*From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-Class- Struggle Defense Work In The U.S. - Building on the Heritage of the International Labor Defense

Markin comment:

The following is an article from an archival issue of Women and Revolution, Winter-Spring, 1996, that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of Women and Revolution during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.

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Class- Struggle Defense Work In The U.S. - Building on the Heritage of the International Labor Defense

We print below an edited speech by Deborah Mackson, executive director of the Partisan Defense Committee, prepared for April 7995 regional educationals in New York, Chicago and Oakland as part of a series of meetings and rallies sponsored by the PDC to mobilize support for Mum/a Abu-Jamal and the fight against the racist death penalty.
Mumia Abu-Jamal describes his current conditions of incarceration on death row at the State Correctional Institution at Greene County, Pennsylvania as "high-tech hell." When Governor Tom Ridge assaults all of the working people and minorities of this country by initiating the first execution of a political prisoner in America since the Rosenbergs, he must hear a resounding "No!" from coast to coast. Because Jamal is an articulate voice for the oppressed, this racist and rotting capitalist state wants to silence him forever. He is indeed dangerous. He is indeed a symbol. He is, indeed, innocent. Hear his powerful words, and you will begin to understand the hatred and fear which inspires the vendetta against this courageous fighter:

"Over many long years, over mountains of fears, through rivers of repression, from the depths of the valley of the shadow of death, I survive to greet you, in the continuing spirit of rebellion.... As America's ruling classes rush backwards into a new Dark Age, the weight of repression comes easier with each passing hour. But as repression increases, so too must resistance.... Like our forefathers, our fore-mothers, our kith and kin, we must fight for every inch of ground gained. The repressive wave sweeping this country will not stop by good wishes, but only by a counterwave of committed people firm in their focus."

We of the Partisan Defense Committee, the Spartacist League and the Labor Black Leagues are committed to a campaign to free this former Black Panther, award-winning journalist and supporter of the controversial MOVE organization who was framed for the 1981 killing of a Philadelphia policeman. Our aim is to effect an international campaign of protest and publicity like that which ultimately saved the nine Scottsboro Boys, framed for rape in Alabama in 1931, from the electric chair. We must mobilize the working class and all the oppressed in the fight to free this class-war prisoner framed by the government's murderous vendetta.

As Marxists, we are opposed to the death penalty on principle. We say that this state does not have the right to decide who lives and who dies. Capital punishment is part of the vast arsenal of terror at the hands of this state, which exists to defend the capitalist system of exploitation and oppression. America's courts are an instrument of the bourgeoisie's war on the working people and the poor; they are neither neutral nor by any stretch of the imagination "color blind."

To us, the defense of America's class-war prisoners— whatever their individual political views may be—is a responsibility of the revolutionary vanguard party which must champion all causes in the interest of the proletariat. The Partisan Defense Committee was initiated by the Spartacist League in 1974 in the tradition of the working-class defense policies of the International Labor Defense, under its founder and first secretary from 1925 to 1928, James P. Cannon. Today, I want to talk to you about how that tradition was built in this country by the best militants of the past 100 years—the leaders of class-struggle organizations like the pre-World War I Industrial Workers of the World, the early Socialist and Communist parties and the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party.

The Roots of Black Oppression

To forge a future, one has to understand the past. The modern American death penalty is the barbaric inheritance of a barbaric system of production: chattel slavery. Like the capitalists who hold state power today, the slavocracy used the instruments of their power, special bodies of armed men and the "justice" system— the laws, courts and prisons—to control people for profit. Directly descendant from the slavocracy's tradition of property in black people is the death penalty. A trail through history illustrates this truth. The "slave codes" codified a series of offenses for which slaves could be killed but for which whites would receive a lesser sentence. In Virginia, the death penalty was mandatory for both slaves and free blacks for any crime for which a white could be imprisoned for three years or more. In Georgia, a black man convicted of raping a white woman faced the death penalty; a white man got two years for the same crime, and punishment was "discretionary" if the victim was black. Slaves could not own property, bear arms, assemble or testify against whites in courts of law. Marriage between slaves was not recognized; families were sold apart; it was illegal to teach a slave to read and write. Slaves were not second- or third-class citizens—they were not human, but legally "personal, movable property," chattel.

William Styron in The Confessions of Nat Turner has the fictional character T.R. Gray explain the slaveowners' rationale to Turner:

"The point is that you are animate chattel and animate chattel is capable of craft and connivery and wily stealth. You ain't a wagon, Reverend, but chattel that possesses moral choice and spiritual volition. Remember that well. Because that's how come the law provides that animate chattel like you can be tried for a felony, and that's how come you're goin' to be tried next Sattidy. "He paused, then said softly without emotion: 'And hung by the neck until dead'."

While the slave codes were a Southern institution, legal and extralegal terror were never exclusive to the South. As early as 1793, fugitive slave laws were on the federal books. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Law was passed in response to the growing abolitionist influence which had inspired several Northern states to pass "personal liberty laws," giving some protection to slaves who had successfully negotiated the Underground Railroad. The 1850 law, seeking to protect the private property of slaveholders, put the burden of proof on captured blacks, but gave them no legal power to prove their freedom—no right to habeas corpus, no right to a jury trial, no right even to testify on their own behalf.

Many blacks were caught in the clutches of this infamous law, which had no bounds. For example, a man in southern Indiana was arrested and returned to an owner’ who claimed he had run away 79 years before. The law knew no pretense. A magistrate's fee doubled if he judged an unfortunate black before the bench a runaway slave instead of a tree man. And fugitives were pursued with vigor. In Battle Cry of Freedom, historian James McPherson recounts the story of Anthony Burns, a slave who stowed away from Virginia to Boston in 1854. The feds spent the equivalent of $2.3 million in current dollars to return him to his "owner." That is approximately equal to what an average death penalty case costs today.

Any hope that "blind justice" could be sought from the U.S. Supreme Court was dashed with the 1856 Dred Scott decision. Chief Justice Taney wrote that at the time the Constitution was adopted, Negroes "had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order...so far inferior, that they had no rights which a white man was bound to respect."

While slavery itself was overthrown in the Civil War and Reconstruction, the needs of the American capitalists for compulsory agricultural labor in the South remained. A new, semi-capitalistic mode of agriculture developed, in which the semi-slave condition of the freed blacks was made permanent by the re-establishment of the social relations of slavery: color discrimination buttressed by segregation and race prejudice.

After the Civil War the slave codes became the "black codes," a separate set of rules defining crime and punishment for blacks and limiting their civil rights. They were enforced by the extralegal terror of the Ku Klux Klan; in the last two decades of the 19th century, lynching vastly outnumbered legal executions. As W.E.B. Du Bois said of lynching:

"It is not simply the Klu Klux Klan; it is not simply weak officials; it is not simply inadequate, unenforced law. It is deeper, far deeper than all this: it is the in-grained spirit of mob and murder, the despising of women and the capitalization of children born of 400 years of Negro slavery and 4,000 years of government for private profit."

The promise of Radical Reconstruction, equality, could only be fulfilled by attacking the problem at its very root: private property in the means of production. Neither Northern capitalists nor Southern planters could abide that revolution, so they made a deal, the Compromise of 1877, in their common interest. That's why we call on American workers, black and white, to finish the Civil War—to complete, through socialist revolution, the unfinished tasks of the Second American Revolution!

In the wake of the Compromise of 1877, the U.S. Supreme Court began to dismantle the Civil Rights Acts of the Reconstruction period. One landmark decision was Plessey v. Ferguson in 1896, which permitted "separate but equal" treatment of black and white in public facilities. But separate is never equal. This was simply the legal cover for the transformation of the "black codes" into "Jim Crow"—the "grandfather clause," poll tax, literacy test, all designed to deny blacks the vote, and the institution of separate facilities from schools to cemeteries. This legal and practical segregation, instituted in the South and transported North, was a tool to divide and rule.

America's Racist Death Penalty

The death penalty was applied at will until 1972. From 1930 to 1967 the U.S. averaged 100 or more executions per year. In 1972, following a decade of civil rights protests, the Supreme Court ruled the death penalty was "cruel and unusual punishment" because of its arbitrary and capricious application. But the hiatus lasted only four years.

In 1976-the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty and has been expanding it ever since. In 1986 the court ruled it unconstitutional to execute the insane, but gave no criteria for defining insanity; in 1988 it approved the execution of 16-year-olds; in 1989 it ruled for the execution of retarded persons. Since 1976, 276 people have been executed in this country. Between January and April of 1995, 17 were killed. And innocence is no barrier, as the Supreme Court recently decreed in the case of Jesse Dewayne Jacobs, executed in Texas in January 1995 after the prosecution submitted that he had not committed the crime for which he had been sentenced. The Supreme Court said it didn't matter, he'd had a "fair trial." What an abomination!
Perhaps the most telling case in recent history was the 1987 McCleskey decision. The evidence submitted to the courts illustrated beyond the shadow of a doubt that racism ruled the application of the death penalty. Overall, a black person convicted of killing a white person is 22 times more likely to be sentenced to death than if the victim is black. When the McCleskey case went to court, liberals across the country hoped for a Brown v. Board of Education decision in regard to the death penalty. The evidence of racial bias was clear and overwhelming. But while the Supreme Court accepted the accuracy of the evidence, it said it doesn't matter. The court showed the real intention of the death penalty when it stated that McCleskey's claim "throws into serious question the principles that underlie our entire criminal justice system" and "the validity of capital punishment in our multi-racial society." Or as a Southern planter wrote in defense of the slave codes, "We have to rely more and more on the power of fear.... We are determined to continue masters" (quoted in Kenneth Stampp, The Peculiar Institution).

Let's take a look for a moment at "our multi-racial society." The U.S. has the highest rate of incarceration in the world: 344 per 100,000. It is one of the two "advanced" industrial countries left in the world which employs capital punishment. As of January 1995, 2,976 men, women and children occupied America's death rows; 48 are women, 37 are juveniles. According to the latest census, blacks make up 12 percent of the population, yet 51 percent of the people awaiting execution are minorities and 40 percent are black.

Eighty-four percent of all capital cases involve white victims even though 50 percent of murder victims in America are black. Of a total of 75 people executed for interracial murders, three involved a black victim and a white defendant, 72 involved a white victim and a black defendant. The death penalty is truly an impulse to genocide against the black population for whom the ruling class no longer sees any need in its profit-grabbing calculations.

Understanding this and understanding the broader importance of the black question in America, we take up Jamal's case as a concrete task in our struggle for black freedom and for proletarian revolution in the interests of the liberation of all of humanity.

Early History of Class-Struggle Defense

From the beginning of the communist movement, a commitment to those persecuted by the ruling classes, whether "on the inside" or out, has been recognized as an integral part of the class struggle. Marx and Engels spent years defending and supporting the refugees of-the Paris Commune.

As Trotskyists, we feel this responsibility keenly because we inherited some of the finest principles for class-struggle defense from James R Cannon, the founder of American Trotskyism. The traditions which inspired the International Labor Defense (ILD) were forged in hard class struggle, dating back to the rise of the labor movement after the Civil War. One of the first acts of the Republican government following the Compromise of 1877 was to pull its troops from the South and send them to quell the railway strikes that had broken out throughout the Northern states. The federal strikebreakers tipped the scales in the hard-fought battles of the time, many of which escalated into general strikes, and the workers were driven back in defeat. But united struggle against the bosses had been launched, and less than a decade later the workers movement had taken up the fight for an eight-hour day.

In the course of this struggle, workers in Chicago amassed at Haymarket Square in early May of 1886. The protest was just winding down when a bomb went off, likely planted by a provocateur. The cops opened fire on the workers, killing one and wounding many. The government’s response was to frame up eight workers, who were sympathetic to anarchist views, on charges of murder. They were tried and convicted, not for the bombing but for their agitation against the employers. Four were hanged, one committed suicide, three were finally pardoned in 1891.

