Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Bo Diddley performing his classic Bo Diddley.
CD Review
Oldies But Goodies, Volume Ten, Original Sound Record Co., 1986
I have been doing a series of commentaries elsewhere on another site on my coming of political age in the early 1960s, but here when I am writing about musical influences I am just speaking of my coming of age, period, which was not necessarily the same thing. No question that those of us who came of age in the 1950s are truly children of rock and roll. We were there, whether we appreciated it or not at the time, when the first, sputtering, musical moves away from ballady Broadway show tunes and rhymey Tin Pan Alley pieces hit the radio airwaves. (If you do not know what a radio is then ask your parents or, ouch, grandparents, please.) And, most importantly, we were there when the music moved away from any and all music that your parents might have approved of, or maybe, even liked, or, hopefully, at least left you alone to play in peace up in your room when rock and roll hit post- World War II America teenagers like, well, like an atomic bomb.
Not all of the material put forth was good, nor was all of it destined to be playable fifty or sixty years later on some “greatest hits” compilation but some of songs had enough chordal energy, lyrical sense, and sheer danceability to make any Jack or Jill jump then, or now. And, here is the good part, especially for painfully shy guys like me, or those who, like me as well, had two left feet on the dance floor. You didn’t need to dance toe to toe, close to close, with that certain she (or he for shes). Just be alive…uh, hip to the music. Otherwise you might become the dreaded wallflower. But that fear, the fear of fears that haunted many a teenage dream then, is a story for another day. Let’s just leave it at this for now. Ah, to be very, very young then was very heaven.
So what still sounds good on this CD compilation to a current AARPer, and perhaps to some of his fellows who comprise the demographic that such a 1950s-oriented compilation “speaks” to. Of course, the late Bo Diddley’s monster guitar riffs on Bo Diddley (and about ten other of his mad man songs from this period). Naturally, in a period of classic rock numbers, Chuck Berry’s Roll Over Beethoven (and about twenty of his songs from this period). And also naturally Fats Domino’s My Blue Heaven (ditto).
But what about the now, seeming mandatory to ask, inevitable end of the night high school dance song (or maybe even middle school) that seems to be included in each CD compilation? The song that you, maybe, waited around all night for just to prove that you were not a wallflower, and more importantly, had the moxie to, mumbly-voiced, parched-throated, sweaty-handed, asked a girl to dance (women can relate their own experiences, probably similar). Here the classic Jerry Butler and Betty Everett Let It Be Me fills the bill. Hey, I did like this one, especially the harmonies, and moreover that certain she (the same certain she of the Volume Six and Eight reviews. Does this mean we are going “steady”?) said yes and this was what you waited for and made it all worthwhile. And, yes, I know, this is one of the slow ones that you had to dance close on. And just hope, hope to high heaven, that you didn’t destroy your partner’s shoes and feet. Well, one learns a few social skills in this world if for no other reason that to “impress” that certain she (or he for shes) mentioned above. I did, didn’t you?
**************
Bo Diddley Lyrics
(Ellas McDaniel) 1955
Bo Diddley bought his babe a diamond ring,
If that diamond ring don't shine,
He gonna take it to a private eye,
If that private eye can't see
He'd better not take the ring from me.
Bo Diddley caught a nanny goat,
To make his pretty baby a Sunday coat,
Bo Diddley caught a bear cat,
To make his pretty baby a Sunday hat.
Mojo come to my house, ya black cat bone,
Take my baby away from home,
Ugly ole mojo, where ya bin,
Up your house, and gone again.
Bo Diddley, Bo Diddley have you heard?
My pretty baby said she wasn't for it.
Thursday, July 29, 2010
*The Never-Ending Review Tour-Coming Of Age, Period- Oldies But Goodies-An Encore
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Eddie Cochran rocking on his classic Summertime Blues.
CD Review
Oldies But Goodies, Volume Eight, Original Sound Record Co., 1986
I have been doing a series of commentaries elsewhere on another site on my coming of political age in the early 1960s, but here when I am writing about musical influences I am just speaking of my coming of age, period, which was not necessarily the same thing. No question that those of us who came of age in the 1950s are truly children of rock and roll. We were there, whether we appreciated it or not at the time, when the first, sputtering, musical moves away from ballady Broadway show tunes and rhymey Tin Pan Alley pieces hit the radio airwaves. (If you do not know what a radio is then ask your parents or, ouch, grandparents, please.) And, most importantly, we were there when the music moved away from any and all music that your parents might have approved of, or maybe, even liked, or, hopefully, at least left you alone to play in peace up in your room when rock and roll hit post- World War II America teenagers like, well, like an atomic bomb.
Not all of the material put forth was good, nor was all of it destined to be playable fifty or sixty years later on some “greatest hits” compilation but some of songs had enough chordal energy, lyrical sense, and sheer danceability to make any Jack or Jill jump then, or now. And, here is the good part, especially for painfully shy guys like me, or those who, like me as well, had two left feet on the dance floor. You didn’t need to dance toe to toe, close to close, with that certain she (or he for shes). Just be alive…uh, hip to the music. Otherwise you might become the dreaded wallflower. But that fear, the fear of fears that haunted many a teenage dream then, is a story for another day. Let’s just leave it at this for now. Ah, to be very, very young then was very heaven.
So what still sounds good on this CD compilation to a current AARPer, and perhaps to some of his fellows who comprise the demographic that such a 1950s-oriented compilation “speaks” to. Of course, Little Richards’ Rip It Up (and about twenty other of his mad man songs from this period). Too short-lived Ritchie Valens’ La Bamba. Naturally, in a period of classic rock numbers, Eddie Cochran’s monster guitar beat Summertime Blues. And also naturally Marvin Gaye’s How Sweet It Is.
But what about the now, seeming mandatory to ask, inevitable end of the night high school dance song (or maybe even middle school) that seems to be included in each CD compilation? The song that you, maybe, waited around all night for just to prove that you were not a wallflower, and more importantly, had the moxie to, mumbly-voiced, parched-throated, sweaty-handed, asked a girl to dance (women can relate their own experiences, probably similar). Here The Drifters classic On Broadway fills the bill. Hey, I did like this, especially the harmonies, and moreover that certain she (the same certain she of the Volume Six review, for those keeping score) said yes and this was what you waited for and made it all worthwhile. And, yes, I know, this is one of the slow ones that you had to dance close on. And just hope, hope to high heaven, that you didn’t destroy your partner’s shoes and feet. Well, one learns a few social skills in this world if for no other reason that to “impress” that certain she (or he for shes) mentioned above. I did, didn’t you?
*************
Summertime Blues- Eddie Cochran
I'm gonna raise a fuss, I'm gonna raise a holler
About a workin' all summer just to try to earn a dollar
Every time I call my baby, and try to get a date
My boss says, "No dice son, you gotta work late"
Sometimes I wonder what I'm a gonna do
But there ain't no cure for the summertime blues
Well my mom and pop told me, "Son you gotta make some money,
If you want to use the car to go ridin' next Sunday"
Well I didn't go to work, told the boss I was sick
"Well you can't use the car 'cause you didn't work a lick"
Sometimes I wonder what I'm a gonna do
But there ain't no cure for the summertime blues
I'm gonna take two weeks, gonna have a fine vacation
I'm gonna take my problem to the United Nations
Well I called my congressman and he said Quote:
"I'd like to help you son but you're too young to vote"
Sometimes I wonder what I'm a gonna do
But there ain't no cure for the summertime blues
CD Review
Oldies But Goodies, Volume Eight, Original Sound Record Co., 1986
I have been doing a series of commentaries elsewhere on another site on my coming of political age in the early 1960s, but here when I am writing about musical influences I am just speaking of my coming of age, period, which was not necessarily the same thing. No question that those of us who came of age in the 1950s are truly children of rock and roll. We were there, whether we appreciated it or not at the time, when the first, sputtering, musical moves away from ballady Broadway show tunes and rhymey Tin Pan Alley pieces hit the radio airwaves. (If you do not know what a radio is then ask your parents or, ouch, grandparents, please.) And, most importantly, we were there when the music moved away from any and all music that your parents might have approved of, or maybe, even liked, or, hopefully, at least left you alone to play in peace up in your room when rock and roll hit post- World War II America teenagers like, well, like an atomic bomb.
Not all of the material put forth was good, nor was all of it destined to be playable fifty or sixty years later on some “greatest hits” compilation but some of songs had enough chordal energy, lyrical sense, and sheer danceability to make any Jack or Jill jump then, or now. And, here is the good part, especially for painfully shy guys like me, or those who, like me as well, had two left feet on the dance floor. You didn’t need to dance toe to toe, close to close, with that certain she (or he for shes). Just be alive…uh, hip to the music. Otherwise you might become the dreaded wallflower. But that fear, the fear of fears that haunted many a teenage dream then, is a story for another day. Let’s just leave it at this for now. Ah, to be very, very young then was very heaven.
So what still sounds good on this CD compilation to a current AARPer, and perhaps to some of his fellows who comprise the demographic that such a 1950s-oriented compilation “speaks” to. Of course, Little Richards’ Rip It Up (and about twenty other of his mad man songs from this period). Too short-lived Ritchie Valens’ La Bamba. Naturally, in a period of classic rock numbers, Eddie Cochran’s monster guitar beat Summertime Blues. And also naturally Marvin Gaye’s How Sweet It Is.
But what about the now, seeming mandatory to ask, inevitable end of the night high school dance song (or maybe even middle school) that seems to be included in each CD compilation? The song that you, maybe, waited around all night for just to prove that you were not a wallflower, and more importantly, had the moxie to, mumbly-voiced, parched-throated, sweaty-handed, asked a girl to dance (women can relate their own experiences, probably similar). Here The Drifters classic On Broadway fills the bill. Hey, I did like this, especially the harmonies, and moreover that certain she (the same certain she of the Volume Six review, for those keeping score) said yes and this was what you waited for and made it all worthwhile. And, yes, I know, this is one of the slow ones that you had to dance close on. And just hope, hope to high heaven, that you didn’t destroy your partner’s shoes and feet. Well, one learns a few social skills in this world if for no other reason that to “impress” that certain she (or he for shes) mentioned above. I did, didn’t you?
*************
Summertime Blues- Eddie Cochran
I'm gonna raise a fuss, I'm gonna raise a holler
About a workin' all summer just to try to earn a dollar
Every time I call my baby, and try to get a date
My boss says, "No dice son, you gotta work late"
Sometimes I wonder what I'm a gonna do
But there ain't no cure for the summertime blues
Well my mom and pop told me, "Son you gotta make some money,
If you want to use the car to go ridin' next Sunday"
Well I didn't go to work, told the boss I was sick
"Well you can't use the car 'cause you didn't work a lick"
Sometimes I wonder what I'm a gonna do
But there ain't no cure for the summertime blues
I'm gonna take two weeks, gonna have a fine vacation
I'm gonna take my problem to the United Nations
Well I called my congressman and he said Quote:
"I'd like to help you son but you're too young to vote"
Sometimes I wonder what I'm a gonna do
But there ain't no cure for the summertime blues
*The Never-Ending Review Tour-Coming Of Age, Period- Oldies But Goodies
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Gene Chandler performing his classic Duke Of Earl
CD Review
Oldies But Goodies, Volume Six, Original Sound Record Co., 1986
I have been doing a series of commentaries elsewhere on another site on my coming of political age in the early 1960s, but here when I am writing about musical influences I am just speaking of my coming of age, period, which was not necessarily the same thing. No question that those of us who came of age in the 1950s are truly children of rock and roll. We were there, whether we appreciated it or not at the time, when the first, sputtering, musical moves away from ballady Broadway show tunes and rhymey Tin Pan Alley pieces hit the radio airwaves. (If you do not know what a radio is then ask your parents or, ouch, grandparents, please.) And, most importantly, we were there when the music moved away from any and all music that your parents might have approved of, or maybe, even liked, or, hopefully, at least left you alone to play in peace up in your room when rock and roll hit post- World War II America teenagers like, well, like an atomic bomb.
Not all of the material put forth was good, nor was all of it destined to be playable fifty or sixty years later on some “greatest hits” compilation but some of songs had enough chordal energy, lyrical sense, and sheer danceability to make any Jack or Jill jump then, or now. And, here is the good part, especially for painfully shy guys like me, or those who, like me as well, had two left feet on the dance floor. You didn’t need to dance toe to toe, close to close, with that certain she (or he for shes). Just be alive…uh, hip to the music. Otherwise you might become the dreaded wallflower. But that fear, the fear of fears that haunted many a teenage dream then, is a story for another day. Let’s just leave it at this for now. Ah, to be very, very young then was very heaven.
So what still sounds good on this CD compilation to a current AARPer, and perhaps to some of his fellows who comprise the demographic that such a 1950s-oriented compilation “speaks” to. Of course, Jerry Lee Lewis’s Breathless (and about twenty other of his songs from this period). The Isley Brothers’ classic Twist And Shout. Dion and The Belmonts Teenager In Love (the battle cry of our, and every, generation). Naturally, in a period of classic doo wop numbers, Gene Chandler’s Duke Of Earl.
But what about the now, seeming mandatory to ask, inevitable end of the night high school dance song (or maybe even middle school) that seems to be included in each CD compilation? The song that you, maybe, waited around all night for just to prove that you were not a wallflower, and more importantly, had the moxie to, mumbly-voiced, parched-throated, sweaty-handed, asked a girl to dance (women can relate their own experiences, probably similar). Here the classic Little Caesar’s Those Oldies But Goodies Remind Me Of You fills the bill. Hey, I didn’t even like the song that much, or the singing, but that certain she (a different certain she than in earlier reviews, oh fickle youth) said yes and this was what you waited for so don’t be so choosey. And, yes, I know, this is one of the slow ones that you had to dance close on. And just hope, hope to high heaven that you didn’t destroy your partner’s shoes and feet. Well, one learns a few social skills in this world if for no other reason that to “impress” that certain she (or he for shes) mentioned above. I did, didn’t you?
************
Duke Of Earl Lyrics-Gene Chandler
Duke, Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
As I walk through this world
Nothing can stop the Duke of Earl
And-a you, you are my girl
And no one can hurt you, oh no
Yes-a, I, oh I'm gonna love you, oh oh
Come on let me hold you darlin'
'Cause I'm the Duke of Earl
So hey yea yea yeah
And when I hold you
You'll be my Duchess, Duchess of Earl
We'll walk through my dukedom
And a paradise we will share
Yes-a, I, oh I'm gonna love you, oh oh
Nothing can stop me now
'Cause I'm the Duke of Earl
So hey yeah yeah yeah
Well, I, oh I'm gonna love you, oh oh
Nothing can stop me now
'Cause I'm the Duke of Earl
So hey yeah yeah yeah
CD Review
Oldies But Goodies, Volume Six, Original Sound Record Co., 1986
I have been doing a series of commentaries elsewhere on another site on my coming of political age in the early 1960s, but here when I am writing about musical influences I am just speaking of my coming of age, period, which was not necessarily the same thing. No question that those of us who came of age in the 1950s are truly children of rock and roll. We were there, whether we appreciated it or not at the time, when the first, sputtering, musical moves away from ballady Broadway show tunes and rhymey Tin Pan Alley pieces hit the radio airwaves. (If you do not know what a radio is then ask your parents or, ouch, grandparents, please.) And, most importantly, we were there when the music moved away from any and all music that your parents might have approved of, or maybe, even liked, or, hopefully, at least left you alone to play in peace up in your room when rock and roll hit post- World War II America teenagers like, well, like an atomic bomb.
Not all of the material put forth was good, nor was all of it destined to be playable fifty or sixty years later on some “greatest hits” compilation but some of songs had enough chordal energy, lyrical sense, and sheer danceability to make any Jack or Jill jump then, or now. And, here is the good part, especially for painfully shy guys like me, or those who, like me as well, had two left feet on the dance floor. You didn’t need to dance toe to toe, close to close, with that certain she (or he for shes). Just be alive…uh, hip to the music. Otherwise you might become the dreaded wallflower. But that fear, the fear of fears that haunted many a teenage dream then, is a story for another day. Let’s just leave it at this for now. Ah, to be very, very young then was very heaven.
So what still sounds good on this CD compilation to a current AARPer, and perhaps to some of his fellows who comprise the demographic that such a 1950s-oriented compilation “speaks” to. Of course, Jerry Lee Lewis’s Breathless (and about twenty other of his songs from this period). The Isley Brothers’ classic Twist And Shout. Dion and The Belmonts Teenager In Love (the battle cry of our, and every, generation). Naturally, in a period of classic doo wop numbers, Gene Chandler’s Duke Of Earl.
But what about the now, seeming mandatory to ask, inevitable end of the night high school dance song (or maybe even middle school) that seems to be included in each CD compilation? The song that you, maybe, waited around all night for just to prove that you were not a wallflower, and more importantly, had the moxie to, mumbly-voiced, parched-throated, sweaty-handed, asked a girl to dance (women can relate their own experiences, probably similar). Here the classic Little Caesar’s Those Oldies But Goodies Remind Me Of You fills the bill. Hey, I didn’t even like the song that much, or the singing, but that certain she (a different certain she than in earlier reviews, oh fickle youth) said yes and this was what you waited for so don’t be so choosey. And, yes, I know, this is one of the slow ones that you had to dance close on. And just hope, hope to high heaven that you didn’t destroy your partner’s shoes and feet. Well, one learns a few social skills in this world if for no other reason that to “impress” that certain she (or he for shes) mentioned above. I did, didn’t you?
************
Duke Of Earl Lyrics-Gene Chandler
Duke, Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
As I walk through this world
Nothing can stop the Duke of Earl
And-a you, you are my girl
And no one can hurt you, oh no
Yes-a, I, oh I'm gonna love you, oh oh
Come on let me hold you darlin'
'Cause I'm the Duke of Earl
So hey yea yea yeah
And when I hold you
You'll be my Duchess, Duchess of Earl
We'll walk through my dukedom
And a paradise we will share
Yes-a, I, oh I'm gonna love you, oh oh
Nothing can stop me now
'Cause I'm the Duke of Earl
So hey yeah yeah yeah
Well, I, oh I'm gonna love you, oh oh
Nothing can stop me now
'Cause I'm the Duke of Earl
So hey yeah yeah yeah
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
*A Tip Of The Hat To "Wikileaks"- Blessed Are The Whistleblowers- Troops Out Of Afghanistan Now!
Click on the headline to link to a Wikileaks entry for the some 75,000 2004-2009 Afghan War documents that were laid at their doorstep.
