Oscar Lopez Rivera: Imprisoned for Supporting Puerto Rican Independence - by Stephen Lendman
After the 1898 Spanish-American War, the US took over the Philippines, Guam, Samoa, Hawaii, Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Canal Zone, assorted other territories, and Puerto Rico. On September 29, its Governor-General, Manuel Macias y Casado (a Spanish general), ceded control to Washington, its current status today as a colony.
In 1966, then University of Puerto Rico economics associate, Dr. Antonio J. Gonzales said:
"The Puerto Rican Independence Party bases its struggle in favor of the independence of Puerto Rico on the conviction that we continue to be a (US) colony, thus being denied (our) right to freedom and sovereignty."
After taking over in 1898, America "never granted Puerto Ricans the total control of their lives and destiny. Sovereign powers have never been transferred to us in order to be able to decide in all those areas that affect the collective life of our nation."
For over 112 years, America's had total control, Puerto Ricans virtually none, forced to "accept the dispositions of laws imposed" by a colonial power. In its relationship with America, Puerto Rico is called "Estado Libre Asociado" (Free Associated State or Commonwealth). Under international law, it's a colony, seeking independence. Therein lies the roots of its struggle, Oscar Lopez Rivera imprisoned for supporting it.
A collective 1981 statement by Puerto Rican Independentistas, convicted of "seditious conspiracy," said the following:
"Our position remains clear: Puerto Rico is a nation intervened, militarily conquered and colonized by the United States....We are prisoners of war captured by the enemy. Our actions have always been and continue to be in the nature of fighting a war of independence, a war of national liberation....The US interventionist government has absolutely no right, no say so whatsoever in regards to Puerto Rico, ourselves, or any Puerto Rican prisoner of war. The US interventionist government has only one choice....and that is to GET OUT! It is our right to regain and secure our national sovereignty. Nothing will stand in the way of achieving our goal."
The struggle continues, Rivera one of its victims. The web site prolibertadweb.com calls him and others like him:
"workers and professionals, students and teachers, community organizers, artists, mothers, and fathers of families. They are fighters (for) Puerto Rico's Independence and social justice." They reject colonization and exploitation. They're committed activists for justice, struggling to end it.
Each year for decades, the UN Decolonization Committee approved a draft resolution for Puerto Rican independence, the latest one on June 21:
"calling on the Government of the United States to expedite a process that would allow the Puerto Rican people to exercise fully their right to self-determination and independence, and for the General Assembly formally to consider the situation concerning Puerto Rico, which the world body had not formerly taken up since the Territory's removal from the list of Non-Self-Governing Territories in 1953."
"....a majority of petitioners expressed dissatisfaction today with the commonwealth's treatment by the United States, arguing that the administering Power was hampering Puerto Rican decolonization initiatives and those of civil society....(America) continue(s) acting as a colonizing Power over a country with its own cultural identity."
Background on Rivera
Born in 1943 in San Sebastian, Puerto Rico, he moved to America at age 12, then two years later to Chicago to live with his sister. A decorated Vietnam veteran, he returned home to his Puerto Rican community, plagued by unemployment, drugs, police brutality, and dire levels of healthcare, education, and other essential social services - issues he was determined to address.
He helped create the Puerto Rican High School and Cultural Center. He co-founded the Rafael Cancel Miranda High School (now called Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos High School). He worked for public school bilingual education, for universities to admit more Latino students and hire Latino faculty and staff, and for Chicago area corporations, like Illinois Bell, People's Gas and Commonwealth Edison, to end discriminatory hiring.
He became an organizer for the Northwest Community Organization (NCO), ASSPA, ASPIRA, and Chicago's First Congregational Church. He also helped found FREE, a half-way house for convicted drug addicts, and ASAS, an educational program for Latino prisoners at Illinois' Stateville Prison.
He also worked for Puerto Rican independence. In 1974, he helped organize the committee to "Free the Five" (Rafael Cancel Miranda, Irwin Flores, Oscar Collazao, Lolita Lebron, and Andres Figueroa Cordero). In 1975, he was forced underground with other comrades after the Justice Department named him an FALN leader (Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion Nacional - Armed Forces of National Liberation).
On May 10, 2001, FBI Director Louis Freeh described the organization as follows to the Senate Committees on Appropriations, Armed Services, and Select Committee on Intelligence, under the heading: "Left-wing and Puerto Rican extremist groups," saying:
"....left-wing (domestic terrorists) generally profess a revolutionary socialist doctrine and view themselves as protectors of the people against the 'dehumanizing effects' of capitalism and imperialism. They aim to bring about change in the United States through revolution rather than through the established political process."
