Markin comment:
The following is an article from an archival issue of Women and Revolution, Summer 1977, that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of Women and Revolution during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
**********
The Rise and Fall of Chiang Ching
by Joseph SeymourWitke, Roxane.
Comrade Chiang Ch'ing.
Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1977.
Few recent books are at once so objectively significant and so utterly intrinsically trivial as Comrade Chiang Ch'ing. In the summer of 1972, American feminist academic Roxane Witke was given 60 hours of exclusive interviews with Chiang Ching; this was by far the longest that any leading Chinese Communist had spoken to a Western writer since the 1930's. This in itself should have made Comrade Chiang Ch'ing a historical¬ly important document.
Almost immediately after the interviews were given, they became a major focus of Peking's venomous cliquism. It was widely reported that Mao was furious at his wife for revealing closely guarded party and state secrets to an outsider. Witke partially corroborates these reports. She recounts that the Chinese govern¬ment, through its UN mission, pressured her to abandon her projected biography of Chiang Ching, even offering her money not to publish it!
Comrade Chiang Ch'ing, published just after the purge of the "gang of four," now takes on even more political significance. This book is Chiang's last chance to defend her political honor before those foreign radicals who may be sympathetic to her cause.
What a prosecutor wouldn't give for such a defense brief as this! In one sense, the new Hua Kuo-feng regime should be grateful that Witke carried through her project, because Witke, despite her sympathy toward her subject, reveals Chiang Ching as a politically shallow, grossly self-indulgent, paranoid and vindictive woman. In another sense, however, there is good reason why the Chinese Stalinist bureaucracy wanted this book suppressed. It unwittingly shows the hypocri¬sy, luxury-loving and viciously clique-ridden nature of Mao's court.
Many foreign radicals were taken in by the Mao/Chiang claim that the so-called Cultural Revolu¬tion was an attack on bureaucratic corruption and privilege. At the time, the Spartacist tendency asserted that the events in China represented an intra-bureaucratic fight, with a large cliquist dimension. Comrade Chiang Ch'ing reveals the petty, sordid, back-stabbing motives of the main inspirers of the Cultural Revolution to a far greater degree than we had envisioned. Key to Chiang's activities during the Cultural Revolution was settling decades-old personal scores. Anyone who, after reading Comrade Chiang Ch'ing, still believes that communist morality and rectitude were on the side of the Mao group is hopelessly politically naive, or worse.
When Chiang was purged, the Hua regime claimed she had been leading a double life, preaching revolutionary austerity and puritanism to the masses, while living like a decadent empress-dowager. At first, one was inclined to dismiss these accusations as typical Stalinist slanders and character assassination. However, after reading Witke's book, it is clear that Hua's charges are not slanders; at most they are exaggerations.
To entertain Witke, Chiang screened her private collection of Greta Garbo films! When Witke asked her why Garbo films were banned as "bourgeois decadence":
'"Those bourgeois democratic films are to be reserved for private showing,' she flatly declared. 'If the people could view them they would criticize them bitterly on political grounds. Such public exposure and attack would be most unfair to Garbo because she is not Chinese'."
Chiang Ching was hardly the only one in Mao's court to indulge in cultural activities forbidden to the people. The "Great Helmsman," himself, and also his old comrade-in-arms Chu Teh wrote poetry in the classical style, which is barred to lesser mortals as a "decadent" art form.
Hua and Teng are no better from the standpoint of communist morality than the "gang of four," but Chiang Ching's crimes are not limited to hypocrisy and self-indulgence. During the Cultural Revolution she and her clique committed unforgivable atrocities, such as starving to death the old guerrilla chief Ho Lung. We no more defend Chiang Ching against Hua than we would defend Beria against Molotov or Molotov against Khrushchev.
From Shanghai With Venom
Before the Cultural Revolution catapulted her to prominence, Mao's wife was virtually unknown, far less a political personage than the wives of other Chinese Communist leaders. Therefore, Chiang Ching is understandably preoccupied with establishing her independent revolutionary credentials and dispelling her image as a beautiful concubine-turned-empress-dowager, who exploited an old man's weak¬ness in order to gain power.
Much of the new material she provides for Witke is an attempt to establish her credentials as a Communist militant years before she went to Yenan and met Mao. She claims to have joined the Communist Party (CP) in early 1933 at age 18 in Tsingtao in her native province of Shantung. Almost immediately thereafter she moved to Shanghai and joined the League of Left-Wing Dramatists, a CP front group.
By her own account, she was a marginal member of the CP in Shanghai. In fact, much of her political effort was directed toward locating the party's underground network, although this fact does not necessarily reflect badly on her subjective revolutionary commit¬ment. The CP was severely repressed by the Kuomintang, and its underground apparatus may well have been as anarchic and inefficient as Chiang Ching makes out. None the less, the fact remains that Chiang Ching was politically insignificant until she moved in with Mao.
Chiang does not attribute her political marginality to objective circumstances, including her own juniority? In truly paranoid fashion she blames the ill-will of the Shanghai leadership. Virtually every male CP cadre she deals with is presented as a male chauvinist pig who tried (unsuccessfully) to seduce her. This section of the book does not read like the biography of a political activist but rather like one of Freud's case studies in paranoia.
Needless to say, the surviving CP cadres who knew Chiang Ching in the early days were almost all victims in the Cultural Revolution. The Red Guards persecuted Li Ta-chang, who was head of the Tsingtao party at the time that Chiang Ching joined, and Tien Han, who was head of the League of Left-Wing Dramatists when she was a member.
Chiang's career as a film actress in her Shanghai days is an acute political embarrassment to her. She finds it difficult to square that career with her claim to have been a revolutionary militant. So she asserts that the CP leadership, in cahoots with the Kuomintang (KMT) forced her to act in films against her will:
"She did not seek fame in films But after she established a reputation as an actress [on stage], several film companies sought her out and tried to force her to sign contracts. Lu Hsun [famous left-wing writer] came to her defense— The great film impresarios (who served the KMT directly or indirectly, e.g., through Chou Yang and his [Communist] Party associates in cultural operations) counterattacked by vilifying him and threatening to kill her" [emphasis in original].
Who could possibly believe this? Who is gullible enough to believe that Chinese film moguls, the underground CP and ruling Kuomintang would conspire to force a young actress to enter films against her will?
As a contribution to the history of the Chinese revolution, Chiang's account of the left in Shanghai in the 1930's is worthless. We learn nothing about the overall goals and activities of the underground CP. We learn little of the major factional struggle between Wang Ming's urban-centered adventurism and Mao's cautious rural-guerrillaist strategy, or of the transition from Third Period adventurism to the Popular Frontist collaboration with the Kuomintang. All we really learn is why Chiang Ching hated almost every CP cadre she encountered.
Mao/Lan Ping Scandalize Yenan
It was quite a bedroom scandal when in 1938 Mao divorced his wife to marry the beautiful, young film actress then called Lan Ping. In a way, Chiang Ching has never lived down the obloquy of that event. To Witke, she was defensive and self-justifying about the begin¬nings of her relationship with Mao.
Mao's first wife, a Communist militant, was captured by the Kuomintang in 1930 and beheaded in revenge for her husband's activities. Shortly thereafter, Mao married another Communist cadre, Ho Tzu-chen, who bore five children by him. She was one of the few women to undertake the Long March in 1935, during which she was wounded.
Although accounts differ, it appears that Mao and Ho had separated, though not yet definitively, when Lan Ping (soon to be Chiang Ching) arrived at Yenan in the summer of 1937. Ho had suffered a psychological breakdown. It was also rumored that Mao's philander¬ing was a cause of the marital break-up. Predictably Chiang Ching describes Ho Tzu-chen as a shrewish wife,'who, driven insane by the horrors of the L'ong March, beat her (and Mao's) children.
When Chiang moved in with Mao, Ho was in a sanitarium in Moscow. The Red Army's "old guard" accepted Mao's love life without much tongue-wagging moralism. But the idealistic youth, who poured into Yenan in this period, were shocked that the great Communist leader would abandon his faithful companion and comrade-in-arms for a Shanghai glamor girl.
Cultural Nihilism and Stalinist Bureaucracy
Comrade Chiang Ch'ing tells us little about the Cultural Revolution and fall of Lin Piao that cannot be found elsewhere in far more intelligible form. Oh yes, we are informed that Lin Piao tried to poison Mao and Chiang gradually; he obviously failed, though she suffered an illness which took her out of action for most of 1969.
For those who still harbor illusions about Chiang Ching as the radical protector of the Red Guards, this book confirms her active role in suppressing the "revolutionary rebels." A turning point in the Cultural Revolution came in September 1967 when under the guise of combatting "ultra-leftism" the Red Guards were disarmed. At the same time, the slogan, "seize a small handful in the army," was withdrawn, and the PLA officer corps—the heart of the Maoist bureaucracy— was declared off-limits for the Cultural Revolution.
In an important speech on 5 September 1967, Chiang Ching attacked the so-called "May 16th" group for criticizing Mao's regime from the "left":
"The 'May 16' is a very typical counter-revolutionary organization, and we must raise our vigilance against it— This is to say that we oppose people who oppose the leadership group of the Party Central Committee headed by Chairman Mao either from the Left, the extreme Left or from the right side."
She goes on to declare that the Cultural Revolution must not touch the army, i.e., the repressive apparatus upon which the bureaucratic regime rests:
"Now we come to the second question—the army. Sometime earlier, there was a wrong slogan: Seize a 'small handful in the army.'Asa result,'asmall handful in the army'was seized everywhere and even the weapons of our regular troops were seized.
"Comrades, come to think of it: Without the People's Liberation Army, is it possible for us to sit in the People's Great Hall holding a conference? If our field army were thrown into confusion and if trouble occurred, could we tolerate such a situation? Let us not fall into the trap. The slogan is wrong. Because the Party, the government and the army are all under the leadership of the Party." —reproduced in Chung Hua-min and Arthur C. Miller, Madame Mao: A Profile of Chiang Ch'ing
Chiang Ching's main impact upon the Great Proletar¬ian Cultural Revolution concerned culture. And the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution bore the same relation to culture as it did to the proletariat—a hostile one. Under Chiang's'direction all Western, Soviet and traditional Chinese art was banned; so was most art produced in the People's Republic before 1966. In 1967 all films were withdrawn from public circulation; few have been reintroduced to date. When Witke asked Chiang if foreign dramas would be reintroduced in China, she replied, "There seemed to be no point in it." She went on, "Original pieces of literature and music should be altered and transformed to revolutionary theater only under the authorization of the leaders, and then with utmost care."
Chiang's activities as cultural tsar were governed by a petty, vindictive subjectivity. She first came to promi¬nence, through her "socialist realist" reform of tradi¬tional opera in 1964. She recounts that the salty-tongued Peng Chen referred to her operas as "still at the stage of wearing trousers with a slit at the seat and sucking the fingers." No doubt this insulting remark was at least as much a factor in Peng Chen's downfall during the Cultural Revolution as any matter of great political import.
Not only in Maoist China but in all Stalinist-ruled societies, art is an important locus of political conflict. There is good reason for this. With open political controversy suppressed, art necessarily becomes a cover and vehicle for polemics. Dramas and operas in Mao's China are replete with obvious historical allegories and symbols related to current political controversy. Wu Han's play, Hai Jui Dismissed from Office, was the main public attack on Mao's sponsor¬ship of the economically disastrous Great Leap Forward of 1958-61. Therefore the Mao group had to make the play a major focus of political attack. The Stalinist suppression of workers democracy necessarily leads to the totalitarian control of art.
There is another important aspect of art under Stalinism which is more central to Chiang's concerns. Her operas are typical examples of "socialist realism," the falsification of reality so as to make China conform to Stalinist ideals. In Stalinist countries, "socialist' realism" is not an arbitrary and dispensable esthetic doctrine but is closely bound up with the false con¬sciousness of the bureaucracies in the degenerat¬ed/deformed workers states. The formal ideological expression of this false consciousness is the doctrine of "socialism in one [backward] country." Poverty, ignorance, greed, careerism, male chauvinism and bureaucratic coercion expose the hollowness of China's "socialist" claims. Like the Christian heaven, Maoist "socialism" can exist only in the imagination— in art.
Stalinist ideology maintains that popular conscious¬ness expresses socialist values and attitudes. Thus, if Chinese workers and peasants appreciate Western bourgeois or traditional art more than local Maoist creations, this gives the lie to the cultural pretensions of "socialism in one country." The Stalinist bureaucrats must consider art produced in contemporary bour¬geois societies not only inferior to their own creations and subversive, but irrelevant. What's the point of reintroducing foreign dramas into China, asks Chiang Ching.
Chiang's attitude toward culture was summarized in a 1966 speech:
"Imperialism is moribund capitalism, parasitic and rotten. Modern revisionism is a product of imperialist policies and a variety of capitalism. They cannot produce any works that are good. Capitalism has a history of several centuries; nevertheless, it has only a pitiful number of 'classics'. They have created some works modelled after the 'classics/ but these are stereotyped and no longer appeal to the people, and are therefore completely on the decline. On the other hand, there are some things that really flood the market, such as rock-and-roll, jazz, strip tease, impressionism, symbolism, abstractionism, fauvism, modernism...all of which are intended to poison and paralyse the minds of the people. In a word, there is decadence and obscenity to poison and paralyse the minds of the people."
—Chung Hua-min and Arthur C. Miller,pp. c/'t. -This kind of cultural nihilism is profoundly anti-Marxist. The Marxist attitude toward culture in a workers state was well expressed by Lenin in his famous attack on the Proletkult school, a forerunner of "socialist realism/' in 1920:
"Marxism has won its historic significance as the ideology of the revolutionary proletariat because, far from rejecting the most valuable achievements of the bour¬geois epoch, it has, on the contrary, assimilated and refashioned everything of value in the more than two
thousand years of the development of human thought and culture. Only further work on this basis and in this direction, inspired by the practical experience of the proletarian dictatorship as the final stage in the struggle against every form of exploita¬tion, can be recognised as the development ' of a genuine proletarian culture."
—V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 31
Hsinhua Weekly
A socialist culture can arise only when the cultural heritage of mankind is accessi¬ble to all members of society. This requires that all members of society possess the available time and resources now enjoyed only by a thin stratum of intellectuals. Such a condition obviously entails a far-higher material level than that of the 'most advanced capitalist society, not to mention the Chinese deformed workers state. The cultural creations of today's advanced bourgeois societies are comparatively richer than those of Maoist China (or Brezhnev's Russia) because they arise from a material base which provides at least some of its members with a greater degree of literacy, of education and of access to culture. It will require several generations for global socialist society to develop a new culture so rich and comprehe'nsive that the art of the past class societies will seem impoverished and antique by comparison.
Official Stalinist art is so boring and sterile that it fails to satisfy the intellectual appetites of the bureaucrats themselves— whence Mao's recourse to classic-style poetry and Chiang Ching's infatuation with Greta Garbo films. But the Maoist bureauc¬racy insists that for the masses only art produced in China since 1949 is permitted, as expressing the veritable nature of reality.
Renmin Hua Bao
Maoist leaders come and go: Top picture published in Hsinhua Weekly (20 September 1976) and in Comrade Chiang Ch'ing, shows Chiang on horseback behind Mao in 1947. After her removal from office she was removed from the picture, which was reprinted in Renmin Hua Bao (November 1976).
intended to poison and paralyse the minds of the people. In a word, there is decadence and obscenity to poison and paralyse the minds of the people."
—Chung Hua-min and Arthur C. Miller,pp. c/'t. -This kind of cultural nihilism is profoundly anti-Marxist. The Marxist attitude toward culture in a workers state was well expressed by Lenin in his famous attack on the Proletkult school, a forerunner of "socialist realism/' in 1920:
"Marxism has won its historic significance as the ideology of the revolutionary proletariat because, far from rejecting the most valuable achievements of the bour¬geois epoch, it has, on the contrary, assimilated and refashioned everything of value in the more than two
Chiang Ching's vicious, paranoid subjectivity, hypocritical self-indulgence and utter philistinism reflect, in the last analysis, her role as representative of the Chinese Stalinist bureaucracy. But this social role does not negate the impact of personality in political life. Che Guevara also was a leading figure in a bureaucratically governed workers state—Cuba. How¬ever, his moral and intellectual integrity, however wrong and misguided his program, enabled him to partially transcend bureaucratic careerism, privilege and hypocrisy. Che Guevara was an admira¬ble figure and his death a defeat for the communist cause.
We adamantly oppose the universal Stalinist practice of murdering political opponents, even when they, like Chiang Ching, have themselves committed heinous crimes (no more so, however, than her potential executioners). As for the purge of Chiang Ching: in the name of communist morality, in the name of intelligence and culture—good riddance! •
Tuesday, November 02, 2010
*Out In The Be-Bop Night- Tom Waits' "Big Joe And The Phantom 309"
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Tom Waits performing his cover of Red Sovine's Big Joe and Phantom 309.