Markin comment:
No bourgeois government, liberal, conservative, centrist or what not likes whistleblowers, in any shape, size or form, period, although we of the extra-parliamentary left certainly do if for no other reason that to see just how grimy and bad the inner workings of the governments we oppose propagandistically day in and day out really are. The Stalinists, as we also know were, and in places like China and Cuba today, are just slightly behind in their scornful attitude toward the species. Nevertheless more knowledge is always a good thing. As 19th century revolutionary, Karl Marx, was fond of saying, “ignorance never did anybody any good.” A very worthy tip of the hat to Wikileaks and to their whistleblowers.
Of course, that is not the end of the matter. The material provided here, unlike the Daniel Ellsberg-leaked Pentagon Papers during the height of the struggle against the Vietnam War, is not an expose of the Bush and Obama administrations' high inner-circle deliberations about the direction of the Afghan War. But, we will take what we can get. On the surface, at least, this material gives us plenty of ammunition to expose the duplicity of the Americans, the Pakistanis, and all factions of the Afghanis (including the Taliban) and, when the deal is finished, who knows who else. But here is the clincher- None of that material does us any good, or little good, if we don’t get a massive opposition organized (something coming off of last spring’s anti-war drive in Washington, D.C. on March 20th we have not done yet) to the Obama/Allied Afghan War policies. Thus- Obama- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops And Mercenaries From Afghanistan (And Iraq)!
Markin comment:
No bourgeois government, liberal, conservative, centrist or what not likes whistleblowers, in any shape, size or form, period, although we of the extra-parliamentary left certainly do if for no other reason that to see just how grimy and bad the inner workings of the governments we oppose propagandistically day in and day out really are. The Stalinists, as we also know were, and in places like China and Cuba today, are just slightly behind in their scornful attitude toward the species. Nevertheless more knowledge is always a good thing. As 19th century revolutionary, Karl Marx, was fond of saying, “ignorance never did anybody any good.” A very worthy tip of the hat to Wikileaks and to their whistleblowers.
Of course, that is not the end of the matter. The material provided here, unlike the Daniel Ellsberg-leaked Pentagon Papers during the height of the struggle against the Vietnam War, is not an expose of the Bush and Obama administrations' high inner-circle deliberations about the direction of the Afghan War. But, we will take what we can get. On the surface, at least, this material gives us plenty of ammunition to expose the duplicity of the Americans, the Pakistanis, and all factions of the Afghanis (including the Taliban) and, when the deal is finished, who knows who else. But here is the clincher- None of that material does us any good, or little good, if we don’t get a massive opposition organized (something coming off of last spring’s anti-war drive in Washington, D.C. on March 20th we have not done yet) to the Obama/Allied Afghan War policies. Thus- Obama- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops And Mercenaries From Afghanistan (And Iraq)!
*From The Wilds Of Cyberspace- The Latest From The "Courage To Resist" G.I. Anti-War Website
Click on the title to link to the website mentioned in the headline for the latest news and opinion from that site.
I thought the winds of change were coming...
US Army Private. July 21, 2010
I would just like to say this website is a safe-haven for me when i thought there was none. I recently joined the National Guard because i was looking to serve the people in my community, state, and country. After President Obama's campaign two years ago in which he criticized supporters of these illegal wars I thought the winds of change were coming. I was naive to think so. I was lied to. We were all lied to. Now I'm facing the possibility of having to go all the way overseas to kill and destroy another country. This is wrong and it makes me physically sick at night. It also makes me sick knowing that there are people out there who still support these wars. I would just like to thank you for listening and for giving people like me a safe-haven to come to.
Published with permission by the author.
I thought the winds of change were coming...
US Army Private. July 21, 2010
I would just like to say this website is a safe-haven for me when i thought there was none. I recently joined the National Guard because i was looking to serve the people in my community, state, and country. After President Obama's campaign two years ago in which he criticized supporters of these illegal wars I thought the winds of change were coming. I was naive to think so. I was lied to. We were all lied to. Now I'm facing the possibility of having to go all the way overseas to kill and destroy another country. This is wrong and it makes me physically sick at night. It also makes me sick knowing that there are people out there who still support these wars. I would just like to thank you for listening and for giving people like me a safe-haven to come to.
Published with permission by the author.
*From The Wilds Of Cyberspace-The Latest From The "Black Panther Alumni" Website- Free All Class-War Prisoners!
Click on the title to link to the website mentioned in the headline for the latest news and opinion from that site.
Markin comment: Free Sundiata Now!
****
This is sick. Sundiata is 73. Come back when you're 83 and maybe????!!!! He's one of the best of our freedom fighters (which the government calls "domestic terrorists."). For more info on our righteous brother, go to http://www.sundiataacoli.org/ where you can find his address as well. Send him some love.
July 14, 2010
Greetings All,
Received a letter today from the Board advising that the 3-Member Panel gave me a 10 year "hit." The basis for the hit will be explained in the Notice of Decision which will be forwarded to me upon its completion. I'll forward copies of the Decision to the Attys and SAFC when I receive it.
Stay strong, I will too.
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863-9977
Markin comment: Free Sundiata Now!
****
This is sick. Sundiata is 73. Come back when you're 83 and maybe????!!!! He's one of the best of our freedom fighters (which the government calls "domestic terrorists."). For more info on our righteous brother, go to http://www.sundiataacoli.org/ where you can find his address as well. Send him some love.
July 14, 2010
Greetings All,
Received a letter today from the Board advising that the 3-Member Panel gave me a 10 year "hit." The basis for the hit will be explained in the Notice of Decision which will be forwarded to me upon its completion. I'll forward copies of the Decision to the Attys and SAFC when I receive it.
Stay strong, I will too.
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863-9977
*From The Wilds Of Cyberspace-The Latest From The "Different Drummer (Fort Drum)" Website-Troops Out Of Afghanistan Now!
Click on the title to link to the website mentioned in the headline for the latest news and opinion from that site.
************
THE NEW GULF WAR SYNDROME
US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are being exposed to toxic chemicals that pose serious health risks
By Nora Eisenberg
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday November 11 2008 14.00 GMT
What does a war injury look like? In the case of Iraq, we tend to picture veterans bravely getting on with their lives with the help of steel legs or computerised limbs. Trauma injuries are certainly the most visible of health problems – the ones that grab our attention. A campaign ad for congressman Tom Udall featured an Iraq war veteran who had survived a shot to his head. Speaking through the computer that now substitutes for his voice, Sergeant Erik Schei extols the top-notch care that saved his life.
As politicians argue about healthcare for veterans, it is generally people like Sgt Schei that they have in mind, men and women torn apart by a bullet or bomb. And of course, these Iraq war veterans must receive the best care available for such complex and catastrophic injuries.
Unfortunately, the dangers of modern war extend far beyond weapons. As Iraqis know only too well, areas of Iraq today are among the most polluted on the planet – so toxic that merely to live, eat and sleep (never mind to fight) in these zones is to risk death. Thousands of soldiers coming home from the war may have been exposed to chemicals that are known to cause cancers and neurological problems. What's most tragic is that the veterans themselves do not always realise that they are in danger from chemical poisoning. Right now, there is no clear way for Iraq war veterans to find out what they've been exposed to and where to get help.
In October, the Military Times reported on the open-air pits on US bases in Iraq, where troops incinerate tons of waste. Because of such pits, tens of thousands of soldiers may be breathing air contaminated with burning Freon, jet fuel and other carcinogens. According to reports, soldiers are coughing up blood or the black goop that has been nicknamed "plume crud".
In other cases, soldiers may have been exposed to poisons spread during efforts to restore Iraq's infrastructure. In 2003, for instance, members of the Indiana national guard were put in charge of protecting a water-treatment plant. They were told not to worry about the bright orange dust lying in piles around the plant, swirling in the air and gathering in the folds of their uniforms. In fact, Indiana soldiers spent weeks or months in a wasteland contaminated with sodium dichromate. The chemical, made famous after its role as the villain in the movie Erin Brockovich, is used to peel corrosion off of water pipes. It is a carcinogen that attacks the lungs and sinuses.
Today, a decade and a half after the first Gulf war, we know that such exposure may lead to widespread suffering. In 1991, veterans began to exhibit fatigue, fevers, rashes, joint pain, intestinal problems, memory loss, mood swings and even cancers, a cluster of symptoms and conditions referred to now as Gulf war syndrome (or illness). For years, the US department of defence maintained that stress caused the veterans' symptoms. Veterans groups blamed war-related toxins. This year, the National Academy of Sciences published an extensive review of years of scientific study of Gulf war illness that concluded a cause and effect relationship existed between the widespread illnesses among veterans and exposure to powerful neurotoxins. Complementing the US studies is an emerging body of epidemiological data linking increased incidence of Iraqi cancer, birth defects, infant mortality and multi-system diseases to toxic exposure.
Strangely enough, though, there has been almost no discussion of whether today's soldiers – those fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan – have also been injured by wartime poisons. We don't have a word yet for the constellation of cancers, psychological ills and systemic diseases that may be caused by toxins in today's wars.
In order to care for our veterans, we must do more than offer state-of-the-art hospitals and high-tech prosthetics. Veterans will need information about what poisons they have breathed or touched or drunk and when.
What would such an effort look like? First the military would need to disclose all known incidents of toxic exposure. Then it would have to reach out to veterans and give them information about how to receive care for conditions that arise from this exposure.
This summer, senator Evan Bayh made a first stab at such a system. Bayh pushed the national guard to track down hundreds of those Indiana soldiers who may have breathed orange dust back in 2003. Most of the soldiers are now civilians scattered across the US, unaware that they are at high risk for lung cancer and other respiratory diseases. Some of them may already be struggling with illness. The national guard is making an effort to search for these veterans and provide them with a phone number to call in order to seek medical help.
That's a good first step. But what about all the other veterans who believe that they have returned home from the war healthy? Without knowing it, they may be carrying a small bomb inside them. And they have a right to know.
************
THE NEW GULF WAR SYNDROME
US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are being exposed to toxic chemicals that pose serious health risks
By Nora Eisenberg
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday November 11 2008 14.00 GMT
What does a war injury look like? In the case of Iraq, we tend to picture veterans bravely getting on with their lives with the help of steel legs or computerised limbs. Trauma injuries are certainly the most visible of health problems – the ones that grab our attention. A campaign ad for congressman Tom Udall featured an Iraq war veteran who had survived a shot to his head. Speaking through the computer that now substitutes for his voice, Sergeant Erik Schei extols the top-notch care that saved his life.
As politicians argue about healthcare for veterans, it is generally people like Sgt Schei that they have in mind, men and women torn apart by a bullet or bomb. And of course, these Iraq war veterans must receive the best care available for such complex and catastrophic injuries.
Unfortunately, the dangers of modern war extend far beyond weapons. As Iraqis know only too well, areas of Iraq today are among the most polluted on the planet – so toxic that merely to live, eat and sleep (never mind to fight) in these zones is to risk death. Thousands of soldiers coming home from the war may have been exposed to chemicals that are known to cause cancers and neurological problems. What's most tragic is that the veterans themselves do not always realise that they are in danger from chemical poisoning. Right now, there is no clear way for Iraq war veterans to find out what they've been exposed to and where to get help.
In October, the Military Times reported on the open-air pits on US bases in Iraq, where troops incinerate tons of waste. Because of such pits, tens of thousands of soldiers may be breathing air contaminated with burning Freon, jet fuel and other carcinogens. According to reports, soldiers are coughing up blood or the black goop that has been nicknamed "plume crud".
In other cases, soldiers may have been exposed to poisons spread during efforts to restore Iraq's infrastructure. In 2003, for instance, members of the Indiana national guard were put in charge of protecting a water-treatment plant. They were told not to worry about the bright orange dust lying in piles around the plant, swirling in the air and gathering in the folds of their uniforms. In fact, Indiana soldiers spent weeks or months in a wasteland contaminated with sodium dichromate. The chemical, made famous after its role as the villain in the movie Erin Brockovich, is used to peel corrosion off of water pipes. It is a carcinogen that attacks the lungs and sinuses.
Today, a decade and a half after the first Gulf war, we know that such exposure may lead to widespread suffering. In 1991, veterans began to exhibit fatigue, fevers, rashes, joint pain, intestinal problems, memory loss, mood swings and even cancers, a cluster of symptoms and conditions referred to now as Gulf war syndrome (or illness). For years, the US department of defence maintained that stress caused the veterans' symptoms. Veterans groups blamed war-related toxins. This year, the National Academy of Sciences published an extensive review of years of scientific study of Gulf war illness that concluded a cause and effect relationship existed between the widespread illnesses among veterans and exposure to powerful neurotoxins. Complementing the US studies is an emerging body of epidemiological data linking increased incidence of Iraqi cancer, birth defects, infant mortality and multi-system diseases to toxic exposure.
Strangely enough, though, there has been almost no discussion of whether today's soldiers – those fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan – have also been injured by wartime poisons. We don't have a word yet for the constellation of cancers, psychological ills and systemic diseases that may be caused by toxins in today's wars.
In order to care for our veterans, we must do more than offer state-of-the-art hospitals and high-tech prosthetics. Veterans will need information about what poisons they have breathed or touched or drunk and when.
What would such an effort look like? First the military would need to disclose all known incidents of toxic exposure. Then it would have to reach out to veterans and give them information about how to receive care for conditions that arise from this exposure.
This summer, senator Evan Bayh made a first stab at such a system. Bayh pushed the national guard to track down hundreds of those Indiana soldiers who may have breathed orange dust back in 2003. Most of the soldiers are now civilians scattered across the US, unaware that they are at high risk for lung cancer and other respiratory diseases. Some of them may already be struggling with illness. The national guard is making an effort to search for these veterans and provide them with a phone number to call in order to seek medical help.
That's a good first step. But what about all the other veterans who believe that they have returned home from the war healthy? Without knowing it, they may be carrying a small bomb inside them. And they have a right to know.
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
*From The Wilds Of Cyberspace-The Latest From The "Black Agenda Report" Website
Click on the title to link to the website mentioned in the headline for the latest news and opinion from that site.
Tea Partyers, Fox News, "Negativity" Against the President? Are These Really Black America's Most Pressing Problems?
Wed, 07/21/2010 - 10:36 — Bruce A. Dixon
Black Misleadership Class | Tea Party | Republicans | Obamarama | Democrats
From the established civil rights organizations like the NAACP to legions of elected Democrats and preachers and even people like our good friends at Color of Change, the main activity these days is an endless circling of wagons around the president, defending him against the flood of racist bile that spews daily from the likes of Fox News, the Tea Partyers and naysaying Republicans. But is that really where so much of our energy and creativity should be going? Aren't there other urgent matters more deserving of the attention of black America's political leadership, our pastors and spokespeople and self-described activists? Matters like black mass incarceration, record unemployment, and the sinking of vast resources into multiple wars abroad?
Tea Partyers, Fox News, "Negativity" Against the President? Are These Really Black America's Most Pressing Problems?
By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
On July 19, an item popped up on the email listserv of SNCC veterans and supporters.
Like anything on these kinds of mailing lists, it was the opinion of whoever posted it, no more and no less. But it pretty much summed up the current strategic thinking of a lot of what passes for African American political leadership, our black intelligensia and a lot of self-identified activists. It was bright red and in bold typeface several times normal size, and before going out to the triple digit number of subscribers to the SNCC list, it had obviously been forwarded to hundreds more. It went like this, (only much larger):
We call on ALL who support President Obama to take action. On August 4th, the President's birthday, we ask those who support him to wear any campaign item from the Presidential election as a demonstration of our ongoing support. Bring out your old campaign paraphernalia.
If you don't have caps, buttons or tee shirts, wear a red, white, and blue tri-color ribbon or clothing on August 4th. If nothing else, this simple demonstration of support for our President will provide a counteraction to the negativity that spews forth daily. We can do this. YES WE CAN. YES WE WILL.
Mark Your Calendar for August 4th! Pass the word on...
As far as most of the black leadership class --- most of our pastors, politicians, professors and such tell it, those are our marching orders. On the president's birthday, we're all supposed to break out those old Obama stickers, shirts and hats, and like the citizens of Oz in The Wiz, we'll flaunt red, white and blue on the president's birthday. Thus we will show our united opposition to the flood of racist invective against the president. We will demonstrate that we are Thus black America will demonstrate that we are the president's millions strong shield against the torrents of “negativity” that issue forth daily from the likes of Fox News and the tea party. That'll show 'em.
Am I the only one who thinks this is just plain dumb? Are the number one problems of black America really the insults and negativity directed at the president by a bunch of crazy people who are not even in power? Are these the times of Shakespeare's Richard III, when the only political yardstick that mattered was whether and how much you did or didn't love the king? Why should Fox News, the tea party, and insults and negativity directed at the president even rank among black America's top ten or twenty problems? And if black America is called upon to make some kind of united political statement in this season of unprecedented joblessness, homelessness, family debt, privatizations and mass incarceration, is flying the red, white and blue to support the president really the most useful thing we can do?
Does “negativity” against the president keep him from addressing mass black incarceration, unemployment, crushing family and student debt, homelessness & ending US imperial wars abroad?
The short answer is no. A longer answer is that we have other matters which are real problems with far greater effect upon the lives of millions of families than the torrent of “negativity” directed at the president.
At the top of any list of black America's real problems is the nation's policy of black mass incarceration, described most thoroughly and eloquently by Michelle Alexander, and a recurring topic in BAR and its predecessors since 2005. The carceral state has been government's main channel of interaction with young blacks for a generation now, despite the fact that their rates of drug use are statistically indistinguishable from those of white youth. African Americans have been locked up and criminalized in such vast numbers that the integrity of millions of our families have been undermined, and the economic futures of entire communities devastated. We are an eighth the nation's population and just under half its prisoners. Why don't our leaders tell us how to make a united political statement about that?
This is the kind of real problem millions of black Americans expected the Obama administration to address.
Does “negativity” against the president keep his administration from addressing black mass incarceration? Of course it doesn't.
Congressional Democrats or the White House could propose tomorrow to sunset all the two strikes, three strikes and mandatory sentencing legislation. It's just a matter of leadership. But instead of calling all Americans together to re-assess the nation's policy of mass incarceration, we have a president and a class of black political misleaders who would just rather not go there.
What about unemployment? Is “negativity” from Fox News, Republicans and the cartoonish tea party the roadblock to creating those millions green jobs that are just over the horizon. Again, the answer is no.
Unemployment is at a six decade high, and the gap between black and white employment is also at a similar high and widening daily. President Roosevelt and the Democratic congresses of the 1930s simply signed checks to put millions of Americans to work. They created public wealth by building bridges and dams, digging new subway lines in cities like Chicago, and constructing thousands of state of the art new schools. The Roosevelt administration even put teaches in local school districts directly on the federal payroll to keep the schools open, the communities viable and the quality of life acceptable.