"Terrorist groups (like FALN), seeking to secure Puerto Rican independence from the United States through violent means, represent one of the remaining active vestiges of left-wing terrorism....they view....acts of terrorism as a means by which to draw attention to their desire for independence....Acts of terrorism continue to be perpetrated (by) violent" separatist groups like FALN.
Rivera's Arrest and Imprisonment
On May 29, 1981, he was arrested, the FBI calling him one of America's most feared fugitives. Accused of being an FALN leader, he neither confirmed or denied it, affirming only his nonviolent activism. At trial, he refused to participate, declaring himself a "prisoner of war."
In 1981, he was convicted of armed robbery, miscellaneous charges, and seditious conspiracy - sedition pertaining to actions to incite insurrection or rebellion; conspiracy by working with others to achieve it.
Initially sentenced to 55 years, 15 more were added in 1988, based on spurious charges of participating in a conspiracy to escape, that sentence to begin when the original one ends.
In 1999, the Clinton administration offered him and 11 other Puerto Rican nationalists clemency. He declined, saying it required him to serve 10 more years with good conduct. Had he accepted, he'd have been free a year ago.
His sister, Zenaida Lopez, said he refused because on parole, he'd be in "prison outside prison." Incarcerated at Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) Terre Haute, IN, July 27, 2027 is his scheduled release date unless paroled and accepts or gets unconditional clemency sooner.
Punitive Sentencing and Treatment
The "ProLIBERTAD campaign for the freedom of Puerto Rican political prisoners and prisoners of war" called sentences given "Puerto Rican patriots excessive and punitive." On average, men got 70.8 years, women 72.8, 19 times longer than average in the year they were sentenced, real criminals faring much better.
For example, from 1966 - 1985, average murder sentences were 22.7 years; rape, 12.5 years, and arms violations 12. Only 12.8% of all federal prisoners got over 20 years. Most often, only repeat offenders get longer sentences. No Puerto Rican "patriot" had a prior record at time of arrest.
Worse still, they've been harshly treated in prison, in violation of UN Minimum Uniform Rules on the Treatment of Prisoners (UNSMRTR), Rule A1 6(1). They've been held far from families despite facilities closer to home. Some have been sexually assaulted, Alejandrina Torres attacked in three different prisons, in one case by prison guards and a male lieutenant. She was then held in solitary confinement for complaining.
They've been denied adequate medical care. Some have been held in underground confinement, Rivera, in 1993, describing his treatment at Marion, IL maximum security as follows:
"I am enclosed in a cell that is 8 feet wide by 9 feet long on an average of 22 hours each day. Today while I write this letter, I have been 36 hours without going out and tomorrow if they do not take us out it will have been three days without moving from this same space. In this little space I have everything. From eating my meals to taking care of my needs. So it is my dining room and latrine at the same time. My bed is a slab of cement. And the whole cell is painted the same dead yellow color. From an aesthetic point of view, it is as attractive as a jail for zoo animals."
In 1987, Amnesty International (AI) condemned Marion conditions, saying:
"In Marion, violations of the (UN) Minimum Standard Rules (for treating prisoners) are common. There is almost no rule in the Minimum Standard Rules that is not broken in one form or another."
In 1988, AI called conditions in Lexington, KY's Maximum Security Unit for women "deliberately and gratuitously oppressive."
The same holds for all federal and state maximum security facilities and many others, prisoners routinely abused, especially political ones. Earlier articles explained, accessed through the following links:
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2010/04/harmful-effects-of-prolonged-isolated.html
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2010/08/political-prisoners-in-america.html
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2010/11/torture-in-us-prisons.html
From 1986 - 1998, Rivera was held in punitive maximum security confinement, and remained in max facilities until 2008. Only then was he transferred to a medium security prison on condition he report every two hours to corrections staff, an unheard of stipulation. Currently at FCI Terre Haute, his mailing address is:
Oscar Lopez Rivera
87651-024
FCI Terre Haute
PO Box 33
Terre Haute, IN 47808
A Final Comment
In early January 2011, likely the first week, Rivera will appear before the US Parole Commission after nearly 30 years in prison. Supporters are urged to download, print and sign the attached letter and mail it to the following address:
Chairman Isaac Fulwood, Jr.
US Parole Commission
5550 Friendship Blvd.
Suite 420
Chevy Chase, MD 20815-7286
In addition, the National Boricua Human Rights Network urges signers to email ricardor@boricuahumanrights.org so they can keep track of supportive letters.
"Together," they say, "we can help free Oscar Lopez Rivera!"