The period from the turn of the century to America's entry into World War I was one of intense social struggle; militant strikes were more numerous than at any time since. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW—the Wobblies) led union organizing drives, anti-lynching campaigns and a free speech movement. The level of struggle meant more frequent arrests, which gave rise to the need for defense of the class and individuals. The left and most labor currents and organizations rallied to the defense of victims of the class war. Non-sectarian defense was the rule of the day. The Wobbly slogan, "an injury to one is an injury to all," was taken to heart by the vast majority of the workers.

This was Cannon's training ground. One of his heroes was Big Bill Haywood, who conceived the ILD with Cannon in Moscow in 1925. As Cannon said, the history of the ILD is "the story of the projection of Bill Haywood's influence—through me and my associates—into the movement from which he was exiled, an influence for simple honesty and good will and genuine non-partisan solidarity toward all the prisoners of the class war in America."

Big Bill Haywood came from the Western Federation of Miners, one of the most combative unions this country has ever produced. The preamble to their constitution was a series of six points, beginning, "We hold that there is a class struggle in society and that this struggle is caused by economic conditions." It goes on to note, "We hold that the class struggle will continue until the producer is recognized as the sole master of his product," and it asserts that the working class and it alone can and must achieve its own emancipation. It ends, "we, the wage slaves...have associated in the Western Federation of Miners."

Not all labor organizations of the time had this class-struggle perspective. Contrast the tract of Samuel Rompers' American Federation of Labor (AFL), "Labor's Bill of Grievances," which he sent to the president and Congress in 1908:

"We present these grievances to your attention because we have long, patiently and in vain waited for redress.

There is not any matter of which we have complained but for which we nave in an honorable and lawful manner submitted remedies. The remedies for these grievances proposed by labor are in line with fundamental law, and with progress and development made necessary by changed industrial conditions."

The IWW, whose constitution began, "The working class and the employing class have nothing in common," was founded in 1905. Haywood was an initiator and one of its most aggressive and influential organizers. As a result of that and his open socialist beliefs, in 1906 he, along with George Pettibone and Charles Moyer, were arrested for the bombing murder of ex-governor Frank Steunenberg of Idaho (the nemesis of the combative Coeur d'Alene miners). The three were kidnapped from Colorado, put on a military train and taken to Idaho.

The Western Federation of Miners and the IWW launched a tremendous defense movement for the three during the 18 months they were waiting to be tried for their lives. Everyone from the anarchists to the AFL participated. Demonstrations of 50,000 and more were organized all across the country. It was this case that brought James Cannon to political consciousness.

The case was important internationally, too. While they were in jail, Maxim Gorky came to New York and sent a telegram to the three with greetings from the Russian workers. Haywood wired back that their imprisonment was an expression of the class struggle which was the same in America as in Russia and in all other capitalist countries.

On a less friendly note, Teddy Roosevelt, then president of America, publicly declared the three "undesirable citizens." Haywood responded that the laws of the country held they were innocent until proven guilty and that a man in Roosevelt's position should be the last to judge them until the case was decided in court.

The Socialist Party (founded in 1901) also rallied to the defense. While in jail, Haywood was nominated as the party's candidate for governor of Colorado and got 16,000 votes. The leader of the SP, Eugene Debs, wrote his famous "Arouse, Ye Slaves" for the SP's Appeal to Reason:

"If they attempt to murder Moyer, Haywood and their brothers, a million revolutionists, at least, will meet them with guns.... Let them dare to execute their devilish plot and every state in this Union will resound with the tramp of revolution....
"Get ready, comrades, for action!... A special revolutionary convention of the proletariat...would be in order, and, if extreme measures are required, a general strike could be ordered and industry paralyzed as a preliminary to a general uprising."

Haywood's trial began in May of 1907. It was Clarence Darrow for the defense and the infamous Senator William E. Borah for the frame-up (prosecution). That this was a political trial was clear to everybody. The prosecution, for example, introduced into evidence issues of the anarchist journal Alarm from 1886, when Haymarket martyr Albert Parsons was its editor. Haywood thought that Dar-row's summary to the jury in his case was the best effort Darrow ever made in the courtroom. But Haywood also got a bit exasperated with his lawyer. In his autobiography, he tells the story of Darrow coming to jail depressed and worried. The defendants would always try to get him to lighten up. Finally Pettibone got tired of this and told Darrow they knew it would be really hard on him to lose this great case with all its national and international attention, but, hey! he said, "You know it's us fellows that have to be hanged!"

Every day of the trial the defense committee packed the courtroom with what Haywood called "a labor jury of Socialists and union men." This is a practice we proudly follow today. On the stand, Haywood told the story of the Western Federation of Miners and its battles against the bosses, putting them on trial. He refused to be intimidated by Senator Borah. When Borah asked whether Haywood had said that Governor Steunenberg should be exterminated, Haywood replied that to the best of his remembrance, he said he should be "eliminated."

On June 28 Haywood was acquitted. Soon thereafter, so were his comrades. At a Chicago rally organized to greet him upon his release, he told the crowd of 200,000, "We owe our lives to your solidarity." Haywood knew that innocence was not enough. It is that kind of solidarity we are seeking to mobilize today for Mumia Abu-Jamal.

The Labor Movement and World War I

Haywood was elected to the National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party in 1908, during its most left-wing period. In 1910, he was one of the party's delegates to the Socialist Congress of the Second International in Copenhagen. Shortly after, the SP moved to the right, and in 1912 (the year Debs polled nearly a million votes in his campaign for president) a number of leftists, including the young Jim Cannon, left the Socialist Party. A year later, when Haywood was purged from the executive board, there was another mass exodus.

The IWW, in which Haywood and Cannon remained active, expanded the scope of its activities. This was the period of the free speech movement and anti-lynching ' campaigns. One Wobbly pamphlet, "Justice for the Negro: How He Can Get It," discusses the question of integrated struggle and how to stop lynchings:

"The workers of every race and nationality must join in one common group against their one common enemy—the employers—so as to be "able to defend themselves and one another. Protection for the working class lies in complete solidarity of the workers, without regard to race, creed, sex or color. 'One Enemy—One Union!' must be their watchword."

They almost got it right: as syndicalists, they didn't understand the need for a vanguard party to fight for a revolutionary program.

With the beginning of World War I and preparations for U.S. involvement, the government declared political war on the IWW and the left. Thousands of Wobblies were imprisoned under "criminal syndicalism" laws—100 in San Quentin and Folsom alone. In response, the IWW adopted the slogan, "Fill the jails." It was a misguided tactic, but unlike many so-called socialists today, the Wobbliest had a principled position where it counted: they'd go to jail before they'd cross a picket line.

1917 was the year of the Russian Revolution. A month after that world-historic event, Haywood was back on trial in Chicago with some 18 other Wobblies. He was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in Leaven worth prison. In 1919 he was released on bail pending appeal and devoted his time to the IWW's General Defense Committee, launching a campaign to raise bail money for those in prison. When the Red Scare and the Palmer Raids began, Haywood learned that he was a primary target. So, as his appeal went to the Supreme Court, he sailed for the Soviet Union. A student of history, he had no illusions in "blind justice."

Cannon was also heavily influenced by the case of California labor leaders Tom Mooney and Warren Billings. In 1916, as America was preparing to go to war, Mooney and Billings were framed up for a bombing at a Preparedness Day Parade in San Francisco. The Preparedness Movement was a bourgeois movement of "open shop" chamber of commerce, right-wing vigilante groups, who were very serious about getting the U.S. into World War I. They went into Mexico to fight Pancho Villa as practice. The Preparedness Movement was opposed by labor, and in fact two days before the bombing there had been a 5,000-strong labor demonstration in San Francisco.

Mooney and Billings were convicted. Mooney was sentenced to hang, Billings got a life sentence. At first, their case was taken up only by the anarchists. The official AFL labor movement took a hands-off position. But when it became clear that they had been framed with perjured testimony, a "Mooney movement" swept the country.

The Mooney case had a big impact on Russian immigrant workers, among others. Thus the Mooney case was carried back to Russia, and in April of 1917 the Russian anarchists led a Mooney defense demonstration in Petrograd at the American consulate. Worried about Russia pulling out of World War I at that point, Woodrow Wilson personally interceded on behalf of Mooney and Billings. It didn't get them out of jail, but the effect of international pressure was not lost on Cannon.

In the U.S., the cops broke up Mooney defense meetings and arrested those present. The class-struggle nature of the defense movement, involving such actions as one-day strikes, was a felt threat to the ruling class, especially in the face of a war. In a conscious effort to dissipate this movement, the state commuted Mooney's death sentence to life in prison. In combination with the domestic repression following the war, this took the life out of the Mooney movement. Mooney and Billings stayed in prison for 22 years. They were released in 1939, and Mooney spent two and a half of the next three years in the hospital and then-died.

In his eulogy "Good-by Tom Mooney!" Cannon wrote:

"They imprisoned Mooney—as they imprisoned Debs and Haywood and hundreds of others—in order to clear the road of militant labor opposition to the First World War, and they kept him in prison for revenge and for a warning to others."

As World War II began, Cannon would find himself in the same position.

The Tradition of International Labor Defense

The parties of the Second International backed their own ruling classes in World War I, and the Bolsheviks fought for a new international party committed to the Marxist movement's call, "Workers of the World Unite!" In 1919, the leaders of the Russian Revolution founded the Third International, the Comintern, to build revolutionary parties which could take up the struggle against capitalist rule. 1919 was also a year of massive strike activity in the U.S. This wave of class struggle swelled the ranks of the Socialist Party, which then split in September. The most left-wing workers regrouped, giving birth to the American Communist movement, and Cannon was among them.

America in the 1920s was not a nice place to be. Warren Harding was elected in a landslide victory on the slogan of "Return to Normalcy." And "normal" was racist and repressive. His attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, launched a war on the left inspired by fear of the Russian Revolution, which resulted in massive deportations of leftists and jailing of American radicals. The young Communist Party went underground. 1920 saw more lynchings and anti-black pogroms than any time in recent memory. The Klan grew like wildfire, and the government passed anti-immigration legislation that would give Newt Gingrich and Pete Wilson wet dreams.

When it was clear that the IWW was for all practical purposes broken, many of its jailed members, including Eugene Debs, were pardoned. The Communists, however, remained in jail. The union movement took it on the chops as well, and by the end of the 1920s only 13 percent of the workforce of this country was unionized.

The 1921 Third Congress of the Comintern was held under the watchword "To the Masses." In the U.S., the newly formed party had been underground and could hardly make a turn to the masses. At the Comintern's urging, the Workers (Communist) Party emerged in December of 1921 with Cannon as its first chairman and main public spokesman.

By the time of the Fourth Congress of the Comintern in 1922, the tactic of the united front had been defined; the Fourth Congress detailed its application. The need for the united front grew out of the post-World War I ebbing of the revolutionary tide following the Russian Revolution. The offensive by the capitalists against the proletariat and its parties was forcing even the reformist-led organizations into partial and defensive struggles to save their very lives.

The slogan "march separately, strike together" encapsulated the two aims of the united-front tactic: class unity and the political fight for a communist program. The Comintern sought both to achieve the maximum unity of the working masses in their defensive struggles and to expose in action the hesitancy of the leadership of the reformist organizations of the Second International to act in the interests of the proletariat and the inability of its program to win against the ruling class.

The united front is a tactic we use today. Our call for labor/black mobilizations to stop the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal and abolish the racist death penalty has brought together many different organizations and individuals to save Jamal's life. At these rallies and demonstrations, we

have insisted on the right to argue for our program to put an end to racist injustice and capitalist exploitation through socialist revolution.

In line with the policies hashed out at the Third and Fourth Congresses, the Communist International founded an international defense organization, the International Red Aid. These events had a substantial effect on the young American party, and one of the direct results was the foundation in 1925 of the International Labor Defense (ILD).

