Click on title to link to the pertinent documents of the Third Congress of the Communist International referred to the Joseph Seymour article below.
Markin comment: This Seymour article is extremely interesting one from a couple of points for those of us here in America who face point blank the question of the arduous task creating socialist propaganda, agitation and party-building. I will do a separate, more extensive commentary shortly. For now though a couple of points are important.
One is that informative distinction (and not just for historical purposes, although that is also helpful) Seymour makes between propaganda, agitation and party-building, one that I, personally, have not always sharply drawn. On that continuum I think that Seymour is right that are tasks today, and in the short term future, have to be directed toward creating cadre. To use his term- explain many complex ideas to the few. Secondly, the trend of American labor action have tended to be explosive and haphazard so that if one projected the creation of a workers party as having to go through some reformist stage first that might be a wrong way to look at it. In any case that task is of a propaganda sort today.
The other point, reading between the lines of the Seymour article at the last couple of paragraphs it is apparent that there is, or was, some confusion about the united front tactic within the International Communist League, or at least the Spartacist League. More later on the united front question, especially its relationship to party-building. I will confess that I am concerned that if we stress teaching complex ideas, whether I think that is the right road or not, to a few in this political environment that we may miss some opportunities.
Workers Vanguard No. 941
28 August 2009
The United Front Tactic: Its Use and Abuse
By Joseph Seymour
(Young Spartacus pages)
We print below a presentation by Spartacist League/U.S. Central Committee member Joseph Seymour to the 13th National Conference of the SL/U.S. held this summer.
The tactic of the united front, as it was originally developed and expounded at the Third Congress of the Communist International (Comintern) in June-July 1921, was intended for mass parties, in particular the nascent Communist Parties in Germany and France. It was aimed at winning over a section of the working-class base of mass reformist organizations led by the Social Democrats and, in France, the right-wing syndicalists. The united-front tactic was not considered applicable for relatively small Communist Parties, such as those in Britain and the United States.
Therefore, it’s important to understand that our use of the united front is an adaptation of the tactic as it was originally conceived and implemented. This adaptation necessarily involves many differences, some obvious, others not so obvious. Thus the characteristic form of the original united front was a military action: a strike, a mass demonstration against government policies (sometimes involving a one-day general strike), defensive actions against the fascists. In contrast, the characteristic form of our united-front activities is a pre-planned political protest. Moreover, often these protests are based on demands that cannot possibly be achieved by the small left-wing propaganda groups participating in them, for example, a campus-based protest against the U.S. occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Such activities are really a form of agitation, not a united-front action at all in the original sense of the term.
In this presentation I’m going to focus on the united-front tactic as it was originally developed and expounded by Lenin, Trotsky and the other leaders of the early Comintern. However, a useful approach in considering the applicability of the united front for a revolutionary Marxist propaganda group like ourselves was indicated six centuries earlier by the young English feudal warrior Henry Percy, otherwise known as Hotspur. As recounted in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part 1, Hotspur was discussing the united-front tactic with his ally, the old Welsh chieftain Owen Glendower. Glendower declaimed: “I can call spirits from the vasty deep.” To which Hotspur replied: “Why, so can I, or so can any man; but will they come when you do call for them?” If the spirits don’t come when we call them from the reformist swamp, we don’t have a united front.
Agitation and Propaganda
I think one source of confusion in our discussions on the united front has been terminological imprecision resulting in a lack of mutual understanding. That is, we use the same terms, but we mean different things by them. A key term in this regard is “agitation.” The classic Marxist definition of agitation was provided by the early Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov, who differentiated it from propaganda in this way. Propaganda is the explanation of many complex ideas to the few. Agitation is the explanation of a few basic ideas to the many. However, in our tendency agitation is often conflated with a call to action. The difference between propaganda and agitation in this case is viewed and presented not in terms of explaining complex versus basic ideas, but rather in terms of the immediate realizability of the latter.
The original Comintern documents on the united front linked agitation with propaganda while clearly differentiating both from involvement in struggle. Thus the July 1921 document “On Tactics” stated:
“From the day of its foundation the Communist International has clearly and unambiguously stated that its task is not to establish small Communist sects aiming to influence the working masses purely through agitation and propaganda, but to participate directly in the struggle of the working masses, establish Communist leadership of the struggle, and in the course of the struggle create large, revolutionary, mass Communist parties.”
—Theses, Resolutions and Manifestos of the First Four Congresses of the Third International (1980)
Or again in the same document: “The Communist Parties can only develop through struggle. Even the smallest Parties should not limit themselves to propaganda and agitation.”
I’ll try to expound this concept in terms of our own organization by a hypothetical example. Let’s say that a number of undocumented Latino immigrants working in hotels and restaurants in San Francisco are seized by federal agents and deported. Some of these immigrant workers are members of the hotel and restaurant workers union. A WV article focusing on this incident concludes with the position that as a general policy the labor movement must oppose deportations and support full citizenship rights for all immigrants. That’s agitation. Let’s continue and say that we have some supporters in the San Francisco hotel and restaurant workers union. They judge that many workers in the union are sufficiently incensed by the deportations that they’re willing to engage in a protest action. So our supporters put up a motion at a union meeting for a one-day protest strike opposing deportations and for immigrant rights. That’s a call to action. We should consistently use the term agitation in its original Plekhanovite sense, clearly differentiating it from propaganda on the one side and from calls to action on the other.
The United Front at the Third Congress
The Third Congress of the Communist International, held in mid 1921, recognized and addressed the temporary restabilization of the bourgeois order in Europe following the revolutionary turbulence of the immediate post-World War I period. In particular, revolutions in Germany and Hungary and an incipient revolution in Italy had been defeated by the forces of bourgeois reaction, abetted, especially in Germany, by the Social Democratic leaders. In 1998, comrade Reuben Samuels gave an educational on the Third Congress in which he summarized the conditions confronting it:
“The defeats of this period demonstrated both the immaturity of the newly formed communist parties and the ability of the Social Democracy—despite its role in WWI mobilizing the proletariat for the imperialist slaughter, and despite its vanguard role in the imperialist expeditions against the Soviet Union—to maintain its base among the organized working class in the advanced industrial countries.”
—“The First Four Congresses of the Communist International,” Marxist Studies for Cadre Education, No. 9 (2003)
One way of looking at the policies developed and adopted at the Third Congress, centrally the united-front tactic, is that they represented a more advanced stage of party building—they sought to gain the support of a less politically advanced layer of the working class. The main theme of the Comintern documents on tactics at this time was that a majority of the organized working class could not be won to the Communist movement simply through propaganda and agitation, that is, on the basis of ideas. For that, the Communist Parties have to demonstrate in practice leadership of day-to-day economic and political struggles, often of a defensive character, for partial demands.
However, a corollary of this position is that a minority of the working class, in fact a numerically significant minority—the most politically advanced elements—can be won over by propaganda and agitation to communism, in particular, through polemical attacks on the reformists and centrists. By 1921, the Communist Parties in Germany and France and some other European countries—Czechoslovakia, for example—had succeeded in attracting the main body of such politically advanced workers. They were now faced with a different task, one of gaining the support of a section of the workers who still adhered to the reformist parties and affiliated trade unions.
These workers pretty much knew what the Communists were about in terms of doctrine, policies and practices. The problem was not lack of familiarity on their part. Rather, these workers rejected what the Communists stood for. In large measure, they subscribed to bourgeois-democratic ideology, centrally the identification of democracy with a parliamentary-type government elected through universal and equal suffrage. In many cases, they viewed the Communists as irresponsible hotheads who would lead the workers following them into adventurist actions that would be smashed by the forces of the state and right-wing paramilitary groups.
However, some of these workers were willing to collaborate with the Communists on the basis—but only on the basis—of mutually agreed upon terms. The December 1921 “Theses on the United Front” describes the mindset of such workers:
“Considerable sections of workers belonging to the old social-democratic parties are even now unwilling to accept the attacks of the social democrats and the centrists on the Communist vanguard. They are even beginning to demand an agreement with the Communists, but at the same time they have not outgrown their belief in the reformists and large numbers of them still support the parties of the Second and the Amsterdam Internationals. They do not formulate their plans and aspirations all that clearly, but in general the new mood of these masses comes down to a wish to set up a united front and make the parties and unions of the Second and the Amsterdam Internationals fight alongside the Communists against the capitalist attack.”
The Amsterdam International was the trade-union grouping affiliated with the Second International.
There are two basic conditions for the united-front tactic to be effective. One, its aims have to involve issues, such as resistance to wage cuts, that reformist-minded workers would struggle for independently of the offer of collaboration by the Communists. Two, the Communist Party has to have sufficient social and political weight to substantially affect the outcome of such struggles. As Trotsky explained in his March 1922 piece, “On the United Front”:
“Wherever the Communist Party already constitutes a big, organized, political force, but not the decisive magnitude; wherever the party embraces organizationally, let us say, one-fourth, one-third, or even a larger proportion of the organized proletarian vanguard, it is confronted with the question of the united front in all its acuteness.”
—The First 5 Years of the Communist International, Volume 2
He contrasted such parties to those that were qualitatively smaller: “In cases where the Communist Party still remains an organization of a numerically insignificant minority, the question of its conduct on the mass-struggle front does not assume a decisive practical and organizational significance.” Later in this presentation I’ll discuss the tactics worked out by the Comintern leadership for those parties, particularly in Britain and the United States, that in Trotsky’s words were still a numerically insignificant minority.
The united-front tactic was intended as a two-edged sword. If the reformist leaders agreed to a united-front action, the Communists would be able to demonstrate in practice that they were the most effective and militant leaders of elemental working-class struggles. In doing so they would gain a more sympathetic hearing from reformist-minded workers for their broader program and goals. If the reformist leaders rejected the offer of a united front, then the Communists could say to the workers who followed them: “See, out of hostility to Communism, your leaders are depriving you of a strong and willing ally in your own struggles against the capitalists and their state apparatus.” As Trotsky put it: “It is necessary that the struggling masses should always be given the opportunity of convincing themselves that the non-achievement of unity in action was not due to our formalistic irreconcilability but to the lack of real will to struggle on the part of the reformists.”
The January 1922 Comintern appeal, “For the United Proletarian Front!” argues:
“No worker, whether communist or social-democrat or syndicalist, or even a member of the Christian or liberal trade unions, wants his wages further reduced. None wants to work longer hours, cold and hungry. And therefore all must unite in a common front against the employers’ offensive.”
—The Communist International, 1919-1943: Documents (Vol. 1, 1919-1922), selected and edited by Jane Degras (1956)
To understand the central importance of elemental wage struggles in motivating and implementing the united-front tactic, one has to recognize that in Germany, France and a number of other European countries at this time the trade-union movement was divided along political lines. Most of our sections are in countries—the U.S., Canada, Britain, Germany, Australia—where there are unitary trade unions encompassing workers of all political persuasions. But we also have sections in countries—France, South Africa, Mexico—where there are competing union federations affiliated with different political parties.
The United Front in France and Germany
Our policies toward the political organizations of the working class are significantly different than toward the economic organizations of the working class. A political party consists of a voluntary selection of individual activists based on a comprehensive program for organizing or reorganizing society. We seek to create a politically homogeneous revolutionary vanguard party. The course of doing so often involves splitting reformist and centrist parties. Thus the French Communist Party was created in 1920 by splitting a left-wing majority from the reformist Socialist Party. Similarly, the German Communist Party was transformed in the same year from a relatively small organization, with about 80,000 members, into a mass party by splitting a left-wing majority from the centrist Independent Social Democratic Party.
However, we advocate and, when appropriate, seek to build industrial unions and factory committees encompassing all workers employed therein, regardless of their political views and affiliations. We aim to gain the political support of the majority of union members in order to replace the incumbent reformist or (in the U.S.) liberal labor bureaucrats, while preserving these organizations intact. But the incumbent bureaucrats will not necessarily play by those rules of the game, especially when they are losing it. That’s what happened in France in 1921.
In the pre-World War I era, the main trade-union organization in France, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), was a bastion of left-wing or revolutionary syndicalism. The CGT was proudly and willfully independent of the Socialist Party and to no small degree hostile to it. Syndicalist militants viewed that party, with good reason, as a predominantly petty-bourgeois organization permeated by parliamentarist careerism and intellectual dilettantism. However, in the last few years before the war the political distance between the CGT and Socialist Party was appreciably narrowed when a new, more right-wing leadership around Léon Jouhaux took over the former. With the outbreak of the war, Jouhaux and other CGT leaders joined with Socialist Party leaders in a so-called “sacred union” of national defense. Jouhaux himself became a government official.
After the war, the CGT polarized between an avowedly reformist right wing around Jouhaux and an amorphous left wing consisting of pro-Bolshevik militants, old-line syndicalists and anarchists. Faced with the increasing prospect of losing out to the forces of the left, the Jouhaux group split the organization in late 1921. The right-wing union federation, which retained the old name, had about 250,000 members. The left-wing organization, called the CGT-Unitaire (CGTU), led by an unstable bloc of fledgling Communists, syndicalists and anarchists, claimed 350,000 members. So to be effective, workers struggles over wages, conditions and layoffs had to involve united action between the Communists and their left-wing allies in the CGTU and the reformists in the CGT.
The situation in Germany was more complicated because the political division between the Communists and reformists was intermeshed with different forms of working-class economic organization. The Social Democrats retained control over the main trade-union organization, the Allgemeine Deutsche Gewerkschaftsbund (ADGB). This was literally a union of trades, based on occupations, not on industrial or other economic units. For example, the machinists union consisted of machinists in different factories while not including non-machinists in these factories. While the Communist Party sought to work in the ADGB, the Social Democratic officialdom was able to use bureaucratic methods to prevent the Communists from wielding authority in the unions, corresponding to their influence in the ranks.
However, the revolutionary turbulence of late 1918-1919 gave rise to another form of mass working-class organization, factory councils. These embraced all workers in the enterprise and were more representative of the ranks than the unions. Council representatives had to be wage-earning workers in that enterprise, thus barring paid union functionaries. By late 1922, the Communist Party had gained sufficient authority to organize a national congress of several thousand factory councils. Thus the united-front tactic often involved calls for united action between the Communist-led factory councils and the Social Democratic-dominated unions.
A good example, albeit in the negative sense, of how the united-front tactic played out on the ground involved a railway workers strike in early 1922. The German railways were state-owned. As part of a fiscal austerity program, the government announced that 20,000 railway workers would be laid off. This provoked a strike by an independent railway union, that is, one not affiliated with the ADGB. The government, headed by the Social Democratic president Friedrich Ebert, declared the strike illegal. In response, the Communist Party issued an appeal for all workers organizations to defend the right to strike and mobilized its own forces in support of the railway workers. When the Social Democratic Party and ADGB leaders refused to support the strike, the railway union executive ordered its members back to work. However, the Communists’ policies and activities increased their political authority among a strategically important section of the working class while discrediting the Social Democrats.
The United Front and the Post-Soviet Period
It’s obvious that the use of the united-front tactic in elemental, day-to-day struggles of labor against capital by the early European Communist Parties is not relevant for us today, nor will it be tomorrow. However, there are other important differences that are much less obvious. One such difference is the role of freedom of criticism or, more precisely, of criticism. In his 1922 piece Trotsky identified freedom of criticism as a negative condition of the united front, that is, something the Communists would not stop doing:
“We broke with the reformists and centrists in order to obtain complete freedom in criticizing perfidy, betrayal, indecision and the half-way spirit in the labor movement. For this reason any sort of organizational agreement which restricts our freedom of criticism and agitation is absolutely unacceptable to us.”
Remember, we are considering mass Communist Parties that had the capability to make their criticisms of the reformist organizations known to the latter’s members and supporters. The German Communist Party in the early ’20s had dozens of daily newspapers, read by hundreds of thousands of workers, including a fraction of the members and supporters of the Social Democracy. The German, French and other European Communist Parties had parliamentary deputies and members of local government councils. They had trade-union officials and representatives on factory committees. In practically every factory in Germany, France and some other countries—such as Italy and Czechoslovakia—Communist workers were continually arguing politics with social-democratic, syndicalist or anarchist co-workers. There was no lack of political engagement and debate between the Communists and other tendencies in the workers movement.
The SL/U.S. faces a very different situation vis-à-vis our somewhat larger reformist opponents—the social-democratic International Socialist Organization (ISO), the Stalinoid Workers World Party and Party for Socialism and Liberation, and the Maoist-Stalinist Revolutionary Communist Party. The leaders and cadre of these organizations do not want to engage in political combat with us and do not feel any need to do so. Quite the contrary. They seek to cordon off their newer, younger members and contacts from “the Sparts.” The ISO, for example, bar us from their public talks. In response, there’s been a tendency to use the united-front tactic to get around the unwillingness of our reformist opponents to engage us in political debate. We can argue about the effectiveness of the tactic for this purpose.
But what is not arguable is that this was not the original purpose of the united-front tactic. Its aim was not to create an additional arena of debate with the reformists over doctrine and program but to engage them at an altogether different level. Thus the December 1921 “Theses on the United Front” stated: “The Communist Parties of the world, having secured complete organizational freedom to extend their ideological influence among the working masses, are now trying at every opportunity to achieve the broadest and fullest possible unity of these masses in practical activity.” [emphasis in original]
I’m going to conclude by discussing the tactics worked out by the Comintern leadership for the smaller Communist Parties in Britain and the United States, for which the united front was not applicable, that is, they lacked sufficient weight to initiate and organize mass working-class actions. At the same time, these were not propaganda groups either. In the early 1920s, the British and American CPs encompassed thousands of experienced worker militants and had in their top ranks some widely known and respected workers’ leaders, such as Tom Mann in Britain and William Z. Foster in the U.S.
In the case of both the British and American parties, Lenin played a central role in working out the appropriate tactics. The basic axis of the united-front tactic is the offer by the Communists of joint struggle with the reformist organizations, including their current leaderships. In Britain, this was expressed through critical electoral support to the Labour Party and also the offer by the Communists to join the Labour Party. As such, the Communists would act openly as an organized faction on the basis of a revolutionary program. At the same time, as members of the Labour Party, Communists would help to build it, for example through winning over more politically backward workers who still supported the Liberals and Tories.
In the U.S., the only mass working-class organizations were (and still are) the trade unions. Hence the Communist demand that the unions form a political party opposed to the Democrats and Republicans in which the Communists would participate. I’m not going to address whether many, perhaps most, American Communists misunderstood the tactic as calling for and being willing to build a new reformist party similar to the British Labour Party. That question is not germane to the purpose of this presentation. What is germane is an understanding that the advocacy of a trade-union-based party was the American analogue of the united-front tactic.
During the early 1970s we had an extensive internal discussion on the labor party question. The substance and conclusions of the discussion were synthesized in a presentation, “A Talk on the Labor Party Question,” in 1972 by comrade Jim Robertson, that was republished in the Spartacist pamphlet On the United Front (January 1996). He explained:
“In the last debate in New York, I spent all my time on the decisions of the Third and Fourth Congresses. I’m going to evade that this time and simply point out that the Labor Party slogan is the current American version of the issue of the united front. It’s posed in the absence of a massive political expression of reformism or Stalinism in the United States; rather, with the organization of industrial unions with a deeply committed pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucracy, it is toward them that the issue of proletarian unity and the process of communist triumph in struggle is centered on the Labor Party question.”
