*From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-Gays And The SWP (American Socialist Workers Party)

Markin comment:

The following is an article from the Spring 1982 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.

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

Seduced and Abandoned: The Politics of Opportunism

Gays and the SWP

"Tinkerbell Meets Trotsky: The Revolution Be¬trayed": With this smirking title as a come-on, Boston's Cay Community News (19 September 1981) reviewed two collections of Socialist Workers Party (SWP) internal documents on gay liberation recently pub¬lished by gay activists to scandalize the SWP. The document collections, Cay Liberation and Socialism (published by David Thorstad) and No Apologies (published by Scott Forgione and Kurt Hill, with an introduction by Thorstad), cover the SWP's gyrations on the gay question from 1970 to 1979. Thorstad, Forgione and Hill are all ex-SWP members who want to expose the SWP's "betrayal" of gay lifestylist politics. In this they certainly succeed. They and the Cay Commu¬nity News reviewer, Scott Tucker, an anarchist/gay liberationist, use the sorry story of SWP hypocrisy to denounce Trotskyism as an enemy of freedom for homosexuals.
But the SWP has not had anything in common with Trotskyism for a long time! The authentic Trotskyist tendency in this country, the Spartacist League, has never wavered in its commitment to opposing anti-gay backwardness and the brutal enforcement of sexual puritanism by the capitalist state. From our very inception as an organization and long before the advent of a "gay liberation movement" (and at a time when the SWP was still forcing gay members to resign!), the Spartacist League has fought against all victimiza¬tion and persecution of homosexuals. But Thorstad & Co. would prefer not to acknowledge our record because their aim is to show that only those who see themselves as gay activists first and foremost can be relied on to defend the democratic rights of homosexuals.
Our commitment to gay rights has never meant patronizing acceptance of gay activists' lifestylist illusions. The Spartacist League has always argued against the dangerously Utopian belief that in this violent, class-divided society "only gays can liberate themselves." On the contrary, only socialist revolution can lay the basis for finally uprooting sick prejudices against "sexual deviance," through providing social alternatives to the stifling monogamous family, the main social institution oppressing women, children and homosexuals. Our aim is not a sectoralist "gay movement" but a revolutionary party based on the working class to lead the struggles of all the oppressed—and in which the best fighters from all sectors of the oppressed will be, not narrow represent¬atives of "their people," but communist revolutionaries.
Lenin's exhortation in What Is To Be Done? (1903) guides our work:
"The Social-Democrat's ideal should not be the trade-union secretary, but the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects... who is able to take advantage of every event, however small, in order to set forth before all his socialist convictions and his democratic demands, in order to clarify for all and everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat." Our principled approach to these questions has attracted to the Spartacist League some of the best elements of the New Left-derived gay liberation milieu, most notably the Los Angeles-based Red Flag Union (formerly Lavender & Red Union), with whom we fused in 1977 (see W&R No. 16, Winter 1977-78, which discusses the key political issues—defense of the Soviet Union, rejection of lifestylism—which laid the pro¬grammatic basis for the fusion).
By contrast, the SWP documents published by Thorstad, Forgione and Hill are a testament to the proposition that opportunism doesn't pay. The value of the SWP documents is not, as Thorstad maintains, that they are "the most important such debates ever to occur inside any left-wing group" or that they will prove "essential" to resolving the question of the relationship between the fight against homosexual oppression and the fight for socialism. They are, however, useful for the light they shed on the grotesque zig-zags and utter cynicism of the reformist SWP. That today the SWP now dismisses Thorstad and his "North American Man/Boy Love Association"— currently being victimized by a state witchhunt—as virtual child molesters, as part of the current SWP policy of benign neglect of gay rights, is not merely evidence of their adaptation to homophobia.
The method behind this history of flirtation with and abandonment of this specially oppressed sector is the same tailist approach the SWP brought to what they called the "autonomous mass movements" of feminists, black nationalists, Chicano nationalists, etc. With the prolif¬eration of "do-it-yourself liberation" currents in the late 1960s/early 1970s, the SWP with consummate cynicism authored the proposition that "consistent" anythingism equals socialism and jumped on the gay bandwagon. When the lifestyle radical mood receded the SWP backed away from the gay question. Ultimate¬ly, the SWP rediscovered the working class and with predictable opportunist logic decided to "turn" to the unions by pandering to some of the most backward attitudes prevalent among workers, as for example through Barnes & Co.'s despicable defense of anti-homosexual "age of consent" laws.
If we can share the disgust of Thorstad et al. with the SWP's wretched politics, it is for very different reasons. There is a political chasm dividing the petty-bourgeois politics of gay community lifestylism from Marxism. Thorstad at least, has drawn the conclusion from his experiences in and out of the SWP that Marxism has nothing to say to homosexuals: "For years, gay socialists have been trying to develop a synthesis between homosexuality and socialism— After a decade of effort, I am ready to draw the conclusion that the left has failed to meet the challenge of gay liberation." He concludes his introduction to No Apologies by quoting an earlier gay liberationism Kurt Hiller, "The liberation of homosexuals can only be the work of homosexuals
themselves."
Spartacist League/ Spartacus Youth League contingent in Los Angeles march against anti-homosexual Briggs Initiative, July 1978.
Hill and Forgione (now, respectively, a supporter of the social-democratic Workers Power group and a staff member of Cay Community News) still present themselves as Marxists—of a sort. Littering their own documents with dozens of cutesy-poo illustrations (a cartoon of Lenin, Brezhnev and Trotsky in a gay bath), they conclude their foreword to No Apologies with the slogans "For an understanding of Michael Mouse-Lennonism too!" and "In defense of campy socialists as well as the socialist camp!" Is this the sort of treatment they think will serve "to further a Marxist perspective" on the gay question?
Tucker is an, unabashed anti-Marxist, an anarchist whose sense of political reality is best illustrated by his comment, "The SWP leadership has no sense of proportion if it really believes that transvestism is so much more exotic and eccentric to the masses than Trotskyism itself"! The entire point of his lengthy review is to use the SWP in order to write off "all 57 varieties of Marxism-Leninism" as "unfit for human consumption." There is, however, a revolutionary alternative to Tucker's anarcho-lifestylism, Thorstad's advocacy of an autonomous gay movement, and Forgiohe/Hill's Mickey-Mouse "Marxism." To develop this theme, it is necessary to delve a little deeper into the SWP's slimy record and into the politics of gay liberationism.
The SWP in the '60s: "Gay is Good"...Maybe
As part of the SWP's political degeneration in the 1960s the organization adopted an unofficial policy of excluding homosexuals. As SWP honcho Jack Barnes admitted in a report to the Political Committee (the SWP top leadership) in November 1970, "Since the early 1960s the party and YSA [Young Socialist Alliance] have been moving toward a policy which proscribes homosexuals from membership" (quoted in Gay Liberation and Socialism, p. 5).
In its earlier revolutionary days the SWP leadership, in particular founding leader James P. Cannon, had a far different attitude. In his contribution to the commemo¬rative book James P. Cannon As We Knew Him, long¬time SWP leader Sam Gordon recalled the case of "a young leader of the organization ...[who] had fallen afoul of the New York homosexual laws, and was clapped into jail one day early in the thirties." Cannon, Gordon recalled, got the comrade out. "The case was finally quashed. Our comrade continued to be a leading member...." But in the 1960s the SWP was sloughing off simple decency, as well as revolutionary principles, in its pursuit of success on the cheap.
The hallmark of that New Left era was the SWP's vigorous attempt to mimic and adapt to black national¬ism, feminism, Chicano nationalism (the mythical land of "Aztlan") and virtually every other "mass movement"—most importantly the liberal-bourgeois anti-war movement. As Barnes said, "The consistent and irreconcilable liberation struggle of an oppressed nationality is our struggle. If it is irreconcilable and consistent, then it will point toward socialism..." (speech to 1970 SWP convention). As applied to feminism et al. this became "consistent (fill in the blank) will lead to socialism." It was only a matter of time until Barnes & Co. discovered gay liberation. And if "Black is Beautiful" and "Sisterhood is Powerful" became, in the SWP's eyes, "socialist" slogans—then why not "Gay is Good"? Tucker indignantly raises this very point, and indeed, by the SWP's own logic, there's no reason they shouldn't have adopted this equally meaningless slogan as well.
However, there was a layer of SWP "old guard" conservatives, trade-union oriented and socially con¬servative, who, while they dared not challenge feminism and black nationalism so openly, found the gay movement hard to swallow. By the time the SWP got geared up to drop its ban on homosexual members and mount an intervention into the gay movement, that movement itself was already showing signs of dying down. Spring 1971 was the height of the SWP's brief infatuation with gay liberation: they mobilized heavily for gay marches and for a gay contingent in the April antiwar peace crawl in Washington. The Militant ran gay-oriented articles (many authored by Thorstad) in virtually every issue.
But as Thorstad later recalled, "The party's involvement had hardly begun when the brakes began to be applied" (Gay Liberator, December 1974-January 1975). In May 1971 the SWP announced a "probe" into the gay liberation movement that, in hindsight, was really the beginning of a withdrawal from it. The following year saw a lengthy literary discussion in the SWP's internal bulletin, which forms the bulk of the documents in Thorstad's collection. This concluded with the 1973 SWP convention where a "Memorandum on the Gay Liberation Movement" outlined the Barnes gang's intention to drop gay lib politics.
Without rejecting the sectoralist method which had led the SWP to briefly tail the gay movement, the Memo basically concluded that there was not enough of a movement to tail. This reality was covered with some orthodox Marxist phrases about taking no position on whether gay was better,, worse, or just as good as straight. The gay question, the Memo said, was simply a question of democratic rights, not (as gay activists would have it) a broader struggle to liberate everyone's sexual nature. And in a revealing aside on just how far lifestylist counter-culturalism had been allowed to flower inside the SWP, the Memo authors felt obliged to note that male comrades should not wear dresses and that "sexual activities... have no place at party socials." ,
The Memo, although it praised the gay liberation movement (with the exception of its "ultraleft" [sic] sector), naturally enough was seen as a gross betrayal by the gay liberationists recruited during the SWP's Spring fling, and especially by chief gay spokesman David Thorstad. A wave of quits predictably followed. As Thorstad explained in his December 1973 resignation statement: "It [the Memo] has made it impossible for gays to reconcile their commitment to gay liberation with party membership" (Cay Liberation and Socialism, p. 127).
Anita Bryant and "The Turn"
The SWP dumped the gay movement in '73 mainly because there didn't seem to be a lot of recruits to gain. There was also an element of concession to conserva¬tive SWP leaders like Tom Kerry and Nat Weinstein. So it was not unexpected that when, in 1977, Anita Bryant's hate campaign against homosexuals provoked a brief spate of massive demonstrations in U.S. cities, it also provoked a renewed interest in the gay movement in the SWP. SWP leader Doug Jenness authored a "clarification" on the '73 Memo, writing that "...we solidarize with the sentiment of the gay liberation movement that 'gay is good'" interpreting this not as advocacy of homosexuality (which of course it was!) but as a statement that "gay people are just as good as heterosexual people" (SWPDiscussion Bulletin, Vol. 35, No. 5, 11 June 1977). An SWP gay oppositionist wrote that "since the June 7 Miami referendum, differences over the party's tactical orientation to the gay move¬ment have been completely superceded by dramatic events—The party has responded in a revolutionary fashion to the latest upsurge of the gay movement" (SWP Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 35, No. 11, 9 July 1977).
But no sooner had the mass marches ceased than SWP interest in the gay movement ceased. Simultane¬ously, having watched the black nationalist, feminist, antiwar and other New Left movements die off in the 1970s, the SWP suddenly discovered the working class. That is to say, Barnes & Co. found something new to tail: the liberal wing of the trade-union bureaucracy. The very same people who had been the architects of what they now called the "long detour" from the working class into the various "independent mass movements" of the oppressed now began declaiming the elemen¬tary Marxist concept that the working class alone has the social weight to make socialist revolution and serve as the liberator of all the oppressed. Cynical? Certainly. Dishonest? By all means. This "turn" meant not only the end of the SWP's dabbling with gay lifestylist politics, but an adaptation to the most backward attitudes, not just among the working class, but increasingly to new moods of conservatism being enforced by a reactionary bourgeois backlash against the "permissive" 1960s.
In part in a drive to ingratiate themselves with liberal union reformers like Ed Sadlowski of the Steelworkers and Arnold Miller of the Mine Workers, the Barnes leadership sought to purge the SWP of its more flagrantly non-"proletarian" elements. Flamboyant gay liberationists were on the top of the list. It only remained to find a reasonable excuse to publicly ditch the gay orientation. In February 1979 an excuse was found—age-of-consent laws and the turn of part of the gay movement (Thorstad in particular) to the explosive issue of "cross-generational" sex and rights for gay youth.
At a Philadelphia conference to plan for a national gay march on Washington, SWPers took an active part. One of the demands raised was "full rights for gay youth, including revision of age-of-consent laws" (later watered down to "protection for lesbian and gay youth ..."). Little more than a month later the Militant (13 April 1979) ran a major article, "The Class-Struggle Road to Winning Gay Rights," in order to reject the march on Washington and blast the very existence of a "so-called gay movement defined by sexuality." The most vicious thrust was a direct attack on Thorstad for having "foisted" the issue of "man-boy love" on the gay movement.
"The repeal of age-of-consent laws is a reactionary demand..." proclaimed the SWP; "saying that children have the 'right' to 'consent' to sex with adults is exactly like saying children should be able to 'consent' to work in a garment factory twelve hours a day." The Militant even rejected '"non-abusive consensual' sex by adults with children": "Laws designed to protect children from sexual and economic exploitation by adults are historic acquisitions of the working class and should be enforced." The SWP refused to mobilize for the Washington march they had helped to plan. Forgione and Hill fought a losing battle against the new direction internally while Michael Maggi, a former co-thinker of Thorstad's who had seen the light in 1973 and become a loyal Barnesite, termed Thorstad a "baby-fucker" and ordered gay literature in the SWP's New York City bookstore thrown out, according to No Apologies.
The issue of age-of-consent laws (or rather, the frightening, still socially taboo issue of childhood sexuality) is inflammatory. Nonetheless, opposition to such laws must be elementary for defenders of democratic rights for youth, whatever their sexual orientation. As Young Spartacus (Summer 1979) put it:
"Revolutionaries, unlike the social-democratic SWP,
oppose any and all legal restrictions by the capitalist state
on effectively consensual sexual activity. Get the cops out
of the bedrooms! We know that such measures are not
designed to protect children but to enforce the sexual
morality of the nuclear family, which is at the root of the
oppression of women, youth and homosexuals "Those who, like the SWP, join the reactionary chorus calling for the capitalist state to enforce the sexual codes based on the morality of the bourgeois family only help to prop up a key bastion of child abuse and one of the strongest pillars of capitalist oppression."
"Gay Liberation" and Marxism
While Forgione and Hill were making their last stand for gay lifestylism in the SWP, they attempted to claim that the Barnes leadership was going the way of the "sectarian" Spartacist League. As Hill wrote:
"The party leadership appears to have capitulated to the sectarian-workerist traits which we used to blast in our opponents. We ridiculed the 'class struggle' formalism of the sectarians such as the Spartacist League who charged that our attitude toward struggles such as women's liberation and Black liberation was'petty-bourgeois.'We encouraged the developments of these and other mass movements for social change."
—SWP Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 36, No. 22,12
July 1979
In some ways Forgione and Hill were simply the most consistent defenders of the SWP's course throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. "Key terms used in the past/' they wrote, "such as 'best builders' of the 'independent mass struggles/ are giving way to the 'worker-Bolsheviks' of 'labor's strategic line of march'....the party is beginning to drift away from the theoretical acquisitions of the past, 20 years" (SWP Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 36, No. 22).
Quite so. But what Forgione and Hill cannot comprehend is that what they term "theoretical acquisitions" had been simply opportunist rationales for tailing petty-bourgeois, self-boosting, mutually-conflicting "mass movements" and that Barnes' "turn" was not toward genuine Trotskyism but toward tailing a new "mass movement"—labor reformism.
What unites all the somewhat disparate elements in the "gay community" is a common commitment to the politics of the gay lifestyle. To the gay liberationist, at bottom simply being openly homosexual is in itself a political act. To the "socialist" gay liberationist, it is even revolutionary. As Forgione put it: "It has been through this struggle for self-affirmation as-an equal human being ('coming out') that has led increasing numbers of lesbians and gay men... to become quite convinced that this society is sick and has to be either radically changed or replaced" (SWP Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 36, No. 17, 9 July 1979).
"Coming out" is obviously a personal decision—and one which, given the realities of life in this society, has potentially serious consequences. But for the New Left and its various spin-offs, the personal is political. Quoting anarchist Gustav Landauer in his review, Scott Tucker is quite explicit tha%the revolution is accom¬plished by livinga revolutionary lifestyle: "TheState isa condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently."
Would that it were so easy to create a new society! The state happens to enforce its morality and its exploitative form of production, with cops, courts, prisons—internationally with MX missiles and armies— and those who go against it are going to get attacked.