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.
posted by Steve Lendman @ 2:35 AM
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Monday, December 13, 2010
Greater St. Louis' Left Wing School builds Solidarity
Saturday, December 11, 2010
Greater St. Louis' Left Wing School builds Solidarity
Second Annual Left-Wing School builds Solidarity in St. Louis
written by Paul Joseph Poposky
Sunday
December 5, 2010
Over 60 local activists and organizers from dozens of Leftist and progressive organizations, political parties and coalitions came together at Southern Illinois University - Edwardsville for the second annual Left Wing School (LWS). This year’s Left Wing School was organized by the Greater St. Louis United Front (GSLUF), a coalition of Left-leaning organizations founded in the wake of the 2009 LWS.
As promised in GSLUF’s promotional literature, the second annual Left Wing School presented participants an opportunity to learn about a variety of ideas, presented by a diverse gathering of organizations and individuals on the political and social Left, and offered a unique opportunity for organizations to come together, exchange their ideas and learn from one another.
The free, all-day event featured tabling displays, workshops, and open discussion in a safe and supportive environment. Autonomy Alliance, organizers of the first Left Wing School, provided a healthy breakfast and lunch – free of charge – featuring artisan bread donated by Black Bear Bakery; a restaurant in the historic Cherokee neighborhood of South St. Louis run as a workers co-operative.
The Left Wing School was co-endorsed by over a dozen local organizations, an improvement over last year’s event. This increased participation was reflected in the diversity of views represented. The Campaign for a Mass Party of Labor (CMPL), new to the LWS this year, explained why CMPL calls for the Left and Labor to break away from the Democrats and found their own mass-party. Gary Gaines of the Southern Illinois Committee on Occupational Health and Safety explained “Your Rights in the Workplace”. Darrin Gilley and Glenn Kage, local labor leaders and former United Auto Workers, offered a course on why we should all be “Buying American”.
Nick Gilliam and Jim Hamilton of the Socialist Organizer (SO) and Workers Emergency Recovery Campaign (WERC) discussed “Fighting Downsizing in the Public Sector” and explained why it is so important for organized labor and the Left to protect public sector jobs and benefits as an anchor for the labor movement and to preserve the public services they provide. The afternoon workshop sponsored by SO presented immigration from the perspective of the Mexican people in “Immigrant Workers and the Fight for a Socialist USA”, in which Dr. Deborah Cohen of the University of Missouri – St. Louis History Dept. showed the film “Cosecha Triste” and lead a discussion of the highly exploitative Bracero “guest worker” program.
Autonomy Alliance (AA) presented two workshops; David Feldman of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and Andy Lucker of AA showed us what an example of a Left-alternative economic model might look like in “Participatory Economics”, while Lucker and E.J. Rollins sought to tie together multiple social theories in a comprehensive and coherent manner in “Complementary Holism”.
Don Fitz and Angelika Mueller of the Gateway Green Alliance asserted that we need less (stuff) to have more (happiness) in “De-Growth: Left Wing Myths and the Environment”. The Instead of War coalition explored the roots of war today in “War and Capitalism”, and the Workers International League explained the crisis of the Cuban Revolution and sought to explain “Where is Cuba Going?” During the lunch hour, an impromptu circle discussion of anarchism also occurred. The Palestine Solidarity Committee helped close the school by showing ways everyday Americans can do their part to change public policy in Israel and respect the rights of Palestinians to live in “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions”, a workshop consistently described by participants as “excellent!”
But two presentations in particular stood out ahead of the pack in terms of content, audience participation and enthusiasm. Steve Fusch’s show-stealing workshop “The Big Gay Breakout” chronicled the trials and tribulations of organizers in the LGBT movement in the 1970’s from Fusch’s own personal experiences. Fusch discussed the modern challenges for LGBT people, concluding with the question: “what way forward for the movement?”
Stephen Houldsworth of Saint Louis Effort for AIDS answered that question in his workshop “Radically Queer”, which concluded the Left Wing School. Houldsworth delved deep into the hidden history of radicalism in LGBT history, and sought to educate LGBT folks and Lefties alike on the foundational role radicals have played in the LGBT movement and the movement on the Left as a whole. Houldsworth showed how time and again the LGBT movement has become dominated by centrist, reformist and assimilationist activists, and how the shift from radical to assimilationist and back again is, in fact, a cyclical process endemic within progressive movements; understanding the historic roots of this process and how the Left is often co-opted by reformist elements is essential to moving the Left forward and back on the offensive.
The closing session of the second annual Left Wing School saw organizers celebrate the general improvement of this year’s effort over the first LWS in 2009 and offer constructive criticism aimed toward building upon the success of this year’s event, expanding and improving it for 2011, and continuing this fine tradition of building solidarity on the Left in St. Louis.
