention of the SWP's youth group, the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA), urgently insisted:
"The masses of black workers and the SNCC leadership and ranks will not pragmatically come to understand and adopt the science of Marxism simply by virtue of their militancy and readiness to grasp any methods within their reach....
"The rising upsurge and militancy ol the black revolt and the contradictory and contused, groping nature of what is now the left wing in the movement provide the revolutionary vanguard with fertile soil and many opportunities to plant the seeds ol revolutionary socialism. Our task is to create a Trotskyist tendency in the broad left wing of the movement, while building that left wing...."
—"The Negro Struggle and the Crisis of Leadership," Draft Resolution on Civil Rights, submitted to the YSA. August 1963
The RT's resolutions were voted down and shortly after we were expelled. The majority's position was that no SWPer was needed in the South at all, since SNCC would become revolutionary on its own in the course of the struggle. When black RTer Shirley Stoute received a personal written invitation from James Forman to work with SNCC in Atlanta, the SWP had to accede. But they sent down majority agents to spy on her, and within about a month called her back to New York on a pretext, refused to let her return to Atlanta, and would not even let her give them a statement why! Thus as the SWP tailed popular black figures, searching around for a "black Castro," they actually forced militant party cadres out of this critical work. For the SWP's centrist degeneration was marked precisely by its rejection of the need for a revolutionary vanguard party from Cuba to the black struggle at home. In 1963, the expulsion of the RT opened the road for the SWP's consolidation around reformism—only a year later after the murders of Chancy, Schwerner and Goodman in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the SWP would come out with its obscene call to withdraw the troops from Vietnam and send them to Mississippi!
"Black Power"
In Lowndes County SNCC had broken with the Democrats. The black radicals advocated armed self-defense in the South and sided with the ghetto rebellions in the North. As the Vietnam War escalated, they made the link between black oppression at home and the U.S.' dirty imperialist war abroad. SNCC's stand against the war horrified the black establishment. When King, Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young pleaded with SNCC to call off an antiwar protest outside Lucy Baines Johnson's wedding on 5 August 1966, they shot back a bitter reply:
"You have displayed more backbone in defending [the president's daughter and her fiance] than you have shown for our black brothers engaged in acts of rebellion in our cities. As far as we are concerned you messengers can tell your boss that his day of jubilation is also the day that his country murdered many in Hiroshima."
This trend had culminated in the May 1966 election of Stokely Carmichael as SNCC chairman. A month later in Greenwood, Mississippi Carmichael raised the "black power" call to a cheering crowd.
The effect was electric. "Black power" was picked up by the young radicals
from the burning ghettos to the Jim Crow South as the rallying cry against the black preachers' sermonizing, the liberals' begging. After all the hopes and expectations of the black masses raised and betrayed by the civil rights leaders, "black power" was the definitive rejection of their "faith in the system." a vow to take matters into their own hands. For SNCC. the "black power" slogan was their hoped-for route to catch up to the urban ghetto masses who had outstripped them. "If America don't come around, we're going to burn it down." swore "Rap" Brown. As the bourgeois press screeched, virtually the entire black establishment was mobilized to condemn it as the "new racism." King temporized, saying he didn't want to "excommunicate" the black power radicals. And Harlem demagogue Adam Clayton Powell was sharp enough to see which way the wind was blowing—he jumped on the bandwagon declaring "black power" meant voting for him. But white liberals were horrified.
Initially, the "black power" movement was contradictory. As we wrote:
"SNCC's empirical rejection of the more obvious brands of reformism advocated by white liberals and petty-bourgeois Black 'leaders' has taken the form of a call for 'Black Power.' a militant-sounding phrase which frightens the white liberals and Uncle Toms. The concepts implied in the SNCC slogan of 'Black Power' are radical enough to have caused the bourgeois press and politicians to shower vicious abuse on it. precisely because the slogan is a groping for solutions outside the framework of the capitalist society."
—"SNCC and Revolution." Spartacist No. 8. November-December 1966
But we warned: "...the slogan 'black power' must be clearly defined in class, not racial terms, for otherwise the'black power' movement may become the black wing of the Democratic Party in the South" ("Black and Red—Class Struggle Road to Negro Freedom," Spartacist No. 10, May-June 1967). Our prediction seemed almost inconceivable to most people at the time, yet that is precisely what happened.
Even though we were small, the Spartacist tendency, recently expelled from the SWP, fought to intersect the "black power" radicals. Our call for a "Freedom-Labor Party" was the axis to link the exploding black struggle to the power of labor, North and South. With it we posed a series of transitional demands to win militants to this class-struggle perspective: for "A Southern Organizing Drive Backed Up by Organ¬ized Labor," for "A Workers United Front Against Federal Intervention," for "Organized, Armed Self-Defense." And we sought to translate this into practice, organizing aid ("Every Dime Buys a Bullet") for the Deacons for Defense and Justice. The Deacons were black vets who sprang up in Jonesboro and Bogalusa, Louisiana to protect CORE workers there. As we wrote:
"The Deacons organization is a tremendous step forward for the Negro struggle, not only because it saves lives, but also because it raises the level of consciousness of the civil rights movement by encouraging independent action and discouraging reliance upon the institutions of the bourgeois state."
—"Toward Arming the Negro Struggle," Sparlacisl No. 5, November-December 1965
But we lacked the forces. As a result of the criminal abstention of the SWP when SNCC first began to break from liberalism the "black power" radicals never found a bridge to the program of workers power. Increasingly in SNCC "black power" came to mean exclusion of whites and consolidation around a hard separatist program. In December 1966 the remaining whites were finally expelled. Even then the vote was 19-18 with 24 abstentions, indicating how deep the bonds of comradeship had been, how wrenching the destruction process. A few years later, as Carson observes, Carmichael's anti-"honky" separatist diatribes put SNCC far to the right of the Panthers. In Oakland, California, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense had been inspired by and took its name from Lowndes County. But in 1968 the Panthers broke with Carmichael over his anti-communist and anti-white political line. At one point Carmichael refused to speak at a big "Free Huey" rally at the Oakland Courthouse (where Huey Newton was imprisoned on frame-up charges of killing a cop) because he didn't want to sit on the same platform with whites from the Peace and Freedom Party. When he finally did show up, it was only to denounce all "white" doctrines such as "Marxism." "Communism is not an ideology suited for black people, period, period," Carmichael raved. Bobby Seale felt compelled to reject this position from the podium, stating that Carmichael was playing "the Klu Klux Klan's game."
Forman, who had been increasingly uneasy about Carmichael's hard "reactionary nationalism" and seeing himself some kind of Marxist, went with the Panthers in the split. After playing around with his "Black Manifesto" scheme, Forman briefly got involved with the important circle of black radical workers springing up in and around the Detroit auto plants. But the League of Revolutionary Black Work-
ers never broke from nationalism and lumped the UAW into the white "power structure." Thus even though it was located in America's most strategic concentration of black workers, it too could not find the road to revolutionary power, working-class power.
Repression and Co-optation
But if the bourgeoisie uniformly denounced black radicals, they also recognized that some of them could be bought. Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" poverty programs were extremely important in co-opting many. Carson tells how Marion Barry, who was sent to Washington in 1965 as SNCC's representative, wrote back to complain that they were losing good organizers to the federal poverty programs, which were doing the same thing as SNCC but paying the staff a lot better! Shortly after, Barry quit SNCC to become head of PRIDE, Inc. Barry was typical of a whole layer of the organization that went this route into the Democratic Party.
On the other hand, those who were so alienated that they couldn't be bought— the "Rap" Browns and a big layer of the Panthers—were simply wiped out. As the ghettos exploded, the bourgeoisie mounted a campaign to pin the riots on black radicals (while SNCC leader Brown played into their hands with his verbal terrorism). Dubbed the "Rap Brown Act," an amendment to LBJ's voting rights act made it a federal crime to cross state lines to start a riot. The feds busted down the doors to SNCC offices, framed up the leaders on the whole gamut of phony charges—arson, conspiracy, criminal syndicalism—and finally just gunned them down in the streets. J. Edgar Hoover's COINTEL-PRO labeled Carmichael and Brown "vociferous firebrands" and started moving in—Carmichael escaped to Africa (having married South African folk singer Miriam Makeba), but they shot Brown and sent him up for a long stretch in jail. The Panthers, coming slightly later, got the full brunt of the unprecedented campaign to exterminate a whole generation of black radical leaders.
Where Are They Now?
In Carson's "Where Are They Now?" epilogue, you can see three SNCC generations. The first generation, who really were simply younger versions of Martin Luther King, ended up in the Democratic Party—Marion Barry, Julian Bond, John Lewis, Charles Sherrod, Ivanhoe Donaldson. A middle layer, like James Forman and Bob Moses (who, burned by Lowenstein, broke off all relations with whites and dropped out after MFDP) drifted back into academia—they were not hardened nationalists but were too radical to be comfortable in the Democratic Party. And the black nationalists only became more so. Carmichael and his AAPRP are the embodiment of reactionary Utopian Pan-Africanism. Rap Brown today is a Black Muslim.
Although at one time Barry and Carmichael represented polar opposites in SNCC, nonetheless, as was seen on November 27, their basic response to today's struggles is to put themselves on the same side—the side opposite the black masses. There is indeed a symbiotic relation between the black liberal establishment and the nationalist-separatist sects. One is the wing of "the talented tenth" who have made it in America; the other is the wing who aspire to their own bourgeois state power. Both of them are instinctively threatened by real struggle for black liberation in America.
A decade ago when black militants were groping toward revolution we did not have the organizational weight to pose an alternative to the no-win choice of liberalism or dead-end black nationalism. A whole generation of dedicated, young black fighters was lost. What would 100 black Trotskyist cadre have meant in Oakland in I968 or in the volatile conditions of Detroit auto at that time? Surely the whole course and rhythm of the American class struggle would look quite different today.
We didn't have the weight to change the course then. Today, instead of the "choice" between Carmichael and Barry, there is a Marxist answer for class-and race-conscious black youth, for black workers seeking emancipation from racial oppression and wage slavery. November 27 as we marched, 5,000-strong, blacks and workers led by communists triumphantly through the streets of the capital, the resounding slogan, "Finish the Civil War— Forward to a Workers State!" pointed the way forward to Black Liberation through Socialist Revolution. •
Sunday, February 03, 2008
*Obama the "Charma" - A View From The Left
Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Commiteee.
February Is Black History Month
The following is an article that may be of general interest to the radical public concerning the dramatic rise of Barack Obama this political season. I have detailed my own opinion of Obama elsewhere in this space. Moreover, the mass media in its 'feeding frenzy' will before this phenomena runs its course have driven us to madness with coverage on the man.
Workers Vanguard No. 906 18 January 2008
Break with the Democrats! For a Class-Struggle Workers Party!
The Obama Campaign and the "End of Racism" Myth
For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!
The candidates of the capitalist Democratic Party say their 2008 campaigns are all about "change." After seven years of rule by the demented Bush gang (or what's left of its inner circle), much of the American populace does indeed want change. The widely unpopular, bloody imperialist occupation of Iraq drags on, the economy teeters on recession, the wages and living conditions of those with jobs have taken a pounding, home foreclosures are soaring, civil liberties have been increasingly shredded. The racist atrocity in the face of Hurricane Katrina is the domestic signature of the Bush administration; millions watched angrily as the poor and black residents of New Orleans were left to die or suffer intolerable conditions. From Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo Bay, the lexicon of torture has become a matter of "civilized debate" in bourgeois circles.
The trade-union bureaucrats and the black bourgeois politicians, tailed by the reformist left, seize on social discontent to peddle the lie that support to the "lesser evil" Democratic Party will serve the interests of working people and the oppressed. But the policies pursued by the Bush regime are not simply the product of a particularly vicious administration. Imperialist war, racism and repression are endemic to the capitalist system. As Marxists, we fight to break workers and the oppressed from illusions in the Democrats, the other party of war and racism, and to forge a workers party that fights to overturn the capitalist system through workers revolution.
In the 2008 presidential race, the Democrats offer two front-runners who would have been unthinkable even a few years ago: a black man, U.S. Senator Barack Obama, and a woman, former first lady Hillary Clinton. Obama took the Iowa caucuses; Clinton the New Hampshire primary. The third top candidate in the Democratic Party race, former vice presidential candidate Senator John Edwards, poses as a populist out to fight the "special interests" and "corporate greed." In stump speeches, they're all for "healing," "hope" and "unity." They're "fired up and ready to go," not least to restore the battered image of U.S. imperialism in the world, including with some belated nods to the popular demand to withdraw sooner rather than later from Iraq.
The Democrats' rhetoric is meant to refurbish illusions that the shell game of bourgeois electoral politics can work in the interests of the working masses. The Republicans revel in inflicting suffering on working people and the oppressed. Just look at the Republican debates where the candidates were competing over who could be the most racist and anti-immigrant bigot. For their part, the Democrats put on a more kindly face, the better to deceive the working people and give a more popular facade to the racist capitalist status quo. As Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin captured it in his 1917 work, The State and Revolution, "To decide once every few years which member of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament—this is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarism."
We revolutionary Marxists do not extend any support to any capitalist politician. Nor would we run for executive office—such as mayor, governor or president—ourselves, although Marxists have and can run for parliamentary office as a tactic to propagate our revolutionary program. As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels taught long ago, the capitalist government is the executive committee that manages the affairs of the capitalist class as a whole. In the U.S., the president is the chief executive responsible for the most massive military power in history and for the domestic machinery of repression that maintains social oppression and exploitation. To run for executive office means to aspire to be the next Commander-in-Chief who decides who gets tortured, who gets bombed, who gets invaded (see Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 60, Autumn 2007).
At the time of the 2006 midterm elections, we wrote in "For a Class-Struggle Workers Party!" (WV No. 881, 24 November 2006):
"Our task in analyzing social discontents, including as revealed through the distorted prism of the elections, is to lay bare the irreconcilable class antagonisms at the base of this society. It is the working class, with its strategic black component, that produces the wealth of society. This is the only social force with the objective interest and potential social power to smash the capitalist system and lay the basis for the construction of an egalitarian socialist society. We stand for the complete political independence of the proletariat from all capitalist parties—Democrat,Republican and Green."
Democratic Party vs. Black Liberation
Barack Obama, the son of a Kenyan father and a white American mother, is perceived as a charismatic, honest politician, above the mudslinging and corruption that define American politics. He is particularly popular among college youth. And in the face of the history of black oppression in this country, the possibility of the election of the first black president, whatever his actual policies, will likely propel many even previously skeptical black people to support him. If this deeply racist country, where religious obscurantism and anti-woman bigotry are pervasive, ever sees a black or female president, it would certainly be a significant development. But it would do nothing to change the oppression of women, which is rooted in the institution of the family in class society, or of black people, which forms the cornerstone of American capitalism. Simply put, the liberation of black people and women will not happen short of the destruction of the capitalist system through socialist revolution.
In the eyes of the capitalist rulers, Obama is potentially acceptable as chief executive because his entire campaign is based on the "end of racism" lie, the claim that black oppression has been overcome. Columnist Gary Younge commented in the Nation (31 December 2007) that the value of black leadership "is, it seems, directly proportional to its distance from the black community and its experiences. Its cheerleaders desire not so much to refashion black politics as to eliminate it altogether, not so much to eliminate racism as to eradicate discussion of it." The article quotes black radical-liberal writer and former Communist Party spokesman Angela Davis aptly noting that Obama "is being consumed as the embodiment of color blindness."
In his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Obama declared: "There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America—there's the United States of America." This message was recently echoed by no less a capitalist mouthpiece than the Wall Street Journal (10 November 2007) which headlined: "Whites' Great Hope? Barack Obama and the Dream of a Color-Blind America."
Dream on. A year after Obama's speech to the DNC, the horror of Katrina would expose (again) this present-day liberal lie for what it is. In response to this glaring racist atrocity, Obama declared that "the incompetence was color-blind." What's "color blind" about the ongoing purge of black people from New Orleans? Then when some 50,000 overwhelmingly black people converged upon Jena, Louisiana, in September to protest Jim Crow justice against six black youth, Obama said he just wanted "fairness" and claimed it "isn't a matter of black and white." Tell that to the black people outraged over the proliferation of hangman's nooses around the country after the Jena protest. Those who came out to Jena were mobilized by black Democrats Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson with the aim of tunneling anger into the Democratic Party and appeals for "justice" to the federal government. Obama did not even bother to show up.
The daily reality of racist oppression can be measured in astronomical unemployment rates for blacks and decrepit ghetto housing; rampant police terror and the consignment of nearly one million black men and women to America's hellhole prisons, mainly due to the "war on drugs"; prison-like inner-city schools and the purge of black youth from higher education. Obama looks upon all this and claims, as he did in his speech in Selma last year, that the civil rights movement brought America "90 percent of the way" toward racial equality!
Certainly such a position serves Obama's career. It means blaming the oppressed for their oppression. In his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope, he declares that "minorities, individually and collectively, have responsibilities as well" for their own condition. They suffer from "too much television," "lack of emphasis on educational achievement" and "the collapse of the two-parent black household." Obama lectures that black people should acknowledge that "perhaps the single biggest thing we could do to reduce such poverty is to encourage teenage girls to finish high school and avoid having children out of wedlock." And "we should also acknowledge that conservatives—and Bill Clinton—were right about welfare," a reference to Clinton's ending of welfare "as we know it," which consigned millions of poor and black people, especially women, to the scrap heap. Such is Obama's program for "change."
Contrary to the myth promoted by Obama and other liberals, black oppression continues to be the central defining feature of U.S. society. It is materially rooted in and central to American capitalism. As against both liberal integrationists and black nationalists, our struggle for black liberation is based on the program of revolutionary integrationism. While opposing every manifestation of racist oppression, fighting in particular to mobilize the social power of the multiracial labor movement, we underline that full equality for the black masses
requires that the working class rip the economy out of the hands of the capitalist rulers and reorganize it on a socialist basis. Only then will it be possible to eliminate the material roots of black oppression through the integration of black people into an egalitarian socialist society based on a collectivized economy with jobs and quality housing, health care and education for all.
As we elaborated in "Black and Red," a key document adopted at the founding conference of the Spartacist League in 1966:
"The struggle of the black people of this country for freedom, while part of the struggle of the working class as a whole, is more than that struggle. The Negro people are an oppressed race-color caste, in the main comprising the most exploited layer of the American working class.... Because of their position as both the most oppressed and also the most conscious and experienced section, revolutionary black workers are slated to play an exceptional role in the coming American revolution."
Black Oppression and American Capitalism
The roots of black oppression lie in chattel slavery, smashed only by blood and iron in the Civil War, the Second American Revolution. In this "conflict between the system of slavery and the system of free labor," as Karl Marx described it, some 200,000 black troops entered the fight and helped turn the tide for the Northern
Union Army.
