From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-Soviet Women Combat Pilots Fought Nazi Germany

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the "Night Witches" discussed below.

Markin comment:

The following is an article from the Spring 1989 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.

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Soviet Women Combat Pilots Fought Nazi Germany

The Story of the Night Witches

The three all-women air combat regiments of the Soviet Union were an integral part of the mass mobilization of the entire population against the Nazi invasion of their country in World War II. Our purpose in recalling the exemplary courage and personal sacrifices of these women is not to show that women are equal to men in even that most terrible of human struggles, war. We honor these women for their brave defense of the USSR, homeland of the first workers revolution in history.

As the capitalist powers plunged the world into a nightmare of slaughter to determine whose imperialism would prevail, the Soviet Union fought to defend the gains of the October Revolution and its socialized property forms. In this vital and desperate battle, women once again came forward, as they had in the Russian Revolution of February 1917, when a strike of women workers sparked the insurrection that overthrew the tsar. During the bitter civil war that followed the Bolsheviks' October Revolution, the Red Army included riflewomen and women armored train commanders and gunners (though most women served as medical personnel). Some women were also partisan fighters and leaders, including the colorful Bolshevik Larissa Reissner. It is these fighters against capitalism that we hail. When bourgeois feminists like NOW took up the plight of U.S. military career women, we took our stand "with the Red Army soldier who has marched to liberate the masses of Afghanistan, rather than with the U.S. female officer who may one day direct bombing raids over Soviet Central Asia" ("No to the Draft!" W&R No. 20, Spring 1980).

The story of the Soviet airwomen, the first women in history to fly planes in combat, is told in Bruce Myles' Night Witches (paperback published by Panther Books, 1983; unless otherwise noted, quotes are from his book). Myles, a Scottish journalist, interviewed veterans of the women's units: the 586th Fighter Regiment, the 587th Bomber Regiment, and the 588th Night Bomber Regiment, known as the "Night Witches" by Nazi troops who feared their nightly sorties.

These women were not unique. Almost one million Soviet women served at the front in all capacities— including as partisans—constituting about 8 percent of total Soviet military personnel at the end of 1943.1 n daring missions behind German lines, women pilots helped supply partisans fighting in Russia's forests— they even carried passengers, who slid themselves out of plywood tubes rigged under the wings into deep snowdrifts as the planes flew only feet above the ground! Women pilots also helped relieve the 900-day German siege of Leningrad, flying food to the starving city.
Stalinism and Women's Struggle to Volunteer

When Hitler launched his "Operation Barbarossa" invasion of the Soviet Union in the early morning hours of 22 June 1941, the USSR was criminally unprepared. Stalin had beheaded the army in his bloody purges, while refusing to believe the Nazis would attack, despite desperate warnings. Sixty percent of the Russian combat air force was destroyed on the ground; by November, the Germans were only 20 miles from Moscow, Leningrad was besieged, and three million Soviets had been taken prisoner, as Hitler sought another "lightning victory." But the Nazis fatally underestimated the will and capacity of the peoples of the USSR to defend the gains of their revolution, and got bogged down in the Russian winter. As the Soviets scrambled to recreate huge military factories back of the Urals out of German reach, hundreds of thousands of volunteers, many in the Komsomol youth groups, overwhelmed the military recruiting centers—including teenage girls with flying experience gained at paramilitary flying clubs across the USSR.

The first response of harassed officials to the young fliers was summed up by the initial rejection of one young woman who later became a Hero of the Soviet Union. She was told: "Things may be bad but we're not so desperate that we're going to put little girls like you up in the skies. Go home and help your mother." The October Revolution which overthrew capitalism opened up tremendous liberating potential for women, promising them freedom at last from subjugation to the family hearth. The Bolsheviks abolished all the old legal impediments to women's equality and sought to provide alternatives to the family, through socialization of housework and childcare. However, the bloody civil war which decimated the proletariat and the failure of revolutionary uprisings internationally, especially in Germany, led to Stalin's political counterrevolution. Without the necessary international economic basis for socialism, the real liberation of women is impossible in an isolated workers state. But this defeat was glorified ideologically by the Stalin regime as part of its defeatist and socially retrograde policy of "socialism in one country," while the Bolsheviks' commitment to replacing the oppressive nuclear family was reversed.

The deeply contradictory nature of the USSR—where the Stalinist regime had politically expropriated the working class, yet was forced to defend the planned economy—made it possible, when the very survival of the workers state was posed, for the official policy of rejecting women as fighters to be reversed. In contrast, in the imperialist West, to the extent women were officially mobilized it was in noncombat roles. In Britain, for example, some 450,000 women were in uniform, but limited to tasks like road building, ferrying planes, or spotting on antiaircraft sites, where they were forbidden to actually fire the guns.

A call went out over Radio Moscow in the fall of 1941 from the country's most famous woman aviator, Marina Raskova, for volunteers for all-women air regiments. Three 400-strong air regiments were formed, each comprising three squadrons of ten aircraft. Mechanics and armament fitters were all female as well. Before leaving for their training base at Engels on the River Volga in October 1941, the women had their first struggle trying to get into the military clothing—to hysterical laughter they stuffed sheets of Pravda and Izvestia into their boot toes, and trimmed trailing pants legs and coattails. More serious adjustments were needed as they learned to handle their aircraft. The 587th Women's Bomber Regiment flew the Petylakov twin-engined PE-2 light bomber, which had a crew of three. One pilot, Katerina Fedotova, recalled:

"Fully loaded with fuel and bombs, the PE-2 needed someone with a lot of strength to pull back on the stick at the appropriate moment to get the nose off the ground. Most of us had to get our navigator to stand beside us on take-off to help yank the stick back on a given command.... And some of the girls with particularly short legs had to have special blocks put on the rubber pedals so that they could reach them with their feet."

The pilots of the 586th Fighter Regiment learned to fly the Yak-1, a single-seat machine, while the "Night Witches" bomber regiment flew Nikolai Polikarpov's PO-2. The PO-2 was a veteran biplane trainer pressed into service as a bomber. Beneath its fabric-and-wood wings were loaded racks of small bombs (maximum load only 800 pounds), released by a wire inside the cockpit. It was incredibly slow—top speed only 100 miles per hour!

By May 1942 the women were ready for their first combat assignments. The 588th bomber regiment had its first test from male Soviet pilots: sent to escort the women to their first airbase, the men dived down at the inexperienced formation, many of whom panicked and broke away. But the women quickly recovered from this embarrassment, and soon proved their worth to their male comrades.

Stalingrad, 1942-43: "Achtung, Litvak!"

In the summer of 1942, Hitler launched a new offensive, against the Caucasus oil fields and against Stalingrad, splitting his forces on the southern front. By winter, Hitler's obsession with taking Stalingrad led the German 6th Army under General Paulus into a trap, dooming the German army to eventual encirclement inside Stalingrad as Soviet reinforcements arrived on the scene late in the year. Among them were the women's day bomber regiment, which had already faced combat in Kirshatz, the "Night Witches" and several of the best women fighter pilots, who joined the men of the 73rd Fighter Regiment in furious air battles over the city.

One of these was Lily Litvak, the daughter of a railway worker, who as a teenager had joined a flying club. Lily Litvak joined up with pilot Alexei Salomaten in the Soviet fighters' standard two-plane formation. By Christmas she had personally shot down six German aircraft over Stalingrad—three fighters and three transport aircraft running the gauntlet of the Russian air defenses in a vain attempt to supply the trapped German 6th Army from the air.

Lily became famous as the "White Rose of Stalingrad," as she had the fuselage of her Yak painted with white roses, one for each plane she shot down. Soviet monitors of air radio could hear German pilots warning each other, "Achtung, Litvak!" Her beloved partner Salomaten had crashed and died, but Lily kept on as a "free fighter"—her tenth "kill" brought down a German ace. As K.J. Cottam recounts in "Soviet Airwomen in Combat in World War II" (MA/AH Publishing, Kansas State University, 1983), the arrogant pilot could not believe what had happened:

"The middle-aged German ace from the Richthofen's 4th Air Fleet whom Lilya [Litvak] forced to bail out from his burning plane was taken to her regimental HQ. Here he sat, a haughty officer decorated with a number of iron crosses and medals, feigning indifference. He had yet to collect himself, to come to terms with what had happened; he was shot down so quickly, so unexpectedly, and in such an audacious manner! The German saw a small girl, looking about 16, enter the dugout. She wore a headset with goggles and a flying suit. His curiosity soon changed to disbelief and then indignation. 'What a humiliation!' exploded the Nazi pilot. 'This is nonsense and I demand a proof.’ Then the Major requested that the girl tell the Germans some-of the details of their dogfight, known only to the antagonists. Soon the prisoner was completely convinced; he glanced at her with new respect and reportedly silently hung his head."

While "free hunters" like the glamorous Lily Litvak received the most publicity in the Soviet press, the women ground crews were vital—the pilots' lives depended on them. Ina Pasportnikova, a mechanic at Stalingrad, recalled the excruciating 40° below winter temperatures, which combined with handling burning-hot metal parts left mechanics' hands permanently scarred as they raced to repair aircraft at top speed during half-hour breaks between sorties: "Sometimes the only way to get, say, a little nut into part of the engine with numbed fingers was to spit on the finger and, as it froze, attach the nut to the finger. Then you'd fumble around the screw, using your finger like a screwdriver to attach it."

The "Night Witches" in the Caucasus and Kerch Peninsula

The 588th women's night bomber regiment fought over the Soviet southern front. In the summer of 1942 as the Nazis pushed toward the oil-rich Caucasus, the women shifted bases quickly, seeking to slow the enemy advance, sleeping anywhere from in haystacks to under the wings of their planes. The Germans quickly learned to recognize the approach of the women night bombers: the little PO-2s made a distinctive "pop-popping" sound as they approached (later the women learned to turn off their engines and glide over the target). The PO-2s' slow speed and low flying altitude enabled the crews to drop bombs with an accuracy unmatched by other Soviet aircraft. The Germans called the planes "night devil”, "sewing machine" or "Russian plywood/' and the pilots "night witches." The Russians themselves referred to the little trainers as "coffee grinders/' "kitchen-gardeners" or "flying bookcases." Incredibly, until the summer of 1944, the women bombers flew without parachutes in order to take on an extra 42 pounds of bombs!