The best proof that gay liberation is a petty-bourgeois ideology is that an openly gay lifestyle in a "gay community" is only possible in severely restricted and largely middle-class "gay ghettoes"—West Hollywood, Castro Street, the West Village. What about gay men and lesbians who do not or cannot move to one of these gay islands in a sea of "patriarchal capitalism"? Cay liberation has no answer.
In fact, Forgione and Hill revealed their own petty-bourgeois biases by their violent resistance to the SWP's "turn" to the working class. They took offense when SWP leaders implied that gays were a petty-bourgeois species, and insisted that there are gay workers too. But when it came time to reach out to their "brothers" in the steel and auto plants, Forgione and Hill seemed strangely reluctant. This is not to give any credence to the Barnes gang's "proletarian" credentials, but Forgione and Hill seem to assume that the only role for homosexual socialists is doing "gay work" in the "gay community."
Can homosexuals, as Thorstad insists, liberate themselves? Here the question of "social weight," referred to ad nauseum in the SWP documents, rears its head. For all that the Socialist Workers Party used this concept simply cynically, nonetheless they have a point—and one on which the Spartacist League insisted while Barnes & Co. were hopping on and off the gay liberation bandwagon. We are for "the sexual libera¬tion of everybody"—however, we certainly do not intend to legislate the sexual behavior of future generations by putting our "seal of approval" on any particular sexual mode in this necessarily deforming society—gay, straight, mixed, whatever. That is why we pose our demands in the sexual-personal area nega¬tively: against moralistic state legislation of sexuality. • But more immediately, changing this society means a struggle for power—which means creating a powerful mass party rooted in the working class, which alone has the cohesiveness and social weight, because it pro¬duces this society's wealth, to make a socialist revolu¬tion. To eliminate the oppression of homosexuals, rooted in the sexual morality of the bourgeois family, it will ultimately be necessary to replace the family with other cooperative institutions in a socialist society. The immediate aftermath of socialist revolution will wipe out all discriminatory laws and criminal sanctions against "deviant" sexual behavior. But a more funda¬mental transformation is required to change deeply-rooted, ancient attitudes toward sex roles and sexuality. We don't think this is an easy, or simply resolved, question by any means. Nonetheless, the ultimate goal of Marxism has always been the creation of a society in which every individual can develop his potential to the utmost, freed of economic compulsion and attendent psychological miseries.
The job of revolutionaries is to forge a revolutionary vanguard party which can, as Lenin said, serve as a "tribune of the people," fighting all forms of oppres¬sion as part of the necessary education of the proletariat in assuming its leading role in the creation of a new society. In the end the "best builders" of rights and freedom for homosexuals will be those who, whatever their sexual orientation, are builders of such a party.

*From "The Rag Blog"- Arizona's Crackers : 'Illegal is Not a Race'

Click on to link to a "The Rag Blog" entry- Arizona's Crackers : 'Illegal is Not a Race'

Markin comment:

Down With The Arizona anti-immigration law! Full citizenship rights for all who make it here (America). And by the way let's fight for some historic justice by giving Arizona back to where it belongs- Mexico. Then those Anglo rednecks in Arizona better start worrying about THEIR immigration papers!

From Green Left Global News & Info-Bank Of America Protest: Dozens Storm Bank Branch In DC

Click on the headline to link to a "Green Left Info" entry on a spirited protest at the Ban of America.

Markin comment:

Now we are starting to get some place. The brothers and sisters in D.C. found a one of the correct targets for our wrath. And they were workers. Dare I think of the words-"anti-capitalist struggle". Probably, no definitely, premature but in the right direction.

*From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-Sex, Race And Class In The "American Century"

Markin comment:

The following is an article from the Spring 1987 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.

Markin comment:

I have posted this entry as a snapshot in time from this period (1980s)presented by a revolutionary whose real working class experiences in the 1960s are probably a little bit different from those of most of us who became serious leftists at that time.

******

Down With U.S. Imperialism!

