Click on the headline to link Part Two of this article.
Markin comment:
On a day when we are honoring the anniversary of the Chinese revolution of 1949 the article posted in this entry and the comment below take on added meaning.
In the old days, in the days when I had broken from many of my previously held left social-democratic political views and had begun to embrace Marxism with a distinct tilt toward Trotskyism, I ran into an old revolutionary in Boston who had been deeply involved (although I did not learn the extend of that involvement until later) in the pre-World War II socialist struggles in Eastern Europe. The details of that involvement will not detain us here now but the import of what he had to impart to me about the defense of revolutionary gains has stuck with me until this day. And, moreover, is germane to the subject of this article-the defense of the Chinese revolution and the gains of that revolution however currently attenuated.
This old comrade, by the circumstances of his life, had escaped that pre-war scene in fascist-wracked Europe and found himself toward the end of the 1930s in New York working with the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party in the period when that organization was going through intense turmoil over the question of defense of the Soviet Union. In the history of American (and international) Trotskyism this is the famous Max Shachtman-James Burnham led opposition that declared, under one theory or another, that the previously defendable Soviet Union had changed dramatically enough in the course of a few months to be not longer worth defending by revolutionaries. What struck him from the start about this dispute was the cavalier attitude of the anti-Soviet opposition, especially among the wet-behind-the-ears youth, on the question of that defense and consequently about the role that workers states, healthy, deformed or degenerated as we use the terms of art in our movement as part of the greater revolutionary strategy. Needless to say most of those who abandoned defense of the Soviet Union when there was even a smidgeon of a reason to defend it left politics and peddled their wares in academia or business. Or if they remained in politics lovingly embraced the virtues of world imperialism.
That said, the current question of defense of the Chinese Revolution hinges on those same premises that animated that old Socialist Workers Party dispute. And strangely enough (or maybe not so strangely) on the question of whether China is now irrevocably on the capitalist road, or is capitalist already (despite some very uncapitalistic economic developments overt the past few years), I find that many of those who oppose that position have that same cavalier attitude the old comrade warned me against back when I was first starting out. There may come a time when we, as we had to with the Soviet Union and other workers states, say that China is no longer a workers state. But today is not that day. In the meantime study the issue, read the posted article, and more importantly, defend the gains of the Chinese Revolution.
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Workers Vanguard No. 964
10 September 2010
China: Labor Struggles in the “Socialist Market Economy”
Defend the Chinese Deformed Workers State Against Imperialism, Capitalist Counterrevolution!
For Proletarian Political Revolution!
Part One
This past spring, China experienced a major strike wave involving young migrant workers employed mainly in factories owned by Japanese, other foreign and offshore Chinese capital. It was centered in the southern coastal province of Guangdong, the main region in the country producing light manufactures for export. Three dozen strikes took place in that province in the span of a month and a half. The upsurge of labor militancy extended to other industrial regions. For example, workers at a Taiwanese-owned rubber plant near Shanghai clashed with police; around 50 workers were injured. In most cases, the strikes were settled quickly with wage increases and other gains for the workers. Recognizing in its own way the significance of these developments, the Economist (31 July), a house organ for American and British finance capital, headlined an editorial: “The Rising Power of the Chinese Worker.”
The strike wave began in mid May at a Honda plant in Foshan that produces transmissions for the company’s four auto assembly plants in China. As a result of the work stoppage, which lasted nearly three weeks, production in all of these plants came to a halt. The strike, which ended with a wage increase averaging 30 percent, was viewed as an important victory for the workers.
Strikes are not uncommon in China. However, they are usually very short-lived, quickly settled and/or quickly suppressed. And they are almost never reported in the government-directed media for fear that doing so would encourage other workers to engage in similar actions. That is just what happened in the case of the Foshan Honda strike, as the conflict between Chinese workers and the Japanese auto giant became a focus of domestic as well as international attention. Subsequently, the authorities reverted to a policy of clamping down on news of labor unrest.
Organization and leadership of the strikes were provided by worker activists outside the bureaucratic structures of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), the official union federation, tied to the ruling Communist Party (CCP). One strike leader, Li Xiaojuan, a 20-year-old woman worker at the Foshan Honda plant, wrote an open letter on behalf of the negotiating committee that declared:
“We must maintain a high degree of unity and not let the representatives of Capital divide us…. This factory’s profits are the fruits of our bitter toil…. This struggle is not just about the interests of our 1,800 workers. We also care about the rights and interests of all Chinese workers.”
— quoted in Financial Times (London), 10 June
The strike wave in the capitalist sector of its industrial economy underscores the fundamental social contradictions of China as a bureaucratically deformed workers state. As Trotskyists (revolutionary Marxists), we strongly supported the strikes and emphasized that the rights and interests of Chinese workers require a leadership with a comprehensive program of class struggle at the political as well as economic levels:
“Chinese workers need a class-struggle leadership to advance their struggle to wrest as much as possible from the capitalist companies that are exploiting them, fight the ravages of inflation and improve their working and living conditions. Workers in state-owned industry also need such a leadership to protect and advance their living standards and to fight against bureaucratic abuse.”
— “Militant Strike Wave in China,” WV No. 961, 2 July
The contradictions besetting the Chinese deformed workers state will ultimately be resolved either by a proletarian political revolution, opening the road to socialism, or capitalist counterrevolution and imperialist re-enslavement.
A Bureaucratically Deformed Workers State
The People’s Republic of China emerged from the 1949 Revolution—a social revolution of world-historic significance in which the peasant-based forces led by the Communist Party of Mao Zedong defeated the U.S.-backed puppet regime of Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang. Hundreds of millions of peasants rose up and seized the land on which their forebears had been exploited from time immemorial. The subsequent creation of a centrally planned, collectivized economy laid the basis for enormous social gains for both urban workers and rural toilers. The revolution enabled women to advance by magnitudes over their previous miserable status, which was rooted in the old Confucian order and marked by such practices as forced marriage and concubinage. A nation that had been ravaged and divided by foreign powers was unified and freed from imperialist domination.
However, the workers state that issued from the Revolution was deformed from its inception under the rule of Mao’s CCP regime, the political apparatus of a privileged bureaucratic caste resting atop the workers state. Unlike the Russian October Revolution of 1917, which was carried out by a class-conscious proletariat guided by the Bolshevik internationalism of Lenin and Trotsky, the Chinese Revolution was the result of peasant guerrilla war led by Stalinist-nationalist forces. Patterned after the Stalinist bureaucracy that usurped political power in the USSR beginning in 1923-24, Mao’s regime and those of his successors, including Hu Jintao today, have preached the profoundly anti-Marxist notion that socialism—a classless, egalitarian society based on material abundance—can be built in a single country. In practice, “socialism in one country” has meant accommodation to world imperialism and opposition to the perspective of international workers revolution that is essential for the advance to socialism.
After a brief interregnum following the death of Mao in 1976, his successor, Deng Xiaoping, scrapped centralized economic planning and began implementing a number of market-oriented policies and practices. In the late 1990s, the regime headed by Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji privatized a large number of small- and medium-sized state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Under “market socialism,” China has attracted large-scale investment, mainly in manufacturing, by Western and Japanese corporations and by the offshore Chinese bourgeoisie in Taiwan, Hong Kong and elsewhere, with the CCP regime acting as labor contractors. On the mainland, there has also emerged a sizable class of indigenous capitalist entrepreneurs, many with familial and financial ties to the CCP officialdom.
One consequence of these developments is the widespread belief in the Western world, extending across the political spectrum, that China, although still ruled by a party calling itself “Communist,” has become capitalist. In reality, China remains a bureaucratically deformed workers state. The core of the industrial economy—steel and non-ferrous metals, heavy electrical equipment, telecommunications, oil extraction and refining, petrochemicals—continues to be based on state-owned enterprises. Outside of the foreign and offshore Chinese capitalist sector, almost all productive investment is channeled through the government and state-controlled banks. The Economist (10 July) pointed out that although China’s large banks “make money and have the trappings of public companies, the state owns a majority stake and the Communist Party appoints the top brass.”
The non-capitalist character of China’s economy has been clearly demonstrated by the effectiveness of the government’s almost $600 billion stimulus program—mainly investment in infrastructure and expanding bank lending—introduced in the fall of 2008 as the First World capitalist economies were plummeting. The sudden collapse of its export markets in North America and West Europe was a heavy blow to China’s economy. The rate of growth of the gross domestic product fell from near 13 percent in 2007 to under 7 percent in the last quarter of 2008. Since then, however, while the capitalist world has remained mired in a deep downturn, economic growth in China has revived rapidly, reaching almost 12 percent in the first quarter of this year before edging down slightly in the second quarter. Noting one significant effect of the skyrocketing levels of investment by state-controlled companies, the New York Times (29 August) reported that “the proportion of industrial production by companies controlled by the Chinese state edged up last year, checking a slow but seemingly inevitable eclipse.”
However much the Beijing Stalinists try to accommodate world imperialism, the U.S. and other major capitalist powers are determined to reverse the 1949 Revolution, reimposing semicolonial subjugation on China and reducing its economy to a giant capitalist sweatshop. Toward that end, they are utilizing economic penetration, increased military pressure from without and political subversion internally, for example, by the reactionary Buddhist forces in Tibet. The U.S. continues to provide capitalist Taiwan with advanced weaponry while itself extending its military reach in Central Asia and other areas near China. As Trotskyists, we stand for the unconditional military defense of China against imperialism and internal counterrevolution.
In answer to the aspirations of the Chinese workers and rural toilers for democratic rights and a government that represents their needs and interests, we stand for proletarian political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracy and replace it with a government elected by workers and peasants councils and committed to revolutionary internationalism. Such a government would fight against bureaucratic arbitrariness and corruption. It would expropriate the new class of domestic capitalist entrepreneurs and renegotiate the terms of foreign investment in the interests of the working people. It would create a centrally planned and managed economy under conditions of workers democracy—not the autarkic, bureaucratic commandism of the Mao era, when “egalitarianism” meant an equalization of poverty. While struggling to provide at least a basic level of economic security for the whole population, a genuine communist leadership would understand that achieving material prosperity for all hinges on the struggle for socialist revolution in the centers of world capitalism.
The Honda Strikes
Migrant workers in China’s capitalist-owned factories are often forced to work 60 to 70 hours a week at wages barely above subsistence levels. The brutal conditions they endure were graphically exposed last spring by the widely publicized suicides of workers at the huge Foxconn industrial complex, employing more than 300,000, in Guangdong. At least a dozen workers have killed themselves since the beginning of the year. Owned by a Taiwanese company, Foxconn is the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer, making products for Apple, Dell and Hewlett-Packard. A Hong Kong-based businessman who toured the site described conditions on the factory floor as “almost militaristic and kind of scary” (Financial Times, 11 June). Popular outrage over the suicides at Foxconn doubtless contributed to widespread sympathy and support for the strikes at Honda and other capitalist-owned firms.