Despite the victory over the slavocracy and installation of the most democratic period for black people in American history under Radical Reconstruction, the promise of black freedom was betrayed as Northern capitalists looked at the devastated South and saw an opportunity not for building a radical democracy but for exploiting Southern resources, and the freedmen. The Compromise of 1877 sealed this betrayal and, with the withdrawal of the remaining troops of the Union Army from the South, a new system of racist exploitation was established through the systematic repression of black people's fight for land, education and civil rights. The former slaves became tenants and sharecroppers toiling on land owned by the white propertied class, consisting of elements of the old slavocracy and a new Southern bourgeoisie with strong ties to Northern capital. Jim Crow segregation became entrenched, enforced and maintained by Klan terror and police-state repression. Black people were effectively completely disenfranchised.
The Southern Jim Crow system made an imprint on the entire country. The capitalist rulers have long fomented ethnic and religious hatred. Well into the 20th century, the central dividing line was one which pitted "native" Protestants against mainly Catholic German, Irish, Italian and other immigrant workers. With the mass migration of blacks from the South to the industrial cities of the North, particularly during World Wars I and II, the bourgeoisie promoted anti-black racism, making the color bar a fundamental dividing line that has served to obscure the irreconcilable class divide. All this has served to retard the political consciousness of the American proletariat. The U.S. is the only industrial country where the workers have not historically had their own independent political party, even a reformist one, reflecting the interests of labor, which are counterposed to the interests of capital.
The courageous struggles of the black and white foot soldiers of the civil rights movement in the 1950s-'60s played an instrumental role in overturning Jim Crow. The creation of a Southern black proletariat fundamentally eroded the Jim Crow system of segregation. The bourgeoisie eventually acquiesced to legal equality in the South, in part because Jim Crow had become an embarrassment to U.S. imperialism's posture as the defender of "democracy" and "human rights" in the Cold War against the Soviet Union, the industrial and military powerhouse of the non-capitalist world.
The struggle for black equality intersected growing discontent and opposition to U.S. imperialism's losing counterrevolutionary war against the Vietnamese workers and peasants. The potential for an explosive and revolutionary transformation of American society was evident. But from its onset, the civil rights movement was dominated by a black middle-class leadership allied to the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. The aim of liberal-pacifist leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. was to pressure the Democratic administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson to grant formal, legal equality. In the context of the current spat between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama over her claim that Johnson did more than King for black rights, it is worth recalling that King supported the suppression of the 1965 Watts ghetto revolt while Johnson dispatched federal troops to crush the 1967 Detroit upheaval.
In the 1960s, the Spartacist League, despite our small forces, put forward the perspective of a class-struggle fight for black freedom. As we stated in our Programmatic Statement, "For Socialist Revolution in the Bastion of World Imperialism":
"In our intervention into the civil rights movement, the Spartacist League raised the call for a South-wide Freedom Labor Party as an expression of working-class political independence and the need to mobilize the labor movement to fight for black emancipation. This was linked to a series of other transitional demands aimed at uniting black and white workers in struggle against the capitalist class enemy, like organizing the unorganized and a sliding scale of wages and hours to combat inflation and unemployment. We called for armed self-defense against racist terror and for a workers united front against government intervention, both in the labor movement and in the use of federal troops to suppress black plebeian struggles. This program is no less urgent today."
The bankruptcy of the liberal program of the civil rights movement's leadership was quickly revealed when the movement swept out of the South and into the North, where black people already had formal legal equality. The struggle for a fundamental change in conditions of life in the ghettos—for real equality, for jobs, decent housing and adequate schools—collided head-on with the realities of American capitalism. Many black militants, frustrated with and opposed to liberal conciliationism, turned to black nationalism, which rejects the multiracial working class as the motor force for revolutionary struggle against this racist capitalist system.
The bourgeoisie responded to growing black militancy—represented by Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party and others—with vicious repression, killing 38 Panthers and imprisoning hundreds more through COINTELPRO. Police repression along with cop riots in major U.S. cities resulted in the spontaneous eruption of ghetto rebellions across the country. At the same time, the bourgeoisie sought to and did co-opt a layer of the liberal black misleaders into the Democratic Party, reflected in the election of a number of black mayors in major American cities over the next couple of decades.
By the late 1960s, a racist backlash was already beginning, and in succeeding decades many of the gains of the civil rights period were reversed or eroded. A key turning point was the defeat of busing in Boston in 1974-75 on the streets by racist mobs and in government halls by liberal politicians. Last year's Supreme Court decision overturning school desegregation plans in Seattle and Louisville eviscerates the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling that banned school segregation. The racist backlash was soon followed by an onslaught against the labor movement, exemplified by the 1981 smashing of the PATCO air traffic controllers union by the Reagan administration using plans drawn up by the Democratic Carter administration.
Barack Obama is a beneficiary of the civil rights movement. He also embodies the utter failure of bourgeois liberalism to address the needs of the black masses. A graduate of Harvard Law School, and the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, Obama's rise to political prominence was meteoric, an effort helped in no small part by elements within the Chicago Democratic Party Daley machine. Twenty years earlier, during Jesse Jackson's 1988 presidential campaign, in which he won 13 primaries and caucuses and got over seven million votes, we pointed out in "Jesse Jackson, Racism and the Democratic Party" (WVNo. 451, 22 April 1988): "Class divisions are sharpening within the black population, marked by the gulf between a thin layer of black professionals, who poured through the gates forced open by the civil rights movement, and the massive 'black underclass' of the permanently unemployed, swollen through the devastation of American industry in the '70s and '80s."
When Jesse Jackson ran for the Democratic nomination in 1984 as part of forming his Rainbow Coalition and again in 1988, he was attempting to exert pressure on the party, including through bringing in more voters, but had no chance of nomination. Obama's campaign today, however, poses the possibility of the election of the first black president. And he may well face attack from racist vigilantes and terrorists; threats along those lines have led to the early assignment of Secret Service protection. As a black worker in North Carolina bluntly put it: "I think he will certainly need to beef up his security, because I think there's these wackos that will go to any extent to make sure he doesn't win" (Washington Post, 5 January).
When black Democrat Harold Washington was elected mayor of Chicago in 1983 and faced a vicious racist backlash, we underlined that "Washington has the right to take office with all the normal prerogatives. Blacks have a right to elect whoever they want to office" (WV No. 326, 25 March 1983). But as opposed to many on the reformist left, we refused to give one ounce of political support to this longtime machine Democrat and warned, "Harold Washington Will Betray Black Chicago" (WV No. 328, 22 April 1983). And, indeed, he did, slashing jobs, services and overseeing Chicago's murderous police department.
It is the role of black elected officials to keep a lid on social struggle and administer racist capitalist rule. As former New York City Democratic mayor David Dinkins quipped when he was running for office in 1989, "They'll take it from me." A grotesque example was the 1985 bombing of the MOVE commune in Philadelphia, which slaughtered eleven black men, women and children and destroyed an entire black neighborhood. This was carried out by black Democratic mayor Wilson Goode in collusion with the Feds.
Obama and the Fake Left
The way forward in the struggle against this deeply racist capitalist system is to break the political chains that bind workers, blacks, immigrants and the oppressed to their class enemy, particularly through support to the Democratic Party. This means waging a political struggle not only against the labor tops, many of whom are leading lights within the Democratic Party, but also against the reformist left. Today, as Obama's popularity mounts especially among blacks and youth, the reformist International Socialist Organization (ISO) paints him as a symbol for "those who want a break with the stale right-wing orthodoxy that has dominated mainstream politics for a generation" (Socialist Worker, 11 January).
Despite various criticisms of Obama, the ISO made clear its stand when at an 11 February 2007 rally at the University of Illinois at Chicago campus ISO-led protesters unfurled a banner pleading: "Obama: Stand Up! Cut the funding!" (for the Iraq war). This is part of their fight to give the Democrats "a backbone," which is supposed to be provided by "a grassroots antiwar movement that can pressure politicians from outside the established party system" (Socialist Worker, 2 March 2007). Of course, no less an establishment Democrat than John Kerry has endorsed Obama, who has also received significant support from Wall Street financiers.
The Workers World Party (WWP) is more blatant; the conclusion of its editorial "Behind the Votes for Obama & Rodham Clinton" (Workers World, 9 January) unmistakably leaves open the possibility of support to this capitalist politician:
"With an Obama candidacy, working-class and revolutionary organizations will have to stay sensitive to the impact of racism on the electoral campaign, even as the left differentiates itself from Obama as well as the Republican [sic]. The left will also have to adjust its approach should there be an active intervention of the population in the electoral process, especially if an economic or war crisis arises during the election."
Indeed, WWP supported Jackson in 1988 and other black Democrats such as Congressional candidate Cynthia McKinney in 2004 and New York City Council member Charles Barron in 2006. For his part, Barren raised the slogan: "Let's get back to Black and vote for Barack" (Amsterdam News, 15 November 2007).
Obama is, in fact, to the right of both Clinton and Edwards on many domestic issues. He is at one with the Clintonian "center" in support of the racist, barbaric death penalty. In the context of vicious attacks on immigrants, he wrote in The Audacity of Hope: "I'm not entirely immune to such nativist sentiments. When I see Mexican flags waved at pro-immigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment." Along with Clinton, Obama's "patriotism" led him to support the "Secure Fence Act," mandating the construction of a 700-mile wall along the U.S.-Mexican border.
As for his international policy, in addition to a cautious and uneven opposition to the Iraq war and occupation, Obama's article on "Renewing American Leadership" in Foreign Affairs (July/August 2007) is instructive. He makes clear that he wants to bring the occupation of Iraq to a "responsible end" in order to redeploy and significantly escalate American military forces and operations around the world. Like the other Democrats, Obama is foursquare behind the murderous occupation of Afghanistan. He is bellicose against Pakistan, as well as Iran and the North Korean deformed workers state, writing: "We must develop a strong international coalition to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and eliminate North Korea's nuclear weapons program.... In confronting these threats, I will not take the military option off the table."
He goes on to proclaim: "To defeat al Qaeda, I will build a twenty-first-century military and twenty-first-century partnerships as strong as the anticommunist alliance that won the Cold War to stay on the offense everywhere from Djibouti to Kandahar." It is no accident that Obama's foreign policy consigliere is one Zbigniew Brzezinski, the veteran of Cold War II who, as part of Jimmy Carter's Democratic administration, worked to militarily and ideologically rearm U.S. imperialism after its humiliating defeat at the hands of the heroic Vietnamese workers and peasants. The Carter administration launched an anti-Communist "human rights" campaign against the Soviet Union, including massive support to Islamic reactionaries in Afghanistan against the Soviet Red Army's intervention on the side of elementary human progress.
For the most part, the reformists marched in lockstep with the imperialists during Cold War II. Today, in the wake of the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union, they have given up even lip service to the struggle for proletarian revolution. As revolutionary Trotskyists, we stood for the unconditional military defense of the Soviet degenerated workers state and the deformed workers states of East and Central Europe while fighting for political revolution to oust the ruling Stalinist bureaucracies and install regimes based on workers democracy and revolutionary internationalism. Today, we apply this same program to the remaining deformed workers states of China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba.
The restoration of capitalism in the USSR was a world-historic defeat for the international proletariat. Today, rapacious U.S. imperialism declares itself the superpower of a "one superpower" world, and the capitalists internationally are intensifying their class war against working people, immigrants and the oppressed. Retrograde "death of communism" consciousness has led to a number of backward offspring, from the mythology of the "end of racism" to widespread despair among working people over their ability to fundamentally ameliorate their conditions. It is a telling statement of the decomposition of the left that radical-liberal writer Alexander Cockburn is now promoting right-wing libertarian Republican Ron Paul—a fanatical proponent of "free market" capitalism—as a "principled fellow" and "a candidate leftists can and should support" (Nation, 21 January).
There will be no effective resistance to the immiseration of American working people without the unity in struggle between the trade unions and the black and Latino poor. It is necessary to fight for a new, class-struggle leadership in the labor movement that fights to mobilize and extend union power not only in defense of workers' livelihoods but also to combat racist discrimination and anti-immigrant attacks. Such a class-struggle leadership would fight against deportations and to organize immigrant workers, demanding full citizenship rights for all immigrants. As we wrote in our Programmatic Statement:
"Despite the destruction of industrial jobs and erosion of union strength, black workers, who have a significantly higher rate of trade-union membership than do white workers, continue to be integrated into strategic sectors of the industrial proletariat, which alone has the power to shatter this racist, capitalist system. Won to a revolutionary program, black workers will be the living link fusing the anger of the dispossessed ghetto masses with the social power of the multiracial proletariat under the leadership of a Leninist vanguard party."
February Is Black History Month
The following is an article that may be of general interest to the radical public concerning the dramatic rise of Barack Obama this political season. I have detailed my own opinion of Obama elsewhere in this space. Moreover, the mass media in its 'feeding frenzy' will before this phenomena runs its course have driven us to madness with coverage on the man.
Workers Vanguard No. 906 18 January 2008
Break with the Democrats! For a Class-Struggle Workers Party!
The Obama Campaign and the "End of Racism" Myth
For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!
The candidates of the capitalist Democratic Party say their 2008 campaigns are all about "change." After seven years of rule by the demented Bush gang (or what's left of its inner circle), much of the American populace does indeed want change. The widely unpopular, bloody imperialist occupation of Iraq drags on, the economy teeters on recession, the wages and living conditions of those with jobs have taken a pounding, home foreclosures are soaring, civil liberties have been increasingly shredded. The racist atrocity in the face of Hurricane Katrina is the domestic signature of the Bush administration; millions watched angrily as the poor and black residents of New Orleans were left to die or suffer intolerable conditions. From Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo Bay, the lexicon of torture has become a matter of "civilized debate" in bourgeois circles.
The trade-union bureaucrats and the black bourgeois politicians, tailed by the reformist left, seize on social discontent to peddle the lie that support to the "lesser evil" Democratic Party will serve the interests of working people and the oppressed. But the policies pursued by the Bush regime are not simply the product of a particularly vicious administration. Imperialist war, racism and repression are endemic to the capitalist system. As Marxists, we fight to break workers and the oppressed from illusions in the Democrats, the other party of war and racism, and to forge a workers party that fights to overturn the capitalist system through workers revolution.
In the 2008 presidential race, the Democrats offer two front-runners who would have been unthinkable even a few years ago: a black man, U.S. Senator Barack Obama, and a woman, former first lady Hillary Clinton. Obama took the Iowa caucuses; Clinton the New Hampshire primary. The third top candidate in the Democratic Party race, former vice presidential candidate Senator John Edwards, poses as a populist out to fight the "special interests" and "corporate greed." In stump speeches, they're all for "healing," "hope" and "unity." They're "fired up and ready to go," not least to restore the battered image of U.S. imperialism in the world, including with some belated nods to the popular demand to withdraw sooner rather than later from Iraq.
The Democrats' rhetoric is meant to refurbish illusions that the shell game of bourgeois electoral politics can work in the interests of the working masses. The Republicans revel in inflicting suffering on working people and the oppressed. Just look at the Republican debates where the candidates were competing over who could be the most racist and anti-immigrant bigot. For their part, the Democrats put on a more kindly face, the better to deceive the working people and give a more popular facade to the racist capitalist status quo. As Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin captured it in his 1917 work, The State and Revolution, "To decide once every few years which member of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament—this is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarism."
We revolutionary Marxists do not extend any support to any capitalist politician. Nor would we run for executive office—such as mayor, governor or president—ourselves, although Marxists have and can run for parliamentary office as a tactic to propagate our revolutionary program. As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels taught long ago, the capitalist government is the executive committee that manages the affairs of the capitalist class as a whole. In the U.S., the president is the chief executive responsible for the most massive military power in history and for the domestic machinery of repression that maintains social oppression and exploitation. To run for executive office means to aspire to be the next Commander-in-Chief who decides who gets tortured, who gets bombed, who gets invaded (see Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 60, Autumn 2007).
At the time of the 2006 midterm elections, we wrote in "For a Class-Struggle Workers Party!" (WV No. 881, 24 November 2006):
"Our task in analyzing social discontents, including as revealed through the distorted prism of the elections, is to lay bare the irreconcilable class antagonisms at the base of this society. It is the working class, with its strategic black component, that produces the wealth of society. This is the only social force with the objective interest and potential social power to smash the capitalist system and lay the basis for the construction of an egalitarian socialist society. We stand for the complete political independence of the proletariat from all capitalist parties—Democrat,Republican and Green."
Democratic Party vs. Black Liberation
Barack Obama, the son of a Kenyan father and a white American mother, is perceived as a charismatic, honest politician, above the mudslinging and corruption that define American politics. He is particularly popular among college youth. And in the face of the history of black oppression in this country, the possibility of the election of the first black president, whatever his actual policies, will likely propel many even previously skeptical black people to support him. If this deeply racist country, where religious obscurantism and anti-woman bigotry are pervasive, ever sees a black or female president, it would certainly be a significant development. But it would do nothing to change the oppression of women, which is rooted in the institution of the family in class society, or of black people, which forms the cornerstone of American capitalism. Simply put, the liberation of black people and women will not happen short of the destruction of the capitalist system through socialist revolution.
In the eyes of the capitalist rulers, Obama is potentially acceptable as chief executive because his entire campaign is based on the "end of racism" lie, the claim that black oppression has been overcome. Columnist Gary Younge commented in the Nation (31 December 2007) that the value of black leadership "is, it seems, directly proportional to its distance from the black community and its experiences. Its cheerleaders desire not so much to refashion black politics as to eliminate it altogether, not so much to eliminate racism as to eradicate discussion of it." The article quotes black radical-liberal writer and former Communist Party spokesman Angela Davis aptly noting that Obama "is being consumed as the embodiment of color blindness."
In his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Obama declared: "There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America—there's the United States of America." This message was recently echoed by no less a capitalist mouthpiece than the Wall Street Journal (10 November 2007) which headlined: "Whites' Great Hope? Barack Obama and the Dream of a Color-Blind America."
Dream on. A year after Obama's speech to the DNC, the horror of Katrina would expose (again) this present-day liberal lie for what it is. In response to this glaring racist atrocity, Obama declared that "the incompetence was color-blind." What's "color blind" about the ongoing purge of black people from New Orleans? Then when some 50,000 overwhelmingly black people converged upon Jena, Louisiana, in September to protest Jim Crow justice against six black youth, Obama said he just wanted "fairness" and claimed it "isn't a matter of black and white." Tell that to the black people outraged over the proliferation of hangman's nooses around the country after the Jena protest. Those who came out to Jena were mobilized by black Democrats Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson with the aim of tunneling anger into the Democratic Party and appeals for "justice" to the federal government. Obama did not even bother to show up.
The daily reality of racist oppression can be measured in astronomical unemployment rates for blacks and decrepit ghetto housing; rampant police terror and the consignment of nearly one million black men and women to America's hellhole prisons, mainly due to the "war on drugs"; prison-like inner-city schools and the purge of black youth from higher education. Obama looks upon all this and claims, as he did in his speech in Selma last year, that the civil rights movement brought America "90 percent of the way" toward racial equality!