Sex, Race and Class in the "American Century"

On 22 November 1986 the Spartacist League held a forum in San Francisco called "Fight Reagan Reaction with Class Struggle!" We print below an edited transcript of the speech given by comrade George Crawford, an SL Central Committee member.
Tonight we're going to be talking about domestic reaction within the United States now—Reagan's war or, very importantly, the ruling class's war, against what is known as the Vietnam syndrome, which came from the U.S. defeat on the battlefield at the hands of the heroic Vietnamese workers and peasants. Now, this is also an international phenomenon, there's America's military attacks on Libya, on Grenada, many evidences of this. But inside the United States you have what you could call a moral rearmament, which is an enforced social reaction coming from the government in league with and using what is known as the Moral Majority forces, religious fundamentalists. It's stepping up, becoming greater every day.

Everybody is constantly amazed that there's no opposition to this incredible crusade against every kind of democratic right; that the Democratic Party basically tries to out-Moral Majority the Moral Majority. And the point that I want to make in the talk is that this is not simply the Republican Party or Reagan. This is a war against the population by an entire ruling class, because something is seriously wrong from their viewpoint with America. Very important for them that, one, workers work for what they're paid and, two, most importantly, volunteer to die en masse when necessary. And if a ruling class does not have that, it's in trouble. And it doesn't have that now, it's a long shot from there.

The 1950s: The Bomb and the Red Purges


I want to go back and describe a little bit about the '50s. The U.S. won World War II and it came out of World War II as the strongest and the overwhelming imperialist. The other imperialists economically were destroyed through the process of World War II. But the Soviet Union also won World War II, and not only that, within a very few years it had the atom bomb. And so the U.S., you might say at the very pinnacle of what it had declared its century, looked over its shoulder and there was the Soviet Union with the atom bomb. The atom bomb was very important to the U.S., by the way, and was used. It's a matter of record that the atom bomb was used not for victory over Japan but to send a message to the Soviet Union for after the war. It was a calculated decision, to the point of even keeping Stalin totally in the dark; they did not want him to know what was going on in terms of the development and the dropping of the bomb.

So the U.S. lost its trump card within a very short time after World War II. Not only that, the U.S. had another problem. The original organizers of the AFL-CIO were in the main some kind of communists. They belonged to the Communist Party, they belonged to the Trotskyist party, they maybe were Musteites; but they were still there. And so in the late '40s, these people were neutralized. Either they were physically thrown
out of the unions, or they were isolated, or they were beaten up.

I remember when I went to work in '64, this was in a rubber plant in L.A., and it was about '69 when I started becoming political; and within about three years I met two guys, and I'd worked with the guys or around them for about eight years, and I had no idea that these people used to be political. Turned out that they were all, not members of the CP because there were no members of the CP left, they were supporters of the CP. One guy had three generations of union members which meant there were union members in his family before 1900. And the other one was a guy that, well, finally he told me that he had a full set of Capital locked away in his basement, which nobody else knew about. But then over a period of time he had convinced himself that communism's okay and all that, and Marx was right and all that, but the real question is the Catholics. And no one in the plant knew that these people were in the least bit leftist. They had not gone to a union meeting since the meeting in 1949 when they took the communist organizers out in the parking lot and beat them up.

Now, the '50s were pretty rough. One of the things in the '50s is that the population actually believed that this was the American Century, and that communism was, indeed, irrelevant—except as an external international phenomenon which was the enemy. But inside the U.S. there was a belief—and I'm not sure it was in all layers of the population, certainly less in terms of blacks—that U.S. imperialism is going to have things its way. And, after all, it had absolutely no competition from any other imperialist power in the '50s. U.S. Steel could produce at less than full capacity and simply dictate world steel prices, and pay incredible dividends (which paid off about 20 years later in plants that can't compete).

There was no pill, of course. You know, this "Just say no"? Boy, we grew up with this "Just say no." You know, it brings one to rage. And for the most part you unfortunately had to say no. Was it because you wanted to be a good citizen or a good Catholic? No, it was fear! Because 15 percent of your graduating class of women were pregnant in high school and they didn't graduate. And you had two choices: in L.A. either you sent your girlfriend or went with her to Tijuana, and since you couldn't speak Spanish you stood out in the avenue with a $20 bill and you ended up with a woman dying or horribly mutilated with infection because the only person that stops is a cab driver. So that wasn't an option. Or you went to one of these incredible homes where the women put their babies up for adoption. And of course the third thing was marriage. So your life's over. At 18, forget it. That's it. The woman doesn't graduate from school, maybe you graduate from school. If you're lucky you've got an old man working in a unionized job and gets you a job, if you're not lucky it's gas station mechanic forever. There's a good film about this called Fat City, a John Huston film.

And so you did not get an enormous amount of questioning about options, what do I want to do in life, what will I do next year in life? It was there, you just did it—or it did it to you. And left politics, or politics per se was not even an alternative. And I'm sure where I grew up was a bit worse, because it was one generation away from the South, a Southern working-class area, but there was no option, one could not conceive of thinking about becoming a revolutionary politician. I mean, the political debate that was going on was whether the Democrats sold out Eastern Europe and China, and if you were a Republican you said yes and if you were a Democrat you said no and that's as far as it went. And that's what the ruling class liked a lot. Because the workers did not create a hell of a lot of trouble. They were economically combative, that is true, but the politics one would say were at an all-time low.

The Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War

What happened to change all this? First of all, you had the civil rights movement. The civil rights movement was very, very powerful because here is a fundamental democratic right that should exist by the very underpinnings—and formal underpinnings, and agreed by all, in the Constitution—of our society. Yet it was impossible and did not happen and the civil rights movement was a failure. Right now they try to pass off what a success it was. At the time we all knew it was a failure, and that what was happening was simply tokenism, and what was happening was that the real leaders of the civil rights movement were being butchered and murdered by the state.

And the second thing of course that happened was the Vietnam War. I want to tell one story about the Vietnam War. We were talking about the Vietnam syndrome and I think this story makes it actually clear. In 1969 I was just beginning to become involved in organized politics and just by chance dropped by Newsreel, a kind of New Leftist group, and they were involved in military organizing on the West Coast. Now, the main and only training camp for the Marines on the West Coast is called Camp Pendleton, it's a critical camp. It's got some of the greatest real estate in the western United States. To get into Camp Pendleton you literally have to go to Oceanside. Well, that's Marine property, basically—it isn't, but it is.

And so there was a demonstration by an organization called the Movement for a Democratic Military. Now the organizer was a black sergeant, supporter of the Black Panther Party. There was a bus with Black Panther Party members going from L.A. to Oceanside for the rally. So I decided to go down with various people to this rally. And I got down there, and there's this little amphitheater right on the ocean, like in a hundred little seaside towns, and you've got an audience of about 500 Vietnam vets or about-to-be Vietnam vets because they're sitting there waiting for demobe orders home. Black and white, overwhelmingly from the South, Marines, sitting in there listening to all the antiwar speakers, including the Black Panthers! And the Black Panthers had a position that the Viet Cong should win the war—long live the revolution of the Viet Cong. And so around the edges of the amphitheater, of course, you've got the other Marines singing the Marine anthem and burning the Viet Cong flag. They had that Green Beret guy that was against the war and various other people, a woman and a doctor and all that, and they spoke for a while. After about an hour and a half, we were approached by military Movement guys who said, "You really ought to leave about now because something's going to happen soon." And so as we were leaving on the only road out of Oceanside, I looked back and fights were starting and the streets of Oceanside became one big melee that night.
Now, first of all, one does not want to say that this is revolutionary integrationism because there was no consciousness of class, there was no place for this to go because there was no mass party. We were too small. But in a little, not insignificant way, class war was beginning a little bit that night in Oceanside. And for the bourgeoisie and everybody who has an interest in capitalism, including the labor bureaucracy, this is the height of their horrors. They can't stand this. This must be reversed no matter what.
And so actually as a postscript to what happened in Oceanside, the Movement for a Democratic Military tried to sustain their organization, and they had a little storefront in Oceanside, and every night or every other night, they got shotgun blasts into their storefront for about six months. And then the cops ran a massive provocateur operation on them, and then some months later there was a massive indictment of antiwar guys and the indictments were held in Arizona. They pulled them all out to Arizona and they resurrected some anti-IWW laws that hadn't been used since the early 20th century.

The other thing is that for the first time the soldiers in the war watched TV almost every night and so they got to hear the total crap that was being put forth on American TV news about how "we are winning the war," and they knew it was all lies, total lies. So in a sense what you had was a snapshot, like a very bright flash bulb, on the real nature of this class society, stripping away all the hypocrisy.

"Ethnic Purity" Carter Paved Way for Reagan

After that the bourgeoisie knew they were in trouble. And so a wing of the bourgeoisie adopted a defeatist position on the war. Now when the SL said that at the time, everybody laughed at us because they were all in the popular front with this wing of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie wanted to get out of this war, they wanted to get out of an impossible situation before it got worse. (They actually did that, they were able to co-opt the antiwar movement in the U.S. Along the way they had to dump Nixon because he wasn't the guy that was going to reinstill faith in anything, it was quite clear.) But what you had was a generation of people that looked at life and figured, what do I really want to do with my life? Sex was one of the answers, there were a lot of answers. But the point of it is that since then the initial reaction to Washington and the government regardless of the power is "Bullshit! What are they trying to do to us now?" And that exists today.

Now, I remember after Watergate reading in the New York Review of Books about how liberals were very upset about Watergate, and they were very pissed off at Nixon. And liberals said: the major problem with Watergate is that it damaged the imperial presidency, possibly beyond repair; and we as liberals know that all progress for the common man must come through the United States imperial presidency. And so this moral rearmament became urgent for them. So you get Jimmy Carter, the born-again, "ethnic purity" Democrat, and that was his purpose.

First of all, you should remember that Jimmy Carter wasn't just an ass. One time in his life he was a nuclear sub officer. So he had to have something going for him that was not obvious. Jimmy Carter, in his anti-Communist crusade, the "human rights" crusade, installed the boycott of the Olympics. It was under Carter that we got the establishment for the first time of religious fundamentalists in Washington; it was under Carter that leftists in Greensboro were slaughtered, an action that was organized by the FBI, like many if not most of these Klan executions in the South are. But he blew it pretty good—the killer rabbit and everything. Some nuclear sub officer!

So what we got was Reagan and Meese. The first thing they did is they got PATCO, the air controllers. Now, these people are so educated and are so white-collar that they were the tip of the top layer of the labor aristocracy. They come out of the service, they're at the top. And so these guys decided their work was impossible—which everybody knows it is—and they needed more money and they needed better working conditions. So they went on strike.

Now, the money demands were irrelevant. There are not that many of these guys. Any other administration would simply pay them off. But rather than pay them off, Reagan fired them all, got two union leaders, put leg irons on them and paraded them across the country, making sure there were lots of photographs. And if he can do this, and does want to do this, and is so proud of doing this to those guys, what the hell is he going to do to the rest of us? That was the message.