The strike at the Honda transmission plant in Foshan was initiated by a 24-year-old worker, Tan Zhiqing, from the interior province of Hunan, a major supplier of migrant labor. A spirit of rebelliousness is celebrated in the popular culture of Hunan, Mao Zedong’s birthplace. Seeing his real earnings shrinking because of inflation, Tan decided to quit Honda and seek higher pay elsewhere. He had earlier approached local ACFTU officials about pressuring management to increase wages but got no response from them. In late April, he and a friend and co-worker named Xiao Xiao submitted a standard one-month-in-advance notice of their intention to leave the company. Tan subsequently told a reporter from China News Weekly (2 June): “Since I was going to quit anyway, I thought I might as well do something for the benefit of my fellow-workers.”
Toward that end, he and Xiao organized secret meetings with a small number of co-workers to plan a work stoppage. On May 17, Tan pushed the emergency button, stopping the assembly line where he was working, and some 50 workers walked off the job. At first, most workers were hesitant to go on strike for fear of reprisals. Production resumed temporarily when management agreed to negotiate with workers’ representatives who were elected from the different departments. A turning point came on May 21-22 when the company offered a wage increase of less than 10 percent of what the workers were demanding and then fired Tan and Xiao. The strike now resumed in earnest, with much greater support and resolve. Strikers routinely sang the national anthem and also an official song of the Chinese military, “Unity Is Strength,” here referring to workers instead of soldiers.
Other management policies intended to weaken the strike also backfired. A large section of the workforce is comprised of teenage trainees from technical schools whose wages were much lower than those of regular workers. In late May, the company demanded that the trainees sign a “memorandum of undertaking” pledging “never to lead, organize, partake in go-slows, stop work or strike.” Not only did most refuse to sign but, as the China News Weekly (2 June) reported, the trainees “were the staunchest supporters of the strike.”
From the outset, the local ACFTU bureaucrats were sidelined during the strike. One of the workers’ demands was “a reorganization of the local trade union: re-elections should be held for union chairman and other representatives.” Union officials sat in on the negotiations, purportedly to “mediate” between the two sides. Some union functionaries were evidently rankled by their visible loss of authority. On May 31, a large squad of ACFTU goons assaulted striking workers. The next day, however, union officials issued a public apology while downplaying the incident and claiming it was a result of “mutual misunderstandings.” In mid June, the head of the Guangdong province ACFTU promised that the Foshan Honda plant would be a “pilot site” in “allowing members to genuinely elect a union chair.”
Within days after the Foshan strike ended, workers at two other Honda parts plants went out. One of these strikes was settled quickly. However, the strike at Honda Lock turned into a bitter conflict, the outcome of which was very different than that at Foshan. Using desktop computers, activists uploaded video of security guards beating workers. In this case, both the Honda management and CCP authorities, at least at the local level, took a harder line. The company recruited “replacement workers” (scabs) and threatened to fire those strikers who refused to accept the wage increase offered. Journalists seeking to report on the strike were taken away from the plant by local police.
CCP Regime’s Response to Strikes
The initial extensive coverage of the Foshan Honda strike in the domestic media was accompanied by an equally unusual candor about the country’s increasing social inequalities. Citing a leader of the ACFTU, the official English-language China Daily (13 May) reported that the share of the country’s gross domestic product going to workers’ wages fell from 57 percent in 1983 to 37 percent in 2005. An editorial in the Global Times (2 June), a People’s Daily spin-off, stated:
“Admittedly, in the three decades of opening-up, ordinary workers are among those who have received the smallest share of economic prosperity….
“The temporary stoppage of production lines
More recently, an ACFTU spokesman laid out an official policy of promoting “the direct election of grassroots trade union leaders” (People’s Daily online, 31 August).
Clearly, influential elements in the bureaucracy are concerned about the danger (to themselves) of growing labor unrest in the private sector. Even before the strike wave, a number of provincial and municipal governments had raised the legal minimum wage, in some cases as much as 20 percent.
Despite increasing economic inequality, one should recognize that workers in China, including migrants in the capitalist sector, have generally experienced a substantial improvement in living standards during the decades of the “reform” era. It is also true that the closing and privatizing of many state-owned enterprises over the years have produced severe economic uncertainty for workers who have seen their previously guaranteed social benefits cut and who lack the education and skills to find new work. But with the export sector booming, between 2004 and 2009 the average real monthly wage of migrant workers increased by more than 40 percent. That workers at Honda used cell phones and the Internet to coordinate strikes at different plants indicates that they have access to modern technology—a world away from the experience of their parents, not to speak of their grandparents on the rural communes of the Mao era.
Because the strikes were in capitalist enterprises, they did not constitute the kind of direct challenge to the ruling bureaucracy that strikes or other labor protests in strategic sectors of the statified economy, such as steel production, oil extraction and the railway system would pose. To a certain extent, the CCP regime could posture as a paternalistic defender of Chinese workers against unbridled exploitation by Japanese, Korean and offshore Chinese capitalists. In mid June, China’s premier Wen Jiabao intoned that “the government and all sectors of society should treat migrant workers as they would their own children.”
The fact that Honda is a Japanese company was likely an important factor in the authorities’ initial tolerance for the strike and the extensive domestic media coverage. The Beijing Stalinist leaders seek popular legitimacy by, above all, appealing to Chinese nationalism, evoking the historical memory of the country’s semicolonial subjugation prior to the 1949 Revolution. An important source of the CCP’s historical authority was its mobilization of the peasant masses in resisting the Japanese imperialists’ invasion and occupation of China in the 1930s-’40s. Even today Japan, rather than the United States, is the main target of both popular and officially sponsored Chinese nationalism.
On the other side of the Sea of Japan, the leading bourgeois newspaper Nikkei complained that “in the strike at the Honda-supplier, the authorities took a neutral stance from beginning to end.” In this respect, the strikes in China contrast sharply with the bloody state repression of labor struggles against Japanese companies in the semicolonial countries of Southeast Asia. For example, soldiers and police recently attacked workers at a Toshiba plant in Indonesia. In the Philippines, a union leader at the Japanese company Takata was murdered in early June in the course of a struggle for union recognition.
The strikes at the Chinese Honda and Toyota factories underscore the need for unity between the proletariats of China and Japan—a prospect that is completely outside the nationalist worldview of China’s Stalinist misrulers. Had the Japanese workers at these two auto giants expressed support for their Chinese class brothers, this would have strengthened their bargaining power and undercut the anti-Japanese nationalism promoted by the Beijing regime.
At the same time, the unity between different strata of workers—trainees from technical schools and full-time employees—displayed during the Foshan Honda strike could provide a positive and powerful example for the Japanese labor movement, with its hierarchical division between the permanent employees of the big corporations and the large number of temporary workers. This division poses directly the need for a political struggle against the lackeys of the bourgeoisie in the top leadership of the unions in Japan. For example, the most powerful unions in strategic industries such as auto and electronics allow only full-time employees to join.
The workers’ suicides at Foxconn and strikes at a number of other Taiwanese-owned enterprises point to the substantial presence of offshore Chinese capital in the mainland industrial economy. The island statelet of Taiwan, where the bulk of Chiang Kai-shek’s defeated forces fled in the late 1940s, is the base of the main body of the Chinese big bourgeoisie. Unlike mainland capitalist entrepreneurs, the bourgeoisie on Taiwan possesses its own counterrevolutionary political organizations. Moreover, the Taiwan-based bourgeoisie operates under the direct military protection of American imperialism.
The Beijing Stalinists have long promoted reunification with Taiwan under the formula, “one country, two systems,” the same formula used to incorporate the capitalist enclave of Hong Kong (a former British colony) in 1997. The incorporation of Taiwan into the People’s Republic under that formula is not on the immediate historical agenda. But should such a development take place, it would greatly strengthen the social forces of capitalist restoration, much more so than in the case of Hong Kong. Opposing the Stalinists’ efforts to accommodate the Taiwan-based Chinese bourgeoisie, we stand for revolutionary reunification: proletarian political revolution on the mainland and proletarian socialist revolution in Taiwan resulting in the expropriation of the bourgeoisie.
A Tight Labor Market and a New Proletarian Generation
The strike wave that began in the spring took place in the capitalist sector of China’s economy. However, favorable conditions for these workers’ struggles have been the result in good part of the workings of the core collectivized sector of the economy. When the world capitalist market tanked in the fall of 2008, an estimated 20 million workers were laid off from the export-producing factories in coastal China. Most returned to the rural villages.
One of the main effects of the government’s stimulus program has been a substantial expansion of employment opportunities in the country’s interior. As export production revived, beginning last summer, the inflow of migrants seeking work in coastal China was less than in the past. Glenn Maguire, Asia chief economist for the French bank Société Générale, observed that this development “suggests that the stimulus packages have been incredibly successful at creating jobs” (Reuters, 1 June). A survey by the ministry of labor estimated that in the Pearl River Delta manufacturing center in Guangdong, job vacancies exceeded applicants by 9 percent in the first quarter of the year. The tight labor market has increased the bargaining power of workers at the individual and the collective level. An executive at a Guangdong-based electronics company noted the changed situation: “When you fined workers nobody would dare to object because if you said anything you were out. But now every time a certain number of workers oppose some management move, my company will adjust it” (Financial Times, 4 June).
In addition to conjunctural factors, the long-term demographic trend is beginning to impact the labor market. For the past several decades, the CCP regime, seeking to curb population growth, has limited urban families to one child and rural families to two. As a consequence, the population between the ages of 15 and 24—the pool from which almost all migrant workers are drawn—has remained basically unchanged for the past five years and is projected to fall by almost 30 percent over the next ten years. Many bourgeois commentators foresee the beginning of the end of “cheap labor” in China.
But it is not only objective conjunctural and demographic factors that underlie the increased assertiveness and social power of China’s workers. The strike wave signals the entry of a new proletarian generation onto the social scene, one whose outlook and attitudes differ significantly from those of their parents.
The young peasant men and women who flooded into the cities in the 1980s and ’90s came from very poor, economically primitive conditions. Working in a factory or construction site, however harsh the conditions, was the only way they could improve their lives. For most of them, the goal was to save enough money so that they could return to their native villages and build new homes, buy equipment for their family farms or open small businesses.
The present generation of migrants has come of age in a society that is far more developed, even in the countryside, but also much more unequal. Their aspirations and expectations are correspondingly different. In response to a survey of 5,000 second-generation migrant workers conducted by the General Labor Union in the Guangdong city of Shenzhen, almost all said that they were unwilling to return to their home villages and become farmers. Cha Jinhua, described as a Guangdong-based labor activist, explained: “We’re different from our parents’ generation. Their wishes were simple—earn some money and return to their home towns. We want to stay in the cities and enjoy our lives here. But we demand respect” (Financial Times, 1 June).