Jim also emphasized that actual motion toward such a labor party, or even substantial sentiment in favor of it, would only be generated by a qualitatively higher level of working-class struggle than existed at the time or even during the big strikes that built the mass industrial unions in the 1930s. Absent such a convulsive upsurge in working-class struggle, our advocacy of a union-based party in opposition to the Democrats is a subordinate aspect of our more fundamental propaganda for the dictatorship of the proletariat (expressed using the term “workers government”).
This approach to the labor party question has, I think, a general relevance for the SL/U.S. in the current period. There’s been a lot of talk about whether or not we have a perspective. I think we do have a perspective but not in the way the term has been used. Our perspective should be to produce more and better propaganda in the Plekhanovite sense of explaining many complex ideas to the few. Let’s stop with the get-rich-quick schemes already. When, in the future, opportunities for organizational breakthroughs arise, we’ll all know it. Doubtless, these will involve both objective problems and internal differences, possibly fights, but that’s not what has been happening in our tendency since the fall of the Soviet Union.
What has happened, I think, is a deepgoing subjective drive to achieve organizational breakthroughs in order to demonstrate (mainly to ourselves) that we are not historically irrelevant, since everyone else in the world thinks we are historically irrelevant. We are historically relevant but we don’t have to and cannot now demonstrate that through substantial organizational breakthroughs or some other kind of external success. That’s just objective reality
Thursday, September 03, 2009
Wednesday, September 02, 2009
*From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-British Miners Fight for All the Oppressed
Click on the headline to link to a"LibCom" website entry for the British miners' strike of 1984-85. This link is provided to give some "color" to the story at the local level from a different political prospective from mine.
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Spring 1985 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
**********
British Miners Fight for All the Oppressed
The British coal miners' strike now in its eleventh month is a crucial class battle whose outcome will shape the social and political climate of the country for years to come. Tory Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is seeking with unrestrained savagery to bludgeon and starve the miners into submission. If the miners lose, they and the whole British working class will be dealt with in the same spirit of limitless vindictiveness that Thatcher unleashed on the helpless young Argentine sailors of the Belgrano during the Falklands/Malvinas war. Thatcher personally supervised this gratuitous war crime when the ship, miles from the war zone, was dispatched to the bottom of the icy Atlantic.
But the British miners do not intend to lose. Standing alone thanks to the treachery of the Labour Party/ Trades Union Congress tops, they have held out against everything that bloody Thatcher and her cops could throw against them. They have endured thousands of arrests and countless injuries and they are still fighting. And their courageous defiance of the vicious "Iron Lady" has won to their side the most oppressed layers of
British society. The heat of sharp class struggle has tended to forge a spirit of solidarity between the miners and oppressed sectors such as blacks, Asians and Irish.
This political point was emphasized by comrade Eibhlin McDonald, a leader of the Spartacist League of Britain, during her recent visit to the U.S. We reprint below comrade Eibhlin's remarks at a public Spartacist forum in New York last November 16 (originally published in Workers Vanguard No. 367,23 November 1984) and her speech to a national internal meeting of the Spartacus Youth League (WV No. 368, 7 December 1984).
Women have played an active role in the miners' strike. Although women do not work in the British mines, being barred by law from doing so since 1942, the miners' wives have taken their place alongside their men. And they have made their presence felt since the beginning. When one week into the strike Thatcher deployed 10,000 cops in a martial law operation, Kent women beat back a police blockade at the Dartford Tunnel aimed at sealing the Kent strikers off, and went on through to join a demonstration in Leicestershire. In addition to organizing collections of food and money for the strikers' families, the women have been active strike militants. Their participation on picket lines has been especially important given the awesome scope of police attacks, where sometimes hundreds of miners are arrested in a single swoop. When 20,000 coal field women and supporters marched through London last August 11, one prominent slogan was "No surrender!" Here in the United States, the Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee have been campaigning to win political support among American unionists for the embattled British miners, and to raise desperately needed funds for the miners and their families. As of February 16, a total of $16,905.63 had been raised. W&R appeals to our readers to generously support this effort. Please make checks payable to: Aid to Striking British Miners'Families; mail to: Partisan Defense Committee, Box 99, Canal Street Station, New York, NY 10013.
I'm a member of the British section of the Spartacist tendency, and I'd like to take a few moments to describe to people particularly the British miners' strike which has been going on now for about nine months, I believe. In fact, we had a demonstration recently in London organized by the Spartacist League on the question of South Africa, where a number of miners attended. And we raised the slogan, "African Gold Miners, British Coal Miners— Same Enemy, Same Fight, Workers of the World Unite!" [Applause.] And this slogan had a really powerful resonance—one which is very deeply felt in Britain, primarily as a result of the experience of these miners after nine months on strike. Because you have to understand, two miners have been killed on picket lines; several others have died on the way to picket lines; and most recently people have been killed trying to salvage coal from rubbish tips in order to heat their homes. If you imagine what it's like to have been without money for your family for nine months—no money for food, they have no heating, t nothing like that.
However, they're pretty solid. They're not going back. Because they know that to go back means 20,000 jobs will be lost, and whole communities will be devastated. And, in fact, several thousand of them have been arrested, just simply for picketing. Thatcher has learned a few lessons from Botha's South Africa. They've recently adopted the tactic, instead of throwing people in prison—you obviously can't throw eight, nine, ten thousand miners in prison, because the prisons will overflow—so what they've started to do is to deport them within the country. People are sent off from English coal mines to the north of Scotland, and are not allowed to return home until after the strike.
So there was a certain identification with some of the stuff that was described recently in South Africa among the British miners. There is, of course, a scabbing operation, pretty well funded, we believe probably by the Vatican. Although if you listen to the news reports, then you could very easily be misled. Because as one miner told us recently in one of our meetings— according to the news reports there are now 3,500 scabs in his pit, which he finds very hard to believe, since only 500 people work there [laughter].
Now, there are two things that I want to draw out from the British miners' strike. One is that such a hard-fought class battle against the Thatcher government has inspired whole sections of the population in support for the miners. It's particularly noticeable among the black and Asian community. Something that is very new in Britain—you have a situation where miners, when they come into the city of London from their areas in order to collect money, of course the cops hound them throughout London, and arrest them for trying to collect money and so forth. They go along to a pub in the black ghetto, and the cops come into the pub— "Where are these miners?"—they want to arrest them. But the word had gone out that the cops were arriving, so of course the local people had hidden them. You know: "What miners? There are no miners here." Now, this kind of thing never would have happened before, because capitalism fosters those kind of divisions, and given that the miners union is predominantly white, this solidarity is a direct result of the struggle against Thatcher.
Another aspect of it is that women, mainly miners' wives and families, who'd come from pretty isolated communities, have in fact become political and taken on a leadership role in the strike and have organized themselves into strike committees.
And the other thing that I want to draw out of it is on the Russian question. It comes up most concretely and revolves around the question of Polish Solidarnosc', in Britain, and it's very sharply felt. Because the background to this miners' strike was in fact—the leader of the British miners, Arthur Scargill, happened to mention before a trade-union conference a year ago that Solidarnosc' was an anti-socialist organization. For this he was witchhunted and hounded by not only the capitalist class, the Tory party and so forth, but by a whole section of the trade-union leadership. And it has now become very clear, the people who were most outraged by Scargill's statement are today urging their union members to cross miners' picket lines quite openly. The leader of the Solidarnosc' movement in Poland has sent a message of solidarity... to the scabs. And so Solidarnosc is hated and despised, not just among the British miners, but among whole sections of the population. Which is actually quite a good thing, because it doesn't bode well for Thatcher's war preparations against the Soviet Union.
They do the same kind of thing there. Talking about the "evil empire" in Russia. Except that in Britain a lot of the population now doesn't believe it, because they have seen miners go off to the Soviet Union and have very nice holidays on the Black Sea, you know, for their families and so forth. And they see this on television, and say, well, this is "totalitarian Russia"...it really doesn't look so bad looking at it from Britain [laughter].
Now, just in conclusion. One of the things that is patently obviously missing from the situation is a revolutionary party with a policy directed to the overthrow of capitalism. Because in order to cohere together the struggle, particularly in a situation where old frameworks are breaking down within the country, to cohere and direct that struggle requires a program for the overthrow of capitalism. And that's what the existing trade-union leadership and the Labour Party in Britain doesn't have. For example, twice in the course of the miners' strike, the dockers were out on strike, and were sent back, having gained absolutely nothing. Because these leaders understand that in order to go all out and do what is necessary in order to win the strike, you must be prepared to at least play around with the question of power. And that's what they're not prepared to do.
That in a nutshell is the strategy and program that the Spartacist League has been fighting for there. Because simply in order to win this strike, it's necessary to spread it to other sections of the working class. We hope as the outcome of that kind of successful class battle that you will have the basis for building a revolutionary party. Because in Britain, in South Africa, in fact in the U.S., you can have very hard-fought class battles which may lose or in fact may be frittered away, if you're not prepared to go all the way and address the question of power, for the working class in power, like they did in Russia in 1917.
The Red Avengers [see article, page 24] is kind of a hard act to follow, but let me make one point that one comrade made in the forum in Toronto the other night: the British miners would really love the Red Avengers.
What I want to try to do is give you a flavor of the political situation in Britain, because it really is in marked contrast with Reagan's America right now. But there's something that I would like to underline, which is that the Thatcher government is in the second term of office and went in with a pretty big majority in the election in 1983, not quite as big as Reagan's. The first real opposition they ran into came from the British miners. And it's important to have the understanding and the hope that Reagan will run into the same kind of trouble, because it really does alter the political contours in the country.
You'll have noticed in the press here recently a lot of ballyhoo about a big "back-to-work" movement. And you could very easily be misled, because if you really added up the figures for people that have gone back to work then you probably would get more than is actually in the miners union, in the NUM itself. However, it is true that there has been a certain erosion within the strike recently. (Unlike what the bourgeois press tells you, it's not because of the Qaddafi connection. Miners think that it's really wonderful if they get money from anywhere, and one of them has said recently, in a meeting where someone mentioned the Qaddafi connection, "Well, you know, if we can't get money from Qaddafi, maybe we can get guns. We can use them." And it's not because of getting money from the Soviet Union—they'd love it.) But as of now, there's not much prospect of industrial struggle alongside the miners, and so they're basically now having to dig in to try and survive through the winter pretty much on their own against all the forces of the capitalist state. And that does have an effect on certain elements in the union.
Now, some of the things that are most striking about the course of the struggle. First of all, the way in which whole sections of the population who are normally deeply divided have rallied behind the miners and have seen in the miners' strike a possible solution to what they suffer under Thatcher. This is particularly true for the racially oppressed minorities. The blacks and Asians in Britain have become some of the most solid supporters of the miners. If you understand that the miners union is predominantly white, and pretty elitist in its political attitudes, for them to find allies in the black and Asian population is really quite a change in British politics. The reason for the identification is that the kind of treatment that's being dished out to the miners in the course of the strike is something that has been dished out to the black and Asian population in the inner cities in Britain for quite a long time.
And there's also the fact that the racial minorities tend to do the dirtiest, most dangerous and worst paid jobs in Britain. In actual fact British mining almost falls into that category, because you have to understand that miners or craftsmen in the British mines might take home, at the end of having worked 40 hours, less than $100 a week. And that's someone who's gone through an apprenticeship. And it's really dangerous and there's a lot of accidents. So there's that reason for identification as well.
It's also true of the Irish population. Previously if you had an IRA bombing in the mainland of Britain, regardless of what the target was, it was always followed by a wave of anti-Irish hysteria. You know, a pretty bad period. Whereas recently when the IRA bombed the hotel where a lot of Tories were staying during their conference the response was everybody cheered because one of the people who suffered most was the employment minister, Norman Tebbit. They showed these pictures on television of this guy lying under four or five floors of rubble and then being dragged out by his feet, and everybody cheered and clapped and thought it was wonderful. And someone had the response, whoever did this should be shot—for missing the target. They're really sorry they missed Thatcher.
There's also another example of the way in which the social divisions have broken down. There's an organization in London called Lesbians and Gay Men Support the Miners, and they have regular weekly meetings. Miners come along and address their meetings and express their solidarity with them, and they collect money and they give it to the miners. This is previously inconceivable in Britain.
And this seems true in other unions. There's a lot of workers in other unions who really desperately want to strike alongside the miners and to support them, but their leadership really doesn't want to take on that question.
The other thing that's really striking is on the Russian question— It's really clear that the miners' strike has done more to thwart Thatcher's war plans against the Soviet Union than all the peace demonstrations—and there have been a lot of them in Britain. You know, there's a big CND organization, you've had Greenham Common women, and so forth. And I tell you, the Greenharn Common women have become really insignificant by comparison with the miners' wives, who are out there organizing and fighting for support of the strike. And in more ways than one they really are the backbone of the strike.
The third thing is that, given that so much depends on the outcome of this strike, unless you're prepared to address the question of power, then you cannot even bring this strike to the conclusion that is possible. What I mean is that this strike could have been won several months ago. You had the dockers out on strike twice, and Britain is an island economy so the docks are pretty important. The dockers are a militant union. And you have this situation where the leadership of the trade-union movement and of the Labour Party itself are actually divided. The right wing of both the Labour Party and the trade-union bureaucracy—they're openly anti-Russian, anti-Communist; they were the people who really witchhunted [NUM leader] Arthur Scargill when he denounced Polish Solidarnosc'. And it's really clear today, they just tell their members to cross miners' picket lines, ignore the strike and don't give them any money.
On the other hand you've got the left wing of the trade-union bureaucracy and of the Labour Party that are not openly anti-Russian. But they simply will not call their members out on strike action. So you have a situation like when the dockers were out on strike, or the railwaymen. Several hundred members of the railway unions have been victimized, locked out and sent home, for refusing to handle scab coal on the trains. And their union is doing absolutely nothing to defend them, having originally instructed them to not handle the scab coal.
Now, the Labour Party. I believe that never before in its history has the Labour Party been more discredited. And this was as a result of the miners' strike. There's this character Denis Healey in the British Labour Party who's well known to have connections with the CIA and there's a clot of people around him, and we raised the slogan that this guy should be driven out of the Labour Party because the sort of dislocation that it would cause would be really interesting and would break the mold of British social democracy. And Tony Benn came here to New York and various other places and argued that well, of course, the last thing in the world the miners want is to see the Labour Party splitting right now. Well, I'll tell you this is a lie. Most of the miners could see these guys in hell, never mind driven out of the Labour Party. The general secretary of the TUC appeared in a meeting recently and the miners hung up a noose for him in the back of the room. Because you know, they have declared their open animosity to the miners' strike.
We're going to do this fund drive in the U.S. And there's a lot of miners that are really keen to come and meet the Spartacist League and the SYL in the U.S. They're really excited to come here and they desperately need the money. So I think that this will be really important for the international tendency. And it'll be important for the miners.
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Spring 1985 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
**********
British Miners Fight for All the Oppressed
The British coal miners' strike now in its eleventh month is a crucial class battle whose outcome will shape the social and political climate of the country for years to come. Tory Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is seeking with unrestrained savagery to bludgeon and starve the miners into submission. If the miners lose, they and the whole British working class will be dealt with in the same spirit of limitless vindictiveness that Thatcher unleashed on the helpless young Argentine sailors of the Belgrano during the Falklands/Malvinas war. Thatcher personally supervised this gratuitous war crime when the ship, miles from the war zone, was dispatched to the bottom of the icy Atlantic.
But the British miners do not intend to lose. Standing alone thanks to the treachery of the Labour Party/ Trades Union Congress tops, they have held out against everything that bloody Thatcher and her cops could throw against them. They have endured thousands of arrests and countless injuries and they are still fighting. And their courageous defiance of the vicious "Iron Lady" has won to their side the most oppressed layers of
British society. The heat of sharp class struggle has tended to forge a spirit of solidarity between the miners and oppressed sectors such as blacks, Asians and Irish.
This political point was emphasized by comrade Eibhlin McDonald, a leader of the Spartacist League of Britain, during her recent visit to the U.S. We reprint below comrade Eibhlin's remarks at a public Spartacist forum in New York last November 16 (originally published in Workers Vanguard No. 367,23 November 1984) and her speech to a national internal meeting of the Spartacus Youth League (WV No. 368, 7 December 1984).
Women have played an active role in the miners' strike. Although women do not work in the British mines, being barred by law from doing so since 1942, the miners' wives have taken their place alongside their men. And they have made their presence felt since the beginning. When one week into the strike Thatcher deployed 10,000 cops in a martial law operation, Kent women beat back a police blockade at the Dartford Tunnel aimed at sealing the Kent strikers off, and went on through to join a demonstration in Leicestershire. In addition to organizing collections of food and money for the strikers' families, the women have been active strike militants. Their participation on picket lines has been especially important given the awesome scope of police attacks, where sometimes hundreds of miners are arrested in a single swoop. When 20,000 coal field women and supporters marched through London last August 11, one prominent slogan was "No surrender!" Here in the United States, the Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee have been campaigning to win political support among American unionists for the embattled British miners, and to raise desperately needed funds for the miners and their families. As of February 16, a total of $16,905.63 had been raised. W&R appeals to our readers to generously support this effort. Please make checks payable to: Aid to Striking British Miners'Families; mail to: Partisan Defense Committee, Box 99, Canal Street Station, New York, NY 10013.
I'm a member of the British section of the Spartacist tendency, and I'd like to take a few moments to describe to people particularly the British miners' strike which has been going on now for about nine months, I believe. In fact, we had a demonstration recently in London organized by the Spartacist League on the question of South Africa, where a number of miners attended. And we raised the slogan, "African Gold Miners, British Coal Miners— Same Enemy, Same Fight, Workers of the World Unite!" [Applause.] And this slogan had a really powerful resonance—one which is very deeply felt in Britain, primarily as a result of the experience of these miners after nine months on strike. Because you have to understand, two miners have been killed on picket lines; several others have died on the way to picket lines; and most recently people have been killed trying to salvage coal from rubbish tips in order to heat their homes. If you imagine what it's like to have been without money for your family for nine months—no money for food, they have no heating, t nothing like that.
However, they're pretty solid. They're not going back. Because they know that to go back means 20,000 jobs will be lost, and whole communities will be devastated. And, in fact, several thousand of them have been arrested, just simply for picketing. Thatcher has learned a few lessons from Botha's South Africa. They've recently adopted the tactic, instead of throwing people in prison—you obviously can't throw eight, nine, ten thousand miners in prison, because the prisons will overflow—so what they've started to do is to deport them within the country. People are sent off from English coal mines to the north of Scotland, and are not allowed to return home until after the strike.
So there was a certain identification with some of the stuff that was described recently in South Africa among the British miners. There is, of course, a scabbing operation, pretty well funded, we believe probably by the Vatican. Although if you listen to the news reports, then you could very easily be misled. Because as one miner told us recently in one of our meetings— according to the news reports there are now 3,500 scabs in his pit, which he finds very hard to believe, since only 500 people work there [laughter].