Paul Poposky is a St. Louis area Labor activist and member of CWA local 6653, the Campaign for a Mass Party of Labor (CMPL) and citizen member of the Greater-St. Louis United Front (GSLUF)
Greater St. Louis' Left Wing School builds Solidarity
Second Annual Left-Wing School builds Solidarity in St. Louis
written by Paul Joseph Poposky
Sunday
December 5, 2010
Over 60 local activists and organizers from dozens of Leftist and progressive organizations, political parties and coalitions came together at Southern Illinois University - Edwardsville for the second annual Left Wing School (LWS). This year’s Left Wing School was organized by the Greater St. Louis United Front (GSLUF), a coalition of Left-leaning organizations founded in the wake of the 2009 LWS.
As promised in GSLUF’s promotional literature, the second annual Left Wing School presented participants an opportunity to learn about a variety of ideas, presented by a diverse gathering of organizations and individuals on the political and social Left, and offered a unique opportunity for organizations to come together, exchange their ideas and learn from one another.
The free, all-day event featured tabling displays, workshops, and open discussion in a safe and supportive environment. Autonomy Alliance, organizers of the first Left Wing School, provided a healthy breakfast and lunch – free of charge – featuring artisan bread donated by Black Bear Bakery; a restaurant in the historic Cherokee neighborhood of South St. Louis run as a workers co-operative.
The Left Wing School was co-endorsed by over a dozen local organizations, an improvement over last year’s event. This increased participation was reflected in the diversity of views represented. The Campaign for a Mass Party of Labor (CMPL), new to the LWS this year, explained why CMPL calls for the Left and Labor to break away from the Democrats and found their own mass-party. Gary Gaines of the Southern Illinois Committee on Occupational Health and Safety explained “Your Rights in the Workplace”. Darrin Gilley and Glenn Kage, local labor leaders and former United Auto Workers, offered a course on why we should all be “Buying American”.
Nick Gilliam and Jim Hamilton of the Socialist Organizer (SO) and Workers Emergency Recovery Campaign (WERC) discussed “Fighting Downsizing in the Public Sector” and explained why it is so important for organized labor and the Left to protect public sector jobs and benefits as an anchor for the labor movement and to preserve the public services they provide. The afternoon workshop sponsored by SO presented immigration from the perspective of the Mexican people in “Immigrant Workers and the Fight for a Socialist USA”, in which Dr. Deborah Cohen of the University of Missouri – St. Louis History Dept. showed the film “Cosecha Triste” and lead a discussion of the highly exploitative Bracero “guest worker” program.
Autonomy Alliance (AA) presented two workshops; David Feldman of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and Andy Lucker of AA showed us what an example of a Left-alternative economic model might look like in “Participatory Economics”, while Lucker and E.J. Rollins sought to tie together multiple social theories in a comprehensive and coherent manner in “Complementary Holism”.
Don Fitz and Angelika Mueller of the Gateway Green Alliance asserted that we need less (stuff) to have more (happiness) in “De-Growth: Left Wing Myths and the Environment”. The Instead of War coalition explored the roots of war today in “War and Capitalism”, and the Workers International League explained the crisis of the Cuban Revolution and sought to explain “Where is Cuba Going?” During the lunch hour, an impromptu circle discussion of anarchism also occurred. The Palestine Solidarity Committee helped close the school by showing ways everyday Americans can do their part to change public policy in Israel and respect the rights of Palestinians to live in “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions”, a workshop consistently described by participants as “excellent!”
But two presentations in particular stood out ahead of the pack in terms of content, audience participation and enthusiasm. Steve Fusch’s show-stealing workshop “The Big Gay Breakout” chronicled the trials and tribulations of organizers in the LGBT movement in the 1970’s from Fusch’s own personal experiences. Fusch discussed the modern challenges for LGBT people, concluding with the question: “what way forward for the movement?”
Stephen Houldsworth of Saint Louis Effort for AIDS answered that question in his workshop “Radically Queer”, which concluded the Left Wing School. Houldsworth delved deep into the hidden history of radicalism in LGBT history, and sought to educate LGBT folks and Lefties alike on the foundational role radicals have played in the LGBT movement and the movement on the Left as a whole. Houldsworth showed how time and again the LGBT movement has become dominated by centrist, reformist and assimilationist activists, and how the shift from radical to assimilationist and back again is, in fact, a cyclical process endemic within progressive movements; understanding the historic roots of this process and how the Left is often co-opted by reformist elements is essential to moving the Left forward and back on the offensive.
The closing session of the second annual Left Wing School saw organizers celebrate the general improvement of this year’s effort over the first LWS in 2009 and offer constructive criticism aimed toward building upon the success of this year’s event, expanding and improving it for 2011, and continuing this fine tradition of building solidarity on the Left in St. Louis.
Paul Poposky is a St. Louis area Labor activist and member of CWA local 6653, the Campaign for a Mass Party of Labor (CMPL) and citizen member of the Greater-St. Louis United Front (GSLUF)
*From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-The 1940s “Quit India” Movement-Stalinist Alliance with Churchill Betrayed Indian Revolution
Click on the headline to link to a Revolutionary History journal entry for a background article, Trotskyism in India, on Indian left politics during this period.