Does this “negativity” against the president keep him signing the checks to put millions of Americans into new, green, wealth creating jobs? Again, the answer is no.
What keeps the Obama administration from going there is its blind loyalty to Wall Street bankers and their bipartisan neoliberal trickle-down ideology. The economic vision of Barack Obama and congressional Democratis is far closer to Ronald Reagan than to Franklin Roosevelt, even though Republicans have been out of power in Congress since the end of 2006.
Does “negativity” against the president keep him from cutting the military budget?
Does it prevent him from closing a few hundred of America's thousand or so overseas military bases, and ending our direct and proxy wars in places from Iraq and Afghanistan to Colombia, Somalia and Yemen? We know the history and we know the answer.
Early in his campaign Obama pledged withdrawal of one brigade a month from Iraq, and vowed to erase what he called “the mindset” that produced America's unjust wars. By the time he wrapped up the nomination, he had endorsed Bush-Cheney's phony “surge” in Iraq, forgotten his withdrawal pledges, and promised to double the troops in Afghanistan. In his first 36 hours as president, Obama launched drones and cruise missiles against civilians and children in Afghanistan, and soon afterward, in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, as had his predecessor. Did the tea party make him do that? Was it the relentless negativity of Fox News? Was it those naysaying Republicans?
From doubling down on Bush's original Wall Street bailout, to stepping up the Bush-Cheney policies of kidnapping, torture and secret imprisonment, to reversing his opposition to offshore drilling once he secured the Democratic nomination and more, not one of the Obama administration's failures to redeem the promises black America imagined it heard can be laid at the feet of Republicans, Fox News or the tea party. Not one.
In a real sense, the lunatic tea party, cartoonish Republicans, and the outrageous lies of Fox News provide our lazy class of black misleaders in the administration and Congress, and the class of politicians, preachers, professors, business people, self-described activists and wannabes around them a fine distraction from what they can and ought to be doing. The energy and creativity devoted to endlessly circling the wagons around the president sucks the air from every room in the house of black politics. It excuses inaction on matters like black mass incarceration and unemployment, runaway privatizations, and the ever-expanding national security state. It keeps our black misleadership class from having to openly oppose the wars and bailouts that suck up the resources which should be creating jobs and opportunities at home. It's almost God's gift to the administration.
The president doesn't need our protection. He's got the secret service, the armed forces, the CIA and FBI and agencies we don't even know the names of. Our families, our communities and our permanent interests, not the career of one man or the racist insults directed against him, ought to be our chief concern.
What would it look like if the folks on the SNCC listserv, and if our black misleadership class and their acolytes today truly possessed the spirit SNCC had half a century ago? Where would a spirit well grounded in the realities of black America, a spirit impatient with injustice, a spirit reaching through the present for a better world tomorrow lead us? Not to reanimating the tired corpse of the 2008 presidential campaign. Just as SNCC fifty years ago reached well outside and beyond what the wise old political heads believed possible, a spirit of creative struggle would take aim at targets the old political heads of today think are impossible.
If the spirit of SNCC fifty years ago where alive today, it might tell us we ought to wear black and green ribbons, black for the 1.2 million African Americans in prison, and green for those millions of green jobs that are somewhere just over the rainbow.
And we wouldn't be wearing them for just a day. This would not be about the president or his birthday, which matters little to most black families. We could wear them till the administration created 8 million new green jobs, the number vice president Biden admitted have been lost in what he called the Great Recession. We could wear them till the number of African Americans in prison had been reduced by at least half. That wouldn't be a perfect world, but who's asking for perfection. We'd just be asking for progress. Halving the black prison population would not be a perfect world either. It would only bring us down to the level of the Latino prison population, and Latinos are severely over-incarcerated too. But it would be undeniable progress. Is that too much to reach for?
So we won't be wearing red white and blue on the 4th of August. Bet on that. But what about those black and green ribbons? There's an idea....
Bruce Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report and based in Atlanta, and will not be wearing red white and blue any time soon. He's a member of the state committee of the GA Green Party and can be reached at bruce.dixon(at) blackagendareport, or by clicking his name anywhere it appears in red on this site.
Tea Partyers, Fox News, "Negativity" Against the President? Are These Really Black America's Most Pressing Problems?
Wed, 07/21/2010 - 10:36 — Bruce A. Dixon
Black Misleadership Class | Tea Party | Republicans | Obamarama | Democrats
From the established civil rights organizations like the NAACP to legions of elected Democrats and preachers and even people like our good friends at Color of Change, the main activity these days is an endless circling of wagons around the president, defending him against the flood of racist bile that spews daily from the likes of Fox News, the Tea Partyers and naysaying Republicans. But is that really where so much of our energy and creativity should be going? Aren't there other urgent matters more deserving of the attention of black America's political leadership, our pastors and spokespeople and self-described activists? Matters like black mass incarceration, record unemployment, and the sinking of vast resources into multiple wars abroad?
Tea Partyers, Fox News, "Negativity" Against the President? Are These Really Black America's Most Pressing Problems?
By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
On July 19, an item popped up on the email listserv of SNCC veterans and supporters.
Like anything on these kinds of mailing lists, it was the opinion of whoever posted it, no more and no less. But it pretty much summed up the current strategic thinking of a lot of what passes for African American political leadership, our black intelligensia and a lot of self-identified activists. It was bright red and in bold typeface several times normal size, and before going out to the triple digit number of subscribers to the SNCC list, it had obviously been forwarded to hundreds more. It went like this, (only much larger):
We call on ALL who support President Obama to take action. On August 4th, the President's birthday, we ask those who support him to wear any campaign item from the Presidential election as a demonstration of our ongoing support. Bring out your old campaign paraphernalia.
If you don't have caps, buttons or tee shirts, wear a red, white, and blue tri-color ribbon or clothing on August 4th. If nothing else, this simple demonstration of support for our President will provide a counteraction to the negativity that spews forth daily. We can do this. YES WE CAN. YES WE WILL.
Mark Your Calendar for August 4th! Pass the word on...
As far as most of the black leadership class --- most of our pastors, politicians, professors and such tell it, those are our marching orders. On the president's birthday, we're all supposed to break out those old Obama stickers, shirts and hats, and like the citizens of Oz in The Wiz, we'll flaunt red, white and blue on the president's birthday. Thus we will show our united opposition to the flood of racist invective against the president. We will demonstrate that we are Thus black America will demonstrate that we are the president's millions strong shield against the torrents of “negativity” that issue forth daily from the likes of Fox News and the tea party. That'll show 'em.
Am I the only one who thinks this is just plain dumb? Are the number one problems of black America really the insults and negativity directed at the president by a bunch of crazy people who are not even in power? Are these the times of Shakespeare's Richard III, when the only political yardstick that mattered was whether and how much you did or didn't love the king? Why should Fox News, the tea party, and insults and negativity directed at the president even rank among black America's top ten or twenty problems? And if black America is called upon to make some kind of united political statement in this season of unprecedented joblessness, homelessness, family debt, privatizations and mass incarceration, is flying the red, white and blue to support the president really the most useful thing we can do?
Does “negativity” against the president keep him from addressing mass black incarceration, unemployment, crushing family and student debt, homelessness & ending US imperial wars abroad?
The short answer is no. A longer answer is that we have other matters which are real problems with far greater effect upon the lives of millions of families than the torrent of “negativity” directed at the president.
At the top of any list of black America's real problems is the nation's policy of black mass incarceration, described most thoroughly and eloquently by Michelle Alexander, and a recurring topic in BAR and its predecessors since 2005. The carceral state has been government's main channel of interaction with young blacks for a generation now, despite the fact that their rates of drug use are statistically indistinguishable from those of white youth. African Americans have been locked up and criminalized in such vast numbers that the integrity of millions of our families have been undermined, and the economic futures of entire communities devastated. We are an eighth the nation's population and just under half its prisoners. Why don't our leaders tell us how to make a united political statement about that?
This is the kind of real problem millions of black Americans expected the Obama administration to address.
Does “negativity” against the president keep his administration from addressing black mass incarceration? Of course it doesn't.
Congressional Democrats or the White House could propose tomorrow to sunset all the two strikes, three strikes and mandatory sentencing legislation. It's just a matter of leadership. But instead of calling all Americans together to re-assess the nation's policy of mass incarceration, we have a president and a class of black political misleaders who would just rather not go there.
What about unemployment? Is “negativity” from Fox News, Republicans and the cartoonish tea party the roadblock to creating those millions green jobs that are just over the horizon. Again, the answer is no.
Unemployment is at a six decade high, and the gap between black and white employment is also at a similar high and widening daily. President Roosevelt and the Democratic congresses of the 1930s simply signed checks to put millions of Americans to work. They created public wealth by building bridges and dams, digging new subway lines in cities like Chicago, and constructing thousands of state of the art new schools. The Roosevelt administration even put teaches in local school districts directly on the federal payroll to keep the schools open, the communities viable and the quality of life acceptable.
Does this “negativity” against the president keep him signing the checks to put millions of Americans into new, green, wealth creating jobs? Again, the answer is no.
What keeps the Obama administration from going there is its blind loyalty to Wall Street bankers and their bipartisan neoliberal trickle-down ideology. The economic vision of Barack Obama and congressional Democratis is far closer to Ronald Reagan than to Franklin Roosevelt, even though Republicans have been out of power in Congress since the end of 2006.
Does “negativity” against the president keep him from cutting the military budget?
Does it prevent him from closing a few hundred of America's thousand or so overseas military bases, and ending our direct and proxy wars in places from Iraq and Afghanistan to Colombia, Somalia and Yemen? We know the history and we know the answer.
Early in his campaign Obama pledged withdrawal of one brigade a month from Iraq, and vowed to erase what he called “the mindset” that produced America's unjust wars. By the time he wrapped up the nomination, he had endorsed Bush-Cheney's phony “surge” in Iraq, forgotten his withdrawal pledges, and promised to double the troops in Afghanistan. In his first 36 hours as president, Obama launched drones and cruise missiles against civilians and children in Afghanistan, and soon afterward, in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, as had his predecessor. Did the tea party make him do that? Was it the relentless negativity of Fox News? Was it those naysaying Republicans?
From doubling down on Bush's original Wall Street bailout, to stepping up the Bush-Cheney policies of kidnapping, torture and secret imprisonment, to reversing his opposition to offshore drilling once he secured the Democratic nomination and more, not one of the Obama administration's failures to redeem the promises black America imagined it heard can be laid at the feet of Republicans, Fox News or the tea party. Not one.
In a real sense, the lunatic tea party, cartoonish Republicans, and the outrageous lies of Fox News provide our lazy class of black misleaders in the administration and Congress, and the class of politicians, preachers, professors, business people, self-described activists and wannabes around them a fine distraction from what they can and ought to be doing. The energy and creativity devoted to endlessly circling the wagons around the president sucks the air from every room in the house of black politics. It excuses inaction on matters like black mass incarceration and unemployment, runaway privatizations, and the ever-expanding national security state. It keeps our black misleadership class from having to openly oppose the wars and bailouts that suck up the resources which should be creating jobs and opportunities at home. It's almost God's gift to the administration.
The president doesn't need our protection. He's got the secret service, the armed forces, the CIA and FBI and agencies we don't even know the names of. Our families, our communities and our permanent interests, not the career of one man or the racist insults directed against him, ought to be our chief concern.
What would it look like if the folks on the SNCC listserv, and if our black misleadership class and their acolytes today truly possessed the spirit SNCC had half a century ago? Where would a spirit well grounded in the realities of black America, a spirit impatient with injustice, a spirit reaching through the present for a better world tomorrow lead us? Not to reanimating the tired corpse of the 2008 presidential campaign. Just as SNCC fifty years ago reached well outside and beyond what the wise old political heads believed possible, a spirit of creative struggle would take aim at targets the old political heads of today think are impossible.
If the spirit of SNCC fifty years ago where alive today, it might tell us we ought to wear black and green ribbons, black for the 1.2 million African Americans in prison, and green for those millions of green jobs that are somewhere just over the rainbow.
And we wouldn't be wearing them for just a day. This would not be about the president or his birthday, which matters little to most black families. We could wear them till the administration created 8 million new green jobs, the number vice president Biden admitted have been lost in what he called the Great Recession. We could wear them till the number of African Americans in prison had been reduced by at least half. That wouldn't be a perfect world, but who's asking for perfection. We'd just be asking for progress. Halving the black prison population would not be a perfect world either. It would only bring us down to the level of the Latino prison population, and Latinos are severely over-incarcerated too. But it would be undeniable progress. Is that too much to reach for?
So we won't be wearing red white and blue on the 4th of August. Bet on that. But what about those black and green ribbons? There's an idea....
Bruce Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report and based in Atlanta, and will not be wearing red white and blue any time soon. He's a member of the state committee of the GA Green Party and can be reached at bruce.dixon(at) blackagendareport, or by clicking his name anywhere it appears in red on this site.
Monday, July 26, 2010
*From The Wilds Of Cyberspace- The Latest From "The National Committee to Free the Cuban Five" Website -Free The Five Ahora!
Click on the title to link to the website mentioned in the headline for the latest news and opinion from that site.
Markin comment:
On a day, July 26th, important in the history of the Cuban revolutionary movement it is also important, as always, to remember that the defense of the Cuban revolution here in the United States, the "heart of the beast", starts with the defense of the Cuban Five.
Markin comment:
On a day, July 26th, important in the history of the Cuban revolutionary movement it is also important, as always, to remember that the defense of the Cuban revolution here in the United States, the "heart of the beast", starts with the defense of the Cuban Five.
Sunday, July 25, 2010
*From The Wilds Of Cyberspace-From The "Against The Stream" Journal Website- A Guest Commentary On Arizona's SB 1070
Click on the title to link to the website mentioned in the headline for the latest news and opinion from that site.
Arizona's Racial Profiling Push
— Malik Miah
ARIZONA GOVERNOR Jan Brewer is quick to blame the federal government for the economic and social ills of her state. Responding to a growing movement to boycott Arizona for its new “show me your papers” law (signed by her on April 23 and to become effective July 29) as “thoughtless and harmful,” she complained that the outraged response “adds to the massive economic burden Arizonans have sustained for years due to the federal government’s failure to secure its borders.”
The new law states that cops must (not merely can) stop all individuals who they determine have a “reasonable suspicion” of being “illegal.” When Gov Brewer was asked the question how reasonable suspicion is determined, she said: “I don’t know but I’m sure our cops will be trained to know how to pick people out.”
Racial Profiling Lives
One politician didn’t have Brewer’s difficulty. He said it’s obvious who is illegal: Just look at their clothes, shoes and other known features of “illegal aliens.” Racial profiling — despite official disclaimers that no one takes seriously — is the core of the law, and quite intentionally so.
The law even says any private citizen can sue cops and law enforcement agencies if they don’t stop “suspicious” individuals. Every brown-skinned person in Arizona can now face white vigilantism if they don’t show proof of citizenship. Propelled by those who think illegals carry forged drivers’ licenses and birth certificates, the inevitable false arrests and deportations of U.S. citizens of Latino heritage will occur.
If more proof is needed to show this is really about the rights of Mexican Americans and Latinos — and not about stopping “illegal criminals” — Arizona’s legislature made that crystal clear when it adopted a new anti-ethnic studies law on May 12. According to The Huffington Post, “Under the ban, sent to Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer by the state legislature, schools will lose state funding if they offer any courses that ‘promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, promote resentment of a particular race or class of people, are designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group or advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.’”
The specific target of the new law is the Tucson Unified School District’s popular Mexican American studies department. The state superintendent of schools Tom Horne charges that the program exhibits “ethnic extremism.” The program is not new or exclusionary. It’s open to all ethnic groups and is nearly 15 years old.
No Accent Allowed
In addition, The Wall Street Journal uncovered a move that the Arizona Department of Education has told schools that teachers with “heavy” or “ungrammatical” accents are no longer allowed to teach English classes. Teachers who can’t meet the new fluency standards have the option of taking classes to improve English but if they fail to reach the state’s targets would be fired or reassigned.
“At least we don’t have to pretend any more,” writes African-American columnist Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post. “Arizona’s passing of that mean-spirited new immigration law wasn’t about high-minded principle or the need to maintain public order. Apparently, it was all about putting Latinos in their place.”
The far right is openly moving to turn Arizona into a replica of the Bull Connor [the notorious Birmingham, Alabama segregationist police chief] era when state officials of Southern governments stood in front of schools to prevent Black children from attending all-white schools.
The shift to the right among whites in general shows the retreat taking place in the country on issues of race and ethnic rights. A McClatchy-Ipsos poll found that 61% of Americans and 64% of registered voters support the Arizona law, even though few have actually read it. The same poll says some 69% of Americans don’t mind if cops stop and ask them about their citizenship.
The so-called Tea Party freedom-loving anti-government types also back the law, even though it directly puts the state government in their personal lives. White people don’t expect to be stopped, since they know who the law is aimed at.
“Good whites” — legal and illegal — don’t see the contradiction of accepting history taught in schools about Italians, Irish or others from Europe while seeing Latino heritage as un-American. Many Asian Americans (few live in Arizona) think the law doesn’t affect them since they clearly don’t look Mexican. Some African Americans back the law, thinking it may get them more job opportunities.
Of course, the “show me the papers” supporters deny the true anti-Latino intent and aims of the law. Some even claim to agree with the great civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, who fought for equality for Blacks by demanding that the country recognize everyone as individuals and not by their ethnic origins.
This twisting of history — of what King said and meant — is used to justify reactionary positions. It was common to use code words like “neighborhood schools” and “colorblind” school programs to justify the denial of desegregation and full rights for minorities. Today the code words are “protect the borders.”
Arizona’s population is 30% Latino (not including undocumented workers). The numbers are growing as the U.S.-born segment of the state continues to expand. Arizona’s white majority has never liked the fact that the state once was originally part of Mexico.
Many white Arizonans are not proud of this link to Mexican and Native American heritage. They see the country as being “taken” from them and fear the end of white political power. These are the roots of the anti-immigrant and anti-Latino heritage backlash in the state and growing parts of the country. The objective is simple: protect historic white privileges.
Many Arizonans with white skin want the “good old days” when Latinos stayed in their place and did not challenge the white political power structure. The fearmongering of demagogues is to keep white workers from understanding the demographic change taking place, that their interests as workers are not served by aligning with racists and white bosses, and that they have more in common with fellow workers of other races and ethnic backgrounds.
Memory of Jim Crow
During the days of Jim Crow segregation of the Deep South, it was easy to racially profile African Americans — by skin color. It wasn’t called that then because the laws of the land in the Deep South were clear about where Blacks could eat, sleep or work. Blacks were legally denied the right to vote. White workers then were also made to believe their interests were with the bosses and bigots.