Then there was the MOVE bombing, just total fire-bombing, genocide of blacks, children, simply because MOVE didn't fit in, simply because they were different. They were no threat to anybody, everybody knows that. It was genocide, straightforward. State-enforced social reaction targeting everybody they suspect of not being in sympathy with a white, Christian fundamentalist, English-speaking America where deviants will not be tolerated.

Now, Rambo. This is Reagan's hero, this is the Reagan administration's movie. What is Rambo? First of all the guy's kind of short, second of all he was a draft dodger, third of all he's an ex-porn star. And this is the guy that kills 5,000 Vietnamese in 45 minutes? It's incredible, nobody believes it, it's just a simple lie. It has no power at all. And the viciousness of this enforced reaction with Reagan is because nobody believes. So the only way forward for Reagan is terror against the American population.

Reagan's Soldiers:
Religion in the Service of Reaction

Now, I want to talk for a few minutes about the nature of Reagan's soldiers, the cutting edge of Reaganism in terms of the active domestic policy, and that's the religious right, the Moral Majority, whatever you want to call them. These people have always been around. First of all, these people are not the Jehovah's Witnesses, who are very sincere in their religious beliefs and suffer for it. These people are not the Amish in Pennsylvania. These people are not particularly religious. I'm not saying that they're enlightened or advanced. What they are demagogues, and they use religion.

These people are also always used, historically. And who are they always historically used by? They're used by the Southern upper class. There was a movie some time ago called Advise and Consent. And always you have the Senator who gets down there and it's the Sam Ervin type and he's got this drawl and he's just the country boy and all, except he's got a Phi Beta Kappa key from Harvard, he's got the Oxford scholarship, his family goes back three hundred years in the South, one of the old slave-owning families. And he's the master. He's the master not simply in that sense for blacks but also for the Southern poor whites, who he calls "Southern white trash," which is the layer you're talking about in terms of these revivalists and such in the South.

These fundamentalist leaders have always served their master. And what these guys are all about is money. Now there was a line from Prizzi's Honor. Some woman has ripped off the Mafia for money, you know, it's not too smart. Jack Nicholson is going with that woman and so he's got trouble now. And he looks at her and he says: You know, Italians like money more than they like their sons, and they like their sons an awful lot. Well, these guys like money more than the racism, and they like the racism an awful lot.

The people that take these guys really seriously are sort of like the types you would see going out on Saturday night to a professional wrestling match and taking it really seriously. I'm sure they must have more people but what I'm trying to say is they are not on their own a significant percentage of our society in terms of power or anything else. Maybe in Alabama, yes, but only if a Huey Long was in office, you see. That's their relationship, always. So they are powerful because of the Reagan government but most of all they are powerful because they serve a need that the entire bourgeoisie has right now, which is this terror on the American people to restore in the population unquestioning loyalty in preparation for the anti-Soviet war drive. That's what purpose they serve.
You could say, well, this doesn't make any sense at all, why is it critical to go after sex videos for this question? Isn't this creating problems? You're going after people, they're not leftists, they just want to be left alone. Why isn't there something like a Brave New World where you've got those pleasure pills and all that sort of stuff, and then you've got total totalitarian society? Because class society doesn't work like that, because it's class; because reaction takes particular historical forms. In Germany, there was Hitler; in this country it takes the form of the Ku Klux Klan.

And so what these people's ideology represents is classical—the ideology of the Ku Klux Klan in this country. If you're talking about fascism and how the bourgeoisie needs fascism at a certain point and turns around and uses these dogs, that's what's going on now. Not in the sense that these people have taken power, no. Not in the sense that the Reagan government is fascist, no. But in the sense of using these people and using this ideology, that is certainly going on.

I want to talk a little bit about their ideology. (I want to use Gore Vidal because Gore Vidal really hates Christianity. As he says, his secret hero is Herod, Herod and the Apostate Julian, the last pagan.) Of course, they pick and choose from the Bible what they want, even though they'll tell you that every word in the Bible is god. Except they fight over which Bible. For example, as the Jews will tell you, the Bible bars shellfish, the Bible bars pork, etc. Well, somehow those things are not effected. They're not effected because Paul sold out on those issues in order to get a hearing from the Romans.
But to them what the Bible is, very important, is a justification for their racism. The whole thing about the descendants of Ham is used by these people. In secular terms, when you hear the cry of "law and order" or "cut welfare" or "the death penalty" those are simply code words for "get blacks." And as for Jews, "these are the people that killed Christ, these are the Christ-killers." And it will never change.

And sex, well, the main teacher for them is Paul, that's the main guy that they swear by. As a comrade said last night, the Catholics call him Saint Paul and for those who have met him personally they call him Paul. The twice-born, the third-born, the people who talk in tongues, who have visions nightly; no priests, they do it—personally.

So, anyway, Paul had a position on sex: forget it. His position was that sex under any circumstances regardless was a sin. It was a departure from purity. You should go out in the desert and wait for God to come to this earth. And God was going to come in six months. God didn't come in six months. Well, God was going to come in nine months. God didn't come in nine months. And he's having trouble with his people, right? Certain things are happening and they're getting upset. And he finally said: it's better to marry than burn. And he wasn't talking about the fires of hell when he's talking about burn. So he will let you marry, but that's as far as it goes.

Now, the position on women for the entire Judaic-Christian tradition is one of the most backward positions there is. It's that women exist simply as a repository of the sacred sperm, that a woman is commanded to serve and obey her husband as he is in turn commanded to serve and obey his temporal, Bible-quoting master. And Constantine, when he was having trouble with the Roman Empire, figured out that Christianity was the best thing that he had. So he made it the state religion. It wasn't actually that big, it certainly was no threat. But it was used, it was the greatest thing for state reinforcement of ideology. Been that way ever since.

Gore Vidal talks about homosexuality in the Bible. And it turns out there's quite a bit of homosexuality in the Bible. Vidal talks about the stuff with David and Jonathan, and it's quite clear. David's always talking about his love for Jonathan. And Vidal talks about Ruth and Naomi. He says, it's quite clear about their emotions toward one another, that this would be the basis for joint ownership of a pottery shop in Laguna Beach.
But then you get to Leviticus. And Leviticus on homosexuality is something like, if one man lie with another man, thereby he be put to death. Real hardcore stuff, from then on.

And Paul of course was dealing with Leviticus. Why does Paul hate sex so much? Aside from maybe he was a little peculiar and he had his problems, why does he hate sex so much? What is the political reason? Well, what Paul was competing against was the Roman gods, the pagan religions. And the greatest god of the pagan religions was the Goddess of Fertility. And, of course, when they went to a Sunday ceremony, they got it on. And they really got it on. The hardest teachings of the Bible against homosexuality and against sex in general come right after what is known as the Babylonian captivity, where the Jews were forced to live in the city of Babylon for a period of time. And it turns out that Babylon was the Paris of the B.C. world. It's sort of like in the First World War, once the farm boys see gay Paree, that's it, boy, ain't never goin' back to the farm. Well, once the Jews got to Babylon they really didn't want to go back to that desert. Not only did they have as much sex in ways that they could never conceive of (human sex, not goats) but indoor plumbing, everything, it was a very advanced city. And the Jewish ruling class had a problem, they somehow had to get the Jews back into the desert. And so you get all these moral strictures on sex. In other words, what was going on in sixth century Palestine was very similar to what they're trying to pull off today. Sex is bad; go out and get killed or live in the damned desert. So, the Bible is a historical document.

"Moral Rearmament" Is Enforced Social Conformity

What are the issues that are coming up today? First of all, women. For what the bourgeoisie is talking about socially, it's essential that women get out of the factory, certainly that women get out of the trade unions. They don't want women to have class consciousness, that's a no-no. They want to get them out of the productive process, back into the home. They want to eliminate their rights. They want to eliminate day care. They want to eliminate abortion. And they're simply doing that by abortion-clinic bombing and terror. What they'd like to do is eliminate the pill, but only the Pope thinks he can pull that off. Their key slogan for women is: Defeat ERA and Save the Family.
There is a study that's just come out that said: For 20 years, the federal government before the Reagan administration had systematically destroyed the family; we have and are going to reverse every one of those policies. What were those policies? The biggest one was welfare. So we're going to save the family by cutting off welfare. Now, figure 20 years back from where Reagan got in office. What do you get? The beginning of the civil rights movement. It's not an accident.

Sex. The Supreme Court has made sodomy illegal, i.e., you will go to jail for sodomy. The point is the way the ruling is formulated: it's illegal because it is against historical Christian-Judaical principle. Well, where does that stop? They can say blacks are unequal because of historical Christian-Judaical principle. (And the head of the Supreme Court turns out to be a racist vigilante.) There's no limit to this. It's a total elimination of separation of church and state. Our position on sex is: government out of the bedrooms, let people figure it out themselves.

AIDS. The first thing you've got to understand is that these people think that AIDS is the greatest thing that's ever happened. As long as it doesn't get in a massive way into the heterosexual population, it's like god speaking. The more homosexuals die, the better it is. So, of course, they do not fund AIDS projects. And, of course, Dianne Feinstein is not going to release needles to drug addicts so AIDS would not be spread many, many times over by using dirty needles. This should be an enormous scandal.
I saw this liberal program on AIDS the other night. I was listening for one of these liberal doctors to get up and say, "We need money. We need massive funding." And they wanted to say it, it's quite clear, but for some reason they didn't say it. But they said everything else. They got the hottest researcher around (he's from Scotland, actually) and he said: AIDS as a virus is very difficult medically, what needs to be done now is massive experimenting; we can sit around, we could talk about it forever, but what needs to be done is trial and error in an international sense. And in the next scene they talk about the technical problems, and the man who narrated says: the problem that scores of researchers are running into across the country— "Scores" of researchers are working on the vaccine for AIDS across the country, that's it! And we're talking about a screaming national health emergency. But the government is coming from a totally different direction on this AIDS question. They want to politically exploit it, it's good for them.

Death penalty. The death penalty simply means: kill blacks. The death penalty was temporarily ruled unconstitutional in 72, largely as a result of the U.S. bourgeoisie trying to clean up its act in terms of how it was seen internationally. By the way, this country is one of the few countries that actually has the death penalty; most of the European countries don't. The interesting thing about the death penalty is that it's a forbidden topic for debate now. We just had a major election in California over [State Supreme Court chief justice] Rose Bird, over the death penalty. Her right-wing attacker's every other word is: she doesn't believe in the death penalty. I saw a number of her commercials; she didn't have the guts to get up and say: I oppose the death penalty. I think it's barbaric, inhuman. And the majority of the world, and the state, and the ruling class of the world agree with me. No, politics has gone so far to the right that she didn't even say that. She said: well, um, I oppose the judiciary being political. You try to figure out what that means.