Markin comment:
This article goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist future mentioned in this day's other posts.
********
Workers Vanguard No. 970
3 December 2010
The 1940s “Quit India” Movement
Stalinist Alliance with Churchill Betrayed Indian Revolution
The following originally appeared as a two-part article in Workers Hammer Nos. 131 and 132 (September/October and November/December 1992), newspaper of the Spartacist League/Britain, section of the International Communist League. Both parts are reprinted below, incorporating a minor factual correction.
PART ONE
“The Indian scene [in 1947] was heavy with menace, but one thing at least gave [British Labour prime minister Major Clement] Attlee great satisfaction. How gratifying it was, he noted, that an old Haileybury School boy like himself [Sir Cyril Radcliffe] was being sent out to take on the task of drawing a line through the [Punjabi] homelands of eighty-eight million human beings.”
“In India, Sikhs and Hindus prowled the cars of ambushed trains slaughtering every circumcised male they found. In Pakistan, Moslems raced along the trains they had stopped, murdering every male who was not circumcised.”
—Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, Freedom at Midnight
Fifty years ago India’s struggle for independence from Britain entered its final, decisive phase. Commonly known as the “Quit India” movement after the main slogan put out by Mohandas Karamchand (“Mahatma” or “great soul”) Gandhi’s bourgeois Indian National Congress in August 1942, this phase swelled to a crescendo between 1945 and 1946. Soon after this, the subcontinent was arbitrarily partitioned into an 80 per cent Hindu-dominated India and an Islamic-confessional Pakistan; a horrendous communal blood-bath was unleashed. The movement’s denouement in February 1948 presented an appropriately bizarre neocolonial spectacle: Britain’s last troops in India, the Somerset Light Infantry, disappeared marching westward through Bombay’s arched Gateway of India (where the “King Emperor” George V had landed in 1911) to the strains of “God Save the King” and “Auld Lang Syne,” played in parting salute by an Indian Navy honour guard band of Sikhs and Gurkhas.
Yet, at its tumultuous peak the mass upheaval, for a few crucial historic moments far outstripping the planned limits of its self-appointed minders and misleaders, had rocked the entire subcontinent, lifting it on to the very precipice of revolution. Millions of workers, soldiers, peasants, students and women, many flying Communist red flags alongside the Congress tricolour and the Muslim League’s green flag, defying British tank and machine-gun fire and even naval and aerial bombardment, jammed the streets and fields from Karachi to Calcutta. Cries of “Inquilab Zindabad!” (Long live the revolution!) filled the air. Armed peasants started forcibly seizing land and setting up “soviets.” And in February 1946 a powerful strike by ratings (enlisted men) of the Royal Indian Navy in Bombay touched off an armed uprising by hundreds of thousands, including Royal Indian Air Force men, in that port and across the whole, electrified country, bringing it to a virtual standstill.
Britain had lost control. Posed pointblank was not only India’s political independence from two hundred and fifty years of the British jackboot; the social liberation of India’s toiling masses from millennia of indigenous caste, gender, communal and class oppression was also now suddenly within grasp. What was needed was a revolutionary vanguard party of India’s small but strategic and modern, urbanised industrial working class which could rally and draw behind it the millions of peasant poor and other oppressed, oust the British, and put the native capitalist-landlord alliance out of business, launching a direct offensive for both national and social liberation through capturing proletarian state power.
This policy, that of the Permanent Revolution, had been the programme of Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks in the victorious October Revolution, thirty years earlier. That revolution had brought national and social liberation to the masses of backward Tsarist Russia, whose Tadzhik, Uzbek and other Central Asian peoples just on the other side of the Himalayan Pamirs from northern Kashmir) had been catapulted from the seventh century into the twentieth as a result. In India the toiling masses had seen the Russian Revolution as a beacon of hope.
Yet by midnight of 14 August 1947, when Congress prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru rose to address “free” India’s parliament of capitalists, landlords and princes, the spectacular upsurge had been derailed. Instead, a pro-imperialist alliance of the Congress bourgeoisie and the Muslim League landlords had successfully diverted the revolutionary momentum into British imperialism’s waiting trap, the nightmare of communalist Partition. India’s working masses had paid with their lives—and were now about to pay even more—for the absence of a revolutionary party to lead its millions in an independent struggle for workers power.