It took a massive civil disobedience movement to push the federal government to act and use force against the racist state troopers and immoral laws like the one in Arizona today.
The right wing points to polls showing a majority of people supporting the law in Arizona. If a poll were taken in the Deep South in the 1960s, a majority of whites would have supported the racist laws. They regularly complained about “Northerners” and “liberals” denying them “states rights.” At the time most whites rejected full integration of Blacks into society as equals. The Confederate civil war “heroes” are still cheered in these states.
After World War II, it took a government Executive Order to integrate the military. No referendum was taken, since it is likely a majority would have rejected the president’s decision. It took a powerful women’s rights movement to open the door for job opportunities and education equality for women. Gays are still fighting for full equality.
Popular Protests
The response to the Arizona law is growing. City Councils in northern and southern California have passed resolutions to boycott Arizona. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, born in Austria, has spoken out against the law.
(California’s reaction is noteworthy, since it was California in 1994 that passed its own anti-immigrant law and played the “illegal alien” card for political purpose. When Proposition 187 was adopted by referendum to deny social benefits to “illegal immigrants” families, the law was taken to court and never implemented.)
In New Mexico, where 45% of its population is Latino, Governor Bill Richardson also rejects targeting undocumented workers. He’s proud of his Mexican roots and has promoted Mexican and Native American culture even though many whites don’t like it. His state allows undocumented people to receive driver’s licenses, educate their children and receive other benefits.
“There is a decided positive in encouraging biculturalism and people working and living together instead of inciting tension,” says Richardson. “The worry I have about Arizona is it is going to spread. It arouses the nativist instinct in people.”
On May 1, pro-immigrant protests took place in Arizona and other states. City councils, universities along with civil liberties organizations, civil rights groups (Black and Latino) and many others are calling for a boycott of Arizona. Prominent athletes are among these opponents since Latinos are a large segment of many sports teams.
In Los Angeles, singer Gloria Estefan kicked off a massive downtown march to demand immigration reform and protest the Arizona law. Estefan spoke in Spanish and English atop a flatbed truck. Proclaiming the United States is a nation of immigrants, she said immigrants are good, hardworking people, not criminals.
The popular protests reflect what occurred two decades ago, when Arizona politicians opposed making Martin Luther King Day a state holiday even after it became a national holiday. Only the huge economic price led to a change.
The Anglo news media have downplayed these protests while giving front-page coverage and constant analysis to small Tea Party events.
In contrast, the Spanish-speaking media give these events broad coverage. The Mexican president and Latin American officials have protested the law and likely racial profiling of their citizens when visiting the United States. Suits have been filed in Arizona by Latino leaders and progressive-minded whites including the mayor of Phoenix, the state’s largest city.
The boycott campaign is an important weapon. People of all races and ethnic groups are denouncing the racial profiling and anti-immigrant law as an attack on their rights. Black leaders especially know the history of code words in taking away their communities’ rights.
Arab and Muslim leaders know this better than any group today because of their treatment, while whites who murder pro-choice doctors or attack IRS offices and kill civilians are not even called terrorists.
Open Borders and Citizenship
Rand (son of Ron) Paul, a Tea Party hero who won the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate to replace the retiring Jim Bunning, wants to repeal or “reinterpret” part of the 14th Amendment that confers citizenship on anyone born in the USA to exclude citizenship for children of “illegal” immigrants. So much for the Constitution (Paul isn’t a big fan of the Civil Rights Act either). While this kind of thinking may be part of the right-wing freak show at the present moment, it represents a menace that must be confronted head-on in a principled fashion.
While liberals and other pro-immigration reform supporters have no viable solutions to help undocumented workers or solve the immigrant citizenship issue, they all know that 10 million undocumented working people cannot and will not be kicked out of the country. These workers play an invaluable role and have a positive impact on society. They reject the racism of the right.
What is a viable pro-immigrant solution? First and foremost we can demand that all racial profiling is made illegal. Second, we can raise the demand to open the borders so all workers and their families can freely migrate to work.
Hundreds of people die each year trying to cross the border looking for jobs and to help their families. If these workers could freely travel to work, they couldn’t be so easily be abused by the landowners and employers who deny them their benefits and wages. They could also join unions, which would benefit all workers.
The solution offered by Democrats and the Obama administration does not move in this direction. Instead it pushes for more stringent border patrols to arrest “illegals” and to declare intent to find a long-term path to citizenship for undocumented workers who currently work in the country.
The emphasis is on law enforcement and building new fences and walls, not human rights. Many Latino leaders and reform supporters, unfortunately, have accepted this “compromise” solution.
There is a deep misunderstanding about the relationship between free labor movement and citizenship. Just as workers across Europe can travel and be employed in member countries of the European Union, it does not give them the vote unless they are citizens. This is what should happen in North America. And it is the demand for which labor and the civil rights and civil liberties organizations should press.
Any compromise with the anti-immigrant hysteria and so called “Take Back America” crowd will undermine genuine reform. The issue of open borders is a way to turn the tables on the right. Calling for an open border policy and free labor movement is the only solution that can end the second-class status of undocumented workers and paves the way for solidarity and unity between citizen workers and noncitizens. It also can allow a legal path to citizenship for those who may want it.
It is not enough to oppose the racism of the right, or to call the new Arizona “show me your papers” laws as racial profiling and un-American as the ACLU does. It is necessary to demand fundamental reform that defends the rights of these working people.
The defense of undocumented workers is a defense of all working people. The issue of immigrant rights is an issue of human rights.
ATC 147, July-August 2010
Arizona's Racial Profiling Push
— Malik Miah
ARIZONA GOVERNOR Jan Brewer is quick to blame the federal government for the economic and social ills of her state. Responding to a growing movement to boycott Arizona for its new “show me your papers” law (signed by her on April 23 and to become effective July 29) as “thoughtless and harmful,” she complained that the outraged response “adds to the massive economic burden Arizonans have sustained for years due to the federal government’s failure to secure its borders.”
The new law states that cops must (not merely can) stop all individuals who they determine have a “reasonable suspicion” of being “illegal.” When Gov Brewer was asked the question how reasonable suspicion is determined, she said: “I don’t know but I’m sure our cops will be trained to know how to pick people out.”
Racial Profiling Lives
One politician didn’t have Brewer’s difficulty. He said it’s obvious who is illegal: Just look at their clothes, shoes and other known features of “illegal aliens.” Racial profiling — despite official disclaimers that no one takes seriously — is the core of the law, and quite intentionally so.
The law even says any private citizen can sue cops and law enforcement agencies if they don’t stop “suspicious” individuals. Every brown-skinned person in Arizona can now face white vigilantism if they don’t show proof of citizenship. Propelled by those who think illegals carry forged drivers’ licenses and birth certificates, the inevitable false arrests and deportations of U.S. citizens of Latino heritage will occur.
If more proof is needed to show this is really about the rights of Mexican Americans and Latinos — and not about stopping “illegal criminals” — Arizona’s legislature made that crystal clear when it adopted a new anti-ethnic studies law on May 12. According to The Huffington Post, “Under the ban, sent to Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer by the state legislature, schools will lose state funding if they offer any courses that ‘promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, promote resentment of a particular race or class of people, are designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group or advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.’”
The specific target of the new law is the Tucson Unified School District’s popular Mexican American studies department. The state superintendent of schools Tom Horne charges that the program exhibits “ethnic extremism.” The program is not new or exclusionary. It’s open to all ethnic groups and is nearly 15 years old.
No Accent Allowed
In addition, The Wall Street Journal uncovered a move that the Arizona Department of Education has told schools that teachers with “heavy” or “ungrammatical” accents are no longer allowed to teach English classes. Teachers who can’t meet the new fluency standards have the option of taking classes to improve English but if they fail to reach the state’s targets would be fired or reassigned.
“At least we don’t have to pretend any more,” writes African-American columnist Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post. “Arizona’s passing of that mean-spirited new immigration law wasn’t about high-minded principle or the need to maintain public order. Apparently, it was all about putting Latinos in their place.”
The far right is openly moving to turn Arizona into a replica of the Bull Connor [the notorious Birmingham, Alabama segregationist police chief] era when state officials of Southern governments stood in front of schools to prevent Black children from attending all-white schools.
The shift to the right among whites in general shows the retreat taking place in the country on issues of race and ethnic rights. A McClatchy-Ipsos poll found that 61% of Americans and 64% of registered voters support the Arizona law, even though few have actually read it. The same poll says some 69% of Americans don’t mind if cops stop and ask them about their citizenship.
The so-called Tea Party freedom-loving anti-government types also back the law, even though it directly puts the state government in their personal lives. White people don’t expect to be stopped, since they know who the law is aimed at.
“Good whites” — legal and illegal — don’t see the contradiction of accepting history taught in schools about Italians, Irish or others from Europe while seeing Latino heritage as un-American. Many Asian Americans (few live in Arizona) think the law doesn’t affect them since they clearly don’t look Mexican. Some African Americans back the law, thinking it may get them more job opportunities.
Of course, the “show me the papers” supporters deny the true anti-Latino intent and aims of the law. Some even claim to agree with the great civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, who fought for equality for Blacks by demanding that the country recognize everyone as individuals and not by their ethnic origins.
This twisting of history — of what King said and meant — is used to justify reactionary positions. It was common to use code words like “neighborhood schools” and “colorblind” school programs to justify the denial of desegregation and full rights for minorities. Today the code words are “protect the borders.”
Arizona’s population is 30% Latino (not including undocumented workers). The numbers are growing as the U.S.-born segment of the state continues to expand. Arizona’s white majority has never liked the fact that the state once was originally part of Mexico.
Many white Arizonans are not proud of this link to Mexican and Native American heritage. They see the country as being “taken” from them and fear the end of white political power. These are the roots of the anti-immigrant and anti-Latino heritage backlash in the state and growing parts of the country. The objective is simple: protect historic white privileges.
Many Arizonans with white skin want the “good old days” when Latinos stayed in their place and did not challenge the white political power structure. The fearmongering of demagogues is to keep white workers from understanding the demographic change taking place, that their interests as workers are not served by aligning with racists and white bosses, and that they have more in common with fellow workers of other races and ethnic backgrounds.
Memory of Jim Crow
During the days of Jim Crow segregation of the Deep South, it was easy to racially profile African Americans — by skin color. It wasn’t called that then because the laws of the land in the Deep South were clear about where Blacks could eat, sleep or work. Blacks were legally denied the right to vote. White workers then were also made to believe their interests were with the bosses and bigots.
It took a massive civil disobedience movement to push the federal government to act and use force against the racist state troopers and immoral laws like the one in Arizona today.
The right wing points to polls showing a majority of people supporting the law in Arizona. If a poll were taken in the Deep South in the 1960s, a majority of whites would have supported the racist laws. They regularly complained about “Northerners” and “liberals” denying them “states rights.” At the time most whites rejected full integration of Blacks into society as equals. The Confederate civil war “heroes” are still cheered in these states.
After World War II, it took a government Executive Order to integrate the military. No referendum was taken, since it is likely a majority would have rejected the president’s decision. It took a powerful women’s rights movement to open the door for job opportunities and education equality for women. Gays are still fighting for full equality.
Popular Protests
The response to the Arizona law is growing. City Councils in northern and southern California have passed resolutions to boycott Arizona. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, born in Austria, has spoken out against the law.
(California’s reaction is noteworthy, since it was California in 1994 that passed its own anti-immigrant law and played the “illegal alien” card for political purpose. When Proposition 187 was adopted by referendum to deny social benefits to “illegal immigrants” families, the law was taken to court and never implemented.)
In New Mexico, where 45% of its population is Latino, Governor Bill Richardson also rejects targeting undocumented workers. He’s proud of his Mexican roots and has promoted Mexican and Native American culture even though many whites don’t like it. His state allows undocumented people to receive driver’s licenses, educate their children and receive other benefits.
“There is a decided positive in encouraging biculturalism and people working and living together instead of inciting tension,” says Richardson. “The worry I have about Arizona is it is going to spread. It arouses the nativist instinct in people.”
On May 1, pro-immigrant protests took place in Arizona and other states. City councils, universities along with civil liberties organizations, civil rights groups (Black and Latino) and many others are calling for a boycott of Arizona. Prominent athletes are among these opponents since Latinos are a large segment of many sports teams.
In Los Angeles, singer Gloria Estefan kicked off a massive downtown march to demand immigration reform and protest the Arizona law. Estefan spoke in Spanish and English atop a flatbed truck. Proclaiming the United States is a nation of immigrants, she said immigrants are good, hardworking people, not criminals.
The popular protests reflect what occurred two decades ago, when Arizona politicians opposed making Martin Luther King Day a state holiday even after it became a national holiday. Only the huge economic price led to a change.
The Anglo news media have downplayed these protests while giving front-page coverage and constant analysis to small Tea Party events.
In contrast, the Spanish-speaking media give these events broad coverage. The Mexican president and Latin American officials have protested the law and likely racial profiling of their citizens when visiting the United States. Suits have been filed in Arizona by Latino leaders and progressive-minded whites including the mayor of Phoenix, the state’s largest city.
The boycott campaign is an important weapon. People of all races and ethnic groups are denouncing the racial profiling and anti-immigrant law as an attack on their rights. Black leaders especially know the history of code words in taking away their communities’ rights.
Arab and Muslim leaders know this better than any group today because of their treatment, while whites who murder pro-choice doctors or attack IRS offices and kill civilians are not even called terrorists.
Open Borders and Citizenship
Rand (son of Ron) Paul, a Tea Party hero who won the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate to replace the retiring Jim Bunning, wants to repeal or “reinterpret” part of the 14th Amendment that confers citizenship on anyone born in the USA to exclude citizenship for children of “illegal” immigrants. So much for the Constitution (Paul isn’t a big fan of the Civil Rights Act either). While this kind of thinking may be part of the right-wing freak show at the present moment, it represents a menace that must be confronted head-on in a principled fashion.
While liberals and other pro-immigration reform supporters have no viable solutions to help undocumented workers or solve the immigrant citizenship issue, they all know that 10 million undocumented working people cannot and will not be kicked out of the country. These workers play an invaluable role and have a positive impact on society. They reject the racism of the right.
What is a viable pro-immigrant solution? First and foremost we can demand that all racial profiling is made illegal. Second, we can raise the demand to open the borders so all workers and their families can freely migrate to work.
Hundreds of people die each year trying to cross the border looking for jobs and to help their families. If these workers could freely travel to work, they couldn’t be so easily be abused by the landowners and employers who deny them their benefits and wages. They could also join unions, which would benefit all workers.
The solution offered by Democrats and the Obama administration does not move in this direction. Instead it pushes for more stringent border patrols to arrest “illegals” and to declare intent to find a long-term path to citizenship for undocumented workers who currently work in the country.
The emphasis is on law enforcement and building new fences and walls, not human rights. Many Latino leaders and reform supporters, unfortunately, have accepted this “compromise” solution.
There is a deep misunderstanding about the relationship between free labor movement and citizenship. Just as workers across Europe can travel and be employed in member countries of the European Union, it does not give them the vote unless they are citizens. This is what should happen in North America. And it is the demand for which labor and the civil rights and civil liberties organizations should press.
Any compromise with the anti-immigrant hysteria and so called “Take Back America” crowd will undermine genuine reform. The issue of open borders is a way to turn the tables on the right. Calling for an open border policy and free labor movement is the only solution that can end the second-class status of undocumented workers and paves the way for solidarity and unity between citizen workers and noncitizens. It also can allow a legal path to citizenship for those who may want it.
It is not enough to oppose the racism of the right, or to call the new Arizona “show me your papers” laws as racial profiling and un-American as the ACLU does. It is necessary to demand fundamental reform that defends the rights of these working people.
The defense of undocumented workers is a defense of all working people. The issue of immigrant rights is an issue of human rights.
ATC 147, July-August 2010
Saturday, July 24, 2010
*From The Wilds Of Cyberspace- The Latest From The "Socialist Action" Website
Click on the title to link to the website mentioned in the headline for the latest news and opinion from that site.
Markin comment:
I will be commenting more on the various stands of the Fourth International movement, the now very broken, organizationally broken although not progammatically broken (think the Transitional Program), movement founded by Leon Trotsky and his co-thinkers in 1938 in the future.
**************
Fourth International Debates Party-Building Strategy
by Jeff Mackler / July 2010
More than 200 delegates, observers, and invited guests from some 45 countries attended the 16th World Congress of the Fourth International (FI), Feb. 23-28 in Belgium. The FI is the world socialist organization founded in 1938 by Leon Trotsky with the help of cothinkers worldwide, including James P. Cannon, the pioneer of American Trotskyism.
The draft reports prepared by the FI leadership to initiate the pre-World Congress on-line discussion appear in the International Viewpoint website under “Documents of the FI.” A critical assessment of these texts, entitled, “Socialist Action USA: A contribution to the pre-World Congress discussion,” appears in the same place.
Three main resolutions were presented for discussion and debate. The first two, on “The World Political Situation” and on “Capitalist Climate Change and Our Tasks” were accepted with little dissent and accompanied by a generally rich and productive discussion.
But there were sharp disagreements with regard to the third report on “The Role and Tasks of the FI.” Socialist Action cast its fraternal vote in favor of the first two resolutions and against the “Role and Tasks” text. Reactionary U.S. legislation bars Socialist Action’s formal membership in the FI. Its delegates therefore participate in a fraternal capacity only.
“The World Political Report” contained a description of the terrible effects on the world’s working classes due to the international capitalist economic crisis, a crisis that was properly judged as flowing from fundamental structural flaws in the capitalist system itself.
The second resolution and reports on the world climate crisis represented an important theoretical advance, as well as an important contribution to the world workers’ movement more generally. The text on climate change combined a thoroughgoing Marxist analysis with the science of ecology, a wealth of factual material, a rejection of a “productivist” (capitalist or Stalinist) way out, a series of transitional and immediate demands, proposals for united mass actions, and a broad appreciation of the magnitude and importance of the climate crisis issue.
The resolution began with a clear and unequivocal statement of the magnitude and importance of the issue: “The climate change that is underway is not the product of human activity in general but of the productivist paradigm developed by capitalism and imitated by other systems that claim to be alternatives to the former. Faced with the danger of a social and ecological catastrophe which is without precedent and is irreversible on a human timescale, the system, incapable of calling into question its fundamental logic of accumulation, is engaged in a dangerous technological forward flight from which there is no way out.”
Debate on “Tasks” resolution
The third resolution debated at the World Congress, “The Role and Tasks of the Fourth International,” drew serious criticism from a number of delegates. The text expressed the view that the priority of the FI today must be the construction of “broad anti-capitalist parties” everywhere—as well as a “new international based on such parties.”