Cannon's goal was to make the ILD the defense arm of the labor movement. Cannon wrote to Debs on the occasion of his endorsement of the ILD:

"The main problem as I see it is to construct the ILD on the broadest possible basis. To conduct the work in a non-partisan and non-sectarian manner and finally establish the impression by our deeds that the ILD is the defender of every worker persecuted for his activities in the class struggle, without any exceptions and without regard to his affiliations."

From 1925 to 1928, the ILD was pretty successful in achieving that goal. It established principles to which we adhere today:

• United-front defense: The ILD campaigns were organized to allow for the broadest possible participation.

• Class-struggle defense: The ILD sought to mobilize the working class in protest on a national and international scale, relying on the class movement of the workers and
placing no faith in the justice of the capitalist courts, while using every legal avenue open to them.

• Non-sectarian defense: When it was founded, the ILD immediately adopted 106 prisoners, instituting the practice of financially assisting these prisoners and their
families. Many had been jailed as a result of the "criminal syndicalism" laws; some were Wobblies, some were anarchists, some were strike leaders. Not one was a member of the Communist Party. The ILD launched the first Holiday Appeal. Of course, the ILD also vigorously defended its own, understanding the vital importance of the legal rights of the Communist Party to exist and organize.

Social Defense and Union Struggle

The ILD's most well-known case was the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti. The frame-up for murder and robbery of these two immigrant anarchist workers, who were sent to their deaths by the state of Massachusetts in 1927, grew directly out of the "red scare" of the early '20s. The ILD applied with alacrity the main lines of its program: unity of all working-class forces and reliance on the class movement of the workers. Thousands of workers rallied to their cause, and unions around the country contributed to a defense fund set up by Italian workers in the Boston area. But the level of class struggle is key to the outcome of defense cases, and the ILD's exemplary campaign proved insufficient to save the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti.

As the case drew to a close, one of the feints used by the state was to start rumors that Sacco and Vanzetti's death penalty sentence would be commuted to life without parole. This was designed to dissipate the Sacco and Vanzetti movement and prepare their execution. Cannon rang the alarm bells from the pages of the Labor Defender, rallying ILD supporters to mass demonstrations and warning them of the devious and two-faced nature of the bourgeoisie. Cannon had not forgotten the demobilization of the Mooney movement after his sentence had been commuted nor the living death that Mooney and Billings were enduring in their 22 years of internment.

This has significance for us today as we fight against the threatened execution of Jamal. Life in prison is hell. Think about the "life" of Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt), another former Panther, jailed for a quarter of a century for a crime the state knows he did not commit. While some call upon Pennsylvania governor Ridge to convert Jamal's sentence to life without parole, we demand the freedom of both these innocent men.

The ILD also worked in defense of the class as a whole. In 1926, about 16,000 textile workers hit the bricks in Passaic, New Jersey. Their strike was eventually defeated, but it drew sharp lessons on the role of the state and demonstrated for Cannon the absolute necessity for a permanent, organized and always ready non-partisan labor defense organization. Cannon wrote in the Labor Defender:

"Our I.L.D. is on the job at Passaic. Not a single striker went into court without our lawyer to defend him. There was not a single conviction that was not appealed. Nobody had to remain in jail more than a few days for lack of bail.... A great wave of protest spread thru the labor movement and even the most conservative labor leaders were compelled to give expression to it."

In 1928, the Trotskyist Left Opposition (including Cannon) was expelled from the Communist Party. The ILD remained under the control of the Communist Party and thus became subject to the zigzags of Stalinist policies throughout the 1930s, including the perversion of the united front from a tactic for class unity into an instrument for class collaboration and counterrevolution.

In 1929, Stalin declared the "Third Period," an ultraleft shift, the main tactic of which was to smash the Social Democratic and other leftist parties by creating what the Stalinists called "united fronts from below." The Comintern charged the reformists with "social fascism"; the real fascists were to be dealt with secondarily. In Germany, this policy contributed to Adolph Hitler's seizure of power— there was no united fight against fascism by the workers in the mass Communist and Social Democratic parties. This policy had an effect on the U.S. party and its defense work.

Legal Lynching in the American South

One result of the stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing Depression was that 200,000people made the rails their home as they moved from place to place looking for work. On 25 March 1931, nine black youths, ranging in age from 13 to 20, were riding the Memphis to Chattanooga freight train. Two young white women, fearful of being jailed for hoboing when the train was stopped after reports that there had been a fight with some white boys, accused the blacks of rape. Among the nine were Olen Montgomery—blind in one eye and with 10 percent vision in the other—headed for Memphis hoping to earn enough money to buy a pair of glasses; Willie Roberson, debilitated by years-long untreated syphilis and gonorrhea—which is important if you're going to be talking about a rape case; and Eugene Williams and Roy Wright, both 13 years old.

The group were nearly lynched on the spot. The trial began in Scottsboro, Alabama on April 6. Four days later, despite medical evidence that no rape had occurred—not to mention gross violations of due process—eight were sentenced to death and one of the 13-year-olds to life in prison. The Communist Party issued a statement condemning the trial as a "legal" lynching. That night, the campaign to free the Scottsboro Boys began.

Freedom was a long time coming. A series of trials and appeals all went badly for the defendants. In 1933, one of the alleged victims, Ruby Bates, recanted her testimony, but it wasn't until 1937 that four of the defendants were freed. Three more were paroled in the 1940s, and in 1948 Haywood Patterson escaped from Angola prison to Michigan, where the governor refused to extradite him. The last, Andy Wright, who had had his 1944 parole revoked, was finally released in 1950. The nine had spent 104 years in jail for a "crime" that never happened.

The ILD made the word "Scottsboro" synonymous, nationally and internationally, with Southern racism, repression and injustice. Their campaign was responsible for saving the Scottsboro Boys from the electric chair. As Haywood Patterson's father wrote in a letter to his son, "You will burn sure if you don't let them preachers alone and trust in the International Labor Defense to handle the case."

The CP's publicity was massive and moving. They organized demonstrations in Harlem and across the country, appealing to the masses to put no confidence in the capitalist courts and to see the struggle for the freedom of these youths as part of the larger class struggle. Young Communists in Dresden, Germany marched on the American consulate, and, when officials refused to accept their petition, hurled bottles through windows. Inside each was the note: "Down with American murder and Imperialism. For the brotherhood of black and white young proletarians. An end to the bloody lynching of our Negro co-workers."

In the South, the defense effort faced not only the racist system but the homegrown fascists of the Ku Klux Klan as well, which launched a campaign under the slogan "The Klan Rides Again to Stamp Out Communism."

The ILD's success in rallying the masses to the defense of the Scottsboro Boys happened despite their sectarian "Third Period" tactics. The ILD denounced the NAACP, the ACLU and most of the trade-union movement as "social fascists" and threw the "Trotskyite" likes of Jim Cannon out of Scottsboro defense meetings. But fascism was on the rise in Europe, and, seeking now to make as many allies as he could, in 1935 Stalin' declared the "Third Period" at an end. A Comintern resolution urged the Communist parties to form "popular fronts" with any and all for progressive ends. In the U.S. this meant supporting Roosevelt and abandoning the struggle to link the defense of black people with the fight against the capitalist system. You can imagine the surprise of the NAACP, who were now greeted warmly by the ILD as "comrades"! This comradeship did not extend to the Trotskyists. The Scottsboro Defense Committee was formed, and a lot of the life went out of the movement as the case dragged on.

Cannon and his party, the Communist League of America, supported the efforts of the ILD to free the Scottsboro Boys. The Trotskyists insisted on the importance of an integrated movement to fight in their defense. Cannon pointed out that it was wrong to view the Scottsboro case solely as a "Negro issue" and agitated in the pages of the Militant for the organization of white workers around the case.
When Clarence Darrow refused to work on the case unless the ILD withdrew because he didn't like its agitation methods, Cannon wrote:

"The ILD was absolutely right in rejecting the presumptuous demands of Darrow and Hays, and the Scottsboro prisoners showed wisdom in supporting the stand of their defense organization. Any other course would have signified an end to the fight to organize the protest of the masses against the legal lynching; and with that would have ended any real hope to save the boys and restore their freedom."

Darrow's big argument was: "You can't mix politics with a law case." Cannon replied:

"That is a reactionary lie. It is father to the poisonous doctrine that a labor case is a purely legal relation between the lawyer and client and the court.... It was the influence of this idea over the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee which paralyzed the protest mass movement at every step and thereby contributed to the final tragic outcome. Not to the courts alone, and not primarily there, but to the masses must the appeal of the persecuted of class and race be taken. There is the power and there is the justice."

Communists on Trial
During the time that the Scottsboro Boys were languishing in their Southern jails, World War II began in Europe. The American workers had gone through the experience of one of the biggest union organizing drives in the history of the country, resulting in the formation of the CIO, and many of the new industrial unions had won significant victories. Communists, including the Trotskyists, Jim Cannon and the Socialist Workers Party, had participated in and led many of these struggles. War is great for capitalist economies—the destruction creates constant demand, and if you win, you get new markets to exploit. But to go to war, you have to regiment the population at home, and that begins with the suspension of civil liberties.

On the eve of America's entry into World War II, Congress passed the Smith Act, requiring the fingerprinting and registering of all aliens residing in the United States and making it a crime to advocate or teach the "violent overthrow of the United States government" or to belong to a group advocating or teaching it.

For public consumption, this act was billed as an antifascist measure, but the Socialist Workers Party (successor to the Communist League of America) and Minneapolis Teamsters were the first victims of the Smith Act prosecutions. Why did the head of the Teamsters Union, Daniel J. Tobin, the U.S. attorney general, Francis Biddle, and the president of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt, conspire to take away the First Amendment rights of a small Trotskyist party, a party with maybe a couple thousand members and influence in one local of one union?

Part of the answer is that the SWP was effective. The party had led some hard class struggle; it was their comrades who had provided the leadership for the Minneapolis strike of 1934 which led to the formation of Teamsters Local 544. Another part of the answer is politics: the SWP was forthright in its opposition to the coming war. This was a calculated government attack designed to cripple the SWP where it had the most influence in the proletariat as America girded for imperialist war.

In the courtroom, the SWP's goal was to put the capitalist system on trial, a tradition we carry forward in our own cases. On the stand, Cannon pedagogically explained the positions of the SWP on the questions of the day and Marxism in general. But the Minneapolis defendants went to jail for 16 months—sentenced on the same day that Congress voted to enter the war. The ruling class hoped that the party would be leaderless and pass from the stage. But at that time the SWP was still a revolutionary party with a revolutionary program and a collective leadership—so that hope was, in the main, dashed.

A number of CIO unions issued statements in defense of the Minneapolis defendants, as did numerous black organizations. The American Communist Party, however, issued the following statement: "The Communist Party has always exposed, fought against and today joins the fight to exterminate the Trotskyite fifth column from the life of our nation." In line with their support for Roosevelt and the war, the CP aided the government in the Smith Act prosecution of the SWP and aided the FBI in their persecution of the Trotskyists in the trade unions. The CP's disgusting collaboration did not prevent them from being prosecuted under the very same Smith Act, beginning in 1948. The Trotskyists, of course, defended the CP unequivocally against the government prosecution while criticizing the CP's Stalinist politics.

Years later the attorney general, Francis Biddle, apologized for prosecuting the Trotskyists. The bourgeoisie sometimes apologizes when its crisis is safely over. Fifty years after the end of World War II, the U.S. government "apologized" for the wartime roundup and internment of Japanese Americans, offering a token compensation to those whose homes were seized and livelihoods ruined. They say whatever outrageous trampling of civil liberties occurred was an "excess" or "wrong" and of course it will "never happen again." But the Reagan government drew up plans to intern Arab Americans in concentration camps in Louisiana after the bombing of Libya. Those camps are ready and waiting for the next time the bourgeoisie feels its rule is substantially threatened.