The new Muslim theocratic state of Pakistan (whose Punjabi-dominated west wing and Bengali east wing looked at each other across 1,000 miles of hostile Hindu Indian territory) was carved out of the living bodies of thoroughly interpenetrated peoples, precipitating the biggest forced population transfers and one of the ghastliest communal slaughters in history. And in this crime, the Labour government of imperialist Britain and their bourgeois-landlord alliance of lackeys in the Congress and Muslim League were fully aided and abetted by the treacherous Stalinist trinity of the Kremlin, the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Communist Party of India. For in this historic betrayal, Stalin was the mover, the CPGB the enforcer and the CPI the executor on the spot.
Lessons of the Chinese Revolution
The developing militant wave and the advent of World War II could have signalled the opening of great possibilities for a revolutionary party the size of the CPI. Instead the second imperialist war was to bring the nadir of Stalinist betrayal in India. To understand the CPI’s treachery on behalf of Churchill’s war effort it is necessary to take up the positions adopted by the Stalinised Comintern as against the Leninist tradition upheld by Trotsky and the Left Opposition.
The Russian Revolution in 1917 fully confirmed Trotsky’s prognosis that “the complete victory of the democratic revolution in Russia is conceivable only in the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, leaning on the peasantry. The dictatorship of the proletariat, which would inevitably place on the order of the day not only democratic but socialistic tasks as well, would at the same time give a powerful impetus to the international socialist revolution. Only the victory of the proletariat in the West could protect Russia from bourgeois restoration and assure it the possibility of rounding out the establishment of socialism” (“Three Concepts of the Russian Revolution” [1939]).
Under the slogan of “socialism in one country” embraced by the conservative, nationalist Stalinist bureaucracy which had risen in the context of the isolated, war-weary and encircled Soviet workers state, the struggle for the extension of the revolution internationally was shelved in favour of “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism. This translated into defeat after defeat for the world proletariat and eventually transformed—after ruthless purges in most cases—the parties of the (Third) Communist International into tools of class-collaboration with their “own” bourgeoisies. In the colonial and neocolonial world it meant rejecting the lessons of October and resuscitating the old Menshevik formula of “two-stage” revolution. As in China earlier, this was to have a devastating effect on the revolutionary proletariat of India.
The tragedy of the Chinese Revolution of 1927-28 was a powerful negative confirmation of the permanent revolution, and it was over China that Trotsky extended his correct prognosis in Russia to all of the backward, colonial countries. The debate on China was whether or not to subordinate the Chinese workers and peasants to the native bourgeoisie in the form of Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang in which the CP [Communist Party] was operating. When the Chinese CP proposed to leave the Kuomintang the plan was vetoed by the Comintern Executive on Stalin’s instruction. They were directed to hold down the class struggle against the “anti-imperialist” bourgeoisie in the cities and contain the peasant movement in the countryside. In early 1926 the Kuomintang itself was admitted to the International as an associate party. Only a few weeks later, on 20 March, Chiang carried out his first anti-communist coup, barring CP members from all leadership posts and demanding a list of all CP members in the Kuomintang. Under orders, the CP complied! After a challenge from the United Opposition leaders Trotsky and Zinoviev and during the crucial days of the Shanghai insurrection which began in March 1927, Stalin stuck to the policy. The main task in China for the Communists was “the further development of the Kuomintang.” On 12 April the Kuomintang army carried out a massacre which cost the lives of tens of thousands of Communists and militant workers who had laid down their arms at Stalin’s orders. This was “socialism in one country” in practice!
Congress—the Indian “Kuomintang”—and the CPI
“India,” Trotsky had noted in May 1930, “is the classic colonial country as Britain is the classic metropolis. All the viciousness of the ruling classes and every form of oppression that capitalism has used against the backward people of the East is most completely and frightfully summed up in the history of the gigantic colony on which the British imperialists have settled themselves like leeches for the past century and a half” (“The Revolution in India, Its Tasks and Dangers,” Writings of Leon Trotsky [1930]). Like pre-revolutionary Russia and China, the road to national liberation, agrarian reform, social equality and advancement lay in the programme of proletarian revolution, requiring a vanguard party defending the political independence of the working class. The weak national bourgeoisie, tied by a thousand threads to imperialism, could in no way carry out even the “democratic” tasks posed.
The Indian industrial bourgeoisie, which started growing towards the very end of the 19th century and expanded considerably during World War I, was still no match for British industrial and finance capital. The Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India (BLPI—Indian section of the Trotskyist Fourth International) pointed out:
“Despite the advance of Indian capital, British capital remains in effective monopolist domination in banking, commerce, exchange, insurance, shipping, in the tea, coffee and rubber plantations, and in the jute industry. In iron and steel, Indian capital has been forced to come to terms with British capital, and even in the cotton industry, the home of Indian capital, the control of British capital through the managing agency system is very great.”