In fact, the entire election was absurd. All these justices say they're friends of labor. Not one of those guys mentioned unions throughout the entire campaign. Reagan's Central America policy is very unpopular with the population. Why didn't [Democratic Senator] Cranston run his campaign on opposition to Central America? It's because he's got Reagan's position on Central America. He didn't want to make Central America an issue. That's what we're talking about, bipartisan support to the war drive. Also, bipartisan support to this social crusade against you.

The drug witchhunt. The ruling class has declared a war on drugs. Total hypocrisy. The ruling class has pushed and made money from drugs I don't know since when. The British used drugs as one of their ways to conquer China; Hong Kong was founded on the profits of the opium trade. And who ran drugs all through the Vietnam War and before that out of the Golden Triangle? It was the CIA. Who provided the planes? It was CIA airplanes. When they talk about landing in those paddy fields, what do you think they were loading? It wasn't all orphans.

And in the cities. As just one example, you have the movie The French Connection, the biggest bust in heroin that's ever happened in New York City. They had the trial years later, not one speck of that heroin was left. They couldn't find it, it was all gone. It'd all been sold. It's obvious and has been documented—it's the cops. The cops either hold the pushers up for their cut and then the pushers charge that much more; or they just take the entire thing and sell it themselves. So what you get between the pushers and the cops is combat for profit. And that's the vice squad.

So this war on drugs is simply a tool to build the police department, to eliminate democratic rights so the police can go anywhere to terrorize black kids. And not only that. The conditions of capitalism in the ghettos are so severe with generational unemployment, with no possibility of getting out for these kids, no possibility of jobs, so why not take drugs? A black mother in the ghetto knows that there's a struggle every day, second by second, to save her child from that damned pusher. So what you get is the black hustlers like Jesse Jackson that come up and say to this black woman, "Yeah, you've got to support your cops, that's the answer." It's a rotten shell game.

Now, we're opposed to laws against what they call "crimes without victims." Basically it's a matter of personal rights. We feel that if somebody wants to take drugs, that's his own right. What kind of sex people want, that's their own right. We're against the state intervening in any of these questions. Now, it doesn't mean that we don't give a damn about a generation of ghetto kids that become addicts. But how do you fight that? How you fight that is by struggling against the ruling class and the conditions they impose by which the kids become addicts.

Now, in the black movement, there's always been two wings. One, the Jesse Jacksons and George Washington Carvers, the Uncle Toms, who say what you've got to do is, don't ask for anything from the white man, improve yourself in the eyes of the white man, and if you're good and good long enough, then you'll get something. And basically what it does, it accepts the terms of the racism of the oppressor. Jesse Jackson's recent statement is that drugs kill more than Klan ropes—does he want a united front with the KKK against drugs? Or what about a united front with the local racist politician against drugs? And then you've got Farrakhan who pushes the same stuff, except in his case, even worse—anti-Semitism, hustling black shampoo.

And then you have the wing of Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois which fights against the conditions, and fights against the racists, and fights for equality. Our position is for revolutionary integrationism, black liberation through socialist revolution.
In California there was an "English-only" proposition on the ballot. Now, this is simply vengeance. Everybody who's had any contact with immigrants knows that the first thing they want to do and have to do is learn English. And by and large they always do learn English. It's critical for them obviously in terms of making money. What this stuff is of going after English-only and destroying bilingual education is to eliminate the possibility of immigrants learning English, to eliminate the possibility of them Irving a decent life in the United States so they don't come here.

Now, of course, one must understand that there are two classes of immigrants. There's the people who come from right-wing reaction, the states which are overwhelmingly supported by the U.S. government, like the Haitians. They don't get in. And then there are the exploiters, the people like [South Vietnam's Marshal] Ky, the protégé’s of the U.S., the U.S. stooges. Not only do they get in, but they get everything.

Dictatorship of the Property Party

Everybody talks about the two-party system in the United States. There's not a two-party system, there's a one-party system. And that party is the property party. The people that belong to that party are less than one percent of the population of the United States, and they own the United States. And they own the government; they run the Republican and the Democratic parties.

The only difference between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party is how they do things, not what they do, and not where they're going. Basically when you become a politician in the Republican or Democratic parties, you get a job. And you don't go to your constituents and get a job. No, you go to the businessman, at whatever level, and get hired, get his endorsement. You're a hireling of the bourgeoisie. Capitalist politicians are generally not the top people around. These are the people who are not good enough to make a great career in the professions, law or things like that. So, you know, you've got a big mouth and you're not particularly successful, not real smart and you don't mind being a prostitute and saying whatever somebody tells you, you become a politician. The property party is what really makes the difference, that's what calls the shots in this country. The class nature of this country is that the people who own this country are the people who run this country. It is their dictatorship.

There is a major economic crisis, it's a crisis that capitalism's had since its inception. What you've got in this country is a question of overproduction in every major field. Protectionism is coming up over the question of U.S. cars, or whatever, and this is reactionary and we're opposed to it.

And you've got overproduction internationally, in steel, in cars, in computer chips. What happens when you get overproduction that exceeds the market's ability to buy? These things are not sold. You get bankruptcies. Economies go under. Now, what happens if you're the U.S. bourgeoisie, you can't sell your stuff, and you've become a weak country economically, but because of a quirk of history you have the strongest military forces, aside from the Soviet Union, in the world? Do you just sit there and say, well, we're not going to sell anything this year, so I think this country is simply going to go down the drain and I'm going to lose everything I got? No, you use your cards. You use your ace, and your ace is your military card. It's the only card the U.S. has right now. So you go into various countries or various areas of the world and you seize those markets. What that is is war. And capitalism has never resolved an overproduction crisis yet through any other agency except war.

Why do we always talk about the anti-Soviet war drive? Why can't there be coexistence, why can't they just disarm? Why can't they recruit some Democrats, maybe they'll get along? They can't get along for two reasons. One, the very fact of the existence of the Soviet Union as a workers state, however degenerated, threatens capitalism. But, two, you've got to sell your goods. And one-sixth of the world's humanity, if you can open it up for private property, that's an enormous market. That would give capitalism a new lease.

In the Communist Manifesto Marx says that the history of man is the question of class struggle, and that where one class cannot triumph over another in a clear way, sooner or later it leads to the ruination of both classes. So what we are facing is barbarism. The only alternative to that is the international proletariat taking power, and the critical aspect is not the lack of a working class or the lack of militancy or anything like that. We've seen plenty of that, we've seen strikes historically and even in the recent period. The question is leadership. And that's the Spartacist League."

*From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-Hamburg: Women Spark Shipyard Occupation (1984)

Markin comment:

The following is an article from the Spring 1984 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.

Markin comment:

With the desperate need to ramp up the class struggle today (from our side, the bosses have been on a seemingly eternal offensive) this is a good article not only about the vanguard role that women can, and have, played in important class struggles in the past but about the tactics and strategy necessary to win struggles, if possible.


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

Last fall in West Germany strikes and plant occupations broke out in the key Hamburg and Bremen shipyards against massive layoffs of the workforce. The nine-day Hamburg HDW [Howaldtswerke-Deutsche Werft] shipyard occupation in September was sparked in large part by the militant actions of a group of women, wives of shipyard workers. W&R, along with comrades of the Trotzkistische Liga Deutschlands (TLD), section of the international Spartacist tendency, recently spoke at length with Birgit Wojak, one of the main activists of the women's group; we are pleased to print below excerpts from this very exciting interview.

The TLD had raised key demands during the occupation, in leaflets and discussions with workers in Hamburg and nationally, to extend and win the workers' strikes. These included: "For factory occupations in all plants hit by mass layoffs and closings! For a joint national shipyard, steel and mine strike!" Layoffs were hitting the vital Ruhr steel and mining districts. At the same time the Board of Directors of HDW (which is owned by a state conglomerate) announced that in HDW's Hamburg branch one half of the 4,500 workers would be laid off and in HDW's Kiel branch one out of every three of the 9,000 workers. This "hot autumn" of workers' demonstrations, strikes and occupations
potentially posed the most important class battle for the German workers in 30 years.

The Hamburg and Bremen shipyard occupations took place as political ferment in West Germany is greater than at any time since the founding of the Federal Republic in 1948. The deployment in West Germany of the first-strike Pershing 2 missiles, under the command of the anti-Soviet fanatic Reagan, has deeply polarized West German society. The dramatic actions of the North Sea shipyard workers is a further sign that the West German capitalist order, long the relatively stable core of NATO Europe, is now beginning to break down under the combined impact of war mobilization and economic crisis.

But as Wojak graphically describes, not only the "IG Metall" union bureaucracy and the SPD [Social Democratic Party], but even the so-called "leftists" who had control of the Hamburg occupation itself, did everything in their power to undercut the struggle and prevent the workers from carrying it to victory. The main brake on the German working class is the Social Democrats. Though out of power when these shipyard layoffs were announced, they were the architects of the West German bourgeoisie's present austerity program which has meant massive attacks on the working class.

The dramatic Hamburg occupation—and its betrayal— showed above all the need to forge a revolutionary working-class party by splitting the working-class SPD ranks away from the pro-capitalist tops.

The TLD's aggressive propaganda campaign around the occupations presented a broad programmatic alternative for the workers. Its leaflet noted the importance of the foreign workers: "Yesterday and today these foreign brothers are in the front lines of the struggle.... Full citizenship rights for foreign workers and their families!" The TLD further noted: "While the IG Metall bureaucracy wants to stiffen the backbone of the German steel magnates in the protectionist Common Market cartel, the 'left' is mobilizing for a 'National Steel Company/ or a 'National Shipyards Company.' But if the capitalist economy is not done away with, these nationalized companies (like HDW) will serve the capitalists. As opposed to the Rostock Yards only a few miles away [in East Germany], whose order books are filled with contracts for icebreakers, passenger ships, etc., running for years thanks to the Soviet planned economy, the capitalist 'solution’ to the crisis in the shipyards is arms production: battleships and submarines for war against the Soviet Union."

Lenin said that the fate of the October Revolution was inseparable from the victory of the German October. The converse of that is that the failure of the German working class, the best organized working class in Europe, to live up to its revolutionary obligations has led to two world imperialist wars. The TLD's leaflet concluded: "A militant strike in steel, the shipyards and coal would show the workers the way to prevent stationing NATO first-strike weapons. By strikes—not 'minutes of warning' against the 'superpowers.' For the Breits and the Loderers the Bundes-wehr is a 'peace force. They hate the Soviet Union and fear a new Bremen Soviet Republic, a new Ruhr Red Army—a German October.