Class-Struggle Defense Work

The Partisan Defense Committee was initiated in 1974 by the Spartacist League with the goal of re-establishing in the workers movement united-front, non-sectarian defense principles in the tradition of Cannon's ILD.

This was not anticipated to be, nor has it been, an easy task. Unlike the ILD, which inherited the rich and principled defense traditions of the IWW and the personal authority of mass leaders like Cannon and Haywood, we were the immediate inheritors of a tradition of Stalinist perversion of defense work. In addition, the ILD was founded as a transitional organization, seeking to organize the masses for class-struggle defense work under the leadership of the party. By its second conference, the ILD had 20,000 individual members, a collective, affiliated membership of 75,000, and 156 branches across the country. The PDC attempts to conduct its work in a way that will make the transformation to such an organization possible.

The PDC program of raising money for monthly stipends for class-war prisoners is an example of an ILD practice to which we adhere. We currently send stipends to 17 prisoners, including Jamal, Geronimo ji Jaga and other former supporters of the Black Panther Party, victims of the FBI's murderous COINTELPRO frame-ups; Jerry Dale Lowe, a miner condemned to eleven years in prison for defending his picket line; and members of the MOVE organization locked up because they survived the racist cop assaults on their homes and murder of their family. We also follow the ILD's policy of strict accounting of finances and have modeled our journal, Class-Struggle Defense Notes, on the ILD's Labor Defender.

We take to heart Cannon's point:

"The problem of organization is a very significant one for labor defense as a school for the class struggle. We must not get the idea that we are merely 'defense workers' collecting money for lawyers. That is only a part of what we are doing. We are organizing workers on issues which are directly related to the class struggle. The workers who take part in the work of the ILD are drawn, step by step into the main stream of the class struggle. The workers participating begin to learn the ABC of the labor struggle."
Class-struggle defense is a broad category. We are a small organization and must pick and choose our cases carefully, with an eye to their exemplary nature. The case of Mario Munoz a Chilean miners' leader condemned to death in 1976 by the Argentine military junta, is a good example. This was the PDC's first major defense effort. Co-sponsored with the Committee to Defend Workers and Sailor Prisoners in Chile, the international campaign of protest by unions and civil libertarians won asylum for Munoz and his family in France.

Some of our work has been in defense of the revolutionary party. The Spartacist League takes its legality— the right to exist and organize—very seriously, and has been quick to challenge every libel and legal attack. The party successfully challenged the FBI's slanderous description of the SL as "terrorists" who covertly advocate the violent’ Overthrow of the government. A 1984 settlement forced them to describe the SL as a "Marxist political organization."

The PDC takes up not only the cases but the causes of the whole of the working people. We have initiated labor/black mobilizations against the Klan from San Francisco to Atlanta to Philadelphia to Springfield, Illinois, and mobilized sections of the integrated labor movement to join these efforts to stop the fascists from spewing their race hate.

In 1989, we broadened our thinking about how the PDC could champion causes of the international proletariat and offered to organize an international brigade to Afghanistan to fight alongside the forces of the left-nationalist Kabul regime against the imperialist-backed, anti-woman Islamic fundamentalists on the occasion of the withdrawal of Soviet troops. When our offer of a brigade was declined, we launched a successful campaign to raise money for the victims of the mullah-led assault on Jalalabad. To reflect this, we expanded the definition of the PDC to one of a legal and social defense organization. To carry out this campaign, it was necessary to expand the PDC internationally. Sections of the International Communist League initiated fraternal organizations in Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan.

Currently we focus our efforts on Mumia Abu-Jamal and the fight to abolish the racist death penalty. Our actions in the Jamal case embody many of the principles of our defense work and the integral relationship of that work to the Marxist program of the Spartacist League, in this case particularly in regard to the fight for black liberation, which is key to the American revolution. This is a political death penalty case which illustrates the racism endemic in this country in its crudest, most vicious form and lays bare the essence of the state.

Throughout the very difficult period ahead, we will put all our faith in the mobilization of the working class and none in the capitalist courts. We embark now on exhausting every legal avenue open to Jamal, but we know the result hinges on the class struggle.

We hope you will join us in the fight to free Mumia Abu-Jamal, to abolish the racist death penalty and finish the Civil War. Forward to the third American revolution! •

*Writer's Corner- James T. Farrell- A Guest Commenatry Taken From Alan Wald's "The New York Intellectuals"

Click on title to link to a section of Alan Wald's "The Ne wYOrk Intellectuals" for portrait of author James T. Farrell.

*Writer's Corner- "Studs Lonigan's" James T. Farrell

Click On Title To Link To Wikipedia's Entry For Politics Of The Writer (Most Famously The "Studs Lonigan" Trilogy)And Left-Wing Political Activist. More, Much More Will Appear On This Writer At A Later Time, Including His Political Disputes With Various American Followers Of Leon Trotsky And His Contributions To The Socialist Workers Party's Political Defense Work(Especially, The Defense Of Leon Trotsky, During The Heart Of The Moscow Trials- When It Counted).

*The Roots Of The Roots of The Roots- Deep Into Musical Americana

Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of Jimmie Rodgers performing "Waiting For A Train".

DVD Review

Times Ain’t What They Used To Be: Early American Rural&Popular Music From Rare Original Film Masters (1928-1935), various artists, Shanachie Entertainment, 2000.

Okay, I will admit that I have gone off the deep-end, at least a little, in my seemingly endless search for the roots of the American musical songbook. I have gone down the musical road to Cajun country, I have gone to the hills of Appalachia and the Piedmont of North Carolina, and I have catalogued cowboy songs, railroad songs, every kind of blues, and even the some selections from Tin Pan Alley. But reviewing the present DVD seems on the outer edge even to me.

The producers of this series of film vignettes from the 1920s and 1930s have apparently gone deep into the vaults to get down, way down, into the depths of musical Americana. Tops here are a couple of yodeling Jimmie Rodgers tunes, Jules Allen doing up “Home On The Range”, The Duke Davis Band playing (accompanied by a huge banjo) “Ida” and the Fiddler’s Convention playing “Turkey In The Straw”. Did I say Americana? Yes, indeed. Also included are anonymous clips of square dancers, singing cowboys (real and fake), banjo strumming black men and a number of other things that practically defy categorization.


"T Is For Texas"


T for texas, T for Tennessee
T for texas, T for Tennessee
T for Thelma, the gal made a wreck out of me

If you don't want me mama, you sure don't have to stall
If you don't want me mama, you sure don't have to stall
I can get more women, than a passenger train can haul

I'm gonna buy me a pistol, just as long as I'm tall
I'm gonna buy me a pistol, just as long as I'm tall
I'm gonna shoot poor Thelma, just to see her jump and fall

And if that's your mama, you'd better tie her to your side
If that's your mama, better tie her to your side
Cause if she flags my train, I'm sure gonna let her ride

I'm gonna buy me a shotgun, with a great long shiny barrel
I'm gonna buy me a shotgun, with a great long shiny barrel
I'm gonna shoot that rounder, that stole away my gal

I'd rather drink muddy water, and sleep in a hollow log
I'd rather drink muddy water, and sleep in a hollow log
Than to be in atlanta treated like a dirty hog

Well it's T for texas, T for Tennessee
T for texas, T for Tennessee
T for Thelma, the gal who made a wreck out of me

*A Word- The Health Care Debate-Let’s Get Real-Free, Quality Health Care For All!

Click on title to link to my blog entry of August 12, 2009 concerning the use of worker defense guards to insure free expression at town hall meetings on the health care question debate.

Commentary

Someone recently pointed out to me that, with the exception of a peripheral entry in this space commenting on someone else’s discussion (see link) on the question of worker defense guards in order to defend the right of free expression at the various healthcare debate arenas this summer threatened by right wing yahoos, I have not thrown myself into this little debate. That assumption is not quite true. I have spent most of my political career involved in the healthcare fight.

Maybe, to be sure, not in the narrow way posed in the specifics proposals put forth by numerous bourgeois politicians today but, if my adherence to the Marxist worldview is defined by anything, it is that struggle that Trotsky mentioned long ago about the tasks that Marxists had set for themselves concerning the three great tragedies of life- hunger, sex and death. We, as Marxists, have focused in on that first struggle but if one thinks about it solving that hunger problem will make the mysteries of the other easier to cope with. It is that more profound sense in which I have been knee-deep in the struggle for health care.

But that rather begs the question of today’s healthcare controversy. Where do leftist militants stand, as oppositionists to the norms of bourgeois, on this great swirling debate? Well, in short, as the title of this entry states-we stand for free, quality health care for all. For everyone. That, my friends, would seem to me to be almost a no-brainer. Society, as a collective enterprise, if it has anything going for it at all SHOULD want to assure that everyone is as healthy as the latest medical discoveries and procedures will permit.

I have to admit though that, after following this debate over the summer, there this is not actually the case. Something, although I should have been less surprised about it, is seriously wrong with assuming that a vast number of people stand for the proposition that their fellows should not be left in the winds to provide for their own medical care. That there are racial and class overtones to the debate is a given. However, the most startling anecdotal evidence of this phenomena was an interview I was reading about from a mass media publication where an unemployed, uninsured woman with no evident prospects of getting any insurance soon and who has a pre-existing health problem was railing against the public insurance option in the Obama that would seem to fit her situation perfectly. Why? Because the notion of a public program spells one thing in her mind. As she made clear, some medical assistance to minorities (that's was code for blacks in the context of her argument). So much for the notion post-racial society we have ‘entered’ into in the Obamiad down at the base of society.

Are we leftists, however, indifferent to the various proposals being put forth today, none of which even comes close to our very traditional and longstanding solution of free health care on demand? No. But let me pose a possible future scenario if we had a workers’ party oppositionist member in Congress. We would propose legislation to that effect and the funding for it and would fight, just as the various proponents today are fighting for and against the present proposals, around that free health care program in order to get the legislation enacted. Depending on the relationship of forces, the language of the legislation and the political climate we would have different types of responses to other kinds of legislation on the order of the types proposed today. From what I have read of the current proposals, as they get whittled down in the bourgeois legislative process, I think we would vote no straight up on the all the current plans.

That brings up a final point. We are certainly very interested in social legislation, that’s our whole reason for existence at some level. However, as noted above, our relationship to existing and proposed legislation by bourgeois forces is basically negative. Negative in the sense that we fight around our own program yet will defend any efforts to erode the social legislation in place. For example, on Social Security, with all its flaws we would fight efforts, and have fought against efforts in the past, to cut benefits and other attempts to destroy the public retirement system. In that sense, to come full circle, my entry on the question of worker defense guards mentioned in the first paragraph is in line with our thinking on this matter. But just to be on the safe side if YOU seriously want you to tackle the health care question then the beginning of wisdom is not to bandage the current system but to build a workers party that fights for a workers government.

***Artist's Corner- Andre Breton's Surrealist Manifesto Of 1924

Click On Title To Link To Wikipedia's Entry For Andre Breton's Surrealist Manifesto Of 1924. Additional Material About This Artist, Writer And Political Activist Can Be Found By Clicking On That Entry. More about Breton's life and work will be presented in this space in the future, especially as one would expect from this site, his relationship with the Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrealist_Manifesto

***From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky-Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art: Andre Breton and Leon Trotsky (1938)

Click On Title To Link To Wikipedia's Entry For Andre Breton.

Guest Commentary

Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art: Andre Breton and Leon Trotsky (1938)

We can say without exaggeration that never before has civilization been menaced so seriously as today. The Vandals, with instruments which were barbarous, and so comparatively ineffective, blotted out the culture of antiquity in one corner of Europe. But today we see world civilization, united in its historic destiny, reeling under the blows of reactionary forces armed with the entire arsenal of modern technology. We are by no means thinking only of the world war that draws near. Even in times of “peace,” the position of art and science has become absolutely intolerable.