Big Joe and Phantom 309 Lyrics-Tom Waits- Original lyrics Red Sovine
well you see I happened to be back on the east coast
a few years back tryin' to make me a buck
like everybody else, well you know
times get hard and well I got down on my luck
and I got tired of just roamin' and bummin'
around, so I started thumbin' my way
back to my old hometown
you know I made quite a few miles
in the first couple of days, and I
figured I'd be home in a week if my
luck held out this way
but you know it was the third night
I got stranded, it was out at a cold lonely
crossroads, and as the rain came
pouring down, I was hungry, tired
freezin', caught myself a chill, but
it was just about that time that
the lights of an old semi topped the hill
you should of seen me smile when I
heard them air brakes come on, and
I climbed up in that cab where I
knew it'd be warm at the wheel
well at the wheel sat a big man
I'd have to say he must of weighed 210
the way he stuck out a big hand and
said with a grin "Big Joe's the name
and this here rig's called Phantom 309"
well I asked him why he called his
rig such a name, but he just turned to me
and said "Why son don't you know this here
rig'll be puttin' 'em all to shame, why
there ain't a driver on this
or any other line for that matter
that's seen nothin' but the taillights of Big Joe
and Phantom 309"
So we rode and talked the better part of the night
and I told my stories and Joe told his and
I smoked up all his Viceroys as we rolled along
he pushed her ahead with 10 forward gears
man that dashboard was lit like the old
Madam La Rue pinball, a serious semi truck
until almost mysteriously, well it was the
lights of a truck stop that rolled into sight
Joe turned to me and said "I'm sorry son
but I'm afraid this is just as far as you go
You see I kinda gotta be makin' a turn
just up the road a piece," but I'll be
damned if he didn't throw me a dime as he
threw her in low and said "Go on in there
son, and get yourself a hot cup of coffee
on Big Joe"
and when Joe and his rig pulled off into
the night, man in nothing flat they was
clean outa sight
so I walked into the old stop and
ordered me up a cup of mud sayin'
"Big Joe's settin' this dude up" but
it got so deathly quiet in that
place, you could of heard a pin drop
as the waiter's face turned kinda
pale, I said "What's the matter did
I say somethin' wrong?" I kinda
said with 8a half way grin. He said
"No son, you see It'll happen every
now and then. You see every driver in
here knows Big Joe, but let me
tell you what happened just 10 years
ago, yea it was 10 years ago
out there at that cold lonely crossroads
where you flagged Joe down, and
there was a whole bus load of kids
and they were just comin' from school
and they were right in the middle when
Joe topped the hill, and could
have been slaughtered except
Joe turned his wheels, and
he jacknifed, and went
into a skid, and folks around here
say he gave his life to save that bunch
of kids, and out there at that cold
lonely crossroads, well they say it
was the end of the line for
Big Joe and Phantom 309, but it's
funny you know, cause every now and then
yea every now and then, when the
moon's holdin' water, they say old Joe
will stop and give you a ride, and
just like you, some hitchhiker will be
comin' by"
"So here son," he said to me, "get
yourself another cup of coffee, it's on the
house, you see I want you to hang on
to that dime, yea you hang on to that
dime as a kind of souvenir, a
souvenir of Big Joe and Phantom 309"
Big Joe and Phantom 309 Lyrics-Tom Waits- Original lyrics Red Sovine
well you see I happened to be back on the east coast
a few years back tryin' to make me a buck
like everybody else, well you know
times get hard and well I got down on my luck
and I got tired of just roamin' and bummin'
around, so I started thumbin' my way
back to my old hometown
you know I made quite a few miles
in the first couple of days, and I
figured I'd be home in a week if my
luck held out this way
but you know it was the third night
I got stranded, it was out at a cold lonely
crossroads, and as the rain came
pouring down, I was hungry, tired
freezin', caught myself a chill, but
it was just about that time that
the lights of an old semi topped the hill
you should of seen me smile when I
heard them air brakes come on, and
I climbed up in that cab where I
knew it'd be warm at the wheel
well at the wheel sat a big man
I'd have to say he must of weighed 210
the way he stuck out a big hand and
said with a grin "Big Joe's the name
and this here rig's called Phantom 309"
well I asked him why he called his
rig such a name, but he just turned to me
and said "Why son don't you know this here
rig'll be puttin' 'em all to shame, why
there ain't a driver on this
or any other line for that matter
that's seen nothin' but the taillights of Big Joe
and Phantom 309"
So we rode and talked the better part of the night
and I told my stories and Joe told his and
I smoked up all his Viceroys as we rolled along
he pushed her ahead with 10 forward gears
man that dashboard was lit like the old
Madam La Rue pinball, a serious semi truck
until almost mysteriously, well it was the
lights of a truck stop that rolled into sight
Joe turned to me and said "I'm sorry son
but I'm afraid this is just as far as you go
You see I kinda gotta be makin' a turn
just up the road a piece," but I'll be
damned if he didn't throw me a dime as he
threw her in low and said "Go on in there
son, and get yourself a hot cup of coffee
on Big Joe"
and when Joe and his rig pulled off into
the night, man in nothing flat they was
clean outa sight
so I walked into the old stop and
ordered me up a cup of mud sayin'
"Big Joe's settin' this dude up" but
it got so deathly quiet in that
place, you could of heard a pin drop
as the waiter's face turned kinda
pale, I said "What's the matter did
I say somethin' wrong?" I kinda
said with 8a half way grin. He said
"No son, you see It'll happen every
now and then. You see every driver in
here knows Big Joe, but let me
tell you what happened just 10 years
ago, yea it was 10 years ago
out there at that cold lonely crossroads
where you flagged Joe down, and
there was a whole bus load of kids
and they were just comin' from school
and they were right in the middle when
Joe topped the hill, and could
have been slaughtered except
Joe turned his wheels, and
he jacknifed, and went
into a skid, and folks around here
say he gave his life to save that bunch
of kids, and out there at that cold
lonely crossroads, well they say it
was the end of the line for
Big Joe and Phantom 309, but it's
funny you know, cause every now and then
yea every now and then, when the
moon's holdin' water, they say old Joe
will stop and give you a ride, and
just like you, some hitchhiker will be
comin' by"
"So here son," he said to me, "get
yourself another cup of coffee, it's on the
house, you see I want you to hang on
to that dime, yea you hang on to that
dime as a kind of souvenir, a
souvenir of Big Joe and Phantom 309"
Monday, November 01, 2010
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"- Obama’s War on Public Education-Defend the Teachers Unions!-For Free Quality Integrated Education for All!
Markin comment:
This timely article goes very well with today's entry from the archives of Women and Revolution on Soviet Educational Policy.
*******
Workers Vanguard No. 967
22 October 2010
Defend the Teachers Unions!
Obama’s War on Public Education
For Free Quality Integrated Education for All!
(Young Spartacus pages)
Under Democratic president Barack Obama’s administration, “school reform” amounts to a massive assault on public education carried out through brass-knuckle attacks on teachers unions. Revamped federal funding rules turn the screws on schools described as failing, shuttering classrooms in ghettos and barrios nationwide, and give a green light for a proliferation of privately run charter schools. From Los Angeles and Chicago to New York City and Washington, D.C., Obama & Co. have made the Bush gang’s policies look like child’s play.
For decades, the arrogant U.S. imperialist rulers have starved education of funding. With fewer and fewer industrial jobs, America’s racist capitalist rulers see little value in paying union wages to educate working-class, black and immigrant youth. The high school graduation rate in the U.S. is below 70 percent; in urban centers including Los Angeles, it falls below 50 percent. U.S. students rank 35th internationally in math, between Azerbaijan and Croatia, and 29th in science, between Latvia and Lithuania—countries many Americans cannot identify on a map. The ruling class cynically blames the teachers unions for this woeful state of affairs as it guns for the wage gains, benefits and job protections that come with a union job.
The Race to the Top program, the centerpiece of the Obama administration’s “reform,” has been described as No Child Left Behind part two, after the plan pushed by late Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy and George W. Bush. Obama’s scheme pitted cash-strapped state school systems against each other in a competition for $4.35 billion in funding—almost 10 percent of the federal budget for education. When the states’ applications were judged, the most weight was given to commitments to eliminate teacher seniority and tenure. Aiming to have “no child left untested,” rewards were also based on states’ plans to track student test scores. Among other things, this is a setup for victimizing individual teachers whose classes don’t measure up well, particularly threatening those in the poorest school districts.
The Education Department has classified as many as 5,000 schools as failing. One reform that might actually improve them—adequate funding—is not what the administration has in mind. “We can’t spend our way out of it,” Obama told the Today show (27 September), which is rather piquant coming from a man who saw through the $700 billion bank bailout. In order for school districts to qualify for funding under Obama’s School Turnaround program, they have to do one of the following to “failing” schools: close them; have a charter take them over; fire the principal and entire staff and rehire no more than half; or fire the principal, lengthen the school day and implement other onerous changes. This all spells a direct attack on the teachers unions, as Obama made clear in March when he endorsed the firing of the entire staff at Rhode Island’s Central Falls High School (see “Labor: Fight Union Busting Attack on Rhode Island Teachers!” WV No. 954, 12 March).
The government’s campaign to cripple the teachers unions is part of a broad attack on public employees. With the erosion of industry and the acquiescence of the pro-capitalist labor tops to the proliferation of non-union shops, public employees now, for the first time, make up the majority of union members in the U.S. (Many of these are cops who, as the hired guns of the capitalists, should have no place in the unions.) The two national teachers unions, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA), represent about a quarter of all union members nationally, with 4.6 million members.
Like capitalist governments in Europe and elsewhere, American federal, state and local governments, under both Democrats and Republicans, have seized on the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression to slash payrolls and extract massive concessions—from working hours to pensions. Some 60,000 school employees were laid off last year, and many more have already lost their jobs this school year as the bourgeoisie further cuts spending for education. Thirty-eight of the 100 largest school districts have instituted wage freezes and another ten have cut wages. The ruling class sees teachers unions as potential obstacles to slashing public education budgets. A big reason it has been able to push through its attacks on education and other services is the decades-long decline in labor struggle, overseen by a miserable trade-union “leadership” that serves as the bourgeoisie’s lieutenants inside the labor movement.
The working class, black people and other minorities have a vital interest in defending public workers unions and fighting against the attacks on social services, including the bourgeoisie’s attempt to turn back the clock on universal, integrated, secular public education. We oppose charter schools because they are an attack on the democratic right to public education and provide an opening for religious groups to get government funds to run schools, and contribute as well to furthering school segregation. The drive to expand charter schools underlines the link between racial oppression, union-busting and the promotion of religious obscurantism.
Like the fight for decent health care, the battle for quality education, including bilingual instruction, for the working class and the black and Latino poor requires hard struggle against the capitalist class, a tiny handful of people whose obscene wealth is gained from exploiting labor and whose rule is reinforced by racial and other forms of social oppression. The money and resources exist for massive construction of schools, hospitals and other infrastructure gutted by the profit-bloated capitalists. To seize that wealth requires breaking the power of the bourgeoisie through socialist revolution.
Education U.S.A.— Separate and Unequal
Education in capitalist America is class- and race-biased from top to bottom. From public education’s earliest days in the industrial revolution of the 19th century, when class bells and the structure of the school day were used to facilitate the transition from the family farm into the factory, education has been crafted to meet the needs of the capitalist class. Ruling-class offspring are guaranteed places at expensive private schools and universities. In addition, the bourgeoisie needs a layer of educated technicians, professionals, managers and ideologues. The last serious effort to promote science education in this country was after the Soviet Union launched its Sputnik I satellite in 1957. Fear of a Soviet lead in military technology led President Eisenhower to demand a billion-dollar program to improve science education in American schools and to sign the National Defense Education Act in 1958.
A certain level of education is also necessary for industrial labor. During World War II, when there was a labor shortage and the bourgeoisie needed workers for war industries, California shipyard owners recruited untrained and often semiliterate Southerners, black as well as white, who learned to read and write, and often became skilled apprentices in little more than three months. During the war, the G.E.D. program was initiated to prepare returning servicemen who lacked a high school diploma to take jobs. It was expanded in 1963 for the general population.
While black workers have been a key component of the workforce in industry, they have also typically been the “last hired and first fired.” And after the bosses took the wrecking ball to steel mills and auto plants in the North and Midwest, the government saw little need for the overhead expense of educating those whose labor power was no longer needed. As a result, the children of black workers in particular have been treated more and more as an expendable population. The financial titans’ interest in “education reform” has nothing to do with the welfare of the poor, black and working-class kids penned up in decrepit, underfunded schools. For these kids, it’s all about pushing union-free schools where longer days and a longer academic year can be required to cultivate obedient wage slaves (if needed) and foot soldiers for the American empire.
In capitalist America, which was founded on black slavery, the black population forms a specially oppressed caste stigmatized because of skin color. Separate never has been and never can be equal. Whether it is run by Barack Obama or anyone else, the capitalist system is racist to its core—from segregated housing and schools to unemployment, cop terror and mass incarceration in the name of the “war on drugs.” While closing schools and hospitals, the capitalist rulers have seen fit to pay for the “overhead expense” of prison construction, on a massive scale. Poor black youth are offered the “choice” of facing death on the streets, including at the hands of the racist cops, enrolling in U.S. imperialism’s wars and occupations, expecting time in jail, or, for some, a minimum-wage job.
Minority students in segregated schools across America confront conditions more suitable for a police state than for a place of study: metal detectors, video cameras, strict hall and truancy monitoring by security guards, drug testing, locker searches. “Zero tolerance” policies have led to tens of thousands of arrests for such “crimes” as pushing, tardiness and using spitballs. Cities hire school security out of local police forces, which carry out murderous racist terror on the streets. The nearly 5,000 “School Safety Agents” and 200 armed police on duty in New York City public schools constitute the tenth-largest police force in the country. This is an “education” system that essentially treats minority youth as future criminals. The schools serve to reinforce the isolation of black youth in a society where 28 percent of black men are destined to spend time behind bars.
In his 2005 book The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, Jonathan Kozol, an award-winning author and former Boston public school teacher, cites a study by Harvard professor Gary Orfield that powerfully documents the growing segregation of public education. Five decades after the 1954 Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education ruling that overturned formal legal segregation of public schools, Northern schools are more segregated than those in the Deep South. More than two million black and Latino students attend what Kozol calls “apartheid schools,” in which 99 to 100 percent of students are non-white. During the 1990s, the proportion of black students who attended majority white schools decreased to a level lower than in any year since 1968. The Supreme Court’s 2007 decision throwing out school desegregation plans in Seattle and Louisville gave official sanction to those seeking to overturn some 1,000 remaining integration plans across the country.
Bilingual education has also been under steady attack. In California in 1998, racist Proposition 227 required replacing bilingual programs with sink-or-swim “English immersion” classes. As we wrote in “Down With ‘English Only’ Racism!” (WV No. 688, 10 April 1998): “Those with the ability to become bilingual on their own due to privileged circumstances—e.g., those with access to private tutoring, or who come from educated households—are deemed to be an asset to the country. The rest, often from impoverished, rural families where no one is literate in any language, are to be used as superexploited, terrorized and preferably illiterate unskilled labor.”
Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!
It has taken tumultuous, even revolutionary struggle to extend the right to education to black people in America. It took a bloody Civil War to uproot the slave system, under which teaching slaves to read was a crime. Most of the first Southern free public schools were established following the Civil War during Radical Reconstruction, the turbulent decade of Southern interracial bourgeois democracy carried out by the freedmen and their white allies and protected by Union Army troops, many of whom were formerly enslaved. A literacy rate that was around 5 percent for black people in the 1860s rose to 40 percent in 1890. As symbols of measures toward black equality, schools were often targets of Ku Klux Klan terror.
With the Compromise of 1877 and the withdrawal of the last federal troops from the South, black people were left at the mercy of former slaveowners, now backed by Northern capital, and their murderous nightriders. Funding for black education was slashed and Jim Crow segregation eventually became the law in the South, leaving its imprint in the North as well. Nonetheless, black teachers continued to struggle against enormous hardship to operate schools for black children. In the segregated Northern ghettos that emerged following the Great Migration of black Americans to industrial centers in the early 20th century, separate and unequal schools for blacks became facts of life linked to segregation in housing.
The civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s took up the fight against segregated and inferior schools, contributing to the end of de jure segregation in the South. But under the leadership of liberals like Martin Luther King, who looked to the capitalist Democratic Party, the courts and the government, that movement could not end the de facto segregation of black people, North and South, which is rooted in the capitalist system.
Starting in reaction to the Supreme Court’s Brown decision, massive “white flight” to private and suburban schools reinforced segregation. A crucial turning point came in the mid 1970s, when school busing was ordered in Boston—a minimal attempt to integrate its public schools. The busing plan touched off a virulent racist reaction as mobs stoned school buses carrying black kids. The court-ordered plan was limited to neighborhoods like South Boston, one of the poorest white areas in the U.S. outside of Appalachia, and the black Roxbury ghetto. Liberal Massachusetts Congressmen, for their part, made sure that nobody was bused out to the relatively privileged suburban schools, further fueling the racist frenzy. The Spartacist League called to defend the busing plan and extend it to the suburbs. We agitated for the integrated labor movement—meatpackers, bus drivers, teachers and others—to organize labor/black defense of the bused black schoolchildren.
In Boston, the liberals caved in to the racist mobs, ushering in decades of attacks on school desegregation nationwide. Even tokenistic affirmative action programs in higher education have been drastically curtailed, to the point that they barely exist outside of some elite universities. Today’s education reformers have adopted the racist code word “school choice,” which, in the period of the civil rights movement, meant allowing white students to attend all-white public schools and creating all-white private academies, aided by state grants to students’ families. Foreshadowing the policies pursued by George W. Bush and Barack Obama was the school voucher system, which also served to perpetuate racist discrimination.
A defining trait of the race and class inequality woven into the fiber of the U.S. public school system is the role of local taxes in education funding. The wealth or poverty of a particular school district essentially determines the quality of its schools. Predominantly white suburban schools often spend twice what urban school districts do and three times what poorer rural areas spend. And when they find government funding insufficient, donors in wealthier areas shell out the cash for reading specialists, music and arts, science labs and computers as well as the extracurricular field trips and activities that make for a quality learning environment.