"For the revolutionary reunification of Germany by a social revolution in the West and proletarian political revolution in the East! Smash the anti-Soviet war drive! For unconditional military support of the DDR/Soviet Union! For a socialist planned economy! For the Socialist United States of Europe!"

W&R: Can you tell us something about your background that you feel contributed to your becoming an activist in this struggle and occupation? Wojak: The thing that made me just want to do something—I didn't know what I wanted to do—was that my mother died, basically because she worked herself to death. Normally she shouldn't have been allowed to work at the job she did because she had asthma. She worked as a presser in a knitting mill and couldn't handle the wool dust. My father had to retire early as a partial invalid. He lost a leg, also worked 25 years at HDW as a welder, and now he can hardly do anything. The only thing my father had was my mother. He's just vegetating. And that was the main thing that made me say, that's not going to happen to me, and I wasn't going to put up with it any longer. And they want to fire my husband from the HDW plant.

W&R: Plans were announced for massive layoffs in the shipbuilding industry in early spring and a "warning strike" was called, including demonstrations. How did you become involved in the struggle? Wojak: I was approached by my husband to get involved with this women's group—they were actually all wives of men who were already active in the HDW shipyard and who were also affiliated with one political current or another. I met the women's group myself at a forum and found out that they had gone into the Hamburg parliament, tried to storm the microphone to draw attention to the situation of workers in the entire shipbuilding industry. The mike was cut off immediately so that they couldn't say anything. And because they had counted on that they had written an "Open Letter" to the mayor of Hamburg, the Social Democrat von Dohnanyi, and rained these leaflets from the gallery down onto all the parliamentarians. And they unfurled a banner reading, "HDW and MAN wives fight together with their men." Two women were picked out and criminal charges were brought for disrupting a public parliamentary session.

I met these women at a forum on this HDW issue, and Klose, the former Social Democratic mayor of Hamburg, was present. What struck me about this forum in particular was the workers; there were a whole lot of workers from HDW there. They were absolutely furious and wanted a complete change. And this Klose, he just tried to channel it into orderly channels that he could keep in hand. In the beginning, when I heard about what they did, it seemed to be a little bit too radical to me. But that Klose wanted to steer the workers in a very definite direction that he could keep in hand seemed even more awful. So I decided then to go to this women's meeting and take a look for myself.

At this first women's meeting I went to, in April, one woman said right away, yeah, maybe we can still see to it that there are a couple of strikes at HDW, and if it all
doesn't do any good, then we have to occupy the plant. And I thought, sure, if they occupy the plant, that's a long way off, and you don't have to go along with them. But during the occupation, in September, it turned out that some of the workers— I count myself among them as well—that we were the ones who carried out the occupation, whereas the women who had been talking weren't at all the ones who did the occupying. These women as well as so-called "activists" in the plant saw the plant occupation as a means to put pressure on the government to save jobs. And then when I participated in this occupation and got angry every time I had to leave the occupied shipyard and had to sleep alone in my bed at home, I saw it as if I had seized a piece of this shipyard along with all those workers. W&R: The women's committee waged a hunger strike that led up to and in some sense precipitated the September shipyard occupation. What motivated it?

Wojak: In all our work between the warning strike in the spring and during the occupation in September, we tried to do all kinds of actions to mobilize the workers so that they would occupy or put up any line of resistance against the layoffs at all. Whenever there was any kind of plant assembly or when any new events in the shipyard came up we stood in front of the gates with our banner and passed out leaflets, calling on the men to defend themselves, to do something, offered them our help. The result was that the men laughed at us. Then this situation came up in a plant assembly where we said, either we're going to storm the microphone now, just like in parliament, or you guys read these things aloud. And the guys running the meeting were scared to death that we'd storm the mike, because they didn't expect the workers to do the same thing the parliamentarians did, namely nothing, when the mike was turned off, but that the workers would probably resist. So under this pressure, they read what we had written. And for the rest of the plant assembly we were surrounded by a ring of company cops. W&R: What were your demands? Wojak: Our demands were basically the men's demands. They were for the 35-hour week, statification of the shipyard under control of the workforce (we extended it to real control). Then there was the men's demand for "useful alternative production," and that filter systems be installed in power plants so they don't pollute the atmosphere so much. In fact, there was quite a hard discussion with one of the women in the women's group about this, with the result that the men raised "alternative production" as a very hard demand and we just raised it on the side.

W&R: Who were they, and what were the political currents in the women's group?

Wojak: The political people in the plant were primarily from the DKP [pro-Moscow Stalinists], people from the GIM [German section of the United Secretariat], people from the SPD, from the union—in fact all the political groupings were present. In the women's group there were the DKP, KPD [Maoists], GIM; there were people from Arbeiterpolitik [Brandlerites] who got in through women's groups in the union. It was the same with the Social Democrats who also had influence through the unions and some women's groups.
This discussion about "useful alternative production" that came up in the women's group was introduced by me, because I was the only really unpolitical woman there and saw immediately what this "useful alternative production" basically meant for jobs. I told them that it's baloney and meaningless for jobs, whereas all the others supported it at first. The minute I started this discussion I had the feeling that all these women had a narrow-minded view of the whole situation because of their political orientation. That led me to view everything essentially more critically than before.

Maybe one more reason why the hunger strike happened. We wanted to spur the men on to fight. And we had found out that at Hoesch, in the Ruhr, where layoffs in the steel industry are also an issue, there was also a women's group, and they had waged a hunger strike. We had exhausted all the possibilities—standing in front of the gates; in plant assemblies; we went into the union and meetings organized by the union, where we were regularly thrown out. But the men saw us, and you couldn't pretend we weren't there. The Hoesch women had videos of their hunger strike and of the men's strike, and they advised us, if you do a hunger strike, there's no way it can fall through—you definitely have to do it.

From the very beginning we said we don't want to starve ourselves to get sick or die or something, but we agreed from the first if we do a hunger strike to limit it to three days. Because we thought, three days: that's enough to get it in the public eye. And if the men haven't gotten it together after three days to pull off a decent action, then even a ten-day hunger strike won't do any good.

W&R: So how long did the hunger strike go on before the occupation began?

Wojak: We waged a three-day hunger strike right before the occupation. When it got under way there were five women who took part in it from the first to the last day. And there were nine on the last day. We didn't just want to wage a hunger strike without drawing in the men in the shipyard. Because we didn't know that they would publish the list with the mass layoffs at just the same time, we had convinced the men beforehand to carry out an action in the plant as well, if we did this hunger strike. We won them over to boycotting overtime at that point. And then-it became known in the yards—that was the afternoon before the hunger strike, right before quitting time—as people found out that 1,354 people were supposed to be laid off, there was a symbolic occupation of the plant gate for two hours, with only 1,200 people taking part.

The first day of our hunger strike, when nobody knew anything about it beforehand, even the men in the shipyard, about 80 percent of the workforce said completely spontaneously, if the women go on a hunger strike then we'll boycott the canteen for the day. That was a very important thing, because you could see that we women were recognized by the men in the shipyard for the first time. The canteen had been contracted out to a private company before the layoffs were announced, and some women who worked in the canteen were thrown out and rehired for considerably less pay—we wanted to boycott the canteen until the women got the same pay as before.

All the men who were at all political had laughed at us before for this demand, and said that no worker would follow this demand because their own stomachs are more important than other people's stomachs. And the fact that 80 percent carried out this canteen boycott— and they really went hungry, because they didn't know they were going to boycott the canteen and didn't bring sandwiches from home—that proves that they were simply wrong, that the workers forgot their own empty stomachs in their solidarity.
This whole hunger strike was received by all the workers in the shipyard extremely well anyway, although they hardly dared to approach us because of their preconceptions—these poor, weak women, they're standing there and what's more, going hungry for us, and what have we done? They could hardly look us in the eye. And after quitting time that evening, here came all the workers and they brought us flowers. Most of them just kind of shoved them in our hands and walked on by.

W&R: So how did the actual plant occupation begin?

Wojak: The first one to call for an occupation, or for a massive action, I believe, was me. After the three days of the hunger strike were over, there was a closing rally. We had gotten an enormous amount of solidarity and over DM 9,000 ($4,500) in contributions. Several plants declared their solidarity, and it was not only for the women but for solidarity against all layoffs.

We held a rally at the end where each of the women who had taken part in the hunger strike was supposed to say something to the brothers in the shipyard. And I was the last one, and I had lost my notes. So I just called on the men to just do something, and if they didn't fight, that we women would think up something to do to them that would be pretty nasty. W&R: Lysistrata meets the class struggle. Wojak: But the effect of that was not that they all got terribly scared of me or the women, but they applauded it wildly, they cheered it, they picked it up like something they'd wanted to say themselves for a long time. And finally somebody said it. The hunger strike was over on Friday and then came the weekend. The gates were picketed from the outside so that no overtime could go on—organized by the men and some of the women picketed too.

There was a general plant assembly during the hunger strike where the men fought with the bosses and got us the right to speak. A plant assembly is where the whole plant comes together in one room, organized by the union—there's a minimum of four assemblies annually. And the Management Committee [the bosses] and the plant council are there and make reports. Every individual worker can speak.60 this plant assembly continued on Monday morning. It ended with a march of the workers through the inner city in a demonstration of 3,000. And after the demonstration all the workers went back into the plant and continued the plant assembly and then voted to occupy the plant. And that was adopted 100 percent.

W&R: And who was elected the leadership of the occupation?

Wojak: There was a prominent supporter of the DKP, who had worked out this occupation plan just in case. And they were essentially the people who had been working together beforehand—like the DKP, SPD, KPD, GIM, unionists.

W&R: What was the relationship of the official union leadership of the Metalworkers [IG Metall] to the occupation?

Wojak: Before the occupation the IG Metall didn't look upon it kindly and it didn't look on the women's activities kindly either. A week before the hunger strike somebody from the union put out the word that the HDW women are dead, they don't exist anymore. And then when this demonstration through the center of town took place and afterwards the occupation was voted, they were singing a different tune all of a sudden. Because they probably saw that the workers just couldn't be stopped. So they said, we'll support every action; go ahead, and we'll always be behind you. Only I'm talking about the local union organization in Hamburg—there wasn't so much as a letter of solidarity from the IG Metall from the rest of the country. During the occupation the union reps didn't behave worse than the "activists" in the plant, which were in all these parties, but they were awful enough themselves.

W&R: We haven't discussed the laws that come from the 1950s—the "Factory Regulation Law" (Betreefasver-rassungsgesetz). Can you explain why this law is followed so slavishly, and what it in fact means with regard to workers' struggles?