Now, there are two things that I want to draw out from the British miners' strike. One is that such a hard-fought class battle against the Thatcher government has inspired whole sections of the population in support for the miners. It's particularly noticeable among the black and Asian community. Something that is very new in Britain—you have a situation where miners, when they come into the city of London from their areas in order to collect money, of course the cops hound them throughout London, and arrest them for trying to collect money and so forth. They go along to a pub in the black ghetto, and the cops come into the pub— "Where are these miners?"—they want to arrest them. But the word had gone out that the cops were arriving, so of course the local people had hidden them. You know: "What miners? There are no miners here." Now, this kind of thing never would have happened before, because capitalism fosters those kind of divisions, and given that the miners union is predominantly white, this solidarity is a direct result of the struggle against Thatcher.
Another aspect of it is that women, mainly miners' wives and families, who'd come from pretty isolated communities, have in fact become political and taken on a leadership role in the strike and have organized themselves into strike committees.
And the other thing that I want to draw out of it is on the Russian question. It comes up most concretely and revolves around the question of Polish Solidarnosc', in Britain, and it's very sharply felt. Because the background to this miners' strike was in fact—the leader of the British miners, Arthur Scargill, happened to mention before a trade-union conference a year ago that Solidarnosc' was an anti-socialist organization. For this he was witchhunted and hounded by not only the capitalist class, the Tory party and so forth, but by a whole section of the trade-union leadership. And it has now become very clear, the people who were most outraged by Scargill's statement are today urging their union members to cross miners' picket lines quite openly. The leader of the Solidarnosc' movement in Poland has sent a message of solidarity... to the scabs. And so Solidarnosc is hated and despised, not just among the British miners, but among whole sections of the population. Which is actually quite a good thing, because it doesn't bode well for Thatcher's war preparations against the Soviet Union.
They do the same kind of thing there. Talking about the "evil empire" in Russia. Except that in Britain a lot of the population now doesn't believe it, because they have seen miners go off to the Soviet Union and have very nice holidays on the Black Sea, you know, for their families and so forth. And they see this on television, and say, well, this is "totalitarian Russia"...it really doesn't look so bad looking at it from Britain [laughter].
Now, just in conclusion. One of the things that is patently obviously missing from the situation is a revolutionary party with a policy directed to the overthrow of capitalism. Because in order to cohere together the struggle, particularly in a situation where old frameworks are breaking down within the country, to cohere and direct that struggle requires a program for the overthrow of capitalism. And that's what the existing trade-union leadership and the Labour Party in Britain doesn't have. For example, twice in the course of the miners' strike, the dockers were out on strike, and were sent back, having gained absolutely nothing. Because these leaders understand that in order to go all out and do what is necessary in order to win the strike, you must be prepared to at least play around with the question of power. And that's what they're not prepared to do.
That in a nutshell is the strategy and program that the Spartacist League has been fighting for there. Because simply in order to win this strike, it's necessary to spread it to other sections of the working class. We hope as the outcome of that kind of successful class battle that you will have the basis for building a revolutionary party. Because in Britain, in South Africa, in fact in the U.S., you can have very hard-fought class battles which may lose or in fact may be frittered away, if you're not prepared to go all the way and address the question of power, for the working class in power, like they did in Russia in 1917.
The Red Avengers [see article, page 24] is kind of a hard act to follow, but let me make one point that one comrade made in the forum in Toronto the other night: the British miners would really love the Red Avengers.
What I want to try to do is give you a flavor of the political situation in Britain, because it really is in marked contrast with Reagan's America right now. But there's something that I would like to underline, which is that the Thatcher government is in the second term of office and went in with a pretty big majority in the election in 1983, not quite as big as Reagan's. The first real opposition they ran into came from the British miners. And it's important to have the understanding and the hope that Reagan will run into the same kind of trouble, because it really does alter the political contours in the country.
You'll have noticed in the press here recently a lot of ballyhoo about a big "back-to-work" movement. And you could very easily be misled, because if you really added up the figures for people that have gone back to work then you probably would get more than is actually in the miners union, in the NUM itself. However, it is true that there has been a certain erosion within the strike recently. (Unlike what the bourgeois press tells you, it's not because of the Qaddafi connection. Miners think that it's really wonderful if they get money from anywhere, and one of them has said recently, in a meeting where someone mentioned the Qaddafi connection, "Well, you know, if we can't get money from Qaddafi, maybe we can get guns. We can use them." And it's not because of getting money from the Soviet Union—they'd love it.) But as of now, there's not much prospect of industrial struggle alongside the miners, and so they're basically now having to dig in to try and survive through the winter pretty much on their own against all the forces of the capitalist state. And that does have an effect on certain elements in the union.
Now, some of the things that are most striking about the course of the struggle. First of all, the way in which whole sections of the population who are normally deeply divided have rallied behind the miners and have seen in the miners' strike a possible solution to what they suffer under Thatcher. This is particularly true for the racially oppressed minorities. The blacks and Asians in Britain have become some of the most solid supporters of the miners. If you understand that the miners union is predominantly white, and pretty elitist in its political attitudes, for them to find allies in the black and Asian population is really quite a change in British politics. The reason for the identification is that the kind of treatment that's being dished out to the miners in the course of the strike is something that has been dished out to the black and Asian population in the inner cities in Britain for quite a long time.
And there's also the fact that the racial minorities tend to do the dirtiest, most dangerous and worst paid jobs in Britain. In actual fact British mining almost falls into that category, because you have to understand that miners or craftsmen in the British mines might take home, at the end of having worked 40 hours, less than $100 a week. And that's someone who's gone through an apprenticeship. And it's really dangerous and there's a lot of accidents. So there's that reason for identification as well.
It's also true of the Irish population. Previously if you had an IRA bombing in the mainland of Britain, regardless of what the target was, it was always followed by a wave of anti-Irish hysteria. You know, a pretty bad period. Whereas recently when the IRA bombed the hotel where a lot of Tories were staying during their conference the response was everybody cheered because one of the people who suffered most was the employment minister, Norman Tebbit. They showed these pictures on television of this guy lying under four or five floors of rubble and then being dragged out by his feet, and everybody cheered and clapped and thought it was wonderful. And someone had the response, whoever did this should be shot—for missing the target. They're really sorry they missed Thatcher.
There's also another example of the way in which the social divisions have broken down. There's an organization in London called Lesbians and Gay Men Support the Miners, and they have regular weekly meetings. Miners come along and address their meetings and express their solidarity with them, and they collect money and they give it to the miners. This is previously inconceivable in Britain.
And this seems true in other unions. There's a lot of workers in other unions who really desperately want to strike alongside the miners and to support them, but their leadership really doesn't want to take on that question.
The other thing that's really striking is on the Russian question— It's really clear that the miners' strike has done more to thwart Thatcher's war plans against the Soviet Union than all the peace demonstrations—and there have been a lot of them in Britain. You know, there's a big CND organization, you've had Greenham Common women, and so forth. And I tell you, the Greenharn Common women have become really insignificant by comparison with the miners' wives, who are out there organizing and fighting for support of the strike. And in more ways than one they really are the backbone of the strike.
The third thing is that, given that so much depends on the outcome of this strike, unless you're prepared to address the question of power, then you cannot even bring this strike to the conclusion that is possible. What I mean is that this strike could have been won several months ago. You had the dockers out on strike twice, and Britain is an island economy so the docks are pretty important. The dockers are a militant union. And you have this situation where the leadership of the trade-union movement and of the Labour Party itself are actually divided. The right wing of both the Labour Party and the trade-union bureaucracy—they're openly anti-Russian, anti-Communist; they were the people who really witchhunted [NUM leader] Arthur Scargill when he denounced Polish Solidarnosc'. And it's really clear today, they just tell their members to cross miners' picket lines, ignore the strike and don't give them any money.
On the other hand you've got the left wing of the trade-union bureaucracy and of the Labour Party that are not openly anti-Russian. But they simply will not call their members out on strike action. So you have a situation like when the dockers were out on strike, or the railwaymen. Several hundred members of the railway unions have been victimized, locked out and sent home, for refusing to handle scab coal on the trains. And their union is doing absolutely nothing to defend them, having originally instructed them to not handle the scab coal.
Now, the Labour Party. I believe that never before in its history has the Labour Party been more discredited. And this was as a result of the miners' strike. There's this character Denis Healey in the British Labour Party who's well known to have connections with the CIA and there's a clot of people around him, and we raised the slogan that this guy should be driven out of the Labour Party because the sort of dislocation that it would cause would be really interesting and would break the mold of British social democracy. And Tony Benn came here to New York and various other places and argued that well, of course, the last thing in the world the miners want is to see the Labour Party splitting right now. Well, I'll tell you this is a lie. Most of the miners could see these guys in hell, never mind driven out of the Labour Party. The general secretary of the TUC appeared in a meeting recently and the miners hung up a noose for him in the back of the room. Because you know, they have declared their open animosity to the miners' strike.
We're going to do this fund drive in the U.S. And there's a lot of miners that are really keen to come and meet the Spartacist League and the SYL in the U.S. They're really excited to come here and they desperately need the money. So I think that this will be really important for the international tendency. And it'll be important for the miners.
*Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!:An Introduction For 2009-A Book Review
Click On Title To Link To Site With Information About The Book Used In This Commentary. This Link Is Placed Here By The Writer Merely For Informational Purposes To Assist Those Who Wish To Get A Copy Of The Book.
Every Month Is Labor History Month
Book Review
Labor’s Untold Story, Richard O. Boyer and Herbert Morais, United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers Of America (UE), New York, 1976,
As I have often noted this space is dedicated to the struggles of the American (and international) working class and their allies. Part of understanding those struggles is to know where we have been in order to have a better grasp of where we need to head in order to create a more just, socially-inclined world. In my travels over the past few years I have noted, even among those who proclaim themselves progressives, radicals, and revolutionaries, a woeful, and in some cases willful, lack of knowledge about the history and traditions of the American labor movement. In order to help rectify that lack I will, occasionally, post entries relating to various events, places and personalities that have helped form what was a very militant if, frustratingly, apolitical(if not purely anti-political, especially against its left-wing)labor history.
In order to provide a starting point for these snapshots in time I am using what I think is a very useful book, Labor’s Untold Story, Richard O. Boyer and Herbert Morais, United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers Of America (UE), New York, 1976, that I can recommend to all those militants interested in getting at least a first taste of what the once mighty organized American labor movement was all about. For those unfamiliar with labor history the UE, cited here as the publisher, was a left-wing union that was split by the main labor federations (AFL and CIO) during the “red scare” of the 1950’s for being “under Communist influence” and refusing to expel its Communist Party supporters. The other organization created at the time was the International Brotherhood Of Electrical Workers (IBEW). The history of that split, and its timing, that caused a wasteful break in the struggle for a single industry-wide union that had been the goal of all thoughtful labor militants will, of course, be the subject of one of these entries at a later date.
That UE imprimatur, for this writer at least, is something of a plus but you know upfront already that this is a pro-labor history so I will not belabor the point. That said, this 400 page book is chock full of events, large and small, complete with very helpful footnotes giving greater detail (mercifully placed at the bottom of the page where the subject is mentioned), that helped turned the American labor movement from an atomized, motley group of conflicting racial, ethnic and political tendencies in the last part of the 19th century to something like a very powerful and somewhat self-confident organized force by the 1940’s. After that period there is a long term decline that, for the book, ends with the period of the “red scare” noted above, and for the rest of us continues until this day.
Here you will learn about the embryonic stages of the modern labor movement after the American Civil War with its urgent industrial demands to provide goods for a pent-up, war-ravaged market and creation of a transportation and information system adequate to meet those needs. Needless to say labor received short shrift in the bargain, especially at first before it was even minimally organized. The story here it should be made clear, the story anytime labor is the subject of discourse, is organized labor. The atomized working class, one pitted against the other by the bosses, as a whole minus this organization did not exist as a historical force. That, my friends, is a great lesson for today as well.
As such, it important to note the establishment in the 1870s of the National Labor Union and its offshoots, later the Knights of Labor and the role of its class collaborationist leaders. Also noted is the fight in the coal mines of the East and the legendary saga of the Irish “Molly McGuires” in Pennsylvania, our first well-know labor martyrs. Then the fight moves west to the lead, copper, silver and gold mines. That push west could only mean a look at the establishment of the Western Federation of Miners, the emergence of the paragon of an American labor leader, "Big Bill" Haywood, his frame-up for murder in 1905 and the subsequent rise of the Industrial Workers of The World. Wobblies (IWW). Along the way there had been various attempts to form a workers party, the most promising, if amorphous, being the Tom Watson-led Populist Party in 1892 before the somewhat more class-based Socialist Party took hold.
Of course no political study of the American working class is complete without a big tip of the hat to the tireless work of Eugene V. Debs, his labor organizing, and his various presidential campaigns up through 1920. While today Debs’ efforts have to be seen in a different light by the fact that our attitude toward labor militants running for executive offices in the capitalist state and his ‘soft’ attitude on the question of the political organization of the working class with an undifferentiated party of the whole class have changed, he stands head and shoulders above most of the other political labor leaders of the day, especially that early renegade from Marxism, Samuel Gompers.
The first “red scare” (immediately after World War I) and its effect on the formation of the first American communist organizations responding to the creation of the first workers state in Russia( and of the subsequrny establishment of the internationally-oriented Communist International), the quiescent of the American labor movement in the 1920s (a position not unlike the state of the American working class today), the rise of the organized labor movement into a mass industrial organization in response to the ups and downs of the Great Depression, the ‘labor peace’ hiatus of World War II, the labor upsurge in the immediate post-World War II period and the “night of the long knives” of the anti-communist “red scare” of the 1950s brings the story up to the time of first publication of the book. As to be expected of a book that pre-dates the rise of the black civil right movement, the women’s liberation movement, and the struggle for gay and lesbian rights there is much less about the role of race, gender and sexual preference in this history of the American labor movement. Not to worry, the black, feminist, and gender scholars have been hard at work rectifying those omissions. And I have been busy reviewing that work elsewhere in this space. But here is your start.
A Short Note On The Pro-Stalinist Perspective Of "Labor's Untold Story"
Commentary
Okay, okay before I get ripped apart for being some kind of Pollyanna in my review of today’s book Labor’s Untold Story let me make a preemptive strike. I am, painfully, aware, that, at least back in the days when such things counted, the United Electrical Workers union (UE) was dominated by supporters of the Stalinist American Communist Party. The reason that I am painfully aware of this fact was that, back in that same day, I organized the unorganized under the auspices of that union. On more than one occasion various middle level figures in that union took me up short every time I tried to “step on the toes” (that is a quote from a real conversation, by the way) of some member of their vaunted “anti-monopolist” coalition. That coalition, my friends, was (and, is, for any unrepentant Stalinist still around) code for various politicos associated with the American Democratic Party. That, I hope, will tell the tale.
Notwithstanding that experience, I still think that Labor’s Untold Story is a very good secondary source for trying to link together the various pieces of our common American labor history. The period before World War I, that is, the period before the creation of the American Communist Party and its subsequent Stalinization, is fairly honestly covered since there is no particular political reason not to do so. The authors begin their “soft-soap” when we get to the 1920s and the Lafollette presidential campaign of 1924 and then really get up a head of steam when discussing the role of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the labor struggles of the 1930s in the interest of the Popular Front (read: the 1930s version of that “anti-monopolist” coalition mentioned above) up until about 1939.
Then, please do not forget, the authors make the ‘turn’ in the party-line during the short period of the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939 when there was nothing that a good right-wing American First Committee member could not have applauded. Of course, once the Soviet Union was invaded the authors went all out in their version of defense of that country (a correct position) when World War II heated up by supporting wholesale the “no strike” pledge and assorted other anti-labor actions (incorrect positions). Then when the Cold War descended in the aftermath of the war and the “red scare” hit the unions big time they cried foul when the capitalists circled the wagons against the Soviet Union and its supporters. Yes, I knew all that well before I re-read the book and wrote the review. Still this is one of the few books which gives you, in one place, virtually every important labor issue from the post-Civil War period to the 1960s (when the book ends). Be forewarned then, and get this little book and learn about our common labor history.
Every Month Is Labor History Month
Book Review
Labor’s Untold Story, Richard O. Boyer and Herbert Morais, United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers Of America (UE), New York, 1976,
As I have often noted this space is dedicated to the struggles of the American (and international) working class and their allies. Part of understanding those struggles is to know where we have been in order to have a better grasp of where we need to head in order to create a more just, socially-inclined world. In my travels over the past few years I have noted, even among those who proclaim themselves progressives, radicals, and revolutionaries, a woeful, and in some cases willful, lack of knowledge about the history and traditions of the American labor movement. In order to help rectify that lack I will, occasionally, post entries relating to various events, places and personalities that have helped form what was a very militant if, frustratingly, apolitical(if not purely anti-political, especially against its left-wing)labor history.
In order to provide a starting point for these snapshots in time I am using what I think is a very useful book, Labor’s Untold Story, Richard O. Boyer and Herbert Morais, United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers Of America (UE), New York, 1976, that I can recommend to all those militants interested in getting at least a first taste of what the once mighty organized American labor movement was all about. For those unfamiliar with labor history the UE, cited here as the publisher, was a left-wing union that was split by the main labor federations (AFL and CIO) during the “red scare” of the 1950’s for being “under Communist influence” and refusing to expel its Communist Party supporters. The other organization created at the time was the International Brotherhood Of Electrical Workers (IBEW). The history of that split, and its timing, that caused a wasteful break in the struggle for a single industry-wide union that had been the goal of all thoughtful labor militants will, of course, be the subject of one of these entries at a later date.
That UE imprimatur, for this writer at least, is something of a plus but you know upfront already that this is a pro-labor history so I will not belabor the point. That said, this 400 page book is chock full of events, large and small, complete with very helpful footnotes giving greater detail (mercifully placed at the bottom of the page where the subject is mentioned), that helped turned the American labor movement from an atomized, motley group of conflicting racial, ethnic and political tendencies in the last part of the 19th century to something like a very powerful and somewhat self-confident organized force by the 1940’s. After that period there is a long term decline that, for the book, ends with the period of the “red scare” noted above, and for the rest of us continues until this day.
Here you will learn about the embryonic stages of the modern labor movement after the American Civil War with its urgent industrial demands to provide goods for a pent-up, war-ravaged market and creation of a transportation and information system adequate to meet those needs. Needless to say labor received short shrift in the bargain, especially at first before it was even minimally organized. The story here it should be made clear, the story anytime labor is the subject of discourse, is organized labor. The atomized working class, one pitted against the other by the bosses, as a whole minus this organization did not exist as a historical force. That, my friends, is a great lesson for today as well.
As such, it important to note the establishment in the 1870s of the National Labor Union and its offshoots, later the Knights of Labor and the role of its class collaborationist leaders. Also noted is the fight in the coal mines of the East and the legendary saga of the Irish “Molly McGuires” in Pennsylvania, our first well-know labor martyrs. Then the fight moves west to the lead, copper, silver and gold mines. That push west could only mean a look at the establishment of the Western Federation of Miners, the emergence of the paragon of an American labor leader, "Big Bill" Haywood, his frame-up for murder in 1905 and the subsequent rise of the Industrial Workers of The World. Wobblies (IWW). Along the way there had been various attempts to form a workers party, the most promising, if amorphous, being the Tom Watson-led Populist Party in 1892 before the somewhat more class-based Socialist Party took hold.