Decades ago, the Spartacus Youth League, forerunner to today’s Spartacus Youth Clubs, explained:
“As socialists, we oppose all class-biased and racially discriminatory privileges in educational opportunity. Thus, we are opposed to educational funding based on local property taxes. Instead, we call for all public schools to be funded at the national level. In addition, all social services—from welfare to health care—should be federally funded.”
—“Public Education: Separate and Unequal,” Young Spartacus No. 52, March 1977
The Spartacist League/SYCs fight to extend the right to education to the university level, demanding open admissions, no tuition, a state-paid living stipend for students and the nationalization of private universities.
The fight for equality in education must also include a struggle against the wretched condition in the ghettos and barrios and in impoverished rural areas as well. How can you be expected to study when you’re homeless or hungry, when your families live in fear of immigration raids or are stuck in overcrowded, rat-infested projects?
While fighting against discrimination and segregation in schools and housing, we understand that racial oppression cannot be rooted out short of the revolutionary overturn of the capitalist system. Like winning jobs for all, eradicating race and class bias in education, so that everyone can have access to the quality education that the children of the bourgeoisie get, requires the working class taking power. The road to black liberation and the emancipation of all the oppressed lies in the fight for an egalitarian socialist society, where production is organized to serve human need, not the capitalists’ bottom line.
Laissez-Faire Schools Disaster
Some of America’s biggest billionaires and venture capitalists have joined with the bourgeois press and Democratic Party hacks in a propaganda offensive aimed at pushing through anti-union school “reform.” The moneybags include hedge-fund managers tied to Joe Williams, whose political action committee Democrats for Education Reform was set up to push charter schools, as well as the foundations of Microsoft mogul Bill Gates, union-busting Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton and Eli Broad, who got his billions in housing, insurance and savings rackets.
For these capitalist profiteers, the crux of education reform is the application of “free market” principles. This scheme dates back to the 1950s and right-wing economist and longtime University of Chicago professor Milton Friedman. Friedman’s “Chicago Boys” gained notoriety by serving as economic advisers to the CIA-backed Chilean dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, which overthrew the popular-front government of Salvador Allende in 1973 and massacred 30,000 workers, peasants and leftists, and imprisoned and tortured thousands more. Once he retired from the University of Chicago, Friedman wrote Free to Choose, a playbook for market-based reform, including privatized schooling, and became an adviser to President Ronald Reagan.
Today’s “Chicago Boys”—Obama, Education Secretary Arne Duncan and their pals—share Friedman’s ideological commitment to “free market” education, embracing privatization, tying funding to test scores and ending union protections like tenure for teachers. An early implementer of this union-busting program was Diane Ravitch, an influential historian and education policy wonk who served in the Bush Senior and Clinton administrations. Ravitch has since had second thoughts. From the standpoint of wanting to further America’s national interests, Ravitch’s book The Death and Life of the Great American School System (2010) laments how the laissez-faire market approach of what she calls “the billionaire boys’ club” has gutted government-run education.
As Ravitch documents, turning out higher test scores has become the top priority for financially shaky schools, taking over the school day and spilling over into weekend classes and extra tutoring. Jonathan Kozol aptly describes how “inner-city kids are being trained to give prescripted answers and to acquiesce in their subordinate position in society” (Huffington Post, 10 September 2007). Another result is the large-scale falsification of test scores.
The drive to improve test scores or face the ax also puts pressure on schools to get rid of their lowest-scoring students. This process has been expedited by the closing of large “failing” schools and the opening of small facilities in their place, with the lowest-scoring students shunted off to resource-starved and decrepit schools apart from better-scoring students. What we said about Bush Senior’s education reforms is as much the point today: “Just test rich and poor ‘equally,’ and when the poor flunk, well then, that supposedly proves the ruling class shouldn’t waste its money on the swelling ranks of the underclass” (“Education U.S.A.—Separate and Unequal,” WV No. 544, 7 February 1992).
The Charter School Onslaught
The keystone of the current “reform” package is the mushrooming of charter schools. While part of local school systems, charters are privately owned and operated outfits that take money away from existing public schools and are exempt from Department of Education regulations, as well as from any union contract carried over from the school systems. Some are explicitly operated as money-making ventures, and some are religion-based schools in everything but name.
Charter schools increase racial segregation and class inequality in education and also serve as a tool to smash unions. As a rule, charter schools are opened in the poorest and most segregated parts of cities, often on public school grounds. The better-off white suburban schools remain untouched. Usually, the new schools are even more segregated than the ones they replace. According to a February 2010 study by the UCLA Civil Rights Project, nearly three out of four black charter school students attend “intensely segregated” schools where 90 percent or more of the students are minorities. This is two times higher than the rate at regular public schools.
The proliferation of charter schools has certainly done nothing to integrate schools in Chicago, long known as “Segregation City.” Before landing in Washington, Arne Duncan ran the Chicago public school system from 2001 to 2008. By his own account, he oversaw the closing of some 60 schools, primarily in black and Latino neighborhoods, and the expansion of charter and military schools.
It says a lot that the Obama administration has taken the dilapidated and segregated Chicago system as a national model. Only about half of its students graduate high school; the rate is even lower for black male students. In a city that is nearly 40 percent white, white students make up just 8 percent of public school students, and a third of the public schools have not even one single white student enrolled. In 2009, the capitalist courts ended the 1980 consent decree that provided whatever shreds of integration existed in Chicago public schools, primarily in the magnet and selective schools. The decree imposed by the federal government has now been deemed unnecessary because the “vestiges of discrimination” have been eliminated “to the extent practicable”!
From 2004, when Duncan brought out his Renaissance 2010 education blueprint, to the present, over 80 Chicago public schools, largely in minority neighborhoods, have been shut down and replaced with smaller schools—about two-thirds of them charter schools. Charters now comprise 10 percent of the city school system, and almost all are non-union. The system’s current “CEO” (the actual title), ex-cop and former Chicago Transit Authority president Ron Huberman, has continued Duncan’s “turnaround schools” plan, under which all teachers and staff at “low-performing” schools are fired and replaced by much younger, less experienced teachers who receive far lower wages. Across the country, idealistic young college graduates, mainly white, are being recruited and given a pro forma training course for exactly this purpose by Teach for America and the New Teacher Project, which are supported by the Gates, Broad and Walton foundations. Many new hires burn out quickly—in Chicago it’s common that they don’t even get through their first school year.
Many black and Latino parents turn to charter schools hoping that they provide an alternative to the decaying inner-city public schools. Schools like Harlem Success Academy are touted as miracle stories, where the black-white “achievement gap” is supposed to be a thing of the past and “behavior problems” are rooted out (including through its “kindergarten boot camp”!). In order to raise standardized test scores, Harlem Success spends hundreds of thousands every year to recruit the students it wants while pressuring those who score low to transfer elsewhere. It offers no teachers of English as a Second Language and no classes for students with disabilities. Eva Moskowitz, CEO of Harlem Success, coldly told one teacher, “The school is not a social service agency” (New York magazine, 25 April).
Belying the hype over such “successful” charters lies a stark fact: charter schools do not even measure up to public schools. According to a 2009 Stanford University study, 46 percent of charter schools perform comparably to public schools—and 37 percent perform significantly worse. Examples of financial skimming and haywire accounting abound. Of the 64 schools in Los Angeles that have had their charters revoked, almost all were accused of financial or administrative mismanagement.
Charter schools represent a major erosion of the separation of church and state supposedly enshrined in the Constitution. A case in point is Chicago, where the parochial school system is already the largest in the world and has long functioned as an escape from integration for white families. Sister Mary Paul McCaughey, superintendent of Chicago Catholic Schools, recently announced that a number of their schools may be converted into charters. In Washington, D.C., seven low-performing Catholic schools became charters on archdiocese property, which, like all church property, is exempt from taxation. We oppose government funding for any religious institution, including schools, and fight as well against any encroachment of religious teaching into the public schools, such as the attempt to promote “intelligent design” at the expense of teaching the fact of evolution.
In a chilling sign of how the administration’s “reform” schemes will further depress the quality of education, earlier this year Education Secretary Arne Duncan ghoulishly declared that Hurricane Katrina was “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans”! The racist rulers viewed the unfolding disaster of Hurricane Katrina as an opportunity to “change the demographics” of New Orleans—i.e., get rid of impoverished blacks. In addition to terrorizing the black population, boarding up public housing and axing social services, this meant gutting public education. One of black Democratic mayor Ray Nagin’s first acts after the floodwaters drained was to fire all 8,000 unionized schoolteachers in an all-out drive to replace public schools with charters. Two-thirds of the city’s children are now enrolled in charter schools.
Obscenely, the Brookings Institution think tank has declared that Haiti should follow the New Orleans model, which, it opines, shows how “a fundamentally different education system can be built in the wake of a disaster.” Nothing is being rebuilt as the desperately impoverished Haitian masses continue to groan under imperialist subjugation, carried out through the UN occupation force supplemented by U.S. National Guardsmen.
Before the earthquake, the vast majority of schools in Haiti were private, and more than half of school-age children did not attend school. Next door in the Dominican Republic, free public elementary education is well-established in the cities, although less so in the rural areas. The contrasting results are stark: the literacy rate in the Dominican Republic is 85 percent; in Haiti it’s 53 percent. Even so, the situation in the neocolonial Dominican Republic pales in comparison to that in Cuba, a bureaucratically deformed workers state. Since the overthrow of capitalist rule in 1960-61, Cuba has achieved one of the highest literacy rates in the world—higher than the U.S.—as well as the highest doctor-patient ratio.
The War on Teachers Unions
America’s capitalist rulers and their media mouthpieces are seeking to manipulate justified anger over the state of public education to bolster their attacks on overworked and underpaid teachers and their unions. Obama & Co. seek to reverse gains for teachers, whose unions grew substantially through a series of labor struggles in the 1950s and ’60s. Before that, they had little protection against meager salaries, political favoritism, domineering principals and sex discrimination against a mostly female workforce.
In mid August, the Los Angeles Times, which for over a century has specialized in bashing unions, ran a series of attack pieces on the United Teachers of Los Angeles. The paper published a database rating some 6,000 elementary school teachers by the test scores of their students, promoting this as a tool for firing teachers—an approach endorsed by both Arne Duncan and Democratic California Education Secretary Bonnie Reiss. This witchhunt has since been implicated in the suicide of Rigoberto Ruelas, a dedicated teacher from an impoverished district in South Los Angeles where students scored lower on tests than those in more affluent neighborhoods.
In many public schools, if students get any education at all, it is testament to the dedication of poorly paid teachers who struggle against cutbacks, decaying facilities and increased administration meddling. With the government refusing to shell out for the most basic classroom materials, some teachers spend thousands of dollars of their own money on school supplies.
There is plenty of anger among the membership of the teachers unions over the attacks on their wages and job protections, and over the state of public education. In California, the Oakland Education Association went out on April 29 for a one-day strike against wage freezes, although its members continue to work without a contract. On October 14, Baltimore teachers voted down a contract that would have effectively gutted seniority. But the unions are saddled with a leadership that acts as labor statesmen for the capitalist government, willingly offering up greater concessions from their members in the name of “sacrificing for the kids.”
The union tops’ class collaborationism is all the more blatant with the Democratic Party, which they falsely promote as the friend of labor and the oppressed, running things. In the last 30 years, the teachers unions have shelled out nearly $57.4 million to bourgeois politicians in federal elections alone, 95 percent of that to Democrats. Ten percent of the delegates to the Democratic National Convention in 2008 were teachers union members. Under Obama, the Democratic Party has put itself in the front lines of the anti-teacher offensive. Republican Congressman John Kline pointed out (New York Times, 1 September) that many of Obama and Duncan’s ideas have been pushed by Republicans for years. The union tops’ support for the Democrats makes their realization possible. As the Times reported, Kline told Duncan, “Arne, only you can do that.... You’re the secretary of education for a Democratic president.”
AFT president Randi Weingarten, formerly the head of NYC’s United Federation of Teachers (UFT), exemplifies the role the labor bureaucracy plays as the bosses’ cops inside the unions. Weingarten’s mentor, longtime AFT head Albert Shanker, was a raving anti-Communist who acted as one of U.S. imperialism’s main labor agents in its drive to smash militant unions and suppress left-wing parties around the world during the anti-Soviet Cold War. Weingarten backs charter schools and various types of “performance pay,” in line with Obama’s calls for “more accountability” from teachers. No wonder that Duncan told the New York Times Magazine (19 September), “I’m a big fan of Randi’s.” This, to say the least, is not the opinion of AFT members who booed and heckled her at a May union meeting in Detroit. Weingarten’s successor at the UFT, Michael Mulgrew, has played his part by agreeing to link teachers’ evaluations to standardized test scores and to make it easier to fire teachers whom administrators deem “incompetent.”
We Need a Workers Party!
In our articles denouncing Obama’s vaunted health care package—a gift to the bankers and insurance companies—we made the point that if the labor movement fought for free, universal, quality health care, it would have broad support among the population, helping to revitalize the trade unions in this country. Similarly, if the teachers unions waged some class struggle in support of free, quality education for all, they would find allies in millions of working-class, black and Latino families. When teachers unions have gone on strike in cities like Chicago, Los Angeles and Oakland, they have won support in the ghettos and barrios. To mobilize the unions in such struggle requires fighting against the class collaborationism of the labor bureaucracy, which places its reliance on phony “friends” in the bourgeois government.
In the same camp as the labor sellouts, the reformist International Socialist Organization (ISO) complained in an article by Gillian Russom in International Socialist Review (May-June 2010): “Education should be at the center of a national debate on social priorities, led by a president who promised ‘change.’ Instead, the economic crisis is being used by the White House to dramatically accelerate a neoliberal agenda for education.” This is simply the language of disappointed suitors, as seen in an exchange among ISO leaders over just how low to bow before the imperialist Commander-in-Chief, whose election the ISO hailed (see article, page 2). Earlier, the ISO’s Socialist Worker (2 November 2009) offered that a “real ‘Race to the Top’ program” could “start by taking the largely taxpayer-funded $23 billion in bonuses that Goldman Sachs is giving out this year, and put that money toward giving nearly 6 million families that $4,000 income supplement.” Or, as Oliver Twist begged, “Please, Sir, I want some more.”
The labor bureaucracy and the reformist left seek to obscure the understanding that this is a capitalist government, whose purpose, as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels instructed over 150 years ago, is to be the executive committee of the ruling class as a whole. Following the years of George W. Bush, the Obama administration was put into office to provide a much-needed facelift for U.S. imperialism in order to further its predatory interests abroad and grind down the working class, blacks and immigrants at home. While handing out billions to bankers and auto bosses, Obama has appealed to everyone else to embrace a “spirit of sacrifice.” Meanwhile, he repeats the disgusting tirade that crumbling schools and poverty are “no excuses” for the black masses and that “hardships will just make you stronger.” Enough! We say: Break with the Democrats! For a workers party that fights for a workers government!
After escaping slavery and educating himself as a fighter in the left wing of the abolitionist movement, Frederick Douglass observed that, in the eyes of the slaveholders, to educate a man “would forever unfit him to be a slave.” The logic of this statement remains unchanged a century and a half later. To give all people the means to attain their full creative potential requires overturning the present social order, based on the exploitation of labor, vicious racial oppression and grinding poverty. Only after a multiracial workers party leads the proletariat, at the head of all the oppressed, in overthrowing the decaying capitalist system and constructing an egalitarian socialist society will mankind be freed of the fetters of scarcity and want, and real human history will begin.
This timely article goes very well with today's entry from the archives of Women and Revolution on Soviet Educational Policy.
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Workers Vanguard No. 967
22 October 2010
Defend the Teachers Unions!
Obama’s War on Public Education
For Free Quality Integrated Education for All!
(Young Spartacus pages)
Under Democratic president Barack Obama’s administration, “school reform” amounts to a massive assault on public education carried out through brass-knuckle attacks on teachers unions. Revamped federal funding rules turn the screws on schools described as failing, shuttering classrooms in ghettos and barrios nationwide, and give a green light for a proliferation of privately run charter schools. From Los Angeles and Chicago to New York City and Washington, D.C., Obama & Co. have made the Bush gang’s policies look like child’s play.
For decades, the arrogant U.S. imperialist rulers have starved education of funding. With fewer and fewer industrial jobs, America’s racist capitalist rulers see little value in paying union wages to educate working-class, black and immigrant youth. The high school graduation rate in the U.S. is below 70 percent; in urban centers including Los Angeles, it falls below 50 percent. U.S. students rank 35th internationally in math, between Azerbaijan and Croatia, and 29th in science, between Latvia and Lithuania—countries many Americans cannot identify on a map. The ruling class cynically blames the teachers unions for this woeful state of affairs as it guns for the wage gains, benefits and job protections that come with a union job.
The Race to the Top program, the centerpiece of the Obama administration’s “reform,” has been described as No Child Left Behind part two, after the plan pushed by late Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy and George W. Bush. Obama’s scheme pitted cash-strapped state school systems against each other in a competition for $4.35 billion in funding—almost 10 percent of the federal budget for education. When the states’ applications were judged, the most weight was given to commitments to eliminate teacher seniority and tenure. Aiming to have “no child left untested,” rewards were also based on states’ plans to track student test scores. Among other things, this is a setup for victimizing individual teachers whose classes don’t measure up well, particularly threatening those in the poorest school districts.