Wojak: The "Factory Regulation Law" is a law the government passed that means limitations on the workers, especially in strikes. It's a terribly thick book that's not easy to explain. But for example it says that in your plant you can't just support strikes in other plants or collect money for them. All the plant assemblies— how they are to be held, whether there are secret or open ballots, are governed by it. And a plant occupation is a violation of the "Factory Regulation Law" because a worker can't just seize the plant that belongs to someone else.

W&R: The fact that the members of the plant council are bound to silence is also laid down in the "Factory Regulation Law" as well, including about layoffs. Wojak: Yes. In the case of this list of 1,354 people to be laid off, for example, the members of the plant council were obligated not to make that public. This law basically just hinders the workers from using their power m any way whatsoever against the bosses. And the unions haven't done anything against it and are therefore complicit.

W&R: What was the role of the women's committee during the occupation?

Wojak: Pretty pathetic, because we had set as our goal calling on the men to wage a fight. And in fact we reached that goal with the hunger strike. So during the occupation we didn't want to stand on the sidelines; but we really didn't know at all what we ought to do
I myself concentrated on extending the strike together with two other women. We went to AC Weser, to a shipyard in Bremen where they had decided long before the HDW occupation to occupy\ this shipyard because there was no more putting the brakes on these workers or holding them back from doing an action like that. So we drove to Bremen and were totally depressed when we got there, because the conditions under which the shipyard was occupied were really awful for the workers. They had one last ship in Bremen which was up for repairs, and then the whole shipyard was supposed to be shut down, closed

We weren't allowed to speak to the workers there before the occupation was voted. And when they did vote to occupy, you could see that a crime was perpetrated against the workers, because the occupation was coupled with the condition that the necessary repairs for this one ship still had to go on during the occupation. Further, the occupation in Bremen was; an extremely late point in time—one day before the occupation in Hamburg was given up, and it w; planned that way.

During the HDW occupation a ship was literal kidnapped from the HDW workers. The cables were cut. One worker was injured, not very seriously, bi people could in fact have been killed. We took the brothers in Bremen a cable from this captured ship as warning that they should keep a close watch on the ship. The workers welcomed us with cheers. We g more applause for what we said there than ever before although it was just to give them a little courage at really nothing more. Afterwards we also discussed with a whole lot of workers, and a lot of them who h been for going on with these repairs changed this opinion within five minutes and didn't want to do it anymore.

Another guy, the DGB [German trade-union federation] chairman in Bremen, spoke, and first express his solidarity and cozied up to them like mad and said you guys are in an unusual situation; so an unusual situation demands unusual means and you guys have
grasped them. And it's right that you have occupied your shipyard and you ought to occupy it a while longer—and then you ought to let the bosses and the politicians decide what ought to happen to the shipyard. And even then the workers applauded. And there was this worker sitting next to me during this speech, and it just slipped out of my mouth: how can this man be allowed to speak here? Why doesn't somebody throw him out? Then he really thought about it, at first he didn't say anything at all, then he said, yeah, that's outrageous, what he's saying here. He can't be allowed to do that. But then the guy up front was already gone. But before, this guy had clapped too.

We had these buttons with "Stop the death of HDW in installments—HDW must stand" on them, with the HDW insignia and over that "HDW Occupied" on a red background. And a worker in Bremen just had to have it, and he gave me his helmet. It has a sticker on one side, "AC Weser Occupied," and on the other "HDW Occupied."

When we women came back from this shipyard occupation, we didn't have the feeling that this occupation would be a support for the HDW workers, but that it was something designed to. go against workers' struggles. When we got back to HDW, we told the strike committee what was going on, that AC Weser wouldn't be a support for Hamburg and that they would have to extend the struggle in other ways. They said it wasn't right to tell the workers something like that. I did tell the workers that, and I know one other woman—from the GIM—also told it to the workers.

W&R: The TLD raised the demand to extend the strike to mining and steel, where there were also plans for substantial layoffs and firings. How do you feel about that demand, and given a revolutionary leadership, do you think it could have been an outgrowth of the shipyard occupation?

Wojak: It would have been possible, definitely. The question of extension was already very close, even without a revolutionary leadership, and only a spark would have been necessary to ignite it. But with a revolutionary leadership there would have been a guarantee for extending it.

W&R: How did the occupation end, and what did the workers win or lose?

Wojak: The HDW occupation lasted nine days. The mass of workers lost their jobs. The layoffs were carried out just like they had been planned. The layoffs are continuing today. The workers in the plant have worse working conditions than before, there's speedup. There have already been two deaths as a result.

The reason the occupation was broken off then was: yeah, they said we have the chance of getting a decent severance plan. They didn't even get the severance plan they had before the occupation but one significantly worse.

The foreign workers are in a very bad position. They are the ones primarily hit by the layoffs. About 50 percent of the foreign workers at HDW were fired. And they can be deported immediately if they don't get a new job, and they don't have a chance to get a new job either. So they won absolutely nothing, except when one or the other can draw the lessons—that you have to design an occupation differently, that is, not carry out an occupation under such conditions, but from the very beginning set the conditions yourself and not let them be dictated to you.

The occupation ended with a general plant assembly, which includes the lower- and middle-level management. Then the Management Committee has the right to take part; most of the time politicians are also invited—but not to this one. The Management Committee announced that if they didn't give up the occupation then they might fire the whole workforce— in one fell swoop. Without notice. People weren't quite convinced that that would in fact happen. But in the 70s that did happen once, when two shipyards, the Deutsche Werft and the Howaldtswerke fused. They fired the whole workforce because they were on strike, and afterwards they just hired back the part that they needed. So the threat of firings was in the air. Then there was the second thing. The Management Committee had announced that if Hamburg resisted and continued the occupation, the works would go deeper and deeper in the red, and then they wouldn't have any other choice but to split off Hamburg and Kiel from one another, as affiliates or even as two independent companies. But this plan has existed a long time, even without the occupation.

W&R: What was the role of the DKP and the KPD and the GIM during the occupation, and in the plant assembly meeting?

Wojak: From the first moment they set their stakes all on negotiations—negotiations with the politicians in Bonn and Schleswig-Holstein, since HDW is 100 percent state-owned. Those are both Christian Democratic governments. And their role was precisely to put pressure on these politicians, to say, "Do something about the shipyard please. Don't throw all these people out onto the street, after all." They all agreed completely on that. Those were always the things that kept coming up even before the occupation, in strikes or other actions—apply pressure. You can also see it in this program for "useful alternative production." That was drafted by people from the DKP, from the GIM— in effect a somewhat broader version of the strike committee together with people from the union and other activists. Then the union took it up and printed it as a program. For all practical purposes their aim is to give the capitalists a hand, how to make it, if you can just get a little bit more capital to boot, without having to fire guys.

W&R: I understand that in the course of the occupation a GIM supporter in the workforce put up a banner of Solidarnos'c'. How was this received?

Wojak: This Solidarnos'c' banner actually only had a slight meaning for the workforce. It was one banner among many. There were other banners from other plants, for example AEG Schiffbau brought over a huge banner. Such banners were received with more applause and many more workers also crowded around them. Solidarnos'c' itself was seen as the shipyard workers there going into the streets, and they stuck together and fought for their rights. Solidarnos'c'' real role wasn't seen; most of the workers don't know much about Solidarnos.

The thing is, they tried to block every political discussion in the union. There was a band in the yard one evening and they were singing some kind of political things, and a guy from the SPD took the mike away from them and said, look, leave politics out of this; the shipyard occupation isn't a political affair. The workers who got wind of it were pretty pissed off. And I noticed how they attacked the union bureaucrats pretty hard: what is this, and everybody can say what they want to here, and even if there's political stuff here—there's a highly political situation at HDW. He went away then, but the musicians didn't have the nerve to start again. But that was just the way discussions about Solidarnos'c' or issues in a larger context during the occupation were blocked, and the GIM supporters hung the sign up, intervened by doing that, but didn't tell the workers anything about it.

W&R: What role did these left groups play in the plant assembly discussion regarding the occupation in the face of the fact that the occupation had spread to Bremen, so that ending the occupation at that particular point in Hamburg was particularly criminal.

Wojak: It was criminal. The political groups were all straining to reach the same goal, told the workers, yes, under these conditions where we have to take into account that the whole workforce will be fired, where there's no sort of severance plan at all, and then the poor foreigners will be fired and won't even be able to take home any severance pay at all if they're deported—at such a point we can't call on you guys to continue the occupation, although we would have really liked to. That was what was said during the occupation, during the vote, by all the political groups. And Bremen. The workers in Bremen were of course terribly disappointed. They probably did see it as criminal, what happened in Hamburg. Only the strike committee (which was the same as the plant council in Bremen) said, what's so bad about that? Hamburg and Bremen don't have anything to do with each other.

W&R: Let's return to the question of the foreign workers. It's my understanding that the foreign worker also supported the end of the occupation even though they had the most to lose by the layoffs. Why was that?

Wojak: It was essentially Turkish workers who sup ported ending the occupation. Not because they were Turkish, but simply because the Turks speak the leas German, and because they were absolutely no properly provided with information. Hardly anything was translated. There was one Yugoslavian woman in our women's group and we were the first ones in the shipyard to have leaflets and placards in Turkish and Yugoslavian when we went into the plant assembly during the hunger strike, and a lot of foreign workers stood up. They applauded us and brought us chairs, because finally somebody in the shipyard was thinking of the foreign workers. I believe that without the women, the foreigners wouldn't even have known what was going on at the beginning of the occupation.

There was one Turkish guy in the yard who could speak good German. They told him, this is the way things are, and then it was up to him the extent to which he passed on the information to his brothers, or not. He handled it by saying, listen, the next vote is going to be about this or that, and if I raise my hand, that's correct, so you guys do the same. Of course, in this vote on the occupation that wasn't possible—it was secret, and nobody raised his hand. Most of the Turks had no idea what they should do and were totally unsure of themselves.

I heard that a couple of days beforehand there were also people in the yard who had threatened the Turkish workers. There was almost a physical fight. They threatened that if the Turks continued to participate actively in the occupation they would beat them up, or they threatened them in other ways. As far as I could find out these were people that came from the [Turkish fascist] Grey Wolves.

W&R: Did the workers in the shipyard occupation take any measures such as forming workers defense guards to defend against the fascistic Grey Wolves or other fascist groups that might attempt to break up the occupation?

Wojak: No, none at all. There was no defense, neither against the fascist groups, nor against the scabs, nor against the police attacks that had been threatened.
I have to add that there were a whole series of scabs during the occupation: almost all the white-collar workers worked during the occupation, and after a couple of days parts of the machine shop started working—in the end I believe it was half of the machine shop that worked, first secretly and then openly.