Of course no political study of the American working class is complete without a big tip of the hat to the tireless work of Eugene V. Debs, his labor organizing, and his various presidential campaigns up through 1920. While today Debs’ efforts have to be seen in a different light by the fact that our attitude toward labor militants running for executive offices in the capitalist state and his ‘soft’ attitude on the question of the political organization of the working class with an undifferentiated party of the whole class have changed, he stands head and shoulders above most of the other political labor leaders of the day, especially that early renegade from Marxism, Samuel Gompers.
The first “red scare” (immediately after World War I) and its effect on the formation of the first American communist organizations responding to the creation of the first workers state in Russia( and of the subsequrny establishment of the internationally-oriented Communist International), the quiescent of the American labor movement in the 1920s (a position not unlike the state of the American working class today), the rise of the organized labor movement into a mass industrial organization in response to the ups and downs of the Great Depression, the ‘labor peace’ hiatus of World War II, the labor upsurge in the immediate post-World War II period and the “night of the long knives” of the anti-communist “red scare” of the 1950s brings the story up to the time of first publication of the book. As to be expected of a book that pre-dates the rise of the black civil right movement, the women’s liberation movement, and the struggle for gay and lesbian rights there is much less about the role of race, gender and sexual preference in this history of the American labor movement. Not to worry, the black, feminist, and gender scholars have been hard at work rectifying those omissions. And I have been busy reviewing that work elsewhere in this space. But here is your start.
A Short Note On The Pro-Stalinist Perspective Of "Labor's Untold Story"
Commentary
Okay, okay before I get ripped apart for being some kind of Pollyanna in my review of today’s book Labor’s Untold Story let me make a preemptive strike. I am, painfully, aware, that, at least back in the days when such things counted, the United Electrical Workers union (UE) was dominated by supporters of the Stalinist American Communist Party. The reason that I am painfully aware of this fact was that, back in that same day, I organized the unorganized under the auspices of that union. On more than one occasion various middle level figures in that union took me up short every time I tried to “step on the toes” (that is a quote from a real conversation, by the way) of some member of their vaunted “anti-monopolist” coalition. That coalition, my friends, was (and, is, for any unrepentant Stalinist still around) code for various politicos associated with the American Democratic Party. That, I hope, will tell the tale.
Notwithstanding that experience, I still think that Labor’s Untold Story is a very good secondary source for trying to link together the various pieces of our common American labor history. The period before World War I, that is, the period before the creation of the American Communist Party and its subsequent Stalinization, is fairly honestly covered since there is no particular political reason not to do so. The authors begin their “soft-soap” when we get to the 1920s and the Lafollette presidential campaign of 1924 and then really get up a head of steam when discussing the role of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the labor struggles of the 1930s in the interest of the Popular Front (read: the 1930s version of that “anti-monopolist” coalition mentioned above) up until about 1939.
Then, please do not forget, the authors make the ‘turn’ in the party-line during the short period of the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939 when there was nothing that a good right-wing American First Committee member could not have applauded. Of course, once the Soviet Union was invaded the authors went all out in their version of defense of that country (a correct position) when World War II heated up by supporting wholesale the “no strike” pledge and assorted other anti-labor actions (incorrect positions). Then when the Cold War descended in the aftermath of the war and the “red scare” hit the unions big time they cried foul when the capitalists circled the wagons against the Soviet Union and its supporters. Yes, I knew all that well before I re-read the book and wrote the review. Still this is one of the few books which gives you, in one place, virtually every important labor issue from the post-Civil War period to the 1960s (when the book ends). Be forewarned then, and get this little book and learn about our common labor history.
Tuesday, September 01, 2009
*Don’t Mourn- Organize (And Maybe Sing A Song Or Two) - In Honor Of Labor Agitator/Songwriter Joe Hill-"The Rebel Girl "( For Elizabeth Gurley Flynn)
Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of Hazel Dickens performing Joe Hill's "The Rebel Girl" (For Elizabeth Gurley Flynn).
Joe Hill’s Last Will
My will is easy to decide,
For there is nothing to divide,
My kin don’t need to fuss and moan-
“Moss does not cling to a rolling stone.”
My body? Ah, If I could choose,
I would to ashes it reduce,
And let the merry breezes blow
My dust to where some flowers grow.
Perhaps some fading flower then
Would come to life and bloom again.
This is my last and final will,
Good luck to all of you, Joe Hill
Joe Hill was an IWW man. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was, and is a radical union dedicated to abolishing the wage system and replacing it with a democratic system of workplace organization.
Joe Hill was a migrant laborer to the US from Sweden, a poet, musician and union radical. The term “pie in the sky” is believed to come from his satirical song, “The Preacher and the Slave”.
Hill was framed for murder and executed by firing squad in Salt Lake City, Utah on November 19, 1915. His last words were, “Fire!”
Just before his death he wrote to fellow IWW organizer Big Bill Haywood a letter which included the famous words, “Don’t mourn, Organize”.
The poem above was his will. It was set to music and became the basis of a song by Ethel Raim called “Joe Hill’s Last Will”.
A praise poem by Alfred Hayes became the lyrics of the best-known song about Joe Hill, written in 1936 by Earl Robinson. This was sung so beautifully by Joan Baez at Woodstock in 1969:
Joe Hill
words by Alfred Hayes
music by Earl Robinson
I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,
Alive as you and me.
Says I “But Joe, you’re ten years dead”
“I never died” said he,
“I never died” said he.
“In Salt Lake, Joe,” says I to him,
him standing by my bed,
“They framed you on a murder charge,”
Says Joe, “But I ain’t dead,”
Says Joe, “But I ain’t dead.”
“The Copper Bosses killed you Joe,
they shot you Joe” says I.
“Takes more than guns to kill a man”
Says Joe “I didn’t die”
Says Joe “I didn’t die”
And standing there as big as life
and smiling with his eyes.
Says Joe “What they can never kill
went on to organize,
went on to organize”
From San Diego up to Maine,
in every mine and mill,
where working-men defend their rights,
it’s there you find Joe Hill,
it’s there you find Joe Hill!
I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,
alive as you and me.
Says I “But Joe, you’re ten years dead”
“I never died” said he,
“I never died” said he.
"The Preacher And The Slave"
Long-haired preachers come out every night,
Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right;
But when asked how ’bout something to eat
They will answer in voices so sweet
You will eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay,
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die
And the Starvation Army they play,
And they sing and they clap and they pray,
Till they get all your coin on the drum,
Then they tell you when you’re on the bum
Holy Rollers and Jumpers come out
And they holler, they jump and they shout
Give your money to Jesus, they say,
He will cure all diseases today
If you fight hard for children and wife-
Try to get something good in this life-
You’re a sinner and bad man, they tell,
When you die you will sure go to hell.
Workingmen of all countries, unite
Side by side we for freedom will fight
When the world and its wealth we have gained
To the grafters we’ll sing this refrain
You will eat, bye and bye,
When you’ve learned how to cook and how to fry;
Chop some wood, ’twill do you good
Then you’ll eat in the sweet bye and bye
The chorus is sung in a call and response pattern.
You will eat [You will eat] bye and bye [bye and bye]
In that glorious land above the sky [Way up high]
Work and pray [Work and pray] live on hay [live on hay]
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die [That's a lie!]
You will eat [You will eat] bye and bye [bye and bye]
When you’ve learned how to cook and how to fry [How to fry]
Chop some wood [Chop some wood], ’twill do you good [do you good]
Then you’ll eat in the sweet bye and bye [That's no lie]
THE REBEL GIRL
by Joe Hill /words updated/
There are women of many descriptions
In this cruel world as everyone knows
Some are living in beautiful mansions
And wearing the finest of clothes
There's the blue blooded queen and the princess
Who have charms made of diamonds and pearls
But the only and true kind of lady
Is the Rebel Girl
chorus:
She's a rebel girl, a rebel girl
To the working class she's the strength of this world
From Newfoundland to B.C.
She's fighting for you and for me
Yes she's there by our side
With her courage and pride
She's unequalled anywhere
And I'm proud to fight for freedom
With the rebel girl!
Pete Seeger Lyrics
Joe Hill Lyrics
I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night
Alive as you or me.
Says I, "But Joe, you're ten years dead."
"I never died," says he,
"I never died," says he
"In Salt Lake, Joe," says I to him,
Him standing by my bed.
"They framed you on a murder charge."
Says Joe, "But I ain't dead,
Says Joe, "But I ain't dead."
"The copper bosses killed you, Joe,
They shot you, Joe," says I.
"Takes more than guns to kill a man."
Says Joe, "I didn't die,"
Says Joe, "I didn't die."
And standing there as big as life,
And smiling with his eyes,
Joe says, "What they forgot to kill
Went on to organize,
Went on to organize."
"Joe Hill ain't dead," he says to me,
"Joe Hill ain't never died.
Where working men are out on strike,
Joe Hill is at their side,
Joe Hill is at their side."
"From San Diego up to Maine
In every mine and mill,
Where workers strike and organize,"
Says he, "You'll find Joe Hill."
Says he, "You'll find Joe Hill."
I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night
Alive as you or me.
Says I, "But Joe, you're ten years dead."
"I never died," says he,
"I never died," says he.
Pete Seeger Lyrics
Talking Union Lyrics
If you want higher wages, let me tell you what to do;
You got to talk to the workers in the shop with you;
You got to build you a union, got to make it strong,
But if you all stick together, now, 'twont he long.
You'll get shorter hours,
Better working conditions.
Vacations with pay,
Take your kids to the seashore.
It ain't quite this simple, so I better explain
Just why you got to ride on the union train;
'Cause if you wait for the boss to raise your pay,
We'll all be waiting till Judgment Day;
We'll all he buried - gone to Heaven -
Saint Peter'll be the straw boss then.
Now, you know you're underpaid, hut the boss says you ain't;
He speeds up the work till you're 'bout to faint,
You may he down and out, but you ain't beaten,
Pass out a leaflet and call a meetin'
Talk it over - speak your mind -
Decide to do something about it.
'Course, the boss may persuade some poor damn fool
To go to your meeting and act like a stool;
But you can always tell a stool, though - that's a fact;
He's got a yellow streak running down his back;
He doesn't have to stool - he'll always make a good living
On what he takes out of blind men's cups.
You got a union now; you're sitting pretty;
Put some of the boys on the steering committee.
The boss won't listen when one man squawks.
But he's got to listen when the union talks.
He better -
He'll be mighty lonely one of these days.
Suppose they're working you so hard it's just outrageous,
They're paying you all starvation wages;
You go to the boss, and the boss would yell,
"Before I'd raise your pay I'd see you all in Hell."
Well, he's puffing a big see-gar and feeling mighty slick,
He thinks he's got your union licked.
He looks out the window, and what does he see
But a thousand pickets, and they all agree
He's a bastard - unfair - slave driver -
Bet he beats his own wife.
Now, boy, you've come to the hardest time;
The boss will try to bust your picket line.
He'll call out the police, the National Guard;
They'll tell you it's a crime to have a union card.
They'll raid your meeting, hit you on the head.
Call every one of you a goddamn Red -
Unpatriotic - Moscow agents -
Bomb throwers, even the kids.
But out in Detroit here's what they found,
And out in Frisco here's what they found,
And out in Pittsburgh here's what they found,
And down in Bethlehem here's what they found,
That if you don't let Red-baiting break you up,
If you don't let stool pigeons break you up,
If you don't let vigilantes break you up,
And if you don't let race hatred break you up -
You'll win. What I mean,
Take it easy - but take it!
Joe Hill’s Last Will
My will is easy to decide,
For there is nothing to divide,
My kin don’t need to fuss and moan-
“Moss does not cling to a rolling stone.”
My body? Ah, If I could choose,
I would to ashes it reduce,
And let the merry breezes blow
My dust to where some flowers grow.
Perhaps some fading flower then
Would come to life and bloom again.
This is my last and final will,
Good luck to all of you, Joe Hill
Joe Hill was an IWW man. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was, and is a radical union dedicated to abolishing the wage system and replacing it with a democratic system of workplace organization.
Joe Hill was a migrant laborer to the US from Sweden, a poet, musician and union radical. The term “pie in the sky” is believed to come from his satirical song, “The Preacher and the Slave”.
Hill was framed for murder and executed by firing squad in Salt Lake City, Utah on November 19, 1915. His last words were, “Fire!”
Just before his death he wrote to fellow IWW organizer Big Bill Haywood a letter which included the famous words, “Don’t mourn, Organize”.
The poem above was his will. It was set to music and became the basis of a song by Ethel Raim called “Joe Hill’s Last Will”.
A praise poem by Alfred Hayes became the lyrics of the best-known song about Joe Hill, written in 1936 by Earl Robinson. This was sung so beautifully by Joan Baez at Woodstock in 1969:
Joe Hill
words by Alfred Hayes
music by Earl Robinson
I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,
Alive as you and me.
Says I “But Joe, you’re ten years dead”
“I never died” said he,
“I never died” said he.
“In Salt Lake, Joe,” says I to him,
him standing by my bed,
“They framed you on a murder charge,”
Says Joe, “But I ain’t dead,”
Says Joe, “But I ain’t dead.”
“The Copper Bosses killed you Joe,
they shot you Joe” says I.
“Takes more than guns to kill a man”
Says Joe “I didn’t die”
Says Joe “I didn’t die”
And standing there as big as life
and smiling with his eyes.
Says Joe “What they can never kill
went on to organize,
went on to organize”
From San Diego up to Maine,
in every mine and mill,
where working-men defend their rights,
it’s there you find Joe Hill,
it’s there you find Joe Hill!
I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,
alive as you and me.
Says I “But Joe, you’re ten years dead”
“I never died” said he,
“I never died” said he.
"The Preacher And The Slave"
Long-haired preachers come out every night,
Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right;
But when asked how ’bout something to eat
They will answer in voices so sweet
You will eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay,
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die
And the Starvation Army they play,
And they sing and they clap and they pray,
Till they get all your coin on the drum,
Then they tell you when you’re on the bum
Holy Rollers and Jumpers come out
And they holler, they jump and they shout
Give your money to Jesus, they say,
He will cure all diseases today
If you fight hard for children and wife-
Try to get something good in this life-
You’re a sinner and bad man, they tell,
When you die you will sure go to hell.
Workingmen of all countries, unite
Side by side we for freedom will fight
When the world and its wealth we have gained
To the grafters we’ll sing this refrain
You will eat, bye and bye,
When you’ve learned how to cook and how to fry;
Chop some wood, ’twill do you good
Then you’ll eat in the sweet bye and bye
The chorus is sung in a call and response pattern.
You will eat [You will eat] bye and bye [bye and bye]
In that glorious land above the sky [Way up high]
Work and pray [Work and pray] live on hay [live on hay]
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die [That's a lie!]
You will eat [You will eat] bye and bye [bye and bye]
When you’ve learned how to cook and how to fry [How to fry]
Chop some wood [Chop some wood], ’twill do you good [do you good]
Then you’ll eat in the sweet bye and bye [That's no lie]
THE REBEL GIRL
by Joe Hill /words updated/
There are women of many descriptions
In this cruel world as everyone knows
Some are living in beautiful mansions
And wearing the finest of clothes
There's the blue blooded queen and the princess
Who have charms made of diamonds and pearls
But the only and true kind of lady
Is the Rebel Girl
chorus:
She's a rebel girl, a rebel girl
To the working class she's the strength of this world
From Newfoundland to B.C.
She's fighting for you and for me
Yes she's there by our side
With her courage and pride
She's unequalled anywhere
And I'm proud to fight for freedom
With the rebel girl!
Pete Seeger Lyrics
Joe Hill Lyrics
I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night
Alive as you or me.
Says I, "But Joe, you're ten years dead."
"I never died," says he,
"I never died," says he
"In Salt Lake, Joe," says I to him,
Him standing by my bed.
"They framed you on a murder charge."
Says Joe, "But I ain't dead,
Says Joe, "But I ain't dead."
"The copper bosses killed you, Joe,
They shot you, Joe," says I.
"Takes more than guns to kill a man."
Says Joe, "I didn't die,"
Says Joe, "I didn't die."
And standing there as big as life,
And smiling with his eyes,
Joe says, "What they forgot to kill
Went on to organize,
Went on to organize."
"Joe Hill ain't dead," he says to me,
"Joe Hill ain't never died.
Where working men are out on strike,
Joe Hill is at their side,
Joe Hill is at their side."
"From San Diego up to Maine
In every mine and mill,
Where workers strike and organize,"
Says he, "You'll find Joe Hill."
Says he, "You'll find Joe Hill."
I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night
Alive as you or me.
Says I, "But Joe, you're ten years dead."
"I never died," says he,
"I never died," says he.
Pete Seeger Lyrics
Talking Union Lyrics
If you want higher wages, let me tell you what to do;
You got to talk to the workers in the shop with you;
You got to build you a union, got to make it strong,
But if you all stick together, now, 'twont he long.
You'll get shorter hours,
Better working conditions.
Vacations with pay,
Take your kids to the seashore.
It ain't quite this simple, so I better explain
Just why you got to ride on the union train;
'Cause if you wait for the boss to raise your pay,
We'll all be waiting till Judgment Day;
We'll all he buried - gone to Heaven -
Saint Peter'll be the straw boss then.
Now, you know you're underpaid, hut the boss says you ain't;
He speeds up the work till you're 'bout to faint,
You may he down and out, but you ain't beaten,
Pass out a leaflet and call a meetin'
Talk it over - speak your mind -
Decide to do something about it.
'Course, the boss may persuade some poor damn fool
To go to your meeting and act like a stool;
But you can always tell a stool, though - that's a fact;
He's got a yellow streak running down his back;
He doesn't have to stool - he'll always make a good living
On what he takes out of blind men's cups.
You got a union now; you're sitting pretty;
Put some of the boys on the steering committee.
The boss won't listen when one man squawks.
But he's got to listen when the union talks.
He better -
He'll be mighty lonely one of these days.
Suppose they're working you so hard it's just outrageous,
They're paying you all starvation wages;
You go to the boss, and the boss would yell,
"Before I'd raise your pay I'd see you all in Hell."
Well, he's puffing a big see-gar and feeling mighty slick,
He thinks he's got your union licked.
He looks out the window, and what does he see
But a thousand pickets, and they all agree
He's a bastard - unfair - slave driver -
Bet he beats his own wife.
Now, boy, you've come to the hardest time;
The boss will try to bust your picket line.
He'll call out the police, the National Guard;
They'll tell you it's a crime to have a union card.
They'll raid your meeting, hit you on the head.
Call every one of you a goddamn Red -
Unpatriotic - Moscow agents -
Bomb throwers, even the kids.
But out in Detroit here's what they found,
And out in Frisco here's what they found,
And out in Pittsburgh here's what they found,
And down in Bethlehem here's what they found,
That if you don't let Red-baiting break you up,
If you don't let stool pigeons break you up,
If you don't let vigilantes break you up,
And if you don't let race hatred break you up -
You'll win. What I mean,
Take it easy - but take it!