The German advance in the Caucasus was finally halted; on 31 January 1943 the Nazis surrendered at Stalingrad. By then the "Night Witches" had flown in combat for over eight months. At their headquarters in the North Caucasus, they were awarded the title of "46th Guards Regiment," the first women's unit to receive this high honor, placing them among the elite of the Red Army's fighting units. They flew more than 24,000 sorties during the war; of the 30 "Hero of the Soviet Union" awards won by airwomen, the "Night Witches" received 23.

They remained in the Kuban area for another eight months, where they took heavy casualties. Navigator Ira Kasherina was awarded the order of the Red Flag for her heroic efforts in bringing her plane home, the pilot dead, after a bombing run on enemy troops at Novorossisk on 22 April 1943. Ducie Nosal, the pilot who was killed, had lost her first-born son at the war's beginning in the ruins of a maternity hospital. She had flown over 354combat missions, and was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, the first Soviet airwoman to receive this honor. On 9 April 1944, the regiment lost one of its favorites, Zhenya Rudneva, chief navigator and a former astronomy student, over Bulgansk in the Crimea. She has an enduring memorial in the skies; the Soviets named an asteroid after her some years later. Lily Litvak, too, fell in battle in 1943 over the Donbass region as eight German fighters zeroed in on her Yak fighter with its white roses.

By October 1943 the Germans had been pushed out of the Caucasus, and the "Night Witches" went on to drop supplies to army and navy troops in one of the Soviets' largest amphibious operations that fall, the seizing of a beachhead on the Kerch Peninsula in order to liberate the Crimea. The landing party at El'tigen near Novorossisk was surrounded by enemy troops on three sides, with the sea at their back, their radio smashed, their supplies running out. In these difficult night flights, the pilots glided in from the sea with their engines cut off, guided by flashlights or bonfires in the rain and wind. Men from the landing party later met the "Night Witches," embracing them enthusiastically and telling them over and over that they had saved them.

The Battle of Kursk

Meanwhile, in central Russia, the key battle of Kursk raged in July 1943. Hitler's "Operation Citadel" sought to inflict a decisive defeat on the USSR by smashing the "Kursk salient"—a bulge driven by the Russians into the German lines, centering on the town of Kursk. On July 5 nearly a million German troops, 2,000 tanks and over 1,800 aircraft attacked, driving to surround Kursk, in the biggest tank battle of the war. The women of the 586th Fighter Regiment were drawn heavily into the mass battles in the air, as over 4,000 aircraft operated in an area only 12 by 30 miles—battles involving up to 150 aircraft at a time were common. Galia Boordina recalled:

"German and Soviet fighters were whirling and diving everywhere— The risks of collision were enormous—even with your own side. It was a complete melee, and most of the aircraft were flying at very high speed. I broke out of the fight briefly to gain height and look for a target. I dived down and pulled up underneath a Messerschmitt 109 and raked it with machine-gun and cannon fire. It fell away immediately, burning. I had shot down two other Germans before that—a bomber and a transport—but that was my first fighter."

Two women of the 586th took on an entire attack group of Germans during the buildup to Kursk. The women were alone in the sky in their two Yak fighters when they spotted a cluster of black dots, materializing in seconds into a group of 42 Junkers 88 and Dornier bombers. Despite the fantastic odds, they dived on the leading formation from out of the sun, seeking to break up the Germans before they reached their target. Two bombers fell away in flames on the first pass; the Yaks pulled up and got one more bomber each on their second pass, while the enemy jettisoned their bombs and broke formation.
When the smoke of the massive tank battle finally cleared, the two German spearheads were still forced 100 miles apart. Hitler had lost his huge gamble, and from that point the offensive passed to the Red Army. Essentially alone, the Soviet Union had broken the back of the mammoth Nazi military machine. Then began the long and hard-fought Soviet advance, retaking its own territory and then liberating the Eastern European nations from fascist occupation. In May 1945 the Red Army triumphantly entered Berlin. Many of the troops wrote their names on Hitler's bombed-out buildings, including a Soviet front-line nurse and fighter, who told an interviewer many years later: "I wrote that I, Sophia Kuntsevitch, Russian daughter of a welder, came here and defeated fascism" (Shelley Saywell, Women in War, Penguin Books, 1986).

The USSR had defeated Hitler—at a terrible cost. Twenty million people—one-tenth of the population—were dead. As the men and women of the Red Army advanced westward, they uncovered the horror of the Nazi Holocaust: smoldering ruins of villages, whole towns massacred, then finally the fascist death camps where millions had perished in the barbaric Nazi "technology" of mass murder.

The Fight for Women's Liberation Today

The women of the Soviet Union, arms in hand, were vital to the defeat of fascism. They proved in blood that they were equal to men in even that supposedly most "masculine" preserve, air combat. Yet even as women like Lily Litvak were shooting down German aces, the Stalinist regime continued its reactionary and shameful glorification of "women's true role" as domestic slave to the family. The Stalinist bureaucracy even introduced "Motherhood Medals": "Motherhood Glory, First, Second and Third Class" (nine, eight or seven children) and "Heroine Mother" for ten children. As Leon Trotsky noted in 1936 in The Revolution Betrayed, "The most compelling motive of the present cult of the family is undoubtedly the need of the bureaucracy for a stable hierarchy of relations."

In 1944, as women fought alongside men at the front, coeducation was abolished in the USSR. A director of the Moscow Municipal Department of National Education wrote, "It is essential to introduce in girls' schools such additional subjects as pedagogics, needlework, courses in domestic science, personal hygiene and the care of children," while another Stalinist ideologue added, "what we must have now is a system by which the school develops boys who will be good fathers and manly fighters for the socialist homeland, and girls who will be intelligent mothers" (quoted in Tony Cliff, Class Struggle and Women's Liberation, Bookmarks, England, 1984). In 1944 a law was passed with heavy financial sanctions against divorce, including the right of the court to reject divorce petitions. Women's right to abortion, which the Bolsheviks had granted in 1920, had been abolished in 1936 (it was reinstated in 1955). At the end of the war, women were taken out of combat positions.

Today, the Bolsheviks' great liberating goals for women remain unfulfilled. Gorbachev, like the other Stalinist bureaucrats before him, believes he can "appease" imperialism's unrelenting hostility to the Soviet Union, which still retains its socialized property forms. So now he's pulled the Soviet army out of Afghanistan, abandoning women and leftists there to a threatened bloodbath by feudal fanatics. While the women of the Soviet Union today are a world—and a social revolution—away from the barbaric enslavement Afghan women have suffered under the veil, they still must bear the burden of working and simultaneously being saddled with childcare, housework and endless standing in shopping lines, still in the grip of the bureaucracy's policies.

Working-class women have proven in every revolutionary struggle that they are among the best fighters for the liberation of their class. Certainly the women of Afghanistan, some of whom received military training, have shown they would be a real component of an army under revolutionary leadership. Our fight for women's liberation means a struggle for socialist revolution against capitalism. In the USSR and other bureaucratically deformed workers states we fight for political revolution to oust the conservative bureaucracies and to restore the revolutionary internationalist goals of Lenin and Trotsky. Among the best cadres in this struggle will be new generations of women, drawing inspiration from the heroic work of their predecessors—including the "Night Witches" of World War II.

*Enough Is Enough -Support The General Strike In Greece May 5th-Victory To The Greek Workers And Their Allies

Click on the headline to line to a "European Left" blog entry in support of the General Strike in Greece scheduled for May 5, 2010.

Markin comment:

Enough of EU/IMF/U.S.-imposed austerity measures against working people everywhere, but most of all today in Greece. The Greek working class speaks for all of us. Make the capitalists pay for their own mistakes. Greece is at the moment the "epicenter" of the world revolution as it takes its first tentative steps into the 21st century after some serious defeats in the late 20th century. We need a victory in Greece, and we need it now. Of course, as Marx, Lenin and Trotsky pointed out long ago the General Strike
at some point poses the question of state power. Build workers councils that fight for a workers government. More, later.

*May Day Message From The Greek Communist Party- Support The General Strike In Greece May 5th- Victory To The Greek Workers And Their Allies

Click on the headline to link to a "Socialist Unity" Website post of a May Day message from the Greek Communist Party.

Markin comment:

Enough of EU/IMF/U.S.-imposed austerity measures against working people everywhere, but most of all today in Greece. The Greek working class speaks for all of us. Make the capitalists pay for their own mistakes. Greece is at the moment the "epicenter" of the world revolution as it takes its first tentative steps into the 21st century after some serious defeats in the late 20th century. We need a victory in Greece, and we need it now. Of course, as Marx, Lenin and Trotsky pointed out long ago the General Strike at some point poses the question of power. Build workers councils that fight for a workers government. More, later.

*From The Greek Communist Party (KKE) Website- Support The Greek General Strike May 5th

Click on the headline to link to the "Greek Communist Party (KKE)" Website.


Markin comment:

Enough of EU/IMF/U.S.-imposed austerity measures against working people everywhere, but most of all today in Greece. The Greek working class speaks for all of us. Make the capitalists pay for their own mistakes. Greece is at the moment the "epicenter" of the world revolution as it takes its first tentative steps into the 21st century after some serious defeats in the late 20th century. We need a victory in Greece, and we need it now. Of course, as Marx, Lenin and Trotsky pointed out long ago the General Strike at some point poses the question of state power. Build workers councils that fight for a workers government. More, later.

*Enough Is Enough- Victory To The General Strike In Greece May 5th- The Struggle For Working Class Power Is On

Click on the headline to link to a "Socialist Workers Party (Ireland) Website entry offering a different perspective on the situation in Greece by an Irish Labor Party leader.


Markin comment:

Enough of EU/IMF/U.S.-imposed austerity measures against working people everywhere, but most of all today in Greece. The Greek working class speaks for all of us. Make the capitalists pay for their own mistakes. Greece is at the moment the "epicenter" of the world revolution as it takes its first tentative steps into the 21st century after some serious defeats in the late 20th century. We need a victory in Greece, and we need it now. Of course, as Marx, Lenin and Trotsky pointed out long ago the General Strike at some point poses the question of power. Build workers councils that fight for a workers government. More, later.

*From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"- "The Cold War And The Civil Rights Movement"- A Guest Commentary

Click on the headline to link to Part Two of the "Workers Vanguard" article, dated April 23, 2010, "The Cold War and the Civil Rights Movement".