The Education Department has classified as many as 5,000 schools as failing. One reform that might actually improve them—adequate funding—is not what the administration has in mind. “We can’t spend our way out of it,” Obama told the Today show (27 September), which is rather piquant coming from a man who saw through the $700 billion bank bailout. In order for school districts to qualify for funding under Obama’s School Turnaround program, they have to do one of the following to “failing” schools: close them; have a charter take them over; fire the principal and entire staff and rehire no more than half; or fire the principal, lengthen the school day and implement other onerous changes. This all spells a direct attack on the teachers unions, as Obama made clear in March when he endorsed the firing of the entire staff at Rhode Island’s Central Falls High School (see “Labor: Fight Union Busting Attack on Rhode Island Teachers!” WV No. 954, 12 March).
The government’s campaign to cripple the teachers unions is part of a broad attack on public employees. With the erosion of industry and the acquiescence of the pro-capitalist labor tops to the proliferation of non-union shops, public employees now, for the first time, make up the majority of union members in the U.S. (Many of these are cops who, as the hired guns of the capitalists, should have no place in the unions.) The two national teachers unions, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA), represent about a quarter of all union members nationally, with 4.6 million members.
Like capitalist governments in Europe and elsewhere, American federal, state and local governments, under both Democrats and Republicans, have seized on the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression to slash payrolls and extract massive concessions—from working hours to pensions. Some 60,000 school employees were laid off last year, and many more have already lost their jobs this school year as the bourgeoisie further cuts spending for education. Thirty-eight of the 100 largest school districts have instituted wage freezes and another ten have cut wages. The ruling class sees teachers unions as potential obstacles to slashing public education budgets. A big reason it has been able to push through its attacks on education and other services is the decades-long decline in labor struggle, overseen by a miserable trade-union “leadership” that serves as the bourgeoisie’s lieutenants inside the labor movement.
The working class, black people and other minorities have a vital interest in defending public workers unions and fighting against the attacks on social services, including the bourgeoisie’s attempt to turn back the clock on universal, integrated, secular public education. We oppose charter schools because they are an attack on the democratic right to public education and provide an opening for religious groups to get government funds to run schools, and contribute as well to furthering school segregation. The drive to expand charter schools underlines the link between racial oppression, union-busting and the promotion of religious obscurantism.
Like the fight for decent health care, the battle for quality education, including bilingual instruction, for the working class and the black and Latino poor requires hard struggle against the capitalist class, a tiny handful of people whose obscene wealth is gained from exploiting labor and whose rule is reinforced by racial and other forms of social oppression. The money and resources exist for massive construction of schools, hospitals and other infrastructure gutted by the profit-bloated capitalists. To seize that wealth requires breaking the power of the bourgeoisie through socialist revolution.
Education U.S.A.— Separate and Unequal
Education in capitalist America is class- and race-biased from top to bottom. From public education’s earliest days in the industrial revolution of the 19th century, when class bells and the structure of the school day were used to facilitate the transition from the family farm into the factory, education has been crafted to meet the needs of the capitalist class. Ruling-class offspring are guaranteed places at expensive private schools and universities. In addition, the bourgeoisie needs a layer of educated technicians, professionals, managers and ideologues. The last serious effort to promote science education in this country was after the Soviet Union launched its Sputnik I satellite in 1957. Fear of a Soviet lead in military technology led President Eisenhower to demand a billion-dollar program to improve science education in American schools and to sign the National Defense Education Act in 1958.
A certain level of education is also necessary for industrial labor. During World War II, when there was a labor shortage and the bourgeoisie needed workers for war industries, California shipyard owners recruited untrained and often semiliterate Southerners, black as well as white, who learned to read and write, and often became skilled apprentices in little more than three months. During the war, the G.E.D. program was initiated to prepare returning servicemen who lacked a high school diploma to take jobs. It was expanded in 1963 for the general population.
While black workers have been a key component of the workforce in industry, they have also typically been the “last hired and first fired.” And after the bosses took the wrecking ball to steel mills and auto plants in the North and Midwest, the government saw little need for the overhead expense of educating those whose labor power was no longer needed. As a result, the children of black workers in particular have been treated more and more as an expendable population. The financial titans’ interest in “education reform” has nothing to do with the welfare of the poor, black and working-class kids penned up in decrepit, underfunded schools. For these kids, it’s all about pushing union-free schools where longer days and a longer academic year can be required to cultivate obedient wage slaves (if needed) and foot soldiers for the American empire.
In capitalist America, which was founded on black slavery, the black population forms a specially oppressed caste stigmatized because of skin color. Separate never has been and never can be equal. Whether it is run by Barack Obama or anyone else, the capitalist system is racist to its core—from segregated housing and schools to unemployment, cop terror and mass incarceration in the name of the “war on drugs.” While closing schools and hospitals, the capitalist rulers have seen fit to pay for the “overhead expense” of prison construction, on a massive scale. Poor black youth are offered the “choice” of facing death on the streets, including at the hands of the racist cops, enrolling in U.S. imperialism’s wars and occupations, expecting time in jail, or, for some, a minimum-wage job.
Minority students in segregated schools across America confront conditions more suitable for a police state than for a place of study: metal detectors, video cameras, strict hall and truancy monitoring by security guards, drug testing, locker searches. “Zero tolerance” policies have led to tens of thousands of arrests for such “crimes” as pushing, tardiness and using spitballs. Cities hire school security out of local police forces, which carry out murderous racist terror on the streets. The nearly 5,000 “School Safety Agents” and 200 armed police on duty in New York City public schools constitute the tenth-largest police force in the country. This is an “education” system that essentially treats minority youth as future criminals. The schools serve to reinforce the isolation of black youth in a society where 28 percent of black men are destined to spend time behind bars.
In his 2005 book The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, Jonathan Kozol, an award-winning author and former Boston public school teacher, cites a study by Harvard professor Gary Orfield that powerfully documents the growing segregation of public education. Five decades after the 1954 Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education ruling that overturned formal legal segregation of public schools, Northern schools are more segregated than those in the Deep South. More than two million black and Latino students attend what Kozol calls “apartheid schools,” in which 99 to 100 percent of students are non-white. During the 1990s, the proportion of black students who attended majority white schools decreased to a level lower than in any year since 1968. The Supreme Court’s 2007 decision throwing out school desegregation plans in Seattle and Louisville gave official sanction to those seeking to overturn some 1,000 remaining integration plans across the country.
Bilingual education has also been under steady attack. In California in 1998, racist Proposition 227 required replacing bilingual programs with sink-or-swim “English immersion” classes. As we wrote in “Down With ‘English Only’ Racism!” (WV No. 688, 10 April 1998): “Those with the ability to become bilingual on their own due to privileged circumstances—e.g., those with access to private tutoring, or who come from educated households—are deemed to be an asset to the country. The rest, often from impoverished, rural families where no one is literate in any language, are to be used as superexploited, terrorized and preferably illiterate unskilled labor.”
Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!
It has taken tumultuous, even revolutionary struggle to extend the right to education to black people in America. It took a bloody Civil War to uproot the slave system, under which teaching slaves to read was a crime. Most of the first Southern free public schools were established following the Civil War during Radical Reconstruction, the turbulent decade of Southern interracial bourgeois democracy carried out by the freedmen and their white allies and protected by Union Army troops, many of whom were formerly enslaved. A literacy rate that was around 5 percent for black people in the 1860s rose to 40 percent in 1890. As symbols of measures toward black equality, schools were often targets of Ku Klux Klan terror.
With the Compromise of 1877 and the withdrawal of the last federal troops from the South, black people were left at the mercy of former slaveowners, now backed by Northern capital, and their murderous nightriders. Funding for black education was slashed and Jim Crow segregation eventually became the law in the South, leaving its imprint in the North as well. Nonetheless, black teachers continued to struggle against enormous hardship to operate schools for black children. In the segregated Northern ghettos that emerged following the Great Migration of black Americans to industrial centers in the early 20th century, separate and unequal schools for blacks became facts of life linked to segregation in housing.
The civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s took up the fight against segregated and inferior schools, contributing to the end of de jure segregation in the South. But under the leadership of liberals like Martin Luther King, who looked to the capitalist Democratic Party, the courts and the government, that movement could not end the de facto segregation of black people, North and South, which is rooted in the capitalist system.
Starting in reaction to the Supreme Court’s Brown decision, massive “white flight” to private and suburban schools reinforced segregation. A crucial turning point came in the mid 1970s, when school busing was ordered in Boston—a minimal attempt to integrate its public schools. The busing plan touched off a virulent racist reaction as mobs stoned school buses carrying black kids. The court-ordered plan was limited to neighborhoods like South Boston, one of the poorest white areas in the U.S. outside of Appalachia, and the black Roxbury ghetto. Liberal Massachusetts Congressmen, for their part, made sure that nobody was bused out to the relatively privileged suburban schools, further fueling the racist frenzy. The Spartacist League called to defend the busing plan and extend it to the suburbs. We agitated for the integrated labor movement—meatpackers, bus drivers, teachers and others—to organize labor/black defense of the bused black schoolchildren.
In Boston, the liberals caved in to the racist mobs, ushering in decades of attacks on school desegregation nationwide. Even tokenistic affirmative action programs in higher education have been drastically curtailed, to the point that they barely exist outside of some elite universities. Today’s education reformers have adopted the racist code word “school choice,” which, in the period of the civil rights movement, meant allowing white students to attend all-white public schools and creating all-white private academies, aided by state grants to students’ families. Foreshadowing the policies pursued by George W. Bush and Barack Obama was the school voucher system, which also served to perpetuate racist discrimination.
A defining trait of the race and class inequality woven into the fiber of the U.S. public school system is the role of local taxes in education funding. The wealth or poverty of a particular school district essentially determines the quality of its schools. Predominantly white suburban schools often spend twice what urban school districts do and three times what poorer rural areas spend. And when they find government funding insufficient, donors in wealthier areas shell out the cash for reading specialists, music and arts, science labs and computers as well as the extracurricular field trips and activities that make for a quality learning environment.
Decades ago, the Spartacus Youth League, forerunner to today’s Spartacus Youth Clubs, explained:
“As socialists, we oppose all class-biased and racially discriminatory privileges in educational opportunity. Thus, we are opposed to educational funding based on local property taxes. Instead, we call for all public schools to be funded at the national level. In addition, all social services—from welfare to health care—should be federally funded.”
—“Public Education: Separate and Unequal,” Young Spartacus No. 52, March 1977
The Spartacist League/SYCs fight to extend the right to education to the university level, demanding open admissions, no tuition, a state-paid living stipend for students and the nationalization of private universities.
The fight for equality in education must also include a struggle against the wretched condition in the ghettos and barrios and in impoverished rural areas as well. How can you be expected to study when you’re homeless or hungry, when your families live in fear of immigration raids or are stuck in overcrowded, rat-infested projects?
While fighting against discrimination and segregation in schools and housing, we understand that racial oppression cannot be rooted out short of the revolutionary overturn of the capitalist system. Like winning jobs for all, eradicating race and class bias in education, so that everyone can have access to the quality education that the children of the bourgeoisie get, requires the working class taking power. The road to black liberation and the emancipation of all the oppressed lies in the fight for an egalitarian socialist society, where production is organized to serve human need, not the capitalists’ bottom line.
Laissez-Faire Schools Disaster
Some of America’s biggest billionaires and venture capitalists have joined with the bourgeois press and Democratic Party hacks in a propaganda offensive aimed at pushing through anti-union school “reform.” The moneybags include hedge-fund managers tied to Joe Williams, whose political action committee Democrats for Education Reform was set up to push charter schools, as well as the foundations of Microsoft mogul Bill Gates, union-busting Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton and Eli Broad, who got his billions in housing, insurance and savings rackets.
For these capitalist profiteers, the crux of education reform is the application of “free market” principles. This scheme dates back to the 1950s and right-wing economist and longtime University of Chicago professor Milton Friedman. Friedman’s “Chicago Boys” gained notoriety by serving as economic advisers to the CIA-backed Chilean dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, which overthrew the popular-front government of Salvador Allende in 1973 and massacred 30,000 workers, peasants and leftists, and imprisoned and tortured thousands more. Once he retired from the University of Chicago, Friedman wrote Free to Choose, a playbook for market-based reform, including privatized schooling, and became an adviser to President Ronald Reagan.
Today’s “Chicago Boys”—Obama, Education Secretary Arne Duncan and their pals—share Friedman’s ideological commitment to “free market” education, embracing privatization, tying funding to test scores and ending union protections like tenure for teachers. An early implementer of this union-busting program was Diane Ravitch, an influential historian and education policy wonk who served in the Bush Senior and Clinton administrations. Ravitch has since had second thoughts. From the standpoint of wanting to further America’s national interests, Ravitch’s book The Death and Life of the Great American School System (2010) laments how the laissez-faire market approach of what she calls “the billionaire boys’ club” has gutted government-run education.
As Ravitch documents, turning out higher test scores has become the top priority for financially shaky schools, taking over the school day and spilling over into weekend classes and extra tutoring. Jonathan Kozol aptly describes how “inner-city kids are being trained to give prescripted answers and to acquiesce in their subordinate position in society” (Huffington Post, 10 September 2007). Another result is the large-scale falsification of test scores.
The drive to improve test scores or face the ax also puts pressure on schools to get rid of their lowest-scoring students. This process has been expedited by the closing of large “failing” schools and the opening of small facilities in their place, with the lowest-scoring students shunted off to resource-starved and decrepit schools apart from better-scoring students. What we said about Bush Senior’s education reforms is as much the point today: “Just test rich and poor ‘equally,’ and when the poor flunk, well then, that supposedly proves the ruling class shouldn’t waste its money on the swelling ranks of the underclass” (“Education U.S.A.—Separate and Unequal,” WV No. 544, 7 February 1992).
The Charter School Onslaught
The keystone of the current “reform” package is the mushrooming of charter schools. While part of local school systems, charters are privately owned and operated outfits that take money away from existing public schools and are exempt from Department of Education regulations, as well as from any union contract carried over from the school systems. Some are explicitly operated as money-making ventures, and some are religion-based schools in everything but name.
Charter schools increase racial segregation and class inequality in education and also serve as a tool to smash unions. As a rule, charter schools are opened in the poorest and most segregated parts of cities, often on public school grounds. The better-off white suburban schools remain untouched. Usually, the new schools are even more segregated than the ones they replace. According to a February 2010 study by the UCLA Civil Rights Project, nearly three out of four black charter school students attend “intensely segregated” schools where 90 percent or more of the students are minorities. This is two times higher than the rate at regular public schools.
The proliferation of charter schools has certainly done nothing to integrate schools in Chicago, long known as “Segregation City.” Before landing in Washington, Arne Duncan ran the Chicago public school system from 2001 to 2008. By his own account, he oversaw the closing of some 60 schools, primarily in black and Latino neighborhoods, and the expansion of charter and military schools.
It says a lot that the Obama administration has taken the dilapidated and segregated Chicago system as a national model. Only about half of its students graduate high school; the rate is even lower for black male students. In a city that is nearly 40 percent white, white students make up just 8 percent of public school students, and a third of the public schools have not even one single white student enrolled. In 2009, the capitalist courts ended the 1980 consent decree that provided whatever shreds of integration existed in Chicago public schools, primarily in the magnet and selective schools. The decree imposed by the federal government has now been deemed unnecessary because the “vestiges of discrimination” have been eliminated “to the extent practicable”!
From 2004, when Duncan brought out his Renaissance 2010 education blueprint, to the present, over 80 Chicago public schools, largely in minority neighborhoods, have been shut down and replaced with smaller schools—about two-thirds of them charter schools. Charters now comprise 10 percent of the city school system, and almost all are non-union. The system’s current “CEO” (the actual title), ex-cop and former Chicago Transit Authority president Ron Huberman, has continued Duncan’s “turnaround schools” plan, under which all teachers and staff at “low-performing” schools are fired and replaced by much younger, less experienced teachers who receive far lower wages. Across the country, idealistic young college graduates, mainly white, are being recruited and given a pro forma training course for exactly this purpose by Teach for America and the New Teacher Project, which are supported by the Gates, Broad and Walton foundations. Many new hires burn out quickly—in Chicago it’s common that they don’t even get through their first school year.
Many black and Latino parents turn to charter schools hoping that they provide an alternative to the decaying inner-city public schools. Schools like Harlem Success Academy are touted as miracle stories, where the black-white “achievement gap” is supposed to be a thing of the past and “behavior problems” are rooted out (including through its “kindergarten boot camp”!). In order to raise standardized test scores, Harlem Success spends hundreds of thousands every year to recruit the students it wants while pressuring those who score low to transfer elsewhere. It offers no teachers of English as a Second Language and no classes for students with disabilities. Eva Moskowitz, CEO of Harlem Success, coldly told one teacher, “The school is not a social service agency” (New York magazine, 25 April).
Belying the hype over such “successful” charters lies a stark fact: charter schools do not even measure up to public schools. According to a 2009 Stanford University study, 46 percent of charter schools perform comparably to public schools—and 37 percent perform significantly worse. Examples of financial skimming and haywire accounting abound. Of the 64 schools in Los Angeles that have had their charters revoked, almost all were accused of financial or administrative mismanagement.
Charter schools represent a major erosion of the separation of church and state supposedly enshrined in the Constitution. A case in point is Chicago, where the parochial school system is already the largest in the world and has long functioned as an escape from integration for white families. Sister Mary Paul McCaughey, superintendent of Chicago Catholic Schools, recently announced that a number of their schools may be converted into charters. In Washington, D.C., seven low-performing Catholic schools became charters on archdiocese property, which, like all church property, is exempt from taxation. We oppose government funding for any religious institution, including schools, and fight as well against any encroachment of religious teaching into the public schools, such as the attempt to promote “intelligent design” at the expense of teaching the fact of evolution.