* The Latest On Mumia Abu Jamal- Free Mumia!
Click on title to link to a YouTube film clip of Mumia Abu Jamal- The "Voice Of The Voiceless" from Death Row in a Pennsylvania prison. The information about Mumia's current legal status and polemic about the way forward in his defense efforts is passed on from the Partisan Defense Committee.
Workers Vanguard No. 941
28 August 2009
Mumia Is an Innocent Man! Free Him Now!
Reformists Crawl to Obama and His Top Cop
For nearly three decades, Mumia Abu-Jamal has been imprisoned on death row. An innocent man, Mumia is a former Black Panther Party spokesman and supporter of the Philadelphia MOVE organization. He was framed up and convicted on charges of killing Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner in December 1981. His conviction was based on lying testimony extorted by the cops, without a shred of physical evidence. His death sentence was secured on the basis of his political convictions and powerful indictments of racist America as a Panther. Since then, court after court has refused to even consider the mountains of evidence proving Mumia’s innocence, including the confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot Faulkner.
On April 6 the U.S. Supreme Court summarily turned down Mumia’s petition to overturn the frame-up conviction. Ominously, it has not ruled on the Philadelphia district attorney’s appeal to reinstate the death sentence, which was overturned by U.S. District Court Judge William Yohn in 2001. Should the Supreme Court rule in favor of the D.A.’s appeal, it would place Mumia a big step closer to the death chamber.
The relentless campaign by the cops, courts, prosecutors and judges to put Mumia to death or entomb him for life epitomizes the apparatus of state repression deployed by the rulers of this country against any perceived opponents. It throws a spotlight on the barbaric, racist death penalty, a form of institutionalized state terror directly descended in the U.S. from black chattel slavery. It goes to the core of the racist subjugation of black people in this country, which is fundamental to the maintenance of American capitalism. It underlines that the fight for Mumia’s freedom must be based on a class-struggle opposition to the racist U.S. capitalist system.
It is this understanding that has infused the work of the Partisan Defense Committee—a legal and social class-struggle defense organization whose views are in accordance with the Marxist principles of the Spartacist League—since it took up Mumia’s case over 20 years ago. While fighting to assist Mumia in pursuing every legal avenue, we had no illusions that this outspoken fighter for the oppressed could or would get any “justice” from the courts or any other agency of the capitalist state. Our fight has been to mobilize the multiracial working class in the U.S. and working people internationally. The proletariat is the one force in this society that has the social power to effectively challenge the capitalist rulers.
Our fight to free Mumia and abolish the racist death penalty is rooted in the revolutionary perspective of winning the working class to the understanding that the bourgeois state is not some “neutral” agency that serves society as a whole but rather exists to defend the class rule and profits of the capitalist class against those they exploit and oppress. To put a final halt to the grisly workings of capitalism’s machinery of death—be they guardians of death row or the cops who operate as “judge, jury and executioner” in gunning down minority youth on the streets—requires sweeping away this entire system, which is based on exploitation and oppression, through socialist revolution.
In contrast, the reformist left’s defense of Mumia is, in the words of Bolshevik revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky, defined by the “framework of bourgeois society and an adaptation to its legality—i.e., the actual training of the masses to become imbued with the inviolability of the bourgeois state” (Lessons of October, 1924). For years the reformists have subordinated the fight for Mumia’s freedom to peddling the most treacherous illusions in the capitalist courts with their calls for a “new,” “fair” trial. Now, with the judicial appeals in which they put their faith all but exhausted, they shamelessly go on bended knee to the Commander-in-Chief of U.S. imperialism Barack Obama and his top cop, Attorney General Eric Holder.
Reformists Beg Capitalist State for “Justice”
A petition to Holder by the International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal (ICFFMAJ), the International Action Center, initiated by the Workers World Party (WWP), and the Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition (NYC) appeals:
“Inasmuch as there is no other court to which Abu-Jamal can appeal for justice, I turn to you for remedy….
“I call on you and the Justice Department to immediately commence a civil rights investigation to examine the many examples of egregious and racist prosecutorial and judicial misconduct dating back to the original trial in 1982 and continuing through to the current inaction [!] of the U.S. Supreme Court….
“I am aware of the many differences that exist between the case of former Senator Ted Stevens and Mumia Abu-Jamal. Still, I note with great interest the actions you have taken with regard to Senator Stevens’ conviction to assure that he not be denied his constitutional rights.”
The petition further notes, with grotesque understatement of the obvious, that Mumia, unlike Stevens, is not “a U.S. senator of great wealth and power.” No kidding. Does anyone really think that the Justice Department hasn’t spotted the difference between a white Senator facing bribery charges and a black radical facing the death penalty on frame-up charges of killing a cop?
This became an all-out lobbying effort at the centennial convention of the NAACP in New York in July, where Obama and Holder were keynote speakers. Standing outside the convention, the Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition (NYC) raised a banner pleading: “Obama & Holder/We Need You Now!/Free Mumia.”
Who are they appealing to? Obama is the Commander-in-Chief of U.S. imperialism—the most bloody and rapacious imperialist power on the face of the planet—and the overseer of the slaughter of countless peoples in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. His attorney general is the warden-in-chief of the prison dungeons holding political prisoners such as Mumia and over two million people, disproportionately blacks and Latinos. It would be hard to find a more savage indictment of the reformists’ fundamental belief in the “democracy” of capitalist class rule.
The appeal for Obama to “free Mumia” is all the more grotesque considering that he supports the death penalty. His credentials in this regard have been promoted by Philadelphia’s right-wing radio broadcaster Michael Smerconish. The co-author of the book, Murdered by Mumia, which rehashes the lies concocted by the Philly cops and D.A.’s office to falsely convict Mumia, Smerconish sees Obama as an ally in his relentless campaign to put Mumia to death. In a 20 August Philadelphia Daily News op-ed article, Smerconish wrote:
“I was also thrilled to have the chance to question him on a subject in which I’ve invested almost 20 years of time and energy—Mumia Abu Jamal.
“Had he taken a position on the case, and if not, did he intend to do so? ‘I haven’t, only because the details of this event I’ve never studied. I’m vaguely familiar with the fact that there’s been a controversy around it. So let me just lay out a very clear principle: In my mind, if somebody killed a police officer, they deserve the death penalty or life in prison,’ he told me.
“Amen to that.”
Reporting on the lobbying effort at the NAACP convention, an article in the Amsterdam News (16-22 July), explained “hope is based on the premise that having a Black attorney general, a Black president…will give Abu-Jamal’s plight stronger consideration.” The self-proclaimed “communists” of WWP took a second to no one in championing Obama’s election as “a triumph for the Black masses and all the oppressed” (Workers World, 20 November 2008).
In fact, after eight years of the widely despised Bush regime, Obama’s election has provided a much-needed facelift for U.S. imperialism to more effectively lord it over the world’s working and oppressed masses. In the U.S., the inauguration of America’s first black president is a powerful propaganda weapon for the U.S. rulers. The message to black people and the oppressed is to shut up and eat it because the election of a black man as president proves the “American dream” works! This was exactly Obama’s message in his speech to the NAACP convention. “No excuses. No excuses,” he intoned, channeling Booker T. Washington, who over a century ago preached accommodation to the racist status quo by telling the impoverished black masses to pull themselves up by their bootstraps (if they owned any).
The reformists and liberals were successful in getting the NAACP to pass a resolution calling on Holder to investigate Mumia’s case. It would be more than welcome if the NAACP put its considerable resources in a genuine fight to free Mumia. But this is not the political purpose of the WWP et al.’s petition for a civil rights investigation, which disappears the fact that Mumia is innocent and pushes illusions in the “fairness” of the American “justice” system. This was captured by NAACP chairman Julian Bond in an interview with Amy Goodman that aired on July 20. Bond argued that Mumia has “had trouble” bringing “doubts” about his case “before a tribunal that can say, you know, these things are true or they’re not true. And we think he needs that chance. We think he needs that chance before the state of Pennsylvania decides to snuff his life out.” I.e., notwithstanding the NAACP’s opposition to the death penalty, the key thing is to let Mumia have another day in court before the rulers “snuff his life out.”
Mumia’s Cause and the Fight for Black Freedom
Black oppression is structurally embedded in American capitalism and will not be overcome short of socialist revolution. In our struggle to free Mumia and abolish the racist death penalty, we seek to win the working class to the understanding that the fight for black freedom is central to the fight for the liberation of all of labor and the oppressed from a system based on exploitation and rooted in the segregation of the black masses at the bottom of society.
The fight to mobilize the social power of the working class in struggle for Mumia’s freedom faces many obstacles. Integrated unions representing millions of workers have gone on record in support of Mumia. But these millions have not been mobilized in action to combat this racist frame-up. The responsibility for that lies with the pro-capitalist trade-union misleaders, who overwhelmingly refuse to call their members into action to defend their economic interests, much less in defense of a black political prisoner. The bureaucracy’s class-collaborationist policies, which have tied the working class to its capitalist class enemy, have dissipated the fighting strength of the unions. The pathetic reformist and liberal petitioners of Obama and Holder similarly do their best in reinforcing belief in the inherent benevolence of the capitalist state.
For the Spartacist League and the Partisan Defense Committee, the fight for Mumia’s freedom is part of the struggle to do away with a social and economic system based on exploitation, increasingly hideous oppression and state terror. The power to do that lies in the hands of the multiracial working class, with its numbers, organization, discipline and, most importantly, its capacity to bring the wheels of the capitalist profit system to a grinding halt. Mobilizing that power is a question of building a revolutionary workers party, acting as the tribune of the people that can bring to the working class the consciousness of its historic interests to be the instrumentality to shatter the power of the racist capitalist rulers and their state.
The stakes are high and the situation is grim, but any real fight for Mumia’s freedom must be based on a class-struggle opposition to the capitalist rulers, who have entombed this innocent black man in prison for more than half his life.
Workers Vanguard No. 941
28 August 2009
Mumia Is an Innocent Man! Free Him Now!
Reformists Crawl to Obama and His Top Cop
For nearly three decades, Mumia Abu-Jamal has been imprisoned on death row. An innocent man, Mumia is a former Black Panther Party spokesman and supporter of the Philadelphia MOVE organization. He was framed up and convicted on charges of killing Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner in December 1981. His conviction was based on lying testimony extorted by the cops, without a shred of physical evidence. His death sentence was secured on the basis of his political convictions and powerful indictments of racist America as a Panther. Since then, court after court has refused to even consider the mountains of evidence proving Mumia’s innocence, including the confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot Faulkner.
On April 6 the U.S. Supreme Court summarily turned down Mumia’s petition to overturn the frame-up conviction. Ominously, it has not ruled on the Philadelphia district attorney’s appeal to reinstate the death sentence, which was overturned by U.S. District Court Judge William Yohn in 2001. Should the Supreme Court rule in favor of the D.A.’s appeal, it would place Mumia a big step closer to the death chamber.
The relentless campaign by the cops, courts, prosecutors and judges to put Mumia to death or entomb him for life epitomizes the apparatus of state repression deployed by the rulers of this country against any perceived opponents. It throws a spotlight on the barbaric, racist death penalty, a form of institutionalized state terror directly descended in the U.S. from black chattel slavery. It goes to the core of the racist subjugation of black people in this country, which is fundamental to the maintenance of American capitalism. It underlines that the fight for Mumia’s freedom must be based on a class-struggle opposition to the racist U.S. capitalist system.
It is this understanding that has infused the work of the Partisan Defense Committee—a legal and social class-struggle defense organization whose views are in accordance with the Marxist principles of the Spartacist League—since it took up Mumia’s case over 20 years ago. While fighting to assist Mumia in pursuing every legal avenue, we had no illusions that this outspoken fighter for the oppressed could or would get any “justice” from the courts or any other agency of the capitalist state. Our fight has been to mobilize the multiracial working class in the U.S. and working people internationally. The proletariat is the one force in this society that has the social power to effectively challenge the capitalist rulers.
Our fight to free Mumia and abolish the racist death penalty is rooted in the revolutionary perspective of winning the working class to the understanding that the bourgeois state is not some “neutral” agency that serves society as a whole but rather exists to defend the class rule and profits of the capitalist class against those they exploit and oppress. To put a final halt to the grisly workings of capitalism’s machinery of death—be they guardians of death row or the cops who operate as “judge, jury and executioner” in gunning down minority youth on the streets—requires sweeping away this entire system, which is based on exploitation and oppression, through socialist revolution.
In contrast, the reformist left’s defense of Mumia is, in the words of Bolshevik revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky, defined by the “framework of bourgeois society and an adaptation to its legality—i.e., the actual training of the masses to become imbued with the inviolability of the bourgeois state” (Lessons of October, 1924). For years the reformists have subordinated the fight for Mumia’s freedom to peddling the most treacherous illusions in the capitalist courts with their calls for a “new,” “fair” trial. Now, with the judicial appeals in which they put their faith all but exhausted, they shamelessly go on bended knee to the Commander-in-Chief of U.S. imperialism Barack Obama and his top cop, Attorney General Eric Holder.
Reformists Beg Capitalist State for “Justice”
A petition to Holder by the International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal (ICFFMAJ), the International Action Center, initiated by the Workers World Party (WWP), and the Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition (NYC) appeals:
“Inasmuch as there is no other court to which Abu-Jamal can appeal for justice, I turn to you for remedy….
“I call on you and the Justice Department to immediately commence a civil rights investigation to examine the many examples of egregious and racist prosecutorial and judicial misconduct dating back to the original trial in 1982 and continuing through to the current inaction [!] of the U.S. Supreme Court….
“I am aware of the many differences that exist between the case of former Senator Ted Stevens and Mumia Abu-Jamal. Still, I note with great interest the actions you have taken with regard to Senator Stevens’ conviction to assure that he not be denied his constitutional rights.”
The petition further notes, with grotesque understatement of the obvious, that Mumia, unlike Stevens, is not “a U.S. senator of great wealth and power.” No kidding. Does anyone really think that the Justice Department hasn’t spotted the difference between a white Senator facing bribery charges and a black radical facing the death penalty on frame-up charges of killing a cop?
This became an all-out lobbying effort at the centennial convention of the NAACP in New York in July, where Obama and Holder were keynote speakers. Standing outside the convention, the Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition (NYC) raised a banner pleading: “Obama & Holder/We Need You Now!/Free Mumia.”
Who are they appealing to? Obama is the Commander-in-Chief of U.S. imperialism—the most bloody and rapacious imperialist power on the face of the planet—and the overseer of the slaughter of countless peoples in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. His attorney general is the warden-in-chief of the prison dungeons holding political prisoners such as Mumia and over two million people, disproportionately blacks and Latinos. It would be hard to find a more savage indictment of the reformists’ fundamental belief in the “democracy” of capitalist class rule.
The appeal for Obama to “free Mumia” is all the more grotesque considering that he supports the death penalty. His credentials in this regard have been promoted by Philadelphia’s right-wing radio broadcaster Michael Smerconish. The co-author of the book, Murdered by Mumia, which rehashes the lies concocted by the Philly cops and D.A.’s office to falsely convict Mumia, Smerconish sees Obama as an ally in his relentless campaign to put Mumia to death. In a 20 August Philadelphia Daily News op-ed article, Smerconish wrote:
“I was also thrilled to have the chance to question him on a subject in which I’ve invested almost 20 years of time and energy—Mumia Abu Jamal.
“Had he taken a position on the case, and if not, did he intend to do so? ‘I haven’t, only because the details of this event I’ve never studied. I’m vaguely familiar with the fact that there’s been a controversy around it. So let me just lay out a very clear principle: In my mind, if somebody killed a police officer, they deserve the death penalty or life in prison,’ he told me.
“Amen to that.”
Reporting on the lobbying effort at the NAACP convention, an article in the Amsterdam News (16-22 July), explained “hope is based on the premise that having a Black attorney general, a Black president…will give Abu-Jamal’s plight stronger consideration.” The self-proclaimed “communists” of WWP took a second to no one in championing Obama’s election as “a triumph for the Black masses and all the oppressed” (Workers World, 20 November 2008).
In fact, after eight years of the widely despised Bush regime, Obama’s election has provided a much-needed facelift for U.S. imperialism to more effectively lord it over the world’s working and oppressed masses. In the U.S., the inauguration of America’s first black president is a powerful propaganda weapon for the U.S. rulers. The message to black people and the oppressed is to shut up and eat it because the election of a black man as president proves the “American dream” works! This was exactly Obama’s message in his speech to the NAACP convention. “No excuses. No excuses,” he intoned, channeling Booker T. Washington, who over a century ago preached accommodation to the racist status quo by telling the impoverished black masses to pull themselves up by their bootstraps (if they owned any).
The reformists and liberals were successful in getting the NAACP to pass a resolution calling on Holder to investigate Mumia’s case. It would be more than welcome if the NAACP put its considerable resources in a genuine fight to free Mumia. But this is not the political purpose of the WWP et al.’s petition for a civil rights investigation, which disappears the fact that Mumia is innocent and pushes illusions in the “fairness” of the American “justice” system. This was captured by NAACP chairman Julian Bond in an interview with Amy Goodman that aired on July 20. Bond argued that Mumia has “had trouble” bringing “doubts” about his case “before a tribunal that can say, you know, these things are true or they’re not true. And we think he needs that chance. We think he needs that chance before the state of Pennsylvania decides to snuff his life out.” I.e., notwithstanding the NAACP’s opposition to the death penalty, the key thing is to let Mumia have another day in court before the rulers “snuff his life out.”
Mumia’s Cause and the Fight for Black Freedom
Black oppression is structurally embedded in American capitalism and will not be overcome short of socialist revolution. In our struggle to free Mumia and abolish the racist death penalty, we seek to win the working class to the understanding that the fight for black freedom is central to the fight for the liberation of all of labor and the oppressed from a system based on exploitation and rooted in the segregation of the black masses at the bottom of society.
The fight to mobilize the social power of the working class in struggle for Mumia’s freedom faces many obstacles. Integrated unions representing millions of workers have gone on record in support of Mumia. But these millions have not been mobilized in action to combat this racist frame-up. The responsibility for that lies with the pro-capitalist trade-union misleaders, who overwhelmingly refuse to call their members into action to defend their economic interests, much less in defense of a black political prisoner. The bureaucracy’s class-collaborationist policies, which have tied the working class to its capitalist class enemy, have dissipated the fighting strength of the unions. The pathetic reformist and liberal petitioners of Obama and Holder similarly do their best in reinforcing belief in the inherent benevolence of the capitalist state.
For the Spartacist League and the Partisan Defense Committee, the fight for Mumia’s freedom is part of the struggle to do away with a social and economic system based on exploitation, increasingly hideous oppression and state terror. The power to do that lies in the hands of the multiracial working class, with its numbers, organization, discipline and, most importantly, its capacity to bring the wheels of the capitalist profit system to a grinding halt. Mobilizing that power is a question of building a revolutionary workers party, acting as the tribune of the people that can bring to the working class the consciousness of its historic interests to be the instrumentality to shatter the power of the racist capitalist rulers and their state.
The stakes are high and the situation is grim, but any real fight for Mumia’s freedom must be based on a class-struggle opposition to the capitalist rulers, who have entombed this innocent black man in prison for more than half his life.