Markin comment:


The presenter, Paul Cone, in the article posted below (Part Two is linked above) , “The Cold War and the Civil Rights Movement”, made a point at the beginning of Part One of referencing his own personally tangential relationship to the events of the 1950s and early 1960s in the black civil rights movement. That, in turn, triggered some of my own remembrances from that time. Although I was thinking at the time about, and thinking through, in my own odd, half-formed early teenage way a lot of political questions in those days the struggle in the South caught and focused my attention for most of that period until things started to unravel in Vietnam in the mid-1960s and that fight took center stage.

This civil rights focus was hardly unique to my own personal political development. Virtually every memoir that I have read , every personal anecdotal piece of evidence, every even minimal instinct to fight for some sense of social justice by those that I have called for convenience sake, the “Generation of ’68, American division, tells the same tale. Lunch counter sit-ins, walking picket lines, voter registration drives, fair housing fights, school desegregations, books for Alabama school kids, bake sales for Mississippi freedom fighters, you name it but some almost cosmic sense of social solidarity drove us to ally ourselves with that struggle. And, we were not wrong to do so either, although I would argue, as does the presenter, that too little was gained for a number of political reasons for such massive effort. That, however, is a separate question.

I have, sputteringly and haphazardly, written various commentaries in this space over the past few years about different signposts in my political coming of age, starting with the period under discussion. I have mentioned the Kennedy boys, John and Robert, the first little unilateral nuclear disarmament demonstration that I attended on Boston Common, my youthful amorphous “softness” toward things Soviet, and things “communist”, and my “hard” left liberal take on the main questions of the day. And so on. Those need not be repeated here, nor do I intend to bring out every possible event and my reaction, or lack of reaction to it that dominated the era. Rather I want to pick a few events that stand out, and that draw some “lessons” about how political consciousness is formed when “big events” are in the air.

What does need some explanation, first, is how a dirt-poor, and I am being kind here, Northern teenage boy from a hard-drinking, hard-bitten, hard-hating, hard working class Irish Catholic neighborhood in the suburbs of Boston who had no black school classmates, ever, and did not know any blacks under any circumstances come to identify his sense of the rightness of the universe with the struggles down South. And who, moreover, had a father, who for all his hard-working efforts to raise and support a family that mainly went for naught and who faced his own insults to his dignity as a Southerner in the North, never in all his life ever even with the most fearsome coaching was able to call a black person anything better than “nigra”. Yes, that certainly calls for some explanation.

And the answer was already contained in the above paragraph, or perhaps you missed it. The dirt-poor phrase. Who knows on what day I came to realize down in that old public housing project that I grew up in (hereafter, “the projects”) that we, my family and I, were poor. All I know is that it was pretty early on and that it was pretty late in the day when I also realized that some, a lot, maybe, of people were not poor. I might add, we were not just “poor as church mice”, because that is too respectability poor for what I am talking about. We are talking about something just a little less primitive that Ohio Democratic Congressman and left liberal gadfly Dennis Kucinich’s living out of an old automobile when growing up.

So when I saw photos or news film of old black dirt farmers struggling to get to the courthouse to vote, or just to register to vote, or of old black women, probably maids or some other such lowly service occupation, who just wanted to rest their weary toes in some part of some bus, but not always the back, or, most famously, when I saw well-dressed (to me) black teenage kids being taunted by hate-filled, but also well-dressed (to me), white kids down in Little Rock, Arkansas and prayed, maybe literally prayed too in those days, that President Eisenhower would do the right thing (which he never really did) I had some primordial affinity that no words, no gesture, no high-flung doctrine could express. And we go from there.

I mentioned in a recent review of a DVD film documentary produced in the wake of the re-opening of the Emmett Till case in 2005 that I was just a little too young to have noted the import of that case, or of the Rosa Parks bus struggles down in Montgomery, Alabama. What I was riveted to, and riveted each morning on the “Today” television show that I watched for news before school was the Little Rock situation. Even today looking at the pictures of those hard-bitten white thugs taunting some black kids, who just wanted to go to a decent school, outrages me. And, we indeed, go from there.

Probably though the first sense that I could take some action against the Southern situation was in support of the Woolworth’s lunch counter sit-ins down in Greensboro, North Carolina (bloody Greensboro then, and now). First, and this is important for those interested in the way that political consciousness gets formed down at the base of society, we had a Woolworth’s in our town which we could picket, and there was also a family-famous one in downtown Boston that my grandmother took us to as a “treat” sometimes. Probably, in those days half the towns of any size in America had a Woolworth’s so I could not understand what the big deal was in trying to exclude people, any people, from having a turkey club sandwich (on white, extra mayo, please). Or a frappe (I will not even bother explaining what that one is, except that it is NOT a milk shake). Or a lime Rickey or chocolate sundae, or whatever. That, my friends, is what that bloody struggle came to, on the surface.

As part of that effect to publicize the Woolworth struggle I was also in contact with NAACP-types from the other side of our town. No, not black representatives, there were no blacks in town, period, as far as I knew but whites, mainly Jewish I think, from a local college who were putting together books for schools down in Mississippi. Now, as I have mentioned in other commentaries even when I was nothing but an ordinary, low-life hoodlum in the making, or at least a wannabe hoodlum, I always had an inordinate regard for books. So when I was asked to go around getting books there was not problem in my linking that little, little effort with the struggle down South.

Now I am a child of the television age, like most of you. So when pictures on the news started coming though of the cops running wild in trying to stop, or start, or whatever they were doing to keep black people from voting , or black kids from going to school where they wanted to, I flipped out. I am personally going South, one way or another. I will save that story for another time because it deserves its own space and as the about already should make clear I am already deeply committed to the black liberation struggle, as I understood it. But know this: if you want to get a sense of what titanic social struggles were and how they “lift all boats” and how they change social consciousness in ways that are not apparent in more settled times think about some of the points above, and, if I know my intended audience, think through those episodes of your lives that brought you to leftist political consciousness. Then organize like righteous hell.

************************

Workers Vanguard No. 956
9 April 2010

For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!

The Cold War and the Civil Rights Movement

Break with the Democrats!

For a Revolutionary Workers Party!

Part One

We print below a Black History Month Forum given in the musicians union hall in New York City on February 20 by Workers Vanguard Editorial Board member Paul Cone.

With pictures of Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie—the fathers of bebop jazz—looking upon us I thought it would be appropriate to recall a short story called “Bop,” first published in 1949 by the great writer Langston Hughes. Through his character, Jesse B. Semple, Hughes describes the origins of bebop. According to Semple, it’s “From the police beating Negroes’ heads. Every time a cop hits a Negro with his billy club, that old club says, ‘BOP! BOP!...BE-BOP!...MOP!...BOP!’... That’s where Be-Bop came from, beaten right out of some Negro’s head into them horns and saxophones and piano keys that plays it.”

That was written on the cusp of the civil rights movement. With some modifications, Semple’s observations are no less applicable today. The billy club has been replaced by the retractable truncheon, the revolver has been replaced by the semiautomatic and the cops have added the Taser stun gun to their arsenal. In the first nine months of last year, nearly half a million men, women and children were subjected to the degrading “stop and frisk” by New York City cops—84 percent of them black or Hispanic. As Hughes’ character, Semple, pointed out, “White folks do not get their heads beat just for being white. But me—a cop is liable to grab me almost any time and beat my head—just for being colored.”

Welcome to our Black History Month forum. We study the history—often buried—of the struggles for black freedom, which are strategic for the American socialist revolution. Our pamphlet series is named Black History and the Class Struggle precisely to express the inextricable link between the emancipation of the proletariat and the fight for the liberation of black people in the U.S.

We meet here today a little over a year after Barack Obama became the first black president of the U.S.—the Commander-in-Chief of the most rapacious imperialist power on the planet. Obama governs on behalf of the capitalist class, whose rule is maintained on the bedrock of black oppression. Obama’s election was hailed by bourgeois pundits and reformist “socialists” alike as the realization of Martin Luther King’s “dream”—a dream that, as King put it in his famous speech at the 1963 March on Washington, was “deeply rooted in the American dream.” Malcolm X saw things quite differently: “I’m one of the 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism. One of the 22 million black people who are the victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy.... I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare” (“The Ballot or the Bullet,” 3 April 1964).

While Wall Street barons wash down lobster dinners with 25-year-old single malt Scotch—paid for by government bailouts—the past year has seen the devastation of the lives of many workers: the loss of jobs, homes, savings and medical coverage, hitting the black population disproportionately hard. I work near 125th Street in Harlem and regularly pass an ever-increasing number of apparently homeless and obviously desperate people asking for help to buy a cup of coffee or some food; blaring from the loudspeakers set up by merchants is Obama’s voice boasting of “change we can believe in.”

Obama has beefed up the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, threatened crippling sanctions against Iran; he has built on the police-state measures implemented first by Bill Clinton and enhanced by George W. Bush in the name of the “war on terrorism,” and escalated attacks and repression against immigrants. Before the election, the Spartacist League declared: “McCain, Obama: Class Enemies of Workers, Oppressed” (WV No. 923, 24 October 2008). We gave no support to any bourgeois candidate, Democrat, Republican or Green like Cynthia McKinney, a former Democratic Party Congresswoman supported by reformists like the Workers World Party.

Just as the reformists’ forebears followed King to John F. Kennedy’s Oval Office, today’s reformists deliver their followers to Obama’s doorstep. Workers World (27 November 2008) proclaimed Obama’s election “a triumph for the Black masses and all the oppressed.” Today, Larry Holmes still recalls the “shock and elation” while watching Obama’s inauguration (Workers World, 18 February). The International Socialist Organization (ISO) enthused in their Socialist Worker (21 January 2009): “Obama’s victory convinced large numbers of people of some basic sentiments at the heart of the great struggles of the past—that something different is possible, and that what we do matters.” To the extent they have any influence, what the reformists do is prop up illusions in the capitalist Democratic Party.

The Demise of Jim Crow

The title of this forum is a bit of a misnomer. It’s not narrowly about the Cold War. I want to try to explain a bit the context in which the mass struggles for civil rights took place. In the Programmatic Statement of the Spartacist League, we wrote regarding the civil rights movement:

“The bourgeoisie eventually acquiesced to the demand for legal equality in the South, both because Jim Crow segregation had grown anachronistic and because it was an embarrassment overseas as American imperialism sought to posture as the champion of ‘democracy’ in the Cold War, particularly in competition with the Soviet Union in the Third World.”