The FI’s primary objective since its founding has been to build mass revolutionary Leninist parties worldwide aimed at the organization of the working class and its allies among the oppressed to take political power and construct socialist societies. Unclear in the resolution was whether its call for “broad anti-capitalist parties” was meant to supplant the FI’s historic party-building strategy.
The debate also concerned the role of FI parties that would participate in these “broad anti-capitalist parties.” Were they to organize as a tendency, caucus, or some such formation designed to win new FI members to a clear revolutionary program and party—or were they to become absorbed into such parties without a clear revolutionary program and Trotskyist identity?
This issue was particularly relevant in light of last year’s dissolution of the French section of the Fourth International, the Revolutionary Communist League, into the New Anti-Capitalist Party, and the absence of any organized FI current within the organization. Was the NPA to be the new model for revolutionaries as opposed to building a Leninist party?
The text had been prepared by the FI’s International Committee after deliberations over the course of more than a year. Some 72 comrades took the floor to express a wide range of views on the resolution.
As the discussion proceeded, it became obvious that there was little agreement among the delegates as to the meaning and purpose of “broad anti-capitalist parties.” Neither the ambiguous language of the text nor the reporter explained whether these parties were envisioned as an alternative to building revolutionary parties based on the historic program of the FI or even whether these parties were to be socialist at all.
In Socialist Action’s view, a tactical decision as to what kind of formations revolutionary socialists participate in must be subordinate to our strategic objective—the construction of revolutionary parties aimed at the organization of the working class and its allies in the struggle for socialism. Of course, party-building can take many forms, from participation in reformist or social-democratic parties, to principled fusions, or unifications with currents with whom we find major programmatic agreement and with whom we find ourselves working together toward the same goals in the mass movement.
Indeed, the struggle to unify the working class in united-front mass actions that challenge specific polices of the capitalist class (such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or attacks on immigrant rights) is a central tool of revolutionaries throughout the world to advance our common cause and simultaneously win the best fighters to socialist politics.
Build the Fourth International!
While the “Role and Tasks” text was approved by the great majority of the delegates, the vote was not without major reservations and also reflected a view that the discussion would be continued.
It was clear from the concluding remarks of the reporter for “The Role and Tasks of the FI” text that the sharp World Congress debates had an important impact on the FI leadership. The reporter essentially accepted an amendment to the text indicating that the disparate views were far from resolved and that the debate would continue at future FI meetings.
A significant number of World Congress participants were enthusiastic, serious, and well-informed youth, an indication that FI sections have been able to assemble a layer of young fighters to replace the older cadre in the years ahead.
The World Congress took place at a difficult time for revolutionaries throughout the world—a time when the attacks on the world’s working classes have taken a great toll while resistance has been generally limited. These defeats undoubtedly weighed heavily on the Congress deliberations, leading some to look for shortcut solutions that ignore the rich lessons of the past.
It became increasingly evident during the World Congress that the critical need to build the Fourth International, based on the construction of revolutionary socialist parties of the Leninist type, will remain central to the FI’s future discussions and debates.
Markin comment:
I will be commenting more on the various stands of the Fourth International movement, the now very broken, organizationally broken although not progammatically broken (think the Transitional Program), movement founded by Leon Trotsky and his co-thinkers in 1938 in the future.
**************
Fourth International Debates Party-Building Strategy
by Jeff Mackler / July 2010
More than 200 delegates, observers, and invited guests from some 45 countries attended the 16th World Congress of the Fourth International (FI), Feb. 23-28 in Belgium. The FI is the world socialist organization founded in 1938 by Leon Trotsky with the help of cothinkers worldwide, including James P. Cannon, the pioneer of American Trotskyism.
The draft reports prepared by the FI leadership to initiate the pre-World Congress on-line discussion appear in the International Viewpoint website under “Documents of the FI.” A critical assessment of these texts, entitled, “Socialist Action USA: A contribution to the pre-World Congress discussion,” appears in the same place.
Three main resolutions were presented for discussion and debate. The first two, on “The World Political Situation” and on “Capitalist Climate Change and Our Tasks” were accepted with little dissent and accompanied by a generally rich and productive discussion.
But there were sharp disagreements with regard to the third report on “The Role and Tasks of the FI.” Socialist Action cast its fraternal vote in favor of the first two resolutions and against the “Role and Tasks” text. Reactionary U.S. legislation bars Socialist Action’s formal membership in the FI. Its delegates therefore participate in a fraternal capacity only.
“The World Political Report” contained a description of the terrible effects on the world’s working classes due to the international capitalist economic crisis, a crisis that was properly judged as flowing from fundamental structural flaws in the capitalist system itself.
The second resolution and reports on the world climate crisis represented an important theoretical advance, as well as an important contribution to the world workers’ movement more generally. The text on climate change combined a thoroughgoing Marxist analysis with the science of ecology, a wealth of factual material, a rejection of a “productivist” (capitalist or Stalinist) way out, a series of transitional and immediate demands, proposals for united mass actions, and a broad appreciation of the magnitude and importance of the climate crisis issue.
The resolution began with a clear and unequivocal statement of the magnitude and importance of the issue: “The climate change that is underway is not the product of human activity in general but of the productivist paradigm developed by capitalism and imitated by other systems that claim to be alternatives to the former. Faced with the danger of a social and ecological catastrophe which is without precedent and is irreversible on a human timescale, the system, incapable of calling into question its fundamental logic of accumulation, is engaged in a dangerous technological forward flight from which there is no way out.”
Debate on “Tasks” resolution
The third resolution debated at the World Congress, “The Role and Tasks of the Fourth International,” drew serious criticism from a number of delegates. The text expressed the view that the priority of the FI today must be the construction of “broad anti-capitalist parties” everywhere—as well as a “new international based on such parties.”
The FI’s primary objective since its founding has been to build mass revolutionary Leninist parties worldwide aimed at the organization of the working class and its allies among the oppressed to take political power and construct socialist societies. Unclear in the resolution was whether its call for “broad anti-capitalist parties” was meant to supplant the FI’s historic party-building strategy.
The debate also concerned the role of FI parties that would participate in these “broad anti-capitalist parties.” Were they to organize as a tendency, caucus, or some such formation designed to win new FI members to a clear revolutionary program and party—or were they to become absorbed into such parties without a clear revolutionary program and Trotskyist identity?
This issue was particularly relevant in light of last year’s dissolution of the French section of the Fourth International, the Revolutionary Communist League, into the New Anti-Capitalist Party, and the absence of any organized FI current within the organization. Was the NPA to be the new model for revolutionaries as opposed to building a Leninist party?
The text had been prepared by the FI’s International Committee after deliberations over the course of more than a year. Some 72 comrades took the floor to express a wide range of views on the resolution.
As the discussion proceeded, it became obvious that there was little agreement among the delegates as to the meaning and purpose of “broad anti-capitalist parties.” Neither the ambiguous language of the text nor the reporter explained whether these parties were envisioned as an alternative to building revolutionary parties based on the historic program of the FI or even whether these parties were to be socialist at all.
In Socialist Action’s view, a tactical decision as to what kind of formations revolutionary socialists participate in must be subordinate to our strategic objective—the construction of revolutionary parties aimed at the organization of the working class and its allies in the struggle for socialism. Of course, party-building can take many forms, from participation in reformist or social-democratic parties, to principled fusions, or unifications with currents with whom we find major programmatic agreement and with whom we find ourselves working together toward the same goals in the mass movement.
Indeed, the struggle to unify the working class in united-front mass actions that challenge specific polices of the capitalist class (such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or attacks on immigrant rights) is a central tool of revolutionaries throughout the world to advance our common cause and simultaneously win the best fighters to socialist politics.
Build the Fourth International!
While the “Role and Tasks” text was approved by the great majority of the delegates, the vote was not without major reservations and also reflected a view that the discussion would be continued.
It was clear from the concluding remarks of the reporter for “The Role and Tasks of the FI” text that the sharp World Congress debates had an important impact on the FI leadership. The reporter essentially accepted an amendment to the text indicating that the disparate views were far from resolved and that the debate would continue at future FI meetings.
A significant number of World Congress participants were enthusiastic, serious, and well-informed youth, an indication that FI sections have been able to assemble a layer of young fighters to replace the older cadre in the years ahead.
The World Congress took place at a difficult time for revolutionaries throughout the world—a time when the attacks on the world’s working classes have taken a great toll while resistance has been generally limited. These defeats undoubtedly weighed heavily on the Congress deliberations, leading some to look for shortcut solutions that ignore the rich lessons of the past.
It became increasingly evident during the World Congress that the critical need to build the Fourth International, based on the construction of revolutionary socialist parties of the Leninist type, will remain central to the FI’s future discussions and debates.
Friday, July 23, 2010
*From The Pages Of "Workers Hammer"-On The British Labour Party, Circa 2010- A Guest Commentary
*Click onthe headline to link to a Workers Hammer article from Spring 2010 on the British Labour Party and the then upcoming elections.
*From The "Spartacist" Journal Archives-"British Communism Aborted:The Far left: 1900-1920"- A Guest Book Review/Commentary
Markin comment:
The following is an article from an archival issue of the Spartacist journal, Winter 1985-86, 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 and political questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of Spartacist periodically throughout the year.
*******************
"British Communism Aborted:The Far left: 1900-1920"- A Guest Book Review/Commentary
A REVIEW
The Origins of British Bolshevism
by Raymond Challinor Croom, Helm Ltd., London, 1977
If knowledge is not always power, ignorance is always weakness. With the deteriorating American school system calculated to produce ignorant youth in a period of reaction and Cold War, education of Marxist cadre is a crucial task for a Leninist organization. In this spirit, the Spartacist League/U.S. has instituted a nationally centralized program of internal education in Marxism and general knowledge.
As an aspect of this educational program, a significant part of the Central Committee plenum of the S L/ U.S., held last August, was devoted to a consideration of Raymond Challinor's The Origins of British Bolshevism. This is a study of the British Socialist Labour Party (SLP) from its origin around 1900 to its rapid disintegration in the early 1920s, following the organization's refusal to participate in the formation of the British section of the Communist International. Also as part of the education program Ed Clarkson of the SL Central Committee gave an educational presentation on Lenin's "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder to a National Committee plenum of the Spartacus Youth League, the SL's youth section (reprinted as "Leninist Tactics and the Road to Workers Power" in Young Spartacus Nos. 130 and I3l, October and November 1985). We print below an edited version of a presentation to the plenum by comrade George Foster of the Sparta cist League Central Committee on Challinor's book.
This study of the British SLP illuminates in one important, concrete case the historic problem of forging Communist parties in the West out of the subjectively revolutionary elements in the pre-1917 socialist and anarcho-syndicalist movements. It also adds appreciably to our understanding of why the Communist Party in Britain was stillborn. The sterility of the CPGB and absence of a real Leninist tradition in Britain have been key negative conditions for the complete hegemony of Laborite reformism over the workers movement right down to the present.
The Third International
Much of the discussion focused on Challinor's parochial and nationally limited conception of revolutionary organization. The very title conveys a false understanding, as if a genuine counterpart of Russian Bolshevism was spontaneously generated on British (or Scottish) soil. Unlike the British SLP, the Russian Bolshevik Party was forged as an instrument to struggle for power amid the universal revolutionary ferment of the last years of the tsarist empire. It was this which set the Bolsheviks apart from even the best pre-World War I socialist parties in the West. In the discussion one conference participant pointed out:
"...[T]he Communist International does not fall from the skies, it comes from the experience of the Russian workers movement and the Russian Revolution— [T]he combination of a great empire; a central ethnicity that was not to be threatened, but massive national oppression; the growth of a great, raw, militant proletariat; pressures given the autocracy such that every member of the intelligentsia went through a selection process—all this churned up through wars, agrarian issues—[thus it was] that of all the parties of the Second International the Russian Social Democrats had the vanguard of experience."
The Bolsheviks' revolutionary experience was generalized and codified in the famous 21 Conditions for membership in the Communist International.
The British SLP was an example of a small Marxist propaganda group, originating and developing under relatively stable conditions of bourgeois democracy, which was then confronted with convulsive events, namely, the first imperialist world war and the Russian Revolution. The SLP had become so habituated to its prewar situation that it failed to make the turn toward the tasks of a new, far stormier period of social struggle.
Presentation
Comrades all have the study guide, the questions that were prepared to be thought about in conjunction with reading the book of Challinor.
For some of these questions the answers are quite clear; others are complex and require a lot of evaluation, thought and weighing; and at least one of them ought to frighten you a bit—which is, how does a party prepare for unanticipated and perhaps unprecedented events in a situation where the tasks posed by those events may for a period be far beyond your capacity? And the simple answer that comes to mind is: go through the experiences of the Bolshevik Party. Which may seem like a tautology, but isn't. And that's the point of this talk—that comrades Lenin and Trotsky and the first four congresses of the Communist International provide us with at least the political method and structure whereby we can forge a party which has both the program and possibly the capacity to make the rapid changes and adjustments necessary to lead to the revolutionary victory of the workers over the bourgeoisie.
I'd like to begin discussing the book by reading a quote from James Cannon, pioneer American Communist and Trotskyist, which 1 think sets this book in its context. And the quote is from Cannon's review of The Roots of American Communism by Theodore Draper. You'll find it in the book The First Ten Years of American Communism. Cannon says:
"The traditional sectarianism of the Americans was expressed most glaringly in their attempt to construct revolutionary unions outside the existing labor movement; their refusal to fight for’ immediate demands' in the course of the class struggle for the socialist goal; and their strongly entrenched anti-parliamentarism, which was only slightly modified in the first program of the Communist Party. All that hodgepodge of ultra-radicalism was practically wiped out of the American movement in 1920-21 by Lenin. He did it, not by an administrative order backed up by police powers, but by the simple device of publishing a pamphlet called "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder. (This famous pamphlet was directed in part against the Dutch theoreticians who had exerted such a strong influence on the Americans and a section of the Germans.)"
Cannon goes on:
"The 'Theses and Resolutions' of the Second Congress of the Comintern in 1920 also cleared up the thinking of the American communists over a wide range of theoretical and political problems, and virtually eliminated the previously dominating influence exerted by the sectarian conceptions of De Leon and the Dutch leaders."
That is to say, whatever the particularities of the fate of the British Socialist Labour Party (SLP) and the impact of that on the viability of the Communist Party of Britain as it was constituted, its importance is far less of a factor than Lenin's "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder. Lenin's work is literally a handbook of communist tactics which solved many of the problems of the American movement—the question of "boring from within," the question of the connection between parliamentarism and industrial action, the question of industrial unions, the question of conservative-dominated craft unions, the question of dual unionism. Unfortunately for most militants of the British SLP, afflicted with many of the very same political diseases, the lessons of Bolshevism were not assimilated. This was not, as Challinor maintains, a consequence of a misinformed Lenin's attempt to arrange a shotgun wedding of unsuitable partners to found the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), but rather a consequence of the SLP's parochial failure to grasp the world-historic significance of the 1917 October Revolution.
Roots of SLP: Britain and America
Now, the British SLP, as comrades read, arose out of a split with the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) (later to become the British Socialist Party). And the split was a good split. It entailed the question of Millerandism, of Ireland, and of the SDF's very opportunistic courting of the Independent Labour Party (ILP). In the first section of his book Challinor lays out the political issues very clearly. The SDF was a rotten creation of a man named H.M. Hyndman who was not one of Marx's favorite people. Comrades, if they've read the book by Pelling on the origins of the British Labour Party [Henry Pelling, The Origins of the Labour Party}, know that Hyndman started out as a Tory radical. He was a fervid supporter of British imperialism, the monarchy and parliamentarism. He was also an anti-Semite and a dedicated opponent of militant class struggle, especially strikes. Himself a wealthy businessman, he and his cronies owned the SDF's newspaper, Justice. It was not until April 1916, under the bloody impact of the imperialist war, that the BSP— the product of a 1912 fusion of the SDF with the small left rump of the Independent Labour Party—got rid of Hyndman. Hyndman and his cohorts then formed a group called the National Socialist Party! A man before his time!
The U.S. SLP played a very big role, of course, in the formation of the British SLP. The American SLP was founded by immigrants of German and Jewish origin. Following Daniel De Leon's rise to leadership the party grew rapidly—controlling over 70 trade unions in the New York Central Labor Federation. The SLP wielded sufficient influence to secure (in 1893) adoption by the American Federation of Labor (AFL) of an eleven-point socialist program. By 1894 it had ousted Samuel Gompers from the presidency of the AFL. Gompers was not pleased. Within a year he was back in office and the SLP was out.
Which caused De Leon to renounce the tactic of "boring from within." As he put it, "the hole you're likely to bore from within is the one you're going to exit through." [Laughter.] And from these experiences came his hostility both to craft unionism and his very strong adherence to industrial unionism. The SLP attempted to set up their own industrial union federation which was called the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance, which had 13,000 members. This formation rapidly disintegrated.
De Leon later refined his conceptions of industrial unionism and actually foreshadowed, in aspects at least, the idea of soviet rule of society—rule based on industrial workers organized in industrial enterprises, i.e., Soviets. And as comrades know, De Leon played an important role, along with Debs, in forging the Industrial Workers of the World, the IWW.
The British SLP when it arose was concentrated overwhelmingly in Scotland and comrades may wonder why that was the case. Why was it that Glasgow, and in particular the Clydeside industrial belt, was the scene of the SLP's greatest strength and most influence in the proletariat? In his very detailed and interesting book called The Revolutionary Movement in Britain 1900-21, Walter Kendall aptly observes:
"Scottish radicalism also had its roots deep in a separate native cultural tradition. At the time of Charles I Scottish nobles and Calvinist clergy had combined to prevent the re-imposition of episcopacy in Scotland. In ensuing centuries the Church of Scotland retained a narrow, rigid theology, continually in conflict with English orthodoxy, a factor which gave a specifically different outlook and flavour to Scottish intellectual life. The Scottish educational system, given an initial impetus by the teachings of John Knox. remained in advance of the English until well into the twentieth century. Religion, the ideology of the establishment in Britain, had in Scotland a more striking record of national struggle. Penetrating deeper into the culture of the people, it gave them a penchant for the cut and thrust of logical argument, an appreciation and enthusiasm for dialectics not to be found in England. As John Knox was acolyte to Calvin, as John Carstairs Matheson to de Leon. So, in later years, Campbell and Gallacher were first to Lenin and then to his successor Stalin."
This is a polite way of presenting the Scottish psyche. [Laughter.]