In a chilling sign of how the administration’s “reform” schemes will further depress the quality of education, earlier this year Education Secretary Arne Duncan ghoulishly declared that Hurricane Katrina was “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans”! The racist rulers viewed the unfolding disaster of Hurricane Katrina as an opportunity to “change the demographics” of New Orleans—i.e., get rid of impoverished blacks. In addition to terrorizing the black population, boarding up public housing and axing social services, this meant gutting public education. One of black Democratic mayor Ray Nagin’s first acts after the floodwaters drained was to fire all 8,000 unionized schoolteachers in an all-out drive to replace public schools with charters. Two-thirds of the city’s children are now enrolled in charter schools.
Obscenely, the Brookings Institution think tank has declared that Haiti should follow the New Orleans model, which, it opines, shows how “a fundamentally different education system can be built in the wake of a disaster.” Nothing is being rebuilt as the desperately impoverished Haitian masses continue to groan under imperialist subjugation, carried out through the UN occupation force supplemented by U.S. National Guardsmen.
Before the earthquake, the vast majority of schools in Haiti were private, and more than half of school-age children did not attend school. Next door in the Dominican Republic, free public elementary education is well-established in the cities, although less so in the rural areas. The contrasting results are stark: the literacy rate in the Dominican Republic is 85 percent; in Haiti it’s 53 percent. Even so, the situation in the neocolonial Dominican Republic pales in comparison to that in Cuba, a bureaucratically deformed workers state. Since the overthrow of capitalist rule in 1960-61, Cuba has achieved one of the highest literacy rates in the world—higher than the U.S.—as well as the highest doctor-patient ratio.
The War on Teachers Unions
America’s capitalist rulers and their media mouthpieces are seeking to manipulate justified anger over the state of public education to bolster their attacks on overworked and underpaid teachers and their unions. Obama & Co. seek to reverse gains for teachers, whose unions grew substantially through a series of labor struggles in the 1950s and ’60s. Before that, they had little protection against meager salaries, political favoritism, domineering principals and sex discrimination against a mostly female workforce.
In mid August, the Los Angeles Times, which for over a century has specialized in bashing unions, ran a series of attack pieces on the United Teachers of Los Angeles. The paper published a database rating some 6,000 elementary school teachers by the test scores of their students, promoting this as a tool for firing teachers—an approach endorsed by both Arne Duncan and Democratic California Education Secretary Bonnie Reiss. This witchhunt has since been implicated in the suicide of Rigoberto Ruelas, a dedicated teacher from an impoverished district in South Los Angeles where students scored lower on tests than those in more affluent neighborhoods.
In many public schools, if students get any education at all, it is testament to the dedication of poorly paid teachers who struggle against cutbacks, decaying facilities and increased administration meddling. With the government refusing to shell out for the most basic classroom materials, some teachers spend thousands of dollars of their own money on school supplies.
There is plenty of anger among the membership of the teachers unions over the attacks on their wages and job protections, and over the state of public education. In California, the Oakland Education Association went out on April 29 for a one-day strike against wage freezes, although its members continue to work without a contract. On October 14, Baltimore teachers voted down a contract that would have effectively gutted seniority. But the unions are saddled with a leadership that acts as labor statesmen for the capitalist government, willingly offering up greater concessions from their members in the name of “sacrificing for the kids.”
The union tops’ class collaborationism is all the more blatant with the Democratic Party, which they falsely promote as the friend of labor and the oppressed, running things. In the last 30 years, the teachers unions have shelled out nearly $57.4 million to bourgeois politicians in federal elections alone, 95 percent of that to Democrats. Ten percent of the delegates to the Democratic National Convention in 2008 were teachers union members. Under Obama, the Democratic Party has put itself in the front lines of the anti-teacher offensive. Republican Congressman John Kline pointed out (New York Times, 1 September) that many of Obama and Duncan’s ideas have been pushed by Republicans for years. The union tops’ support for the Democrats makes their realization possible. As the Times reported, Kline told Duncan, “Arne, only you can do that.... You’re the secretary of education for a Democratic president.”
AFT president Randi Weingarten, formerly the head of NYC’s United Federation of Teachers (UFT), exemplifies the role the labor bureaucracy plays as the bosses’ cops inside the unions. Weingarten’s mentor, longtime AFT head Albert Shanker, was a raving anti-Communist who acted as one of U.S. imperialism’s main labor agents in its drive to smash militant unions and suppress left-wing parties around the world during the anti-Soviet Cold War. Weingarten backs charter schools and various types of “performance pay,” in line with Obama’s calls for “more accountability” from teachers. No wonder that Duncan told the New York Times Magazine (19 September), “I’m a big fan of Randi’s.” This, to say the least, is not the opinion of AFT members who booed and heckled her at a May union meeting in Detroit. Weingarten’s successor at the UFT, Michael Mulgrew, has played his part by agreeing to link teachers’ evaluations to standardized test scores and to make it easier to fire teachers whom administrators deem “incompetent.”
We Need a Workers Party!
In our articles denouncing Obama’s vaunted health care package—a gift to the bankers and insurance companies—we made the point that if the labor movement fought for free, universal, quality health care, it would have broad support among the population, helping to revitalize the trade unions in this country. Similarly, if the teachers unions waged some class struggle in support of free, quality education for all, they would find allies in millions of working-class, black and Latino families. When teachers unions have gone on strike in cities like Chicago, Los Angeles and Oakland, they have won support in the ghettos and barrios. To mobilize the unions in such struggle requires fighting against the class collaborationism of the labor bureaucracy, which places its reliance on phony “friends” in the bourgeois government.
In the same camp as the labor sellouts, the reformist International Socialist Organization (ISO) complained in an article by Gillian Russom in International Socialist Review (May-June 2010): “Education should be at the center of a national debate on social priorities, led by a president who promised ‘change.’ Instead, the economic crisis is being used by the White House to dramatically accelerate a neoliberal agenda for education.” This is simply the language of disappointed suitors, as seen in an exchange among ISO leaders over just how low to bow before the imperialist Commander-in-Chief, whose election the ISO hailed (see article, page 2). Earlier, the ISO’s Socialist Worker (2 November 2009) offered that a “real ‘Race to the Top’ program” could “start by taking the largely taxpayer-funded $23 billion in bonuses that Goldman Sachs is giving out this year, and put that money toward giving nearly 6 million families that $4,000 income supplement.” Or, as Oliver Twist begged, “Please, Sir, I want some more.”
The labor bureaucracy and the reformist left seek to obscure the understanding that this is a capitalist government, whose purpose, as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels instructed over 150 years ago, is to be the executive committee of the ruling class as a whole. Following the years of George W. Bush, the Obama administration was put into office to provide a much-needed facelift for U.S. imperialism in order to further its predatory interests abroad and grind down the working class, blacks and immigrants at home. While handing out billions to bankers and auto bosses, Obama has appealed to everyone else to embrace a “spirit of sacrifice.” Meanwhile, he repeats the disgusting tirade that crumbling schools and poverty are “no excuses” for the black masses and that “hardships will just make you stronger.” Enough! We say: Break with the Democrats! For a workers party that fights for a workers government!
After escaping slavery and educating himself as a fighter in the left wing of the abolitionist movement, Frederick Douglass observed that, in the eyes of the slaveholders, to educate a man “would forever unfit him to be a slave.” The logic of this statement remains unchanged a century and a half later. To give all people the means to attain their full creative potential requires overturning the present social order, based on the exploitation of labor, vicious racial oppression and grinding poverty. Only after a multiracial workers party leads the proletariat, at the head of all the oppressed, in overthrowing the decaying capitalist system and constructing an egalitarian socialist society will mankind be freed of the fetters of scarcity and want, and real human history will begin.
Saturday, October 30, 2010
From The Archives Of The Spartacist League (U.S.)- The Struggle Against Class Collaboration In The Anti-War Movement- “Victory To The Vietnamese Revolution!-The War And The Class Struggle” (1972)
Click on the headline to link to the Karl Liebknecht Internet Archive copy of his famous 1915 anti-war tract, The Main Enemy Is At Home!
Markin comment:
I had not originally intended to include this document along with today’s three other related posts but the headline and the substance of article do a rather nice job of summing up what it took me over a decade of my youth to figure out. The lessons: we had a side we wanted to win in the Vietnam War (and it was not the U.S.) and the struggle against imperialist war, is a central component of any program of class struggle under conditions of modern imperialism. Like I said in an earlier post I did not read this material posted today until sometime in the mid-1970s long after DRV-NLF had resolved the question militarily. I could have saved myself some hellious inner turmoil if I had. Finally, I note that this article also parallels most of my own thinking, retrospectively, on the Vietnam War. It is as close as I got to a revolutionary position on that struggle at the time; I did get around to figuring out things better later (and more quickly).
*********
Victory to the Vietnamese Revolution!
The War and the Class Struggle
—from RCY Newsletter No. 12, May-June 1972 (Revolutionary Communist Youth, then the name of the youth organization affiliated with the Spartacist League)
Roused out of apathy by Nixon's escalation of the Vietnam war students began a massive strike wave on Friday, April 21. On campuses across the country, the RCY is working to extend the student strikes to the working class by raising demands to turn students toward left-wing and anti-war groupings in the unions, and by raising among workers the crucial need for labor strikes against imperialist war. At Brandeis University in Boston for example, a work-stoppage committee was set up, under the direction of the RCY, to contact anti-war workers both on and off campus. At Boston University, already on strike against marine recruiters and the war. the RCY participated in the seizure of the Administration Building, then suggested, and was prominent in building, a defense squad and picket line. While sharply attacking the illusion that student actions by themselves can end the war, the RCY supports student strikes against the war and participates militantly in building such strikes, seeking to extend them to the organized working class. At Columbia University in New York City the RCY participated in militant picketing of buildings and. at mass strike meetings, presented demands aimed at defending and extending the strike, through a working-class orientation. The fact that Columbia workers met separately and voted for a work stoppage on Friday showed the practicality and immediate urgency of working with anti-war workers. At the University of California, Berkeley, all unionized campus workers are on strike for state recognition of their unions. The RCY has been fighting to build student support for the strike with militant picket lines and seeking to link student anti-war sentiment to the workers' struggles. At UCLA and Los Angeles City College, RCYers raised the need to expand the student Strike to a workers' strike, despite SWP/YSA opposition and obstructionism.
The role of the various revisionist tendencies in the current strike wave demonstrates their refusal to formulate working-class strategy for social struggles. Simple campus militancy, supported by various Maoists and leftover New Leftists, can lead at best to starting summer vacation a few weeks early. PL/SDS, while calling for "militant actions," has limited its demands to calling on the universities to divest themselves of "evil" stockholdings and ROTC. The mirror image of PL/SDS's adventurist student vanguardism is the reformist student vanguardism pushed by the SWP/YSA and its front group SMC, which also ignores the need for working-class struggle, calling for students to turn campuses into "anti-war universities." The SWP/YSA seeks to use the student strikes to build its peace rallies as a left cover for McGovern-Muskie-Lindsay's presidential campaign.
The Labor Committee took a sectarian and abstensionist position on the student strikes, calling on the Columbia student strikers to "abandon anarchist tactics, "adopt the full (reformist) program of the Labor Committee, and call for a city-wide meeting of the entire "non-ruling class population" on the basis of a "common-interest program." The Workers League covered its capitulation to the SWP/YSA's pop front by super-sectarianism, demanding repudiation of middle-class student strikes and "posing the question of April 22" and the building of a labor party in '72. At Boston University, the WL's Pat Connolly was the only personal a mass student meeting to vote against calling a student strike!
For Labor Strikes Against the War!
Contrary to SMC claims that "in 1968 the anti-war movement forced Johnson to stop the bombing and invasion" (Columbia SMC leaflet), the re-escalation demonstrates that neither the anti-war movement nor student strikes by themselves can force U.S. imperialism out of Indochina. In fact, in 1968 Johnson did not stop the bombing: he merely moved it from the North to the South where the overall bombing was increased. Nixon only withdrew U.S. troops from Cambodia after he had opened the Cambodian border to successive waves of South Vietnamese Army invasions. U.S. aerial bombings, and last year the re-invasion of U.S. troops.
The present anti-war movement and student strikes have no real impact on the actual course of the war because they lack the social
power to challenge U.S. capitalism. Only the working class has both the social interest and the social power to fight imperialist war. The Cambodia-Kent-Jackson State student strike, while demonstrating the unquestionable opposition to the war of the overwhelming majority of students, ultimately had no real effect on U.S. government policy. On the other hand, the recent West Coast dock strike, if it had been extended to war goods, would have made it logistically impossible for the U.S. to maintain a military presence in Vietnam. Because ten thousand striking dock workers offer a far greater potential threat to capitalism than a million striking students, capitalist politicians like McGovern will support student strikes at the same time they call on Nixon to bust the dock strike.
Student strikes must be extended to labor strikes; the anti-war movement must be turned into an anti-capitalist movement. Radical students must turn their efforts toward support to the only real way of fighting imperialism: class struggle.
All Indochina Must Go Communist!
The liberal defenders of imperialism are quick to seek to turn the revulsion against Nixon's re-escalation to their own advantage. Bella Abzug, for example, rushed up to Columbia in an attempt to rally the striking students around her electoral ambitions. The elementary duty to exclude the class enemy from the student strikes must he linked with ceaseless political exposure of the liberals and fake-lefts who bring the bourgeoisie's program into the strikes. The liberals' call to "set the date" only means that "date" when the Vietnamese revolution is crushed and a pro-American government stabilized. The SMC's emphasis on the single issue of troop withdrawal plays straight into Nixon's "Vietnamization" strategy of replacing U.S. soldiers with soldiers of the Saigon puppet government. To draw a hard line between those who oppose imperialism and those who seek a more popular, less costly way to buttress it. the student strikes must take sides with the embattled working people of Vietnam. They must oppose to the class collaborationist of the U.S. anti-war movement and of the Vietnamese Stalinists the demands:
MILITARY VICTORY TO THE NLF/ DRV! ALL INDOCHINA MUST GO COMMUNIST!
Markin comment:
I had not originally intended to include this document along with today’s three other related posts but the headline and the substance of article do a rather nice job of summing up what it took me over a decade of my youth to figure out. The lessons: we had a side we wanted to win in the Vietnam War (and it was not the U.S.) and the struggle against imperialist war, is a central component of any program of class struggle under conditions of modern imperialism. Like I said in an earlier post I did not read this material posted today until sometime in the mid-1970s long after DRV-NLF had resolved the question militarily. I could have saved myself some hellious inner turmoil if I had. Finally, I note that this article also parallels most of my own thinking, retrospectively, on the Vietnam War. It is as close as I got to a revolutionary position on that struggle at the time; I did get around to figuring out things better later (and more quickly).
*********
Victory to the Vietnamese Revolution!
The War and the Class Struggle
—from RCY Newsletter No. 12, May-June 1972 (Revolutionary Communist Youth, then the name of the youth organization affiliated with the Spartacist League)
Roused out of apathy by Nixon's escalation of the Vietnam war students began a massive strike wave on Friday, April 21. On campuses across the country, the RCY is working to extend the student strikes to the working class by raising demands to turn students toward left-wing and anti-war groupings in the unions, and by raising among workers the crucial need for labor strikes against imperialist war. At Brandeis University in Boston for example, a work-stoppage committee was set up, under the direction of the RCY, to contact anti-war workers both on and off campus. At Boston University, already on strike against marine recruiters and the war. the RCY participated in the seizure of the Administration Building, then suggested, and was prominent in building, a defense squad and picket line. While sharply attacking the illusion that student actions by themselves can end the war, the RCY supports student strikes against the war and participates militantly in building such strikes, seeking to extend them to the organized working class. At Columbia University in New York City the RCY participated in militant picketing of buildings and. at mass strike meetings, presented demands aimed at defending and extending the strike, through a working-class orientation. The fact that Columbia workers met separately and voted for a work stoppage on Friday showed the practicality and immediate urgency of working with anti-war workers. At the University of California, Berkeley, all unionized campus workers are on strike for state recognition of their unions. The RCY has been fighting to build student support for the strike with militant picket lines and seeking to link student anti-war sentiment to the workers' struggles. At UCLA and Los Angeles City College, RCYers raised the need to expand the student Strike to a workers' strike, despite SWP/YSA opposition and obstructionism.
The role of the various revisionist tendencies in the current strike wave demonstrates their refusal to formulate working-class strategy for social struggles. Simple campus militancy, supported by various Maoists and leftover New Leftists, can lead at best to starting summer vacation a few weeks early. PL/SDS, while calling for "militant actions," has limited its demands to calling on the universities to divest themselves of "evil" stockholdings and ROTC. The mirror image of PL/SDS's adventurist student vanguardism is the reformist student vanguardism pushed by the SWP/YSA and its front group SMC, which also ignores the need for working-class struggle, calling for students to turn campuses into "anti-war universities." The SWP/YSA seeks to use the student strikes to build its peace rallies as a left cover for McGovern-Muskie-Lindsay's presidential campaign.