And that is roughly what I will be talking about. But not yet.

As Marxists, we see the motor force of history as the struggle between oppressor classes—today, the capitalist class, which owns the means of production like the banks, land and factories—and the oppressed classes. Under capitalism, this is the proletariat, workers who have nothing but their labor power, which they sell to the capitalists in order to live. Capitalism is an irrational system based on production for profit, born “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt” as Marx put it in his classic work Capital (1867). The capitalist rulers, who claim the banner of “freedom” and “civilization,” have carried out mass murder and torture on an immense scale in their drive to secure world markets, cheap labor and raw materials. And history has shown that this system cannot be made to be more humane or the imperialist rulers more peace-loving. Nor can capitalism provide for the needs of the world’s masses, despite the vast wealth it possesses.

In order to preserve their class rule, the tiny capitalist class has at its disposal the vast powers of the state—which at its core is made up of the army, cops and courts—and means of ideological subjugation through the schools, press and religion. The capitalist state cannot be reformed to serve the interests of workers and the oppressed. On the road to revolution, it must be smashed by the revolutionary proletariat, and a workers government established in its place.

A key prop of capitalism is to keep the working class divided along ethnic and racial lines, which in this country means foremost the segregation of black people. We fight for black freedom on the program of revolutionary integrationism: while the working class must fight against all instances of racist oppression and discrimination, genuine equality for black people in the U.S. will only come about through the smashing of capitalism, preparing the road to an egalitarian socialist order. This perspective is counterposed to liberal integration, which is premised on the utopian notion that equality for black people can be attained within the confines of this capitalist society founded on black oppression. It is also counterposed to go-it-alone black nationalism—a petty-bourgeois ideology of despair which at bottom accepts the racist status quo.

Freedom for blacks in the U.S. will not come about without a socialist revolution. And there will be no socialist revolution without the working class taking up the fight for black freedom. As Karl Marx wrote shortly after the Civil War, “Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.”

Our model is the Bolshevik Party of V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky that led the October Revolution in Russia in 1917. This was the greatest victory for the working people of the world: it gave the program of proletarian revolution flesh and blood. The proletariat seized political power and created a workers state based on soviets (workers councils). The young workers state eliminated laws discriminating against women and homosexuals and recognized the right to self-determination of the many peoples oppressed under tsarist/capitalist rule. The Soviet government proclaimed the right of working people to jobs, health care, housing and education.

The Russian Revolution was not made solely for Russia, but was seen as the opening shot of a necessarily international struggle of labor against the rule of capital. It was an inspiration to the oppressed masses of the world and had a direct impact on the struggle of black people in the U.S. The American rulers have always seen a connection between the Russian Revolution and the struggles of black people in the U.S.—and rightly so. The Bolshevik Revolution was popular among wide layers of urban blacks and even among moderate black newspapers and organizations. The Messenger, published by prominent Socialist Party member A. Philip Randolph, who would later become a vicious anti-Communist, captured this sentiment with articles like, “We Want More Bolshevik Patriotism” (May-June 1919).

It was the intervention by the Communist International in the 1920s that turned the attention of the American Communists to the necessity of special work among the oppressed black population—a sharp break from the practice of the earlier socialist movement. After the Russian Revolution, J. Edgar Hoover railed that “a certain class of Negro leaders” had shown “an outspoken advocacy of the Bolsheviki or Soviet doctrines,” had been “openly, defiantly assertive” of their “own equality or even superiority” and had demanded “social equality” (quoted in Robert Goldstein, Political Repression in Modern America: 1870 to the Present [1978]). The government immediately put together an apparatus of surveillance, harassment and terror that would be a model for the later FBI COINTELPRO (Counter-Intelligence Program) in the 1950s through the 1970s. COINTELPRO meant massive wiretapping, burglaries and surveillance against even tame civil rights leaders like King, and the killings of 38 members of the Black Panther Party and imprisonment of hundreds more. As Martin Dies, head of the witchhunting House Committee on Un-American Affairs declared in the mid 1940s, “Moscow realizes that it cannot revolutionize the United States unless the Negro can be won over to the Communist cause” (quoted in Gerald Horne, Black and Red: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War [1986]).

From the beginning, the young Russian workers state was surrounded and besieged by hostile capitalist countries. The Revolution prevailed in a bloody civil war against the counterrevolutionaries and the forces of 14 invading capitalist powers. But the poverty, backwardness and isolation of the country, especially following the defeat of the 1923 German Revolution, laid the ground for the development of a bureaucratic caste, led by Stalin, which expropriated political power from the working class. The nationalist outlook of the bureaucracy was given expression in Stalin’s proclamation in the fall of 1924 of the anti-Marxist “theory” that socialism—a classless, egalitarian society based on material abundance—could be built in a single country, and a backward one at that. In practice, “socialism in one country” came to mean opposition to the perspective of workers revolution internationally and accommodation to world imperialism—leading to the sellout of revolutionary opportunities—and in particular the propping up of capitalist rule in West Europe after World War II.

Despite the profoundly deforming bureaucratic means employed by the Stalinist regime, which undermined the Bolshevik Revolution’s gains, state ownership of the means of production and economic planning made possible the transformation of what had been an impoverished, backward, largely peasant country into an industrial and military powerhouse within the span of two decades. The Soviet Union provided a military counterweight to U.S. imperialism, making possible the survival of overturns of capitalism in East Europe and the social revolutions in China, North Korea, Cuba and Vietnam.

We fought to the end to defend the Soviet degenerated workers state against imperialism and counterrevolution, while at the same time fighting for a proletarian political revolution to oust the Stalinist misrulers and restore the working class to political power. Today, we continue to defend the remaining deformed workers states of China, Cuba, Vietnam and North Korea. The counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991-92 was a world historic defeat, not merely for the working people of the former Soviet Union but also for the international working class. The collapse of the USSR has meant U.S./NATO imperialist slaughter from the Balkans to Iraq and Afghanistan—accompanied by devastating attacks on the workers and oppressed minorities domestically.

The Civil Rights Movement

We study past struggles—victories and defeats—in order to politically arm ourselves and the proletariat for future battles. There are very few historical conjunctures in which a small Marxist propaganda group with a few hundred members could within a few years have transformed itself into a workers party leading a significant section of the proletariat. The South in the early 1960s offered such a rare opportunity.

The mass mobilization of black people in the Southern civil rights movement, and the subsequent Northern ghetto rebellions, disrupted and challenged the racist American bourgeois order. It shattered the anti-Communist consensus and it paved the road for the mass protest movements that followed—against the U.S. dirty war in Vietnam, for the rights of women, gays, students and others.

The civil rights movement achieved important—though partial—gains for black people largely in the realm of formal democratic rights whose main beneficiaries have been a thin layer of the black petty bourgeoisie. Public facilities were desegregated, black people won the right to register to vote in the South, and mandated school segregation was outlawed. But the liberal-led civil rights movement did not and could not challenge the root cause of black oppression. The hellish conditions of ghetto life—the mass chronic unemployment, racist cop terror, crumbling schools, poverty and hunger (the “American nightmare”)—which remain the lot of the mass of black people nearly 50 years after the Civil Rights Act was adopted are rooted in American capitalism. The civil rights movement smashed its head against this fact when it swept out of the South and into the North in the mid 1960s.

From its onset, the civil rights movement was dominated by a black middle-class leadership allied to Democratic Party liberalism. The aim of this leadership—whose most effective exponent was King—was to pressure the Democratic Party administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson to grant formal, legal equality to blacks in the South. Walter Reuther’s United Auto Workers (UAW) and Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters—assisted by elements of the decomposing American social democracy like Bayard Rustin and Michael Harrington as well as by the Stalinized Communist Party (CP)—worked to keep the civil rights movement within the confines of bourgeois reformism and the Democratic Party. And this they did very well. Ultimately, millions of youth, whose opposition to racist oppression and growing animosity toward U.S. imperialist depredations were leading them to seek revolutionary solutions, were channeled into the Democratic Party of racism and war. In his classic work in defense of the Bolshevik Revolution, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918) Lenin nailed Karl Kautsky, the granddaddy of the later social democrats and reformists:

“Even in the most democratic bourgeois state the oppressed people at every step encounter the crying contradiction between the formal equality proclaimed by the ‘democracy’ of the capitalists and the thousands of real limitations and subterfuges which turn the proletarians into wage-slaves. It is precisely this contradiction that is opening the eyes of the people to the rottenness, mendacity and hypocrisy of capitalism. It is this contradiction that the agitators and propagandists of socialism are constantly exposing to the people, in order to prepare them for revolution! And now that the era of revolution has begun, Kautsky turns his back upon it and begins to extol the charms of moribund bourgeois democracy.”

If you didn’t live through it, I think it’s hard to appreciate how tempestuous and volatile this period was, and how the struggle for black rights dominated domestic politics for over a decade. That era has become sanitized in movies, newspapers, books and the accounts of many of its participants—even former militants from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panther Party, who are today comfortably ensconced in the Democratic Party.

Now I’ll confess, I was a bit young, only ten years old at the time of the March on Washington, for example, so I wasn’t a participant in these events like some of my comrades. A lot of my focus that year was on the upcoming Dodgers/Yankees World Series; the Dodgers swept them. But even at that age and younger, I was surrounded by the images of the assassination of Medgar Evers, Mississippi governor Ross Barnett blocking the steps of the University of Mississippi to blacks, the burning churches, the vilification of one of my childhood idols, Muhammad Ali, when he appeared with Malcolm X by his side after winning the heavyweight title. I recall the fear that Malcolm generated, seen in the eyes and heard in the voices of the bourgeois press corps and politicians, who in turn embraced the same conservative civil rights leaders whom they earlier castigated for wanting to move “too fast.” I also remember the cities in flames, starting with Harlem in 1964.

Largely ignored by accounts of that period is the ferment in the North, where black people had already attained the formal rights blacks in the South were fighting for. But discrimination in housing was public policy. In New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Cleveland, Milwaukee and other cities of the North, black newcomers were forced into overcrowded ghettos, where they paid high rent for rat-infested slums; black children were sent to inferior schools, and black adults had few job opportunities and few, if any, public facilities. By 1962-63, there were as many protests in the North and West as in the South—for jobs, an end to segregated housing, and for school integration.