There were other factors also ably cited by Kendall. There were a very large number of Irish immigrants in the Clydeside area, many of whom were active supporters of Sinn Fein. And as comrades know, the great Irish revolutionary James Connolly was indeed one of the founders of the SLP. Large-scale capitalism came late to Scotland and a large proportion of the proletariat of Glasgow had been uprooted from the countryside and pushed into the city, which like Petrograd had enormous engineering plants. So for a number of reasons the SLP sank its roots very deeply into Scotland and had very close links with the Irish struggle, and also, because of the large Scottish and Irish emigrations to North America, with the class struggle in the United States.
Impact of 1905 Russian Revolution
One of the enormous international impacts of the 1905 Russian Revolution was to turn the attention of socialists to the power of mass political strikes. In Germany Rosa Luxemburg and her followers seized upon the weapon of the mass strike as an answer to the social-reformist passivity of SPD [Social Democratic Party] tops, while failing to grasp the critical differences between the activities of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in the 1905 upheavals in Russia [see "The Russian Revolution of 1905," Workers Vanguard Nos. 288 and 289, 11 and 25 September 1981]. The experience of 1905 was very directly connected with the founding of the IWW in the United States in that same year. This inspired subsequently similar efforts on the part of the British SLP.
However, the British SLP's Advocates of Industrial Unionism (AIU) never managed to rise to the level of the IWW despite a very strong swing toward syndicalism on the part of the British proletariat in the period from 1905 through 1913. In those years of stormy class conflict, a response to a massive rationalization and further concentration of British capital at the expense of the workers, trade unions in Britain grew enormously. This upsurge hit its high point in 1912 with the great miners strike.
During this period the AIU managed to only hitch a ride on this elemental wave of class struggle. But this was sufficient to blood its militants in the class struggle, and root them deeply in the militant proletariat in the sprawling Clyde engineering plants. This was to place them in a strategic position during the tumultuous strikes that ripped the region both in 1915-16 and early 1919.
In comparison with its British competitors, e.g., Hyndman's BSP and the ILP, the British SLP was impressive. Indeed it compares favorably to the American SLP of De Leon. The British SLP rejected De Leon's sectarian disavowal of "immediate demands," and played an important role in the class struggle. De Leon found himself isolated from the labor movement with his split with the IWW in 1908. Already in 1900 Hillquit, Berger and Debs had led a split out of the SLP to found the Socialist Party (SP). Cannon asserts in The First Ten Years that the SLP even before 1905 was well on its way to becoming a sect, noting the SP not only pulled in all the reformists, but also most of the left, vital revolutionary elements of the American proletariat.
Forging a Bolshevik Party
Challinor definitely misleads his readers by implying that the De Leonist SLP was two-thirds or three-quarters of the way to being a Bolshevik-type party. He says, "Clearly, the SLP was among the first to see the need for an organisational and ideological split from social democracy." In discussing this matter it's particularly useful to look at the SLP through the lens of Lenin's What Is To Be Done? About a year before the SLP was born,
Lenin wrote his work. If "Left- Wing" Communism constitutes a handbook on communist tactics, What Is To Be Done? contains the blueprints for the construction of a party and a cadre. So that the whole struggle against economism, the struggle for a party of professional revolutionaries, the struggle which Lenin talks about at great length in "Left-Wing" Communism—for a political party to be a tribune of the people, to master politics in many arenas—all this is laid out of course in What Is To Be Done? You don't see anything at all like this in the SLP.
On everything from press questions to forms of organization the differences are clear. In particular they are clear on the necessity of constructing a cadre of full-time professional revolutionaries. The British SLP had difficulty keeping a full-timer and a lot of the time didn't have one. I found it a source of great irritation that Challinor holds this up as a virtue. Referring to the valiant work of SLP leader MacManus during the war, he says:
"It is hard to imagine how great the strain upon certain individuals must have been. For example. Arthur MacManus was editor of The Socialist, and in I9l5,when the Clyde Workers' Committee was formed, he became its chairman. As spokesman for this rank-and-file organization, the most powerful of its kind in the country, he played a leading role in the creation of a National Workers' & Shop Stewards' Movement. All this was done in his spare time: he also had a full-time job as an engineer at G. & J. Weir's Cathcart works, where he was the most well-known militant. Besides these commitments, which would have been more than enough for half a do/en men with only a normal amount of energy. MacManus found time to help in the struggle in Ireland. In 1915, James Connolly visited Glasgow and told his old SLP comrades that the authorities had suppressed their journal, the Irish Worker. So the SLP undertook to print it clandestinely on the Party's press at Renfrew Street. In his autobiography Tom Bell stated, 'Comrade Arthur MacManus was especially keen on doing this; working night and day to get it out, and arranged for the shipment of the paper, which he took over personally to Dublin'."
Heroic MacManus indeed was. But the inability of the SLP to provide for full-time party workers was a source of abiding weakness. It prevented the cohering of a cadre around a program, and prevented that leadership from jelling. One gets the impression of a lot of very talented, capable, tough-minded, experienced propagandists and trade-union agitators who tended to be more an association than a party. I think this explains one of the big questions that this book raises. Why was it that those elements of the SLP who were for a fusion with the Third International, who wanted to bring the SLP in as part of the Communist Party of Britain and who themselves were among the most pre-eminent of the SLP leaders, actually had the organization taken away from them and were incapable of effecting any significant split for Leninism? The answer is to be found in their inability to construct a party with the resources, but above all the perspective, of maintaining a cadre of professional revolutionists.
If the SLP started out as a good split from the SDF, on the eve of World War 1 it had a very murky split, reflecting above all the political incapacity of De Leonism to serve as a guide for revolutionary action. In 1912 the SLP lost over half its members in a dispute over whether or not it was permissible for the party to support reforms—e.g., should an SLP councillor in Glasgow cast a vote for more money to the unemployed. Defeated at the Manchester conference, the anti-reform "impossibilists" walked out of the party, taking a majority of the membership with them.
The SLP had a good line on the first imperialist war, but its activities in the unions during the war revealed weakness in the party. In short the SLP did not carry its line against the war in a way that counted into the massive Clyde strikes of 1915-1916—strikes in which the SLP played a leading role. Challinor excuses this on the grounds that for the SLP to insist that the Clyde Workers' Committee—which was running this massive strike against the Munitions Act— adopt the SLP's line on the war would have split the Workers' Committee. Again you see here a failure to grasp what Lenin later was to try to teach the British workers movement—which was that they were obligated to have their people who were working in that arena attempt to transform this strike, to agitate to infuse the strike with a political content aimed against the imperialist war and the British government. The strike was a strike against key munitions industries in wartime, and against the M munitions Act. Objectively it was a political strike against war par excellence.
Instead the behavior of SLP strike leader John Muir dragged the SLP's antiwar banner in the mud. Dragged before the bosses' court for his role in the strike, Muir cravenly swore that the strike was a purely economic struggle over shop issues and that he was for the war and war production! And the SLP tolerated this renegade remaining in its ranks! The honor of the Clyde Workers' Committee was upheld by John Maclean, the representative of the left internationalist wing of the BSP, who turned his trial into a political indictment of the bourgeoisie and its imperialist war.
British capitalism emerged from World War I profoundly shaken. Under the impact of the October Revolution the class antagonisms generated by war exploded in a massive postwar strike wave accompanied by episodic strikes and mutinies in the armband navy. In January 1919 the Clyde workers went out in a massive general strike for a 40-hour week. The government responded with armed troops. Unfortunately the strike did not spread and the strikers did not test the troops. At the time the government had only two battalions of reserves.
Challinor quotes from Aneurin Sevan's In Place of Fear, which described the famous 1919 meeting between the prime minister, Lloyd George, and the leaders of the Triple
Alliance. All I can say is, Lloyd George knew his Labour leaders [laughter]—which he ought to, since the Liberal Party and the ILP and the trade unions were very closely
linked. It reminds me of the German events of the autumn of 1918, when the troops were mutinying and forming Soviets. The German general staff pulled the same act on
the German soldiers' Soviets on the Western Front, saying, "Well, fine. You soldiers' Soviets have to withdraw two million people from France and Belgium. Here, you do it.
Are you ready?" Nope, they weren't. But that was a gamble[laughs]. In Britain a couple of the right guys in there and one might have had something approaching a 1905
situation, or at least a very big, much more massive wave ofpolitical strikes—which would have put the British workers in a lot better position both objectively and from a
standpoint of cohering a communist party. The whole incident both highlights the counterrevolutionary role of the trade-union tops, and exposes the political incapacity
of the SLP which had no idea how to overcome these roadblocks to revolution. ,
Challinor plays up the very real strengths of the SLP, while downplaying its De Leonist weaknesses—indeed, treating them as virtues. Meanwhile he presents such a compelling picture of the wretchedness of the BSP that one wonders how any chunk of this party made it into the Comintern. In fact the BSP was a heterogeneous organization that underwent a series of left-right polarizations under the impact of the war and the Russian Revolutions of 1917.
Affiliation to the Communist International
Following the 1916 split between Hyndman and E.G. Fairchild, who had a Kautskyite position on the war, the BSP moved leftward. At its April 1919 Conference the BSP declared itself for soviet rule and polled its branches on affiliation to the Communist International (Cl). Fairchild supported the Russian Revolution, but didn't consider a soviet-type revolution in Britain a serious possibility. The left majority, including John Maclean who maintained a consistent internationalist position as a BSPer throughout the war, believed the British revolution was on the order of the day and that they should link up with the Third International. The result of the ballot on affiliation to the Communist International, announced in October, was 98 to 4 in favor of affiliation.
Undoubtedly among those for the CI were a goodly number of "November Bolsheviks." Theodore Rothstein, a rotten apple, was perhaps the leading example of this layer. His trajectory was parallel to that of many left social-democratic sharpies in Europe, who thought that the Third International was the wave of the future. You had the Frossards and Cachins and scads of social democrats in the French party who went over to the Third International but didn't belong there. The main aim of the 21 Conditions was to filter such people out, and also to filter out the practices they brought with them.
The Russians were, I think, much more familiar with the BSP than SLP. All of the Bolshevik congresses except the one held in Stockholm—from 1903 to the Revolution— were held in London. Lenin himself lived for a time in London, as did some 30,000 other Russian emigres. And of those that were leftists—adherents to socialism—many belonged to the BSP. They constituted a large portion of the left wing of that organization. During the war a very large number of them were supporters of Trotsky's Nashe Slovo which was printed in Paris. Challinor makes the point that half of the circulation of that journal took place in Britain, .and the overwhelming proportion of that in London. There was also a colony of Russian exiles—and that too swelled enormously after the 1905Revolution—in Scotland, again associated with the SDF/BSP.
Litvinov and Chicherin and a number of others were associated with and had links with the BSP in London. Further, SDF members both in England and Scotland ran guns to the Russian revolutionaries from 1905 through 1907—quite a lot of them, hundreds of Brownings, millions of rounds of ammo. They would buy them in Europe, smuggle them to Newcastle, get them to Scotland, and then on to tsarist ships to smuggle them into Russia.
So not all BSPers were clones of the top-hatted and corpulent H.M. Hyndman! As with the SLP, a significant part of the BSP far left was located in Scotland. Most noteworthy was John Maclean, who as earlier indicated maintained a consistent internationalist position on the war, and played an important role in the Clyde strikes. The formidable Maclean was arguably the most capable proletarian revolutionist in Britain and a close associate of BSPer Peter Petroff, a hero of the 1905 Russian Revolution.
The Communist unity negotiations in Britain are very confusing, above all a reflection of the political confusion of the participants in the negotiations. There were three main groups and a couple of subsidiary ones. You had the SLP, Sylvia Pankhurst's Workers' Socialist Federation, the South Wales Socialist Society and the ILP left, and they all hailed the Russian Revolution—both revolutions. And some of them genuinely hailed the second one too. [Laughter.] It does strike you in reading the SLP's writings on the Russian Revolution that on the one hand, yes, they're happy it happened and... its real, main and key significance was it vindicates the SLP and its line in Britain! [Laughs.] In short, to repeat, the SLP failed to appreciate the world-historic significance of the October Revolution both in the broad sense and also in the particular communist sense that Lenin outlined in "Left- Wing" Communism.
I think Challinor makes a very good case that Lenin did not have clear ideas on everything that was going on in Britain. How could he? He was at some distance from the events, and certainly had other things occupying his mind in the immediate period after the October Revolution. Further, revolutionary Russia was blockaded by the imperialists. His information was partial.
However, Lenin did recognize something very important: that there needed to be a unified Communist party in Britain. You had all these groups claiming adherence to the October Revolution, to soviet government and for the Third International. There was an objective requirement for a Bolshevik-type party in Britain. But if there was to be such a party it had to have a policy toward the Labour Party. What gets omitted in Challinor is any policy toward the Labour Party except throwing rocks at it.
Was Britain going through a revolutionary period in 1918-1920? No. But if the Triple Alliance had decided to tell Lloyd George to shove it, we might have had something
break. But that didn't happen, and a lot of people voted Labour. There were 4 million workers affiliated to the Labour Party. The Labour Party in 1918 became socialist. You better believe that had something to do with the October Revolution and the Labour Party covering its ass. For communists the question was how to deal with this obstacle.
The most striking failure was, as I mentioned earlier, the failure of the pro-fusion wing of the SLP, the Communist Unity Group of MacManus and Bell, to carry the majority of the SLP into the CPGB. They had no conception of factional struggle for their particular position. Thus the best of the SLP, who could not understand how to conduct a faction fight in their own party, certainly could not understand what Lenin was talking about at all regarding the Labour Party. Challinor drags out J.T. Murphy's "cogent arguments" against Labour Party affiliation. These are not very cogent at all and have been answered dozens of times. Reading Murphy what comes through is: we'll either be swamped in the Labour Party or we have to destroy it. There's no conception of using class-struggle means to polarize and gut it—i.e., no conception therefore of political struggle for a political line and program. Behind that is the conception of the party as the worst sort of a passive propaganda society.
This was a fatal flaw of De Leonism, its social-democratic underbelly. The party through patient propaganda and education was to win the proletariat to its side. In the U.S. De Leon projected the SLP would eventually win at the polls and dissolve the capitalist government. Should the bourgeoisie resist, they would be "locked out" by the socialist industrial unions, which would then proceed to administer socialism. The concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, of a transition period and of the role of the party in that transition are absent.
So the SLP had a pretty good party in terms of—not the party that made the October Revolution—but of what was floating around in England or even the U.S. in that period. They didn't make it. What stands out is their parochialism. In the U.S. out of the left wing of the SP came the Haywood wing of the IWW, Cannon. Swabeck, John Reed, the foreign-language federations and a few of the native American workers. And out of that was forged a viable Communist Party—a little too viable in its early period. Like Cannon said, they fought like hell all the time. It was the Comintern that came in and provided the lessons and the correctives to teach the young American CP how to become a Leninist party—how to solve a lot of the problems that had tied up the American party and British and German and pre-war social democracy.
The party issuing out of the 1920 Communist Unity Convention was stillborn. And the indication of that was— no fights. The recent Euro/tankie fight is the CPGB's first serious faction fight. Very early on the British party acquired a set of leaders who seemed to live forever [laughs] and didn't get any better. The congenital incapacity of the CPGB was evident during the 1926 General Strike and since, and has also had negative impact on Trotskyism in Britain. Cannon and a section of the American CP were forged into genuine Leninists who, when the degeneration of the Comintern came, were able to pick up the banner. This was not the case in Britain. Gerry Healy tries to suck glorious origins of British Trotskyism out of his thumb, but it's a fact that Trotskyism had to be imported.
The SLP in Britain disappeared very quickly after it stood aside from the Third International, in many ways like the syndicalist wing of the IWW did in the U.S. Cannon made the point that one would have thought, on the face of it, given the history of the IWW during the war which was as a semi-party, certainly revolutionary-minded and with many experienced militants, that a large number of them would have made it to the Communist Party. But, as he put it, it was the foreigners, the callow youth, only some fragments of the IWW that actually came to be the core of the American Communist Party. They didn't have the experience of many of the IWW, but in the end program was decisive. But there at least you had a germ cell that was fertilized and grew. I think in Britain what you had was a miscarriage; Challinor might more aptly have titled his book "The Abortion of British Bolshevism."
For Challinor, himself a supporter of the anti-Soviet and social-democratic Socialist Workers Party (SWP) of Britain, the abortionists are Lenin and the Communist International. Clearly he feels that it was erroneous to insist that the new CPGB affiliate to the Labour Party, as this blocked the majority of the SLP, whom he wrongly considers the "native Bolsheviks," from entering that CP.
Challinor's position should be contrasted with that of Lenin at the Second Congress. Lenin insisted that the question of the Labour Party be debated before the International. He insisted that the new International not repeat the experience of the Second International and let the British comrades get into a room and decide the question among themselves. The Labour Party question was not simply a British question but an international problem. It was the obligation of the Cl to come up with a policy and pursue it. If this led to some splits, so be it, but it would be good experience for the British party to try to implement these tactics.
Challinor does not take up the real difficulty in implementing the CIs policy. To carry it off successfully you needed a hard, cohesive, ideologically tested formation. And that certainly was not what the British CP was. We have a contradiction. If the CPGB had successfully affiliated, they probably would very likely have capitulated in just the way many of the SLPers feared they would. [Interjection: Adopt a position in favor of entry, and don't enter!] Right, right! A zero approximation of a position of shallow entry! [Laughter.] What you needed were Comintern reps on the scene to take these various would-be Bolsheviks by the political scruff of the neck, to teach them and fight with them. Lenin was very aware that a policy of affiliation was no automatic recipe for success. He thought this would be a good school for the CPGB, a school of political struggle, leading very possibly to splits and a fusion on a higher order.
Challinor, like all anti-Leninist centrists, invokes Lenin against Lenin. He quotes Lenin's criticism of the Third Congress Org Resolution that it was "too Russian." We've made the point numerous times but it bears repeating. Lenin thought that resolution was "too Russian" in the sense that it was too long and no one would read or understand it. But if you read on, he remarks (and this was his last speech to the Communist International):
"We Russians must also find ways and means to explaining the principles of this resolution to the foreigners. Unless we do that, it will be absolutely impossible for them to carry it out. I am sure that in this connection we must tell not only the Russians, but the foreign comrades as well, that the most important thing in the period we are now entering is to study. We are studying in the general sense. They, however, must study in the special sense, in order that they may really understand the organisation, structure, method and content of revolutionary work. If they do that, I am sure the prospects of the world revolution will be not only good, but excellent." —Collected Works Vol. 33
Better the road of Lenin than that of Challinor!