The Labor Committee took a sectarian and abstensionist position on the student strikes, calling on the Columbia student strikers to "abandon anarchist tactics, "adopt the full (reformist) program of the Labor Committee, and call for a city-wide meeting of the entire "non-ruling class population" on the basis of a "common-interest program." The Workers League covered its capitulation to the SWP/YSA's pop front by super-sectarianism, demanding repudiation of middle-class student strikes and "posing the question of April 22" and the building of a labor party in '72. At Boston University, the WL's Pat Connolly was the only personal a mass student meeting to vote against calling a student strike!
For Labor Strikes Against the War!
Contrary to SMC claims that "in 1968 the anti-war movement forced Johnson to stop the bombing and invasion" (Columbia SMC leaflet), the re-escalation demonstrates that neither the anti-war movement nor student strikes by themselves can force U.S. imperialism out of Indochina. In fact, in 1968 Johnson did not stop the bombing: he merely moved it from the North to the South where the overall bombing was increased. Nixon only withdrew U.S. troops from Cambodia after he had opened the Cambodian border to successive waves of South Vietnamese Army invasions. U.S. aerial bombings, and last year the re-invasion of U.S. troops.
The present anti-war movement and student strikes have no real impact on the actual course of the war because they lack the social
power to challenge U.S. capitalism. Only the working class has both the social interest and the social power to fight imperialist war. The Cambodia-Kent-Jackson State student strike, while demonstrating the unquestionable opposition to the war of the overwhelming majority of students, ultimately had no real effect on U.S. government policy. On the other hand, the recent West Coast dock strike, if it had been extended to war goods, would have made it logistically impossible for the U.S. to maintain a military presence in Vietnam. Because ten thousand striking dock workers offer a far greater potential threat to capitalism than a million striking students, capitalist politicians like McGovern will support student strikes at the same time they call on Nixon to bust the dock strike.
Student strikes must be extended to labor strikes; the anti-war movement must be turned into an anti-capitalist movement. Radical students must turn their efforts toward support to the only real way of fighting imperialism: class struggle.
All Indochina Must Go Communist!
The liberal defenders of imperialism are quick to seek to turn the revulsion against Nixon's re-escalation to their own advantage. Bella Abzug, for example, rushed up to Columbia in an attempt to rally the striking students around her electoral ambitions. The elementary duty to exclude the class enemy from the student strikes must he linked with ceaseless political exposure of the liberals and fake-lefts who bring the bourgeoisie's program into the strikes. The liberals' call to "set the date" only means that "date" when the Vietnamese revolution is crushed and a pro-American government stabilized. The SMC's emphasis on the single issue of troop withdrawal plays straight into Nixon's "Vietnamization" strategy of replacing U.S. soldiers with soldiers of the Saigon puppet government. To draw a hard line between those who oppose imperialism and those who seek a more popular, less costly way to buttress it. the student strikes must take sides with the embattled working people of Vietnam. They must oppose to the class collaborationist of the U.S. anti-war movement and of the Vietnamese Stalinists the demands:
MILITARY VICTORY TO THE NLF/ DRV! ALL INDOCHINA MUST GO COMMUNIST!
*From The Archives Of The Spartacist League (U.S.)- The Struggle Against Class Collaboration In The Anti-War Movement- Against NPAC (National Peace Action Commitee) Pop Fronts: For Class Action Against The War (1971)
Click on the headline to link to an American Left History entry entitled WHEN DID THE 1960'S END? for background on the events of May Day 1971 that figure prominently in this post.
Markin comment:
Earlier this month I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement that in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.
After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Deb’s Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.
Today I am starting what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.
However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
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Markin comment on the peace and/or anti-war question:
If I was asked to name the number one political cause that I have fought for in my life, and I thought about it for a few moments, the answer would have to be the peace, or put a better way, the anti-war question. I will just quickly draw a distinction between the two terms for purposes of this commentary. Of course, everybody and their brother and sister wants peace, talks about peace, would love to see in their lifetimes, and so on. By this they mean, usually, no wars, or at least just little ones, or may an occasional civil war or something like that. Mainly though, truth to tell, no wars to intrude on their daily lives, and certainly nothing that they have to take up arms about, or worst, sent their children with those selfsame arms to fight. Sunday speech peace is what this attitude boils down to. We have heard that noise from politicians, high and low, for an eternity. And for a fair part of my political youth, truth to tell, that kind of peace, that kind of striving for peace as a political activist, if not quite put in that hard-boiled a manner had great appeal.
Yes, but I am a big boy now, and have been for quite awhile. Thus, sweet Sunday speech peace preachments leave nothing but a bitter taste in my mouth. First of all, as a historical materialist by political inclination I know that there are some wars, like the class struggle wars that I don not want to be peaceful about, at least if the bourgeoisies of the world get in our way as they usually do. Or certain wars for national self-determination by oppressed nations, like the Vietnam War that caused me to re-evaluate my “peace” principles on more than one occasion back in the 1960s. Or wars fought by progressive, or at least smaller sized and helpless entities against bigger, bullying ones. So no, in the year 2010, I do not want to fight for “peace at any price.” And while I am no inveterate war-monger by any means thems the facts. As to the anti-war part of the question I think that I can stand on that position a little better, a little more truthfully, by opposing the wars that world imperialism, and in the first instance American imperialism, constantly throw at us, including today’s Iraq and Afghan occupations for starters.
That said, let me go back to that Vietnam War anti-war experience or rather experiences for they will be illustrative of the transformation of my search for “peace” to that of class justice in this wicked old world. Early on in that war, before the massive escalations of the mid-1960s, I would characterize my position as pacifistic in the universal sense reflecting a Catholic Worker-type position tinged with not a little unkempt social-patriotism toward the American government. As the bombs kept endlessly falling on that benighted country and I studied and learned more about the historic struggle of the Vietnamese against foreign oppression I came to support their struggles under the rubric of a war of national liberation. As I moved further left I held quasi-positions (quasi in the sense of ill-formed, or not fully worked out in those hectic times when one could not move fast enough leftward, and as importantly, theoretically leftward) that the anti-war movement should act as an active “second front” in the Vietnamese national liberation struggle by “bringing the war home” (and rather passive toward what ultimately needed to be done to the American government). Finally, finally I came closer to Bolshevik positions on the war question, the need to defend a workers state (in whatever condition, that too evolved over time), the need to do with and in the American military to bring the war to an end the Bolshevik way.
That said, this particular series of entries from the archives of the Spartacist League would have made life infinitely easier if I had had access to them in those days as expressions of a clear way forward for the anti-war movement that I (and not I alone) was getting increasingly frustrated with as it got mired into bourgeois defeatism, and then into oblivion as that war wound down. Unfortunately I did not initially read this material until some time in the mid-1970s. I will make additional individual comments on each entry.
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Markin comment on the futility of individual heroic anti-war resistance and the strategy of ever more massive “peace crawls” in the Vietnam War period.
Sometimes in politics, and after a lifetime of experiences I believe this to be true especially in revolutionary politics, the tempo of political struggle and upheaval can in a short period of time take individuals and movements far beyond what it would normally take many years to traverse, if ever. Such was the 1960s, for me as an individual politico and for American (and world) politics. That quickening of the political process (in our leftward favor that time, for a while anyway) is part of the reason that I have spilled no little ink in the space trying to draw some lessons applicable today from that now long ago series of experiences.
Additionally, in the period since about 1975 (I will take other arguments on dates but certainly no later than 1980 and the “Reagan revolution”) there have been few, if any, occasions to draw lessons from since there have not been the kind of political, social and cultural uprisings associated with the 1960s. The end of that period, the proverbial end of the 1960s that has been the subject on a great deal of commentary (including in this space) is the focus of this commentary. (Note: I have posted a link entry from a couple of years ago giving my opinion on the subject of when the 1960s ended. That commentary is also relevant to the time-frame of the document under discussion in this post.)
In two other of today’s posts I have noted that once I came of political age in the early 1960s I was constantly searching, to put it succinctly, for the best way to combine a political career with “doing good in the world.” (See From The Archives Of The Spartacist League (U.S.)-The Struggle Against Class Collaboration In The Anti-War Movement- New York Peace Parade Statement (1965) and From The Archives Of The Spartacist League (U.S.)- The Struggle Against Class Collaboration In The Anti-War Movement- Beyond October 21: From Protest To Power (1967)). Most of that decade was spent essentially hoping against hope that the struggles against war, for nuclear disarmament, for black civil rights, and for working people, black and white, to get a couple of breaks in this sorry, old world could be resolved with the “system” (bourgeois society). As the decade progressed and the rawness, unfairness and irrationality of the “system” kept tripping up my precious political calculations even I began to realize that it was the “system’ itself that was the problem. Getting beyond that understanding, nevertheless, took several more years of political beatings no matter how much previous political baggage, as noted in those other entries, I discarded along the way.
Sometimes political wisdom comes in strange forms and under seemingly improbable circumstances. The death of my beliefs that things could be smoothed out within the capitalist imperial system came not with the various brutally suppressed black rebellions in the cities, nor the constant Johnson Vietnam troop escalations, and not even the death of my last great hope, Senator Robert Kennedy. No, it was a simple letter, a letter from my draft board stating that they would like the pleasure of my company in the U.S. Army. Although I tussled with refusal I allowed myself to be drafted. And not, let me state for the record, under any Bolshevik concept of going off with my fellow working class stiffs in order to win them to the concept of revolutionary defeatism for the American side. That came later, or a variation of it anyway.
I do not want to dwell on my military experience here except to say that after about three days into that mess I was finally broken from my bourgeois illusions and radicalized, and I have never looked back since. All the later stuff leading up to my understanding of the need to struggle for a workers party that fights for a workers government has been a fine-tuning of the reality “discovered” there that when the deal went down the army (and I later incorporated the courts, the prisons, and the other repressive institutions of bourgeois society into this scheme) was the core of the American state. No, thank you.
That said, the next few years were spent in the political wilderness looking for all kinds of, mainly, individual (or small group) radical expressions of my opposition to bourgeois society, including all sorts of communal activities, a small romance with anarchism, a bigger romance with the Black Panthers (at times when whites could approach them), and a very, very big romance with the notion of acting as some kind of “second front” for the Vietnamese in their struggle against American imperialism. Then came May Day 1971 when we collectively, the Mayday Tribe that is, were going to “stop the government, if the government does not stop the war.” We were crushed unceremoniously and with dispatch on that day by that selfsame government. That desperate experience convinced me that brave, if isolated, remnant that we were there had to be a better way to fight the “beast.” Shortly thereafter I started reading serious socialist stuff, and then ….Marxist tracts (via Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution). And I have not looked back, well, except for that life-long necessity of fine-tuning those class struggle understandings.
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Against NPAC Pop Fronts:
For Class Action Against the War!
—from Spartacist supplement, July 1971
The "Spring Offensive" is over, but the Vietnam war drags on. The Mayday Tribe's threat to "Stop the Government" if the government did not stop the war only demonstrated with what ruthless efficiency the government handles radicals who talk about stopping the government but lack any means except wishful thinking. The Mayday Tribe represented merely a new chapter in the conflict of perspectives which has been ingrained in the anti-war movement since its inception: "respectable" reformism vs. petty-bourgeois adventurism. Each outbreak of confrontationism is greeted by a new wave of "we told you so" from the radical-liberal-bourgeois coalition dominated by the astute class-collaborationist maneuvering of the ex-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP). What hypocrisy! For it is precisely the obvious liberalism of the mainstream anti-war movement which has driven the frustrated student protesters in desperation into the ranks of the Mayday Tribe. And as for futility, what has the SWP's much-touted "mass movement" accomplished? the National Peace Action Coalition (NPAC) "peace action" of April 24 only produced the traffic jam to which the Mayday Tribe aspired. So long as the anti-war movement continues to be circumscribed by these two alternatives—reformism or adventurism there can be no way forward.
Kent State Revisited
The outraged opposition spontaneously generated last year by the U.S. invasion of Cambodia and the Kent-Jackson State massacres has been completely dissipated. The invasion of Laos earlier this year an escalation and expansion of the war equal to the Cambodia invasion produced only scattered protests. The July 2-4 NPAC Convention takes place after the first relatively quiet spring in nearly a decade on college campuses, heretofore the bastion of the anti-war movement. Instead, the campus has become a breeding ground for reactionary cultism (with Campus Crusade for Christ Revivals rivalling anti-war rallies for attendance) and relative political apathy.
The energy of the May 1970 upsurge was dissipated precisely because its lessons have been ignored. The massacres ol students took place in the midst of a massive, ascending strike wave representing a radicalization of the U.S. and international working class unprecedented since World War II. One of the most important episodes of this strike wave was the nationwide teamster wildcat. In Ohio during April-May 1970 twenty thousand teamsters went out. Joining with the trucking owners in calling on right-wing Republican Governor Rhoadcs to mobilize four thousand National Guardsmen to break the wildcat were "friends of labor," "friends of the peace movement" like Senator Saxbe and Mayor Stokes, and the international "leadership" of the Teamsters, including President Fit/simmons and Vice-President Harold Gibbons -labor's "representative" on the podium at the April 24 rally in Washington and endorser of this NPAC Convention.
The trucking owners tried to move scab trucks in convoys of five, supported by a massive show of firepower: military helicopters, armored cars and armed Guardsmen literally riding shotgun in each cabin. The teamsters countered by organizing flying-picket squads which massed at terminal gates whenever the owners tried to move scab trucks. The teamsters were able to lace down the Guardsmen and defend their strike.
It was from this strike-breaking detail that four hundred Guardsmen were taken and sent to Kent State. Unlike the teamsters, the students put up no resistance. But it was students, not teamsters. who were gunned down. Why? A massacre of teamsters, in the middle of a tense, militant nationwide wildcat by one of the country's strongest unions, would have precipitated a series of nationwide protest and sympathy strikes a far greater show of social power than all the student strikes, peace crawls and police confrontations combined. In contrast, the massacre of students had little more long-term social impact than starting summer vacation three weeks early on college campuses.
What made the protesting students so vulnerable was precisely the question of brute social power: the teamsters and other organized workers have it; students do not. Likewise, while polls, parades and police confrontations may demonstrate that the overwhelming majority in this country is against the war, no variation or combination of protest politics can force the U.S. ruling class out of Indochina. Only a combination of social forces whose consciousness and militancy pose a greater threat to the world hegemony of U.S. imperialism than military defeat in Vietnam can force a halt to the war.
NPAC's Predecessor
The predecessor to this NPAC Convention was last year's "Emergency National Conference Against the Cambodia-Laos-Vietnam War" held in Cleveland over June 19-21. Mayor Stokes, fresh from helping break the teamster strike, officiary endorsed the conference and proclaimed June 19-21 as "Peace Action Days." The SWP-dominated conference immediately proposed a demonstration in downtown Cleveland "against Agnew"—a demonstration which any liberal Republican or Democratic hustler like Stokes could solidari/.e with. SDS, supported in their demand by Progressive Labor and the Spartacist League, counterposed a demonstration in support of the teamster wildcat and against Stokes as well as Agnew. The SWP, predictably, was enraged at the suggestion of anything that might "divide" the peace movement and alienate its "friends" in the Democratic Party and trade union bureaucracy.
In addition to marching "against Agnew," the conference attempted to reassemble from the wreckage of various Mobilizations, Coalitions. Committees, Conferences. Caucuses, Congresses, Con¬ventions and other concoctions an even newer, broader, more indivisible peace-group-to-end-all-peace-groups—the "National Peace Action Coalition." Although maneuvering in lesser arenas, the SWP has adopted the Communist Party's proclivity for forming coalitions only to toss them out again when their treachery is no longer of service. Such was the history of the "Spring," "National" and "New" Mobili/ations behind which the SWP was the motivating force, and such will be the history of NPAC. NPAC is a Popular Front combining the SWP with the liberal bourgeoisie and Cold Warrior "socialists," through which the SWP can "lead" masses of people and rub shoulders with .Vance Hartke and Victor Reuther. The SWP is able to "lead" these masses through the oldest opportunist sleight-of-hand in the world —by adopting the liberal bourgeoisie's program! Capitalist politicians like Hartke know that the real decisions about when and how to "end" the war are made in Wall Street high-rises and Pentagon sub-basements. They come to these conferences as they go to livestock shows and state fairs—to garner votes.
"Mass Actions"
To the accusation that formations like NPAC are Popular Fronts of class collaboration, SWPer Doug Jenness responded:
"If NPAC was watering down its program to get support from capitalist politicians, your charges would be justified. But NPAC follows an entirely different course. It has an independent perspective to unite as many people as possible, regardless of political affiliations or views, in mass actions against the Vietnam War." -Militant, 28 May 1970
And to be sure, the Cleveland "Emergency Conference" dutifully passed a resolution calling for "mass actions." Jenness' statement is perfectly clear—and perfectly meaningless. The SWP wants to "unite" lots of "people" (explicitly regardless of politics) in "mass actions." "Unite" which "people," on the basis of what program, in what kind of "mass action"? The massacre of a million Indonesian communist workers was a "mass action." So were the Cossack pogroms. So, for that matter, was the October Revolution. The demonstration "against Agnew" and the teamster wildcat were also "mass actions." However, the SWP endorsed the former while one of their spokesmen (Miguel Padilla.at Cleveland) dismissed the latter as "racist and reactionary." Why do the self-proclaimed "Marxists" of the SWP have so much difficulty understanding that society is made up of classes, not undifferentiated masses, and that the two primary classes in capitalist society are the bourgeoisie and the working class? It is absurd to talk about having "an independent perspective"; the reformist anti-war movement is deliberately organized as a classless formation, but though it may opt to ignore the class struggle, the class struggle does not ignore it! The middle-class youth who have flocked to the anti-war movement in moral outrage must choose sides in the class struggle; they can play no role outside it. The SWP's "independent perspective" in reality means independence from the fight for the international proletarian revolution, in favor of back¬handed support to the class enemy of U.S. workers and their class brothers in Indochina.