Certainly such a position serves Obama's career. It means blaming the oppressed for their oppression. In his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope, he declares that "minorities, individually and collectively, have responsibilities as well" for their own condition. They suffer from "too much television," "lack of emphasis on educational achievement" and "the collapse of the two-parent black household." Obama lectures that black people should acknowledge that "perhaps the single biggest thing we could do to reduce such poverty is to encourage teenage girls to finish high school and avoid having children out of wedlock." And "we should also acknowledge that conservatives—and Bill Clinton—were right about welfare," a reference to Clinton's ending of welfare "as we know it," which consigned millions of poor and black people, especially women, to the scrap heap. Such is Obama's program for "change."
Contrary to the myth promoted by Obama and other liberals, black oppression continues to be the central defining feature of U.S. society. It is materially rooted in and central to American capitalism. As against both liberal integrationists and black nationalists, our struggle for black liberation is based on the program of revolutionary integrationism. While opposing every manifestation of racist oppression, fighting in particular to mobilize the social power of the multiracial labor movement, we underline that full equality for the black masses
requires that the working class rip the economy out of the hands of the capitalist rulers and reorganize it on a socialist basis. Only then will it be possible to eliminate the material roots of black oppression through the integration of black people into an egalitarian socialist society based on a collectivized economy with jobs and quality housing, health care and education for all.
As we elaborated in "Black and Red," a key document adopted at the founding conference of the Spartacist League in 1966:
"The struggle of the black people of this country for freedom, while part of the struggle of the working class as a whole, is more than that struggle. The Negro people are an oppressed race-color caste, in the main comprising the most exploited layer of the American working class.... Because of their position as both the most oppressed and also the most conscious and experienced section, revolutionary black workers are slated to play an exceptional role in the coming American revolution."
Black Oppression and American Capitalism
The roots of black oppression lie in chattel slavery, smashed only by blood and iron in the Civil War, the Second American Revolution. In this "conflict between the system of slavery and the system of free labor," as Karl Marx described it, some 200,000 black troops entered the fight and helped turn the tide for the Northern
Union Army.
Despite the victory over the slavocracy and installation of the most democratic period for black people in American history under Radical Reconstruction, the promise of black freedom was betrayed as Northern capitalists looked at the devastated South and saw an opportunity not for building a radical democracy but for exploiting Southern resources, and the freedmen. The Compromise of 1877 sealed this betrayal and, with the withdrawal of the remaining troops of the Union Army from the South, a new system of racist exploitation was established through the systematic repression of black people's fight for land, education and civil rights. The former slaves became tenants and sharecroppers toiling on land owned by the white propertied class, consisting of elements of the old slavocracy and a new Southern bourgeoisie with strong ties to Northern capital. Jim Crow segregation became entrenched, enforced and maintained by Klan terror and police-state repression. Black people were effectively completely disenfranchised.
The Southern Jim Crow system made an imprint on the entire country. The capitalist rulers have long fomented ethnic and religious hatred. Well into the 20th century, the central dividing line was one which pitted "native" Protestants against mainly Catholic German, Irish, Italian and other immigrant workers. With the mass migration of blacks from the South to the industrial cities of the North, particularly during World Wars I and II, the bourgeoisie promoted anti-black racism, making the color bar a fundamental dividing line that has served to obscure the irreconcilable class divide. All this has served to retard the political consciousness of the American proletariat. The U.S. is the only industrial country where the workers have not historically had their own independent political party, even a reformist one, reflecting the interests of labor, which are counterposed to the interests of capital.
The courageous struggles of the black and white foot soldiers of the civil rights movement in the 1950s-'60s played an instrumental role in overturning Jim Crow. The creation of a Southern black proletariat fundamentally eroded the Jim Crow system of segregation. The bourgeoisie eventually acquiesced to legal equality in the South, in part because Jim Crow had become an embarrassment to U.S. imperialism's posture as the defender of "democracy" and "human rights" in the Cold War against the Soviet Union, the industrial and military powerhouse of the non-capitalist world.
The struggle for black equality intersected growing discontent and opposition to U.S. imperialism's losing counterrevolutionary war against the Vietnamese workers and peasants. The potential for an explosive and revolutionary transformation of American society was evident. But from its onset, the civil rights movement was dominated by a black middle-class leadership allied to the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. The aim of liberal-pacifist leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. was to pressure the Democratic administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson to grant formal, legal equality. In the context of the current spat between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama over her claim that Johnson did more than King for black rights, it is worth recalling that King supported the suppression of the 1965 Watts ghetto revolt while Johnson dispatched federal troops to crush the 1967 Detroit upheaval.
In the 1960s, the Spartacist League, despite our small forces, put forward the perspective of a class-struggle fight for black freedom. As we stated in our Programmatic Statement, "For Socialist Revolution in the Bastion of World Imperialism":
"In our intervention into the civil rights movement, the Spartacist League raised the call for a South-wide Freedom Labor Party as an expression of working-class political independence and the need to mobilize the labor movement to fight for black emancipation. This was linked to a series of other transitional demands aimed at uniting black and white workers in struggle against the capitalist class enemy, like organizing the unorganized and a sliding scale of wages and hours to combat inflation and unemployment. We called for armed self-defense against racist terror and for a workers united front against government intervention, both in the labor movement and in the use of federal troops to suppress black plebeian struggles. This program is no less urgent today."
The bankruptcy of the liberal program of the civil rights movement's leadership was quickly revealed when the movement swept out of the South and into the North, where black people already had formal legal equality. The struggle for a fundamental change in conditions of life in the ghettos—for real equality, for jobs, decent housing and adequate schools—collided head-on with the realities of American capitalism. Many black militants, frustrated with and opposed to liberal conciliationism, turned to black nationalism, which rejects the multiracial working class as the motor force for revolutionary struggle against this racist capitalist system.
The bourgeoisie responded to growing black militancy—represented by Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party and others—with vicious repression, killing 38 Panthers and imprisoning hundreds more through COINTELPRO. Police repression along with cop riots in major U.S. cities resulted in the spontaneous eruption of ghetto rebellions across the country. At the same time, the bourgeoisie sought to and did co-opt a layer of the liberal black misleaders into the Democratic Party, reflected in the election of a number of black mayors in major American cities over the next couple of decades.
By the late 1960s, a racist backlash was already beginning, and in succeeding decades many of the gains of the civil rights period were reversed or eroded. A key turning point was the defeat of busing in Boston in 1974-75 on the streets by racist mobs and in government halls by liberal politicians. Last year's Supreme Court decision overturning school desegregation plans in Seattle and Louisville eviscerates the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling that banned school segregation. The racist backlash was soon followed by an onslaught against the labor movement, exemplified by the 1981 smashing of the PATCO air traffic controllers union by the Reagan administration using plans drawn up by the Democratic Carter administration.
Barack Obama is a beneficiary of the civil rights movement. He also embodies the utter failure of bourgeois liberalism to address the needs of the black masses. A graduate of Harvard Law School, and the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, Obama's rise to political prominence was meteoric, an effort helped in no small part by elements within the Chicago Democratic Party Daley machine. Twenty years earlier, during Jesse Jackson's 1988 presidential campaign, in which he won 13 primaries and caucuses and got over seven million votes, we pointed out in "Jesse Jackson, Racism and the Democratic Party" (WVNo. 451, 22 April 1988): "Class divisions are sharpening within the black population, marked by the gulf between a thin layer of black professionals, who poured through the gates forced open by the civil rights movement, and the massive 'black underclass' of the permanently unemployed, swollen through the devastation of American industry in the '70s and '80s."
When Jesse Jackson ran for the Democratic nomination in 1984 as part of forming his Rainbow Coalition and again in 1988, he was attempting to exert pressure on the party, including through bringing in more voters, but had no chance of nomination. Obama's campaign today, however, poses the possibility of the election of the first black president. And he may well face attack from racist vigilantes and terrorists; threats along those lines have led to the early assignment of Secret Service protection. As a black worker in North Carolina bluntly put it: "I think he will certainly need to beef up his security, because I think there's these wackos that will go to any extent to make sure he doesn't win" (Washington Post, 5 January).
When black Democrat Harold Washington was elected mayor of Chicago in 1983 and faced a vicious racist backlash, we underlined that "Washington has the right to take office with all the normal prerogatives. Blacks have a right to elect whoever they want to office" (WV No. 326, 25 March 1983). But as opposed to many on the reformist left, we refused to give one ounce of political support to this longtime machine Democrat and warned, "Harold Washington Will Betray Black Chicago" (WV No. 328, 22 April 1983). And, indeed, he did, slashing jobs, services and overseeing Chicago's murderous police department.
It is the role of black elected officials to keep a lid on social struggle and administer racist capitalist rule. As former New York City Democratic mayor David Dinkins quipped when he was running for office in 1989, "They'll take it from me." A grotesque example was the 1985 bombing of the MOVE commune in Philadelphia, which slaughtered eleven black men, women and children and destroyed an entire black neighborhood. This was carried out by black Democratic mayor Wilson Goode in collusion with the Feds.
Obama and the Fake Left
The way forward in the struggle against this deeply racist capitalist system is to break the political chains that bind workers, blacks, immigrants and the oppressed to their class enemy, particularly through support to the Democratic Party. This means waging a political struggle not only against the labor tops, many of whom are leading lights within the Democratic Party, but also against the reformist left. Today, as Obama's popularity mounts especially among blacks and youth, the reformist International Socialist Organization (ISO) paints him as a symbol for "those who want a break with the stale right-wing orthodoxy that has dominated mainstream politics for a generation" (Socialist Worker, 11 January).
Despite various criticisms of Obama, the ISO made clear its stand when at an 11 February 2007 rally at the University of Illinois at Chicago campus ISO-led protesters unfurled a banner pleading: "Obama: Stand Up! Cut the funding!" (for the Iraq war). This is part of their fight to give the Democrats "a backbone," which is supposed to be provided by "a grassroots antiwar movement that can pressure politicians from outside the established party system" (Socialist Worker, 2 March 2007). Of course, no less an establishment Democrat than John Kerry has endorsed Obama, who has also received significant support from Wall Street financiers.
The Workers World Party (WWP) is more blatant; the conclusion of its editorial "Behind the Votes for Obama & Rodham Clinton" (Workers World, 9 January) unmistakably leaves open the possibility of support to this capitalist politician:
"With an Obama candidacy, working-class and revolutionary organizations will have to stay sensitive to the impact of racism on the electoral campaign, even as the left differentiates itself from Obama as well as the Republican [sic]. The left will also have to adjust its approach should there be an active intervention of the population in the electoral process, especially if an economic or war crisis arises during the election."
Indeed, WWP supported Jackson in 1988 and other black Democrats such as Congressional candidate Cynthia McKinney in 2004 and New York City Council member Charles Barron in 2006. For his part, Barren raised the slogan: "Let's get back to Black and vote for Barack" (Amsterdam News, 15 November 2007).
Obama is, in fact, to the right of both Clinton and Edwards on many domestic issues. He is at one with the Clintonian "center" in support of the racist, barbaric death penalty. In the context of vicious attacks on immigrants, he wrote in The Audacity of Hope: "I'm not entirely immune to such nativist sentiments. When I see Mexican flags waved at pro-immigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment." Along with Clinton, Obama's "patriotism" led him to support the "Secure Fence Act," mandating the construction of a 700-mile wall along the U.S.-Mexican border.
As for his international policy, in addition to a cautious and uneven opposition to the Iraq war and occupation, Obama's article on "Renewing American Leadership" in Foreign Affairs (July/August 2007) is instructive. He makes clear that he wants to bring the occupation of Iraq to a "responsible end" in order to redeploy and significantly escalate American military forces and operations around the world. Like the other Democrats, Obama is foursquare behind the murderous occupation of Afghanistan. He is bellicose against Pakistan, as well as Iran and the North Korean deformed workers state, writing: "We must develop a strong international coalition to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and eliminate North Korea's nuclear weapons program.... In confronting these threats, I will not take the military option off the table."
He goes on to proclaim: "To defeat al Qaeda, I will build a twenty-first-century military and twenty-first-century partnerships as strong as the anticommunist alliance that won the Cold War to stay on the offense everywhere from Djibouti to Kandahar." It is no accident that Obama's foreign policy consigliere is one Zbigniew Brzezinski, the veteran of Cold War II who, as part of Jimmy Carter's Democratic administration, worked to militarily and ideologically rearm U.S. imperialism after its humiliating defeat at the hands of the heroic Vietnamese workers and peasants. The Carter administration launched an anti-Communist "human rights" campaign against the Soviet Union, including massive support to Islamic reactionaries in Afghanistan against the Soviet Red Army's intervention on the side of elementary human progress.
For the most part, the reformists marched in lockstep with the imperialists during Cold War II. Today, in the wake of the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union, they have given up even lip service to the struggle for proletarian revolution. As revolutionary Trotskyists, we stood for the unconditional military defense of the Soviet degenerated workers state and the deformed workers states of East and Central Europe while fighting for political revolution to oust the ruling Stalinist bureaucracies and install regimes based on workers democracy and revolutionary internationalism. Today, we apply this same program to the remaining deformed workers states of China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba.
The restoration of capitalism in the USSR was a world-historic defeat for the international proletariat. Today, rapacious U.S. imperialism declares itself the superpower of a "one superpower" world, and the capitalists internationally are intensifying their class war against working people, immigrants and the oppressed. Retrograde "death of communism" consciousness has led to a number of backward offspring, from the mythology of the "end of racism" to widespread despair among working people over their ability to fundamentally ameliorate their conditions. It is a telling statement of the decomposition of the left that radical-liberal writer Alexander Cockburn is now promoting right-wing libertarian Republican Ron Paul—a fanatical proponent of "free market" capitalism—as a "principled fellow" and "a candidate leftists can and should support" (Nation, 21 January).
There will be no effective resistance to the immiseration of American working people without the unity in struggle between the trade unions and the black and Latino poor. It is necessary to fight for a new, class-struggle leadership in the labor movement that fights to mobilize and extend union power not only in defense of workers' livelihoods but also to combat racist discrimination and anti-immigrant attacks. Such a class-struggle leadership would fight against deportations and to organize immigrant workers, demanding full citizenship rights for all immigrants. As we wrote in our Programmatic Statement:
"Despite the destruction of industrial jobs and erosion of union strength, black workers, who have a significantly higher rate of trade-union membership than do white workers, continue to be integrated into strategic sectors of the industrial proletariat, which alone has the power to shatter this racist, capitalist system. Won to a revolutionary program, black workers will be the living link fusing the anger of the dispossessed ghetto masses with the social power of the multiracial proletariat under the leadership of a Leninist vanguard party."
Honor the Memory of Phillip Agee
Commentary
This political obituary of Phillip Agee is passed on from Workers Vanguard. It seems to hit the political high notes on the career of Agee for leftists just about right. One point- In the history of the international working class movement we have had comparatively few class traitors come into our ranks. Phillip Agee would probably not come under either Lenin's Bolshevik definition of what service to socialism entailed nor for that matter Julius Martov's looser Menshevik definition either in that famous fight in the Russian Social Democracy in 1903. But, hell what Agee did by naming names of CIA agents, our implacable arch-enemies, was surely an important contribution to the struggles of the international working class. Yes, Agee deserves the political tribute below.
Workers Vanguard No.907 February 1 2008
On January 7, Philip Agee died in a Havana hospital after surgical attempts failed to correct his perforated ulcers. Agee, who is perhaps unknown to many of our younger readers, was an ex-CIA agent who resigned from that agency in 1969. He spent the rest of his life meticulously documenting and exposing the spies, non-governmental agencies and State Department operatives that prosecuted U.S. imperialism's myriad efforts to subvert and overturn such foreign governments as displeased the U.S. imperialist rulers, especially in those countries (such as Chile in the early 1970s and Nicaragua in the 1980s) where the threat of revolutionary overturns was posed.
A onetime altar boy and the son of a prosperous Florida businessman, Agee was recruited to the CIA in 1957 after his graduation from Notre Dame, spending, his time in the agency in a variety of assignments in Latin America. He was posted to Mexico City in 1968, the year in which the Institutional Revolutionary Party regime of Gustavo Diaz Ordaz slaughtered hundreds of protesting students on the eve of the Olympics, an event that precipitated Agee's resignation in early 1969. Agee, perhaps whimsically, said he left the CIA because "I fell in love with a woman who thought Che Guevara was the most wonderful man in the world."
In 1975 Agee published Inside the Company: CIA Diary in which he named 250 agency officers, NGOs and foreign agents—an activity he continued in the pages of Covert Action Information Bulletin (later Covert Action Quarterly) that he helped initiate in 1978 (it ceased publication in 2005). Agee later described his motivation: "It was a time in the 70s when the worst imaginable horrors were going in in Latin America. Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Guatemala, El Salvador—they were military dictatorships with death squads, all with the backing of the CIA and the US government" (London Guardian, 10 January 2007).
His activities did not go unnoticed by his ex-employer. In 1982, Congress passed the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which was specifically aimed at Agee's actions. It criminalized outing covert agents—a non-crime from the standpoint of the proletariat that is, in fact, a service to humanity. After the debut of Covert Action Agee became a "man without a country," expelled from Britain in 1977 at the behest of then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger by the obliging Labour Party government of James Callaghan. He was subsequently refused entry by France and the Netherlands. Agee did not obtain secure residency until he achieved a German pass-
port in 1990 after marrying Giselle Roberge, a German ballerina. Until his death, Agee sojourned between his home in Hamburg and an apartment in Havana.
The "death of communism" triumphalism in the aftermath of the 1991-92 capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet degenerated workers state has transformed many onetime critics of American imperialism into its sniveling and lying sycophants who religiously retail the lie that the "socialist experiment" has failed. Not so Agee, who, until his death, remained a staunch defender of the Cuban Revolution and an opponent of U.S. efforts toward a counterrevolutionary overturn of the Castro regime. While not a few of the obituaries detailing Agee's death describe him as a "turncoat," "renegade" and "traitor," none call him a liar, nor do any attempt to refute his revelations.
A man of considerable intellect and principle, Philip Agee saw deeply into the heart of the monster he chose to oppose. Just two weeks after the September 11 attacks, he gave a talk in Stockholm describing Osama bin Laden as "a creature of the CIA" in its efforts to mobilize Islamic reactionaries in opposition to the Soviet Union's intervention in Afghanistan. He went on to assert that the "war on terror" was of service to the U.S. imperialist rulers precisely because it is "an ongoing war, for which there will be no quick resolution" and "no great battles." He pointed out that it would be used to effect restraints on civil liberties and political dissent. In all this he was spot-on.