Fueling this rage was the grim reality that the economic advancement of much of the black working class—which came with wartime employment, U.S. industrial dominance and, most importantly, unionized jobs—was coming to an end. Between 1947 and 1963 Detroit lost 140,000 manufacturing jobs. In New York City, over 70,000 garment industry jobs were lost in the 1950s. The same was happening to meatpacking workers in Chicago and longshore, warehouse and shipbuilding workers in Baltimore, Newark, Oakland and Philadelphia. In large part this was because the capitalists were increasingly moving production to the South. Much of the industrial Northeast and Midwest was soon rendered rotting hulls. This was largely a product of the union tops’ failure to organize the South—a failure that stemmed from the anti-Communist purging of militant organizers during the Cold War, the union tops’ allegiance to the Democrats and failure to take up the fight for black rights.

On 13 May 1963, in solidarity with blacks in Birmingham, Alabama, who were fighting back against the racist terrorists and in protest against brutal cop terror in their city, some 3,000 black teenagers in Chicago pelted cops with bricks and bottles. In New York City, 1963 and 1964 saw thousands of Harlem tenants forming tenants councils, withholding rent and winning services and repairs from the slumlords. This was met with a vicious bourgeois campaign of racist hysteria. The purpose was, as we wrote at the time, “preparation and justification for the smashing, through police terror, of the coming stage of the Negro rights struggle” (“Negro Struggle in the North,” Spartacist No. 2, July-August 1964). In July of 1964, New York City cops exploited the protests against the police killing of 15-year-old James Powell to justify a full-scale offensive to smash every sign of these struggles. Such cop terror as that in Harlem would trigger many of the ghetto upheavals that took place in over 300 cities over the next three years. In New York, as the cops sealed off Harlem, we Spartacists launched the Harlem Solidarity Committee, which organized a protest of 1,000 in the garment district.

Adding to the civil rights movement’s turbulent character was the fact that activists were on a daily basis forced to confront and grapple with questions of where their movement was going. Such questions ultimately bring to the fore the nature of the capitalist state, class divisions in society, the “rottenness, mendacity and hypocrisy of capitalism”—leading to the heart of the question of reform vs. revolution. This played out in the first instance in the issue of armed self-defense or the strategy of “non-violence,” which was the calling card of King. For this, King won the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize. This prize itself has no noble history. It was also later awarded to such peace-loving people as Menachem Begin, Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter and now Barack Obama.

In 1960, Trotskyist activists got a first-hand view of how the question of armed self-defense was perceived by student activists during a visit to Southern black campuses shortly after the student sit-in movement was launched at the Greensboro, North Carolina, Woolworth’s in February. While the student militants were for peaceful picketing—perfectly correct as they were outnumbered—the influence of pacifist ideology was slight, and, notably, the students undertook self-defense measures to protect their campus and themselves from the racist terrorists.

Armed defense of meetings of black activists in the Klan-ridden South had been a well-established tradition, stemming not least from the efforts of the Communist Party to organize sharecroppers in the 1930s. This had been a necessary measure to make sure such gatherings took place without anybody being killed. This tradition however was anathema to the accommodationist wing of the civil rights movement led by King. Be clear: this question was not an issue of whether or not an individual whose home or family was under attack would repel the invaders. In a well-known 1959 statement, King himself acknowledged this basic human impulse. The issue was quite different. By pledging non-violence, the civil rights leaders were pledging allegiance to the white power structure, asserting that the movement could not go beyond the bounds set for it by the liberal wing of the ruling class represented by the Democratic Party. To say that the civil rights movement had the right to defend itself against racist terror was to say that you didn’t accept the rules of the capitalist ruling class and its racist “democracy.”

The ISO portrays King’s statement as part of a “debate” with black militant leader Robert F. Williams. This was no “debate.” King’s statement was used by the NAACP leadership in suspending Williams as president of the Monroe, North Carolina, chapter. Williams was targeted by the state and ultimately driven out of the country in 1961 for organizing black self-defense against KKK terror. To King’s argument that “violence” by black Americans “would be the greatest tragedy that could befall us,” Williams responded, “I am a man and I will walk upright as a man should. I will not crawl!” (quoted in Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power, 1999). We defended Williams. In 1965, the SL initiated a fund-raising campaign for the defense of the Deacons for Defense and Justice in Bogalusa, Louisiana, who also organized armed self-defense. In doing so we advanced our class perspective—the revolutionary mobilization of the working class independent of the capitalist rulers.

During the civil rights movement, as government forces, not only the Southern municipalities but at the federal level, either stood by or facilitated the beatings of activists, the question of the nature of the capitalist state was brought to the fore. In part, dealing with such issues accounted for the receptivity among students to Marxist literature during that 1960 trip to the South I just referred to. Notable as well was the absence of the social democrats and Stalinists, which also provided openings for Marxists, and the distrust by many student activists of the adult leadership groups that acted as a brake on the movement—specifically including King and preachers identified with him.

The RT’s Fight for Revolutionary Integrationism

It is during these years that our organization originated as the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) opposition within the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). (Among the founders of the RT were the former editors of the Trotskyist Young Socialist, who had initiated a nationwide campaign of picket line protests at Woolworth’s in support of the Greensboro sit-in.) Our strategic perspective was to transform the left wing of the civil rights movement into a revolutionary workers party capable of leading much of the black working class and impoverished petty bourgeoisie in the South.

The SWP had for decades been the Trotskyist party in the U.S. It maintained a revolutionary course through the difficult World War II years and the immediate period thereafter. In 1941, under the thought-crime anti-Communist Smith Act, 18 Trotskyists and Minneapolis Teamsters leaders were sent to prison by the Roosevelt administration for their opposition to the imperialist slaughter of World War II. During the war, the SWP took up and publicized the defense cases of black soldiers victimized for opposition to Jim Crow segregation. In the aftermath of anti-black riots in Detroit in 1943, they fought for flying squadrons of union militants to stand ready to defend blacks menaced by racist mobs.

In contrast, following Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Stalinist CP hailed U.S. entry into World War II in December and worked overtime to enforce the trade-union bureaucracy’s “no strike” pledge. They demanded that the black masses forsake their struggle for equality in the interest of the imperialist war effort. The SWP viewed black liberation as the task of the working class as a whole, and intervened in the struggle against racial oppression with a militant integrationist perspective. The party won hundreds of black recruits, including a major breakthrough in Detroit. However, under the intense pressure of the Cold War period, most of them left the party over the next few years.

By the early 1960s, the SWP had lost its revolutionary bearings and tailed non-proletarian class forces, seen domestically in its policy of abstention from the Southern civil rights struggle and later embrace of black nationalism. By 1965 it had become a thoroughly reformist party. As opposed to the SWP majority, the RT fought the party’s criminal abstentionism and pointed out that the young radicals would not come to a Marxist program simply by virtue of their militancy—the intervention of a revolutionary party was necessary. Building a revolutionary vanguard necessarily meant participating in and building a revolutionary leadership in the current struggles of the working class. The RT fought inside the SWP for the party to seize the opportunity to recruit black Trotskyist cadres to their ranks. The RT put forward a series of demands linking the fight for black rights to broader struggles of the working class and addressing immediate needs such as organized self-defense and union organizing drives throughout the South.

Many SNCC activists were open to a revolutionary perspective. Shirley Stoute, a black member of the RT, received a personal invitation to work with SNCC in Atlanta, which the SWP majority had to accede to. Then they called her back to New York on a pretext a month later. After a bitter political fight over this and other questions, the RT was expelled from the SWP in 1963-64, going on to found the Spartacist League in 1966.

In an August 1963 document, “The Negro Struggle and the Crisis of Leadership,” the Revolutionary Tendency wrote: “We must consider non-intervention in the crisis of leadership a crime of the worst sort.” Had the SWP remained a revolutionary party and concentrated its forces in the Southern civil rights movement, it could have won to Trotskyism a large fraction of those young black radicals who eventually became black nationalists. After being expelled from the SWP, we intervened with our small forces in the civil rights movement in both the South and North. We called on militants to break with the Democratic Party. Our call for a Freedom Labor Party was an axis to link the exploding black struggle to the power of labor, North and South. As we elaborated in “Black and Red—Class Struggle Road to Negro Freedom,” adopted at the founding conference of the Spartacist League/U.S. in 1966:

“Ultimately their road to freedom lies only through struggle with the rest of the working class to abolish capitalism and establish in its place an egalitarian, socialist society.

“Yet the struggle of the Black people of this country for freedom, while part of the struggle of the working class as a whole, is more than that struggle. The Negro people are an oppressed race-color caste, in the main comprising the most exploited layer of the American working class…. Because of their position as both the most oppressed and also the most conscious and experienced section, revolutionary black workers are slated to play an exceptional role in the coming American revolution….

“The victory of the socialist revolution in this country will be achieved through the united struggle of black and white workers under the leadership of the revolutionary vanguard party. In the course of this struggle unbreakable bonds will be forged between the two sections of the working class. The success of the struggle will place the Negro people in a position to insure at last the end of slavery, racism and super-exploitation.”

The Rise of the Civil Rights Movement

The civil rights movement did not just fall from the sky. The elimination of legal segregation cannot be portrayed as an idea whose time had come, as the fulfillment of American democracy’s supposed “moral mission,” as the realization of the ideals of the Declaration of Independence or, as Martin Luther King claimed, the cashing of a promissory note from the “founding fathers” to blacks whose ancestors were enslaved. As I mentioned earlier, the Jim Crow system, designed to control and terrorize blacks in the rural South, had become anachronistic—i.e., it no longer served the needs of the U.S. bourgeoisie. This is important to understand.

The Civil War, America’s second bourgeois revolution, had smashed the slave system, paving the way for the development of industrial capitalism in the U.S. as a whole. But after the betrayal of Reconstruction by the Northern bourgeoisie, “the Negro was left in the South in the indefinite position of semi-slavery, semi-serfdom and semi-wage slavery” as then-Trotskyist Max Shachtman put it in his 1933 piece “Communism and the Negro” (reprinted as Race and Revolution [2003]). Sharecropping and tenancy formed the labor backbone of Southern agriculture. Sitting atop this was the system of Jim Crow, the systematic legal segregation of black people in the South enforced by legal and extralegal violence. It was designed to prevent blacks from voting, becoming educated or fighting for their rights. When blacks did challenge Jim Crow—either by personally refusing to follow its rules or, more rarely, by organizing against it—they faced racist terror, whether by the local sheriff or the Klan (who were often one and the same). At least 3,000 black people were lynched between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and the dismantling of Jim Crow in the 1960s.