Insofar as it originates with an individual, insofar as it brings into play subjective talents to create something which brings about an objective enriching of culture, any philosophical, sociological, scientific, or artistic discovery seems to be the fruit of a precious chance, that is to say, the manifestation, more or less spontaneous, of necessity. Such creations cannot be slighted, whether from the standpoint of general knowledge (which interprets the existing world), or of revolutionary knowledge (which, to change the world for the better, requires an exact analysis of the laws which govern its movement). Specifically, we cannot remain indifferent to the intellectual conditions under which creative activity take place, nor should we fail to pay all respect to those particular laws which govern intellectual creation.

In the contemporary world we must recognize the ever more widespread destruction of those conditions under which intellectual creation is possible. From this follows of necessity an increasingly manifest degradation not only of the work of art but also of the specifically “artistic” personality. The regime of Hitler, now that it has rid Germany of all those artists whose work expressed the slightest sympathy for liberty, however superficial, has reduced those who still consent to take up pen or brush to the statues of domestic servants of the regime, whose task it is to glorify it on order, according to the worst possible aesthetic conventions. If reports may be believed, it is the same in the Soviet Union, where Thermidorean reaction is now reaching its climax.

It goes without saying that we do not identify ourselves with the currently fashionable catchword: “Neither fascism nor communism!” a shibboleth which suits the temperament of the Philistine, conservative and frightened, clinging to the tattered remnants of the “democratic” past. True art, which is not content to play variations on ready-made models but rather insists on expressing the inner needs of man and mankind in its time--true art is unable not to be revolutionary, not to aspire to a complete and radical reconstruction of society. This it must do, were it only to deliver intellectual creation from the chains which bind it, and to allow all mankind to raise itself to those heights which only isolated geniuses have achieved in the past. We recognize that only the social revolution can sweep clear the path for a new culture. If, however, we reject all solidarity with the bureaucracy now in control of the Soviet Union, it is precisely because, in our eyes, it represents not communism but its most treacherous and dangerous enemy.

The totalitarian regime of the U.S.S.R., working through the so-called “cultural” organizations it controls in other countries, has spread over the entire world a deep twilight hostile to ever sort of spiritual value. A twilight of filth and blood in which, disguised as intellectuals and artists, those men steep themselves who have made servility a career, of lying for pay a custom, and of the palliation of crime a source of pleasure. The official art of Stalinism mirrors with a blatancy unexampled in history their efforts to put a good face on their mercenary profession.

The repugnance which this shameful negation of the principles of art inspires in the artistic world--a negation which even slave states have never dared carry so far--should give rise to an active, uncompromising condemnation. The opposition of writers and artists is one of the forces which can usefully contribute to the discrediting and overthrow of regimes which are destroying, along with the right of the proletariat to aspire to a better world, every sentiment of nobility and even human dignity.

The communist revolution is not afraid of art. It realizes that the role of the artist in a decadent capitalist society is determined by the conflict between the individual and various social forms which are hostile to him. This fact alone, insofar as he is conscious of it, makes the artist the natural ally of revolution. The process of sublimation, which here comes into play, and which psychoanalysis has analyzed, tries to restore the broken equilibrium between the integral “ego” and the outside elements it rejects. This restoration works to the advantage of the “ideal of self,” which marshals against the unbearable present reality all those powers of the interior world, of the “self,” which are common to all men and which are constantly flowering and developing. The need for emancipation felt by the individual spirit has only to follow its natural course to be led to mingle its stream with this primeval necessity: the need for the emancipation of man.

The conception of the writer’s function which the young Marx worked out is worth recalling. “The writer,” he declared, “naturally must take money in order to live and write, but he should not under any circumstances live and write in order to make money. The writer by no means looks at his work as a means. It is an end in itself and so little a means in the eyes of himself and of others that if necessary he sacrifices his existence to the existence of his work....The first condition of the freedom of the press is that it is not a business activity.” It is more than ever fitting to use this statement against those who would regiment intellectual activity in the direction of end foreign to itself, and prescribe, in the guise of so-called “reasons of State,” the themes of art. The free choice of these themes and the absence of all restrictions on the range of his explorations--these are possessions which the artist has a right to claim as inalienable. In the realm of artistic creation, the imagination must escape from all constraint and must, under no pretext, allow itself to be placed under bonds. To those who would urge us, whether for today or for tomorrow, to consent that art should submit to a discipline which we hold to be radically incompatible with its nature, we give a flat refusal, and we repeat our deliberate intention of standing by the formula: complete freedom for art.

We recognize, of course, that the revolutionary State has the right to defend itself against the counterattack of the bourgeoisie, even when this drapes itself in the flag of science or art. But there is an abyss between these enforced and temporary measures of revolutionary self-defense and the pretension to lay commands on intellectual creation. If, for the better development of the forces of material production, the revolution must build a socialist regime with centralized control, to develop intellectual creation an anarchist regime of individual liberty should from the first be established. No authority, no dictation, not the least trace of orders from above! Only on a base of friendly cooperation, without the constraint from the outside, will it be possible for scholars and artists to carry out their tasks, which will be more far-reaching than ever before in history.

It should be clear by now that in defending freedom of thought we have no intention of justifying political indifference, and that it is far from our wish to revive a so-called “pure” art which generally serves the extremely impure ends of reaction. No, our conception of the role of art is too high to refuse it an influence on the fate of society. We believe that the supreme task of art in our epoch is to take part actively and consciously in the preparation of the revolution. But the artist cannot serve the struggle for freedom unless he subjectively assimilates its social content, unless he feels in his very nerves its meaning and drama and freely seeks to give his own inner world incarnation in his art.

In the present period of the death agony of capitalism, democratic as well as fascist, the artist sees himself threatened with the loss of his right to live and continue working. He sees all avenues of communication choked with the debris of capitalist collapse. Only naturally, he turns to the Stalinist organizations, which hold out the possibility of escaping from his isolation. But if he is to avoid complete demoralization, he cannot remain there, because of the impossibility of delivering his own message and the degrading servility which these organizations exact from him in exchange for certain material advantages. He must understand that his place is elsewhere, not among those who betray the cause of the revolution and of mankind, but among those who with unshaken fidelity bear witness to this revolution, among those who, for this reason, are alone able to bring it to fruition, and along with it the ultimate free expression of all forms of human genius.

The aim of this appeal is to find a common ground on which may be reunited all revolutionary writers and artists, the better to serve the revolution by their art and to defend the liberty of that art itself against the usurpers of the revolution. We believe that aesthetic, philosophical, and political tendencies of the most varied sort can find here a common ground. Marxists can march here hand in hand with anarchists, provided both parties uncompromisingly reject the reactionary police-patrol spirit represented by Joseph Stalin and by his henchman, Garcia Oliver.

We know very well that thousands of isolated thinkers and artists are today scattered throughout the world, their voices drowned out by the loud choruses of well-disciplined liars. Hundreds of small local magazines are trying to gather youthful forces about them, seeking new paths and not subsidies. Every progressive tendency in art is destroyed by fascism as “degenerate.” Every free creation is called “fascist” by the Stalinists. Independent revolutionary art must now gather its forces for the struggle against reactionary persecution. It must proclaim aloud its right to exist. Such a union of forces is the aim of the International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art which we believe it is now necessary to form.

We by no means insist on every idea put forth in this manifesto, which we ourselves consider only a first step in the new direction. We urge every friend and defender of art, who cannot but realize the necessity for this appeal, to make himself heard at once. We address the same appeal to all those publications of the left-wing which are ready to participate in the creation of the International Federation and to consider its task and methods of action.
When a preliminary international contract has been established through the press and by correspondence, we will proceed to the organization of local and national congresses on a modest scale. the final step will be the assembling of a world congress which will officially mark the foundation of the International Federation.

Our aims:
The independence of art--for the revolution;
The revolution--for the complete liberation of art!

*On The Death Of The "Old Man"- James P. Cannon's Political Obituary For Leon Trotsky

Click on title to link to American Socialist Workers Party founder and Leon Trotsky co-thinker James P. Cannon's appreciation of the life of Trotsky at a memorial meeting held in New York City in 1940 immediately after the assassination of Trotsky by a Stalinist agent.

*In Honor Of Leon Trotsky-Leader Of The Red Army

Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky, founder and leader of the Russian Red Army, on the anniversary of his death.

*On The Anniversary Of His Death-Leon Trotsky On Marxism And Terrorism- The View From The Revolutionary Left

Click On Title To Link To 1938 Leon Trotsky Article "For Grynszpan" Mentioned Below.

This year marks the 69th anniversary of the Stalin-directed assassination of the great Bolshevik revolutionary, Leon Trotsky.

Book Review (of sorts)

Marxism &Terrorism, Leon Trotsky, Pathfinder Press, New York, 1974

I have gone on endlessly in this space, as is only natural for a space ultimately dedicated to the struggle for revolutionary change, about the Russian October Revolution of 1917 led by the Bolsheviks and that created in its wake the first workers state in world history that held out for any length of time. (We always, and rightly so, pay homage to the Paris Commune of 1871 as the first experiment of a workers government but that, to our sorrow, lasted only a couple of months.) Needless to say, anyone who stands on the political grounds of that revolution as this writer does is anxious to distill the lessons to be drawn from that experience, for better or worst. Moreover, it is not just the immediate lessons of the Russian case about the necessity of overthrowing of the old Czarist order, of its replacement provisional government and of the need for a combat working class vanguard party to carry out those tasks but the whole pre-history of struggle against other tendencies fighting for leadership in the broader revolutionary movement. In Russia, a mainly peasant society in the 19th century, this included a long term fight against the strategy of exemplary individual acts of terror as a catalyst in order to remove the moribund Czarist regime.

Needless to say, if one is to learn anything at all from our long international revolutionary history, modern revolutions do not just fall from the sky but are prepared, and necessarily need to be well-prepared, by the creation of a cadre that has assimilated the experiences, good and bad, of the whole prior revolutionary movement. In this the year of the 69th anniversary of the Stalinist assassination of the great Bolshevik revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky down in his Mexican exile there is no more fitting way to pay tribute to his place in the revolutionary pantheon than to look at a couple of aspects of his work. Here, in a short review of a few of his previously published articles on the subject, it is the question of the use of terror in order achieve to one’s political goals. In an accompanying commentary also posted on this date I will turn the tables 180 degrees and discuss some of Trotsky’s contributions to Marxist literary theory and the struggle for socialist culture, subjects he spend some time on as well.

Excepting only Lenin, no other name is so closely identified with the high expectations that derived from the October Revolution of 1917 as Leon Trotsky. In a certain sense today to speak of the Russian Revolution is to evoke the specter of Trotsky’s ghost as he was the last widely known original fighter on the last barricade, pen in hand, in defense of the initial goals of that experience. Moreover, as a military leader, organizer of insurrection , high Soviet official, political pamphleteer and literary critic he was well placed to discuss the relative merits of the mass working class organizational methods of changing the world and of comparing that strategy to one of isolated heroic actions on behalf of such changes.

Without delving deeply in his biography here Leon Trotsky, whatever else his accomplishments, was a convinced revolutionary from his youth and spent the next forty years or so of his life in dogged pursuit of those youthful aims. Before the Russian Revolutions of 1905 (in which he played a big role as President Of The Petrograd Soviet), the February 1917 Revolution (which started during a period when he was in exile in America) and the victory in October which he organized and led he had many years experience fighting those tendencies in the Russian and international socialist movement that saw isolated “propaganda of the deed” actions as a viable strategy for social change. Thus, in one man (and there were others, to be sure, but Trotsky is the outstanding representative), we have encapsulated the experience of the whole Russian revolutionary movement from the last quarter of the 19th century. Trotsky knew, first hand, from personal polemical combat with the Russian Narodniks (People’s Will and various other organizations) and their political heirs in the then emerging Social Revolutionary Party that individual terrorist actions while, perhaps, morally satisfying were politically self-defeating, at best.