Lest anyone should think that the SWP has gone astray through simple ignorance of these elementary tenets of Marxist analysis, it is instructive to compare the SWP's current politics with its analysis of the way to conduct anti-war struggle at the time of the Korean war, another instance of imperialism's continuing assault on the gains of limited social revolutions abroad expressed militarily. In March 1953 Farrcll Dobbs then and now a principal leadei of theSWP- wrote:
"... the most vital place to carry on anti-war agitation and participate in anti-war actions is in the unions where the masses are. We have always envisaged the struggle against war as an extension of the class
struggle onto a higher plane. The fight against the war can really be
effective only to the extent that the workers adopt class-struggle
policies in defending their interests. If we are to help this process along
we must be in the unions "
SWP Internal Bulletin Vol. 15. No. 6, March 1953 (our
emphasis)
Now this is neither a particularly profound nor a particularly eloquent polemic. It is simple matter-of-fact statement of an orientation which stands blatantly and diametrically counterposed to the current politics of the SWP. The SWP leaders are not naive would-be revolutionaries ignorant of the theories of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky; they have consciously rejected Trotskyism in favor of a perspective of reformist class collaboration.
Clear-Cut Choice
Like the national postal strike before it and the recent two-day mini-general strike of New York City public employees, the Teamster wildcat produced a clear-cut line-up of class forces. The trucking owners, cops, courts, the bourgeois press and politicians (from the most liberal to the most conservative) stood united as a class and, together with their agents in the unions, the labor bureaucracy, tried to crush the Teamster struggle. On the other side of the barricades were the Teamsters. The SDS resolution put before the Cleveland "Emergency Conference" a clear-cut, inescapable choice: support the Teamsters (which would have forced NPAC to break with capitalist politicians like Stokes and the "lieutenants of capital" within the workers movement like Fitzsimmons and Gibbons); or cement the Popular Front bloc by calling the Teamsters simply "racist and reactionary" and demonstrating against Agnew. The SWP chose the latter course -the course of class collaboration and betrayal.
On the main issue facing the Cleveland conference—class collaboration the SWP's conduct was unequivocal. Not so that of the pseudo-Trotskyist Workers League (WL) which, in a frenzy of the same opportunist appetite which led it to enthusiastically and virtually uncritically endorse the wretched 1970 SWPneleetorat campaigns, insisted that the real issue was "Trotskyism vs. Stalinism." By this catchy slogan the WL meant that its main enemy at the conference was PL ("Stalinism") and the SDS motions which posed, in a limited but generally correct way, an anti-liberal, working-class orientation for the anti-war movement. The WL in effect made a bloc with the SWP ("Trotskyism"—but since when is the SWP legitimately Trotskyist?) against opposition from the left, thereby endorsing the essence of Stalinism though not the label, for Stalinism like all varieties of revisionism—is nothing more or less than the abandonment of an international, proletarian and revolutionary perspective in favor of alliances with some wing of the class enemy, precisely'the SWP's policy in the anti-war movement! (The WL, which has jumped all over the map on the anti-war question tailending the Popular Front in 1965, offering critical political support to the NLF Stalinists and Ho Chi Minh in 1967— recently adopted a new face: calling its own rally on April 24, the WL denounced all those who participated in the "official" rally, thus condemning the mass of anti-war activists for the betrayals of their reformist, social-chauvinist leaders.)
The SWP Rediscovers Workers
The SWP and its succession of front groups have made their choice—class collaboration rather than class struggle. But since the SWP's usefulness to its bourgeois allies depends precisely on its continued ability to lead the would-be radicals among the anti-war protesters into the Popular Front trap, the SWP now needs the left cover of a pseudo-working-class orientation. Many of the more conscious student activists cannot fail to compare the futility of the April 24 "mass action" with the virtual paralysis of New York City caused by a few thousands of militant workers, even despite their sellout leaders. So the SWP is making renewed efforts to develop the facade of a labor base. A call in the June 18 Militant for the NPAC Convention announces tha.t NPAC is preparing a series of letters addressed to "various anti-war constituencies." Prominent among these separate-but-equal "constituencies" is "trade unionists," and several union bureaucrats are listed among the sponsors of the Convention.
But a Marxist working-class perspective does not consist of the
willingness to orient towards workers (mediated through the class
(traitors of the labor bureaucracy, to be sure) for the purpose of
including them among the various other "constituencies" assembled under the political banner of the liberal bourgeoisie. The empirical reflex of much of the U.S. left, faced with the demonstrated revolutionary aspirations of the working class following the 1968 French upsurge, has been to go where the action is by adopting a simple-minded "workerism" underlaid with the social do-goodism previously characteristic of the New Left's attitude toward the "Third World." In this respect PL-SDS's "tactics" of "allying" with workers by showing how much you want to help them is not atypical, and provides yet another excuse for the right wing of the radical movement (perfectly typified by the SWP's Padilla as well as the old New Leftists) to justify dismissal of the working class as the force for revolution because of the false consciousness (racism, patriotism) which simple-minded "workerism" must ignore as a principle.
To the extent that sections of the working class do remain imbued with the ideology of the bourgeoisie, groups like the SWP have only themselves to blame. Workers see their most sophisticated enemies (McCarthy, Lindsay, Hartkc) lauded by the supposed "Marxists," cheered on by the labor parasites who serve the bourgeoisie within the workers' own organizations. The sections of the left who recognize the SWP's sellout for what it is must go beyond "workerism" to a program which can break the disastrous unity of anti-war militants with the most sell-conscious and dangerous wing of the bourgeoisie, and replace it by a real unity a unity based on a program of international class struggle:
Class Struggle Program
1. No Liberal Bourgeois Speakers at Anti-War Rallies! Under the
rubric of "non-exclusionism" and "independence',' the SWP-NPAC
leadership welcomes the class enemy into the anti-war movement.
The major activity of the movement's "mass actions" has been to
provide both the forum and a captive audience for liberals to do their
canvassing. The only real "independence" for the movement is
irreconcilable opposition to the class enemy.
2. For Labor Political Strikes Against the War! No amount of
student strikes and weekend peace crawls can force U.S. imperialism
to end the Indochinese war. But a strike by U.S. workers in solidarity
with the Indochinese working people could compel the capitalists to
face an enemy even more potent than the Vietnamese Revolution—a
powerful, organized and conscious working class in struggle for its
own class interests in the very citadel of imperialism. The NPAC
leadership opposes this perspective because it wants to maintain its
alliance with the liberal bourgeoisie, trading away the potential of a
powerful, working-class-based mass movement in order to win the
adherence ol "moderates" to a classless, implicitly pro-capitalist line.
A struggle for this demand means the struggle against the conservative, self-interested labor bureaucracy which mortally fears any class action which would upset its peaceful coexistence with the bosses and their politicians.
3. Break with the Capitalist Parties—For a Political Party of the
Working Class! The U.S. working class will remain politically
trapped until it has built, by struggle against its fake "leaders," its own
party. A workers party must have a consistent class program as well
as a working-class base. We do not call upon the tested servants of
capitalism, the labor bureaucrats, to form this party; we do not seek
to pressure them into building a trap for the workers along the lines of
the British Labour Party. We must fight from the beginning to make the workers party a revolutionary party.
4. Smash Imperialism—All U.S. Troops Out of Asia Now! We
must expose the pro-imperialist liberals who speak at the invitation
of the SWP-NPAC —no negotiations, no timetables! We must make
it clear that we want no bourgeois evasions de-escalation, troop
shifts, moratoriums — to interfere with the defeat of imperialism in
Asia!
5. Victory to the Indochinese Revolution — No Confidence in
Sellout "Leaders" at Home or Abroad! The SWP-NPAC demands
"self-determination" for Vietnam. But for Marxists there is an even
higher principle at stake: the class nature of the war. We have a
responsibility to take sides. Our commitment to the revolutionary
struggle of the Indochinese working people demands that we must
give no confidence to the Stalinist traitors who have repeatedly sold
out the struggle (from the Geneva Accords to the People's Peace
Treaty) All Indochina Must Go Communist!
******
The document printed above was prepared for the July 1971 NPAC conference and encapsulated the sharp political struggle which had raged within the antiwar movement for six years. That conference represented a political milestone where the SWP, now class-collahorationist to the core, sealed its popular-front strategy in hlood. After years of organizing toothless pacifist ic conferences and "peace now" marches on a hasis politically acceptable to the "dove" section of the bourgeoisie, these ex- Trotskyists finally succeeded in luring a genuine capitalist politician, U.S. Senator Vance Hartke, onto the NPAC steering committee. At the conference the SWP demonstrated that its political degeneration was matched by the appropriate organizational methods— Stalinist-style gangster attacks on left critics.
To the discomfiture of the SWP and its friend Hartke, Spartacist League supporters demanded that this imperialist spokesman be summarily excluded from the conference, and (when the SL motion was ignored by the chairman) SLers joined with supporters of Progressive Labor (PL) and SDS in soundly booing Hartke's speech. The second major spokesman was Victor Reuther. United Automobile Workers (UAW representative and a key red-baiting CIA lackey within the AFL-CIO bureaucracy. As Reuther rose to speak, the Spartacist delegation chanted "Labor Strikes Against the War," a slogan designed to expose the labor leadership's pro-imperialist hypocrisy, and then sat down.
PL supporters, who saw no difference between Reuther, a "labor lieutenant of capital" within the workers movement and Hartke, a direct representative of the bourgeoisie, attempted to prevent the UAW misleader from speaking. At that point the SWP marshals responded to PL's verbal disruption with a vicious assault and began to physicially throw them out. The SL supporters jumped up to protest these goon-squad tactics and were also attacked, resulting in injuries to several comrades.
The following day, while Hartke denounced PL as "just as responsible for the war as Nixon," the SWP capped its thug attack with a political purge and refused to allow any PL or SL supporters hack into the conference. So blatantly provocative were the SWP's actions that even political tendencies that had not lifted a finger during the attack fell compelled to separate themselves from this violent exclusionism. Only one group was shameless enough to join with the SWP in the assault (later serving up nauseating left" justifications lo whitewash the SWP's anti-red purge): the Healyile Workers League, then pursuing one of its many unprincipled belly-crawling maneuvers toward the U.S. Pabloites.
Markin comment:
Earlier this month I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement that in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.
After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Deb’s Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.
Today I am starting what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.
However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
***********
Markin comment on the peace and/or anti-war question:
If I was asked to name the number one political cause that I have fought for in my life, and I thought about it for a few moments, the answer would have to be the peace, or put a better way, the anti-war question. I will just quickly draw a distinction between the two terms for purposes of this commentary. Of course, everybody and their brother and sister wants peace, talks about peace, would love to see in their lifetimes, and so on. By this they mean, usually, no wars, or at least just little ones, or may an occasional civil war or something like that. Mainly though, truth to tell, no wars to intrude on their daily lives, and certainly nothing that they have to take up arms about, or worst, sent their children with those selfsame arms to fight. Sunday speech peace is what this attitude boils down to. We have heard that noise from politicians, high and low, for an eternity. And for a fair part of my political youth, truth to tell, that kind of peace, that kind of striving for peace as a political activist, if not quite put in that hard-boiled a manner had great appeal.
Yes, but I am a big boy now, and have been for quite awhile. Thus, sweet Sunday speech peace preachments leave nothing but a bitter taste in my mouth. First of all, as a historical materialist by political inclination I know that there are some wars, like the class struggle wars that I don not want to be peaceful about, at least if the bourgeoisies of the world get in our way as they usually do. Or certain wars for national self-determination by oppressed nations, like the Vietnam War that caused me to re-evaluate my “peace” principles on more than one occasion back in the 1960s. Or wars fought by progressive, or at least smaller sized and helpless entities against bigger, bullying ones. So no, in the year 2010, I do not want to fight for “peace at any price.” And while I am no inveterate war-monger by any means thems the facts. As to the anti-war part of the question I think that I can stand on that position a little better, a little more truthfully, by opposing the wars that world imperialism, and in the first instance American imperialism, constantly throw at us, including today’s Iraq and Afghan occupations for starters.
That said, let me go back to that Vietnam War anti-war experience or rather experiences for they will be illustrative of the transformation of my search for “peace” to that of class justice in this wicked old world. Early on in that war, before the massive escalations of the mid-1960s, I would characterize my position as pacifistic in the universal sense reflecting a Catholic Worker-type position tinged with not a little unkempt social-patriotism toward the American government. As the bombs kept endlessly falling on that benighted country and I studied and learned more about the historic struggle of the Vietnamese against foreign oppression I came to support their struggles under the rubric of a war of national liberation. As I moved further left I held quasi-positions (quasi in the sense of ill-formed, or not fully worked out in those hectic times when one could not move fast enough leftward, and as importantly, theoretically leftward) that the anti-war movement should act as an active “second front” in the Vietnamese national liberation struggle by “bringing the war home” (and rather passive toward what ultimately needed to be done to the American government). Finally, finally I came closer to Bolshevik positions on the war question, the need to defend a workers state (in whatever condition, that too evolved over time), the need to do with and in the American military to bring the war to an end the Bolshevik way.
That said, this particular series of entries from the archives of the Spartacist League would have made life infinitely easier if I had had access to them in those days as expressions of a clear way forward for the anti-war movement that I (and not I alone) was getting increasingly frustrated with as it got mired into bourgeois defeatism, and then into oblivion as that war wound down. Unfortunately I did not initially read this material until some time in the mid-1970s. I will make additional individual comments on each entry.
********
Markin comment on the futility of individual heroic anti-war resistance and the strategy of ever more massive “peace crawls” in the Vietnam War period.
Sometimes in politics, and after a lifetime of experiences I believe this to be true especially in revolutionary politics, the tempo of political struggle and upheaval can in a short period of time take individuals and movements far beyond what it would normally take many years to traverse, if ever. Such was the 1960s, for me as an individual politico and for American (and world) politics. That quickening of the political process (in our leftward favor that time, for a while anyway) is part of the reason that I have spilled no little ink in the space trying to draw some lessons applicable today from that now long ago series of experiences.
Additionally, in the period since about 1975 (I will take other arguments on dates but certainly no later than 1980 and the “Reagan revolution”) there have been few, if any, occasions to draw lessons from since there have not been the kind of political, social and cultural uprisings associated with the 1960s. The end of that period, the proverbial end of the 1960s that has been the subject on a great deal of commentary (including in this space) is the focus of this commentary. (Note: I have posted a link entry from a couple of years ago giving my opinion on the subject of when the 1960s ended. That commentary is also relevant to the time-frame of the document under discussion in this post.)
In two other of today’s posts I have noted that once I came of political age in the early 1960s I was constantly searching, to put it succinctly, for the best way to combine a political career with “doing good in the world.” (See From The Archives Of The Spartacist League (U.S.)-The Struggle Against Class Collaboration In The Anti-War Movement- New York Peace Parade Statement (1965) and From The Archives Of The Spartacist League (U.S.)- The Struggle Against Class Collaboration In The Anti-War Movement- Beyond October 21: From Protest To Power (1967)). Most of that decade was spent essentially hoping against hope that the struggles against war, for nuclear disarmament, for black civil rights, and for working people, black and white, to get a couple of breaks in this sorry, old world could be resolved with the “system” (bourgeois society). As the decade progressed and the rawness, unfairness and irrationality of the “system” kept tripping up my precious political calculations even I began to realize that it was the “system’ itself that was the problem. Getting beyond that understanding, nevertheless, took several more years of political beatings no matter how much previous political baggage, as noted in those other entries, I discarded along the way.
Sometimes political wisdom comes in strange forms and under seemingly improbable circumstances. The death of my beliefs that things could be smoothed out within the capitalist imperial system came not with the various brutally suppressed black rebellions in the cities, nor the constant Johnson Vietnam troop escalations, and not even the death of my last great hope, Senator Robert Kennedy. No, it was a simple letter, a letter from my draft board stating that they would like the pleasure of my company in the U.S. Army. Although I tussled with refusal I allowed myself to be drafted. And not, let me state for the record, under any Bolshevik concept of going off with my fellow working class stiffs in order to win them to the concept of revolutionary defeatism for the American side. That came later, or a variation of it anyway.
I do not want to dwell on my military experience here except to say that after about three days into that mess I was finally broken from my bourgeois illusions and radicalized, and I have never looked back since. All the later stuff leading up to my understanding of the need to struggle for a workers party that fights for a workers government has been a fine-tuning of the reality “discovered” there that when the deal went down the army (and I later incorporated the courts, the prisons, and the other repressive institutions of bourgeois society into this scheme) was the core of the American state. No, thank you.
That said, the next few years were spent in the political wilderness looking for all kinds of, mainly, individual (or small group) radical expressions of my opposition to bourgeois society, including all sorts of communal activities, a small romance with anarchism, a bigger romance with the Black Panthers (at times when whites could approach them), and a very, very big romance with the notion of acting as some kind of “second front” for the Vietnamese in their struggle against American imperialism. Then came May Day 1971 when we collectively, the Mayday Tribe that is, were going to “stop the government, if the government does not stop the war.” We were crushed unceremoniously and with dispatch on that day by that selfsame government. That desperate experience convinced me that brave, if isolated, remnant that we were there had to be a better way to fight the “beast.” Shortly thereafter I started reading serious socialist stuff, and then ….Marxist tracts (via Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution). And I have not looked back, well, except for that life-long necessity of fine-tuning those class struggle understandings.