*The Latest On Native American Leader Leonard Peltier- Free Leonard Peltier- He Must Not Die In Jail!
Click on title to link to the Leonard Peltier Defense web site. The information below is passed on from the Partisan Defense Committee.
Outrage
Leonard Peltier Denied Parole
On August 21, the U.S. Parole Commission again turned down the parole request of Leonard Peltier, a prominent member of the American Indian Movement who was framed up on charges of killing two FBI agents during the federal assault on the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1975. The commission coldbloodedly declared Peltier would not be considered for parole for another 15 years! For the 64-year-old Peltier, who suffers from diabetes, high blood pressure, partial blindness and a heart condition, this is a declaration by the racist rulers that this courageous man will die in prison.
Grotesquely, U.S. Attorney Drew Wrigley gloated, “Leonard Peltier is exactly where he belongs—federal prison, serving two life sentences.” Wrigley added the claim that Peltier “has neither accepted responsibility for the murders nor shown any remorse,” a standard ruse for denying parole to those imprisoned for crimes they did not commit. As the PDC pointed out in a June 29 letter to the Parole Commission demanding freedom for Peltier (see WV No. 940, 31 July):
“One court proceeding after another has laid bare the evidence of his innocence and of massive prosecutorial misconduct. In a 1985 appeals hearing, the government’s lead attorney admitted, ‘We can’t prove who shot those agents.’
“In 1986, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the trial jury could have acquitted Mr. Peltier if records improperly withheld from the defense had been made available.
“In November 2003, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals stated, ‘Much of the government’s behavior at the Pine Ridge Reservation and in its prosecution of Mr. Peltier is to be condemned. The government withheld evidence. It intimidated witnesses. These facts are not disputed.’
“In 2001, in response to requests under the Freedom of Information Act and lawsuits, the U.S. government admitted it had withheld a staggering 142,579 pages of evidence of its secret COINTELPRO efforts to persecute and convict Mr. Peltier.”
Yet again, the depraved capitalist rulers have demonstrated there is no justice for fighters for the oppressed like Peltier. We join with millions worldwide in demanding: Free Leonard Peltier now!
Outrage
Leonard Peltier Denied Parole
On August 21, the U.S. Parole Commission again turned down the parole request of Leonard Peltier, a prominent member of the American Indian Movement who was framed up on charges of killing two FBI agents during the federal assault on the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1975. The commission coldbloodedly declared Peltier would not be considered for parole for another 15 years! For the 64-year-old Peltier, who suffers from diabetes, high blood pressure, partial blindness and a heart condition, this is a declaration by the racist rulers that this courageous man will die in prison.
Grotesquely, U.S. Attorney Drew Wrigley gloated, “Leonard Peltier is exactly where he belongs—federal prison, serving two life sentences.” Wrigley added the claim that Peltier “has neither accepted responsibility for the murders nor shown any remorse,” a standard ruse for denying parole to those imprisoned for crimes they did not commit. As the PDC pointed out in a June 29 letter to the Parole Commission demanding freedom for Peltier (see WV No. 940, 31 July):
“One court proceeding after another has laid bare the evidence of his innocence and of massive prosecutorial misconduct. In a 1985 appeals hearing, the government’s lead attorney admitted, ‘We can’t prove who shot those agents.’
“In 1986, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the trial jury could have acquitted Mr. Peltier if records improperly withheld from the defense had been made available.
“In November 2003, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals stated, ‘Much of the government’s behavior at the Pine Ridge Reservation and in its prosecution of Mr. Peltier is to be condemned. The government withheld evidence. It intimidated witnesses. These facts are not disputed.’
“In 2001, in response to requests under the Freedom of Information Act and lawsuits, the U.S. government admitted it had withheld a staggering 142,579 pages of evidence of its secret COINTELPRO efforts to persecute and convict Mr. Peltier.”
Yet again, the depraved capitalist rulers have demonstrated there is no justice for fighters for the oppressed like Peltier. We join with millions worldwide in demanding: Free Leonard Peltier now!
Sunday, August 30, 2009
*A Candid Assessment Of The Afghan Debacle By One Of Their Own-Joint Chief Chairman Mullen's View-Ouch !
Click on title to link to recent interview with Joint Chief Of Staff Chairman Mullen for "the real deal" on the situation in Afghanistan (Brian Bender, "Boston Globe", August 26, 2009). Of course, this information has become increasingly apparent for about a year now. Moreover, as an underling to Commander-in-Chief Obama Mullen will salute and say "What next, sir? We have a better idea in every way- Obama, sir (optional),Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Alled Troops!
Saturday, August 29, 2009
*Hold The Presses-The Real Question Of The Day- Who Will Win The National College Football Championship?
Click on title to link to the Associated Press's pre-season Top 25 College Football team ratings.
Well, another season has come around. I usually have plenty to say about the college football scene but I am taking a page from the late gonzo "sportswriter' Hunter S. Thompson playbook. Thompson's premise was that once you have "run the board' on one football season (or any sporting event)you can basically live off the fat of the land thereafter. In the word processor/Internet blog age all you have to do is call up a previous year's work and slip it in. I do so here. Except to note that unless something strange happens (always entirely possible in college football, especially the very competitive SEC)Florida with ace quarterback Tebow should repeat. If they falter, then my real favorite Texas out of the Big 12 should prevail.
Below is the commentary from 2008. Thanks for the tip, Hunter.
"Commentary
This running commentary was started on August 29, 2008 and will continue until January 2009. Each week I am making my comments on the previous week and making my selections for the upcoming week in the comment section. Of course, using the power of the Marxist scientific method (or maybe dumb luck) to enlighten one and all on this earth shaking struggle.
Well, folks now is the lead-up to the first real weekend of college football and time once again for this unrepentant Marxist to use his materialist concept of history to predict the trends of the season. But let us back up for a moment to last year’s (yes, I know ancient history but with blog history available, such as it is in this case, it can be pulled up in an instant) zany season and this forecaster’s ill-advised choices. One knows things are not right when upstart Appalachian State takes Michigan in the first week. It went downhill from there. The next couple of paragraphs taken from a review of Hunter Thompson’s Hey, Rube and a postscript tell the tale when the deal went down.
A run through the ups and downs of Thompson's previous seasons' (2000-2003) gambling wins and loses, however, does not date well. Hell, I can barely remember last week's bets. But the real problem is that, as in politics, we listen to different drummers. I am a long time fan of `pristine and pure' big time college football and would not sully my hands to bet on the NFL so his whining about the San Francisco 49'ers or the Denver Broncos is so much hot air. However, I will take Ohio State and 3 points against LSU in the 2007 college championship game. That's the ticket. I miss Hunter and his wild and wacky writing that made me laugh many a time when I was down and needed a boost but not here. Enough said.
Postscript: May 15, 2008. Needless to say there is a strong difference between my uncanny powers of political prognosis and the rather mundane ability to pick college football champions. Obviously, only a fool would have bet on the Buckeyes of Ohio State against a real SEC team like those Cajun boys from LSU. Right?
...Obviously, at the end of this year’s football season I will have to make better use of the delete key. But all of that is so much hot air and ancient history. Today we start as fresh as new born babes. That, after all is the beauty of this kind of madness. Here goes.
A Democratic convention with a historic black candidate for a nominee. Ho hum. A Republican convention coming up with the same old same old. Yawn. Today, or at least the time it takes me to write up this commentary, all that ‘real’ news is so much hot air. Why? This weekend marks the first serious collegiate football Saturday and the time to make my predictions about who will win this year’s coveted national championship (Jesus, I better stick to politics, this line sounds like something out of the late legendary sportswriter Grantland Rice. Somebody please stop me if I start writing about the 'mythical' national championship). I admit that I got waylaid last year when LSU seemingly came out of nowhere at the end to deliver Ohio State its second consecutive national championship lost. But that was last year. This year is as fresh as the driven snow.
On the first weekend of September it would be pointless (and foolhardy, as well) to name the winner. One of the virtues of following the Top 25 in the college football ratings is that, more so than in professional sports, the most precise calculations can blow up in your face. Witness last year’s unlikely defeat of Michigan by Appalachian State. So with that precaution in mind here is my Top Four which reflects the strength of the top conferences in the scheme of things. Pac-10- Southern California (no-brainer out West). Big 10-Ohio State (here I finally like them so they probably will tank out on me). Big 12- Oklahoma (although I like that quarterback McCoy from Texas, if he ever stops throwing interceptions) and the home conference of last year’s national champion’s, the SEC- Georgia who came on like gang busters at the end of last season (no, no repeat for LSU. Yes, I like Florida's Heisman Trophy Tebow but is the team around him strong enough?). For all you Clemson(ACC) and/or West Virginia fans (Big East). Get real-again!
I promise to do better updating the weekly commentary. Hell, all there is as an alternative is this misbegotten presidential campaign so I should have plenty of time on my hands."
Well, another season has come around. I usually have plenty to say about the college football scene but I am taking a page from the late gonzo "sportswriter' Hunter S. Thompson playbook. Thompson's premise was that once you have "run the board' on one football season (or any sporting event)you can basically live off the fat of the land thereafter. In the word processor/Internet blog age all you have to do is call up a previous year's work and slip it in. I do so here. Except to note that unless something strange happens (always entirely possible in college football, especially the very competitive SEC)Florida with ace quarterback Tebow should repeat. If they falter, then my real favorite Texas out of the Big 12 should prevail.
Below is the commentary from 2008. Thanks for the tip, Hunter.
"Commentary
This running commentary was started on August 29, 2008 and will continue until January 2009. Each week I am making my comments on the previous week and making my selections for the upcoming week in the comment section. Of course, using the power of the Marxist scientific method (or maybe dumb luck) to enlighten one and all on this earth shaking struggle.
Well, folks now is the lead-up to the first real weekend of college football and time once again for this unrepentant Marxist to use his materialist concept of history to predict the trends of the season. But let us back up for a moment to last year’s (yes, I know ancient history but with blog history available, such as it is in this case, it can be pulled up in an instant) zany season and this forecaster’s ill-advised choices. One knows things are not right when upstart Appalachian State takes Michigan in the first week. It went downhill from there. The next couple of paragraphs taken from a review of Hunter Thompson’s Hey, Rube and a postscript tell the tale when the deal went down.
A run through the ups and downs of Thompson's previous seasons' (2000-2003) gambling wins and loses, however, does not date well. Hell, I can barely remember last week's bets. But the real problem is that, as in politics, we listen to different drummers. I am a long time fan of `pristine and pure' big time college football and would not sully my hands to bet on the NFL so his whining about the San Francisco 49'ers or the Denver Broncos is so much hot air. However, I will take Ohio State and 3 points against LSU in the 2007 college championship game. That's the ticket. I miss Hunter and his wild and wacky writing that made me laugh many a time when I was down and needed a boost but not here. Enough said.
Postscript: May 15, 2008. Needless to say there is a strong difference between my uncanny powers of political prognosis and the rather mundane ability to pick college football champions. Obviously, only a fool would have bet on the Buckeyes of Ohio State against a real SEC team like those Cajun boys from LSU. Right?
...Obviously, at the end of this year’s football season I will have to make better use of the delete key. But all of that is so much hot air and ancient history. Today we start as fresh as new born babes. That, after all is the beauty of this kind of madness. Here goes.
A Democratic convention with a historic black candidate for a nominee. Ho hum. A Republican convention coming up with the same old same old. Yawn. Today, or at least the time it takes me to write up this commentary, all that ‘real’ news is so much hot air. Why? This weekend marks the first serious collegiate football Saturday and the time to make my predictions about who will win this year’s coveted national championship (Jesus, I better stick to politics, this line sounds like something out of the late legendary sportswriter Grantland Rice. Somebody please stop me if I start writing about the 'mythical' national championship). I admit that I got waylaid last year when LSU seemingly came out of nowhere at the end to deliver Ohio State its second consecutive national championship lost. But that was last year. This year is as fresh as the driven snow.
On the first weekend of September it would be pointless (and foolhardy, as well) to name the winner. One of the virtues of following the Top 25 in the college football ratings is that, more so than in professional sports, the most precise calculations can blow up in your face. Witness last year’s unlikely defeat of Michigan by Appalachian State. So with that precaution in mind here is my Top Four which reflects the strength of the top conferences in the scheme of things. Pac-10- Southern California (no-brainer out West). Big 10-Ohio State (here I finally like them so they probably will tank out on me). Big 12- Oklahoma (although I like that quarterback McCoy from Texas, if he ever stops throwing interceptions) and the home conference of last year’s national champion’s, the SEC- Georgia who came on like gang busters at the end of last season (no, no repeat for LSU. Yes, I like Florida's Heisman Trophy Tebow but is the team around him strong enough?). For all you Clemson(ACC) and/or West Virginia fans (Big East). Get real-again!
I promise to do better updating the weekly commentary. Hell, all there is as an alternative is this misbegotten presidential campaign so I should have plenty of time on my hands."
*From The 1960s Folk Revival -Spider John Koerner-Music For The Long Haul From When First We Came Unto This Country
Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of Spider John Koerner performing at the "Plough And Stars" In Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2007. Sounds like about the right place for him to be, right?
CD Review
Stargeezer, Spider John Koerner, Red House Reords, 1996
Okay, Okay those of you who have been keeping tabs know that I have spend much of the last year, when not doing political commentary or book or movie reviews, reviewing many of the old time folk artists that, along with the blues, were the passion of my youth in the early 1960's. You might also know, if you are keeping tabs, that I have been attempting to answer a question that I have posed elsewhere in this space earlier about the fate or fates of various performers from that period. Spider John Koerner was a lesser known, but important, fixture on the Cambridge/Boston folk scene during that time, as well as later once the hubbub died down and he and a local stalwart, Mr. Bones, carried on the tradition in smaller venues and in front of smaller crowds.
The CD represents a later 1996 attempt to keep up with folk developments as well as the old traditions. I find the CD as whole a little uneven in quality but certainly his efforts on "Stewball", "Danville Girl" and "Casey Jones" rank with the best of his earlier work. I would make special note of his cover of the old popular tune "Stardust". That cover may be worth the price of the whole CD. He is coming from some very different place on that one, and it is a very nice place indeed.
WHEN FIRST UNTO THIS COUNTRY
Lyrics: Traditional
Music: Traditional
When first unto this country
A stranger I came
I courted a fair maid
And Nancy was her name
I courted her for love
Her love I didn't obtain
Do you think I've any reason
Or right to complain
I rode to see my Nancy
I rode both night and day
I stoled a fine stallion
From Colonel Charles Grey
I rode to see my Nancy
I rode both day and night
I courted fairest Nancy
My own heart's true delight
The sheriff's men they followed
And overtaken me
They carted me away
To the penitentiary
They opened up the door
And then they threw me in
They shaved off my hair
And they cleared off my chin
They beat me and they banged me
And they fed me on dry beans
'Til I wished to my own soul
I'd never been a thief
With my hands stuck in my pockets
And my cap set on so bold
My coat of many colors
Like Joseph's of old
When first unto this country
A stranger I came
I courted a fair maid
And Nancy was her name
CD Review
Stargeezer, Spider John Koerner, Red House Reords, 1996
Okay, Okay those of you who have been keeping tabs know that I have spend much of the last year, when not doing political commentary or book or movie reviews, reviewing many of the old time folk artists that, along with the blues, were the passion of my youth in the early 1960's. You might also know, if you are keeping tabs, that I have been attempting to answer a question that I have posed elsewhere in this space earlier about the fate or fates of various performers from that period. Spider John Koerner was a lesser known, but important, fixture on the Cambridge/Boston folk scene during that time, as well as later once the hubbub died down and he and a local stalwart, Mr. Bones, carried on the tradition in smaller venues and in front of smaller crowds.
The CD represents a later 1996 attempt to keep up with folk developments as well as the old traditions. I find the CD as whole a little uneven in quality but certainly his efforts on "Stewball", "Danville Girl" and "Casey Jones" rank with the best of his earlier work. I would make special note of his cover of the old popular tune "Stardust". That cover may be worth the price of the whole CD. He is coming from some very different place on that one, and it is a very nice place indeed.
WHEN FIRST UNTO THIS COUNTRY
Lyrics: Traditional
Music: Traditional
When first unto this country
A stranger I came
I courted a fair maid
And Nancy was her name
I courted her for love
Her love I didn't obtain
Do you think I've any reason
Or right to complain
I rode to see my Nancy
I rode both night and day
I stoled a fine stallion
From Colonel Charles Grey
I rode to see my Nancy
I rode both day and night
I courted fairest Nancy
My own heart's true delight
The sheriff's men they followed
And overtaken me
They carted me away
To the penitentiary
They opened up the door
And then they threw me in
They shaved off my hair
And they cleared off my chin
They beat me and they banged me
And they fed me on dry beans
'Til I wished to my own soul
I'd never been a thief
With my hands stuck in my pockets
And my cap set on so bold
My coat of many colors
Like Joseph's of old
When first unto this country
A stranger I came
I courted a fair maid
And Nancy was her name
Friday, August 28, 2009
*Listen Reds, So You Want Run For President- Read This -The Fight Against Bourgeois Electoral Cretinism- “Marxist Principles and Electoral Tactics"
Click On Title To Link To “ Marxist Principles And Electoral Tactics” , An Article From “Spartacist” Spring 2009 The International Communist League’s English Language Theoretical Journal.
Markin Commentary
Although the latest bourgeois election cycle is now, mercifully over, and we probably have a few days left in the year 2009 before the major capitalist parties once again start full-bore (or is it full-boring?) on the next electoral cycle leading up to the 2012 presidential elections it is not a bad time for radicals and revolutionaries to reflect, once gain, on our relationship to the norms of the bourgeois electoral cycle. Although it may not seem to be apparent as a pressing issue for radicals and revolutionaries, given our other propaganda and agitational tasks around opposition to various American-led imperial wars, the fight against further atomization of the working class and the struggle for a workers party now is the time to be clear about where we have to head strategically. With that in mind I have linked to an interesting article put out by the International Communist League from “Spartacist” Spring 2009, their English language theoretical journal “Marxist Principles and Electoral Tactics”.
I will state upfront that I am a recent convert to the view that radical and revolutionaries should not run for the executive offices of the bourgeois state. I wrote an entry in this space in 2008 during the last electoral cycle describing that “conversion”, the reasoning behind it and why it made sense to do so at the time. (PUT IN HERE ENTRY If elected …..) I, nevertheless, had some lingering questions and, frankly, leftover attitudes from my previous adherence to the old time orthodox left communist position of running for executive office with the explicit proviso that one, of course, if elected would refuse to serve. This article goes a long way toward answering at least some of those questions and providing an exhaustive background look at the history of the controversy in the international workers movement.
The most pressing question resolved, and I shutter to think that I was so cavalier about it, is the strategic communist attitude toward elections as a piece of the puzzle in putting together a revolutionary strategy. If nothing else this article should make those who think that we can just summarily throw up candidates helter-skelter for any office in order to serve our immediate propaganda purposes. As the article details many a socialist and communist has lost their way in incorrectly assuming that “controlling” the administrative offices of the bourgeois state or having a huge parliamentary fraction in some national assembly gave one a leg up on the revolutionary process. The most important sentence in the whole argument is the one where, while dismissing running for elective executive offices out of hand, it was stated that communist could serve in national assemblies, as oppositionists. That is the forgotten quality that had been missing in the movement and in my own take on this question. It is not a matter of how many or how big parliamentary political organization revolutionaries can build but how they can use the bourgeois institutions to overthrow them. If you undertake the task of administering the bourgeois state you will, one way or another, “pay the piper”.