Summary
A question was raised about the attitude of the SLP to the colonial question, and in particular to the Amritsar massacre. Regarding this a British comrade has handed me a note stating that a reading of The Socialist, the SLP's newspaper, and also The Call, which was the BSP's, indicates that in fact they did take it up. He observes: "If it's possible to differentiate active internationalism in the building of the party from the tribune of the people, I think they were pretty good on the latter." In that sense I think they would therefore be with the best of the Second International. Comrades recall that last year we printed the following quote from Trotsky on this question from his 1932 essay "What Next?" He was referring to the German centrists, and Ledebour in particular:
"Ledebour demands that a battle be waged against colonial oppression: he is ready to vote in parliament against colonial credits: he is ready to take upon himself fearless defense of the victims of a crushed colonial insurrection. But Ledebour will not participate in preparing a colonial insurrection. Such work he considers putschism. adventurism. Bolshevism. And therein is the whole gist of the matter."
The American SLP hung on for years, and it's a question as to how this happened. It's not the same people who founded the party in the 1860s or the 1870s although, to look at them, sometimes you think so. [Laughter.] They became a sect, but some sects don't make it. The American SLP made it because they did have a base among some of the foreign-language groups. They stopped publication of their Bulgarian-language paper only a short while ago. It's been pointed out that the SLP probably got the Bulgarians in the U.S. because they were the closest thing to the Narrows [Bulgarian Narrow Socialist Party]. [Laughter.] Shachtman in '46 decided the Workers Party would become a small mass party in a very big country. The Bulgarians tried to be a small party in a small country and wound up a mass party.
As I said, John Maclean was probably the best of the BSP. Indeed Lenin singled him out as representing the best far-left, internationalist wing of British socialism. And he also didn't make it. He spiraled into creating a nationalist party, i.e., the Scottish Communist Party. He thought that the axis of a workers revolution in Britain would be an Irish/Scottish revolution. And London would follow—which is just plain wrong. You have to get the capital. In other times, from a very different class standpoint, this strategy was tried and didn't succeed. [Laughter.]
When the Independent Labour Party and the Labour Representation Committee were being formed it was not at all clear that they would forge a labor party which would capture the allegiance of the British proletariat. But indeed it did succeed, and by 1918 had become a formidable obstacle to proletarian revolution. Remember the Leeds Conference, where you had people like Snowden and Henderson coming out for "soviets" in Britain... adopting the protective coloration of pink.
In closing, to reiterate Cannon's point: the October Revolution marked a watershed not only in the broad international sense but also in the specific, communist sense. It was the Bolsheviks who taught us how to forge parties of a new type—vanguard parties, Leninist parties, combat parties. The experience of Bolshevism solved all the dilemmas that had arisen in the preceding period: the questions of "boring from within," parliamentary action, industrial action, etc. So that we stand far higher than the SLP did, but on the shoulders of the Russian Revolution. If we can see these things it's because we're the continuators. As Cannon said, "We are the party of the Russian Revolution"—our teachers.
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Are You Ready to Take the Power?
We reprint below an excerpt from In Place of Fear, the autobiography of the late Aneurin Bevan.
I remember vividly Robert Smillie describing to me an interview the leaders of the Triple Alliance had with David Lloyd George in 1919. The strategy of the leaders was clear. The miners under Robert Smillie, the transport workers under Robert Williams, and the National Union of Railwaymen under James Henry Thomas, formed the most formidable combination of industrial workers-in the history of Great Britain. They had agreed on the demands that were to be made on the employers, knowing well that the government would be bound to be involved at an early stage. And so it happened. A great deal of industry was still under government wartime control and so the state power was immediately implicated.
Lloyd George sent for the Labour leaders, and they went, so Robert told me, "truculently determined they would not be talked over by the seductive and eloquent Welshman." At this Bob's eyes twinkled in his grave, strong face. "He was quite frank with us from the outset," Bob went on. "He said to us: 'Gentlemen, you have fashioned, in the Triple Alliance of the unions represented by you, a most powerful instrument. I feel bound to tell you that in our opinion we are at your mercy. The Army is disaffected and cannot be relied upon. Trouble has occurred already in a number of camps. We have just emerged from a great war and the people are eager for the reward of their sacrifices, and we are in no position to satisfy them. In these circumstances, if you carry out your threat and strike, then you will defeat us.
"'But if you do so,' went on Mr. Lloyd George, 'have you weighed the consequences? The strike will be in defiance of the Government of the country and by its very success will precipitate a constitutional crisis of the first importance. For, if a force arises in the State which is stronger than the State itself, then it must be ready to take on the functions of the State, or withdraw and accept the authority of the State. Gentlemen,' asked the Prime Minister quietly, 'have you considered, and if you have, are you ready?' From that moment on," said Robert Smillie, "we were beaten and we knew we were."
The following is an article from an archival issue of the Spartacist journal, Winter 1985-86, 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 and political questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of Spartacist periodically throughout the year.
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"British Communism Aborted:The Far left: 1900-1920"- A Guest Book Review/Commentary
A REVIEW
The Origins of British Bolshevism
by Raymond Challinor Croom, Helm Ltd., London, 1977
If knowledge is not always power, ignorance is always weakness. With the deteriorating American school system calculated to produce ignorant youth in a period of reaction and Cold War, education of Marxist cadre is a crucial task for a Leninist organization. In this spirit, the Spartacist League/U.S. has instituted a nationally centralized program of internal education in Marxism and general knowledge.
As an aspect of this educational program, a significant part of the Central Committee plenum of the S L/ U.S., held last August, was devoted to a consideration of Raymond Challinor's The Origins of British Bolshevism. This is a study of the British Socialist Labour Party (SLP) from its origin around 1900 to its rapid disintegration in the early 1920s, following the organization's refusal to participate in the formation of the British section of the Communist International. Also as part of the education program Ed Clarkson of the SL Central Committee gave an educational presentation on Lenin's "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder to a National Committee plenum of the Spartacus Youth League, the SL's youth section (reprinted as "Leninist Tactics and the Road to Workers Power" in Young Spartacus Nos. 130 and I3l, October and November 1985). We print below an edited version of a presentation to the plenum by comrade George Foster of the Sparta cist League Central Committee on Challinor's book.
This study of the British SLP illuminates in one important, concrete case the historic problem of forging Communist parties in the West out of the subjectively revolutionary elements in the pre-1917 socialist and anarcho-syndicalist movements. It also adds appreciably to our understanding of why the Communist Party in Britain was stillborn. The sterility of the CPGB and absence of a real Leninist tradition in Britain have been key negative conditions for the complete hegemony of Laborite reformism over the workers movement right down to the present.
The Third International
Much of the discussion focused on Challinor's parochial and nationally limited conception of revolutionary organization. The very title conveys a false understanding, as if a genuine counterpart of Russian Bolshevism was spontaneously generated on British (or Scottish) soil. Unlike the British SLP, the Russian Bolshevik Party was forged as an instrument to struggle for power amid the universal revolutionary ferment of the last years of the tsarist empire. It was this which set the Bolsheviks apart from even the best pre-World War I socialist parties in the West. In the discussion one conference participant pointed out:
"...[T]he Communist International does not fall from the skies, it comes from the experience of the Russian workers movement and the Russian Revolution— [T]he combination of a great empire; a central ethnicity that was not to be threatened, but massive national oppression; the growth of a great, raw, militant proletariat; pressures given the autocracy such that every member of the intelligentsia went through a selection process—all this churned up through wars, agrarian issues—[thus it was] that of all the parties of the Second International the Russian Social Democrats had the vanguard of experience."
The Bolsheviks' revolutionary experience was generalized and codified in the famous 21 Conditions for membership in the Communist International.
The British SLP was an example of a small Marxist propaganda group, originating and developing under relatively stable conditions of bourgeois democracy, which was then confronted with convulsive events, namely, the first imperialist world war and the Russian Revolution. The SLP had become so habituated to its prewar situation that it failed to make the turn toward the tasks of a new, far stormier period of social struggle.
Presentation
Comrades all have the study guide, the questions that were prepared to be thought about in conjunction with reading the book of Challinor.
For some of these questions the answers are quite clear; others are complex and require a lot of evaluation, thought and weighing; and at least one of them ought to frighten you a bit—which is, how does a party prepare for unanticipated and perhaps unprecedented events in a situation where the tasks posed by those events may for a period be far beyond your capacity? And the simple answer that comes to mind is: go through the experiences of the Bolshevik Party. Which may seem like a tautology, but isn't. And that's the point of this talk—that comrades Lenin and Trotsky and the first four congresses of the Communist International provide us with at least the political method and structure whereby we can forge a party which has both the program and possibly the capacity to make the rapid changes and adjustments necessary to lead to the revolutionary victory of the workers over the bourgeoisie.
I'd like to begin discussing the book by reading a quote from James Cannon, pioneer American Communist and Trotskyist, which 1 think sets this book in its context. And the quote is from Cannon's review of The Roots of American Communism by Theodore Draper. You'll find it in the book The First Ten Years of American Communism. Cannon says:
"The traditional sectarianism of the Americans was expressed most glaringly in their attempt to construct revolutionary unions outside the existing labor movement; their refusal to fight for’ immediate demands' in the course of the class struggle for the socialist goal; and their strongly entrenched anti-parliamentarism, which was only slightly modified in the first program of the Communist Party. All that hodgepodge of ultra-radicalism was practically wiped out of the American movement in 1920-21 by Lenin. He did it, not by an administrative order backed up by police powers, but by the simple device of publishing a pamphlet called "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder. (This famous pamphlet was directed in part against the Dutch theoreticians who had exerted such a strong influence on the Americans and a section of the Germans.)"
Cannon goes on:
"The 'Theses and Resolutions' of the Second Congress of the Comintern in 1920 also cleared up the thinking of the American communists over a wide range of theoretical and political problems, and virtually eliminated the previously dominating influence exerted by the sectarian conceptions of De Leon and the Dutch leaders."
That is to say, whatever the particularities of the fate of the British Socialist Labour Party (SLP) and the impact of that on the viability of the Communist Party of Britain as it was constituted, its importance is far less of a factor than Lenin's "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder. Lenin's work is literally a handbook of communist tactics which solved many of the problems of the American movement—the question of "boring from within," the question of the connection between parliamentarism and industrial action, the question of industrial unions, the question of conservative-dominated craft unions, the question of dual unionism. Unfortunately for most militants of the British SLP, afflicted with many of the very same political diseases, the lessons of Bolshevism were not assimilated. This was not, as Challinor maintains, a consequence of a misinformed Lenin's attempt to arrange a shotgun wedding of unsuitable partners to found the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), but rather a consequence of the SLP's parochial failure to grasp the world-historic significance of the 1917 October Revolution.
Roots of SLP: Britain and America
Now, the British SLP, as comrades read, arose out of a split with the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) (later to become the British Socialist Party). And the split was a good split. It entailed the question of Millerandism, of Ireland, and of the SDF's very opportunistic courting of the Independent Labour Party (ILP). In the first section of his book Challinor lays out the political issues very clearly. The SDF was a rotten creation of a man named H.M. Hyndman who was not one of Marx's favorite people. Comrades, if they've read the book by Pelling on the origins of the British Labour Party [Henry Pelling, The Origins of the Labour Party}, know that Hyndman started out as a Tory radical. He was a fervid supporter of British imperialism, the monarchy and parliamentarism. He was also an anti-Semite and a dedicated opponent of militant class struggle, especially strikes. Himself a wealthy businessman, he and his cronies owned the SDF's newspaper, Justice. It was not until April 1916, under the bloody impact of the imperialist war, that the BSP— the product of a 1912 fusion of the SDF with the small left rump of the Independent Labour Party—got rid of Hyndman. Hyndman and his cohorts then formed a group called the National Socialist Party! A man before his time!
The U.S. SLP played a very big role, of course, in the formation of the British SLP. The American SLP was founded by immigrants of German and Jewish origin. Following Daniel De Leon's rise to leadership the party grew rapidly—controlling over 70 trade unions in the New York Central Labor Federation. The SLP wielded sufficient influence to secure (in 1893) adoption by the American Federation of Labor (AFL) of an eleven-point socialist program. By 1894 it had ousted Samuel Gompers from the presidency of the AFL. Gompers was not pleased. Within a year he was back in office and the SLP was out.
Which caused De Leon to renounce the tactic of "boring from within." As he put it, "the hole you're likely to bore from within is the one you're going to exit through." [Laughter.] And from these experiences came his hostility both to craft unionism and his very strong adherence to industrial unionism. The SLP attempted to set up their own industrial union federation which was called the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance, which had 13,000 members. This formation rapidly disintegrated.
De Leon later refined his conceptions of industrial unionism and actually foreshadowed, in aspects at least, the idea of soviet rule of society—rule based on industrial workers organized in industrial enterprises, i.e., Soviets. And as comrades know, De Leon played an important role, along with Debs, in forging the Industrial Workers of the World, the IWW.
The British SLP when it arose was concentrated overwhelmingly in Scotland and comrades may wonder why that was the case. Why was it that Glasgow, and in particular the Clydeside industrial belt, was the scene of the SLP's greatest strength and most influence in the proletariat? In his very detailed and interesting book called The Revolutionary Movement in Britain 1900-21, Walter Kendall aptly observes:
"Scottish radicalism also had its roots deep in a separate native cultural tradition. At the time of Charles I Scottish nobles and Calvinist clergy had combined to prevent the re-imposition of episcopacy in Scotland. In ensuing centuries the Church of Scotland retained a narrow, rigid theology, continually in conflict with English orthodoxy, a factor which gave a specifically different outlook and flavour to Scottish intellectual life. The Scottish educational system, given an initial impetus by the teachings of John Knox. remained in advance of the English until well into the twentieth century. Religion, the ideology of the establishment in Britain, had in Scotland a more striking record of national struggle. Penetrating deeper into the culture of the people, it gave them a penchant for the cut and thrust of logical argument, an appreciation and enthusiasm for dialectics not to be found in England. As John Knox was acolyte to Calvin, as John Carstairs Matheson to de Leon. So, in later years, Campbell and Gallacher were first to Lenin and then to his successor Stalin."
This is a polite way of presenting the Scottish psyche. [Laughter.]
There were other factors also ably cited by Kendall. There were a very large number of Irish immigrants in the Clydeside area, many of whom were active supporters of Sinn Fein. And as comrades know, the great Irish revolutionary James Connolly was indeed one of the founders of the SLP. Large-scale capitalism came late to Scotland and a large proportion of the proletariat of Glasgow had been uprooted from the countryside and pushed into the city, which like Petrograd had enormous engineering plants. So for a number of reasons the SLP sank its roots very deeply into Scotland and had very close links with the Irish struggle, and also, because of the large Scottish and Irish emigrations to North America, with the class struggle in the United States.
Impact of 1905 Russian Revolution
One of the enormous international impacts of the 1905 Russian Revolution was to turn the attention of socialists to the power of mass political strikes. In Germany Rosa Luxemburg and her followers seized upon the weapon of the mass strike as an answer to the social-reformist passivity of SPD [Social Democratic Party] tops, while failing to grasp the critical differences between the activities of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in the 1905 upheavals in Russia [see "The Russian Revolution of 1905," Workers Vanguard Nos. 288 and 289, 11 and 25 September 1981]. The experience of 1905 was very directly connected with the founding of the IWW in the United States in that same year. This inspired subsequently similar efforts on the part of the British SLP.
However, the British SLP's Advocates of Industrial Unionism (AIU) never managed to rise to the level of the IWW despite a very strong swing toward syndicalism on the part of the British proletariat in the period from 1905 through 1913. In those years of stormy class conflict, a response to a massive rationalization and further concentration of British capital at the expense of the workers, trade unions in Britain grew enormously. This upsurge hit its high point in 1912 with the great miners strike.
During this period the AIU managed to only hitch a ride on this elemental wave of class struggle. But this was sufficient to blood its militants in the class struggle, and root them deeply in the militant proletariat in the sprawling Clyde engineering plants. This was to place them in a strategic position during the tumultuous strikes that ripped the region both in 1915-16 and early 1919.
In comparison with its British competitors, e.g., Hyndman's BSP and the ILP, the British SLP was impressive. Indeed it compares favorably to the American SLP of De Leon. The British SLP rejected De Leon's sectarian disavowal of "immediate demands," and played an important role in the class struggle. De Leon found himself isolated from the labor movement with his split with the IWW in 1908. Already in 1900 Hillquit, Berger and Debs had led a split out of the SLP to found the Socialist Party (SP). Cannon asserts in The First Ten Years that the SLP even before 1905 was well on its way to becoming a sect, noting the SP not only pulled in all the reformists, but also most of the left, vital revolutionary elements of the American proletariat.
Forging a Bolshevik Party
Challinor definitely misleads his readers by implying that the De Leonist SLP was two-thirds or three-quarters of the way to being a Bolshevik-type party. He says, "Clearly, the SLP was among the first to see the need for an organisational and ideological split from social democracy." In discussing this matter it's particularly useful to look at the SLP through the lens of Lenin's What Is To Be Done? About a year before the SLP was born,
Lenin wrote his work. If "Left- Wing" Communism constitutes a handbook on communist tactics, What Is To Be Done? contains the blueprints for the construction of a party and a cadre. So that the whole struggle against economism, the struggle for a party of professional revolutionaries, the struggle which Lenin talks about at great length in "Left-Wing" Communism—for a political party to be a tribune of the people, to master politics in many arenas—all this is laid out of course in What Is To Be Done? You don't see anything at all like this in the SLP.
On everything from press questions to forms of organization the differences are clear. In particular they are clear on the necessity of constructing a cadre of full-time professional revolutionaries. The British SLP had difficulty keeping a full-timer and a lot of the time didn't have one. I found it a source of great irritation that Challinor holds this up as a virtue. Referring to the valiant work of SLP leader MacManus during the war, he says:
"It is hard to imagine how great the strain upon certain individuals must have been. For example. Arthur MacManus was editor of The Socialist, and in I9l5,when the Clyde Workers' Committee was formed, he became its chairman. As spokesman for this rank-and-file organization, the most powerful of its kind in the country, he played a leading role in the creation of a National Workers' & Shop Stewards' Movement. All this was done in his spare time: he also had a full-time job as an engineer at G. & J. Weir's Cathcart works, where he was the most well-known militant. Besides these commitments, which would have been more than enough for half a do/en men with only a normal amount of energy. MacManus found time to help in the struggle in Ireland. In 1915, James Connolly visited Glasgow and told his old SLP comrades that the authorities had suppressed their journal, the Irish Worker. So the SLP undertook to print it clandestinely on the Party's press at Renfrew Street. In his autobiography Tom Bell stated, 'Comrade Arthur MacManus was especially keen on doing this; working night and day to get it out, and arranged for the shipment of the paper, which he took over personally to Dublin'."