However, the aspirations of young migrant workers to build good lives for themselves in the cities directly confront the legally based household registration or hukou system. Workers as well as members of the petty bourgeoisie who have an urban household registration have social benefits that are denied to those with a rural hukou. And the latter includes the grown children of migrants who, while born in the cities, are registered as members of a rural household. Holders of an urban hukou have priority for employment in state-owned enterprises, which generally provide much better social benefits, such as subsidized housing, and greater job security. In general, migrants pay more for inferior medical care and public schooling for their children. Furthermore, as we observed in “Women Workers and the Contradictions of China Today” (Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 61, Spring 2009):
“The migrant population is itself divided between those who have legal status and those who do not. Almost all migrant workers in factories and other major enterprises like Wal-Mart have temporary urban residency permits. However, there are millions of ‘undocumented’ migrants—no one knows exactly how many—who eke out an existence as casual laborers, housemaids and nannies, street vendors and the like.”
We have long called for the abolition of the hukou system and for migrants to have the same rights and access to jobs as legally registered urban residents. In championing the rights of migrant workers, a class-struggle labor leadership would help unite the struggles of workers in state-owned industries against bureaucratic mismanagement and cuts in benefits with those of workers exploited in capitalist enterprises.
Labor Struggles in Guangdong: Yesterday and Today
The parents and older brothers and sisters of the workers involved in the recent strike wave also fought for a better life in the capitalist-owned factories and construction sites of coastal China. And there are important elements of continuity as well as differences across the generational divide.
A few years ago, Ching Kwan Lee, an academic of leftist sympathies, published a book based on her fieldwork in two very different regions of China in the early 2000s: Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt (University of California Press [2007]). The “rustbelt” in the subtitle is the northeastern province of Liaoning, which suffered economic devastation and mass unemployment when many large SOEs were downsized and smaller ones were privatized or closed outright in the late 1990s. The “sunbelt” refers to Guangdong.
In regard to the latter region, Lee emphasized the importance of labor laws and their non-enforcement in conditioning workers’ struggles. Almost all strikes and other industrial actions were preceded by complaints to local officials that the employer had violated the law with respect to wages (unpaid or below the legal minimum), overtime, social benefits or safety. She cited a case where complaints to the Labor Bureau by a small number of workers’ representatives were repeatedly ignored. Only when all of the workers in the factory went on strike did the Bureau intervene to arrange mediation.
Lee concluded that “migrant workers, feeling deprived of the socialist social contract available to state-owned enterprise workers, see the Labor Law as the only institutional resource protecting their interests vis-à-vis powerful employers and local officials.” One woman worker told her: “Once we saw the terms of the Labor Law, we realized that what we thought of as bitterness and bad luck were actually violations of our legal rights and interests.” A construction worker made similar comments in explaining the struggle against an employer who had forged workers’ signatures on labor contracts and denied workers access to the contracts’ terms:
“For two weeks, we had only one meal each day and we read everything on the Labor Law and labor dispute arbitration in the bookstore. Before this, we had no idea what the law said about us migrant workers. For many years, we had only heard about the labor contract, but we did not press the company hard enough when they refused to give us a copy…. Since we started this struggle with the company, many workers have begun to read newspapers. Some even cut out labor dispute stories for circulation in the dormitory.”
The prevailing attitude among workers was that the labor laws, if enforced, would substantially improve their conditions of life. But they were not enforced by local officials, many of whom were corrupt and openly colluded with the employers. A lawyer specializing in getting compensation for workers injured on the job recounted that a judge once told him: “Lawyer Zhou, if the court adheres to all the laws and regulations of the provincial government, all these factories would move elsewhere and the local economy would collapse. Who would be responsible then? You?”
To what extent is Lee’s observation from the early 2000s, that knowledge of the labor laws encourages and shapes workers’ struggles, applicable to the recent strike wave? From afar one cannot give a definitive answer. However, in the judgment of most observers, an important contributing factor to the upsurge of labor militancy was the new labor law adopted in 2008, which strengthened workers’ formal rights vis-à-vis the employer. Obviously, the CCP leadership did not intend this legislation to be an incitement for workers to go on strike. Rather, it sought to pressure capitalist firms to ameliorate the conditions of exploitation so as to minimize labor unrest.
The relation between workers’ struggles and the labor laws is contradictory. Workers have been emboldened to undertake strikes and other actions in defense of their legally recognized rights. At the same time, a belief that the laws are good but local officials are bad can foster illusions in the benevolent nature of the central government/party leadership. China’s premier likes to be called “Uncle Wen,” as he cultivates an avuncular image. It serves political stability if the workers’ anger is directed at low-level functionaries who can easily be sacrificed to assuage popular sentiment.
[TO BE CONTINUED]
Click on headline to link ot Part Two of this article.
Friday, October 01, 2010
*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Problems of Chinese Trotskyism
Click on the headline to link to the Revolutionary History Journal entry listed in the title.
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-The Communist League of China
Click on the headline to link to the Revolutionary History Journal entry listed in the title.
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-The birth of the Chinese Left Opposition
Click on the headline to link to the Revolutionary History Journal entry listed in the title.
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution: A Review
Click on the headline to link to the Revolutionary History Journal entry listed in the title.
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
*In Honor Of The Chinese Revolution Of 1949- From The Archives- The Collected Writings Of Leon Trotsky On China
Click on title to link to the Leon Trotsky Internet Archive's "Collected Writings Of Leon Trotsky On China".
Honor The Anniversary Of The Chinese Revolution, October 1, 1949
Honor The Anniversary Of The Chinese Revolution, October 1, 1949
Thursday, September 30, 2010
*All Out On October 2nd To End The Afghan And Iraq Wars And Struggle For Economic And Social Justice
Click on the headline to link to the Majority Agenda Report website for information on the aims of sponsors of the One Nation October 2, 2010 March and Rally in Washington, D.C.
Markin comment:
I have already argued in previous entries about the continuing importance of massing in Washington, D.C. on October 2nd for this event. (See, On The Question Of Organizing Anti-War Contingents For The October 2, 2010 "One Nation" Demonstrations In Washington, D.C., originally dated September 7, 2010.) Bring your own slogans and banners, but be there to really start building the long-delayed and needed divorce from one Barack Obama who has been given a pass on war issues- for no known rational reason. We anti-war militants knew, because he made it clear from the beginning what his priorities were in 2008, and he rubbed our noses in it last year. Now we need to get our priorities clear along with all the other issues. Obama- Troops Out Now!
Markin comment:
I have already argued in previous entries about the continuing importance of massing in Washington, D.C. on October 2nd for this event. (See, On The Question Of Organizing Anti-War Contingents For The October 2, 2010 "One Nation" Demonstrations In Washington, D.C., originally dated September 7, 2010.) Bring your own slogans and banners, but be there to really start building the long-delayed and needed divorce from one Barack Obama who has been given a pass on war issues- for no known rational reason. We anti-war militants knew, because he made it clear from the beginning what his priorities were in 2008, and he rubbed our noses in it last year. Now we need to get our priorities clear along with all the other issues. Obama- Troops Out Now!
* “Workers of The World Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains”-The Struggle For Trotsky's Fourth (Communist) International-From The Archives
Click on the headline to link to the Toward A History Of The Fourth International website for the article listed below.
John G. Wright
The Soviet Union at War
(August 1941)
Markin comment:
Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls, comrades, that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward
The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.
With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
John G. Wright
The Soviet Union at War
(August 1941)
Markin comment:
Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls, comrades, that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward
The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.
With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
* “Workers of The World Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains”-The Struggle For Trotsky's Fourth (Communist) International-From The Archives
Click on the headline to link to the Toward A History Of The Fourth International website for the article listed below.
James P. Cannon
A Statement on the War
December 21, 1941
Markin comment:
Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls, comrades, that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward
The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.
With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
James P. Cannon
A Statement on the War
December 21, 1941
Markin comment:
Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls, comrades, that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward
The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.
With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
*On The Question Of Organizing Anti-War Contingents For The October 2, 2010 "One Nation" Demonstrations In Washington, D.C.
Click on the headline to link to the Majority Agenda Report website for information on the aims of sponsors of the One Nation October 2, 2010 March and Rally in Washington, D.C.
Markin comment:
Last winter I went out of my way to argue, and argue strongly, for organizing our anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist forces as best we could for the March 20th anti-war rally in Washington, D.C. (See, On The Question Of Organizing For A Major National Anti-War Rally This Spring – A Commentary, dated January 30, 2010.) My motivation at that time was to stir up opposition to President Barack Obama’s then recent troop escalations in Afghanistan with a show of anti-war forces in the streets if for nothing else than to see who we really had on board, and to stick a thumb in Obama’s false anti-war credentialed eye. As I noted after the event the turnout was not as large, not nearly as large, as we could have used in order to create an effective battering ram against the Obama war policies. I believed, and argued so shortly after that rally to the effect, that it was still a worthwhile effort.
Now comes the inevitable fall campaign season, no, not the electoral sideshow 2010 Congressional elections but a labor-centered rally in Washington, D.C. on October 2nd being pushed by the NAACP, SEIU, AFL-CIO and the usual other suspects . (See the call to action from the Majority Agenda Project website below). As a perusal of the call indicates this is about jobs and other economic issues (all important, no question) but has no, none, nada, point on the struggle against Obama’s imperial war policies. I assume the sponsors, given their almost unanimous 2008 support to his candidacy, believed that they were being very “radical” by merely advocating the idea of a rally in Obama’s Washington during election time. Well, as the saying use to go back in the day, the 1960s day, a Maoist favorite aphorism as well, that is THEIR contradiction.
That, however, still begs the question of what leftists and other anti-war militants should do about the war issue at this rally. Or, for that matter, about whether we should be marching in this thing at all. I believe on that second point, which also will incorporate the first point, that we should attend as anti-war contingents linking the opposition to the Obama war policies with the one thousand and one other things that need fixing and that his Administration is patently incapable of fixing, even if it knew how to do so is which is very much up an open question these days.
As motivation for this position I would offer up most of the arguments that I made for participation in the March rally and will repost the pertinent sections below:
“In a recent blog entry, As The 2010 Anti-War Season Heats Up- A Note On "The Three Whales" For A Class Struggle Fight Against Obama’s Wars, dated January 19, 2010, I put forth a few ideas, particularly around the concept of forming anti-war soldiers and sailors solidarity committees, that the circle of anti-war militants that I work with locally are committed to pursuing this year as the struggle against War-monger-in-Chief Obama’s Afghan war policies takes shape. The elephant in the room that was missing in that laundry list of tasks enumerated in the entry was any notion of supporting a national mass anti-war rally in Washington, D.C. this spring, now scheduled, as usual, for the anniversary of the start of the Iraq war in 2003, March 20th. And there is a good and sufficient reason for that omission. The circle is split on an orientation toward that event. Thus, the comment that follows in favor of organizing for and building such an endeavor and putting some resources and energy into the event is my own personal take on the question, fair or foul.