—BLPI Draft Programme
Indian reality emphatically underlined the revolutionary correctness of the perspective of permanent revolution. The Indian Trotskyists drew the correct conclusion that “the Indian bourgeoisie, shackled as it is to Imperialism, cannot play the historical role of the West-European bourgeoisie in liberating and developing the productive forces. The industrial advance of India demands absolutely the overthrow of Imperialism, with which Indian bourgeois interests are indissolubly bound, and the overthrow of which they are bound to resist” (ibid).
Faced with British imperialist intransigence, the weak and dependent Indian bourgeoisie sought methods of struggle that could pressure the colonial masters to make concessions without disturbing the social order by unleashing struggles of the masses that would threaten not just the British but also the Indian capitalists and their landlord brothers. The origins of Congress are instructive in this regard.
An English ex-civil servant of the Empire, A.O. Hume, was a founder of the Indian National Congress in 1885. Its stated third aim was “THE CONSOLIDATION OF THE UNION BETWEEN ENGLAND AND INDIA, BY SECURING THE MODIFICATION OF SUCH OF ITS CONDITIONS AS MAY BE UNJUST OR INJURIOUS TO THE LATTER COUNTRY” (The Indian Nationalist Movement, 1885-1947: Select documents, ed. B.N. Pandey). As its first president, W.C. Bonnerjee explained:
“Lord Dufferin...said there was no body of persons in this country who performed the functions which Her Majesty’s Opposition did in England...and as the English were necessarily ignorant of what was thought of them and their policy in native circles, it would be very desirable in the interests as well of the rulers as of the ruled that Indian politicians should meet yearly and point out to the Government in what respects the administration was defective and how it could be improved” (ibid).
Enter Gandhi. At the time he arrived on the nationalist political scene at the start of World War I, Gandhi could be found enthusiastically urging London’s Indians to “think imperially” and organising a Field Ambulance Training Corps as his personal contribution to the interimperialist war “effort.” Gandhi’s job was to extract as much as possible from the British, in the common interests of saving capitalism, while keeping the burgeoning and now increasingly militant struggles of the workers and peasants at bay. The textile magnate Ambalal Sarabhai put it succinctly when he said Gandhi “was the best guarantee against communism which India possessed” (D.A. Low, Congress and the Raj).
It was only after World War I that India’s modern proletariat, numbering five million by the second imperialist world war, emerged as a distinct force. The first great wave of strikes (1918-21) was triggered by mass immiseration under war conditions, a flu epidemic that killed 14 million, the Amritsar massacre in the wake of the draconian Rowlatt Act, and the impact of the 1917 Revolution. And it was the backdrop to Gandhi’s 1920-21 mass civil disobedience campaign for minimal constitutional reforms. The first six months of 1920 saw 200 strikes involving half a million workers, along with growing peasant struggles. Gandhi got cold feet, declaring that he had committed a “blunder of Himalayan proportions which had enabled ill-disposed persons, not true passive resisters at all, to perpetrate disorders.” In February 1922, on the eve of another passive resistance crawl, when 22 policemen were killed in the course of a peasant anti-rent agitation, Gandhi called off the entire non-cooperation movement, essentially going into purdah over the next decade. And the Congress told its supporters that withholding rent to the zemindars [landlords] was contrary to its policies and “the best interests of the country.” Gandhi re-emerged in the thirties when new waves of militant struggles broke out. He reiterated his opposition to “class war” and called for the “harmonious cooperation of labour and capital, the landlord and tenant.”
The situation in India not only cried out for a revolutionary solution but provided great opportunities for building a communist-led movement against colonial oppression and to overthrow capitalism. The prestige of the October Revolution was immense among the toiling masses. Founded among other places in revolutionary Tashkent in 1920, the CPI had early succumbed to the global anti-revolutionary policies emanating from Stalin’s Comintern after 1924; Stalin’s search for “peaceful coexistence” did not help the Indian Communists. In the late twenties they employed themselves with generally rightist plans for front organisations and multi-class parties. Then the “Third Period” had them pursuing sterile sectarian policies which condemned the Indian nationalists equally with the British imperialists.
In the popular front period (1935-39) they accepted the leadership of the Congress and “Gandhiji” as necessary for the first “democratic” stage of the revolution. And moreover, because Stalin was pursuing an alliance with “democratic” imperialist Britain, the CPI soft-pedalled the struggle against British imperialism, placing the emphasis on reforms and gradualist change. At the Seventh Congress of the Third International in Moscow in July-August 1935, the CPI was denounced for long-standing “left” sectarian errors and for using slogans such as “an Indian Workers’ and Peasants’ Soviet Republic,” and “confiscation of lands belonging to the zemindars (landlords) without compensation.” Even as late as March 1936 the Congress was characterised as “definitely a class organisation of the Indian bourgeoisie” in a CPI publication, but the new class-collaborationist line laid down by “India experts” for the CPGB, R. Palme Dutt and Ben Bradley, was:
“The National Congress can play a great part and a foremost part in the work of realising the anti-imperialist People’s Front. It is even possible that the National Congress by the further transformation of its organisation and programme may become the form of realisation of the anti-imperialist People’s Front” (quoted in S. Tagore, Against the Stream).