Heroic MacManus indeed was. But the inability of the SLP to provide for full-time party workers was a source of abiding weakness. It prevented the cohering of a cadre around a program, and prevented that leadership from jelling. One gets the impression of a lot of very talented, capable, tough-minded, experienced propagandists and trade-union agitators who tended to be more an association than a party. I think this explains one of the big questions that this book raises. Why was it that those elements of the SLP who were for a fusion with the Third International, who wanted to bring the SLP in as part of the Communist Party of Britain and who themselves were among the most pre-eminent of the SLP leaders, actually had the organization taken away from them and were incapable of effecting any significant split for Leninism? The answer is to be found in their inability to construct a party with the resources, but above all the perspective, of maintaining a cadre of professional revolutionists.
If the SLP started out as a good split from the SDF, on the eve of World War 1 it had a very murky split, reflecting above all the political incapacity of De Leonism to serve as a guide for revolutionary action. In 1912 the SLP lost over half its members in a dispute over whether or not it was permissible for the party to support reforms—e.g., should an SLP councillor in Glasgow cast a vote for more money to the unemployed. Defeated at the Manchester conference, the anti-reform "impossibilists" walked out of the party, taking a majority of the membership with them.
The SLP had a good line on the first imperialist war, but its activities in the unions during the war revealed weakness in the party. In short the SLP did not carry its line against the war in a way that counted into the massive Clyde strikes of 1915-1916—strikes in which the SLP played a leading role. Challinor excuses this on the grounds that for the SLP to insist that the Clyde Workers' Committee—which was running this massive strike against the Munitions Act— adopt the SLP's line on the war would have split the Workers' Committee. Again you see here a failure to grasp what Lenin later was to try to teach the British workers movement—which was that they were obligated to have their people who were working in that arena attempt to transform this strike, to agitate to infuse the strike with a political content aimed against the imperialist war and the British government. The strike was a strike against key munitions industries in wartime, and against the M munitions Act. Objectively it was a political strike against war par excellence.
Instead the behavior of SLP strike leader John Muir dragged the SLP's antiwar banner in the mud. Dragged before the bosses' court for his role in the strike, Muir cravenly swore that the strike was a purely economic struggle over shop issues and that he was for the war and war production! And the SLP tolerated this renegade remaining in its ranks! The honor of the Clyde Workers' Committee was upheld by John Maclean, the representative of the left internationalist wing of the BSP, who turned his trial into a political indictment of the bourgeoisie and its imperialist war.
British capitalism emerged from World War I profoundly shaken. Under the impact of the October Revolution the class antagonisms generated by war exploded in a massive postwar strike wave accompanied by episodic strikes and mutinies in the armband navy. In January 1919 the Clyde workers went out in a massive general strike for a 40-hour week. The government responded with armed troops. Unfortunately the strike did not spread and the strikers did not test the troops. At the time the government had only two battalions of reserves.
Challinor quotes from Aneurin Sevan's In Place of Fear, which described the famous 1919 meeting between the prime minister, Lloyd George, and the leaders of the Triple
Alliance. All I can say is, Lloyd George knew his Labour leaders [laughter]—which he ought to, since the Liberal Party and the ILP and the trade unions were very closely
linked. It reminds me of the German events of the autumn of 1918, when the troops were mutinying and forming Soviets. The German general staff pulled the same act on
the German soldiers' Soviets on the Western Front, saying, "Well, fine. You soldiers' Soviets have to withdraw two million people from France and Belgium. Here, you do it.
Are you ready?" Nope, they weren't. But that was a gamble[laughs]. In Britain a couple of the right guys in there and one might have had something approaching a 1905
situation, or at least a very big, much more massive wave ofpolitical strikes—which would have put the British workers in a lot better position both objectively and from a
standpoint of cohering a communist party. The whole incident both highlights the counterrevolutionary role of the trade-union tops, and exposes the political incapacity
of the SLP which had no idea how to overcome these roadblocks to revolution. ,
Challinor plays up the very real strengths of the SLP, while downplaying its De Leonist weaknesses—indeed, treating them as virtues. Meanwhile he presents such a compelling picture of the wretchedness of the BSP that one wonders how any chunk of this party made it into the Comintern. In fact the BSP was a heterogeneous organization that underwent a series of left-right polarizations under the impact of the war and the Russian Revolutions of 1917.
Affiliation to the Communist International
Following the 1916 split between Hyndman and E.G. Fairchild, who had a Kautskyite position on the war, the BSP moved leftward. At its April 1919 Conference the BSP declared itself for soviet rule and polled its branches on affiliation to the Communist International (Cl). Fairchild supported the Russian Revolution, but didn't consider a soviet-type revolution in Britain a serious possibility. The left majority, including John Maclean who maintained a consistent internationalist position as a BSPer throughout the war, believed the British revolution was on the order of the day and that they should link up with the Third International. The result of the ballot on affiliation to the Communist International, announced in October, was 98 to 4 in favor of affiliation.
Undoubtedly among those for the CI were a goodly number of "November Bolsheviks." Theodore Rothstein, a rotten apple, was perhaps the leading example of this layer. His trajectory was parallel to that of many left social-democratic sharpies in Europe, who thought that the Third International was the wave of the future. You had the Frossards and Cachins and scads of social democrats in the French party who went over to the Third International but didn't belong there. The main aim of the 21 Conditions was to filter such people out, and also to filter out the practices they brought with them.
The Russians were, I think, much more familiar with the BSP than SLP. All of the Bolshevik congresses except the one held in Stockholm—from 1903 to the Revolution— were held in London. Lenin himself lived for a time in London, as did some 30,000 other Russian emigres. And of those that were leftists—adherents to socialism—many belonged to the BSP. They constituted a large portion of the left wing of that organization. During the war a very large number of them were supporters of Trotsky's Nashe Slovo which was printed in Paris. Challinor makes the point that half of the circulation of that journal took place in Britain, .and the overwhelming proportion of that in London. There was also a colony of Russian exiles—and that too swelled enormously after the 1905Revolution—in Scotland, again associated with the SDF/BSP.
Litvinov and Chicherin and a number of others were associated with and had links with the BSP in London. Further, SDF members both in England and Scotland ran guns to the Russian revolutionaries from 1905 through 1907—quite a lot of them, hundreds of Brownings, millions of rounds of ammo. They would buy them in Europe, smuggle them to Newcastle, get them to Scotland, and then on to tsarist ships to smuggle them into Russia.
So not all BSPers were clones of the top-hatted and corpulent H.M. Hyndman! As with the SLP, a significant part of the BSP far left was located in Scotland. Most noteworthy was John Maclean, who as earlier indicated maintained a consistent internationalist position on the war, and played an important role in the Clyde strikes. The formidable Maclean was arguably the most capable proletarian revolutionist in Britain and a close associate of BSPer Peter Petroff, a hero of the 1905 Russian Revolution.
The Communist unity negotiations in Britain are very confusing, above all a reflection of the political confusion of the participants in the negotiations. There were three main groups and a couple of subsidiary ones. You had the SLP, Sylvia Pankhurst's Workers' Socialist Federation, the South Wales Socialist Society and the ILP left, and they all hailed the Russian Revolution—both revolutions. And some of them genuinely hailed the second one too. [Laughter.] It does strike you in reading the SLP's writings on the Russian Revolution that on the one hand, yes, they're happy it happened and... its real, main and key significance was it vindicates the SLP and its line in Britain! [Laughs.] In short, to repeat, the SLP failed to appreciate the world-historic significance of the October Revolution both in the broad sense and also in the particular communist sense that Lenin outlined in "Left- Wing" Communism.
I think Challinor makes a very good case that Lenin did not have clear ideas on everything that was going on in Britain. How could he? He was at some distance from the events, and certainly had other things occupying his mind in the immediate period after the October Revolution. Further, revolutionary Russia was blockaded by the imperialists. His information was partial.
However, Lenin did recognize something very important: that there needed to be a unified Communist party in Britain. You had all these groups claiming adherence to the October Revolution, to soviet government and for the Third International. There was an objective requirement for a Bolshevik-type party in Britain. But if there was to be such a party it had to have a policy toward the Labour Party. What gets omitted in Challinor is any policy toward the Labour Party except throwing rocks at it.
Was Britain going through a revolutionary period in 1918-1920? No. But if the Triple Alliance had decided to tell Lloyd George to shove it, we might have had something
break. But that didn't happen, and a lot of people voted Labour. There were 4 million workers affiliated to the Labour Party. The Labour Party in 1918 became socialist. You better believe that had something to do with the October Revolution and the Labour Party covering its ass. For communists the question was how to deal with this obstacle.
The most striking failure was, as I mentioned earlier, the failure of the pro-fusion wing of the SLP, the Communist Unity Group of MacManus and Bell, to carry the majority of the SLP into the CPGB. They had no conception of factional struggle for their particular position. Thus the best of the SLP, who could not understand how to conduct a faction fight in their own party, certainly could not understand what Lenin was talking about at all regarding the Labour Party. Challinor drags out J.T. Murphy's "cogent arguments" against Labour Party affiliation. These are not very cogent at all and have been answered dozens of times. Reading Murphy what comes through is: we'll either be swamped in the Labour Party or we have to destroy it. There's no conception of using class-struggle means to polarize and gut it—i.e., no conception therefore of political struggle for a political line and program. Behind that is the conception of the party as the worst sort of a passive propaganda society.
This was a fatal flaw of De Leonism, its social-democratic underbelly. The party through patient propaganda and education was to win the proletariat to its side. In the U.S. De Leon projected the SLP would eventually win at the polls and dissolve the capitalist government. Should the bourgeoisie resist, they would be "locked out" by the socialist industrial unions, which would then proceed to administer socialism. The concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, of a transition period and of the role of the party in that transition are absent.
So the SLP had a pretty good party in terms of—not the party that made the October Revolution—but of what was floating around in England or even the U.S. in that period. They didn't make it. What stands out is their parochialism. In the U.S. out of the left wing of the SP came the Haywood wing of the IWW, Cannon. Swabeck, John Reed, the foreign-language federations and a few of the native American workers. And out of that was forged a viable Communist Party—a little too viable in its early period. Like Cannon said, they fought like hell all the time. It was the Comintern that came in and provided the lessons and the correctives to teach the young American CP how to become a Leninist party—how to solve a lot of the problems that had tied up the American party and British and German and pre-war social democracy.
The party issuing out of the 1920 Communist Unity Convention was stillborn. And the indication of that was— no fights. The recent Euro/tankie fight is the CPGB's first serious faction fight. Very early on the British party acquired a set of leaders who seemed to live forever [laughs] and didn't get any better. The congenital incapacity of the CPGB was evident during the 1926 General Strike and since, and has also had negative impact on Trotskyism in Britain. Cannon and a section of the American CP were forged into genuine Leninists who, when the degeneration of the Comintern came, were able to pick up the banner. This was not the case in Britain. Gerry Healy tries to suck glorious origins of British Trotskyism out of his thumb, but it's a fact that Trotskyism had to be imported.
The SLP in Britain disappeared very quickly after it stood aside from the Third International, in many ways like the syndicalist wing of the IWW did in the U.S. Cannon made the point that one would have thought, on the face of it, given the history of the IWW during the war which was as a semi-party, certainly revolutionary-minded and with many experienced militants, that a large number of them would have made it to the Communist Party. But, as he put it, it was the foreigners, the callow youth, only some fragments of the IWW that actually came to be the core of the American Communist Party. They didn't have the experience of many of the IWW, but in the end program was decisive. But there at least you had a germ cell that was fertilized and grew. I think in Britain what you had was a miscarriage; Challinor might more aptly have titled his book "The Abortion of British Bolshevism."
For Challinor, himself a supporter of the anti-Soviet and social-democratic Socialist Workers Party (SWP) of Britain, the abortionists are Lenin and the Communist International. Clearly he feels that it was erroneous to insist that the new CPGB affiliate to the Labour Party, as this blocked the majority of the SLP, whom he wrongly considers the "native Bolsheviks," from entering that CP.
Challinor's position should be contrasted with that of Lenin at the Second Congress. Lenin insisted that the question of the Labour Party be debated before the International. He insisted that the new International not repeat the experience of the Second International and let the British comrades get into a room and decide the question among themselves. The Labour Party question was not simply a British question but an international problem. It was the obligation of the Cl to come up with a policy and pursue it. If this led to some splits, so be it, but it would be good experience for the British party to try to implement these tactics.
Challinor does not take up the real difficulty in implementing the CIs policy. To carry it off successfully you needed a hard, cohesive, ideologically tested formation. And that certainly was not what the British CP was. We have a contradiction. If the CPGB had successfully affiliated, they probably would very likely have capitulated in just the way many of the SLPers feared they would. [Interjection: Adopt a position in favor of entry, and don't enter!] Right, right! A zero approximation of a position of shallow entry! [Laughter.] What you needed were Comintern reps on the scene to take these various would-be Bolsheviks by the political scruff of the neck, to teach them and fight with them. Lenin was very aware that a policy of affiliation was no automatic recipe for success. He thought this would be a good school for the CPGB, a school of political struggle, leading very possibly to splits and a fusion on a higher order.
Challinor, like all anti-Leninist centrists, invokes Lenin against Lenin. He quotes Lenin's criticism of the Third Congress Org Resolution that it was "too Russian." We've made the point numerous times but it bears repeating. Lenin thought that resolution was "too Russian" in the sense that it was too long and no one would read or understand it. But if you read on, he remarks (and this was his last speech to the Communist International):
"We Russians must also find ways and means to explaining the principles of this resolution to the foreigners. Unless we do that, it will be absolutely impossible for them to carry it out. I am sure that in this connection we must tell not only the Russians, but the foreign comrades as well, that the most important thing in the period we are now entering is to study. We are studying in the general sense. They, however, must study in the special sense, in order that they may really understand the organisation, structure, method and content of revolutionary work. If they do that, I am sure the prospects of the world revolution will be not only good, but excellent." —Collected Works Vol. 33
Better the road of Lenin than that of Challinor!
Summary
A question was raised about the attitude of the SLP to the colonial question, and in particular to the Amritsar massacre. Regarding this a British comrade has handed me a note stating that a reading of The Socialist, the SLP's newspaper, and also The Call, which was the BSP's, indicates that in fact they did take it up. He observes: "If it's possible to differentiate active internationalism in the building of the party from the tribune of the people, I think they were pretty good on the latter." In that sense I think they would therefore be with the best of the Second International. Comrades recall that last year we printed the following quote from Trotsky on this question from his 1932 essay "What Next?" He was referring to the German centrists, and Ledebour in particular:
"Ledebour demands that a battle be waged against colonial oppression: he is ready to vote in parliament against colonial credits: he is ready to take upon himself fearless defense of the victims of a crushed colonial insurrection. But Ledebour will not participate in preparing a colonial insurrection. Such work he considers putschism. adventurism. Bolshevism. And therein is the whole gist of the matter."
The American SLP hung on for years, and it's a question as to how this happened. It's not the same people who founded the party in the 1860s or the 1870s although, to look at them, sometimes you think so. [Laughter.] They became a sect, but some sects don't make it. The American SLP made it because they did have a base among some of the foreign-language groups. They stopped publication of their Bulgarian-language paper only a short while ago. It's been pointed out that the SLP probably got the Bulgarians in the U.S. because they were the closest thing to the Narrows [Bulgarian Narrow Socialist Party]. [Laughter.] Shachtman in '46 decided the Workers Party would become a small mass party in a very big country. The Bulgarians tried to be a small party in a small country and wound up a mass party.
As I said, John Maclean was probably the best of the BSP. Indeed Lenin singled him out as representing the best far-left, internationalist wing of British socialism. And he also didn't make it. He spiraled into creating a nationalist party, i.e., the Scottish Communist Party. He thought that the axis of a workers revolution in Britain would be an Irish/Scottish revolution. And London would follow—which is just plain wrong. You have to get the capital. In other times, from a very different class standpoint, this strategy was tried and didn't succeed. [Laughter.]
When the Independent Labour Party and the Labour Representation Committee were being formed it was not at all clear that they would forge a labor party which would capture the allegiance of the British proletariat. But indeed it did succeed, and by 1918 had become a formidable obstacle to proletarian revolution. Remember the Leeds Conference, where you had people like Snowden and Henderson coming out for "soviets" in Britain... adopting the protective coloration of pink.
In closing, to reiterate Cannon's point: the October Revolution marked a watershed not only in the broad international sense but also in the specific, communist sense. It was the Bolsheviks who taught us how to forge parties of a new type—vanguard parties, Leninist parties, combat parties. The experience of Bolshevism solved all the dilemmas that had arisen in the preceding period: the questions of "boring from within," parliamentary action, industrial action, etc. So that we stand far higher than the SLP did, but on the shoulders of the Russian Revolution. If we can see these things it's because we're the continuators. As Cannon said, "We are the party of the Russian Revolution"—our teachers.
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Are You Ready to Take the Power?
We reprint below an excerpt from In Place of Fear, the autobiography of the late Aneurin Bevan.
I remember vividly Robert Smillie describing to me an interview the leaders of the Triple Alliance had with David Lloyd George in 1919. The strategy of the leaders was clear. The miners under Robert Smillie, the transport workers under Robert Williams, and the National Union of Railwaymen under James Henry Thomas, formed the most formidable combination of industrial workers-in the history of Great Britain. They had agreed on the demands that were to be made on the employers, knowing well that the government would be bound to be involved at an early stage. And so it happened. A great deal of industry was still under government wartime control and so the state power was immediately implicated.
Lloyd George sent for the Labour leaders, and they went, so Robert told me, "truculently determined they would not be talked over by the seductive and eloquent Welshman." At this Bob's eyes twinkled in his grave, strong face. "He was quite frank with us from the outset," Bob went on. "He said to us: 'Gentlemen, you have fashioned, in the Triple Alliance of the unions represented by you, a most powerful instrument. I feel bound to tell you that in our opinion we are at your mercy. The Army is disaffected and cannot be relied upon. Trouble has occurred already in a number of camps. We have just emerged from a great war and the people are eager for the reward of their sacrifices, and we are in no position to satisfy them. In these circumstances, if you carry out your threat and strike, then you will defeat us.
"'But if you do so,' went on Mr. Lloyd George, 'have you weighed the consequences? The strike will be in defiance of the Government of the country and by its very success will precipitate a constitutional crisis of the first importance. For, if a force arises in the State which is stronger than the State itself, then it must be ready to take on the functions of the State, or withdraw and accept the authority of the State. Gentlemen,' asked the Prime Minister quietly, 'have you considered, and if you have, are you ready?' From that moment on," said Robert Smillie, "we were beaten and we knew we were."
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