Certainly, given the priorities listed in that previous blog entry mentioned above, it would be quite easy to walk away from serious organizing for, getting transportation for, making housing arrangements for, and the thousand and one details that go into providing a contingent for a national march or rally. Moreover, as has been argued in the circle by a number of militants, to do so for just one more garden variety of a seemingly endless (and fruitless) series of mass marches over the past several years. And normally I would agree with that analysis, especially once it became clear that the main strategy of those groups who call such national marches is to make such events the main, and exclusive, point of extra-parliamentary opposition to the war. Or worst, see these things as an effective political tool for “pressuring” politicians, especially “progressive” Democrats (if there are any left, as of late). Pleassee...
Hear me out on this one though. President Obama made his dramatic announcement for a major Afghan troop escalation on December 1, 2009. That, along with a less publicized build-up in February 2009, and the odd brigade deployed here or there since has meant that the troop totals-I will not even bother to count “contractors”, for the simple reason that who knows what those numbers really are. I don’t, do you? - are almost double those that ex-President Bush nearly had his head handed to him on a platter for in the notorious troop “surge” of 2007. And the response to Obama’s chest-thumping war-mongering. Nada. Or almost nothing, except a small demonstration in Washington on December 12th with the “usual cast of suspects” (Kucinich, McKinney, et. al) and a few hundred attendees and small local demonstrations around the country.
Now this might seem like a slam-dunk argument for wasting no more time on the spring rally tactic. And that argument is enticing. But, as a veteran of way too many of these demos, and as a militant who has spilled no small amount of ink arguing against the endless rally strategy on many previous occasions, I still like the idea of a spring march. First, because Obama needs to know that those on his left, particularly those who supported him in the 2008 election cycle are more than just passively angry at him for the Afghan troop escalation. And that is important even if the numbers do not match those of the Bush era. Secondly, those of us on the extra-parliamentary left need to see who those disenchanted Obamians are. If we are going to be successful we have to get our fair share of these left-liberals before they ditch politics altogether. And lastly, as the bikers and gang members say- “we have to show our colors”. Large or small we need to see what we look like. All those may not be individually, in the end, sufficient reasons but I will say this to finish up. Unless you plan to have an anti-war demonstration outside the gates of places like the military bases at Fort Bragg, Fort Hood, Fort Drum, and Fort Lewis in which case I will be more than happy to mark you present and accounted for you should be in Washington on March 20th. And ready to fight around the slogan – Obama- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal of all U.S./Allied Troops and Mercenaries from Iraq and Afghanistan!”
And on October 2nd too! More later.
***************
Published on Majority Agenda Project (http://majorityagendaproject.org/go)
Home > A Call to all sectors of our movements for justice and peace to mobilize for October 2
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A Call to all sectors of our movements for justice and peace to mobilize for October 2
signatories [1] || what you can do [2] || transportation [3]
The NAACP, SEIU 1199, United for Peace and Justice, the AFL-CIO, Green for All, and a broad range of civil rights, labor, peace and social justice organizations around the country are calling upon us to join them on October 2 in Washington. Leading with a demand for jobs, this will be a massive demonstration to blunt the attack from the right and to unify a majority of Americans around a hopeful and inspiring vision of our nation based on social justice, mutual respect and common values.
Come to Washington DC on October 2 for an emergency mobilization of all our forces at this critical moment before the fall elections!
•Take our government back from big oil and the banks.
•Stand up for the well-being and economic security of all our families.
•Stand up against hatred, intolerance and immigrant-bashing.
•Stand up for a society that works for all of us.
•Demand the change that we voted for in 2008.
Dear Friends,
Our country is at a crossroads. Big oil, big banks, big pharmaceuticals, the military-industrial complex and big money of all types have a stranglehold on our government and our society. Their corporate agenda has led us into an unparalleled social crisis marked by economic distress, environmental danger, unsustainable military spending and endless war.
But this is also a time of opportunity for comprehensive, mutually-reinforcing and effective solutions: building a green economy cuts harmful emissions and creates millions of desperately needed jobs; national security based on international cooperation and negotiation rather than war frees up the resources needed to keep our teachers in the classroom and maintain all essential local services; sustainable economic policies protect our environment and foster grassroots economic development. All of these goals are within our grasp and are supported by a growing majority. Together they save lives, dollars and the planet that sustains us.
Yet instead of positive solutions we see the media dominance of an aggressive, energized and reactionary movement of the right fostered by Fox News and an out-of-control talk radio establishment. Intolerance, hatred and immigrant-bashing will be the big story this fall--grabbing national attention and electing extremist candidates who will ride the coattails of that mobilization to make big gains in November and beyond. Unless …
…we all come together to create a vibrant, viable grassroots mobilization built on a vision that inspires action and commitment. That galvanizes the majority for justice and fair play. That builds a movement that involves everyone in dealing effectively with the multiple crises confronting the country.
Now is the time to give visibility to effective policies that actually address our crises of employment, health care, environmental catastrophe and a deepening war in Afghanistan and Pakistan that is draining our resources, undermining out security and killing scores of people every day.
It is critical that our social movements join together with labor and major African-American and Latino organizations to make a broad-based showing of strength.
Fortunately, the NAACP in Washington and SEIU 1199 in New York have initiated “One Nation Working Together.” Exciting meetings in New York and Washington brought together the AFL-CIO, many other labor unions, United for Peace and Justice, Green For All and over one hundred other major social change organizations. They are building a mobilization that can unify the majority around a hopeful and inspiring vision of our nation based on social justice.
The signature event of One Nation is a massive march on Washington on October 2, 2010.
They have asked all of us to join them in this major effort to move us off the sidelines of the national debate and out, onto the playing field where we can participate in the fight for the future, starting with the fall elections.
This mobilization addresses only some of the key issues that deeply concern us. But without such a mobilization, all of our efforts will be set back years if the right-wing mobilization is allowed to go unchallenged.
We call on all parts of our social movements to mobilize for the October 2 demonstration and participate in the One Nation Campaign and bring your priorities to D.C.
- The Majority Agenda Project
August 4, 2010
Markin comment:
Last winter I went out of my way to argue, and argue strongly, for organizing our anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist forces as best we could for the March 20th anti-war rally in Washington, D.C. (See, On The Question Of Organizing For A Major National Anti-War Rally This Spring – A Commentary, dated January 30, 2010.) My motivation at that time was to stir up opposition to President Barack Obama’s then recent troop escalations in Afghanistan with a show of anti-war forces in the streets if for nothing else than to see who we really had on board, and to stick a thumb in Obama’s false anti-war credentialed eye. As I noted after the event the turnout was not as large, not nearly as large, as we could have used in order to create an effective battering ram against the Obama war policies. I believed, and argued so shortly after that rally to the effect, that it was still a worthwhile effort.
Now comes the inevitable fall campaign season, no, not the electoral sideshow 2010 Congressional elections but a labor-centered rally in Washington, D.C. on October 2nd being pushed by the NAACP, SEIU, AFL-CIO and the usual other suspects . (See the call to action from the Majority Agenda Project website below). As a perusal of the call indicates this is about jobs and other economic issues (all important, no question) but has no, none, nada, point on the struggle against Obama’s imperial war policies. I assume the sponsors, given their almost unanimous 2008 support to his candidacy, believed that they were being very “radical” by merely advocating the idea of a rally in Obama’s Washington during election time. Well, as the saying use to go back in the day, the 1960s day, a Maoist favorite aphorism as well, that is THEIR contradiction.
That, however, still begs the question of what leftists and other anti-war militants should do about the war issue at this rally. Or, for that matter, about whether we should be marching in this thing at all. I believe on that second point, which also will incorporate the first point, that we should attend as anti-war contingents linking the opposition to the Obama war policies with the one thousand and one other things that need fixing and that his Administration is patently incapable of fixing, even if it knew how to do so is which is very much up an open question these days.
As motivation for this position I would offer up most of the arguments that I made for participation in the March rally and will repost the pertinent sections below:
“In a recent blog entry, As The 2010 Anti-War Season Heats Up- A Note On "The Three Whales" For A Class Struggle Fight Against Obama’s Wars, dated January 19, 2010, I put forth a few ideas, particularly around the concept of forming anti-war soldiers and sailors solidarity committees, that the circle of anti-war militants that I work with locally are committed to pursuing this year as the struggle against War-monger-in-Chief Obama’s Afghan war policies takes shape. The elephant in the room that was missing in that laundry list of tasks enumerated in the entry was any notion of supporting a national mass anti-war rally in Washington, D.C. this spring, now scheduled, as usual, for the anniversary of the start of the Iraq war in 2003, March 20th. And there is a good and sufficient reason for that omission. The circle is split on an orientation toward that event. Thus, the comment that follows in favor of organizing for and building such an endeavor and putting some resources and energy into the event is my own personal take on the question, fair or foul.
Certainly, given the priorities listed in that previous blog entry mentioned above, it would be quite easy to walk away from serious organizing for, getting transportation for, making housing arrangements for, and the thousand and one details that go into providing a contingent for a national march or rally. Moreover, as has been argued in the circle by a number of militants, to do so for just one more garden variety of a seemingly endless (and fruitless) series of mass marches over the past several years. And normally I would agree with that analysis, especially once it became clear that the main strategy of those groups who call such national marches is to make such events the main, and exclusive, point of extra-parliamentary opposition to the war. Or worst, see these things as an effective political tool for “pressuring” politicians, especially “progressive” Democrats (if there are any left, as of late). Pleassee...
Hear me out on this one though. President Obama made his dramatic announcement for a major Afghan troop escalation on December 1, 2009. That, along with a less publicized build-up in February 2009, and the odd brigade deployed here or there since has meant that the troop totals-I will not even bother to count “contractors”, for the simple reason that who knows what those numbers really are. I don’t, do you? - are almost double those that ex-President Bush nearly had his head handed to him on a platter for in the notorious troop “surge” of 2007. And the response to Obama’s chest-thumping war-mongering. Nada. Or almost nothing, except a small demonstration in Washington on December 12th with the “usual cast of suspects” (Kucinich, McKinney, et. al) and a few hundred attendees and small local demonstrations around the country.