Black people in the U.S. constitute a race-color caste integrated into the capitalist economy at its lower rungs while socially segregated. As historic Trotskyist leader Richard S. Fraser noted:

“Discrimination and prejudice in the rest of the United States derives directly from the southern system, feeds upon it, and like racial discrimination throughout the world is completely dependent upon it.... In every possible way it [the capitalist class] perpetuates the division of the working class by establishing throughout the entire nation the basic reciprocal relations between discrimination, segregation and prejudice which are so successful in the South.”

—“The Negro Struggle and the Proletarian Revolution” (1953), reprinted in “In Memoriam—Richard S. Fraser: An Appreciation and Selection of His Work,” Prometheus Research Series No. 3, August 1990

Fraser added, “the scar of race antagonism” serves to fortify and stabilize “the structure of American capitalism by dividing the population into hostile racial groups, who find it difficult to get together in defense of their common interests against the master class.”

The industrial needs of both world wars, and the murderous terror blacks faced in the South, led to mass emigration out of the South and into Northern and Western industrial centers. Rural sharecroppers were transformed into proletarians in modern mass production industries. Following the strikes in the 1930s that formed the CIO labor federation, black workers were integrated into powerful industrial unions.

At the same time, by the 1930s, Southern agriculture in this most advanced capitalist country was still economically backward, retaining significant remnants of the slave system. In search of cheaper labor markets, and to accommodate the economic needs of World War II, American capitalism had been forced to abandon its earlier conception of the agrarian South as mainly a source of raw materials and very limited industrial development. By the Depression, textile, iron, coal, steel and chemical industries had been developing in the South. The urbanization and industrialization of the American South during and after World War II created large concentrations of black workers, and proletarianized poor agrarian and middle-class whites. This created a clear identity of interests between white and black exploited industrial workers, establishing conditions for the emergence of broader class struggle and the struggle for black freedom. The practice of landlords and sheriffs picking up isolated tenants, sharecroppers or black transients at will, and forcing them into the prison slave-labor system (powerfully depicted in the book Slavery by Another Name [2008] by Douglas A. Blackmon) was not very effective when dealing with black workers concentrated in factories—particularly if organized into unions.

For black people, the Deep South in the early 1950s remained a racist totalitarian police state. When black soldiers came back from integrated units in the Korean War, they swore they would no longer submit to Jim Crow. The emergence of a mass movement of blacks in the South that not only protested but also defied racist legality posed a problem for the Northern bourgeoisie, which controlled the federal government. They could either go along with the suppression of the civil rights movement by the Southern state authorities and local governments, or they could utilize the federal government to favor policies that would introduce to the South the same bourgeois-democratic norms that existed in the rest of the country.

Dominant sections of the Northern bourgeoisie concentrated in the Democratic Party opted for the latter. They would use the federal government to pressure, but not compel, their Southern class brethren to grant democratic rights to blacks. The Eisenhower and Kennedy/Johnson administrations engaged in a continual series of compromises between the civil rights movement and Southern authorities. At the same time they did very little to prevent the violent suppression of civil rights activists by the Southern authorities and sometimes collaborated in that suppression. For instance, when asked what the government would do about attacks on civil rights activists, Kennedy answered, “We’ll do what we always do. Nothing.”

It is to this wing of the bourgeoisie that the leaders of the civil rights movement shackled the fight for black freedom. The bourgeoisie could acquiesce to partial gains for blacks—desegregation of public facilities, voter registration, as well as a degree of school integration—as these did not undermine their class rule. Moreover, continued denial of civil rights to blacks in the South was a liability to the ambitions of U.S. imperialism internationally. In short order, as the federal government granted civil rights concessions, the NAACP and other civil rights organizations and celebrities would be signing on to the Cold War against the Soviet Union and anti-communist witchhunts at home—even as they found themselves in the gun sights of the McCarthyites, HUAC and their Southern replicas.

[TO BE CONTINUED]

*From "The Rag Blog"- Carl Davidson On The 50th Anniversary Of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)

Click on the headline to link to a "The Rag Blog" entry- "Carl Davidson On The 50th Anniversary Of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)."

Markin comment:

For my own political evolution and its relationship to what was happening with SNCC see today's other entry-"On The Cold War And The Civil Rights Movement".

*The Latest Boston Anti-Authoritarian Movement (BAAM)Newsletter#33

Click on the headline to link to the latest BAAM Newsletter #33.

Markin comment:

As always, I disclaim any political kinship with this newsletter. However, I have many times found interesting articles there. This issue has a good article on the struggle in Greece. And, in any case, it is always good to see what the younger anarchist militants are up to.

*On May Day-Labor's Untold Story- The Memorial In Honor Of The Haymarket Martyrs

Click on title to link to Youtube's film clip of the Haymarket Martyrs Memorial.

Every Month Is Labor History Month

This Commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!

As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.

*The Defeat Of The French At Dien Bien Phu- "Valley Of Death"- A Guest Book Review

Click on the headline to link to a "The Boston Sunday Globe",dated March 14, 2010, book review of "Valley Of Death: The Tragedy At Dien Bein Phu That Led America Into The Vietnam War".

Today marks the 35th anniversary of the defeat of American imperialism in Vietnam with the NLF/NVA takeover in Ho Chi Minh City (then Saigon). All honor to the Vietnamese national liberation fighters.

Markin comment:

Obviously the sub-title tells the viewpoint here. That struggle, now seemingly long ago in 1975, however was a victory for our side. As was Dien Bien Phu in 1954. We need more, and we will get them in due course.

*On The 35th Anniversary Of The Fall Of Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City)

Click On Title To Link To "Wikipedia"'s Entry For The Fall Of Saigon And A Famous Photograph Of The Evacuation Of The United States Embassy In The Wake Of The North Vietnamese Army Advances On Saigon.

Markin comment:

This is a repost of last year's 34th anniversary commemoration and the points below still apply, perhaps more so in light of Democratic president Obama's troops escalations in Afghanistan since then.

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April 30th Marks The 35th Anniversary Of The Military Victory Of The North Vietnamese Army/South Vietnamese National Liberation Front With The Fall Of Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City).

Other years I have used this occasion to review some work directly related to that victory from the view point of highlighting some exploit of the victors in that war- our side. One should not underestimate the importance of that victory by a determined, if outgunned military force, in crimping the style of American imperial policy for a significant period (and some would argue its continuing effect today). One should also note, sadly, that this event (always dramatically visualized in the mind’s eye by those pictures of the helicopters evacuating American and other personnel from the rooftop of the U.S. Embassy) the last clear cut anti-capitalist victory that we have been able to celebrate. That, in itself, is cause for reflection.

This year, with the almost daily growing evidence by the Obama administration that it is seeking to escalate the American presence in the quagmire that is Afghanistan beyond any rational necessity, I wish to review the memoir of one of the American architects of the American escalation in Vietnam, Secretary of War Robert Strange McNamara. As McNamara’s version of the Vietnam saga unfolds, and not incidentally or accidentally his craven attempt to reshape the history of his involvement in that process as well, one cannot help but see that the same sense of American hubris is at play now. As always to be on the safe side here the slogan remains- Obama- All U.S./Allied Troops Out Of Iraq and Afghanistan Now!

The Fog Of War, Part II- War Secretary Robert McNamara’s View Of His Handiwork in Vietnam

Book Review

In Retrospect: The Tragedy And Lessons Of Vietnam, Robert Strange McNamara with Brain VanDeMark, Random House, 1995

Anyone who had caught the Friday March 27, 2009 headlines is aware that the Democratic Party-run Obama government has called for some 4,000 additional troops for Afghanistan and what they, euphemistically, call civilian support teams in order to bolster the sagging regime of “Mayor of Kabul” Karzai. Those numbers are in addition to the 17,000 extras already committed by the Obama regime in February. Does the word escalation seem appropriate here?

One of the problems of having gone through the Vietnam experience in my youth (including periods of lukewarm support for American policy under John F. Kennedy, a hands-off attitude in the early Lyndon B. Johnson years and then full-bore opposition under the late Johnson, Richard M. Nixon and Gerald Ford regimes) is a tendency to view today’s American imperial policy in the same by-the-numbers approach as I took as a result of observing the Vietnam War as it unfolded. There are differences, some of them hugely so, between Vietnam and Afghanistan. Just as, I have previously noted in this space, there are differences between Vietnam and the recently “completed” Iraq War. (Hey, I’m just going by what the media tells me is going on. They wouldn’t lead us astray, would they?)

But, I keep getting this eerie feeling in the back of my neck every time I hear, or see, anything concerning Afghanistan coming out of this new Obama administration. They appear clueless, yet are determined to forge ahead with this policy that can only lead to the same kind of quagmire than Vietnam and Iraq turned into. That is where the analogies to Vietnam do connect up. In this regard, I have recently been re-reading Kennedy/Johnson War Secretary Robert Strange (that’s his middle name, folk, I didn’t make it up and didn’t need to) McNamara’s memoirs, written in 1995, of his central role in the development of Vietnam policy, “In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam”.

Obviously McNamara has put his own ‘spin’ on his personal role then in order to absolve himself (a little) before history. That is to be expected. What comes through crystal clear, however, because in the final analysis McNamara still doesn’t get it, is that when you’re the number one imperial power all the decisions you make are suppose to fall into place for your benefit because you represent the “good guys”. Regardless of what you do, or do not, know about the internal workings of the situation at hand. The Kennedy/Johnson administrations were almost totally ignorant of the internal working of Vietnamese society. That is why I have that eerie, very eerie, feeling about this Obama war policy.

In the normal course of events former high level bureaucrats in American presidential administrations usually save their attempts at self-justification for high ticket published memoirs or congenial `softball' speaking tours and conferences. In short, they prefer to preach to the choir at retail prices. Apparently, Cold Warrior extraordinaire Secretary of War Robert Strange McNamara felt that such efforts were very necessary in his case and hence he had to go to the prints in order to whitewash his role in the history of his times. Despite an apparent agreement with his “ghost writer” not to cover certain subjects and be allowed to present his story his way it is always good to catch a view of how the other side operates. It ain't pretty.