Agee was not an advocate of proletarian revolution. Although he described himself as a socialist, it seems clear that his contempt was directed rather specifically at the bloody predations of American imperialism. Nor did Agee perceive that the nationalist Castro-led bureaucracy that holds sway in Cuba itself endangers the Cuban deformed workers state, not least through its Stalinist dogma of "socialism in one country," which stands in opposition to the struggle for international socialist revolution, including in the U.S.
Philip Agee was an intransigent opponent of the would-be world-conquering, bloodsoaked American bourgeoisie and, indeed, a traitor to his class. For that we honor him. As Granma, the paper of the Cuban Communist Party, said upon his death, Agee was "a loyal friend of Cuba and fervent defender of the peoples' fight for a better world." His contributions to that end will be sorely missed. •
This political obituary of Phillip Agee is passed on from Workers Vanguard. It seems to hit the political high notes on the career of Agee for leftists just about right. One point- In the history of the international working class movement we have had comparatively few class traitors come into our ranks. Phillip Agee would probably not come under either Lenin's Bolshevik definition of what service to socialism entailed nor for that matter Julius Martov's looser Menshevik definition either in that famous fight in the Russian Social Democracy in 1903. But, hell what Agee did by naming names of CIA agents, our implacable arch-enemies, was surely an important contribution to the struggles of the international working class. Yes, Agee deserves the political tribute below.
Workers Vanguard No.907 February 1 2008
On January 7, Philip Agee died in a Havana hospital after surgical attempts failed to correct his perforated ulcers. Agee, who is perhaps unknown to many of our younger readers, was an ex-CIA agent who resigned from that agency in 1969. He spent the rest of his life meticulously documenting and exposing the spies, non-governmental agencies and State Department operatives that prosecuted U.S. imperialism's myriad efforts to subvert and overturn such foreign governments as displeased the U.S. imperialist rulers, especially in those countries (such as Chile in the early 1970s and Nicaragua in the 1980s) where the threat of revolutionary overturns was posed.
A onetime altar boy and the son of a prosperous Florida businessman, Agee was recruited to the CIA in 1957 after his graduation from Notre Dame, spending, his time in the agency in a variety of assignments in Latin America. He was posted to Mexico City in 1968, the year in which the Institutional Revolutionary Party regime of Gustavo Diaz Ordaz slaughtered hundreds of protesting students on the eve of the Olympics, an event that precipitated Agee's resignation in early 1969. Agee, perhaps whimsically, said he left the CIA because "I fell in love with a woman who thought Che Guevara was the most wonderful man in the world."
In 1975 Agee published Inside the Company: CIA Diary in which he named 250 agency officers, NGOs and foreign agents—an activity he continued in the pages of Covert Action Information Bulletin (later Covert Action Quarterly) that he helped initiate in 1978 (it ceased publication in 2005). Agee later described his motivation: "It was a time in the 70s when the worst imaginable horrors were going in in Latin America. Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Guatemala, El Salvador—they were military dictatorships with death squads, all with the backing of the CIA and the US government" (London Guardian, 10 January 2007).
His activities did not go unnoticed by his ex-employer. In 1982, Congress passed the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which was specifically aimed at Agee's actions. It criminalized outing covert agents—a non-crime from the standpoint of the proletariat that is, in fact, a service to humanity. After the debut of Covert Action Agee became a "man without a country," expelled from Britain in 1977 at the behest of then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger by the obliging Labour Party government of James Callaghan. He was subsequently refused entry by France and the Netherlands. Agee did not obtain secure residency until he achieved a German pass-
port in 1990 after marrying Giselle Roberge, a German ballerina. Until his death, Agee sojourned between his home in Hamburg and an apartment in Havana.
The "death of communism" triumphalism in the aftermath of the 1991-92 capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet degenerated workers state has transformed many onetime critics of American imperialism into its sniveling and lying sycophants who religiously retail the lie that the "socialist experiment" has failed. Not so Agee, who, until his death, remained a staunch defender of the Cuban Revolution and an opponent of U.S. efforts toward a counterrevolutionary overturn of the Castro regime. While not a few of the obituaries detailing Agee's death describe him as a "turncoat," "renegade" and "traitor," none call him a liar, nor do any attempt to refute his revelations.
A man of considerable intellect and principle, Philip Agee saw deeply into the heart of the monster he chose to oppose. Just two weeks after the September 11 attacks, he gave a talk in Stockholm describing Osama bin Laden as "a creature of the CIA" in its efforts to mobilize Islamic reactionaries in opposition to the Soviet Union's intervention in Afghanistan. He went on to assert that the "war on terror" was of service to the U.S. imperialist rulers precisely because it is "an ongoing war, for which there will be no quick resolution" and "no great battles." He pointed out that it would be used to effect restraints on civil liberties and political dissent. In all this he was spot-on.
Agee was not an advocate of proletarian revolution. Although he described himself as a socialist, it seems clear that his contempt was directed rather specifically at the bloody predations of American imperialism. Nor did Agee perceive that the nationalist Castro-led bureaucracy that holds sway in Cuba itself endangers the Cuban deformed workers state, not least through its Stalinist dogma of "socialism in one country," which stands in opposition to the struggle for international socialist revolution, including in the U.S.
Philip Agee was an intransigent opponent of the would-be world-conquering, bloodsoaked American bourgeoisie and, indeed, a traitor to his class. For that we honor him. As Granma, the paper of the Cuban Communist Party, said upon his death, Agee was "a loyal friend of Cuba and fervent defender of the peoples' fight for a better world." His contributions to that end will be sorely missed. •
*The Latest From Jena, Louisiana- Drop the Charges Against William Winchester, Jr.
Click On Title to Link To Associated Press, June 27, 2009, Article On The Latest In The Jena Six Case.
February is Black History Month
The following statement is passed on from the Partisan Defense Committee concerning the latest protest action in the fight for justice in Jena, Louisiana. Nothing need be added here. Send letters of support to the Jena Defense Committee P.O Box 2798, Jena La. 71342 and of protest to the LaSalle Parish (not county,remember this is Louisiana) District Attorney J. Reed Walters. Pronto.
Drop Charges Against Anti-Fascist Protestor
We print below a January 27 letter from the Partisan Defense Committee to LaSalle Parish District Attorney J. Reed Walters. The PDC is a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization associated with the Sparta-cist League.
The Partisan Defense Committee demands that the charges be dropped against William Winchester Jr., a supporter of the New Black Panther Party who was arrested in Jena, Louisiana, for demonstrating against a fascist provocation on January 21, Martin Luther King Day. Mr. Winchester was charged with battery of a police officer and resisting arrest.
The white supremacists, led by the Mississippi-based Nationalist Movement, came to Jena armed, waving the Confederate flag of black chattel slavery and brandishing lynch-rope nooses. The race-terrorists staged their murderous threats under the protection of several hundred state, local and federal law enforcement officers, including deputies from other parishes, SWAT teams and police snipers stationed on roofs.
The fascist bands spewing their racist filth through the streets of Jena are part of a wave of racist provocations, many involving hanging nooses to terrorize black people, that have swept the U.S. after the September 20 demonstration in Jena. That day, as many as 50,000 overwhelmingly black people protested against Jim Crow "justice" and in defense of the Jena Six, black high school students framed up for defending themselves after months of racist attacks. Mychal Bell of the Jena Six is now in prison. Free Mychal Bell! Drop all charges against the Jena Six! Drop the charges against William Winchester Jr.! •
The following is an article of interest to the radical public and black liberation fighters on the demonstrations down in Jena, Louisiana in September 2007. This is taken from the Young Spartacus pages of Workers Vanguard No. 899, dated September 28, 2007. I would only add that many of the political points made in the article are worthy of attention as we fight for the immediate goal of freedom for the Jena Six and the ultimate goal of victory in the black liberation struggle. And friends, that does not mean Obama as president, as significant as that may be in this deeply racist country.
Workers Vanguard No. 899 28 September 2007
Jena Six: Racist "Justice" U.S.A.
Break with the Democrats! For a Class-Struggle Workers Party! Finish the Civil War—For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!
(Young Spartacus pages)
On September 20, as many as 50,000 protesters—overwhelmingly black and comprising workers, students, retirees and church groups—poured into the small rural town of Jena, Louisiana. Alerted by black radio and Internet networks, they came on buses from all over the South, from Detroit and Harlem and as far away as Los Angeles, to express their outrage at the Jim Crow "justice" meted out to six black Jena high school students. After months of racist insults and threats prompted by black students sitting under the "white tree," with racists putting hangman's nooses on the tree, five of the youth were charged with attempted murder following a schoolyard scuffle with a white student, while the sixth was charged as a juvenile (see "Outrage Over Jim Crow Justice in Louisiana," JFFNo. 896, 3 August). On campuses and workplaces across the country, the case of the Jena Six has touched a raw nerve among black people. One protester in Jena held up a sign reading, "There Would Be More of Us Here But So Many of Us Are in Jail."
The day after the protesters left, Jim Crow justice in Jena reasserted itself. Earlier, 17-year-old Mychal Bell, the only one of the six students who has been continuously imprisoned since the schoolyard fight, saw his aggravated assault and conspiracy charges thrown out because he had been tried as an adult. But outrageously, on September 21 he was denied bail. Bell remains incarcerated in a town in the central Louisiana pine woods that has been a stronghold for KKKer David Duke. The other five still await trial, although charges against four of them have been reduced. Hours after the Jena demonstration, two young whites, one an admitted Klansman, provocatively drove through the nearby city of Alexandria, threatening people who had returned from the protest by dragging two nooses from their pickup truck, which contained a rifle and brass knuckles. Free Mychal Bell now! Drop all the charges against the Jena Six!
"Jena justice" is not some aberration. In Georgia, black youth Genarlow Wilson is still in prison for having had consensual oral sex with a 15-year-old girl when he was 17. After a court reduced his sentence to time already served, prosecutors appealed the ruling, keeping him behind bars. In New York City, Sean Bell, a young black man celebrating his upcoming wedding, was cut down in a hail of 50 cop bullets last December, and six months later black and Latino high school students in Brooklyn's Bushwick neighborhood were rounded up by cops as they tried to attend a friend's wake. The prisons, and the barbaric death rows within the prisons, are overflowing with black men in a country with the highest incarceration rate in the world.
Many of the protesters who poured into Jena appreciated the connection made by Spartacist League and Spartacus Youth Club comrades between the case of the Jena Six and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, one of the worst racist atrocities in modern U.S. history. But Democratic politicians Jesse Jackson Sr. and Al Sharpton, central leaders of the Jena protest, did not organize any significant protests over Katrina. The Katrina disaster could not be blamed solely on the criminal policies of the Bush administration but also indicted the Democratic Party, which for decades helped preside over the deterioration of the flood control system and ran the notoriously racist and corrupt New Orleans cops. A featured speaker on September 20 was New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin, who ordered the city's evacuation while abandoning those without cars—overwhelmingly black and poor—to the Katrina floodwaters. We wrote in a 4 September 2005 Spartacist League statement titled "New Orleans: Racist Atrocity" (WV No. 854,16 September 2005):
"This disaster has laid bare the class and race divisions in America. The logic of U.S. capitalism is that whites mainly lost property, blacks mainly lost lives. It is overwhelmingly black people, deemed 'expendable' by the rulers, who suffered and died by the thousands in this two-thirds black city.... This catastrophic destruction of lives and livelihoods underlines that the oppression of black people is rooted in the very bedrock of American capitalism and will not be ended short of a socialist revolution that rips power and the means of production from the greedy rulers and places them in the hands of the working people."
We look to the working class and its strategic black component as the social force that can overturn the capitalist order. With its hands on the means of production—the factories, mines, transportation systems—the working class produces the profits of the capitalist exploiters. We fight to build a workers party based on the perspective of revolutionary integrationism. While combatting racist segregation and state repression, we understand that black liberation can be achieved only through the integration of black people into an egalitarian socialist society. This program is counterposed to the liberal myth that black people—an oppressed race-color caste—can achieve equality within the confines of the capitalist profit system. It is also counterposed to black nationalism, which capitulates to and helps perpetuate the racist segregation fostered by this country's rulers and despairs of multiracial class struggle.
Liberal Misleaders
Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, whose longtime role as "black leaders" has been to quell social unrest, came down to Jena to preach reliance on the same "justice" system that from the county sheriff on up is a machine of racial and class oppression. Sharpton called in Jena for "federal intervention to protect people from Southern injustice," intoning that "our fathers in the 1960's had to penetrate the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, we have to do the same thing" (Associated Press, 20 September).
It is a lie that the federal government is a friend of black equality. Fifty years ago during the battle to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, President Eisenhower sent in troops to head off efforts by black people to defend themselves against racist mobs and KKK nightriders. Federal intervention into anti-racist and other social struggles has meant spying on and murderous repression of activists. President Bush, cynically claiming to be "saddened" by the events in Jena, noted that "the Justice Department and the FBI are monitoring the situation." We're sure they are—just like they "monitored" the Black Panther Party and thousands of other radicals, black and white, in the civil rights, anti-Vietnam War and New Left movements.
Under the FBI's Counter-intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), 38 Black Panther Party members were killed and hundreds of others framed up. FBI "infiltrators" made up about 20 percent of Ku Klux Klan membership in the 1960s and were involved in bombings and murders, including the 1963 Birmingham church bombing and the murder of civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo in her car in 1965. The November 1979 Klan/Nazi massacre of five leftists and union officials in Greensboro, North Carolina, was aided by a government agent who helped train the killers and by a "former" FBI informant who rode shotgun in the fascists' motorcade of death.
A living symbol of the system of racist capitalist injustice today is the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther and later a MOVE supporter and radical journalist who has been imprisoned on death row for a quarter century, framed up on false charges of killing a Philadelphia policeman in December 1981. From the time he was a 15-year-old leader of the Philadelphia Panthers in the late 1960s, Mumia was a target of COINTELPRO spying and harassment. The cops, prosecutors, bourgeois politicians and their media jackals have howled for Mumia's legal lynching because they see in him the spectre of black revolt.
The big-name black liberals who organized the Jena Six protest have done nothing at all comparable on behalf of Mumia. While Jena is a small Southern town, Philadelphia is a major Northern city long run by the Democratic Party machine. And it was the local Democrats who joined with the cops and prosecutors in putting Mumia on death row. The D.A. who prosecuted Mumia in 1982, Ed Rendell, is now the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania. Since first taking up Mumia's cause two decades ago, the Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee have urged all opponents of racist oppression to join the fight for his freedom and to abolish the racist death penalty. But we understand that this fight must be waged independently of the capitalist courts and political parties that conspired to railroad Mumia.
Democrats: The Other Party of Racist Capitalist Rule
What politicians like Sharpton, who admits that he wore a wire for the FBI in the 1980s, want above all else is to keep black people tied to the Democratic Party as the "lesser evil" to the Republicans, who openly appeal to the white racist vote. All the major GOP presidential candidates recently refused to appear in a debate at Baltimore's historically black Morgan State University. In an earlier calculated insult, all but one Republican candidate turned down the chance to debate on the Spanish-language Univision network. In his New York Times (24 August) column, liberal commentator Paul Krugman noted that the Republicans' "electoral strategy has depended largely on exploiting racial fear and animosity." He pointed out that "Rudy Giuliani remains the front-runner for the G.O.P. nomination," despite his big-city social life and record on abortion, because he "comes across as an authoritarian, willing in particular to crack down on you-know-who."
The impoverishment of the black populace is perpetuated by the American capitalist government—federal, state and city—whether run by Democrats or Republicans. It was the Clinton administration in the mid 1990s that axed the main federal welfare program, thereby condemning millions of women and children, disproportionately black, to destitution while further depressing wages at the low end of the labor market, where black workers are concentrated. Today in response to the Jena atrocity, Hillary Clinton has joined the call for an "investigation," while Barack Obama says he just wants "fairness" and claims it "isn't a matter of black and white." Tell that to the marchers who passed Confederate flags on the way out of Jena!
The bulk of the "socialist" left, which sows the illusion that the capitalist system can be reformed to serve the interests of workers and the oppressed, has offered no criticism of the Sharpton and Jackson leadership of the Jena protest. Typical are the eccentric Maoists of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), who went to Jena with stickers to "Impeach Bush!"—their longstanding gimmick to promote the Democratic Party of racism and imperialist war. The RCP's Revolution has pumped out a lot of newsprint on Jena that includes some ritualistic denunciations of capitalism and white supremacy. But you won't hear from them that Jackson, Sharpton & Co. have repeatedly moved to steer anger over racist abuses into toothless "reforms" and bourgeois electoral politics.
MLK and the Failure of Liberal Reformism
There was a lot of talk at the Jena protest about the need for a "new civil rights movement." It's obvious to millions of oppressed black people that something needs to be done. The bipartisan "war on drugs" campaign has led to the mass incarceration of black as well as Latino youth. A decision by the Supreme Court this summer effectively put the last nail in the coffin of school integration. The mass of black people is forced to live in ghettos that are little more than rotting shells: no jobs, no health care, primary and high schools little more than prisons. In some inner cities, infant mortality rates approach Third World conditions.
The civil rights movement succeeded in eliminating legalized racial segregation (the Jim Crow system) in the South. That system had taken hold in the late 19th century after the defeat of Radical Reconstruction, the period of racial equality and black political empowerment that followed the smashing of the slavocracy in the Civil War. An important factor leading to the end of Jim Crow was that by the late 1950s legalized segregation had become an increasing embarrassment for the U.S. imperialist rulers in their Cold War with the Soviet Union, especially in the former colonial countries of Asia and Africa.
But the civil rights movement was defeated in the mid 1960s when it came North, where blacks already had the same formal democratic rights as whites but remained segregated at the bottom of society. For here it ran straight into the conditions of black impoverishment and oppression rooted in the basic structure of American capitalist society: mass unemployment, rat-infested slums, rampant police brutality. These conditions could not be eradicated by Congress passing a new civil rights act.
However, the civil rights movement—in which the black masses courageously confronted the white-supremacist police states of the South—also had the possibility of developing into a working-class-centered struggle for black equality. Such a struggle was obstructed and sabotaged by Martin Luther King Jr. and the other black misleaders who tied the movement to the Democratic Party of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.
The main organization of young civil rights militants in the South was the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which in the early 1960s underwent a leftward radicalization. Through their own bitter experience, SNCC militants came to recognize that the Kennedy/Johnson White House was a lot closer to the racist Dixiecrats than it was to them. At the same time, they also came to recognize that the Democrats, no less than the Republicans, were a party of imperialist militarism, seeking to overthrow the Cuban Revolution and escalating the war in Vietnam in the name of anti-Communism.
Tensions between the young militants and King & Co. came to the surface during the 1963 March on Washington. The liberal leaders pressured then SNCC chairman John Lewis into deleting from his prepared speech the following passage: "We cannot depend on any political party for both the Democrats and Republicans have betrayed the basic principles of the Declaration of Independence." Subsequently, Lewis, like many other activists, came to terms with the racist capitalist order, becoming a Democratic Congressman.