Now this might seem like a slam-dunk argument for wasting no more time on the spring rally tactic. And that argument is enticing. But, as a veteran of way too many of these demos, and as a militant who has spilled no small amount of ink arguing against the endless rally strategy on many previous occasions, I still like the idea of a spring march. First, because Obama needs to know that those on his left, particularly those who supported him in the 2008 election cycle are more than just passively angry at him for the Afghan troop escalation. And that is important even if the numbers do not match those of the Bush era. Secondly, those of us on the extra-parliamentary left need to see who those disenchanted Obamians are. If we are going to be successful we have to get our fair share of these left-liberals before they ditch politics altogether. And lastly, as the bikers and gang members say- “we have to show our colors”. Large or small we need to see what we look like. All those may not be individually, in the end, sufficient reasons but I will say this to finish up. Unless you plan to have an anti-war demonstration outside the gates of places like the military bases at Fort Bragg, Fort Hood, Fort Drum, and Fort Lewis in which case I will be more than happy to mark you present and accounted for you should be in Washington on March 20th. And ready to fight around the slogan – Obama- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal of all U.S./Allied Troops and Mercenaries from Iraq and Afghanistan!”
And on October 2nd too! More later.
***************
Published on Majority Agenda Project (http://majorityagendaproject.org/go)
Home > A Call to all sectors of our movements for justice and peace to mobilize for October 2
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A Call to all sectors of our movements for justice and peace to mobilize for October 2
signatories [1] || what you can do [2] || transportation [3]
The NAACP, SEIU 1199, United for Peace and Justice, the AFL-CIO, Green for All, and a broad range of civil rights, labor, peace and social justice organizations around the country are calling upon us to join them on October 2 in Washington. Leading with a demand for jobs, this will be a massive demonstration to blunt the attack from the right and to unify a majority of Americans around a hopeful and inspiring vision of our nation based on social justice, mutual respect and common values.
Come to Washington DC on October 2 for an emergency mobilization of all our forces at this critical moment before the fall elections!
•Take our government back from big oil and the banks.
•Stand up for the well-being and economic security of all our families.
•Stand up against hatred, intolerance and immigrant-bashing.
•Stand up for a society that works for all of us.
•Demand the change that we voted for in 2008.
Dear Friends,
Our country is at a crossroads. Big oil, big banks, big pharmaceuticals, the military-industrial complex and big money of all types have a stranglehold on our government and our society. Their corporate agenda has led us into an unparalleled social crisis marked by economic distress, environmental danger, unsustainable military spending and endless war.
But this is also a time of opportunity for comprehensive, mutually-reinforcing and effective solutions: building a green economy cuts harmful emissions and creates millions of desperately needed jobs; national security based on international cooperation and negotiation rather than war frees up the resources needed to keep our teachers in the classroom and maintain all essential local services; sustainable economic policies protect our environment and foster grassroots economic development. All of these goals are within our grasp and are supported by a growing majority. Together they save lives, dollars and the planet that sustains us.
Yet instead of positive solutions we see the media dominance of an aggressive, energized and reactionary movement of the right fostered by Fox News and an out-of-control talk radio establishment. Intolerance, hatred and immigrant-bashing will be the big story this fall--grabbing national attention and electing extremist candidates who will ride the coattails of that mobilization to make big gains in November and beyond. Unless …
…we all come together to create a vibrant, viable grassroots mobilization built on a vision that inspires action and commitment. That galvanizes the majority for justice and fair play. That builds a movement that involves everyone in dealing effectively with the multiple crises confronting the country.
Now is the time to give visibility to effective policies that actually address our crises of employment, health care, environmental catastrophe and a deepening war in Afghanistan and Pakistan that is draining our resources, undermining out security and killing scores of people every day.
It is critical that our social movements join together with labor and major African-American and Latino organizations to make a broad-based showing of strength.
Fortunately, the NAACP in Washington and SEIU 1199 in New York have initiated “One Nation Working Together.” Exciting meetings in New York and Washington brought together the AFL-CIO, many other labor unions, United for Peace and Justice, Green For All and over one hundred other major social change organizations. They are building a mobilization that can unify the majority around a hopeful and inspiring vision of our nation based on social justice.
The signature event of One Nation is a massive march on Washington on October 2, 2010.
They have asked all of us to join them in this major effort to move us off the sidelines of the national debate and out, onto the playing field where we can participate in the fight for the future, starting with the fall elections.
This mobilization addresses only some of the key issues that deeply concern us. But without such a mobilization, all of our efforts will be set back years if the right-wing mobilization is allowed to go unchallenged.
We call on all parts of our social movements to mobilize for the October 2 demonstration and participate in the One Nation Campaign and bring your priorities to D.C.
- The Majority Agenda Project
August 4, 2010
*All Out On October 2nd To End The Afghan And Iraq Wars And Struggle For Economic And Social Justice
Click on the headline to link to the Majority Agenda Report website for information on the aims of sponsors of the One Nation October 2, 2010 March and Rally in Washington, D.C.
Markin comment:
I have already argued in previous entries about the continuing importance of massing in Washington, D.C. on October 2nd for this event. (See, On The Question Of Organizing Anti-War Contingents For The October 2, 2010 "One Nation" Demonstrations In Washington, D.C., originally dated September 7, 2010.) Bring your own slogans and banners, but be there to really start building the long-delayed and needed divorce from one Barack Obama who has been given a pass on war issues- for no known rational reason. We anti-war militants knew, because he made it clear from the beginning what his priorities were in 2008, and he rubbed our noses in it last year. Now we need to get our priorities clear along with all the other issues. Obama- Troops Out Now!
Markin comment:
I have already argued in previous entries about the continuing importance of massing in Washington, D.C. on October 2nd for this event. (See, On The Question Of Organizing Anti-War Contingents For The October 2, 2010 "One Nation" Demonstrations In Washington, D.C., originally dated September 7, 2010.) Bring your own slogans and banners, but be there to really start building the long-delayed and needed divorce from one Barack Obama who has been given a pass on war issues- for no known rational reason. We anti-war militants knew, because he made it clear from the beginning what his priorities were in 2008, and he rubbed our noses in it last year. Now we need to get our priorities clear along with all the other issues. Obama- Troops Out Now!
*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-The Dubliners' "The Molly Maguires"
Click on the title to link a YouTube film clip of the Dubliners performing The Molly Maguires.
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
******
THE DUBLINERS THE MOLLY MAGUIRES LYRICS
Make way for the Molly Maguires
They're drinkers, they're liars, but they're men
Make way for the Molly Maguires
You'll never see the likes of them again
Down the mines no sunlight shines
Those pits they're black as hell
In mud and slime they do their time
It's Paddy's prison cell
And they'll curse the day they travelled far
And drowned their tears with a jar
(Chorus)
Backs will break and muscles ache
Down there there's no time to dream
Of fields and farms, of women's arms
Just dig that bloody seam
But they'll break their bodies underground
Who'll dare to push them around
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
******
THE DUBLINERS THE MOLLY MAGUIRES LYRICS
Make way for the Molly Maguires
They're drinkers, they're liars, but they're men
Make way for the Molly Maguires
You'll never see the likes of them again
Down the mines no sunlight shines
Those pits they're black as hell
In mud and slime they do their time
It's Paddy's prison cell
And they'll curse the day they travelled far
And drowned their tears with a jar
(Chorus)
Backs will break and muscles ache
Down there there's no time to dream
Of fields and farms, of women's arms
Just dig that bloody seam
But they'll break their bodies underground
Who'll dare to push them around
*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-Rory Gallagher's "The Banker's Blues"
Click on the title to link a YouTube film clip of Rory Gallagher performing The Banker's Blues.
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
*********
Markin comment on The Banker's Blues:
Hey, I am only the messenger on this one. I take no personal, political or social responsibility for the lyrics. Well, except maybe a little on the personal front with my own lovin' companion. Okay? Also I was looking for Big Bill Broonzy's version of the song but couldn't find it.
Rory Gallagher
Banker's Blues lyrics
If you got money in the bank,
Don't let your woman draw it out,
Cause she'll take all your money...and,
Then she'll kick you out.
I once had money and a fast Cadillac car,
But I made one big mistake, let my baby know where they are,
And she took all my possessions...and,
Then she threw me out.
Now young men, heed my advice,
I'll tell you once, I may not tell you twice,
Keep an eye on your old lady anytime that she goes steppin' out.
There's only one woman that I hate more,
You know who that is, why that's my mother-in-law,
My baby's pretty fast but her mother's even faster on the draw.
My baby, my little baby I believe she's gonna jump'n shout,
And I walk down to the bank,
And I draw all of my money out.
Well you got money in the bank,
Don't let your woman draw it out,
Cause she'll take all your money...and,
Then she'll throw you out.
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
*********
Markin comment on The Banker's Blues:
Hey, I am only the messenger on this one. I take no personal, political or social responsibility for the lyrics. Well, except maybe a little on the personal front with my own lovin' companion. Okay? Also I was looking for Big Bill Broonzy's version of the song but couldn't find it.
Rory Gallagher
Banker's Blues lyrics
If you got money in the bank,
Don't let your woman draw it out,
Cause she'll take all your money...and,
Then she'll kick you out.
I once had money and a fast Cadillac car,
But I made one big mistake, let my baby know where they are,
And she took all my possessions...and,
Then she threw me out.
Now young men, heed my advice,
I'll tell you once, I may not tell you twice,
Keep an eye on your old lady anytime that she goes steppin' out.
There's only one woman that I hate more,
You know who that is, why that's my mother-in-law,
My baby's pretty fast but her mother's even faster on the draw.
My baby, my little baby I believe she's gonna jump'n shout,
And I walk down to the bank,
And I draw all of my money out.
Well you got money in the bank,
Don't let your woman draw it out,
Cause she'll take all your money...and,
Then she'll throw you out.
* “Workers of The World Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains”-The Struggle For Trotsky's Fourth (Communist) International-From The Archives
Click on the headline to link to the Toward A History Of The Fourth International website for the article listed below.
Manifesto of the Fourth International
For Defense of the Soviet Union
August 1941
Markin comment:
Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls, comrades, that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward
The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.
With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
Manifesto of the Fourth International
For Defense of the Soviet Union
August 1941
Markin comment:
Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls, comrades, that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward
The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.
With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
Monday, September 27, 2010
* “Workers of The World Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains”-The Struggle For Trotsky's Fourth (Communist) International-From The Archives
Click on the headline to link to the Toward A History Of The Fourth International website for the article listed below.
Leon Trotsky
In Defense of Marxism
From a Scratch –
To the Danger of Gangrene
(January 1940)
(Part 1)
Markin comment:
Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls, comrades, that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward
The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.
With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
Leon Trotsky
In Defense of Marxism
From a Scratch –
To the Danger of Gangrene
(January 1940)
(Part 1)
Markin comment:
Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls, comrades, that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward
The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.