Aside from honing in on that political perspective the other virtue of the article is that it gives a very detailed historical description of various attitudes and policies that evolved since the time of the revolutions of 1848 in the international movement. Clearly, if it were merely a matter of the weight of history then the ICL position as posed would be a minority one. Interestingly, even the great revolutionary organization, the Communist International, in its revolutionary days and the great Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky (and his American followers originally, during his lifetime, coalesced in the Socialist Workers Party has, at best equivocal positions, on this question. As I mentioned in that previous entry the power of precedent is not confined to the law. A powerful argument has to be made in order to justify a change of positions. While I still have some practical tactical questions around the implementation of this policy, for example, the effect that it has on the issue of critical support to other workers organizations that DO run for executive office and support to parliamentary fractions of workers organizations that attempt form coalition governments with bourgeois forced in order, in effect, to administer the bourgeois state this is an important contribution to Marxist theory of the state. As important as Lenin’s “State And Revolution”? No. But an important supplement to that work. Read, and re-read this article. Down With The Executive Offices Of The Capitalist State!
Markin Commentary
Although the latest bourgeois election cycle is now, mercifully over, and we probably have a few days left in the year 2009 before the major capitalist parties once again start full-bore (or is it full-boring?) on the next electoral cycle leading up to the 2012 presidential elections it is not a bad time for radicals and revolutionaries to reflect, once gain, on our relationship to the norms of the bourgeois electoral cycle. Although it may not seem to be apparent as a pressing issue for radicals and revolutionaries, given our other propaganda and agitational tasks around opposition to various American-led imperial wars, the fight against further atomization of the working class and the struggle for a workers party now is the time to be clear about where we have to head strategically. With that in mind I have linked to an interesting article put out by the International Communist League from “Spartacist” Spring 2009, their English language theoretical journal “Marxist Principles and Electoral Tactics”.
I will state upfront that I am a recent convert to the view that radical and revolutionaries should not run for the executive offices of the bourgeois state. I wrote an entry in this space in 2008 during the last electoral cycle describing that “conversion”, the reasoning behind it and why it made sense to do so at the time. (PUT IN HERE ENTRY If elected …..) I, nevertheless, had some lingering questions and, frankly, leftover attitudes from my previous adherence to the old time orthodox left communist position of running for executive office with the explicit proviso that one, of course, if elected would refuse to serve. This article goes a long way toward answering at least some of those questions and providing an exhaustive background look at the history of the controversy in the international workers movement.
The most pressing question resolved, and I shutter to think that I was so cavalier about it, is the strategic communist attitude toward elections as a piece of the puzzle in putting together a revolutionary strategy. If nothing else this article should make those who think that we can just summarily throw up candidates helter-skelter for any office in order to serve our immediate propaganda purposes. As the article details many a socialist and communist has lost their way in incorrectly assuming that “controlling” the administrative offices of the bourgeois state or having a huge parliamentary fraction in some national assembly gave one a leg up on the revolutionary process. The most important sentence in the whole argument is the one where, while dismissing running for elective executive offices out of hand, it was stated that communist could serve in national assemblies, as oppositionists. That is the forgotten quality that had been missing in the movement and in my own take on this question. It is not a matter of how many or how big parliamentary political organization revolutionaries can build but how they can use the bourgeois institutions to overthrow them. If you undertake the task of administering the bourgeois state you will, one way or another, “pay the piper”.
Aside from honing in on that political perspective the other virtue of the article is that it gives a very detailed historical description of various attitudes and policies that evolved since the time of the revolutions of 1848 in the international movement. Clearly, if it were merely a matter of the weight of history then the ICL position as posed would be a minority one. Interestingly, even the great revolutionary organization, the Communist International, in its revolutionary days and the great Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky (and his American followers originally, during his lifetime, coalesced in the Socialist Workers Party has, at best equivocal positions, on this question. As I mentioned in that previous entry the power of precedent is not confined to the law. A powerful argument has to be made in order to justify a change of positions. While I still have some practical tactical questions around the implementation of this policy, for example, the effect that it has on the issue of critical support to other workers organizations that DO run for executive office and support to parliamentary fractions of workers organizations that attempt form coalition governments with bourgeois forced in order, in effect, to administer the bourgeois state this is an important contribution to Marxist theory of the state. As important as Lenin’s “State And Revolution”? No. But an important supplement to that work. Read, and re-read this article. Down With The Executive Offices Of The Capitalist State!
*The Controversy Over Revolutionaries Running For The Executive Offices Of The Capitalist State-Do You Really Want To Be In Obama's Shoes-Hell, No!
Click on title to link to an earlier entry in this space concerning my “getting religion” on the question of revolutionaries running for the executive offices of the capitalist state.
Markin comment:
As detailed in that entry I, for a very long time, had held to the classic communist view (including previously to their new turn, the International Communist League) that there was some propaganda value in running for such offices under the assumption that, of course, if victorious the office would be rejected. Even saying that last sentence now, in my post-conversion period, makes me realize just how absurd the old position honorably held or not, really was given our relationship to the capitalist state. The exchange below from the pages of “Workers Vanguard” and a reader only emphasize that problem. Like many a late “convert” I am now ‘more Catholic than the Pope’, as the old expression used to be put in my grandparents’ house. The reader’s argument is so, well lets’ say it straight, naïve (at best) that it is hard to believe that there would be any opposition to this particular line change among revolutionaries. Let’s just put it this way-”Down With The Executive Offices of the Capitalist State!”. Needless to say, down with the capitalist state as well.
Workers Vanguard No. 940
31 July 2009
On Executive Offices and the Capitalist State: An Exchange
(Letter)
To the editor:
You take the position in Workers Vanguard (No. 918 [1 August 2008]) that Socialists should not run for executive office. You argue “To run for executive office means to aspire to be the next Commander-in-Chief who decides who gets tortured, who gets bombed, who gets invaded.”
On the contrary, a Socialist President would have the torturers arrested and prosecuted, starting with those who authorized the torture, to wit, Bush and Cheney et al.
He would immediately end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and bring all the troops home. And he would do everything in his power to advance the struggle for Socialism and oppose Capitalism and U.S. Imperialism.
U.S. military bases around the world would be shut down and all U.S. forces returned home and demobilized. Guantánamo would be returned to Cuba and the embargo ended. U.S. support for right wing regimes and Israel would end. The Pentagon and CIA budgets would be reduced to close to zero and the money saved would be used to better the lives of the American people.
All Federal political prisoners would be pardoned and so called “enemy combatants” would be freed or tried in Federal courts. Military commissions would be abolished. Spying on Americans would be immediately stopped. The crimes and lies of the Bush administration and its predecessors would be brought to the attention of the public. The practice of rendition would be ended. Left wing attorneys would be nominated to the Federal Judiciary.
Obviously if a Socialist were elected to the Presidency it would mean a tremendous leftward shift in U.S. politics, brought on no doubt by an economic crisis of severe proportions. The workers would be looking to Socialism as the answer to their problems.
A Socialist President by himself could not bring about Socialism, but he would explain what Socialism is and what would be needed to bring it about.
He would propose nationalizing the key industries, services and banks and operating them under workers control. If these proposals were blocked by Congress, the executive powers of Eminent Domain could be used to take over key industries etc. without Congressional approval.
He would fight for and mobilize the workers to achieve: Single Payer National Health insurance, a 30 hour week at 40 hour pay, repeal of all anti-labor laws, an indefinite moratorium on home mortgage foreclosures, a ban on companies relocating outside the country, shifting the tax burden off the workers onto the wealthy and the corporations, free college education, a guaranteed job for all, etc.
Incidentally, you might recall that both Marx and Engels believed that at least in the case of the United States and England, because of their long democratic traditions, Socialism could be achieved electorally and peacefully.
However, should a workers revolution develop in the United States, wouldn’t its chances of success be far greater if the President, who is Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, were a Socialist? Think about this.
Running for the Presidency gives Socialists a wonderful opportunity to educate the American people about Socialism.
And if a Socialist were elected President it would represent a giant step toward a Socialist America.
Yours truly,
Concerned Reader
WV Replies:
The starting point of the above letter, using the example of the American imperial presidency, is that the working class can utilize the existing state apparatus to implement beneficial policies and gain political supremacy. In fact, the tasks that the author proposes for a “socialist” president are hardly revolutionary. Such proposals on torture, spying, the economy and health care read like a liberal or social-democratic wish list, while the call for a ban on companies relocating abroad echoes the “Buy American” chauvinism of the Democrats and the trade-union bureaucracy. More fundamentally, the differences we have with the letter are not only over the question of running for executive offices but the very basis of our opposition to running for such offices: the nature of the capitalist state. As we wrote in our extensive article (to which we refer readers), “Marxist Principles and Electoral Tactics” (Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 61, Spring 2009):
“Behind the question of running for executive office stands the fundamental counterposition between reformism and Marxism: Can the proletariat use bourgeois democracy and the bourgeois state to achieve a peaceful transition to socialism? Or, rather, must the proletariat smash the old state machinery, and in its place create a new state to impose its own class rule—the dictatorship of the proletariat—to suppress and expropriate the capitalist exploiters?”
Bourgeois politicians, sociologists and academics have utterly distorted what the state is, presenting it as a body that stands above society with the purpose of organizing it and arbitrating its class antagonisms. In reality, as Marxist leader V.I. Lenin outlined in his 1917 work, The State and Revolution, “the state is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another; it is the creation of ‘order,’ which legalises and perpetuates this oppression by moderating the conflict between the classes.” In modern capitalist society, the state exists to defend the rule and profits of the bourgeoisie against the working class and oppressed. At its core, the state is made up of armed bodies of men and their adjuncts dedicated to that task: the cops, the military, the prisons, the courts.
The letter writer betrays huge illusions in bourgeois democracy. Such democracy is, in fact, for the bourgeoisie against the proletariat and oppressed. Lenin observed, “A democratic republic is the best possible political shell for capitalism, and, therefore, once capital has gained possession of this very best shell…it establishes its power so securely, so firmly, that no change of persons, institutions or parties in the bourgeois-democratic republic can shake it.”
History has repeatedly demonstrated that the bourgeois state cannot be made to serve the interests of the proletariat and the oppressed. This was shown by the 1871 Paris Commune—when the Parisian proletariat held power for nearly three months before being crushed at a cost of over 20,000 lives. Lenin pointed out that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels found only one point from the 1848 Communist Manifesto that they considered “out-of-date.” Based on the experience of the Commune, Marx wrote in The Civil War in France (1871) that it had become clear that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes.” Lenin underlined in The State and Revolution, “The working class must break up, smash the ‘ready-made state machinery,’ and not confine itself merely to laying hold of it.” The capitalist state must be smashed through a socialist revolution that erects in its place a workers state—i.e., the dictatorship of the proletariat, based on democratically-elected workers councils (soviets). It will take the victory of proletarian revolution on an international scale to lay the basis for the creation of a classless communist society and the withering away of the state.
To bolster its argument, the above letter states that “Marx and Engels believed that at least in the case of the United States and England, because of their long democratic traditions, Socialism could be achieved electorally and peacefully.” In fact, in those instances where Marx asserted that in the U.S. and England “workers may achieve their aims by peaceful means” (“On the Hague Congress,” 8 September 1872), he did not base himself on these countries’ “long democratic traditions” but rather on his belief that these countries lacked militarist cliques or significant bureaucratic apparatuses.
However, Marx’s speculation was in error. Britain had a vast colonial empire requiring large bureaucracies and military forces. In the U.S., the post-Civil War period produced an enormous boost to Northern capital, so that by the time of the Ulysses S. Grant administration all the pieces were in place for the development of full-blown U.S. imperialism in the coming decades (see “The Grant Administration (1869-1877) and the Rise of U.S. Imperialism,” WV Nos. 938 and 939, 5 June and 3 July). At any rate, whatever Marx may have speculated, we are now in the imperialist epoch. Today, the idea of a peaceful, parliamentary transition to socialism is worse than a pipe dream; it is a noose placed on the proletariat by the reformists and other enemies of workers revolution.
Writing in 1899, after French Socialist Alexandre Millerand took a ministerial post in the government, revolutionary Marxist Rosa Luxemburg underscored: “The government of the modern state is essentially an organization of class domination, the regular functioning of which is one of the conditions of existence of the class state. With the entry of a socialist into the government, and class domination continuing to exist, the bourgeois government doesn’t transform itself into a socialist government, but a socialist transforms himself into a bourgeois minister.”
This point has been repeatedly confirmed, with tragic results for workers and the oppressed. In 1970 in Chile, the Socialist Party’s Salvador Allende and his Unidad Popular—a coalition government that subordinated the workers to their deadly class enemies through a bloc of workers parties with a mythical “progressive” section of the bourgeoisie and the “democratic” officer corps—won a major electoral victory. When Allende became president, reformists across the globe hailed this as a great victory in the advance to socialism. But as we warned in “The Chilean Popular Front” (Spartacist No. 19, November-December 1970): “It is the most elementary duty for revolutionary Marxists to irreconcilably oppose the Popular Front in the election and to place absolutely no confidence in it in power. Any ‘critical support’ to the Allende coalition is class treason, paving the way for a bloody defeat for the Chilean working people when domestic reaction, abetted by international imperialism, is ready.”
It was the Chilean masses that paid for the reformists’ betrayals. Backed by the U.S., General Augusto Pinochet, whom Allende had appointed as Commander-in-Chief of the Army, led a military coup on 11 September 1973 that overthrew the government, assassinated Allende and slaughtered tens of thousands of workers and other militants. Allende was not simply a martyred victim of the CIA and Chilean generals; he and his reformist supporters, with their promotion of a “peaceful” (i.e., parliamentary) road to socialism, led the Chilean working masses directly into this defeat.
Our position is that communist deputies can, as oppositionists, serve in bourgeois legislative bodies as tribunes of the proletariat. But assuming executive office means taking responsibility for the administration of the machinery of the capitalist state. And to stand for executive office carries the implication that one is ready to accept such responsibility (no matter what disclaimer one makes in advance). This can only lend legitimacy to prevailing and reformist conceptions of the state.
The 1917 Russian Revolution led by the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky proved the validity of the Marxist theory on the state and made it a reality. In reaching our position on not running for executive offices, we are fulfilling and extending the work of the Communist International of Lenin and Trotsky’s time. As Lenin put it in The State and Revolution, “A Marxist is solely someone who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat.”
Markin comment:
As detailed in that entry I, for a very long time, had held to the classic communist view (including previously to their new turn, the International Communist League) that there was some propaganda value in running for such offices under the assumption that, of course, if victorious the office would be rejected. Even saying that last sentence now, in my post-conversion period, makes me realize just how absurd the old position honorably held or not, really was given our relationship to the capitalist state. The exchange below from the pages of “Workers Vanguard” and a reader only emphasize that problem. Like many a late “convert” I am now ‘more Catholic than the Pope’, as the old expression used to be put in my grandparents’ house. The reader’s argument is so, well lets’ say it straight, naïve (at best) that it is hard to believe that there would be any opposition to this particular line change among revolutionaries. Let’s just put it this way-”Down With The Executive Offices of the Capitalist State!”. Needless to say, down with the capitalist state as well.
Workers Vanguard No. 940
31 July 2009
On Executive Offices and the Capitalist State: An Exchange
(Letter)
To the editor:
You take the position in Workers Vanguard (No. 918 [1 August 2008]) that Socialists should not run for executive office. You argue “To run for executive office means to aspire to be the next Commander-in-Chief who decides who gets tortured, who gets bombed, who gets invaded.”
On the contrary, a Socialist President would have the torturers arrested and prosecuted, starting with those who authorized the torture, to wit, Bush and Cheney et al.
He would immediately end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and bring all the troops home. And he would do everything in his power to advance the struggle for Socialism and oppose Capitalism and U.S. Imperialism.
U.S. military bases around the world would be shut down and all U.S. forces returned home and demobilized. Guantánamo would be returned to Cuba and the embargo ended. U.S. support for right wing regimes and Israel would end. The Pentagon and CIA budgets would be reduced to close to zero and the money saved would be used to better the lives of the American people.
All Federal political prisoners would be pardoned and so called “enemy combatants” would be freed or tried in Federal courts. Military commissions would be abolished. Spying on Americans would be immediately stopped. The crimes and lies of the Bush administration and its predecessors would be brought to the attention of the public. The practice of rendition would be ended. Left wing attorneys would be nominated to the Federal Judiciary.
Obviously if a Socialist were elected to the Presidency it would mean a tremendous leftward shift in U.S. politics, brought on no doubt by an economic crisis of severe proportions. The workers would be looking to Socialism as the answer to their problems.
A Socialist President by himself could not bring about Socialism, but he would explain what Socialism is and what would be needed to bring it about.
He would propose nationalizing the key industries, services and banks and operating them under workers control. If these proposals were blocked by Congress, the executive powers of Eminent Domain could be used to take over key industries etc. without Congressional approval.
He would fight for and mobilize the workers to achieve: Single Payer National Health insurance, a 30 hour week at 40 hour pay, repeal of all anti-labor laws, an indefinite moratorium on home mortgage foreclosures, a ban on companies relocating outside the country, shifting the tax burden off the workers onto the wealthy and the corporations, free college education, a guaranteed job for all, etc.
Incidentally, you might recall that both Marx and Engels believed that at least in the case of the United States and England, because of their long democratic traditions, Socialism could be achieved electorally and peacefully.
However, should a workers revolution develop in the United States, wouldn’t its chances of success be far greater if the President, who is Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, were a Socialist? Think about this.
Running for the Presidency gives Socialists a wonderful opportunity to educate the American people about Socialism.
And if a Socialist were elected President it would represent a giant step toward a Socialist America.
Yours truly,
Concerned Reader
WV Replies:
The starting point of the above letter, using the example of the American imperial presidency, is that the working class can utilize the existing state apparatus to implement beneficial policies and gain political supremacy. In fact, the tasks that the author proposes for a “socialist” president are hardly revolutionary. Such proposals on torture, spying, the economy and health care read like a liberal or social-democratic wish list, while the call for a ban on companies relocating abroad echoes the “Buy American” chauvinism of the Democrats and the trade-union bureaucracy. More fundamentally, the differences we have with the letter are not only over the question of running for executive offices but the very basis of our opposition to running for such offices: the nature of the capitalist state. As we wrote in our extensive article (to which we refer readers), “Marxist Principles and Electoral Tactics” (Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 61, Spring 2009):
“Behind the question of running for executive office stands the fundamental counterposition between reformism and Marxism: Can the proletariat use bourgeois democracy and the bourgeois state to achieve a peaceful transition to socialism? Or, rather, must the proletariat smash the old state machinery, and in its place create a new state to impose its own class rule—the dictatorship of the proletariat—to suppress and expropriate the capitalist exploiters?”