To black people, King preached "non-violent resistance" in the face of racist police repression as well as attacks by the Klan. And when in the summer of 1965 blacks in the Watts district of Los Angeles rose up against police brutality, King, at the behest of Lyndon Johnson, endorsed their bloody suppression by the L.A. cops and National Guard. King's support for the suppression of the Watts rebellion widely discredited him among young black militants who were already derisively calling him "De Lawd."
Our own political tendency emerged during this convulsive period. The Spartacist League originated as a left opposition, the Revolutionary Tendency (RT), in the once-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP). When the Southern civil rights struggles erupted in the late 1950s, the SWP was beginning to move away from the Trotskyist program, finally descending into reformism in 1965. The SWP leadership abstained from intervening in the mass struggles for democratic rights while acting as cheerleaders for both King and the black nationalists of the Nation of Islam.
The RT fought for the SWP to intervene into the civil rights movement based on a program of linking the struggle for black democratic rights and social equality with the working-class struggle against capitalist exploitation. Concretely, we called on civil rights militants to break with the Democratic Party and form a Freedom Labor Party. We called as well for a Southern organizing drive backed by the labor movement. Then as now, only on the basis of common class interests and struggle can the deep racial divide between black and white workers be overcome. After being expelled from the SWP, the early Spartacist League intervened in the civil rights movement in both the South and North, to the best of the ability of our very small forces.
Recoiling against the liberal reformism of King and identifying the labor movement with its bureaucratic misleaders, many SNCC and other militants turned toward black nationalism. Black nationalism or, more accurately, separatism is at bottom a doctrine of despair. This outlook accepts that the racist character of American society is unchangeable and that no significant section of the white populace can be won to the struggle for black equality. The best of the young black radicals of this period were represented by the Black Panther Party, which was destroyed largely through murderous state repression. Many Panthers subsequently returned to the fold of liberal reformism and the Democratic Party.
The Class-Struggle Road to Black Liberation
Black nationalism obscures the class divide in this society, denying the potential power that black workers have as a strategic component of the multiracial proletariat. Despite the destruction of many industrial jobs and erosion of union strength, black workers, whose rate of union membership is significantly higher than that of white workers, continue to be integrated into such industries as steel, auto, urban transit and longshore. The proletariat alone has the power to shatter this racist, capitalist system. Won to a revolutionary program and under the leadership of a Leninist vanguard party, black workers will be the living link between the anger of the dispossessed ghetto masses and the social power of the proletariat.
The two main obstacles preventing black workers from playing that historic role are the Democratic Party, especially its black component, and the trade-union bureaucracy, which chains workers to the capitalist Democrats. Beginning in the mid 1960s, the Republican Party positioned itself as the party of the "white backlash" while the Democrats moved to co-opt young black activists into the government bureaucracy. Black Democrats became mayors of major cities, where they acted as overseers of the ghetto masses and implemented the killing cuts in social welfare programs. One of those mayors, Wilson Goode of Philadelphia, ordered the firebombing of the MOVE commune in May 1985, killing eleven black men, women and children and destroying an entire black neighborhood in the process.
The failure of the trade-union misleadership to mobilize labor's power to combat the oppression of black people is a major factor underlying the decline of the union movement. This is nowhere clearer than in the South, where the legacy of Jim Crow racism has made it the main regional bastion of anti-labor reaction since the building of the integrated industrial unions in the 1930s. Nonetheless, black workers retain considerable social power alongside their white and Latino class brothers and sisters. The strike of 7,000 shipyard workers at Northrop Grumman, the world's largest naval shipbuilder, in Pascagoula, Mississippi, earlier this year demonstrated the potential power of the integrated labor movement, which under class-struggle leadership could spearhead a drive to organize the open shop South.
Organizing the region's working class, which now includes increasing numbers of immigrants, especially from Latin America, cannot be achieved on the basis of narrow business unionism. Labor needs a leadership which does not bow to this country's harsh anti-labor laws and which mobilizes unions to fight the systematic oppression of black people and to defend the rights of immigrants and all the oppressed. Black and working-class militants must stand for full citizenship rights for all immigrants.
Our perspective of revolutionary integrationism is premised on the understanding that black freedom requires smashing the capitalist system and constructing an egalitarian socialist society. There will be no social revolution in this country without a united struggle of black, white and immigrant workers led by their multiracial workers party. As stated in the preamble to the program of the Labor Black Leagues, which are fraternally allied to the Spartacist League: "The civil rights movement, tied to pro-Democratic Party pressure politics and sold out by liberal reformism, failed to complete the unfinished business of the Civil War. We fight to win the entire working class, including white workers as well as the growing number of Latino and other immigrants, to the fight for black liberation, strategic to the American revolution."
February is Black History Month
The following statement is passed on from the Partisan Defense Committee concerning the latest protest action in the fight for justice in Jena, Louisiana. Nothing need be added here. Send letters of support to the Jena Defense Committee P.O Box 2798, Jena La. 71342 and of protest to the LaSalle Parish (not county,remember this is Louisiana) District Attorney J. Reed Walters. Pronto.
Drop Charges Against Anti-Fascist Protestor
We print below a January 27 letter from the Partisan Defense Committee to LaSalle Parish District Attorney J. Reed Walters. The PDC is a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization associated with the Sparta-cist League.
The Partisan Defense Committee demands that the charges be dropped against William Winchester Jr., a supporter of the New Black Panther Party who was arrested in Jena, Louisiana, for demonstrating against a fascist provocation on January 21, Martin Luther King Day. Mr. Winchester was charged with battery of a police officer and resisting arrest.
The white supremacists, led by the Mississippi-based Nationalist Movement, came to Jena armed, waving the Confederate flag of black chattel slavery and brandishing lynch-rope nooses. The race-terrorists staged their murderous threats under the protection of several hundred state, local and federal law enforcement officers, including deputies from other parishes, SWAT teams and police snipers stationed on roofs.
The fascist bands spewing their racist filth through the streets of Jena are part of a wave of racist provocations, many involving hanging nooses to terrorize black people, that have swept the U.S. after the September 20 demonstration in Jena. That day, as many as 50,000 overwhelmingly black people protested against Jim Crow "justice" and in defense of the Jena Six, black high school students framed up for defending themselves after months of racist attacks. Mychal Bell of the Jena Six is now in prison. Free Mychal Bell! Drop all charges against the Jena Six! Drop the charges against William Winchester Jr.! •
The following is an article of interest to the radical public and black liberation fighters on the demonstrations down in Jena, Louisiana in September 2007. This is taken from the Young Spartacus pages of Workers Vanguard No. 899, dated September 28, 2007. I would only add that many of the political points made in the article are worthy of attention as we fight for the immediate goal of freedom for the Jena Six and the ultimate goal of victory in the black liberation struggle. And friends, that does not mean Obama as president, as significant as that may be in this deeply racist country.
Workers Vanguard No. 899 28 September 2007
Jena Six: Racist "Justice" U.S.A.
Break with the Democrats! For a Class-Struggle Workers Party! Finish the Civil War—For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!
(Young Spartacus pages)
On September 20, as many as 50,000 protesters—overwhelmingly black and comprising workers, students, retirees and church groups—poured into the small rural town of Jena, Louisiana. Alerted by black radio and Internet networks, they came on buses from all over the South, from Detroit and Harlem and as far away as Los Angeles, to express their outrage at the Jim Crow "justice" meted out to six black Jena high school students. After months of racist insults and threats prompted by black students sitting under the "white tree," with racists putting hangman's nooses on the tree, five of the youth were charged with attempted murder following a schoolyard scuffle with a white student, while the sixth was charged as a juvenile (see "Outrage Over Jim Crow Justice in Louisiana," JFFNo. 896, 3 August). On campuses and workplaces across the country, the case of the Jena Six has touched a raw nerve among black people. One protester in Jena held up a sign reading, "There Would Be More of Us Here But So Many of Us Are in Jail."
The day after the protesters left, Jim Crow justice in Jena reasserted itself. Earlier, 17-year-old Mychal Bell, the only one of the six students who has been continuously imprisoned since the schoolyard fight, saw his aggravated assault and conspiracy charges thrown out because he had been tried as an adult. But outrageously, on September 21 he was denied bail. Bell remains incarcerated in a town in the central Louisiana pine woods that has been a stronghold for KKKer David Duke. The other five still await trial, although charges against four of them have been reduced. Hours after the Jena demonstration, two young whites, one an admitted Klansman, provocatively drove through the nearby city of Alexandria, threatening people who had returned from the protest by dragging two nooses from their pickup truck, which contained a rifle and brass knuckles. Free Mychal Bell now! Drop all the charges against the Jena Six!
"Jena justice" is not some aberration. In Georgia, black youth Genarlow Wilson is still in prison for having had consensual oral sex with a 15-year-old girl when he was 17. After a court reduced his sentence to time already served, prosecutors appealed the ruling, keeping him behind bars. In New York City, Sean Bell, a young black man celebrating his upcoming wedding, was cut down in a hail of 50 cop bullets last December, and six months later black and Latino high school students in Brooklyn's Bushwick neighborhood were rounded up by cops as they tried to attend a friend's wake. The prisons, and the barbaric death rows within the prisons, are overflowing with black men in a country with the highest incarceration rate in the world.
Many of the protesters who poured into Jena appreciated the connection made by Spartacist League and Spartacus Youth Club comrades between the case of the Jena Six and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, one of the worst racist atrocities in modern U.S. history. But Democratic politicians Jesse Jackson Sr. and Al Sharpton, central leaders of the Jena protest, did not organize any significant protests over Katrina. The Katrina disaster could not be blamed solely on the criminal policies of the Bush administration but also indicted the Democratic Party, which for decades helped preside over the deterioration of the flood control system and ran the notoriously racist and corrupt New Orleans cops. A featured speaker on September 20 was New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin, who ordered the city's evacuation while abandoning those without cars—overwhelmingly black and poor—to the Katrina floodwaters. We wrote in a 4 September 2005 Spartacist League statement titled "New Orleans: Racist Atrocity" (WV No. 854,16 September 2005):
"This disaster has laid bare the class and race divisions in America. The logic of U.S. capitalism is that whites mainly lost property, blacks mainly lost lives. It is overwhelmingly black people, deemed 'expendable' by the rulers, who suffered and died by the thousands in this two-thirds black city.... This catastrophic destruction of lives and livelihoods underlines that the oppression of black people is rooted in the very bedrock of American capitalism and will not be ended short of a socialist revolution that rips power and the means of production from the greedy rulers and places them in the hands of the working people."
We look to the working class and its strategic black component as the social force that can overturn the capitalist order. With its hands on the means of production—the factories, mines, transportation systems—the working class produces the profits of the capitalist exploiters. We fight to build a workers party based on the perspective of revolutionary integrationism. While combatting racist segregation and state repression, we understand that black liberation can be achieved only through the integration of black people into an egalitarian socialist society. This program is counterposed to the liberal myth that black people—an oppressed race-color caste—can achieve equality within the confines of the capitalist profit system. It is also counterposed to black nationalism, which capitulates to and helps perpetuate the racist segregation fostered by this country's rulers and despairs of multiracial class struggle.
Liberal Misleaders
Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, whose longtime role as "black leaders" has been to quell social unrest, came down to Jena to preach reliance on the same "justice" system that from the county sheriff on up is a machine of racial and class oppression. Sharpton called in Jena for "federal intervention to protect people from Southern injustice," intoning that "our fathers in the 1960's had to penetrate the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, we have to do the same thing" (Associated Press, 20 September).
It is a lie that the federal government is a friend of black equality. Fifty years ago during the battle to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, President Eisenhower sent in troops to head off efforts by black people to defend themselves against racist mobs and KKK nightriders. Federal intervention into anti-racist and other social struggles has meant spying on and murderous repression of activists. President Bush, cynically claiming to be "saddened" by the events in Jena, noted that "the Justice Department and the FBI are monitoring the situation." We're sure they are—just like they "monitored" the Black Panther Party and thousands of other radicals, black and white, in the civil rights, anti-Vietnam War and New Left movements.
Under the FBI's Counter-intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), 38 Black Panther Party members were killed and hundreds of others framed up. FBI "infiltrators" made up about 20 percent of Ku Klux Klan membership in the 1960s and were involved in bombings and murders, including the 1963 Birmingham church bombing and the murder of civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo in her car in 1965. The November 1979 Klan/Nazi massacre of five leftists and union officials in Greensboro, North Carolina, was aided by a government agent who helped train the killers and by a "former" FBI informant who rode shotgun in the fascists' motorcade of death.
A living symbol of the system of racist capitalist injustice today is the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther and later a MOVE supporter and radical journalist who has been imprisoned on death row for a quarter century, framed up on false charges of killing a Philadelphia policeman in December 1981. From the time he was a 15-year-old leader of the Philadelphia Panthers in the late 1960s, Mumia was a target of COINTELPRO spying and harassment. The cops, prosecutors, bourgeois politicians and their media jackals have howled for Mumia's legal lynching because they see in him the spectre of black revolt.
The big-name black liberals who organized the Jena Six protest have done nothing at all comparable on behalf of Mumia. While Jena is a small Southern town, Philadelphia is a major Northern city long run by the Democratic Party machine. And it was the local Democrats who joined with the cops and prosecutors in putting Mumia on death row. The D.A. who prosecuted Mumia in 1982, Ed Rendell, is now the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania. Since first taking up Mumia's cause two decades ago, the Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee have urged all opponents of racist oppression to join the fight for his freedom and to abolish the racist death penalty. But we understand that this fight must be waged independently of the capitalist courts and political parties that conspired to railroad Mumia.
Democrats: The Other Party of Racist Capitalist Rule
What politicians like Sharpton, who admits that he wore a wire for the FBI in the 1980s, want above all else is to keep black people tied to the Democratic Party as the "lesser evil" to the Republicans, who openly appeal to the white racist vote. All the major GOP presidential candidates recently refused to appear in a debate at Baltimore's historically black Morgan State University. In an earlier calculated insult, all but one Republican candidate turned down the chance to debate on the Spanish-language Univision network. In his New York Times (24 August) column, liberal commentator Paul Krugman noted that the Republicans' "electoral strategy has depended largely on exploiting racial fear and animosity." He pointed out that "Rudy Giuliani remains the front-runner for the G.O.P. nomination," despite his big-city social life and record on abortion, because he "comes across as an authoritarian, willing in particular to crack down on you-know-who."
The impoverishment of the black populace is perpetuated by the American capitalist government—federal, state and city—whether run by Democrats or Republicans. It was the Clinton administration in the mid 1990s that axed the main federal welfare program, thereby condemning millions of women and children, disproportionately black, to destitution while further depressing wages at the low end of the labor market, where black workers are concentrated. Today in response to the Jena atrocity, Hillary Clinton has joined the call for an "investigation," while Barack Obama says he just wants "fairness" and claims it "isn't a matter of black and white." Tell that to the marchers who passed Confederate flags on the way out of Jena!
The bulk of the "socialist" left, which sows the illusion that the capitalist system can be reformed to serve the interests of workers and the oppressed, has offered no criticism of the Sharpton and Jackson leadership of the Jena protest. Typical are the eccentric Maoists of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), who went to Jena with stickers to "Impeach Bush!"—their longstanding gimmick to promote the Democratic Party of racism and imperialist war. The RCP's Revolution has pumped out a lot of newsprint on Jena that includes some ritualistic denunciations of capitalism and white supremacy. But you won't hear from them that Jackson, Sharpton & Co. have repeatedly moved to steer anger over racist abuses into toothless "reforms" and bourgeois electoral politics.
MLK and the Failure of Liberal Reformism
There was a lot of talk at the Jena protest about the need for a "new civil rights movement." It's obvious to millions of oppressed black people that something needs to be done. The bipartisan "war on drugs" campaign has led to the mass incarceration of black as well as Latino youth. A decision by the Supreme Court this summer effectively put the last nail in the coffin of school integration. The mass of black people is forced to live in ghettos that are little more than rotting shells: no jobs, no health care, primary and high schools little more than prisons. In some inner cities, infant mortality rates approach Third World conditions.
The civil rights movement succeeded in eliminating legalized racial segregation (the Jim Crow system) in the South. That system had taken hold in the late 19th century after the defeat of Radical Reconstruction, the period of racial equality and black political empowerment that followed the smashing of the slavocracy in the Civil War. An important factor leading to the end of Jim Crow was that by the late 1950s legalized segregation had become an increasing embarrassment for the U.S. imperialist rulers in their Cold War with the Soviet Union, especially in the former colonial countries of Asia and Africa.
But the civil rights movement was defeated in the mid 1960s when it came North, where blacks already had the same formal democratic rights as whites but remained segregated at the bottom of society. For here it ran straight into the conditions of black impoverishment and oppression rooted in the basic structure of American capitalist society: mass unemployment, rat-infested slums, rampant police brutality. These conditions could not be eradicated by Congress passing a new civil rights act.
However, the civil rights movement—in which the black masses courageously confronted the white-supremacist police states of the South—also had the possibility of developing into a working-class-centered struggle for black equality. Such a struggle was obstructed and sabotaged by Martin Luther King Jr. and the other black misleaders who tied the movement to the Democratic Party of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.
The main organization of young civil rights militants in the South was the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which in the early 1960s underwent a leftward radicalization. Through their own bitter experience, SNCC militants came to recognize that the Kennedy/Johnson White House was a lot closer to the racist Dixiecrats than it was to them. At the same time, they also came to recognize that the Democrats, no less than the Republicans, were a party of imperialist militarism, seeking to overthrow the Cuban Revolution and escalating the war in Vietnam in the name of anti-Communism.
Tensions between the young militants and King & Co. came to the surface during the 1963 March on Washington. The liberal leaders pressured then SNCC chairman John Lewis into deleting from his prepared speech the following passage: "We cannot depend on any political party for both the Democrats and Republicans have betrayed the basic principles of the Declaration of Independence." Subsequently, Lewis, like many other activists, came to terms with the racist capitalist order, becoming a Democratic Congressman.
To black people, King preached "non-violent resistance" in the face of racist police repression as well as attacks by the Klan. And when in the summer of 1965 blacks in the Watts district of Los Angeles rose up against police brutality, King, at the behest of Lyndon Johnson, endorsed their bloody suppression by the L.A. cops and National Guard. King's support for the suppression of the Watts rebellion widely discredited him among young black militants who were already derisively calling him "De Lawd."
Our own political tendency emerged during this convulsive period. The Spartacist League originated as a left opposition, the Revolutionary Tendency (RT), in the once-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP). When the Southern civil rights struggles erupted in the late 1950s, the SWP was beginning to move away from the Trotskyist program, finally descending into reformism in 1965. The SWP leadership abstained from intervening in the mass struggles for democratic rights while acting as cheerleaders for both King and the black nationalists of the Nation of Islam.