With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
Sunday, September 26, 2010
*All Out On October 2nd To End The Afghan And Iraq Wars And Struggle For Economic And Social Justice
Click on the headline to link to the Majority Agenda Report website for information on the aims of sponsors of the One Nation October 2, 2010 March and Rally in Washington, D.C.
Markin comment:
I have already argued in previous entries about the continuing importance of massing in Washington, D.C. on October 2nd for this event. (See, On The Question Of Organizing Anti-War Contingents For The October 2, 2010 "One Nation" Demonstrations In Washington, D.C., originally dated September 7, 2010.) Bring your own slogans and banners, but be there to really start building the long-delayed and needed divorce from one Barack Obama who has been given a pass on war issues- for no known rational reason. We anti-war militants knew, because he made it clear from the beginning what his priorities were in 2008, and he rubbed our noses in it last year. Now we need to get our priorities clear along with all the other issues. Obama- Troops Out Now!
Markin comment:
I have already argued in previous entries about the continuing importance of massing in Washington, D.C. on October 2nd for this event. (See, On The Question Of Organizing Anti-War Contingents For The October 2, 2010 "One Nation" Demonstrations In Washington, D.C., originally dated September 7, 2010.) Bring your own slogans and banners, but be there to really start building the long-delayed and needed divorce from one Barack Obama who has been given a pass on war issues- for no known rational reason. We anti-war militants knew, because he made it clear from the beginning what his priorities were in 2008, and he rubbed our noses in it last year. Now we need to get our priorities clear along with all the other issues. Obama- Troops Out Now!
* “Workers of The World Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains”-The Struggle For Trotsky's Fourth (Communist) International-From The Archives
Click on the headline to link to the Toward A History Of The Fourth International website for the article listed below.
James Burnham
Science and Style
A Reply to Comrade Trotsky
(February 1940)
Markin comment:
Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls, comrades, that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward
The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.
With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
James Burnham
Science and Style
A Reply to Comrade Trotsky
(February 1940)
Markin comment:
Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls, comrades, that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward
The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.
With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
Saturday, September 25, 2010
*Films To While Away The Class Struggle By- A Slice Of Cold War History- “The Real Story Of Charlie Wilson’s War”- A Guest Review-An Encore
Click on the title to link to a YouTube film clip of the commercial movie trailer version of Charlie Wilson's War.
Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some films that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. In the future I expect to do the same for books under a similar heading.-Markin
Markin comment: September 25, 2010
I have recently viewed the History Channel's 2003 production, The Real Story of Charlie Wilson's War. That docu-drama effort basically follows the outline of the commercial film except that there you get interviews, self-serving, self-justifying interviews of course, in the post-9/11 period from the main villains of the piece. Thus, on this one I stand by my comments directly below and the thrust of the comments from the guest reviewer's review of the commercial film.
Markin comment:
The other day I made a short comment on another political blog after viewing this film and reading a long review that gave the real details behind the CIA efforts and the long-term political implications behind the maneuvers that Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson used to get secret appropriations to fund the mujahadeens in Afghanistan back in the early 1980s, the previous heyday of American covert operations around the world, during the early years of the Reagan administration. In that comment I noted that the reviewer made all the key points about the political meaning of this film, including the obvious ones that there was disturbing absence of context about who these 8th century-loving mujahadeen “allies” were and, more importantly, their political program (other than the obvious anti-Soviet one) that Congressman Wilson was so earnestly attempting to help and why the then legally-constituted secular government in Kabul sought out help from the Soviets against this threat. But those are merely just ‘little’ picky points on my part now, right?
I would only add that in politics, any kind of politics, as the American government now has been learning under successive Republican and Democratic administrations in relationship to Afghanistan under different circumstances than those portrayed in the film- the enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend. I believe that you learn that basic lesson in your youthful schoolyard days, no later. Ouch! The only other point worth noting is that Congressman Wilson surely deserved the citation from the American governmental “combined intelligences services” for his services on their behalf in long ago Afghanistan. However, the rest of us are still living with the fall-out from his “innocent” escapades.
******
Workers Vanguard No. 921
26 September 2008
We Said “Hail Red Army in Afghanistan!”
Charlie Wilson’s War Was the ISO’s War
After spending decades in bed with the most vile anti-Communist and woman-hating forces around the world—from Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan and Iran to clerical reactionary Polish Solidarność and Tibetan monks—the International Socialist Organization (ISO) has suddenly decided it was time for a morning-after pill. A September 9 Web posting by the ISO is promoting a petition by faculty at the University of Texas objecting “to the establishment of a chair in Pakistan studies named for former Texas congressman and misguided cold warrior Charlie Wilson.” Democratic Congressman Wilson played a key role in winning billions in CIA funding and high-tech weaponry for the Afghan mujahedin fighting the Soviet Red Army in the 1980s. For its part, the ISO would have preferred a less “misguided” Cold Warrior.
Earlier this year, in a column by Joe Allen (Socialist Worker, 25 January), the ISO disparaged the movie Charlie Wilson’s War, which, the ISO complains, paid “a fawning homage to America’s ‘clandestine services’,” who were “recruiting largely reactionary Islamic forces to the mujahedeen.” Allen’s article, “Charlie Wilson’s Not-So-Good War,” declares that “Hollywood’s liberals portray the Afghanistan war as a great triumph in the struggle for freedom, when it should be seen as another savage war for empire in which the people of Afghanistan continue to be the prime targets.” Reading these articles, one wouldn’t know that the ISO was for the Afghan mujahedin long before they were against them.
Well before the Soviet intervention into Afghanistan in December 1979, Washington started funneling arms to the mujahedin from the moment the Soviet-allied People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) came to power in April 1978 in what was essentially a left-wing military coup with popular support among intellectuals and government workers. The PDPA embarked on a program of reforms that included canceling peasant debts, carrying out land redistribution, prohibiting forced marriages and lowering the bride price to a nominal sum. They made schooling compulsory for girls and launched literacy programs for women, building 600 schools in just over a year. These measures threatened the mullahs’ stranglehold on social and economic life and immediately provoked a murderous backlash. The earliest bloody confrontations were over women’s literacy, as PDPA cadres and women literacy workers were driven from villages and killed.
The PDPA could not quell the mujahedin insurgency, which was heavily backed by the U.S., Pakistan and Iran (where the Islamic theocracy under Ayatollah Khomeini had come to power in early 1979). After ignoring repeated requests for military aid, including troops, the Soviet Union, fearing the PDPA regime was about to collapse, finally sent in 100,000 soldiers to combat the Islamic reactionaries. The imperialists seized on the Red Army intervention to launch a renewed Cold War drive. As the CIA undertook its biggest covert operation ever, Afghanistan became the front line of the imperialists’ relentless drive to destroy the Soviet Union. The threat of a CIA-backed Islamic takeover on the USSR’s southern flank posed pointblank unconditional military defense of the Soviet degenerated workers state. As we wrote at the time:
“A victory for the Islamic-feudalist insurgency in Afghanistan will not only mean a hostile, imperialist-allied state on the USSR’s southern border. It will mean the extermination of the Afghan left and the reimposition of feudal barbarism—the veil, the bride price. Moreover, the Soviet military occupation raises the possibility of a social revolution in this wretchedly backward country, a possibility which did not exist before.”
—Spartacist (English-language edition) No. 29, Summer 1980
We unambiguously declared, “Hail Red Army! Extend the gains of the October Revolution to Afghan peoples!” For their part, the ISO howled with the imperialist wolves when the Soviets entered Afghanistan, and popped champagne corks when the Red Army was withdrawn nine years later. Since Charlie Wilson’s war was the ISO’s war, we are left wondering, “What’s their beef?” The exposures of CIA waterboarding, extraordinary rendition and secret prison black sites may make being on the same side as the CIA torturers a bit awkward. Or perhaps lauding the virtues of the veterans of the war against the Red Army isn’t the kick it was before the September 11 attacks. Or it just could be that the ISO—historically allied with the international tendency led by the late Tony Cliff—is irritated that no credit is being given to their role in drumming up support for the CIA-backed cutthroats at the height of Cold War II. Maybe a “Tony Cliff chair” is what they are after.
Screaming “Troops Out of Afghanistan” was not enough for the ISO’s then-parent group, the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP). SWP leader Paul Foot succeeded in provoking an anti-Soviet frenzy on the floor of Parliament, by right-wing Tories and Labour Party “lefts” alike, through incendiary “exposés” in his Daily Mirror column of the possibility that British meat—“our beef”—exported to the Soviet Union might be sent to Soviet soldiers serving in Afghanistan.
Today, the ISO calls Charlie Wilson’s War “thoroughly reactionary.” There is, for example, the scene where wealthy right-wing socialite Joanne Herring, played by Julia Roberts, tells Wilson, played by Tom Hanks, “I want you to deliver such a crushing defeat to the Soviets that Communism crumbles.” But such was exactly the position of the ISO. When Soviet forces pulled out of Afghanistan in 1988-89, in a futile attempt by the Kremlin Stalinist bureaucracy to appease the imperialists, the ISO gloated: “We welcome the defeat of the Russians in Afghanistan. It will give heart to all those inside the USSR and in Eastern Europe who want to break the rule of Stalin’s heirs” (Socialist Worker, May 1988). Three years later, the British SWP exulted: “Communism has collapsed…. It is a fact that should have every socialist rejoicing” (Socialist Worker [Britain], 31 August 1991). The ISO could have scripted the lines for crazed anti-Communist Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser under Democrat Jimmy Carter and today a foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama, when he ranted: “What was more important in the world view of history? The Taliban or the fall of the Soviet Empire? A few stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”
Charlie Wilson’s War is a thoroughly reactionary movie. The film peddles anti-Soviet lies discredited long ago, such as that Red Army troops planted toys containing bombs on roadsides in order to maim Afghan children. Nowhere does the film even hint that long before the Red Army intervention, the U.S. was funneling aid to the mullahs who rose up against the Afghan government’s modest reforms for the brutally enslaved women. Ronald Reagan’s “freedom fighters,” with whom the ISO sided, were exemplified by one Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the largest recipient of American aid, who had a penchant for throwing acid at the faces of unveiled women. Though the mujahedin fought to maintain women in purdah (seclusion), forced them to wear the suffocating head-to-toe burka and deprived them of education and medical care, the film ludicrously shows unveiled women mixing freely with men in refugee camps.
Meanwhile, Jonathan Neale of the ISO’s erstwhile comrades of the British SWP (they split in 2001) has suddenly discovered, doubtless after much research, that “feminism is now very weak in Afghanistan”! The cause? “In the 1980s Afghan feminist women supported the Russians and their violent occupation” (Socialist Worker [Britain], 19 January). The “lesson for today,” Neale lectures, is “if the left allies with the invader, the eventual resistance will hate the left.” In blaming the present condition of Afghan women on the Soviet Union and those women who fought alongside the Red Army, the SWP sounds much like the Southern “redeemers” after the U.S. Civil War who condemned former slaves for joining with the Union Army as it marched through the South.