Bourgeois politicians, sociologists and academics have utterly distorted what the state is, presenting it as a body that stands above society with the purpose of organizing it and arbitrating its class antagonisms. In reality, as Marxist leader V.I. Lenin outlined in his 1917 work, The State and Revolution, “the state is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another; it is the creation of ‘order,’ which legalises and perpetuates this oppression by moderating the conflict between the classes.” In modern capitalist society, the state exists to defend the rule and profits of the bourgeoisie against the working class and oppressed. At its core, the state is made up of armed bodies of men and their adjuncts dedicated to that task: the cops, the military, the prisons, the courts.
The letter writer betrays huge illusions in bourgeois democracy. Such democracy is, in fact, for the bourgeoisie against the proletariat and oppressed. Lenin observed, “A democratic republic is the best possible political shell for capitalism, and, therefore, once capital has gained possession of this very best shell…it establishes its power so securely, so firmly, that no change of persons, institutions or parties in the bourgeois-democratic republic can shake it.”
History has repeatedly demonstrated that the bourgeois state cannot be made to serve the interests of the proletariat and the oppressed. This was shown by the 1871 Paris Commune—when the Parisian proletariat held power for nearly three months before being crushed at a cost of over 20,000 lives. Lenin pointed out that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels found only one point from the 1848 Communist Manifesto that they considered “out-of-date.” Based on the experience of the Commune, Marx wrote in The Civil War in France (1871) that it had become clear that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes.” Lenin underlined in The State and Revolution, “The working class must break up, smash the ‘ready-made state machinery,’ and not confine itself merely to laying hold of it.” The capitalist state must be smashed through a socialist revolution that erects in its place a workers state—i.e., the dictatorship of the proletariat, based on democratically-elected workers councils (soviets). It will take the victory of proletarian revolution on an international scale to lay the basis for the creation of a classless communist society and the withering away of the state.
To bolster its argument, the above letter states that “Marx and Engels believed that at least in the case of the United States and England, because of their long democratic traditions, Socialism could be achieved electorally and peacefully.” In fact, in those instances where Marx asserted that in the U.S. and England “workers may achieve their aims by peaceful means” (“On the Hague Congress,” 8 September 1872), he did not base himself on these countries’ “long democratic traditions” but rather on his belief that these countries lacked militarist cliques or significant bureaucratic apparatuses.
However, Marx’s speculation was in error. Britain had a vast colonial empire requiring large bureaucracies and military forces. In the U.S., the post-Civil War period produced an enormous boost to Northern capital, so that by the time of the Ulysses S. Grant administration all the pieces were in place for the development of full-blown U.S. imperialism in the coming decades (see “The Grant Administration (1869-1877) and the Rise of U.S. Imperialism,” WV Nos. 938 and 939, 5 June and 3 July). At any rate, whatever Marx may have speculated, we are now in the imperialist epoch. Today, the idea of a peaceful, parliamentary transition to socialism is worse than a pipe dream; it is a noose placed on the proletariat by the reformists and other enemies of workers revolution.
Writing in 1899, after French Socialist Alexandre Millerand took a ministerial post in the government, revolutionary Marxist Rosa Luxemburg underscored: “The government of the modern state is essentially an organization of class domination, the regular functioning of which is one of the conditions of existence of the class state. With the entry of a socialist into the government, and class domination continuing to exist, the bourgeois government doesn’t transform itself into a socialist government, but a socialist transforms himself into a bourgeois minister.”
This point has been repeatedly confirmed, with tragic results for workers and the oppressed. In 1970 in Chile, the Socialist Party’s Salvador Allende and his Unidad Popular—a coalition government that subordinated the workers to their deadly class enemies through a bloc of workers parties with a mythical “progressive” section of the bourgeoisie and the “democratic” officer corps—won a major electoral victory. When Allende became president, reformists across the globe hailed this as a great victory in the advance to socialism. But as we warned in “The Chilean Popular Front” (Spartacist No. 19, November-December 1970): “It is the most elementary duty for revolutionary Marxists to irreconcilably oppose the Popular Front in the election and to place absolutely no confidence in it in power. Any ‘critical support’ to the Allende coalition is class treason, paving the way for a bloody defeat for the Chilean working people when domestic reaction, abetted by international imperialism, is ready.”
It was the Chilean masses that paid for the reformists’ betrayals. Backed by the U.S., General Augusto Pinochet, whom Allende had appointed as Commander-in-Chief of the Army, led a military coup on 11 September 1973 that overthrew the government, assassinated Allende and slaughtered tens of thousands of workers and other militants. Allende was not simply a martyred victim of the CIA and Chilean generals; he and his reformist supporters, with their promotion of a “peaceful” (i.e., parliamentary) road to socialism, led the Chilean working masses directly into this defeat.
Our position is that communist deputies can, as oppositionists, serve in bourgeois legislative bodies as tribunes of the proletariat. But assuming executive office means taking responsibility for the administration of the machinery of the capitalist state. And to stand for executive office carries the implication that one is ready to accept such responsibility (no matter what disclaimer one makes in advance). This can only lend legitimacy to prevailing and reformist conceptions of the state.
The 1917 Russian Revolution led by the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky proved the validity of the Marxist theory on the state and made it a reality. In reaching our position on not running for executive offices, we are fulfilling and extending the work of the Communist International of Lenin and Trotsky’s time. As Lenin put it in The State and Revolution, “A Marxist is solely someone who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat.”
As The Kennedy Legacy In American Politics Passes- Reflections Of An Old Leftist On Bobby Kennedy
Click on title to link to the Public Broadcasting System's "American Experience" episode on Robert Kennedy.
Markin Commentary-August 28, 2009
With the passing of Massachusetts United Senator Edward Kennedy on August 26, 2009 there is a palpable sense that a political era has passed in American bourgeois politics. That may be. There will be plenty of time to analyze that, for those so inclined, later. For now though this reviewer, as one who was born in Massachusetts and has been face to face with the Kennedy aura since early childhood, has a few comments to make, not on Ted Kennedy, but on the political hero of my youth his older brother, Robert. I am reposting two entries, “The Real Robert Kennedy” and “On Bobby Kennedy”, from last year, the 40th anniversary of Bobby’s assassination during his run for the 1968 democratic presidential nomination.
As for the late Ted Kennedy he probably went as far it is possible to do in professing the liberal capitalist credo inherited from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “New Deal”. Admittedly, since the halcyon “Camelot” days of the early 1960s that has been a bar that has been progressively lowered. Nevertheless, on specific issues, we leftists could unite (and did), with the appropriate freedom of criticism that we needed to insist on as a condition for joint action, with Ted Kennedy. That, my friends, who may not understand is under the old principle of uniting with “the devil and his grandmother” for the good of our cause.
But here is the real “skinny” on Ted Kennedy from our prospective. When, and if, the deal went down and the existence of the capitalist system was on the line old Teddy would have been the last “liberal” defender on the last barricade of that system. And why not? It was his system. Somewhere to Kennedy’s left there was a great divide that he could not pass and where we would, of necessity, have had to part company on those barricades just mentioned. Enough said on Ted though today I really want to go back to my young and reminisce about Bobby. Again.
Posted on “American Left History”-July 17, 2008
*The Real Robert Kennedy- A Sober Liberal View From PBS's American Experience Series
DVD REVIEW
Robert Kennedy, American Experience, PBS, 2004
It is somewhat ironic that at just the time that when presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, a recent addition to the Democratic Party pantheon of heroes and heir apparent to the Kennedy legacy, is claiming the nomination of the party that the 40th Anniversary of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy during the presidential campaign of 1968 is being remembered in some quarters. That event holds much meaning in the political evolution of this writer. The Robert Kennedy campaign of 1968 was the last time that this writer had a serious desire to fight solely on the parliamentary road for progressive political change. So today he too has some remembrances, as well. This documentary from the Public Broadcasting System’s "American Experience" series only adds some visual flashes to those remembrances.
In a commentary in another space I have mentioned that through the tumultuous period leading to the early spring of 1968 that I had done some political somersaults as a result of Bobby Kennedy’s early refusal to take on a sitting president, Lyndon Johnson, for the Democratic nomination for the presidency. Moreover, I committed myself early (sometime in late 1967) to the reelection of Lyndon Johnson, as much as I hated his Vietnam War policy. Why? One Richard M. Nixon. I did not give Eugene McCarthy’s insurgent campaign even a sniff, although I agreed with his anti-war stance. Why? He could not beat one Richard M. Nixon. When Bobby Kennedy jumped in and Johnson announced that he was not going to run again and I was there the next day. I was a senior in college at the time but I believe I spent hundreds of hours that spring working the campaign either out of Boston, Washington, D.C. or elsewhere. Why? Well, you can guess the obvious by now. He COULD beat one Richard M. Nixon.
It was more than that though, and I will discuss that in the next paragraph. I took, as many did, Bobby's murder hard. It would be rather facile now to say that something of my youth, and that of others who I have talked to recently about this event, got left behind with his murder but there you have it. However, to show you the kind of political year that it was for me about a week after his death I was in the Hubert Humphrey campaign office in Boston. Why? You know why by now. And for those who don’t it had one name- Richard M. Nixon.
But let us get back to that other, more virtuous, political motive for supporting Bobby Kennedy. It was always, in those days, complicated coming from Massachusetts to separate out the whirlwind effect that the Kennedy family had on us, especially on ‘shanty’ Irish families. On the one hand we wished one of our own well, especially against the WASPs, on the other there was always that innate bitterness (jealousy, if you will) that it was not we who were the ones that were getting ahead. If there is any Irish in your family you know what I am talking about.
To be sure, as a fourteen year old I walked the neighborhood for John Kennedy in 1960 but as I have mentioned elsewhere that was a pro forma thing. Part of the ritual of entry into presidential politics. The Bobby thing was from the heart. Why? It is hard to explain but there was something about the deeply felt sense of Irish fatalism that he projected, especially after the death of his brother, that attracted me to him. But also the ruthless side where he was willing to cut Mayor Daly and every politician like him down or pat them on the back and more, if necessary, to get a little rough justice in the world. In those days I held those qualities, especially in tandem, in high esteem. Hell, I still do, if on a narrower basis.
Okay, that is enough for a trip down memory lane back to the old politically naïve days, or rather opportunistic days. Without detailing the events here the end of 1968 was also a watershed year for changing my belief that an individual candidate rather than ideas and political program were decisive for political organizing. That understanding, furthermore, changed my political appreciation for Bobby Kennedy (and the vices and virtues of the Democratic Party). That is the import of this well-produced (as always) portrayal of the short life and career of Robert Kennedy. If in 1968, with my 1968 political understandings, I stood shoulder to shoulder with Robert Kennedy my political evolution and his political past, as detailed here, have changed my perceptions dramatically.
This documentary highlights the close relationship between Robert and his older brother John starting with the Massachusetts United Senate campaign in 1952 (and that would continue in the 1960 campaign and during John Kennedy’s administration right up to the assassination). We are presented here, however, with the ‘bad’ Bobby who was more than willing to join Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy’s “red scare” anti-communist campaign and the anti-labor McClellan Committee campaigns against Jimmy Hoffa in particular. There is no love lost between this writer and labor bureaucrats like Hoffa (or his son) but a bedrock position then and today is the need for labor to clean its own house. What purpose does government intervention into the labor movement do except to weaken it? Bobby was on the other side on this one, as well.
Under the John Kennedy Administration Robert, moreover, played a key role in putting a damper on the early civil rights movement in the South (as well as putting a 'tap' on Martin Luther King at the behest of one J. Edgar Hoover), the Bay of Pigs decision and aftermath , the Cuban Missile Crisis confrontation with the Soviet Union and the early escalation, under the rubric of counter-insurgency, in Vietnam. As readily observable, where I had previously downplayed my opposition to some of Bobby's positions I now put a minus next to them. That is politics.
Finally though, I will frankly admit a lingering ‘softness’ for Bobby. Why? The late political journalist Jack Newfield one of the inevitable 'talking heads' that people PBS productions, a biographer of Robert Kennedy I believe but in any case a close companion in the mid-1960’s and a prior resident of the Bedford-Stuveysant ghetto of New York City, made this comment about a Robert Kennedy response to his question during a tour of that area. Newfield asked Kennedy what he would have become if he had grown up in Bedford-Stuveysant. Bobby responded quickly- I would either be a juvenile delinquent or a revolutionary. I would like to think that he meant those alternatives seriously. Enough said.
Markin Commentary-August 28, 2009
With the passing of Massachusetts United Senator Edward Kennedy on August 26, 2009 there is a palpable sense that a political era has passed in American bourgeois politics. That may be. There will be plenty of time to analyze that, for those so inclined, later. For now though this reviewer, as one who was born in Massachusetts and has been face to face with the Kennedy aura since early childhood, has a few comments to make, not on Ted Kennedy, but on the political hero of my youth his older brother, Robert. I am reposting two entries, “The Real Robert Kennedy” and “On Bobby Kennedy”, from last year, the 40th anniversary of Bobby’s assassination during his run for the 1968 democratic presidential nomination.
As for the late Ted Kennedy he probably went as far it is possible to do in professing the liberal capitalist credo inherited from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “New Deal”. Admittedly, since the halcyon “Camelot” days of the early 1960s that has been a bar that has been progressively lowered. Nevertheless, on specific issues, we leftists could unite (and did), with the appropriate freedom of criticism that we needed to insist on as a condition for joint action, with Ted Kennedy. That, my friends, who may not understand is under the old principle of uniting with “the devil and his grandmother” for the good of our cause.
But here is the real “skinny” on Ted Kennedy from our prospective. When, and if, the deal went down and the existence of the capitalist system was on the line old Teddy would have been the last “liberal” defender on the last barricade of that system. And why not? It was his system. Somewhere to Kennedy’s left there was a great divide that he could not pass and where we would, of necessity, have had to part company on those barricades just mentioned. Enough said on Ted though today I really want to go back to my young and reminisce about Bobby. Again.
Posted on “American Left History”-July 17, 2008
*The Real Robert Kennedy- A Sober Liberal View From PBS's American Experience Series
DVD REVIEW
Robert Kennedy, American Experience, PBS, 2004
It is somewhat ironic that at just the time that when presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, a recent addition to the Democratic Party pantheon of heroes and heir apparent to the Kennedy legacy, is claiming the nomination of the party that the 40th Anniversary of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy during the presidential campaign of 1968 is being remembered in some quarters. That event holds much meaning in the political evolution of this writer. The Robert Kennedy campaign of 1968 was the last time that this writer had a serious desire to fight solely on the parliamentary road for progressive political change. So today he too has some remembrances, as well. This documentary from the Public Broadcasting System’s "American Experience" series only adds some visual flashes to those remembrances.
In a commentary in another space I have mentioned that through the tumultuous period leading to the early spring of 1968 that I had done some political somersaults as a result of Bobby Kennedy’s early refusal to take on a sitting president, Lyndon Johnson, for the Democratic nomination for the presidency. Moreover, I committed myself early (sometime in late 1967) to the reelection of Lyndon Johnson, as much as I hated his Vietnam War policy. Why? One Richard M. Nixon. I did not give Eugene McCarthy’s insurgent campaign even a sniff, although I agreed with his anti-war stance. Why? He could not beat one Richard M. Nixon. When Bobby Kennedy jumped in and Johnson announced that he was not going to run again and I was there the next day. I was a senior in college at the time but I believe I spent hundreds of hours that spring working the campaign either out of Boston, Washington, D.C. or elsewhere. Why? Well, you can guess the obvious by now. He COULD beat one Richard M. Nixon.
It was more than that though, and I will discuss that in the next paragraph. I took, as many did, Bobby's murder hard. It would be rather facile now to say that something of my youth, and that of others who I have talked to recently about this event, got left behind with his murder but there you have it. However, to show you the kind of political year that it was for me about a week after his death I was in the Hubert Humphrey campaign office in Boston. Why? You know why by now. And for those who don’t it had one name- Richard M. Nixon.
But let us get back to that other, more virtuous, political motive for supporting Bobby Kennedy. It was always, in those days, complicated coming from Massachusetts to separate out the whirlwind effect that the Kennedy family had on us, especially on ‘shanty’ Irish families. On the one hand we wished one of our own well, especially against the WASPs, on the other there was always that innate bitterness (jealousy, if you will) that it was not we who were the ones that were getting ahead. If there is any Irish in your family you know what I am talking about.
To be sure, as a fourteen year old I walked the neighborhood for John Kennedy in 1960 but as I have mentioned elsewhere that was a pro forma thing. Part of the ritual of entry into presidential politics. The Bobby thing was from the heart. Why? It is hard to explain but there was something about the deeply felt sense of Irish fatalism that he projected, especially after the death of his brother, that attracted me to him. But also the ruthless side where he was willing to cut Mayor Daly and every politician like him down or pat them on the back and more, if necessary, to get a little rough justice in the world. In those days I held those qualities, especially in tandem, in high esteem. Hell, I still do, if on a narrower basis.
Okay, that is enough for a trip down memory lane back to the old politically naïve days, or rather opportunistic days. Without detailing the events here the end of 1968 was also a watershed year for changing my belief that an individual candidate rather than ideas and political program were decisive for political organizing. That understanding, furthermore, changed my political appreciation for Bobby Kennedy (and the vices and virtues of the Democratic Party). That is the import of this well-produced (as always) portrayal of the short life and career of Robert Kennedy. If in 1968, with my 1968 political understandings, I stood shoulder to shoulder with Robert Kennedy my political evolution and his political past, as detailed here, have changed my perceptions dramatically.
This documentary highlights the close relationship between Robert and his older brother John starting with the Massachusetts United Senate campaign in 1952 (and that would continue in the 1960 campaign and during John Kennedy’s administration right up to the assassination). We are presented here, however, with the ‘bad’ Bobby who was more than willing to join Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy’s “red scare” anti-communist campaign and the anti-labor McClellan Committee campaigns against Jimmy Hoffa in particular. There is no love lost between this writer and labor bureaucrats like Hoffa (or his son) but a bedrock position then and today is the need for labor to clean its own house. What purpose does government intervention into the labor movement do except to weaken it? Bobby was on the other side on this one, as well.
Under the John Kennedy Administration Robert, moreover, played a key role in putting a damper on the early civil rights movement in the South (as well as putting a 'tap' on Martin Luther King at the behest of one J. Edgar Hoover), the Bay of Pigs decision and aftermath , the Cuban Missile Crisis confrontation with the Soviet Union and the early escalation, under the rubric of counter-insurgency, in Vietnam. As readily observable, where I had previously downplayed my opposition to some of Bobby's positions I now put a minus next to them. That is politics.
Finally though, I will frankly admit a lingering ‘softness’ for Bobby. Why? The late political journalist Jack Newfield one of the inevitable 'talking heads' that people PBS productions, a biographer of Robert Kennedy I believe but in any case a close companion in the mid-1960’s and a prior resident of the Bedford-Stuveysant ghetto of New York City, made this comment about a Robert Kennedy response to his question during a tour of that area. Newfield asked Kennedy what he would have become if he had grown up in Bedford-Stuveysant. Bobby responded quickly- I would either be a juvenile delinquent or a revolutionary. I would like to think that he meant those alternatives seriously. Enough said.
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