The above paragraphs can thus serve as something of a preface to this tiny little booklet of Trotsky articles put out by Pathfinder Press, “Marxism & Terrorism”, about the Marxist attitude toward individual terror, or for that matter mass terror, as a means for achieving progressive social goals. I place special emphasis on those last few words of the last sentence because most of the talk about terror and terrorists today centers on various actions of Islamic and other religious fundamentalists and their reactionary agendas. Those actions are generally beyond the pale of what Marxists understand as the use of terror as a political strategy. The actions that are of concern to Marxists , as noted by Trotsky in an article (Vienna “Pravda”, his newspaper at the time I believe, March 27, 1909) about the Social Revolutionary Party in early 20th century Russia. That party, based on the peasantry, but which had a strong bend toward a policy of individual assassination of governmental officials, reflected a long-time historic tendency in the Russian revolutionary movement.

As Trotsky acidly notes, such actions are futile, as witnessed by the ease that the various constituted governments had in replacing these officials at will. Furthermore, what really happens is that the political/combat organizations based on such strategies, of necessity, draw in on themselves and are very vulnerable to police infiltration or cadre attrition. The history of the progressive social movements of the 20th century, if not at present, only confirm those points.

To finish up though, I want make a point clear here, as Trotsky does in his short article from 1938 entitled “ For Grynszpan” in which he speaks of the question of Marxist solidarity with heroic individual actions on behalf of the oppressed, misguided as they might be. The Grynszpan case revolved around the assassination of a Nazi official in Paris by a frustrated Jewish youth shortly before World War II exploded on the Europeon scene. Trotsky, while noting the futility of the action in the grand scheme of things, expressed his moral solidarity with Grynzspan’s actions. And that is exactly the point. We, as Marxists, fight politically against the tendency toward isolated individual acts- that “propaganda of the deed” strategy mentioned above.

However, we have no truck with those, unfortunately too many, so-called leftists who wash their hands of defending those who, mistakenly, fight the battles against the oppressors in a different way than through mass working class organizing. Here I wish to note the abandonment of the Weatherman in America in the 1970’s and later of the militants who were known as the “Ohio Seven” by the “armchair” leftists of those times. Internationally, that was similarly the fate of the German Bader-Meinhof Group and of the Italian Red Brigades, among others. Trotsky had it just about right, fight against the strategy of individual acts of terror but also show appropriate scorn to those Social Democratic and “Communist” political cowards who run for cover when the state put the heat on. See, I told you the Russian Revolution and Comrade Trotsky had plenty of lessons to offer that apply today. Let's get to it.

*Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits- Honor Russian Revolutionary Leon Trotsky

Click on the title to link to the Leon Trotsky Internet Archive's copy of his 1923 article, "The Tasks Of Communist Education"

This is a repost of an earlier entry used here to honor of the memory of this great communist internationalist revolutionary on the anniversary of his death.

Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.

*****

Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts
contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.


Markin comment:

The name Leon Trotsky hardly needs added comment from this writer. After Marx, Engels and Lenin, and in his case it is just slightly after, Trotsky is our heroic leader of the international communist movement. I would argue, and have in the past, that if one were looking for a model of what a human being would be like in our communist future Leon Trotsky, warts and all, is the closest approximation that the bourgeois age has produced. No bad, right? Thanks, Comrade Trotsky.

***Writer's Corner- James T. Farrell On Meeting Leon Trotsky

Click On Title To Link To Wikipedia's Entry For The Writer (Most Famously The "Studs Lonigan" Trilogy)And Left-Wing Political Activist. More, Much More Will Appear On This Writer At A Later Time, Including His Political Disputes With Various American Followers Of Leon Trotsky And His Contributions To The Socialist Workers Party's Political Defense Work(Especially, The Defense Of Leon Trotsky, During The Heart Of The Moscow Trials- When It Counted).

Guest Commentary

James T Farrell

A Memoir on Leon Trotsky

I met Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1937. He seemed different from what might have been expected. He gave the impression of extraordinary simplicity. Alice Ruhl – wife of Otto Ruhl, one time left wing Socialist member of the German Reichstag and biographer of Karl Marx – said of Trotsky that he had changed from his younger days: he had, she said, become more simple, more like Lenin. Many who knew him earlier said that he was cold. He did not seem so in Mexico. He was easy to talk to and one felt less distance between him and oneself than is sometimes the case when one meets a man prominent in political life. But this comparison is perhaps not a good one. Trotsky was then a defeated leader, and a man in exile. He was seeking to rebuild a political movement and was engaged in the most dramatic fight of his life. Accused of betraying the revolution he helped to lead and the society he did so much in helping to found, he was defending his revolutionary honor. He lived behind guarded walls, and followers and secretaries of his carried guns inside his home. He was preparing to answer the charges Stalin launched against him in the Moscow trials.

Elsewhere I have described the Coyoacan Hearings held by the Commission of Inquiry of which Dr. John Dewey was chairman. [1] I shall not repeat this here, but shall merely offer a few personal impressions and anecdotes about him.

One could not separate Trotsky the man from Trotsky the historical figure. When you saw him and spoke with him, you were aware that he was the man who organized the practical details of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, and also that he was the organizer of the Red Army. You were aware that you were speaking with one of the greatest revolutionaries in history. He himself had a deep sense of history and of his own historic role. The intense drama of his life was known to me. There he was in that home on Avenida Londres in Coyoacan, pitting his brain against an empire. It was because he was Trotsky that his simplicity was so striking when he was gray and living like a hunted man in Mexico. His followers spoke of him in worshipful tones. For them, he made life more important. He permitted them to believe that they, too, were entering history. They called him “the Old Man,” and they acted like disciples. Constantly, they would pose questions to ascertain what one thought of him, and when John Dewey remarked on Trotsky’s brilliance, they immediately began thinking and hoping that Trotsky would convert Dewey to Trotskyism.

There was an exactness about Trotsky. Even in English, his choice of words revealed this. He seemed to know how far he wanted to go with each person, and his choice of words conveyed or suggested this. There was not, however, much spontaneity in him – or, rather, his spontaneity was kept in check. He, himself, had given his life to an Idea. This Idea – the Revolution – and his personality were as though fused together. A brave man, he was always ready to make any sacrifice to the Idea, and he dealt with people in terms of their relationship to and their acceptance of the Idea. What use would they be to this Idea, this cause? He was working for and living for the cause.

Thus, while he was easy to talk. to, it yet remained that there was a distance between him and others. You did not come into contact with his full personality as you did with, say, John Dewey. This seemed most clear to me the last time I spoke with him. We sat by the long table on which he worked in the home of the painter, Diego Rivera, on Avenida Londres in Coyoacan. He asked me what I was going to do when I returned to America. “I’m going to write novels.” He said he knew that, but again asked me what I was going to do. The service to the cause was more important to him than your personality. Max Eastman, who knew him much better than I did, has often said that he was cold. This I believe is what Eastman means, this seeing individuals as servants to an aim and an idea rather than as personalities in their own right. And this was a trait in his character which marked him off as so different from John Dewey.

He was a witty, graceful, and gallant man. There was something deeply touching and inspiring in his relationship with his wife, Natalia. She was very small and elegant. One could see that she had once been a beautiful woman. The tragedies of her life, the loss of her children in particular, had saddened her. Hers was one of the saddest faces I have ever seen, and she is one of the bravest and noblest of women. Whenever you saw them together, you could not but sense how there was a current of tenderness between them. A gentleness and depth of feeling was apparent in the way he looked at her or touched her hand.

We went on a picnic with him after the ending of the Coyoacan Hearings. Waiting to leave and standing on the porch of the patio of the Rivera home, there was Trotsky bustling about, making sure that there was enough food for everyone, that there was beer for me, that nothing would be forgotten or overlooked. My wife said to me teasingly that Trotsky took an interest in his home and that if he could, why couldn’t I. He came up to me a moment later. I remarked: “L.D., you have ruined my life.”

I explained what I meant and told him what my wife had said.

“It is very simple,” he answered, speaking with a strong accent. “Once (pronouncing it like vunce) I had to feed five million men. It is a little more complicated than feeding five.” Often there was a point, a political reference, a moral in his wit.

We left for a nearby woods in two cars. My wife and I got into the back seat of a roadster. All was in readiness for our departure. Suddenly, Trotsky appeared at the side of the car and said: “Jim, I will (the w pronounced like a v) ride in the open car, and Hortense will ride in the closed car.”

There was gallantry here. For Trotsky to ride in an open car meant a possible risk to his life. Along with his gallantry, there was in his nature a deep respect for women. I have met many Europeans of the Left and of the Revolution, and I have read much of their lives and been told many anecdotes about them. Many of these men, without being quite aware of it, have given the best years of their lives to an effort to emancipate mankind. But with a good proportion of them, emancipation stops at the door of their own homes. Their wives are not completely included in this emancipation; they do all of the housework and serve their revolutionary husbands, sometimes slavishly. In one place in his recent biography The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921, Isaac Deutscher mentions how Trotsky, busy as he was, would in a very un-European fashion, help Natalia with the housework and the care of the children. Trotsky’s gallantry was, I believe, real, and it was based on a sense of the dignity of women and of respect for them.

At the picnic, Trotsky and Natalia went off to walk in the woods in opposite directions. This was undoubtedly a solace to him. He lived a guarded life of confinement with little freedom of movement. His secretaries constantly guarded him, with guns on holsters at their side. A contingent of Mexican police stood outside the Rivera home to protect him. He fretted and balked in this confinement, and he was fatalistic about the danger of his being assassinated. He believed that when Stalin wanted really and finally to have him murdered, Stalin would undoubtedly succeed. And as is known, this happened.

After taking the walk, he returned to the group. One of the Americans present was building a fire. He was an ex-follower of Trotsky’s who had left the Trotsky movement, but who had come to Coyoacan to help the work of the Dewey hearings. Trotsky watched him for a moment and became impatient. He didn’t like the way the American friend was going about making the fire. He took over and made his own fire, accompanying it with raillery that was friendly but also sharp. And there was political point to this. Trotsky was teasing a one-time follower for having broken ideologically with the Trotskyite Movement. Trotsky always liked to tease Americans, especially about so-called American efficiency, and he also teased his American ex-follower in this vein.

We ate and talked and sang. One of Trotsky’s police guards was a tall, young, and good looking Mexican cop. Trotsky liked and trusted him. This policeman sang El Rancho Grande, and everyone liked it so much that he was asked to sing it again. After Trotsky was murdered, I was told that this policeman had been bought by enemies of Trotsky’s.

I had several talks with him. Having been an American in the twenties and having read my H.L. Mencken, I sometimes took a relish in telling stories which recounted stupidity. I told a story of this kind. The subject was a famous European writer with whom Trotsky had had controversies. This writer is not stupid, but he appeared this way because he had been evading questions concerning Stalin that would have pinned him down. Trotsky became quickly impatient and didn’t want to hear the end of the story. It bored him. He interrupted and said: “X should learn how to write better novels.”

He asked questions about American literature and spoke of having read Babbitt, but his admiration for Lewis’ book was qualified. The character of Babbitt seemed unintelligent to him. I spoke of Dreiser whom I praised as a great writer but whose philosophical and general ideas I thought sometimes banal. Trotsky asked how could a man be a great writer if his ideas were stupid. “What American writers need,” he said, “is a new perspective.”

He meant a Marxian perspective. He believed that America would one , day have a great Marxist renaissance. Actually he hadn’t read enough of American literature to know whether American writers did or did not need a new perspective. His statement was a consequence of the confidence of faith. Marxism was a science to him, and it permitted him to predict in faith.

Speaking of how Americans viewed him, I said that many saw him as a romantic figure, in fact as a romantic hero. He said that he knew this and disliked being so regarded. He wasn’t interested in my explanation of how it happened that he seemed to some Americans a romantic figure.