The Soviet military intervention into Afghanistan was one of the few genuinely progressive acts carried out by the Soviet Stalinist bureaucracy, opening the vista of social liberation to the downtrodden Afghan peoples. It underlined the Trotskyist understanding that despite its degeneration under a Stalinist bureaucratic caste, the Soviet Union remained a workers state embodying the historic gains of the October Revolution of 1917, centrally a planned economy and collectivized property. A Red Army victory posed the extension of the social gains of the October Revolution to Afghanistan through a prolonged occupation and the country’s integration into the Soviet system. The Red Army troops, many of them recruits from Soviet Central Asia, who fought against the CIA-backed mujahedin genuinely believed they were fulfilling their internationalist duty. And so they were!
This military intervention in defense of the Soviet degenerated workers state not only opened up the possibility of tremendous gains for the hideously oppressed Afghan peoples but offered the prospect of reanimating the Bolshevik program of proletarian revolutionary internationalism in the Soviet Union. As we stressed at the time, a genuinely internationalist perspective toward Afghanistan required a proletarian political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracy and return the Soviet Union to the road of Lenin and Trotsky.
By the mid 1980s the Red Army had the mujahedin on the run. But as we warned from the outset, the Kremlin bureaucracy cut a deal with the imperialists and pulled out. When in 1988-89 Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev withdrew Soviet forces from Afghanistan, we denounced this as a crime against both the Afghan and Soviet peoples. We stressed to Soviet workers and soldiers that it was far better to defeat counterrevolution in Afghanistan than to confront it in Leningrad. Events have bitterly and amply verified our warning that the Soviet pullout from Afghanistan would mean a bloodbath for women and leftists. And the Stalinist bureaucracy’s treachery in Afghanistan was the direct precursor to the 1991-92 capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union, destroying the homeland of the October Revolution.
As the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan, we extended an offer to the beleaguered PDPA regime to organize international brigades to “fight to the death” against the mujahedin cutthroats. This offer was refused, but the Partisan Defense Committee—a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League—took up the PDPA’s appeal to organize an international aid campaign for the besieged city of Jalalabad, raising some $44,000. For the next three years, the Kabul government forces, especially the women’s militias, fought valiantly, but were finally overrun by the U.S.-backed fundamentalists. A few years later, the Taliban, born and bred under the patronage of Pakistan’s ISI secret police and supported by the U.S., emerged as the strongest of the mujahedin factions in the internecine feuding that broke out after the fall of the PDPA regime, coming to power in Afghanistan in 1996.
The ISO greeted the Taliban’s rise to power by grotesquely declaring, “Tragically, the Taliban has no answer to the terrible crisis of the country”! The Cliffites have always displayed a certain penchant for Islamic fundamentalism. As the Shi’ite mullahs fought for power in Iran in 1979, we put forward a program for proletarian revolution, declaring: “Down With the Shah! Down With the Mullahs! Workers Must Lead Iranian Revolution!” In contrast, the ISO ran laudatory articles on the mullahs’ “mass movement” with headlines like, “The Form—Religious, the Spirit—Revolution!” In 1994, the Cliffites published a pamphlet by SWP “theoretician” Chris Harman titled, The Prophet and the Proletariat, complete with a green cover and Arabic-looking lettering, while the British SWP declared, “Islamists have now replaced socialists and the left in terms of being in the frontline against the state in many countries” (Socialist Worker [Britain], 20 August 1994).
The Cliffites’ genuflection before religious reaction is not a bizarre aberration. They have historically sided with any and all counterrevolutionary forces against the Soviet Union, no matter how reactionary. In this, they stand completely in line with U.S. imperialism, which, notwithstanding its current reactionary crusade against Islamic fundamentalism, fostered the growth of Islamic reaction for decades as a bulwark against “godless” Communism and even secular nationalism. In 1950, John Foster Dulles, who was later Secretary of State during the Eisenhower presidency, wrote: “The religions of the East are deeply rooted and have many precious values. Their spiritual beliefs cannot be reconciled with Communist atheism and materialism. That creates a common bond between us, and our task is to find it and develop it.”
Just as it was obligatory to fight for the unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union and East European deformed workers states, so it is the elementary duty of workers around the world to defend the remaining deformed workers states of China, Cuba, Vietnam and North Korea. Today, the ISO continues to fight Charlie Wilson’s war. In “Tyrannies That Ruled in the Name of Socialism” (Socialist Worker, 28 August), Paul D’Amato reasserts the ISO’s “Where We Stand” call for capitalist counterrevolution: “China and Cuba, like the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, have nothing to do with socialism. They are state capitalist regimes.” The ISO sides with the forces of “democratic” imperialism and capitalist counterrevolution, reprinting in Socialist Worker online (27 August) a piece by Dave Zirin, a regular contributor to that paper, that chides the bourgeois media for insufficient China-bashing during the Olympics and condemning them for supposedly not asking “why the State Department last April took China off its list of nations that commit human rights violations.”
As Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky taught, you can’t win new gains without defending those already won. The capitalist counterrevolution welcomed by the imperialists and their social-democratic lackeys like the ISO was a world-historic defeat for the international proletariat, creating a “one superpower” world where the U.S. imperialists feel they can run roughshod over the world. It paved the way for the brutal wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, where women continue to be enslaved. U.S. out of Iraq and Afghanistan! Defeat U.S. imperialism through workers revolution! For new October Revolutions!
Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some films that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. In the future I expect to do the same for books under a similar heading.-Markin
Markin comment: September 25, 2010
I have recently viewed the History Channel's 2003 production, The Real Story of Charlie Wilson's War. That docu-drama effort basically follows the outline of the commercial film except that there you get interviews, self-serving, self-justifying interviews of course, in the post-9/11 period from the main villains of the piece. Thus, on this one I stand by my comments directly below and the thrust of the comments from the guest reviewer's review of the commercial film.
Markin comment:
The other day I made a short comment on another political blog after viewing this film and reading a long review that gave the real details behind the CIA efforts and the long-term political implications behind the maneuvers that Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson used to get secret appropriations to fund the mujahadeens in Afghanistan back in the early 1980s, the previous heyday of American covert operations around the world, during the early years of the Reagan administration. In that comment I noted that the reviewer made all the key points about the political meaning of this film, including the obvious ones that there was disturbing absence of context about who these 8th century-loving mujahadeen “allies” were and, more importantly, their political program (other than the obvious anti-Soviet one) that Congressman Wilson was so earnestly attempting to help and why the then legally-constituted secular government in Kabul sought out help from the Soviets against this threat. But those are merely just ‘little’ picky points on my part now, right?
I would only add that in politics, any kind of politics, as the American government now has been learning under successive Republican and Democratic administrations in relationship to Afghanistan under different circumstances than those portrayed in the film- the enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend. I believe that you learn that basic lesson in your youthful schoolyard days, no later. Ouch! The only other point worth noting is that Congressman Wilson surely deserved the citation from the American governmental “combined intelligences services” for his services on their behalf in long ago Afghanistan. However, the rest of us are still living with the fall-out from his “innocent” escapades.
******
Workers Vanguard No. 921
26 September 2008
We Said “Hail Red Army in Afghanistan!”
Charlie Wilson’s War Was the ISO’s War
After spending decades in bed with the most vile anti-Communist and woman-hating forces around the world—from Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan and Iran to clerical reactionary Polish Solidarność and Tibetan monks—the International Socialist Organization (ISO) has suddenly decided it was time for a morning-after pill. A September 9 Web posting by the ISO is promoting a petition by faculty at the University of Texas objecting “to the establishment of a chair in Pakistan studies named for former Texas congressman and misguided cold warrior Charlie Wilson.” Democratic Congressman Wilson played a key role in winning billions in CIA funding and high-tech weaponry for the Afghan mujahedin fighting the Soviet Red Army in the 1980s. For its part, the ISO would have preferred a less “misguided” Cold Warrior.
Earlier this year, in a column by Joe Allen (Socialist Worker, 25 January), the ISO disparaged the movie Charlie Wilson’s War, which, the ISO complains, paid “a fawning homage to America’s ‘clandestine services’,” who were “recruiting largely reactionary Islamic forces to the mujahedeen.” Allen’s article, “Charlie Wilson’s Not-So-Good War,” declares that “Hollywood’s liberals portray the Afghanistan war as a great triumph in the struggle for freedom, when it should be seen as another savage war for empire in which the people of Afghanistan continue to be the prime targets.” Reading these articles, one wouldn’t know that the ISO was for the Afghan mujahedin long before they were against them.
Well before the Soviet intervention into Afghanistan in December 1979, Washington started funneling arms to the mujahedin from the moment the Soviet-allied People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) came to power in April 1978 in what was essentially a left-wing military coup with popular support among intellectuals and government workers. The PDPA embarked on a program of reforms that included canceling peasant debts, carrying out land redistribution, prohibiting forced marriages and lowering the bride price to a nominal sum. They made schooling compulsory for girls and launched literacy programs for women, building 600 schools in just over a year. These measures threatened the mullahs’ stranglehold on social and economic life and immediately provoked a murderous backlash. The earliest bloody confrontations were over women’s literacy, as PDPA cadres and women literacy workers were driven from villages and killed.
The PDPA could not quell the mujahedin insurgency, which was heavily backed by the U.S., Pakistan and Iran (where the Islamic theocracy under Ayatollah Khomeini had come to power in early 1979). After ignoring repeated requests for military aid, including troops, the Soviet Union, fearing the PDPA regime was about to collapse, finally sent in 100,000 soldiers to combat the Islamic reactionaries. The imperialists seized on the Red Army intervention to launch a renewed Cold War drive. As the CIA undertook its biggest covert operation ever, Afghanistan became the front line of the imperialists’ relentless drive to destroy the Soviet Union. The threat of a CIA-backed Islamic takeover on the USSR’s southern flank posed pointblank unconditional military defense of the Soviet degenerated workers state. As we wrote at the time:
“A victory for the Islamic-feudalist insurgency in Afghanistan will not only mean a hostile, imperialist-allied state on the USSR’s southern border. It will mean the extermination of the Afghan left and the reimposition of feudal barbarism—the veil, the bride price. Moreover, the Soviet military occupation raises the possibility of a social revolution in this wretchedly backward country, a possibility which did not exist before.”