First the workers said, look, they're working. They can't do that. We're going to throw them out. And then there were discussions with the strike committee, and they said, no, that would disturb the "peace and quiet" in the yard, and peace and quiet and order [Ruhe und Ordnung], that's the one thing that you have to maintain in such a big occupation, and you ought to go to the people and talk to them and try to convince them not to work. When I came onto the yard the next day I asked, well, did you guys throw out the white-collar workers? And the workers said, no, we have to keep it quiet, and all that creates an uproar, and we can't do that either. That's the way they manipulated the workers' opinion in practice.

I ask myself how these people in the strike committee wanted to convince people to continue the occupation or not to work, when they themselves had made a deal with the management about painting the bottom of a ship and sent the workers off to work. The painting has to be done in two coats—if the second coat isn't done, then the first coat is ruined too. And for doing that they got from the management deliveries of food to the canteen for one more day.

A number of times in the Social Democratic daily paper there were two-page spreads: HDW will be cleared; police attack; police intervention threats—in order to confuse the workers about what they ought to do. When the first article came out I was in the yard too, and the workers said—a lot of them anyway—what do they think they want, the police? They won't even get in here; the gates are shut tight, and right behind the gates is the fire station. We have water cannons, we have helmets, we have clubs, we have everything here. They won't get in here at all; we'll know how to defend our shipyard for sure. And the next day I asked, what are you guys doing now, and they said, well, when the police come, then we'll let them carry us all away. We won't offer any resistance. And so that's another sign how the opinion was manipulated by the strike committee.

W&R: One of the points made in the TLD's leaflet directed at the HDW occupation was the comparison between the Rostock shipyards in East Germany, where the order books are full—a demonstration of the power of a planned economy—and HDW, which is even turning away work from the Soviet Union at the same time it's laying off thousands of workers. Did this contrast have any impact on the workers during the occupation?

Wojak: This discussion definitely existed in the shipyard, this comparison between the DDR yards in general and shipyards in the Soviet Union, and here in West Germany—simply because these orders to build ships were refused. The workers said, sure, build ships—if it was a question of what kind of ships we need, we could be booked up too. The thing is whether we want to build them—or whether our bosses want to build them. And they just don't want to. And that's whose fault it is that we aren't getting any more work in the harbor.

W&R: After the occupation you put out a leaflet in which you call for a study of the lessons of the occupation. What do you think those lessons are?

Wojak: The lessons of the occupation are that the workers' interests were not represented during the occupation at all, otherwise they would have had something to take home with them from such a large-scale occupation. The people who are responsible for this are the strike committee, who belonged to all the political parties. It would have definitely been possible to extend a strike to all the shipyards, to the mines and to the steel industry, like it says in the TLD's leaflet. That was the least that could have happened. Such an extension into broad areas would have paralyzed a large part of the West German economy. At that point the HDW occupation would have been just one point of a massive campaign.

But of course you can't carry out such an extension if you basically don't want to win but only want a couple of concessions from the capitalists. If you lay the basis for things like this, then the consequence is that the workers take the power. And you have to want that.

There was criticism of a lack of solidarity from other plants. Well, if you don't offer me something to fight for, then what am I supposed to go running off and fight for?
During the occupation I saw what would have been possible, and I saw what all the parties and political groupings did. I saw what the social democrats of the SPD did. They said to the workers, we are the party; we'll do everything for you; we'll save your jobs, but we're going to do it together with the capitalists. And together with the capitalists means against the workers. That's not a party that can be the leadership of an occupation or of strikes, or of the workers' interests.

The DKP did nothing different from the SPD. Maybe there was a little bit more leftist touch in their speeches, but looking at what they did, they are indistinguishable. The GIM was in the shipyard, and they hardly opened their mouth. But the one guy from the GIM that was in the strike committee was also indistinguishable. It's exactly the same with the KPD, and the people from Arbeiterpolitik didn't have any different program either.

The first thing the workers have to have, that's a decent party that represents their interests. When you read the TLD's leaflet, you saw that they did represent the workers. The other political groups, parties—they wanted to keep the TLD out of the shipyard as far as possible. And discussions they had with individual workers were also not looked on kindly.

All the political groups except the TLD said, the workers—they're not that advanced; they can't do all that yet; and they don't understand all that yet. But I'm a worker myself. If somebody asks me, do you want to determine what's produced in your plant, I'll say of course I want that. And if he asked me, do you also want to determine how much you earn, then I'll say, of course I want to determine that. And do you also want to determine your hours and your working conditions? Then of course I say I want to determine that too. I don't have to be so all-fired advanced for that; every worker understands that. And that's what the TLD said. And it's simply necessary to have a party, one you can really turn to with your interests and doesn't turn right around and betray the workers again.

*Films To While Away The Class Struggle By- "The Baader-Meinhof Complex"

Click on the headline to link to a "YouTube" film clip of the movie trailer for "The Baader-Meinhof Complex"

Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some films that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. In the future I expect to do the same for books under a similar heading.-Markin

DVD Review

The Baader-Meinhof Complex, Constantin Productions, 2008

This film, "The Baader-Meinhof Complex", is based on a novelistic treatment of the, sometimes, heroic exploits of the 1960s radical Germany group, the Baader-Meinhof Group (aka Red Army Faction, RAF), that, like a number of other such formations at that time, such as the the Weathermen in the United States, set out to form guerrilla organizations in order to fight imperialism. That of their own state, as with the Weathermen, or others, or to act as a "second front" in order to assist the Vietnamese in their struggle against American imperialism.

Just before I watched this film I watched and reviewed, "Salt Of The Earth". That latter film presented a very different view, one that involved getting working and other oppressed peoples to organize themselves in mass action in the struggle against the bosses, a view more in tune with my own understanding of political organizing for radical social change. A way that in the long haul would prove, I think, to be more effective in the fight against international capitalism that the actions of RAF-type guerrilla formations. Nothing in this film, other than a sneaking admiration for the willingness of these fighters to sacrifice their lives for the struggle, has moved me from that earlier conviction.

And that, my friends is the most graphic comparison that I can make about the fate of those, mainly, student radicals that went up against the German state in a more protracted struggle than here in the United States, and lost. Throughout the viewing of the film I kept getting the feeling that these fighters were talking to themselves in a vacuum. That the mere fact of being willing to fight, and to die, for the cause of the oppressed was enough to validate their positions and their strategies. And as the story unfolds I kept getting the feeling that I had been here before. And I had. In previous reviews of the actions of the Weathermen and of other armed struggle, substitutionist radical student-based formations that dotted the left-wing political landscape in the 1960s and the early 1970s. Off this viewing I would note though that the RAF seemed to be a much more serious and committed organization, at least before its original cadre were taken off the scene and out of day-to-day leadership, one way or another, by the West German security apparatus and their international allies.

An American communist revolutionary that I greatly admire, James P. Cannon, an old Wobblie, founder of the American Communist party and founder of the American Trotskyist movement, once noted that if you get a small group of radical political people in a room and keep them there long enough anything is bound to happen. And that is exactly what happened here. The script could have almost been something out of Dostoevsky's "The Possessed", with a few modern technological updates. And this in a country, Germany, that had a long traditional of radical action, including a not unheroic communist past, had a vibrant and wide-spread student movement in the 1960s and, most importantly, an organized working class chafing under a bureaucratic Social Democratic Party leadership that needed to be replaced.

So what does the Red Army faction do- starts an urban guerrilla campaign based on expropriations and acts of selected terror. Now, let us be clear most of the actions of the RAF, especially those aimed directly at the American military presence in Germany were defensible, as was the organization itself when confronted by the German state. The political differences over strategy, here the effectiveness of an intellectual elite-led urban guerrilla warfare not based on mass support against a modern industrial state, are what separate us, at it did with the Weathermen. However, the weakness of such a strategy got confirmed, intentionally or not, as the leaders and rank and file members got rather easily picked up, picked off, placed in jail, and placed on trial. In the end, with not way out, the isolated original leadership is forced to acts of suicide. In a sense, what we are witnessing unfold is the turn from a heroic guerrilla formation to a class war political defense organization. That scenario too is familiar from the old Black Panther days here in America.

This is a film to watch, however, whatever the intentions of the director and producers as to the lessons to be drawn. If the strategy of urban guerrilla warfare ever seriously resurfaces in the West just drag out this film to clear the air. And then have your contacts watch that "Salt Of The Earth" that I mentioned before.

From "Revolutionary History" -Vol.4 Nos.1 & 2-The Spanish Civil War- José Rebull -On the Slogan of ‘A UGT-CNT Government’

Click on the headline to link to "Revolutionary History" -Vol.4 Nos.1 & 2, 1992-The Spanish Civil War. The View from the Left-On the Slogan of ‘A UGT-CNT Government’

Markin comment:

Part of knowing what to do to forward the struggle in Greece today is to know some historical background of the struggle in the past. Here is a contribution from a POUM leftist in the Spanish Civil War period. The UGT was the Socialist-aligned trade union federation in Spain. The CNT the Anarchist (FAI)-aligned federation. The POUM and its militants had many faults, too many to be a revolutionary organization during that war but the commentator is dead on about the slogan of a purely trade union government- and why we oppose such a slogan. Victory to the Greek workers! Workers to Power!

From "Revolutionary History", Vol.3 No.3, Spring 1991-Open Letter to the KKE (Communist Party Of Greece), 1927-A Guest Commentary

Click on the headline to link to "Revolutionary History, Vol.3 No.3, Spring 1991-Open Letter to the KKE (1927).

Markin comment:

Part of knowing what to do to forward the struggle in Greece today is to know some historical background of the struggle in the past. Here is a contribution. Victory to the Greek workers! Workers to Power!

*From "Revolutionary History", Vol.3 No.3, Spring 1991-The Left Opposition in Greece (1930)- A Guest Commentary

Click on the headline to link to "Revolutionary History, Vol.3 No.3, Spring 1991-The Left Opposition in Greece (1930).

Markin comment:

Part of knowing what to do to forward the struggle in Greece today is to know some historical background of the struggle in the past. Here is a contribution. Victory to the Greek workers! Workers to Power!

*From "Revolutionary History", Vol.3 No.3, Spring 1991-Stalinism and Trotskyism in Greece (1924-1949)- A Guest Commentary

Click on the headline to link to "Revolutionary History, Vol.3 No.3, Spring 1991-"Stalinism and Trotskyism in Greece (1924-1949)".

Markin comment:

Part of knowing what to do to forward the struggle in Greece today is to know some historical background of the struggle in the past. Here is a contribution. Victory to the Greek workers! Workers to Power!