The RT fought for the SWP to intervene into the civil rights movement based on a program of linking the struggle for black democratic rights and social equality with the working-class struggle against capitalist exploitation. Concretely, we called on civil rights militants to break with the Democratic Party and form a Freedom Labor Party. We called as well for a Southern organizing drive backed by the labor movement. Then as now, only on the basis of common class interests and struggle can the deep racial divide between black and white workers be overcome. After being expelled from the SWP, the early Spartacist League intervened in the civil rights movement in both the South and North, to the best of the ability of our very small forces.
Recoiling against the liberal reformism of King and identifying the labor movement with its bureaucratic misleaders, many SNCC and other militants turned toward black nationalism. Black nationalism or, more accurately, separatism is at bottom a doctrine of despair. This outlook accepts that the racist character of American society is unchangeable and that no significant section of the white populace can be won to the struggle for black equality. The best of the young black radicals of this period were represented by the Black Panther Party, which was destroyed largely through murderous state repression. Many Panthers subsequently returned to the fold of liberal reformism and the Democratic Party.
The Class-Struggle Road to Black Liberation
Black nationalism obscures the class divide in this society, denying the potential power that black workers have as a strategic component of the multiracial proletariat. Despite the destruction of many industrial jobs and erosion of union strength, black workers, whose rate of union membership is significantly higher than that of white workers, continue to be integrated into such industries as steel, auto, urban transit and longshore. The proletariat alone has the power to shatter this racist, capitalist system. Won to a revolutionary program and under the leadership of a Leninist vanguard party, black workers will be the living link between the anger of the dispossessed ghetto masses and the social power of the proletariat.
The two main obstacles preventing black workers from playing that historic role are the Democratic Party, especially its black component, and the trade-union bureaucracy, which chains workers to the capitalist Democrats. Beginning in the mid 1960s, the Republican Party positioned itself as the party of the "white backlash" while the Democrats moved to co-opt young black activists into the government bureaucracy. Black Democrats became mayors of major cities, where they acted as overseers of the ghetto masses and implemented the killing cuts in social welfare programs. One of those mayors, Wilson Goode of Philadelphia, ordered the firebombing of the MOVE commune in May 1985, killing eleven black men, women and children and destroying an entire black neighborhood in the process.
The failure of the trade-union misleadership to mobilize labor's power to combat the oppression of black people is a major factor underlying the decline of the union movement. This is nowhere clearer than in the South, where the legacy of Jim Crow racism has made it the main regional bastion of anti-labor reaction since the building of the integrated industrial unions in the 1930s. Nonetheless, black workers retain considerable social power alongside their white and Latino class brothers and sisters. The strike of 7,000 shipyard workers at Northrop Grumman, the world's largest naval shipbuilder, in Pascagoula, Mississippi, earlier this year demonstrated the potential power of the integrated labor movement, which under class-struggle leadership could spearhead a drive to organize the open shop South.
Organizing the region's working class, which now includes increasing numbers of immigrants, especially from Latin America, cannot be achieved on the basis of narrow business unionism. Labor needs a leadership which does not bow to this country's harsh anti-labor laws and which mobilizes unions to fight the systematic oppression of black people and to defend the rights of immigrants and all the oppressed. Black and working-class militants must stand for full citizenship rights for all immigrants.
Our perspective of revolutionary integrationism is premised on the understanding that black freedom requires smashing the capitalist system and constructing an egalitarian socialist society. There will be no social revolution in this country without a united struggle of black, white and immigrant workers led by their multiracial workers party. As stated in the preamble to the program of the Labor Black Leagues, which are fraternally allied to the Spartacist League: "The civil rights movement, tied to pro-Democratic Party pressure politics and sold out by liberal reformism, failed to complete the unfinished business of the Civil War. We fight to win the entire working class, including white workers as well as the growing number of Latino and other immigrants, to the fight for black liberation, strategic to the American revolution."
Friday, February 01, 2008
*From The Pages Of “Workers Vanguard”-Supreme Court: Retooling the Machinery of Death-Abolish the Racist Death Penalty!
Click on the headline to link to the article from “Workers Vanguard” described in the title.
Markin comment:
As almost always these historical articles and polemics are purposefully helpful to clarify the issues in the struggle against world imperialism, particularly the “monster” here in America.
Markin comment:
As almost always these historical articles and polemics are purposefully helpful to clarify the issues in the struggle against world imperialism, particularly the “monster” here in America.
A Study in Black and Red- Memoirs of an Unrepentant Black Stalinist- The Harry Haywood Story- "Black Bolshevik"
Click on the headlne to link to a Wikipedia entry for Harry Haywood.
Book Review
February is Black History Month
Black Bolshevik-Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist, Harry Haywood, Lake View Press, Chicago, 1978
If there is one name in the early American communist movement of the 1920’s associated with the theory of national self-determination for blacks (specifically in the then Southern Black Belt) it is the author of this autobiography, Harry Haywood. While I will discuss that theory below this is also an opportunity, during Black History Month, to analyze the political trajectory of an American black communist who tried, unsuccessfully, to bring being black and being red together. That prospect is still a key task for the American left today. That Haywood failed to so is due, in great part due to his willfully stubborn adherence to Stalinist politics, in the final analysis does not take away from the importance of today’s youth reading about his political struggles.
I have read a fair number of biographies of 20th century black American revolutionaries like Malcolm, Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver and others. Haywood’s autobiography is quite different from that of latter black revolutionaries; let us say the average Black Panther of the 1960’s biography. Although Haywood was brought up and came of age in the Middle West, notably in Omaha and Chicago he had many roots in the South and on the farm. Later black revolutionaries have a greater urban and more proletarian profile. Notwithstanding those differences Haywood’s tales about the various problems he had seeking and keeping work as a proud young black in a hostile white world will resonant with today’s black reader of his story. No question there have been some strides made by blacks in this country but Haywood’s tales of the racial prejudice down at the base of society that he confronted constantly could have been written today.
One thing that I have always looked for in reading about previous generations of radicals and revolutionaries is to find the spark that drove them over the edge away from bourgeois society and on the road to fighting for fundamental social change. Revolutionaries are made not born so I have found that the reasons span a wide range of human experiences from deep-seated class and racial hatreds to intellectual curiosity. Although it is easy to see how blacks and other minorities in this country could take a radical path without much effort it is nevertheless truth that, as with whites, most have not. It is thus interesting to compare notes. Haywood’s military service, unlike my own service during Vietnam, in a black regiment in World War I that was sent to France and which came under fire was not a decisive radicalizing experience in itself. However post-war white racial attitudes and the very real racial riots in major urban areas like Chicago, belied all the propaganda about the democratic nature of the war and acted as a catalyst to move him to politics and toward leftist politics.
Haywood became a communist in the early days of the American party, the time of the consolidation of the Communist International and the afterglow of the early heroic days of the Bolshevik Revolution. when black communists were few and far between. This was a time, unlike our own, when willing, capable young blacks, workers, women and others were systematically trained here and in the Soviet Union to become professional revolutionaries. Much of Haywood’s early experiences as described in detail in the book centered on his student days in Moscow.
Haywood went through the University of the Toilers of the East and the Lenin School in the Soviet Union at the time of the Stalinist consolidation of power there and his political development reflects that change. That experience does not negate the important of training to create cadre. My generation, the generation of ’68, and later generations have had to learn by the seat of their pants. There is a difference and its showed in our poor theoretical and organizations understandings.
In many ways the most interesting sections of Haywood’s book revolve around his factional activities in the early days of the party. I have read Cannon, Foster, Browder, Lovestone, Wolfe and other whites from the early days discuss their factional activities that dominated the early party. It was rather interesting to get a black perspective on these events. I might add that Haywood’s take, as a member of the Foster faction, on the matters confirms the thoughts of the others that the early party was a ‘hothouse’ of factional intrigue, if not a madhouse.
Every question, including Haywood’s pet theory of an embryonic black nation, was subject to the gristmill of the factional struggles in the early American party as well as by the dictates of the Communist International that served as a referee during these donnybrooks. The main fault lines though these fights can be summarized as first (and foremost) who would run the American party-the party functionaries or the trade unionists. Ultimately, as the Stalinization of the Communist International set in the fault line turned to who was loyal to Moscow and who wasn’t. Haywood always drifted with the winds and bent at the knee to Stalin
The thread that centrally runs throughout the early part of Haywood’s take on the early party is the black question. Specifically the question of whether blacks in this country in the 1920’s formed a nation or were a racial color-caste. That political fight might seem odd today when blacks are, at least formally, integrated (at the bottom) of American society but then, and perhaps only then, this question had a semblance of realism to it.
Haywood’s section on the development of communist work among blacks, the creation of a black cadre and the formulating of the question of a black nation with the right to national self-determination is an essential reading for any militant trying to find the roots of communist work among blacks. Although the 1920’s were not the heyday of black recruitment to the party, the pioneer work in the 1920’s gave the party a huge leg up when the radicalization of the 1930’s among all workers occurred.
The left-wing movement in America, including the Communist Party and its offshoots has always had problems with what has been called the Black Question. Marxists have always considers support to the right of national self-determination to be a wedge against the nationalists and a way to put the class axis to the fore. In any case, Marxist has always predicated that support on there being a possibility for the group to form a nation. Absent that, other methods of struggle are necessary to deal with the special oppression of black people. This special oppression, nevertheless, requires demands to address that situation not the benign neglect (at best) that it has received through most of American left history.
Part of the problem with the American Communist position on self-determination was that the conditions which would have created the possibility of a black state were being destroyed with the mechanization of agriculture, the migration of blacks to the Northern industrial centers and the overwhelming need to fight for black people’s rights to survive under the conditions of the Great Depression. Moreover, overall blacks were won to communist politics DESPITE the Communist Party’s position on black national self-determination. However, carefully read this section as it is the genesis for many of the theoretical threads of black nationalist positions today.
Above I mentioned that blacks began to follow the lead of the Communist Party despite its position on the black nation. The actual work of the party, and Haywood’s own work as an organizer of strike solidarity action on behalf of the National Mine Union, gives evidence of that contention. Although the slogan of national self-determination played a propaganda role in the background for holiday occasions during this period, called the ‘third period’ in communist parlance, the heart of communist work in the early 1930’s were struggles over wage equality, saving jobs, unemployed work the fight against lynch law in the South and labor and black defense work.
The most famous aspect of that defense work, which Haywood had a role in, was the case of Scottsboro boys, nine Alabama men who were being railroaded into the electric chair over the alleged rape of two white women. This was a case to hot to handle for the likes of the NAACP and other liberal organizations, until the fight against it became a mass movement and they tried to channel it in their direction. Nothing new here. If there has been one taboo in modern American politics greater than being black and red it is the question of interracial sex. Perhaps not as overtly this remains true today. The Communist Party nevertheless did yeoman’s work to save the lives of the Boys. Kudos here for their defense work.
In a very literal sense Haywood’s heyday was the so-called ‘third period’ when the Communist International, falsely as it turned out, predicted imminent socialism, or at least the fight for it. His personal political trajectory rose and fell on that note. The time of the popular front in the late thirties and its later manifestations in anti-monopoly coalitions and emergence into ‘progressive’ politics were not his times. From membership in the Political Bureau at the height of the 'third period' he thereafter became, in essence, a gadfly with this black belt self-determination strategy. Popular frontist politics, or one of its variations, is not a time for clear class lines or seemingly provocative proposals that would split off nations from the American body politic.
Most of the last third of the book, after detailing and defending Haywood’s murky service with the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, his merchant marine service in World War II and his post war struggles against Browderite ‘revisionism’ (a Stalinist variation of class collaborationism) is spent in criticism of the policies of the American Communist Party.
Oddly, at least in partial and distorted sense, some of Haywood’s criticisms are those that left anti-Stalinists had been making for at least a few decades at the time of publication of his book. The problem with Haywood’s analysis (aside from the Black Belt fetish) is that it is essentially unreconstructed Stalinism. A basically correct critique of the popular front with Roosevelt, for example, commingles with a post hoc defense of the Moscow show trials of the same period. A critique of the anti-monopoly coalition strategy of the 1950’s with a defense of Stalin against Khrushchev’s 20th Party Congress criticisms. In the end despite snatches of agreement we part ways with Mr. Haywood over virtually every political issue. Nevertheless read this book and the memoirs of all the old communists you can get a hold of in order to find out what went right ( and what went wrong) with the early 20th century communist movement.
Book Review
February is Black History Month
Black Bolshevik-Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist, Harry Haywood, Lake View Press, Chicago, 1978
If there is one name in the early American communist movement of the 1920’s associated with the theory of national self-determination for blacks (specifically in the then Southern Black Belt) it is the author of this autobiography, Harry Haywood. While I will discuss that theory below this is also an opportunity, during Black History Month, to analyze the political trajectory of an American black communist who tried, unsuccessfully, to bring being black and being red together. That prospect is still a key task for the American left today. That Haywood failed to so is due, in great part due to his willfully stubborn adherence to Stalinist politics, in the final analysis does not take away from the importance of today’s youth reading about his political struggles.
I have read a fair number of biographies of 20th century black American revolutionaries like Malcolm, Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver and others. Haywood’s autobiography is quite different from that of latter black revolutionaries; let us say the average Black Panther of the 1960’s biography. Although Haywood was brought up and came of age in the Middle West, notably in Omaha and Chicago he had many roots in the South and on the farm. Later black revolutionaries have a greater urban and more proletarian profile. Notwithstanding those differences Haywood’s tales about the various problems he had seeking and keeping work as a proud young black in a hostile white world will resonant with today’s black reader of his story. No question there have been some strides made by blacks in this country but Haywood’s tales of the racial prejudice down at the base of society that he confronted constantly could have been written today.
One thing that I have always looked for in reading about previous generations of radicals and revolutionaries is to find the spark that drove them over the edge away from bourgeois society and on the road to fighting for fundamental social change. Revolutionaries are made not born so I have found that the reasons span a wide range of human experiences from deep-seated class and racial hatreds to intellectual curiosity. Although it is easy to see how blacks and other minorities in this country could take a radical path without much effort it is nevertheless truth that, as with whites, most have not. It is thus interesting to compare notes. Haywood’s military service, unlike my own service during Vietnam, in a black regiment in World War I that was sent to France and which came under fire was not a decisive radicalizing experience in itself. However post-war white racial attitudes and the very real racial riots in major urban areas like Chicago, belied all the propaganda about the democratic nature of the war and acted as a catalyst to move him to politics and toward leftist politics.
Haywood became a communist in the early days of the American party, the time of the consolidation of the Communist International and the afterglow of the early heroic days of the Bolshevik Revolution. when black communists were few and far between. This was a time, unlike our own, when willing, capable young blacks, workers, women and others were systematically trained here and in the Soviet Union to become professional revolutionaries. Much of Haywood’s early experiences as described in detail in the book centered on his student days in Moscow.
Haywood went through the University of the Toilers of the East and the Lenin School in the Soviet Union at the time of the Stalinist consolidation of power there and his political development reflects that change. That experience does not negate the important of training to create cadre. My generation, the generation of ’68, and later generations have had to learn by the seat of their pants. There is a difference and its showed in our poor theoretical and organizations understandings.
In many ways the most interesting sections of Haywood’s book revolve around his factional activities in the early days of the party. I have read Cannon, Foster, Browder, Lovestone, Wolfe and other whites from the early days discuss their factional activities that dominated the early party. It was rather interesting to get a black perspective on these events. I might add that Haywood’s take, as a member of the Foster faction, on the matters confirms the thoughts of the others that the early party was a ‘hothouse’ of factional intrigue, if not a madhouse.
Every question, including Haywood’s pet theory of an embryonic black nation, was subject to the gristmill of the factional struggles in the early American party as well as by the dictates of the Communist International that served as a referee during these donnybrooks. The main fault lines though these fights can be summarized as first (and foremost) who would run the American party-the party functionaries or the trade unionists. Ultimately, as the Stalinization of the Communist International set in the fault line turned to who was loyal to Moscow and who wasn’t. Haywood always drifted with the winds and bent at the knee to Stalin
The thread that centrally runs throughout the early part of Haywood’s take on the early party is the black question. Specifically the question of whether blacks in this country in the 1920’s formed a nation or were a racial color-caste. That political fight might seem odd today when blacks are, at least formally, integrated (at the bottom) of American society but then, and perhaps only then, this question had a semblance of realism to it.
Haywood’s section on the development of communist work among blacks, the creation of a black cadre and the formulating of the question of a black nation with the right to national self-determination is an essential reading for any militant trying to find the roots of communist work among blacks. Although the 1920’s were not the heyday of black recruitment to the party, the pioneer work in the 1920’s gave the party a huge leg up when the radicalization of the 1930’s among all workers occurred.
The left-wing movement in America, including the Communist Party and its offshoots has always had problems with what has been called the Black Question. Marxists have always considers support to the right of national self-determination to be a wedge against the nationalists and a way to put the class axis to the fore. In any case, Marxist has always predicated that support on there being a possibility for the group to form a nation. Absent that, other methods of struggle are necessary to deal with the special oppression of black people. This special oppression, nevertheless, requires demands to address that situation not the benign neglect (at best) that it has received through most of American left history.
Part of the problem with the American Communist position on self-determination was that the conditions which would have created the possibility of a black state were being destroyed with the mechanization of agriculture, the migration of blacks to the Northern industrial centers and the overwhelming need to fight for black people’s rights to survive under the conditions of the Great Depression. Moreover, overall blacks were won to communist politics DESPITE the Communist Party’s position on black national self-determination. However, carefully read this section as it is the genesis for many of the theoretical threads of black nationalist positions today.
Above I mentioned that blacks began to follow the lead of the Communist Party despite its position on the black nation. The actual work of the party, and Haywood’s own work as an organizer of strike solidarity action on behalf of the National Mine Union, gives evidence of that contention. Although the slogan of national self-determination played a propaganda role in the background for holiday occasions during this period, called the ‘third period’ in communist parlance, the heart of communist work in the early 1930’s were struggles over wage equality, saving jobs, unemployed work the fight against lynch law in the South and labor and black defense work.
The most famous aspect of that defense work, which Haywood had a role in, was the case of Scottsboro boys, nine Alabama men who were being railroaded into the electric chair over the alleged rape of two white women. This was a case to hot to handle for the likes of the NAACP and other liberal organizations, until the fight against it became a mass movement and they tried to channel it in their direction. Nothing new here. If there has been one taboo in modern American politics greater than being black and red it is the question of interracial sex. Perhaps not as overtly this remains true today. The Communist Party nevertheless did yeoman’s work to save the lives of the Boys. Kudos here for their defense work.
In a very literal sense Haywood’s heyday was the so-called ‘third period’ when the Communist International, falsely as it turned out, predicted imminent socialism, or at least the fight for it. His personal political trajectory rose and fell on that note. The time of the popular front in the late thirties and its later manifestations in anti-monopoly coalitions and emergence into ‘progressive’ politics were not his times. From membership in the Political Bureau at the height of the 'third period' he thereafter became, in essence, a gadfly with this black belt self-determination strategy. Popular frontist politics, or one of its variations, is not a time for clear class lines or seemingly provocative proposals that would split off nations from the American body politic.