Just before the beginning of the first of the hearings of the Dewey Commission, Trotsky was standing on the porch outside his work room. The divorced wife of a famous American writer crashed the gate, and, inside the home, she went up to Trotsky. She told him that he didn’t know who she was and then identified herself by giving her former husband’s name.

“I am sure,” responded Trotsky, “that if I did know, I should be most impressed.”

Another time, I asked him if he thought that Stalin and Hitler would get together. This was in 1937, and some of us who had engaged in the bitter fight against the Moscow trials had come to believe that a Nazi-Soviet alliance was going to be made. Trotsky answered by remarking that if this happened, it would be a great catastrophe. Around that time, he predicted the Stalin-Hitler pact.

My publisher, James Henle, an old newspaper man, had worked on the New York World in 1917. He had been sent to interview Trotsky, then in New York, and they had met in a bakery on the East Side. Trotsky had struck Henle as an intelligent man. He had predicted the Russian Revolution. But as Henle tells the story, he heard endless predictions in those days. A month later, the February Revolution in Russia happened. Trotsky did not remember this interview.

The last time I saw him, I went to his home on the day before I left Mexico. When I arrived he was talking with Otto Ruhl in his office. Ruhl had stood with Karl Liebnecht during the first World War. When the Bolshevik Revolution succeeded, Ruhl had characterized it as a “pacifist putsch.” He and Trotsky had almost never agreed, it seemed. There they were, two old revolutionaries in exile in Mexico. They still disagreed, and speaking in German, their voices rose. I heard Trotsky talking loudly, in fact shouting. I couldn’t understand a word of German, but I could guess what they were arguing about. Ruhl was still, in Mexico, determined to press his disagreement, with the Bolsheviks of 1917. I was told that soon after this Otto Ruhl and Trotsky stopped seeing each other.

The lunch was simple, but less so than normal. Trotsky was a most gracious host. There was not much talk and then we said good-by. He went to take an afternoon siesta.

His was one of the fastest working minds I have ever encountered. And just to see and talk to him, one had a sense of a great will. His body, his habit were bent to that will. in many ways he was Spartan. There were times in fact during his days of power when he spoke like a man of a modern Sparta, and Isaac Deutscher uses the word Spartan in reference to Trotsky at one point in his biography.

This memoir is passing and random. It does not treat of Trotsky’s theories and ideas. This I shall try to discuss on another occasion. Here, I merely wished to set down passing impressions of Trotsky. His personality was not only strong but highly attractive. He was very gracious. There was a mocking look in his bright eyes, and I had the feeling that he looked out on life with a kind of mockery and irrepressible sense of irony. He had committed himself to an idea, and he had risen to heights of power that few men know. And then, there he was, back in exile. Most of his life was spent in exile. In Siberia, Turkey, England, France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Norway, he had been an exile – writing, talking, urging, serving a burning idea with total conviction.

He was strikingly different from many exiles. Revolutionary exiles frequently decay and disintegrate. Trotsky didn’t. No man could have known a defeat more total than he. It was amazing how little it damaged him. Writing, fighting the same battle, he didn’t seem like an embittered or unhappy man. I thought of this, and how different are the stories of Napoleon’s exile. Trotsky was a man who might be compared to Napoleon. But in exile, Napoleon bore the strains and the isolation less well than Trotsky. With Napoleon, power was all. To Trotsky, power was the means of making his ideas possible. It was the means whereby man achieved his historic destiny. Power was the arm of a faith. That faith served him in exile.


I was in the hospital, weak and worn, following an operation for a carbuncle. It was night. A radio was on at the head of my bed. I was not listening to it. There was a news broadcast. About half of the words penetrated my mind. Leon Trotsky ... assassin ... not expected to live.

I was shocked. I couldn’t sleep and was given a pill. The next morning, I woke up with a feeling of guilt. I had had some dream. Then the news vendor came, and there was the story of the murder. His life was like a Greek tragedy. He was a great hero and a great martyr. But the tragic character of Trotsky’s death only focuses on the great and terrible tragedy of our century. Such burning conviction, such brilliance, such Spartan sacrifice as his – and it went to create a state that evolved into the most terrible tyranny in history. Today, the state which he helped to create stands threatening the freedom of all of us. The values we cherish, the hopes of man for a more decent world, these are now threatened by that powerful state. Trotsky and Lenin were among the great men of this century. But has it ever been that the work, the life of two great men has ended in such brutal and inhuman tyranny? The ironies of their stories are written in blood and suffering. It is now almost thirty-seven years since they were the leaders of the October Revolution. And as we can look back, it, seems from this particular vantage point that we could be no worse off if their work and their achievement had never been. The horrors of Tsardom are as nothing to those which succeeded it.

Trotsky walked in his garden. The sun was shining. The afternoon was at the point of beginning to wane. He went into his work room and sat down with the manuscript his assassin had brought him. The Alpine stock was driven into his brain. His blood fell on a page of the manuscript of his biography of Stalin. The last words he had written were “the idea.” His own blood spilled on that page.



Footnotes
[1] John Dewey in Mexico, in my book, Reflections At Fifty and Other Essays, New York 1954.

*In Memory Of Leon Trotsky On The 69th Anniversary Of His Death- A Look At His Views Of Literature And Culture

Click On Title To Link To Leon Trotsky Archive 1938 Article "Art And Politics In Our Epoch". The Points Made There By Trotsky Are Still Relevant Today.


The Follwing Is A Repost Of A Book Review Of Leon Trotsky's Views On Literature And Art In Memory Of The 69th Anniversary Of His Death.

BOOK REVIEW

Leon Trotsky on Literature and Art, Leon Trotsky, ed. By Paul N. Siegel, Pathfinder Press, Inc. New York, 1970

Some of the points made here are taken from a review of Trotsky’s other compilation on this subject "Literature and Revolution". The first part of the book under review book draws from that work in discussing the question of ‘proletarian culture’ and its probabilities

Trotsky reputedly once wrote that of the three great tragedies of life- hunger, sex and death- revolutionary Marxism, which was the driving force behind his life and work, mainly concerned itself with the struggle against hunger. That observation contains an essential truth about the central thrust of the Marxist tradition. However, as Trotsky demonstrates here, Marxist methodology cannot and should not be reduced to an analysis of and prescription for that single struggle. Here Trotsky takes on an aspect of the struggle for mass cultural development.

In a healthy post-capitalist society mass cultural development would be greatly expanded and encouraged. If the task of socialism were merely to vastly expand economic equality, in a sense, it would be a relativity simple task for a healthy socialist society in concert with other like-minded societies to provide general economic equality with a little tweaking after vanquishing the capitalism mode of production. What Marxism aimed for, and Trotsky defends here, is a prospect that with the end of class society and economic and social injustice the capacity of individual human beings to reach new heights of intellectual and creative development would flourish.

The most important and lasting polemic that Trotsky raised here, however, was the fight against the proponents of ‘proletarian culture’ inside the Russian Communist Party. The argument put forth by this trend maintained that since the Soviet Union was a workers state those who wrote about working class themes or were workers themselves should in the interest of cultural development be given special status and encouragement (read: a monopoly on the literary front). Trotsky makes short shrift of this argument by noting that, in theory at least as its turned out, the proletarian state was only a transitional state and therefore no lasting ‘proletarian culture’ would have time to develop. Although history did not turn out to prove Trotsky correct the polemic is still relevant to any theory of mass cultural development.

The second half of the book is made up of commentaries, using the Marxist method, to discuss various cultural and political figures. These include an incisive essay on Tolstoy, acerbic comment on Winston Churchill, fair eulogies of the Russian poets Essessin and Mayakovsky and a polemical article reviewing Andre Malraux's fictional work on the Chinese revolution of the 1920's. Not a bad combination to show the power of Trotsky’s thought and the range of his interests. Also, to some extend, this is a study on his progression as a writer from the somewhat florid early Tolstoy pieces to the solid polemic of the Malraux article. Read on.

*A Tom Waits Encore- "Used Songs, 1973-1980"

Click On To Title To Link To YouTube's Film Clip Of Tom Waits Doing "Jersey Girl". Wow. Along with Greg Brown's cover of "Vincent White Lightning 52" (about a local motorcycle bandit, his bike and his Red Molly)this song are the leading candidates for the great, modern working poor/ lumpen proletarian love songs. In my own case, it was a near thing that I might have fallen into that life. It certainly had its attractions. Yes, it was near thing, indeed.

CD Review

Tom Waits Used Songs, Tom Waits, Rhino Records,2001

The name Tom Waits is no stranger to this space, particularly as I have recently reviewed many of his CDs. During that time I have reviewed both the early, more jazzy work that reflected his “night club act” approach and his later gravelly, time-worn, time-tested efforts that I always appreciate in any male singer (note, Bob Dylan, Dave Van Ronk, Howlin’ Wolf, early Rod Stewart, etc.). Here, as a Waits encore, is something of a “greatest hits” CD from the early days.

There are many classic here. I note “Looking For The Heart Of Saturday Night”, “I Never Talk To Strangers” (nice repartee with female companion), the sardonic “Step Right Up” (with possibly every advertising cliché that every existed) and the whimsical, although heartfelt, tribute to those Edward Hopper folk of “Nighthawks At The Diner”, “Eggs And Sausage” (Tom Waits, whimsical?). However, my favorite is the homage to young love (and longings for love) “Jersey Girl”. (“I got not time for the corner boys..., I don’t want no whores from 8th Avenue…” are definitely lines that will get my attention.). Yes, that is the ticket.


Jersey Girl Lyrics

Got no time for the corner boys, down in the street makin all that noise,
Dont want no whores on eighth avenue, cause tonight Im gonna be with you.

Cause tonight Im gonna take that ride, across the river to the jersey side,
Take my baby to the carnival, and Ill take you on all the rides, sing sha la
La la la la sha la la la.

Down the shore everythings alright, you with your baby on a saturday night,
Dont you know that all my dreams come true, when Im walkin down the street
With you, sing sha la la la la la sha la la la.

You know she thrills me with all her charms, when Im wrapped up in my
Babys arms, my little angel gives me everything, I know someday that shell
Wear my ring.

So dont bother me cause I got no time, Im on my way to see that girl of
Mine, nothin else matters in this whole wide world, when youre in love with
A jersey girl, sing sha la la la la la la.

And I call your name, I cant sleep
at night, sha la la la la la

"(Looking For) The Heart of Saturday Night"

Well you gassed her up
Behind the wheel
With your arm around your sweet one
In your Oldsmobile
Barrelin' down the boulevard
You're looking for the heart of Saturday night

And you got paid on Friday
And your pockets are jinglin'
And you see the lights
You get all tinglin' cause you're cruisin' with a 6
And you're looking for the heart of Saturday night

Then you comb your hair
Shave your face
Tryin' to wipe out ev'ry trace
All the other days
In the week you know that this'll be the Saturday
You're reachin' your peak

Stoppin' on the red
You're goin' on the green
'Cause tonight'll be like nothin'
You've ever seen
And you're barrelin' down the boulevard
Lookin' for the heart of Saturday night

Tell me is the crack of the poolballs, neon buzzin?
Telephone's ringin'; it's your second cousin
Is it the barmaid that's smilin' from the corner of her eye?
Magic of the melancholy tear in your eye.

Makes it kind of quiver down in the core
'Cause you're dreamin' of them Saturdays that came before
And now you're stumblin'
You're stumblin' onto the heart of Saturday night

Well you gassed her up
And you're behind the wheel
With your arm around your sweet one
In your Oldsmobile
Barrellin' down the boulevard,
You're lookin' for the heart of Saturday night

Is the crack of the poolballs, neon buzzin?
Telephone's ringin'; it's your second cousin
And the barmaid is smilin' from the corner of her eye
Magic of the melancholy tear in your eye.