—Spartacist (English-language edition) No. 29, Summer 1980
We unambiguously declared, “Hail Red Army! Extend the gains of the October Revolution to Afghan peoples!” For their part, the ISO howled with the imperialist wolves when the Soviets entered Afghanistan, and popped champagne corks when the Red Army was withdrawn nine years later. Since Charlie Wilson’s war was the ISO’s war, we are left wondering, “What’s their beef?” The exposures of CIA waterboarding, extraordinary rendition and secret prison black sites may make being on the same side as the CIA torturers a bit awkward. Or perhaps lauding the virtues of the veterans of the war against the Red Army isn’t the kick it was before the September 11 attacks. Or it just could be that the ISO—historically allied with the international tendency led by the late Tony Cliff—is irritated that no credit is being given to their role in drumming up support for the CIA-backed cutthroats at the height of Cold War II. Maybe a “Tony Cliff chair” is what they are after.
Screaming “Troops Out of Afghanistan” was not enough for the ISO’s then-parent group, the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP). SWP leader Paul Foot succeeded in provoking an anti-Soviet frenzy on the floor of Parliament, by right-wing Tories and Labour Party “lefts” alike, through incendiary “exposés” in his Daily Mirror column of the possibility that British meat—“our beef”—exported to the Soviet Union might be sent to Soviet soldiers serving in Afghanistan.
Today, the ISO calls Charlie Wilson’s War “thoroughly reactionary.” There is, for example, the scene where wealthy right-wing socialite Joanne Herring, played by Julia Roberts, tells Wilson, played by Tom Hanks, “I want you to deliver such a crushing defeat to the Soviets that Communism crumbles.” But such was exactly the position of the ISO. When Soviet forces pulled out of Afghanistan in 1988-89, in a futile attempt by the Kremlin Stalinist bureaucracy to appease the imperialists, the ISO gloated: “We welcome the defeat of the Russians in Afghanistan. It will give heart to all those inside the USSR and in Eastern Europe who want to break the rule of Stalin’s heirs” (Socialist Worker, May 1988). Three years later, the British SWP exulted: “Communism has collapsed…. It is a fact that should have every socialist rejoicing” (Socialist Worker [Britain], 31 August 1991). The ISO could have scripted the lines for crazed anti-Communist Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser under Democrat Jimmy Carter and today a foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama, when he ranted: “What was more important in the world view of history? The Taliban or the fall of the Soviet Empire? A few stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”
Charlie Wilson’s War is a thoroughly reactionary movie. The film peddles anti-Soviet lies discredited long ago, such as that Red Army troops planted toys containing bombs on roadsides in order to maim Afghan children. Nowhere does the film even hint that long before the Red Army intervention, the U.S. was funneling aid to the mullahs who rose up against the Afghan government’s modest reforms for the brutally enslaved women. Ronald Reagan’s “freedom fighters,” with whom the ISO sided, were exemplified by one Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the largest recipient of American aid, who had a penchant for throwing acid at the faces of unveiled women. Though the mujahedin fought to maintain women in purdah (seclusion), forced them to wear the suffocating head-to-toe burka and deprived them of education and medical care, the film ludicrously shows unveiled women mixing freely with men in refugee camps.
Meanwhile, Jonathan Neale of the ISO’s erstwhile comrades of the British SWP (they split in 2001) has suddenly discovered, doubtless after much research, that “feminism is now very weak in Afghanistan”! The cause? “In the 1980s Afghan feminist women supported the Russians and their violent occupation” (Socialist Worker [Britain], 19 January). The “lesson for today,” Neale lectures, is “if the left allies with the invader, the eventual resistance will hate the left.” In blaming the present condition of Afghan women on the Soviet Union and those women who fought alongside the Red Army, the SWP sounds much like the Southern “redeemers” after the U.S. Civil War who condemned former slaves for joining with the Union Army as it marched through the South.
The Soviet military intervention into Afghanistan was one of the few genuinely progressive acts carried out by the Soviet Stalinist bureaucracy, opening the vista of social liberation to the downtrodden Afghan peoples. It underlined the Trotskyist understanding that despite its degeneration under a Stalinist bureaucratic caste, the Soviet Union remained a workers state embodying the historic gains of the October Revolution of 1917, centrally a planned economy and collectivized property. A Red Army victory posed the extension of the social gains of the October Revolution to Afghanistan through a prolonged occupation and the country’s integration into the Soviet system. The Red Army troops, many of them recruits from Soviet Central Asia, who fought against the CIA-backed mujahedin genuinely believed they were fulfilling their internationalist duty. And so they were!
This military intervention in defense of the Soviet degenerated workers state not only opened up the possibility of tremendous gains for the hideously oppressed Afghan peoples but offered the prospect of reanimating the Bolshevik program of proletarian revolutionary internationalism in the Soviet Union. As we stressed at the time, a genuinely internationalist perspective toward Afghanistan required a proletarian political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracy and return the Soviet Union to the road of Lenin and Trotsky.
By the mid 1980s the Red Army had the mujahedin on the run. But as we warned from the outset, the Kremlin bureaucracy cut a deal with the imperialists and pulled out. When in 1988-89 Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev withdrew Soviet forces from Afghanistan, we denounced this as a crime against both the Afghan and Soviet peoples. We stressed to Soviet workers and soldiers that it was far better to defeat counterrevolution in Afghanistan than to confront it in Leningrad. Events have bitterly and amply verified our warning that the Soviet pullout from Afghanistan would mean a bloodbath for women and leftists. And the Stalinist bureaucracy’s treachery in Afghanistan was the direct precursor to the 1991-92 capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union, destroying the homeland of the October Revolution.
As the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan, we extended an offer to the beleaguered PDPA regime to organize international brigades to “fight to the death” against the mujahedin cutthroats. This offer was refused, but the Partisan Defense Committee—a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League—took up the PDPA’s appeal to organize an international aid campaign for the besieged city of Jalalabad, raising some $44,000. For the next three years, the Kabul government forces, especially the women’s militias, fought valiantly, but were finally overrun by the U.S.-backed fundamentalists. A few years later, the Taliban, born and bred under the patronage of Pakistan’s ISI secret police and supported by the U.S., emerged as the strongest of the mujahedin factions in the internecine feuding that broke out after the fall of the PDPA regime, coming to power in Afghanistan in 1996.
The ISO greeted the Taliban’s rise to power by grotesquely declaring, “Tragically, the Taliban has no answer to the terrible crisis of the country”! The Cliffites have always displayed a certain penchant for Islamic fundamentalism. As the Shi’ite mullahs fought for power in Iran in 1979, we put forward a program for proletarian revolution, declaring: “Down With the Shah! Down With the Mullahs! Workers Must Lead Iranian Revolution!” In contrast, the ISO ran laudatory articles on the mullahs’ “mass movement” with headlines like, “The Form—Religious, the Spirit—Revolution!” In 1994, the Cliffites published a pamphlet by SWP “theoretician” Chris Harman titled, The Prophet and the Proletariat, complete with a green cover and Arabic-looking lettering, while the British SWP declared, “Islamists have now replaced socialists and the left in terms of being in the frontline against the state in many countries” (Socialist Worker [Britain], 20 August 1994).
The Cliffites’ genuflection before religious reaction is not a bizarre aberration. They have historically sided with any and all counterrevolutionary forces against the Soviet Union, no matter how reactionary. In this, they stand completely in line with U.S. imperialism, which, notwithstanding its current reactionary crusade against Islamic fundamentalism, fostered the growth of Islamic reaction for decades as a bulwark against “godless” Communism and even secular nationalism. In 1950, John Foster Dulles, who was later Secretary of State during the Eisenhower presidency, wrote: “The religions of the East are deeply rooted and have many precious values. Their spiritual beliefs cannot be reconciled with Communist atheism and materialism. That creates a common bond between us, and our task is to find it and develop it.”
Just as it was obligatory to fight for the unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union and East European deformed workers states, so it is the elementary duty of workers around the world to defend the remaining deformed workers states of China, Cuba, Vietnam and North Korea. Today, the ISO continues to fight Charlie Wilson’s war. In “Tyrannies That Ruled in the Name of Socialism” (Socialist Worker, 28 August), Paul D’Amato reasserts the ISO’s “Where We Stand” call for capitalist counterrevolution: “China and Cuba, like the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, have nothing to do with socialism. They are state capitalist regimes.” The ISO sides with the forces of “democratic” imperialism and capitalist counterrevolution, reprinting in Socialist Worker online (27 August) a piece by Dave Zirin, a regular contributor to that paper, that chides the bourgeois media for insufficient China-bashing during the Olympics and condemning them for supposedly not asking “why the State Department last April took China off its list of nations that commit human rights violations.”
As Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky taught, you can’t win new gains without defending those already won. The capitalist counterrevolution welcomed by the imperialists and their social-democratic lackeys like the ISO was a world-historic defeat for the international proletariat, creating a “one superpower” world where the U.S. imperialists feel they can run roughshod over the world. It paved the way for the brutal wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, where women continue to be enslaved. U.S. out of Iraq and Afghanistan! Defeat U.S. imperialism through workers revolution! For new October Revolutions!
* “Workers of The World Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains”-The Struggle For Trotsky's Fourth (Communist) International-From The Archives
Click on the headline to link to the Toward A History Of The Fourth International website for the article listed below.
Resolution on Russia:
A Statement of Policy by the Political Committee of the Socialist Workers Party
Markin comment:
Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls, comrades, that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward
The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.
With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
Resolution on Russia:
A Statement of Policy by the Political Committee of the Socialist Workers Party
Markin comment:
Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls, comrades, that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward
The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.
With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
Friday, September 24, 2010
*All Out On October 2nd To End The Afghan And Iraq Wars And Struggle For Economic And Social Justice
Click on the headline to link to the Majority Agenda Report website for information on the aims of sponsors of the One Nation October 2, 2010 March and Rally in Washington, D.C.
Markin comment:
I have already argued in previous entries about the continuing importance of massing in Washington, D.C. on October 2nd for this event. (See, On The Question Of Organizing Anti-War Contingents For The October 2, 2010 "One Nation" Demonstrations In Washington, D.C., originally dated September 7, 2010.) Bring your own slogans and banners, but be there to really start building the long-delayed and needed divorce from one Barack Obama who has been given a pass on war issues- for no known rational reason. We anti-war militants knew, because he made it clear from the beginning what his priorities were in 2008, and he rubbed our noses in it last year. Now we need to get our priorities clear along with all the other issues. Obama- Troops Out Now!
Markin comment:
I have already argued in previous entries about the continuing importance of massing in Washington, D.C. on October 2nd for this event. (See, On The Question Of Organizing Anti-War Contingents For The October 2, 2010 "One Nation" Demonstrations In Washington, D.C., originally dated September 7, 2010.) Bring your own slogans and banners, but be there to really start building the long-delayed and needed divorce from one Barack Obama who has been given a pass on war issues- for no known rational reason. We anti-war militants knew, because he made it clear from the beginning what his priorities were in 2008, and he rubbed our noses in it last year. Now we need to get our priorities clear along with all the other issues. Obama- Troops Out Now!
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