Most of the last third of the book, after detailing and defending Haywood’s murky service with the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, his merchant marine service in World War II and his post war struggles against Browderite ‘revisionism’ (a Stalinist variation of class collaborationism) is spent in criticism of the policies of the American Communist Party.
Oddly, at least in partial and distorted sense, some of Haywood’s criticisms are those that left anti-Stalinists had been making for at least a few decades at the time of publication of his book. The problem with Haywood’s analysis (aside from the Black Belt fetish) is that it is essentially unreconstructed Stalinism. A basically correct critique of the popular front with Roosevelt, for example, commingles with a post hoc defense of the Moscow show trials of the same period. A critique of the anti-monopoly coalition strategy of the 1950’s with a defense of Stalin against Khrushchev’s 20th Party Congress criticisms. In the end despite snatches of agreement we part ways with Mr. Haywood over virtually every political issue. Nevertheless read this book and the memoirs of all the old communists you can get a hold of in order to find out what went right ( and what went wrong) with the early 20th century communist movement.
Political Bric-A-Brac
Every once in a while I find myself at something of a lost in trying to get a handle on the trends of the day. Today is such a day. Sure, there is plenty of news to talk about, especially political news on the campaign trail but that ‘space’ has been done to death by the chattering classes. These American presidential nominating contests have taken the air out of the fight to talk about more substantive issues. Like those damn wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are no closer to being ended than at this time last year despite any rhetoric emanating from the campaign trail. Today we make just a few haphazard comments while stewing about the situation.
The American Commanders in Iraq Are Getting Skittish
Of necessity the lead comment today, as has usually been the case over the past five years, is the situation in Iraq. The presidential candidates may have effectively banished it from serious discourse, the media may have placed it on page fourteen, Congress has taken a dive on ending funding for it, the bulk of the American population may have sent it under the radar but the damn thing still goes on at about the levels of troop engagement of five years ago.
According to the military analysts the ‘success’ of the surge over the past several months has permitted steady troop reductions that will reduce the American presence to fifteen brigades by summer. Now, however, there is serious talk by military authorities of a ‘pause’ to evaluate the progress of the surge strategy. That, my friends, is short hand for hedging bets that the Iraq military and/or police are up to the task of policing their own country. The long and short of this is that the Bush Administration has left the next presidential administration an immediate decision before it on the question of further withdrawals. Thanks, President Bush. To help the next administration along on its way let me give a lead on this – Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan.
It’s the Economy, Stupid!
In light of the remarks in the above paragraphs I have to take a political slap on the face for somewhat missing the extent of the rise of the economy as the central question before the public. Since last year I have believed that foreign affairs would be central to the American presidential campaign. Although I will not give up my persistent advocacy that Iraq and Afghanistan are the burning questions of the hour it is hardly irrational that the many individuals and families that are facing the wall on mortgage foreclosures, unemployment or the ability to just pay the bills see economic recovery as their primary issue. Okay, so it is the economy, stupid!
Mark this, however, where and what are the proposed just solutions to the problems of the vast inequalities of wealth in America coming from? The Republicratic candidates? Hell, no. They all are committed to ‘free markets’ and, one way or another, the international capitalist globalization of those markets. This would be a great time for those of us with socialist solutions, that is, social solutions to the economic problems of the day, starting with the need for a planned economy, to take the floor. And link the fight against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with the war against the working class and poor here.
Israeli Supreme Court Approves Cut in Gas Supplies to Gaza
In a commentary a couple of months ago concerning the lead up to the Middle East Annapolis meetings and President Bush’s pollyannaish belief that he could gain a peace treaty between the Israelis and Palestinians I mentioned that I HATE to comment on the Israeli-Palestinian confrontations because there is so little sense that, this side of paradise, there is any rational and just solution to the long time controversy. A recent decision by the Israeli Supreme Court on cutting gas supplies to Gaza is a case in point. That august body has determined that using this weapon of limiting vital gas supplies to the residents of Gaza by the Israeli government is correct in its fight against the ‘terrorists’ who rule there (by that they mean Hamas). The reasoning of the Court, however, will be hard to square with any sense of traditional Solomonic judgments, the vaunted rule of law that Western civilization touts as the cornerstone of its existence or simple humanity. Once again I throw down the challenge- Is there really any solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict short of a socialist one in the context of a wider Middle Eastern solution? To ask the question provides the answer.
Okay, now that I have gotten the serious commentary out of the way I can move on to American presidential politics. What would one expect from a confessed political ‘junkie’, anyway? At this point most of this campaign is of real interest only to technicians but here are some observations from afar. As always, I preface my remarks with the comment that, thankfully, I do not have to vote for any of these candidates.
In Mr. Bill’s Neighborhood-South Carolina.
The long time notion that Bill Clinton had been the first ‘black’ president, a comment made as much or more in the past by blacks than whites, got sorely tested and justly upended by the campaign in South Carolina. Clinton in attempting to prove that whites can use the race card as well as blacks, especially when ‘wifie’ is a candidate, got his head handed to him on platter. When the deal went down Mr. Bill turned into just another redneck hillbilly from the Ozarks and blacks judged accordingly. The fallout from this is far from over. Mr. Bill is being openingly mocked by younger blacks that I run into as just another white honky. If one really looks at what Clinton did during his reign, eliminating welfare as we know it, making the death penalty easier to impose and putting more police on the ground in black neighborhoods that is a perfect description. Playing jazz saxophone and having a few black friends on Martha’s Vineyard does little to cut the other way these days.
The Talk Around The Water Cooler
Maybe it is the winnowing process at this point in the campaign. Maybe it is just the momentarily whirl of politics but around my work water cooler there has been a very dramatic shift in political talk. About a year ago nobody (except me, of course), white, black or Hispanic talked about anything or anybody but Hillary. Today that talk has significantly shifted.
Blacks, who last year thought that Obama was too white, now are making it a question of race loyalty to support him. And by their lights this makes sense. Obama may be mixed but in race-conscious America he is BLACK. Hispanics, and in this particular case I am talking about Hispanic males, are talking up Hillary. This reflects the tension between the black and Hispanic communities that get a full workout over the question of immigration and other issues that separate these communities.
As for whites, again especially males, there is now actually less talk about the presidential campaigns. The great secret of this campaign at least on the Democratic side, a secret that will become more apparent now that John Edwards is out, is that white males for the first time in Democratic Party history do not have one of their own to vote for. For those old enough to remember the old days this is indeed a strange turn of events. The main point here, from a socialist perspective, is that if either Hillary or Obama wins the presidency that has to be a significant development in this country. Is that enough? Hell, no but it is significant.
John Edwards and the Working Class
The recently ended campaign of former North Carolina Senator John Edwards is a case in point for the proposition that while you may come from the working class that does not insure that you are a working class candidate. And that, my friends, is the problem with today trying to run a populist campaign out of the Democratic Party. In order to do so you must put it in terms of the middle class, a very nebulous and slippery concept. However, the middle class in this country is not the working class. If you are going to fight for the poor of the Ninth District in New Orleans (and that is very definitely a good thing to fight for) then you cannot mix up your message. But what you really need to do is get the hell out of the Democratic Party and fight for a workers party. Then you can, like I am, be a proud son of the working class.
The Revenge of John McCain
Republican presidential candidate Arizona Senator John McCain staked his campaign on the premise that the surge strategy in Iraq would work. Those of us on the left who have argued that it would not have to take our licking on this issue. At least in the short haul the surge has worked and that success has worked to McCain’s benefit. We concede the point for now. But as stated up in the first comment we still fight for immediate withdrawal from Iraq no matter whom the next president will be.
The Torch Passes
In my youth I cut my political teeth on John Kennedy’s presidential campaign. Elsewhere in this space I have freely admitted to having had my first political love affair with Robert Kennedy. Recently long time liberal icon Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy and John Kennedy’s daughter Caroline went out of their way to endorse Senator Obama. As John Kennedy said in his 1961 Inauguration speech the torch had passed to a new generation. That thought is being echoed here. I have also mentioned in this space that I sense the need for and welcome that change. The question remains, however, what programs and what policies will the next generation take hold of to ‘seek the newer world’. In my dewy-eyed youth it was enough to use a few sweeping phrase for a politician to state his (or her) case. In my old age I want a specific program that fights for the interest of working people. To date I do not see that. Enough said.
Anyone Can Run for President, Right?
Most of us remember as kids the old democratic political adage that any one (or almost anyone-look at the constitutional limitations) could run for President of the United States. As we matured we became painfully aware that that adage was less than the truth. In recent decades this has become even more painfully clear, as the cash nexus has driven the price of presidential politics through the roof. That brings me to the question of buying your way to the presidency. One multi-millionaire Republican candidate ex-Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney has literally kept his campaign alive by dipping in his own funds. New York City Mayor Bloomberg, if he decides on an independent run, apparently would finance such an endeavor by tapping into his personal fortune. I can only say this when the fight for a workers party wins us a workers government it will not be the color of one’s money but the worth of one’s political program that will be decisive. Or you will get the boot, pronto. Again, enough said.
The American Commanders in Iraq Are Getting Skittish
Of necessity the lead comment today, as has usually been the case over the past five years, is the situation in Iraq. The presidential candidates may have effectively banished it from serious discourse, the media may have placed it on page fourteen, Congress has taken a dive on ending funding for it, the bulk of the American population may have sent it under the radar but the damn thing still goes on at about the levels of troop engagement of five years ago.
According to the military analysts the ‘success’ of the surge over the past several months has permitted steady troop reductions that will reduce the American presence to fifteen brigades by summer. Now, however, there is serious talk by military authorities of a ‘pause’ to evaluate the progress of the surge strategy. That, my friends, is short hand for hedging bets that the Iraq military and/or police are up to the task of policing their own country. The long and short of this is that the Bush Administration has left the next presidential administration an immediate decision before it on the question of further withdrawals. Thanks, President Bush. To help the next administration along on its way let me give a lead on this – Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan.
It’s the Economy, Stupid!
In light of the remarks in the above paragraphs I have to take a political slap on the face for somewhat missing the extent of the rise of the economy as the central question before the public. Since last year I have believed that foreign affairs would be central to the American presidential campaign. Although I will not give up my persistent advocacy that Iraq and Afghanistan are the burning questions of the hour it is hardly irrational that the many individuals and families that are facing the wall on mortgage foreclosures, unemployment or the ability to just pay the bills see economic recovery as their primary issue. Okay, so it is the economy, stupid!
Mark this, however, where and what are the proposed just solutions to the problems of the vast inequalities of wealth in America coming from? The Republicratic candidates? Hell, no. They all are committed to ‘free markets’ and, one way or another, the international capitalist globalization of those markets. This would be a great time for those of us with socialist solutions, that is, social solutions to the economic problems of the day, starting with the need for a planned economy, to take the floor. And link the fight against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with the war against the working class and poor here.
Israeli Supreme Court Approves Cut in Gas Supplies to Gaza
In a commentary a couple of months ago concerning the lead up to the Middle East Annapolis meetings and President Bush’s pollyannaish belief that he could gain a peace treaty between the Israelis and Palestinians I mentioned that I HATE to comment on the Israeli-Palestinian confrontations because there is so little sense that, this side of paradise, there is any rational and just solution to the long time controversy. A recent decision by the Israeli Supreme Court on cutting gas supplies to Gaza is a case in point. That august body has determined that using this weapon of limiting vital gas supplies to the residents of Gaza by the Israeli government is correct in its fight against the ‘terrorists’ who rule there (by that they mean Hamas). The reasoning of the Court, however, will be hard to square with any sense of traditional Solomonic judgments, the vaunted rule of law that Western civilization touts as the cornerstone of its existence or simple humanity. Once again I throw down the challenge- Is there really any solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict short of a socialist one in the context of a wider Middle Eastern solution? To ask the question provides the answer.
Okay, now that I have gotten the serious commentary out of the way I can move on to American presidential politics. What would one expect from a confessed political ‘junkie’, anyway? At this point most of this campaign is of real interest only to technicians but here are some observations from afar. As always, I preface my remarks with the comment that, thankfully, I do not have to vote for any of these candidates.
In Mr. Bill’s Neighborhood-South Carolina.
The long time notion that Bill Clinton had been the first ‘black’ president, a comment made as much or more in the past by blacks than whites, got sorely tested and justly upended by the campaign in South Carolina. Clinton in attempting to prove that whites can use the race card as well as blacks, especially when ‘wifie’ is a candidate, got his head handed to him on platter. When the deal went down Mr. Bill turned into just another redneck hillbilly from the Ozarks and blacks judged accordingly. The fallout from this is far from over. Mr. Bill is being openingly mocked by younger blacks that I run into as just another white honky. If one really looks at what Clinton did during his reign, eliminating welfare as we know it, making the death penalty easier to impose and putting more police on the ground in black neighborhoods that is a perfect description. Playing jazz saxophone and having a few black friends on Martha’s Vineyard does little to cut the other way these days.
The Talk Around The Water Cooler
Maybe it is the winnowing process at this point in the campaign. Maybe it is just the momentarily whirl of politics but around my work water cooler there has been a very dramatic shift in political talk. About a year ago nobody (except me, of course), white, black or Hispanic talked about anything or anybody but Hillary. Today that talk has significantly shifted.
Blacks, who last year thought that Obama was too white, now are making it a question of race loyalty to support him. And by their lights this makes sense. Obama may be mixed but in race-conscious America he is BLACK. Hispanics, and in this particular case I am talking about Hispanic males, are talking up Hillary. This reflects the tension between the black and Hispanic communities that get a full workout over the question of immigration and other issues that separate these communities.
As for whites, again especially males, there is now actually less talk about the presidential campaigns. The great secret of this campaign at least on the Democratic side, a secret that will become more apparent now that John Edwards is out, is that white males for the first time in Democratic Party history do not have one of their own to vote for. For those old enough to remember the old days this is indeed a strange turn of events. The main point here, from a socialist perspective, is that if either Hillary or Obama wins the presidency that has to be a significant development in this country. Is that enough? Hell, no but it is significant.
John Edwards and the Working Class
The recently ended campaign of former North Carolina Senator John Edwards is a case in point for the proposition that while you may come from the working class that does not insure that you are a working class candidate. And that, my friends, is the problem with today trying to run a populist campaign out of the Democratic Party. In order to do so you must put it in terms of the middle class, a very nebulous and slippery concept. However, the middle class in this country is not the working class. If you are going to fight for the poor of the Ninth District in New Orleans (and that is very definitely a good thing to fight for) then you cannot mix up your message. But what you really need to do is get the hell out of the Democratic Party and fight for a workers party. Then you can, like I am, be a proud son of the working class.
The Revenge of John McCain
Republican presidential candidate Arizona Senator John McCain staked his campaign on the premise that the surge strategy in Iraq would work. Those of us on the left who have argued that it would not have to take our licking on this issue. At least in the short haul the surge has worked and that success has worked to McCain’s benefit. We concede the point for now. But as stated up in the first comment we still fight for immediate withdrawal from Iraq no matter whom the next president will be.
The Torch Passes
In my youth I cut my political teeth on John Kennedy’s presidential campaign. Elsewhere in this space I have freely admitted to having had my first political love affair with Robert Kennedy. Recently long time liberal icon Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy and John Kennedy’s daughter Caroline went out of their way to endorse Senator Obama. As John Kennedy said in his 1961 Inauguration speech the torch had passed to a new generation. That thought is being echoed here. I have also mentioned in this space that I sense the need for and welcome that change. The question remains, however, what programs and what policies will the next generation take hold of to ‘seek the newer world’. In my dewy-eyed youth it was enough to use a few sweeping phrase for a politician to state his (or her) case. In my old age I want a specific program that fights for the interest of working people. To date I do not see that. Enough said.
Anyone Can Run for President, Right?
Most of us remember as kids the old democratic political adage that any one (or almost anyone-look at the constitutional limitations) could run for President of the United States. As we matured we became painfully aware that that adage was less than the truth. In recent decades this has become even more painfully clear, as the cash nexus has driven the price of presidential politics through the roof. That brings me to the question of buying your way to the presidency. One multi-millionaire Republican candidate ex-Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney has literally kept his campaign alive by dipping in his own funds. New York City Mayor Bloomberg, if he decides on an independent run, apparently would finance such an endeavor by tapping into his personal fortune. I can only say this when the fight for a workers party wins us a workers government it will not be the color of one’s money but the worth of one’s political program that will be decisive. Or you will get the boot, pronto. Again, enough said.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
*Free The Last of the Ohio Seven-They Must Not Die In Jail
Click on title to link to the Partisan Defense Committee (an organization whose goals I support) to learn more about the Manning and Laaman cases(and other political prisoners supported by the organization)
COMMENTARY
ONE OF THE OHIO SEVEN -RICHARD WILLIAMS- RECENTLY DIED IN PRISON (2006). THAT LEAVES JAAN LAAMAN AND TOM MANNING STILL IN PRISON. IT IS AN URGENT DUTY FOR THE INTERNATIONAL LABOR MOVEMENT AND OTHERS TO RAISE THE CALL FOR THEIR FREEDOM. FREE ALL CLASS WAR PRISONERS.
I have added a link to Tom Manning's site that can provide a link to Jaan Laaman's site. For convenience I have labelled this link the Ohio Seven Defense Committee site. Free the last of the Seven. Below is a commentary written in 2006 arguing for their freedom.
Below is a repost of a commentary I made in 2007 to support of freedom for the last of the Ohio Seven
The Ohio Seven, like many other subjective revolutionaries, coming out of the turbulent anti-Vietnam War and anti-imperialist movements, were committed to social change. The different is that this organization included mainly working class militants, some of whose political consciousness was formed by participation as soldiers in the Vietnam War itself. Various members were convicted for carrying out robberies, apparently to raise money for their struggles, and bombings of imperialist targets. Without going into their particular personal and political biographies I note that these were the kind of subjective revolutionaries that must be recruited to a working class vanguard party if there ever is to be a chance of bringing off a socialist revolution. In the absence of a viable revolutionary labor party in the 1970’s and 1980’s the politics of the Ohio Seven, like the Black Panthers and the Weathermen, were borne of despair at the immensity of the task and also by desperation to do something concrete in aid of the Vietnamese Revolution and other Third World struggles . Their actions in trying to open up a second front militarily in the United States in aid of Third World struggles without a mass base proved to be mistaken but, as the Partisan Defense Committee which I support has noted, their actions were no crime in the eyes of the international working class.