Makes it kind of special down in the core
And you're dreamin' of them Saturdays that came before
It's found you stumblin'
Stumblin' onto the heart of Saturday night
And you're stumblin'
Stumblin onto the heart of Saturday night

*Tom Waits-The Early Jazzy Years

Click On Title To Link To YouTube's Film Clip Of Tom Waits Doing "Tom Traubert's Blues".

CD Reviews

The Early Years, Volume One, Tom Waits,

The inner lives of the denizens of that late night diner in the famous painting by the American realist artist Edward Hopper, “Nighthawks” (1942). The scorching literary sketches of the rich and famous and the skid row bums provided by the late “Gonzo” journalist Doctor Hunter Thompson, accompanied by the renderings of the artist Ralph Steadman. The jingle-jangle high side lyrics of the legendary folk musician Bob Dylan of the “Blood On The Tracks” period. The reach into the far side of the part of the psyche exhibited by those down at the base of American society in an earlier period by the novelist Nelson Algren in “Walk On The Wild Side”. And that same reach later by the man of the “mean” Los Angeles streets, Charles Bukowski. Wrap them all up in a whiskey-soaked, cigarette-scarred, gravelly, rasping voice and you have the idiosyncratic musician Tom Waits. Placed in that same company as above? Yes, by all means. Not a bad place to be, right?

Although I have been listening to the music of one Tom Waits for decades, every since I heard Jerry Jeff Walker do a cover of his classic song of loneliness, longing and reaching for the elusive promise of Saturday night dreams in “Looking For The Heart Of Saturday Night”, I am not familiar with his biography. All I know is that aside from his own far-reaching musical endeavors, as expressed in numerous albums over the years, he has acted in some motion pictures, most notably as a skid row philosopher of sorts in the movie version of William Kennedy’s “Ironweed” (a natural, right?) and has provided the soundtrack music to many movies, most notably the Al Pacino-starring “Sea Of Love”. That Waits soundtrack version of the late 1950’s, early 1960’s classic teenage anthem to longing and love is just the right example of what Brother Waits means musically to this reviewer. Taking that simple song of teenage longing, Waits’ husky-voiced rendition reaches back and turns it into something almost primordial, something that goes back beyond time to our first understandings that we are ‘alone’ in the universe. Enough said.

But so much for all of that because what I really want to mention is the “Waits effect”. Every once in a while I ‘need’ to listen to words and sounds that express the dark, misbegotten side of the human experience. You know, sagas of Gun Street girls, guys talking “Spanish in the halls’, people lost out there on the edge of society and the like. Is there anyone today who can musically put it better? If you need to hear about hope, dope, the rope. Wine, women and song or no wine, no women or no song. About whiskey-caked barroom floors, floozies, boozies, flotsam, jetsam, stale motel rooms, cigarette-infested hotels, wrong gees, jokers, smokers and ten-cent croakers. Drifters, grifters, no good midnight sifters. Life on the fast lane, nowhere lane, some back street alley, perhaps, out in the valley. This, my friends is you address. Listen up. Professor Waits is at the lectern.

Good picks here are "I'm Your Late Night Evening Prostitute" and "When You Ain't Got Nobody". This compilation shows more of Tom's lounge act style and is a little more jazzy than some of his later work.

Tom Waits Lyrics

"Tom Waits I'm Your Late Night Evening Prostitute lyrics"

Well I got here at eight and I'll be here till two
I'll try my best to entertain you and
Please don't mind me if I get a bit crude
I'm your late night evening prostitute
So drink your martinis and stare at the moon
Don't mind me I'll continue to croon
Don't mind me if I get a bit loon
I'm your late night evening prostitute
And dance, have a good time
I'll continue to shine
Yes Dance, have a good time
Don't mind me if I slip upon a rhyme
Well I got here at eight and I'll be here till two
I'll try my best to entertain you and
Please don't mind me if I get a bit crude
I'm your late night evening prostitute
I'm your late night evening prostitute

*Still Looking For The Heart Of Saturday Night-Tom Waits: Under Review Over-reviewed

Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of Tom Waits performing "Hoist That Rag". For a notoriously non-political guy- Ouch!

DVD Review

Tom Waits: Under Review: 1983-2006, Sexy Intellectual Productions, 2007

Apparently, after viewing this musical film documentary about the mid-career changes in the work of master vocalist Tom Waits, not all such efforts are born equality. I, honestly, do not want to spend much time on this one. Not because of the “talking heads” that always populate these kinds of films, usually in music documentaries they are filled with good information. Rather, I was left with two distinct negative impressions, one that this was something of an academic exercise for the “talking heads” that well beyond the most rarified flights of fancy that can come out of that milieu. The second was that, strangely, Tom Waits for all of his musical virtuosity really is better served by exposure to his works than a discussion of the chronology of his various efforts over the past quarter century. Mercifully this thing was only an hour and a half. Otherwise I thought would have to call on one of the corner boys, Gun Street Girl or one of the Nighthawk diners to do their thing.




Hoist That Rag Lyrics-Tom Waits

Well I learned the trade
From Piggy Knowles and
Sing sing Tommy Shay Boys
god used me as hammer boys
To beat his weary drum today

Hoist that rag
Hoist that rag

The sun is up the world is flat
Damn good address for a rat
The smell of blood
The drone of files
You know what to do if
The baby cries

Hoist that rag
Hoist that rag

Well we stick our fingers in
The ground, heave and
Turn the world around
Smoke is blacking out the sun

At night I pray and clean my gun
The cracked bell ring as
The ghost bird sings and the gods
Go begging here
So just open fire
When you hit the shore
All is fair in love
And war

Hoist that rag
Hoist that rag
Hoist that rag
Hoist that rag

*Rain Dogs- The Late Work Of Tom Waits

Click On Title To Link To YouTube's Film Clip Of Tom Waits Doing "Rain Dogs"

CD Reviews

Rain Dogs, Tom Waits, Island Records, 1985

The inner lives of the denizens of that late night diner in the famous painting by the American realist artist Edward Hopper, “Nighthawks” (1942). The scorching literary sketches of the rich and famous and the skid row bums provided by the late “Gonzo” journalist Doctor Hunter Thompson, accompanied by the renderings of the artist Ralph Steadman. The jingle-jangle high side lyrics of the legendary folk musician Bob Dylan of the “Blood On The Tracks” period. The reach into the far side of the part of the psyche exhibited by those down at the base of American society in an earlier period by the novelist Nelson Algren in “Walk On The Wild Side”. And that same reach later by the man of the “mean” Los Angeles streets, Charles Bukowski. Wrap them all up in a whiskey-soaked, cigarette-scarred, gravelly, rasping voice and you have the idiosyncratic musician Tom Waits. Placed in that same company as above? Yes, by all means. Not a bad place to be, right?

Although I have been listening to the music of one Tom Waits for decades, every since I heard Jerry Jeff Walker do a cover of his classic song of loneliness, longing and reaching for the elusive promise of Saturday night dreams in “Looking For The Heart Of Saturday Night”, I am not familiar with his biography. All I know is that aside from his own far-reaching musical endeavors, as expressed in numerous albums over the years, he has acted in some motion pictures, most notably as a skid row philosopher of sorts in the movie version of William Kennedy’s “Ironweed” (a natural, right?) and has provided the soundtrack music to many movies, most notably the Al Pacino-starring “Sea Of Love”. That Waits soundtrack version of the late 1950’s, early 1960’s classic teenage anthem to longing and love is just the right example of what Brother Waits means musically to this reviewer. Taking that simple song of teenage longing, Waits’ husky-voiced rendition reaches back and turns it into something almost primordial, something that goes back beyond time to our first understandings that we are ‘alone’ in the universe. Enough said.

But so much for all of that because what I really want to mention is the “Waits effect”. Every once in a while I ‘need’ to listen to words and sounds that express the dark, misbegotten side of the human experience. You know, sagas of Gun Street girls, guys talking “Spanish in the halls’, people lost out there on the edge of society and the like. Is there anyone today who can musically put it better? If you need to hear about hope, dope, the rope. Wine, women and song or no wine, no women or no song. About whiskey-caked barroom floors, floozies, boozies, flotsam, jetsam, stale motel rooms, cigarette-infested hotels, wrong gees, jokers, smokers and ten-cent croakers. Drifters, grifters, no good midnight sifters. Life on the fast lane, nowhere lane, some back street alley, perhaps, out in the valley. This, my friends is you address. Listen up. Professor Waits is at the lectern.

This one is filled with great work. The evocative “Gun Street Girl”, the dark “Walking Spanish”, “Hang Down Your Head” and the title track “Rain Dogs” lead this parade.

"Gun Street Girl"

Falling James in the Tahoe mud
Stick around to tell us all the tail
He fell in love with a Gun Street Girl and
Now he's danced in the Birmingham jail.

Took a 100 dollars off a slaughterhouse Joe
Brought a bran' new michigan 20 gauge
Got all liquored up on that road house corn,
Blew a hole in the hood of a yellow corvette
Blew a hole in the hood of a yellow corvette.
Brought a second hand Nova from a Cuban Chinese
Dyed his hair in the bathroom of Texaco
With a pawnshop radio, quarter past 4
Well, he left Waukegan at the slammin' of the door
He left Waukegan at the slammin' of the door

Chorus:
I said John, John he's long gone
Gone to Indiana
Ain't never coming home
I said John, John he's long gone
Gone to Indiana, ain't never coming home.
Sitting in a sycamore in St. John's Wood
Soaking' day old bread in kerosene
He was blue as a robin's egg brown as a hog
Stayin' out of circulation till the dogs get tire
Stayin' out of circulation till the dogs get tired
Shadow fixed the toilet with an old trombone
He never got up in the morning on a Saturday
Sittin' by the Erie with a bull whipped dog
Tellin' everyone he saw
They went thatta way

Tellin' everyone he saw
They went thatta way.
Now the rain's like gravel on old tin roof
And the Burlinton Northern's pullin' out of the world
With a head full of bourbon and a dream in the straw.
And a Gun Street Girl was the cause of it all.
Riding in the shadow by the St. Joe Ridge
He heard the click clack tappin' of a blind man's cane
Pullin' into Baker on New Year's Eve
With one eye on the pistol the other on the door,
With one eye on the pistol the other on the door.
Miss Charlotte took her satchel down to King Row
And the smuggled in a bran' new pair of alligator shoes.
With her fireman's raincoat and her long yellow hair, well
They tied her to a tree with a skinny millionaire,
They tied her to a tree with a skinny millionaire.

Chorus
I said John, John he's long gone
Gone to Indiana
Ain't never coming home
I said John, John he's long gone
Gone to Indiana, ain't never coming home.
Bangin' on a table with an old tin cup
Sing I'll never kiss a Gun Street Girl again,
I'll never kiss a Gun Street Girl again.

Repeat chorus

Walking Spanish Lyrics

He's got himself a homemade special
You know his glass is full of sand
And it feels just like a jaybird the way it fits into his hand
He rolled a blade up in his trick towel
They slap their hands against the wall
You never trip, you never stumble
He's walking Spanish down the hall

Slip him a picture of our Jesus
Or give him a spoon to dig a hole
What all he done ain't no one's business
But he'll need blankets for the cold
They dim the lights over on Broadway
Even the king has bowed his head
And every face looks right up at Mason
Man he's walking Spanish down the hall

Litella's screeching for a blind pig
Punk Sanders carved it out of wood
He never sang when he got hoodwinked
They tried it all but he never would
Tomorrow morning there'll be laundry
But he'll be somewhere else to hear the call
Don't say goodbye, he's just leaving early
He's walking Spanish down the hall

All St. Barthelemew said
Was whispered into the ear of Blind Jack Dawes
All Baker told the machine was that he never broke the law
Go on and tip your hat up to the Pilate
Take off your watch, your rings and all
Even Jesus wanted just a little more time
When he was walking Spanish down the hall