After a lifetime of relative public silence, at the age of 8o something, McNamara decided to give his take on events in which he was a central figure like dealing with the fact of American imperial military superiority in the post- World War II period, dealing with the Russians and the fight for American nuclear superiority during the Cold War, the ill-conceived Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the later Cuban Missile crisis and above all his role in the escalation of the wars in Southeast Asia, primarily Vietnam.

Very little here focuses on his time at the World Bank, a not unimportant omission that would highlight my point that he might have changed his clothing in the course of his career but not his mindset. While those of us interested in learning the lessons of history have long understood that to know the political enemy is the beginning of wisdom one will not find much here that was not infinitely better covered by the late journalist David Halberstam in his classic “The Best and The Brightest”.

McNamara has chosen to present his story in the form of parables, or rather, little vignettes about the “lessons” to be drawn from experiences (eleven in all by the way). Thus, we are asked to sit, embarrassingly, through McNamara's freshman course in revisionist history as he attempts to take himself from the cold-hearted Cold Warrior and legitimate “war criminal” to the teddy-bearish old man who has learned something in his life- after a lifetime of treachery. Yet, like that freshman course there are things to be learned despite the professor and more to learn, if only by reading between the lines, than he or she wanted to express.

McNamara presents his take by dividing the Vietnam War buildup, at least at the executive level, into periods; the early almost passive Kennedy days; the post Kennedy assassination period when Lyndon Johnson was trying to be all things to all men; the decisive post-1964 election period; and, various periods of fruitless and clueless escalation. It is this process that is, almost unwittingly, the most important to take from this world. Although McNamara, at the time of writing was an older and wiser man, when he had power he went along with ever step of the “hawks”, civilian and military. He led no internal opposition, and certainly not public one. This is the classic “good old boys” network where one falls on one’s sword when the policy turns wrong. And he is still scratching his head over why masses of anti-war protesters chanted “war criminal” when they confronted him with his deeds. And then listen to the latest screeds by current War Secretary Gates concerning Afghanistan. It will sound very familiar.

In the end, if one took his story at face value, one could only conclude that he was just trying to serve his bosses the best way he could and if things went wrong it was their fault. Nothing new there, though. Henry Kissinger has turned that little devise into an art form. Teary-eyed at the end McNamara might be as he acknowledges his role in the mass killings of his time, but beware of a wolf in sheep's clothing. Yet, you need to read this book if you want to understand how these guys (and gals) defended their state then, and now.


As is always appropriate on international working class holidays and days of remembrance here is the song most closely associated with that movement “The Internationale” in English, French and German. I will not vouch for the closeness of the translations but certainly of the spirit. Workers Of The World Unite!


The Internationale [variant words in square brackets]

Arise ye workers [starvelings] from your slumbers
Arise ye prisoners of want
For reason in revolt now thunders
And at last ends the age of cant.
Away with all your superstitions
Servile masses arise, arise
We'll change henceforth [forthwith] the old tradition [conditions]
And spurn the dust to win the prize.

So comrades, come rally
And the last fight let us face
The Internationale unites the human race.
So comrades, come rally
And the last fight let us face
The Internationale unites the human race.

No more deluded by reaction
On tyrants only we'll make war
The soldiers too will take strike action
They'll break ranks and fight no more
And if those cannibals keep trying
To sacrifice us to their pride
They soon shall hear the bullets flying
We'll shoot the generals on our own side.

No saviour from on high delivers
No faith have we in prince or peer
Our own right hand the chains must shiver
Chains of hatred, greed and fear
E'er the thieves will out with their booty [give up their booty]
And give to all a happier lot.
Each [those] at the forge must do their duty
And we'll strike while the iron is hot.




________________________________________

L'Internationale

Debout les damnés de la terre
Debout les forçats de la faim
La raison tonne en son cratère
C'est l'éruption de la fin
Du passe faisons table rase
Foules, esclaves, debout, debout
Le monde va changer de base
Nous ne sommes rien, soyons tout

C'est la lutte finale
Groupons-nous, et demain (bis)
L'Internationale
Sera le genre humain

Il n'est pas de sauveurs suprêmes
Ni Dieu, ni César, ni tribun
Producteurs, sauvons-nous nous-mêmes
Décrétons le salut commun
Pour que le voleur rende gorge
Pour tirer l'esprit du cachot
Soufflons nous-mêmes notre forge
Battons le fer quand il est chaud

L'état comprime et la loi triche
L'impôt saigne le malheureux
Nul devoir ne s'impose au riche
Le droit du pauvre est un mot creux
C'est assez, languir en tutelle
L'égalité veut d'autres lois
Pas de droits sans devoirs dit-elle
Egaux, pas de devoirs sans droits

Hideux dans leur apothéose
Les rois de la mine et du rail
Ont-ils jamais fait autre chose
Que dévaliser le travail
Dans les coffres-forts de la bande
Ce qu'il a crée s'est fondu
En décrétant qu'on le lui rende
Le peuple ne veut que son dû.

Les rois nous saoulaient de fumées
Paix entre nous, guerre aux tyrans
Appliquons la grève aux armées
Crosse en l'air, et rompons les rangs
S'ils s'obstinent, ces cannibales
A faire de nous des héros
Ils sauront bientôt que nos balles
Sont pour nos propres généraux

Ouvriers, paysans, nous sommes
Le grand parti des travailleurs
La terre n'appartient qu'aux hommes
L'oisif ira loger ailleurs
Combien, de nos chairs se repaissent
Mais si les corbeaux, les vautours
Un de ces matins disparaissent
Le soleil brillera toujours.


________________________________________

Die Internationale

Wacht auf, Verdammte dieser Erde,
die stets man noch zum Hungern zwingt!
Das Recht wie Glut im Kraterherde
nun mit Macht zum Durchbruch dringt.
Reinen Tisch macht mit dem Bedranger!
Heer der Sklaven, wache auf!
Ein nichts zu sein, tragt es nicht langer
Alles zu werden, stromt zuhauf!

Volker, hort die Signale!
Auf, zum letzten Gefecht!
Die Internationale
Erkampft das Menschenrecht

Es rettet uns kein hoh'res Wesen
kein Gott, kein Kaiser, noch Tribun
Uns aus dem Elend zu erlosen
konnen wir nur selber tun!
Leeres Wort: des armen Rechte,
Leeres Wort: des Reichen Pflicht!
Unmundigt nennt man uns Knechte,
duldet die Schmach langer nicht!

In Stadt und Land, ihr Arbeitsleute,
wir sind die starkste Partei'n
Die Mussigganger schiebt beiseite!
Diese Welt muss unser sein;
Unser Blut sei nicht mehr der Raben
und der machtigen Geier Frass!
Erst wenn wir sie vertrieben haben
dann scheint die Sonn' ohn' Unterlass!

*From The International Communist League- Once Again On Haiti- A Repudiation- A Guest Commentary

Click on the headline to link to an "American Left History" blog entry, dated February 20, 2010, a polemic concerning the question of the timing of the call for U.S./U.N. withdrawal from Haiti between the International Communist League and the Internationalist Group.

Markin comment:

I am not privy to the internal workings of the International Communist League or of the Spartacist League/U.S. or of all their motivations behind issuing this repudiation. Obviously the tasks of a left organization, including its internal functioning, and that of a left individual militant are of different orders. However I am not persuaded, on a first reading of this repudiation of their earliest position on U.S./U.N. withdrawal from Haiti, that they were wrong to NOT raise the issue of withdrawal in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake. That, in any case, was my own position at the time and although I have been wrong politically more times than I like to admit I do not think that it was wrong in that short window of time. I will, however, think about this one some more based on the issues raised in the statement. U.S./U.N Troops Out Of Haiti Now!

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27 April 2010

Statement of the International Executive Committee of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist)

Repudiating Our Position on Haiti Earthquake

A Capitulation to U.S. Imperialism

In its articles on the Haitian earthquake, Workers Vanguard, the newspaper of the Spartacist League/U.S., committed a betrayal of the fundamental principle of opposition to one’s “own” imperialist rulers. In addition to justifying the U.S. imperialist troops as essential to the aid effort, these articles polemicized against the principled and correct position of demanding the immediate withdrawal of the troops. This line was carried in a number of presses in other ICL sections, becoming the de facto line of the International Communist League. Without a public accounting and correction, we would be far down the road to our destruction as a revolutionary party. From the beginning the only revolutionary internationalist position was to demand that all U.S./UN troops get out of Haiti!

In our article in WV No. 951 (29 January), repeated in subsequent issues of the newspaper, we baldly stated:

“The U.S. military is the only force on the ground with the capacity—e.g., trucks, planes, ships—to organize the transport of what food, water, medical and other supplies are getting to Haiti’s population. And they’re doing it in the typical piggish U.S. imperialist manner. We have always opposed U.S. and UN occupations in Haiti and everywhere—and it may become necessary to call for U.S./UN out of Haiti in the near future—but we are not going to call for an end to such aid as the desperate Haitian masses can get their hands on.”

The International Executive Committee of the ICL repudiates this betrayal of our revolutionary program. As stated in the SL/U.S. Programmatic Statement: “We unconditionally oppose all U.S. military intervention—and U.S. military bases—abroad, and defend the colonial, semicolonial and other smaller, less developed countries in the face of U.S./UN attack and embargo.”

Even in very belatedly raising the call for “All U.S./UN Troops Out of Haiti Now!” in WV No. 955 (26 March), we continued to evade and reject the principle of opposition to the U.S. imperialist occupation of neocolonial Haiti. Moreover this article stated: “As we made clear in our article, ‘Haiti Earthquake Horror: Imperialism, Racism and Starvation’ (WV No. 951, 29 January), while we were not for the U.S. military going into Haiti, neither were we going to demand, in the immediate aftermath of that horrific natural disaster, the immediate withdrawal of any forces that were supplying such aid as was reaching the Haitian masses.” In fact, our earlier article had not clearly stated that we were not for the U.S. troops going in nor did it even call the U.S. military takeover what it was.