The lack of a revolutionary vanguard to attract such working class elements away from adventurism is rendered even more tragic in the case of the Ohio Seven. Leon Trotsky, a leader with Lenin of the Russian Revolution of 1917, noted in a political obituary for his fallen comrade and fellow Left Oppositionist Kote Tsintadze that the West has not produced such fighters as Kote. Kote, who went through all the phases of struggle for the Russian Revolution, including imprisonment and exile under both the Czar and Stalin benefited from solidarity in a mass revolutionary vanguard party to sustain him through the hard times. What a revolutionary party could have done with the evident capacity and continuing commitment of subjective revolutionaries like the Ohio Seven poses that question point blank. This is the central problem and task of cadre development in the West in resolving the crisis of revolutionary leadership.
Finally, I would like to note that except for the Partisan Defense Committee and their own defense organizations – the Ohio 7 Defense Committee and the Jaan Laaman Defense Fund- the Ohio Seven have long ago been abandoned by those New Left elements and others, who as noted, at one time had very similar politics. At least part of this can be attributed to the rightward drift to liberal pacifist politics by many of them, but some must be attributed to class. Although the Ohio Seven were not our people- they are our people. All honor to them. As James P Cannon, a founding leader of the International Labor Defense, forerunner of the Partisan Defense Committee, pointed out long ago –Solidarity with class war prisoners is not charity- it is a duty. Their fight is our fight! LET US DO OUR DUTY HERE. RAISE THE CALL FOR THE FREEDOM OF LAAMAN AND MANNING. MAKE MOTIONS OF SOLIDARITY IN YOUR POLITICAL ORGANIZATION, SCHOOL OR UNION.
YOU CAN GOOGLE THE ORGANIZATIONS MENTIONED ABOVE- THE PARTISAN DEFENSE COMMITTEE- THE OHIO 7 DEFENSE COMMITTEE- THE JAAN LAAMAN DEFENSE FUND.
COMMENTARY
ONE OF THE OHIO SEVEN -RICHARD WILLIAMS- RECENTLY DIED IN PRISON (2006). THAT LEAVES JAAN LAAMAN AND TOM MANNING STILL IN PRISON. IT IS AN URGENT DUTY FOR THE INTERNATIONAL LABOR MOVEMENT AND OTHERS TO RAISE THE CALL FOR THEIR FREEDOM. FREE ALL CLASS WAR PRISONERS.
I have added a link to Tom Manning's site that can provide a link to Jaan Laaman's site. For convenience I have labelled this link the Ohio Seven Defense Committee site. Free the last of the Seven. Below is a commentary written in 2006 arguing for their freedom.
Below is a repost of a commentary I made in 2007 to support of freedom for the last of the Ohio Seven
The Ohio Seven, like many other subjective revolutionaries, coming out of the turbulent anti-Vietnam War and anti-imperialist movements, were committed to social change. The different is that this organization included mainly working class militants, some of whose political consciousness was formed by participation as soldiers in the Vietnam War itself. Various members were convicted for carrying out robberies, apparently to raise money for their struggles, and bombings of imperialist targets. Without going into their particular personal and political biographies I note that these were the kind of subjective revolutionaries that must be recruited to a working class vanguard party if there ever is to be a chance of bringing off a socialist revolution. In the absence of a viable revolutionary labor party in the 1970’s and 1980’s the politics of the Ohio Seven, like the Black Panthers and the Weathermen, were borne of despair at the immensity of the task and also by desperation to do something concrete in aid of the Vietnamese Revolution and other Third World struggles . Their actions in trying to open up a second front militarily in the United States in aid of Third World struggles without a mass base proved to be mistaken but, as the Partisan Defense Committee which I support has noted, their actions were no crime in the eyes of the international working class.
The lack of a revolutionary vanguard to attract such working class elements away from adventurism is rendered even more tragic in the case of the Ohio Seven. Leon Trotsky, a leader with Lenin of the Russian Revolution of 1917, noted in a political obituary for his fallen comrade and fellow Left Oppositionist Kote Tsintadze that the West has not produced such fighters as Kote. Kote, who went through all the phases of struggle for the Russian Revolution, including imprisonment and exile under both the Czar and Stalin benefited from solidarity in a mass revolutionary vanguard party to sustain him through the hard times. What a revolutionary party could have done with the evident capacity and continuing commitment of subjective revolutionaries like the Ohio Seven poses that question point blank. This is the central problem and task of cadre development in the West in resolving the crisis of revolutionary leadership.
Finally, I would like to note that except for the Partisan Defense Committee and their own defense organizations – the Ohio 7 Defense Committee and the Jaan Laaman Defense Fund- the Ohio Seven have long ago been abandoned by those New Left elements and others, who as noted, at one time had very similar politics. At least part of this can be attributed to the rightward drift to liberal pacifist politics by many of them, but some must be attributed to class. Although the Ohio Seven were not our people- they are our people. All honor to them. As James P Cannon, a founding leader of the International Labor Defense, forerunner of the Partisan Defense Committee, pointed out long ago –Solidarity with class war prisoners is not charity- it is a duty. Their fight is our fight! LET US DO OUR DUTY HERE. RAISE THE CALL FOR THE FREEDOM OF LAAMAN AND MANNING. MAKE MOTIONS OF SOLIDARITY IN YOUR POLITICAL ORGANIZATION, SCHOOL OR UNION.
YOU CAN GOOGLE THE ORGANIZATIONS MENTIONED ABOVE- THE PARTISAN DEFENSE COMMITTEE- THE OHIO 7 DEFENSE COMMITTEE- THE JAAN LAAMAN DEFENSE FUND.
How The West Was Won?
DVD Review
Magnificent Seven, 1960
The portrayal of the American cowboy has undergone a dramatic upheaval since the time of my youth in the 1950’s when the image of John Wayne as the Maximum Cowboy held sway. In such films as Red River Valley we were presented with morality plays that displayed white American manhood (and marginally, womanhood) and frontier virtue, etched in starkly black and white terms, from a long gone era. Since then we have been presented with good bad cowboys, bad good cowboys, spaghetti western cowboys, down on their luck corrupt cowboys, end of the line cowboys and gay cowboys. From the classic The Misfits to Brokeback Mountain we have seen the cowboy turn from a simple slow to draw, slow to anger angel of deliverance to a much more nuanced figure on the screen with an internal life almost as conflicted as our own.
No small part in this turnaround has been played by the work of the likes of Larry McMurtry who have taken a deep knowledge of the real West and presented us with a truer vision of what the westward expansion of America was all about. Today however, in the movie under review, The Magnificent Seven (hereafter, the Seven), we hark back to that earlier concept that I mentioned above when all a man needed was a horse, a few weapons of choice and plenty of open space.
The Magnificent Seven, interestingly, was first screened in the early 1960’s in the same period as the Misfits. Both films had plenty of well-acted performances (including by Eli Wallach in both films), understandable, if sparse, dialogue and nice plot lines. However, apart from those similarities they go there separate ways in looking at the heroic figure of the American cowboy and his fate in a modernizing world.
The plot line of the Seven is fairly simple, as is usually the case with old time oaters, as a village of beleaguered Mexican farmers being bled white by a gang of Mexican bad guys seeks help from north of the border. In forming a small army of motley gunfighters to battle against evil Chris (played by Yul Bryner) has gathered in every social type, from pathological killer to raw kid on the make, known to the western. However when the deal goes down the good guys beat the bad guys. Straight up. The cast of actors used to fill the roles of the gunfighters was basically a who’s who of macho male actors, from Bryner to McQueen to Vaughn, of the early 1960’s. Here high testoserone meets a worthy cause.
Although there are plenty of doubts about the virtues of the cowboy lifestyle expressed by the lead cowboys, particularly by Steve McQueen, this film’s central premise is that it takes such types with their well-worn sense of honor to right the wrongs of the little world that they have decided to inhabit. In a sense this is the Last Chance to give meaning to all those macho qualities that we have been told created the vast American West. Adios.
Magnificent Seven, 1960
The portrayal of the American cowboy has undergone a dramatic upheaval since the time of my youth in the 1950’s when the image of John Wayne as the Maximum Cowboy held sway. In such films as Red River Valley we were presented with morality plays that displayed white American manhood (and marginally, womanhood) and frontier virtue, etched in starkly black and white terms, from a long gone era. Since then we have been presented with good bad cowboys, bad good cowboys, spaghetti western cowboys, down on their luck corrupt cowboys, end of the line cowboys and gay cowboys. From the classic The Misfits to Brokeback Mountain we have seen the cowboy turn from a simple slow to draw, slow to anger angel of deliverance to a much more nuanced figure on the screen with an internal life almost as conflicted as our own.
No small part in this turnaround has been played by the work of the likes of Larry McMurtry who have taken a deep knowledge of the real West and presented us with a truer vision of what the westward expansion of America was all about. Today however, in the movie under review, The Magnificent Seven (hereafter, the Seven), we hark back to that earlier concept that I mentioned above when all a man needed was a horse, a few weapons of choice and plenty of open space.
The Magnificent Seven, interestingly, was first screened in the early 1960’s in the same period as the Misfits. Both films had plenty of well-acted performances (including by Eli Wallach in both films), understandable, if sparse, dialogue and nice plot lines. However, apart from those similarities they go there separate ways in looking at the heroic figure of the American cowboy and his fate in a modernizing world.
The plot line of the Seven is fairly simple, as is usually the case with old time oaters, as a village of beleaguered Mexican farmers being bled white by a gang of Mexican bad guys seeks help from north of the border. In forming a small army of motley gunfighters to battle against evil Chris (played by Yul Bryner) has gathered in every social type, from pathological killer to raw kid on the make, known to the western. However when the deal goes down the good guys beat the bad guys. Straight up. The cast of actors used to fill the roles of the gunfighters was basically a who’s who of macho male actors, from Bryner to McQueen to Vaughn, of the early 1960’s. Here high testoserone meets a worthy cause.
Although there are plenty of doubts about the virtues of the cowboy lifestyle expressed by the lead cowboys, particularly by Steve McQueen, this film’s central premise is that it takes such types with their well-worn sense of honor to right the wrongs of the little world that they have decided to inhabit. In a sense this is the Last Chance to give meaning to all those macho qualities that we have been told created the vast American West. Adios.
Monday, January 28, 2008
* American Communist Founder And Leader James P. Cannon Is In The House!
Click on title to link to the James P. Cannon Internet Archive's copy of his 1944 analysis of the lessons of the great Minneapolis teamsters strikes of 1934 (in which he played an important advisory part).
I have added a link to the James P. Cannon Archives. Those who read this space know that I stand proudly in the Cannon tradition of socialism. His work was, in his prime, the work of a man who wanted to make a revolution. In a real sense today's militant leftists, whether they know it or not, also stand on that tradition, as well. If you do not read anything else of Cannon's read his analysis of the great Minneapolis General Strike of 1934 (written in 1944) that he helped direct. It has many lessons for today's class struggle-starved militants. I will be commenting on the article shortly.
I have added a link to the James P. Cannon Archives. Those who read this space know that I stand proudly in the Cannon tradition of socialism. His work was, in his prime, the work of a man who wanted to make a revolution. In a real sense today's militant leftists, whether they know it or not, also stand on that tradition, as well. If you do not read anything else of Cannon's read his analysis of the great Minneapolis General Strike of 1934 (written in 1944) that he helped direct. It has many lessons for today's class struggle-starved militants. I will be commenting on the article shortly.
*The Fox in the Hen House- A Paul Wolfowitz Sighting
Click on title to link to Wikipedia's entry for Max Schachtman the "max daddy" of the neo-conservatives back when they flirted with what they thought was Trotskyism in the 1950s. At that time old Max had long shed the revolutionary credentials (and they were real)of his youth.
Commentary
In the spring of 2007 after head of the World Bank and former deputy secretary of war Paul Wolfowitz got the boot from the bank for trying to impress his girlfriend
I speculated that he would not wind up sleeping on a Central Park bench. Needless to say I was right- these guys and gals flip through government and the think tanks with the greatest of ease and the good old boy and girl networks provide the parachute.
Apparently Wolfowitz initially landed at the conservative old folks home- the American Enterprise Institute but as a recent item by Janine Zacharia of Bloomberg News that caught my attention noted the boy is back in the hen house. Wolfowitz has now been tagged to head the State Department’s International Security Advisory Board. This board gives ‘advice’ on a whole range of issues concerning arms control, disarmament, nonproliferation, etc. A nice soft job for an old pro at such issues.
But, hell, wait a minute. This Wolfowitz is the same guy who was the point man (person, excuse me) on the question of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And if memory serves me right, according to Seymour Hersh’s April 2006 New Yorker expose, a leading advocate for disarming Iran by military means. What kind of advise would any rational person, and I believe that Condi Rice is by her own lights rational, take from this guy? Paul Cirincione of the Center for American Progress (where do they get these names for these think tanks, by the way) hit the nail on the head with the following comment-“The advise given by Paul Wolfowitz over the past six years ranks among the worst provided by any defense official in history. I have no idea why anyone would want more.” Nicely put. And that is by someone working the same street as brother Wolfowitz. Note this though- Saddam Hussein was not the only one who should have been in the dock for crimes against the Iraqi people. One unlamented former American War Secretary Donald Rumsfeld should have stood beside him. And his deputy Paul Wolfowitz to his right.
Below is a repost on a comment made in May 2007 as Wolfowitz was facing the ax at the World Bank.
On the Outside Looking Out- The Strange Tale of Paul Wolfowitz Former Neo-Con Whiz Kid
At one time the currently beleaguered head of the World Bank Paul Wolfowitz was seen as one of the ‘best and brightest’ of his generation of neo-cons who had come to dominate the inner team of the Bush Administration. While one should not expect that Mr. Wolfowitz would wind up sleeping on a bench in Central Park his star has certainly lost its luster. First the quagmire in Iraq of which he was a central architect and now creating a 'safe haven' for his girl friend. Oh well. I personally will cry no tears over his fate. Will you? This case is, however, prima facie evidence for why, when the working class takes state power through workers councils, we will invoke the long time socialist tradition of immediate recall of governmental officials for cause. One should not have to go through a 'cold' international civil war at the World Bank, or anywhere else for that matter, just to get rid of a guy who is out to impress his girl friend.
Just one other little point on Mr. Wolfowitz’s personal history. Much has been made in the more political publications about the so-called Trotskyist past of a number of neo-cons, including Mr. Wolfowitz. One would get the impression that these were 'red' revolutionaries who saw the error of their youthful ways and on seeing their errors immediately offered their services as direct agents of American imperialism. Not so. They essentially spent five minutes going to some State Department socialist meetings of the American Socialist Party in the late 1950's or early 1960's.
What passes for the Trotskyism the publications are talking about is the Trostkyist past of one by then burned-out Max Shachtman of the Socialist Party, he of the support to the Bay of Pigs invasion and of the Vietnam War infamy, or of Irving Howe, social democratic editor of Dissent. By comparison with their progeny both Mr. Howe and Mr. Shachtman were serious about Trotsky's ideas and in the case of Shachtman had actually rendered valuable service to the Trotskyist movement at one time. But that was in their pasts. When the neo-cons arrived neither Howe nor Shachtman were Trotskyists. Christ, from their political positions at that point I do not believe that by that time they knew how to spell the word. If one was looking for the semblance of Trotskyist ideas in America at that time the place to look was the Socialist Workers Party led by James P. Cannon. I do not see that political address on any neo-con resume. Enough said.
Commentary
In the spring of 2007 after head of the World Bank and former deputy secretary of war Paul Wolfowitz got the boot from the bank for trying to impress his girlfriend
I speculated that he would not wind up sleeping on a Central Park bench. Needless to say I was right- these guys and gals flip through government and the think tanks with the greatest of ease and the good old boy and girl networks provide the parachute.
Apparently Wolfowitz initially landed at the conservative old folks home- the American Enterprise Institute but as a recent item by Janine Zacharia of Bloomberg News that caught my attention noted the boy is back in the hen house. Wolfowitz has now been tagged to head the State Department’s International Security Advisory Board. This board gives ‘advice’ on a whole range of issues concerning arms control, disarmament, nonproliferation, etc. A nice soft job for an old pro at such issues.
But, hell, wait a minute. This Wolfowitz is the same guy who was the point man (person, excuse me) on the question of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And if memory serves me right, according to Seymour Hersh’s April 2006 New Yorker expose, a leading advocate for disarming Iran by military means. What kind of advise would any rational person, and I believe that Condi Rice is by her own lights rational, take from this guy? Paul Cirincione of the Center for American Progress (where do they get these names for these think tanks, by the way) hit the nail on the head with the following comment-“The advise given by Paul Wolfowitz over the past six years ranks among the worst provided by any defense official in history. I have no idea why anyone would want more.” Nicely put. And that is by someone working the same street as brother Wolfowitz. Note this though- Saddam Hussein was not the only one who should have been in the dock for crimes against the Iraqi people. One unlamented former American War Secretary Donald Rumsfeld should have stood beside him. And his deputy Paul Wolfowitz to his right.
Below is a repost on a comment made in May 2007 as Wolfowitz was facing the ax at the World Bank.
On the Outside Looking Out- The Strange Tale of Paul Wolfowitz Former Neo-Con Whiz Kid
At one time the currently beleaguered head of the World Bank Paul Wolfowitz was seen as one of the ‘best and brightest’ of his generation of neo-cons who had come to dominate the inner team of the Bush Administration. While one should not expect that Mr. Wolfowitz would wind up sleeping on a bench in Central Park his star has certainly lost its luster. First the quagmire in Iraq of which he was a central architect and now creating a 'safe haven' for his girl friend. Oh well. I personally will cry no tears over his fate. Will you? This case is, however, prima facie evidence for why, when the working class takes state power through workers councils, we will invoke the long time socialist tradition of immediate recall of governmental officials for cause. One should not have to go through a 'cold' international civil war at the World Bank, or anywhere else for that matter, just to get rid of a guy who is out to impress his girl friend.
Just one other little point on Mr. Wolfowitz’s personal history. Much has been made in the more political publications about the so-called Trotskyist past of a number of neo-cons, including Mr. Wolfowitz. One would get the impression that these were 'red' revolutionaries who saw the error of their youthful ways and on seeing their errors immediately offered their services as direct agents of American imperialism. Not so. They essentially spent five minutes going to some State Department socialist meetings of the American Socialist Party in the late 1950's or early 1960's.
What passes for the Trotskyism the publications are talking about is the Trostkyist past of one by then burned-out Max Shachtman of the Socialist Party, he of the support to the Bay of Pigs invasion and of the Vietnam War infamy, or of Irving Howe, social democratic editor of Dissent. By comparison with their progeny both Mr. Howe and Mr. Shachtman were serious about Trotsky's ideas and in the case of Shachtman had actually rendered valuable service to the Trotskyist movement at one time. But that was in their pasts. When the neo-cons arrived neither Howe nor Shachtman were Trotskyists. Christ, from their political positions at that point I do not believe that by that time they knew how to spell the word. If one was looking for the semblance of Trotskyist ideas in America at that time the place to look was the Socialist Workers Party led by James P. Cannon. I do not see that political address on any neo-con resume. Enough said.
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