**************
Against NPAC Pop Fronts:
For Class Action Against the War!
—from Spartacist supplement, July 1971
The "Spring Offensive" is over, but the Vietnam war drags on. The Mayday Tribe's threat to "Stop the Government" if the government did not stop the war only demonstrated with what ruthless efficiency the government handles radicals who talk about stopping the government but lack any means except wishful thinking. The Mayday Tribe represented merely a new chapter in the conflict of perspectives which has been ingrained in the anti-war movement since its inception: "respectable" reformism vs. petty-bourgeois adventurism. Each outbreak of confrontationism is greeted by a new wave of "we told you so" from the radical-liberal-bourgeois coalition dominated by the astute class-collaborationist maneuvering of the ex-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP). What hypocrisy! For it is precisely the obvious liberalism of the mainstream anti-war movement which has driven the frustrated student protesters in desperation into the ranks of the Mayday Tribe. And as for futility, what has the SWP's much-touted "mass movement" accomplished? the National Peace Action Coalition (NPAC) "peace action" of April 24 only produced the traffic jam to which the Mayday Tribe aspired. So long as the anti-war movement continues to be circumscribed by these two alternatives—reformism or adventurism there can be no way forward.
Kent State Revisited
The outraged opposition spontaneously generated last year by the U.S. invasion of Cambodia and the Kent-Jackson State massacres has been completely dissipated. The invasion of Laos earlier this year an escalation and expansion of the war equal to the Cambodia invasion produced only scattered protests. The July 2-4 NPAC Convention takes place after the first relatively quiet spring in nearly a decade on college campuses, heretofore the bastion of the anti-war movement. Instead, the campus has become a breeding ground for reactionary cultism (with Campus Crusade for Christ Revivals rivalling anti-war rallies for attendance) and relative political apathy.
The energy of the May 1970 upsurge was dissipated precisely because its lessons have been ignored. The massacres ol students took place in the midst of a massive, ascending strike wave representing a radicalization of the U.S. and international working class unprecedented since World War II. One of the most important episodes of this strike wave was the nationwide teamster wildcat. In Ohio during April-May 1970 twenty thousand teamsters went out. Joining with the trucking owners in calling on right-wing Republican Governor Rhoadcs to mobilize four thousand National Guardsmen to break the wildcat were "friends of labor," "friends of the peace movement" like Senator Saxbe and Mayor Stokes, and the international "leadership" of the Teamsters, including President Fit/simmons and Vice-President Harold Gibbons -labor's "representative" on the podium at the April 24 rally in Washington and endorser of this NPAC Convention.
The trucking owners tried to move scab trucks in convoys of five, supported by a massive show of firepower: military helicopters, armored cars and armed Guardsmen literally riding shotgun in each cabin. The teamsters countered by organizing flying-picket squads which massed at terminal gates whenever the owners tried to move scab trucks. The teamsters were able to lace down the Guardsmen and defend their strike.
It was from this strike-breaking detail that four hundred Guardsmen were taken and sent to Kent State. Unlike the teamsters, the students put up no resistance. But it was students, not teamsters. who were gunned down. Why? A massacre of teamsters, in the middle of a tense, militant nationwide wildcat by one of the country's strongest unions, would have precipitated a series of nationwide protest and sympathy strikes a far greater show of social power than all the student strikes, peace crawls and police confrontations combined. In contrast, the massacre of students had little more long-term social impact than starting summer vacation three weeks early on college campuses.
What made the protesting students so vulnerable was precisely the question of brute social power: the teamsters and other organized workers have it; students do not. Likewise, while polls, parades and police confrontations may demonstrate that the overwhelming majority in this country is against the war, no variation or combination of protest politics can force the U.S. ruling class out of Indochina. Only a combination of social forces whose consciousness and militancy pose a greater threat to the world hegemony of U.S. imperialism than military defeat in Vietnam can force a halt to the war.
NPAC's Predecessor
The predecessor to this NPAC Convention was last year's "Emergency National Conference Against the Cambodia-Laos-Vietnam War" held in Cleveland over June 19-21. Mayor Stokes, fresh from helping break the teamster strike, officiary endorsed the conference and proclaimed June 19-21 as "Peace Action Days." The SWP-dominated conference immediately proposed a demonstration in downtown Cleveland "against Agnew"—a demonstration which any liberal Republican or Democratic hustler like Stokes could solidari/.e with. SDS, supported in their demand by Progressive Labor and the Spartacist League, counterposed a demonstration in support of the teamster wildcat and against Stokes as well as Agnew. The SWP, predictably, was enraged at the suggestion of anything that might "divide" the peace movement and alienate its "friends" in the Democratic Party and trade union bureaucracy.
In addition to marching "against Agnew," the conference attempted to reassemble from the wreckage of various Mobilizations, Coalitions. Committees, Conferences. Caucuses, Congresses, Con¬ventions and other concoctions an even newer, broader, more indivisible peace-group-to-end-all-peace-groups—the "National Peace Action Coalition." Although maneuvering in lesser arenas, the SWP has adopted the Communist Party's proclivity for forming coalitions only to toss them out again when their treachery is no longer of service. Such was the history of the "Spring," "National" and "New" Mobili/ations behind which the SWP was the motivating force, and such will be the history of NPAC. NPAC is a Popular Front combining the SWP with the liberal bourgeoisie and Cold Warrior "socialists," through which the SWP can "lead" masses of people and rub shoulders with .Vance Hartke and Victor Reuther. The SWP is able to "lead" these masses through the oldest opportunist sleight-of-hand in the world —by adopting the liberal bourgeoisie's program! Capitalist politicians like Hartke know that the real decisions about when and how to "end" the war are made in Wall Street high-rises and Pentagon sub-basements. They come to these conferences as they go to livestock shows and state fairs—to garner votes.
"Mass Actions"
To the accusation that formations like NPAC are Popular Fronts of class collaboration, SWPer Doug Jenness responded:
"If NPAC was watering down its program to get support from capitalist politicians, your charges would be justified. But NPAC follows an entirely different course. It has an independent perspective to unite as many people as possible, regardless of political affiliations or views, in mass actions against the Vietnam War." -Militant, 28 May 1970
And to be sure, the Cleveland "Emergency Conference" dutifully passed a resolution calling for "mass actions." Jenness' statement is perfectly clear—and perfectly meaningless. The SWP wants to "unite" lots of "people" (explicitly regardless of politics) in "mass actions." "Unite" which "people," on the basis of what program, in what kind of "mass action"? The massacre of a million Indonesian communist workers was a "mass action." So were the Cossack pogroms. So, for that matter, was the October Revolution. The demonstration "against Agnew" and the teamster wildcat were also "mass actions." However, the SWP endorsed the former while one of their spokesmen (Miguel Padilla.at Cleveland) dismissed the latter as "racist and reactionary." Why do the self-proclaimed "Marxists" of the SWP have so much difficulty understanding that society is made up of classes, not undifferentiated masses, and that the two primary classes in capitalist society are the bourgeoisie and the working class? It is absurd to talk about having "an independent perspective"; the reformist anti-war movement is deliberately organized as a classless formation, but though it may opt to ignore the class struggle, the class struggle does not ignore it! The middle-class youth who have flocked to the anti-war movement in moral outrage must choose sides in the class struggle; they can play no role outside it. The SWP's "independent perspective" in reality means independence from the fight for the international proletarian revolution, in favor of back¬handed support to the class enemy of U.S. workers and their class brothers in Indochina.
Lest anyone should think that the SWP has gone astray through simple ignorance of these elementary tenets of Marxist analysis, it is instructive to compare the SWP's current politics with its analysis of the way to conduct anti-war struggle at the time of the Korean war, another instance of imperialism's continuing assault on the gains of limited social revolutions abroad expressed militarily. In March 1953 Farrcll Dobbs then and now a principal leadei of theSWP- wrote:
"... the most vital place to carry on anti-war agitation and participate in anti-war actions is in the unions where the masses are. We have always envisaged the struggle against war as an extension of the class
struggle onto a higher plane. The fight against the war can really be
effective only to the extent that the workers adopt class-struggle
policies in defending their interests. If we are to help this process along
we must be in the unions "
SWP Internal Bulletin Vol. 15. No. 6, March 1953 (our
emphasis)
Now this is neither a particularly profound nor a particularly eloquent polemic. It is simple matter-of-fact statement of an orientation which stands blatantly and diametrically counterposed to the current politics of the SWP. The SWP leaders are not naive would-be revolutionaries ignorant of the theories of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky; they have consciously rejected Trotskyism in favor of a perspective of reformist class collaboration.
Clear-Cut Choice
Like the national postal strike before it and the recent two-day mini-general strike of New York City public employees, the Teamster wildcat produced a clear-cut line-up of class forces. The trucking owners, cops, courts, the bourgeois press and politicians (from the most liberal to the most conservative) stood united as a class and, together with their agents in the unions, the labor bureaucracy, tried to crush the Teamster struggle. On the other side of the barricades were the Teamsters. The SDS resolution put before the Cleveland "Emergency Conference" a clear-cut, inescapable choice: support the Teamsters (which would have forced NPAC to break with capitalist politicians like Stokes and the "lieutenants of capital" within the workers movement like Fitzsimmons and Gibbons); or cement the Popular Front bloc by calling the Teamsters simply "racist and reactionary" and demonstrating against Agnew. The SWP chose the latter course -the course of class collaboration and betrayal.
On the main issue facing the Cleveland conference—class collaboration the SWP's conduct was unequivocal. Not so that of the pseudo-Trotskyist Workers League (WL) which, in a frenzy of the same opportunist appetite which led it to enthusiastically and virtually uncritically endorse the wretched 1970 SWPneleetorat campaigns, insisted that the real issue was "Trotskyism vs. Stalinism." By this catchy slogan the WL meant that its main enemy at the conference was PL ("Stalinism") and the SDS motions which posed, in a limited but generally correct way, an anti-liberal, working-class orientation for the anti-war movement. The WL in effect made a bloc with the SWP ("Trotskyism"—but since when is the SWP legitimately Trotskyist?) against opposition from the left, thereby endorsing the essence of Stalinism though not the label, for Stalinism like all varieties of revisionism—is nothing more or less than the abandonment of an international, proletarian and revolutionary perspective in favor of alliances with some wing of the class enemy, precisely'the SWP's policy in the anti-war movement! (The WL, which has jumped all over the map on the anti-war question tailending the Popular Front in 1965, offering critical political support to the NLF Stalinists and Ho Chi Minh in 1967— recently adopted a new face: calling its own rally on April 24, the WL denounced all those who participated in the "official" rally, thus condemning the mass of anti-war activists for the betrayals of their reformist, social-chauvinist leaders.)
The SWP Rediscovers Workers
The SWP and its succession of front groups have made their choice—class collaboration rather than class struggle. But since the SWP's usefulness to its bourgeois allies depends precisely on its continued ability to lead the would-be radicals among the anti-war protesters into the Popular Front trap, the SWP now needs the left cover of a pseudo-working-class orientation. Many of the more conscious student activists cannot fail to compare the futility of the April 24 "mass action" with the virtual paralysis of New York City caused by a few thousands of militant workers, even despite their sellout leaders. So the SWP is making renewed efforts to develop the facade of a labor base. A call in the June 18 Militant for the NPAC Convention announces tha.t NPAC is preparing a series of letters addressed to "various anti-war constituencies." Prominent among these separate-but-equal "constituencies" is "trade unionists," and several union bureaucrats are listed among the sponsors of the Convention.
But a Marxist working-class perspective does not consist of the
willingness to orient towards workers (mediated through the class
(traitors of the labor bureaucracy, to be sure) for the purpose of
including them among the various other "constituencies" assembled under the political banner of the liberal bourgeoisie. The empirical reflex of much of the U.S. left, faced with the demonstrated revolutionary aspirations of the working class following the 1968 French upsurge, has been to go where the action is by adopting a simple-minded "workerism" underlaid with the social do-goodism previously characteristic of the New Left's attitude toward the "Third World." In this respect PL-SDS's "tactics" of "allying" with workers by showing how much you want to help them is not atypical, and provides yet another excuse for the right wing of the radical movement (perfectly typified by the SWP's Padilla as well as the old New Leftists) to justify dismissal of the working class as the force for revolution because of the false consciousness (racism, patriotism) which simple-minded "workerism" must ignore as a principle.
To the extent that sections of the working class do remain imbued with the ideology of the bourgeoisie, groups like the SWP have only themselves to blame. Workers see their most sophisticated enemies (McCarthy, Lindsay, Hartkc) lauded by the supposed "Marxists," cheered on by the labor parasites who serve the bourgeoisie within the workers' own organizations. The sections of the left who recognize the SWP's sellout for what it is must go beyond "workerism" to a program which can break the disastrous unity of anti-war militants with the most sell-conscious and dangerous wing of the bourgeoisie, and replace it by a real unity a unity based on a program of international class struggle:
Class Struggle Program
1. No Liberal Bourgeois Speakers at Anti-War Rallies! Under the
rubric of "non-exclusionism" and "independence',' the SWP-NPAC
leadership welcomes the class enemy into the anti-war movement.
The major activity of the movement's "mass actions" has been to
provide both the forum and a captive audience for liberals to do their
canvassing. The only real "independence" for the movement is
irreconcilable opposition to the class enemy.
2. For Labor Political Strikes Against the War! No amount of
student strikes and weekend peace crawls can force U.S. imperialism
to end the Indochinese war. But a strike by U.S. workers in solidarity
with the Indochinese working people could compel the capitalists to
face an enemy even more potent than the Vietnamese Revolution—a
powerful, organized and conscious working class in struggle for its
own class interests in the very citadel of imperialism. The NPAC
leadership opposes this perspective because it wants to maintain its
alliance with the liberal bourgeoisie, trading away the potential of a
powerful, working-class-based mass movement in order to win the
adherence ol "moderates" to a classless, implicitly pro-capitalist line.
A struggle for this demand means the struggle against the conservative, self-interested labor bureaucracy which mortally fears any class action which would upset its peaceful coexistence with the bosses and their politicians.
3. Break with the Capitalist Parties—For a Political Party of the
Working Class! The U.S. working class will remain politically
trapped until it has built, by struggle against its fake "leaders," its own
party. A workers party must have a consistent class program as well
as a working-class base. We do not call upon the tested servants of
capitalism, the labor bureaucrats, to form this party; we do not seek
to pressure them into building a trap for the workers along the lines of
the British Labour Party. We must fight from the beginning to make the workers party a revolutionary party.
4. Smash Imperialism—All U.S. Troops Out of Asia Now! We
must expose the pro-imperialist liberals who speak at the invitation
of the SWP-NPAC —no negotiations, no timetables! We must make
it clear that we want no bourgeois evasions de-escalation, troop
shifts, moratoriums — to interfere with the defeat of imperialism in
Asia!
5. Victory to the Indochinese Revolution — No Confidence in
Sellout "Leaders" at Home or Abroad! The SWP-NPAC demands
"self-determination" for Vietnam. But for Marxists there is an even
higher principle at stake: the class nature of the war. We have a
responsibility to take sides. Our commitment to the revolutionary
struggle of the Indochinese working people demands that we must
give no confidence to the Stalinist traitors who have repeatedly sold
out the struggle (from the Geneva Accords to the People's Peace
Treaty) All Indochina Must Go Communist!
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The document printed above was prepared for the July 1971 NPAC conference and encapsulated the sharp political struggle which had raged within the antiwar movement for six years. That conference represented a political milestone where the SWP, now class-collahorationist to the core, sealed its popular-front strategy in hlood. After years of organizing toothless pacifist ic conferences and "peace now" marches on a hasis politically acceptable to the "dove" section of the bourgeoisie, these ex- Trotskyists finally succeeded in luring a genuine capitalist politician, U.S. Senator Vance Hartke, onto the NPAC steering committee. At the conference the SWP demonstrated that its political degeneration was matched by the appropriate organizational methods— Stalinist-style gangster attacks on left critics.
To the discomfiture of the SWP and its friend Hartke, Spartacist League supporters demanded that this imperialist spokesman be summarily excluded from the conference, and (when the SL motion was ignored by the chairman) SLers joined with supporters of Progressive Labor (PL) and SDS in soundly booing Hartke's speech. The second major spokesman was Victor Reuther. United Automobile Workers (UAW representative and a key red-baiting CIA lackey within the AFL-CIO bureaucracy. As Reuther rose to speak, the Spartacist delegation chanted "Labor Strikes Against the War," a slogan designed to expose the labor leadership's pro-imperialist hypocrisy, and then sat down.
PL supporters, who saw no difference between Reuther, a "labor lieutenant of capital" within the workers movement and Hartke, a direct representative of the bourgeoisie, attempted to prevent the UAW misleader from speaking. At that point the SWP marshals responded to PL's verbal disruption with a vicious assault and began to physicially throw them out. The SL supporters jumped up to protest these goon-squad tactics and were also attacked, resulting in injuries to several comrades.
The following day, while Hartke denounced PL as "just as responsible for the war as Nixon," the SWP capped its thug attack with a political purge and refused to allow any PL or SL supporters hack into the conference. So blatantly provocative were the SWP's actions that even political tendencies that had not lifted a finger during the attack fell compelled to separate themselves from this violent exclusionism. Only one group was shameless enough to join with the SWP in the assault (later serving up nauseating left" justifications lo whitewash the SWP's anti-red purge): the Healyile Workers League, then pursuing one of its many unprincipled belly-crawling maneuvers toward the U.S. Pabloites.
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