The U.S. military invasion was designed to provide a “humanitarian” face-lift to bloody U.S. imperialism and was aimed at securing U.S. military control in Haiti and reasserting American imperialist domination over the Caribbean, including against imperialist rivals like France. In failing to oppose the invasion, we also ignored the particular danger this posed to the Cuban deformed workers state (as well as to the bourgeois nationalist-populist regime of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela). We accepted Washington’s line that the provision of aid was inextricably linked to the U.S. military takeover and thus helped to sell the myth peddled by the Democratic Party Obama administration that this was a “humanitarian” mission. Our statement that “it may become necessary to call for U.S./UN out of Haiti in the near future” (emphasis added) amounted to giving conditional support to U.S. military intervention. As one leading party comrade argued, the only difference between the position we took and August 4, 1914, when the German Social Democrats voted war credits to the German imperialist rulers at the outset of the First World War, is that this was not a war.

Thus we gutted the revolutionary internationalist essence of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution linking the fight for social and national liberation to the struggle for proletarian state power both in neocolonial and in more advanced countries. This means educating the proletariat in North America, and internationally, that its class interests lie in actively championing the fight against the imperialist domination of Haiti. Instead our articles did the opposite, promoting illusions in U.S. imperialist “democracy” as the savior of the Haitian people. We all but echoed Barack Obama as he dispatched imperialist combat troops, including elements of the 82nd Airborne Division and a Marine expeditionary unit. One doubts that we could so easily have taken such a position if the Republican Bush administration were still in the White House.

In its latest article, “SL Twists and Turns on Haiti” (Internationalist, 9 April), the centrist Internationalist Group (IG) writes: “While support to imperialist occupation is a small step for reformists, who only seek to modify imperialist policies rather than to bring down the imperialist system, in the case of the SL/ICL it should be harder to digest.” Indeed it is. For its part, the IG treated the earthquake as an opening for revolution in Haiti, asserting: “This small but militant proletariat can place itself at the head of the impoverished urban and rural masses seeking to organize their own power, particularly at present where the machinery of the capitalist state is largely reduced to rubble and a few marauding bands of police” (“Haiti: Workers Solidarity, Yes! Imperialist Occupation, No!” Internationalist, 20 January).

Instead of simply exposing the IG’s Third Worldist fantasies, we concentrated in our polemics on zealous apologies for the U.S. imperialist military intervention, a position to the right of the IG. These centrist apologists for Third World nationalism quite correctly characterized our position as “social imperialist”—socialist in words, support for imperialism in deeds. This is a bitter pill to swallow. Only through a savage indictment of our line can we avoid the alternative of going down the road that led the founders of the IG to defect from our organization in the pursuit of forces other than the proletariat. In their case, this has ranged from remnants of the Stalinist bureaucracy that sold out to imperialist counterrevolution in the DDR to Latin American nationalists and left-talking trade-union bureaucrats.

In the context of polemics with the IG, Workers Vanguard misused the authority of the revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky in order to alibi support to an imperialist occupation. In his 1938 article “Learn to Think,” Trotsky argued that one should not always put a minus where the bourgeoisie puts a plus. He was referring not to a military occupation force but to instances where an imperialist government might send military aid to anti-colonialist fighters. Moreover, Trotsky’s reference in this article to workers fraternizing with an army called in to fight a fire manifestly did not refer to a situation like Haiti where U.S. imperialist troops were invading a neocolonial country, an act which Leninists unconditionally oppose on principle.

However, neither do revolutionaries foster illusions in such non-military aid as capitalist governments may provide. In responding to the U.S. imperialist invasion of Haiti following the earthquake, we would have done well to look to the position of our Australian section in 2005 responding to the imperialist “aid” intervention in Indonesia, specifically the secessionist province of Aceh, following the tsunami. Demanding “Australian/all imperialist military/cops get out of Aceh now!” an article in Australasian Spartacist titled “Australian Imperialists Seize on Tsunami Catastrophe” (No. 190, Autumn 2005) indicted imperialist aid programs. The article pointed out that “whatever short-term benefit a part of them may provide to a small number of oppressed people,” such aid is “always aimed at reinforcing neocolonial subjugation of the Third World masses.”

The “Politics of the Possible”

From the time of our tendency’s inception as a left opposition within the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the early 1960s, we have recognized that national isolation must in short order destroy any subjectively revolutionary formation, not least one subjected to the pressures of operating in the heartland of world imperialism, the United States. Genuine proletarian internationalism means disciplined international collaboration, without which we cannot successfully counter the powerful pull of nationalist opportunism.

The handmaiden to our embellishment of U.S. imperialist intervention was the abrogation of international democratic centralism. The role of propaganda as the scaffolding of a revolutionary party is to publish the line of the party as decided through discussion and motions by the party leadership. Prior to going into print opposing the call for “troops out of Haiti” in WV No. 951, the SL/U.S. Political Bureau and the International Secretariat (the resident administrative body of the IEC) abdicated responsibility by not holding an organized discussion and vote, instead setting our line through informal consultation. However, once the line was published in Workers Vanguard it was picked up by many of the ICL’s other sectional presses, indicating that there was little initial disagreement.

A meeting of the I.S. on March 18 did at last vote to call for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. and United Nations troops. However, the motions adopted at that meeting, which became the basis for the article in WV No. 955, reaffirmed that “we were correct in not calling for the withdrawal of U.S. troops in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake.” In stating that “the particular exceptional circumstances that obtained two months ago no longer exist,” the motions also continued to insist that conditional defense of the U.S. military invasion was correct in the immediate conjuncture of a natural disaster. Moreover, while criticizing the formulation that the U.S. military was the only force on the ground with the wherewithal to deliver aid, the I.S. motions did not mandate a public correction of this statement. This kind of dishonesty was condemned by James P. Cannon, founder of American Trotskyism. In addressing a situation where the Trotskyist SWP at its 1954 convention needed to acknowledge mistakes, he noted: “You know, the Stalinists make more changes, and more rapid and drastic changes, than any other party in history. But they never say: ‘We made a mistake.’ They always say: ‘The situation has changed.’ We should be more precise and more honest.”

Menshevism often takes the guise of “realism” and “expediency.” Looking to come up with a “concrete solution” in a situation where there was no such solution from a proletarian revolutionary vantage point, we capitulated. What our small revolutionary party had to put forward was a proletarian internationalist perspective for the liberation of Haiti, above all through opposition to our “own” imperialist rulers. In the immediate situation, the only concrete expression of such a program was negative—to demand that any and all Haitian refugees be allowed into the U.S. with full citizenship rights, to oppose any deportations of Haitians who had made it here and above all to demand all U.S./UN troops out.

Our articles distorted reality in order to justify the American military presence. We correctly criticized the reformists for spreading illusions in the imperialist governments by demanding that they provide “aid, not troops” but our own response was worse. Our articles presented U.S. military intervention as the only “realistic” way for the Haitian masses to get “aid” and claimed demagogically that withdrawal of U.S. combat troops “would result in mass death through starvation.” This was to treat the question not from the standpoint of Marxist program, but through the liberal lens of “disaster relief.” Michael Harrington—the former leader of the Democratic Socialists of America and adviser to the “war on poverty” programs of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Democratic Party administration—captured the core of such a social-democratic worldview with the expression, “the left wing of the possible.”

The “politics of the possible” is a palpable pressure in the period of post-Soviet reaction, where revolution—or even, particularly in the U.S., militant class struggle—appears remote and there is an overwhelming absence of resonance for our political views. There is a yawning abyss between what we stand for and the consciousness of the working class and young radicals, even those who claim to be socialist. As we have noted, it has been very difficult to maintain our revolutionary continuity and very easy to have it destroyed.

The Fight to Maintain a Revolutionary Perspective

In fighting against the Cochranite opposition in the then-revolutionary American Socialist Workers Party in the early 1950s, James P. Cannon argued:

“The revolutionary movement, under the best conditions, is a hard fight, and it wears out a lot of human material. Not for nothing has it been said a thousand times in the past: ‘The revolution is a devourer of men.’ The movement in this, the richest and most conservative country in the world, is perhaps the most voracious of all.

“It is not easy to persist in the struggle, to hold on, to stay tough and fight it out year after year without victory; and even, in times such as the present, without tangible progress. That requires theoretical conviction and historical perspective as well as character. And, in addition to that, it requires association with others in a common party.”

— “Trade Unionists and Revolutionists,” 11 May 1953

The example of the degeneration of the SWP from a revolutionary party through centrism to abject reformism is instructive. The party endured more than a decade of stagnation and isolation during the anti-Communist witchhunt. Seeing their role reduced essentially to a holding operation in the citadel of U.S. imperialism, aging party cadre like those in the Cochran wing gave up on a revolutionary perspective. The SWP majority under Cannon and Farrell Dobbs fought to preserve the revolutionary continuity of Trotskyism against this liquidationism. But they themselves were not immune from the deforming pressures that led the Cochranites to split.

Four years later, in 1957, the SWP supported the introduction of federal troops into Little Rock, Arkansas—the end result of which was the crushing of local black self-defense efforts against the howling racist mobs fighting school integration. Painting U.S. troops as reliable defenders of black people engendered significant opposition within the party in the 1950s, particularly from Richard Fraser whose program of revolutionary integrationism as the road to black freedom in the U.S. we take as our own. But the wrong line was never corrected and the view of the U.S. imperialist army as the only “realistic” force to defend civil rights protesters in the Jim Crow South against racist terror deepened. By 1964 the SWP had adopted the grotesque campaign slogan, “Withdraw the Troops from Viet Nam and Send Them to Mississippi!” By 1965, the SWP had thrown overboard the last remnant of a revolutionary opposition to imperialism, promoting the reformist lie that a classless peace movement could stop U.S. imperialism’s dirty war against the Vietnamese workers and peasants.

The young SWP cadre in the Revolutionary Tendency who fought the party’s degeneration were the founding leaders of our organization. Recognizing where the SWP went, and holding it up as a mirror of where we could go without correcting our mistakes and the outright betrayal of our revolutionary internationalist program in response to the Haiti earthquake, is part of the fight to preserve this continuity with Cannon’s revolutionary party that extends back to Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks.

But the ability to make such a correction is hardly cause for celebration. It merely lays the basis for political rectification. We crossed the class line and the urgent necessity is to reassert and struggle to maintain the proletarian internationalist program of Leninism.

—27 April 2010

*From The "HistoMat" Blog- An Update On The UK Elections

Click on the headline ot link to a "HistoMat" blog entry, dated April 29, 2010, on the upcoming UK parliamentary elections.

Markin comment:

I have already given my view on the UK elections in this space today. "HistoMat" just gives some nice anecdotal evidence for that view. Thanks- "HistoMat".