The CPI supported the Congress in the provincial elections of 1937. In 1936 a miserable and tokenistic Congress proposal for agricultural reform was lauded. In fact the Congress ministries of this period did next to nothing to alleviate the condition of the peasantry. Indicatively the only places where Congress ministries even talked about land reform were in areas where the landlords were to a large extent Muslims and the peasants Hindus, such as the United Provinces, Bihar and Madras.
At the same time the inception of Congress ministries in some parts of India gave the CPI more room to organise, and with growing mass disillusionment with Congress the CPI began to grow significantly. It developed strong roots in the working class in major industrial cities like Bombay, and considerable influence in student and peasant organisations. But it held the struggles back in the interests of the alliance with Congress. In November 1938, after the shootings of workers protesting anti-trade-union legislation introduced by the Congress ministry in Bombay, one “Congress Communist” (CPI entrist in Congress) told a protest rally: “Anger and sorrow have been kindled in our minds by the oppression that has been perpetrated on the workers of Bombay. Still, we are proceeding with restraint with our eyes fixed on national solidarity and unity.”
The CPI in World War II
During the period of the Stalin-Hitler pact the CPI as all the other parties of the Comintern (which would be formally liquidated by Stalin in 1943) denounced the “democratic” facade of the British imperialists in their war against Germany. Indeed in contrast to the Stalinists of His Majesty’s CPGB who displayed visible discomfort at Stalin’s about face (with its pro-German tilt), many militants of the CPI appear to have relished the opportunity to take a full-blooded stance against their hated main enemy. In the context of mounting anti-imperialist militancy, this line would have come increasingly into contradiction with the CPI’s continuing adherence to the Stalinist policy of a “first” “democratic” stage in alliance with the bourgeois Congress, provoking splits and opportunities for revolutionary regroupment. But when Hitler’s “Operation Barbarossa” was launched against the Soviet Union in June 1941 and the wartime alliance between Britain and the USSR was sealed, the Comintern instructed another sharp turn to the “People’s War Against Fascism” and all-out support for the war effort in the imperialist countries and their colonies. As late as July 1941 the CPI, lacking precise instructions from Stalin via the CPGB, however, had adopted a line which distinguished between the interimperialist war between the Allied and Axis powers and the need to defend the Soviet Union. A CPI manifesto issued at the time read in part:
“The Communist Party declares that the only way in which the Indian people can help in the just war which the Soviet is waging, is by fighting all the more vigorously for their own emancipation from the imperialist yoke. Our attitude towards the British Government and the imperialist war remains what it was.... We can render really effective aid to the Soviet Union, only as a free people. That is why our campaign for the demonstration of our support and solidarity with the Soviet Union, must be coupled with the exposure of the imperialist hypocrisy of the Churchills and Roosevelts with the demand for the intensification of our struggle for independence” (quoted in David N. Druhe, Soviet Russia and Indian Communism).
But the CPI leadership, after the years of its popular front treachery, were not going to oppose Stalin’s dictates. They soon embraced the Allied war effort. In the Guidelines of the History of the Communist Party of India, by the Central Party Education Department, the CPI noted the July position, adding: “Then a document proposing change of line was sent by the comrades in Deoli camp in December 1941. In February 1942 the PB said in a resolution: ‘Make the Indian people play a people’s role in the people’s war.’ In July 1942 the ban on the CPI was lifted and releases started. The main slogans were correct: ‘National government for national defence.’ ‘National unity for national government’.”
Let’s be clear. The emissaries from the Comintern responsible for dealing with the CPI—the Communist Party of Great Britain—broke the news to their Indian comrades that they were out of line. Harry Pollitt’s letter announcing this was even deliberately permitted by the British authorities to be passed to the Communists incarcerated in Deoli prison. Debate ensued and there were those who broke with the CPI rather than scab on the struggle against British imperialism for the sake of the “People’s War” but the CPI leaders accepted the new line. Their support to the war would now be “unqualified, wholehearted and full-throated.”
For its part Congress’ formal position was that its support to the war was conditional on being granted independence from Britain. What this boiled down to was “demanding” some concessions in exchange for producing cannon fodder for the imperialist war effort. Then, emboldened by Britain’s difficulties as Japan advanced through the Pacific and into Burma and cognisant that they might soon need to deal with another imperialist overlord, Congress went from conditional support to open opposition, seeking to force a settlement with British imperialism. Even arch-reactionary Churchill was compelled to recognise that concessions were needed to shore up the shaky Raj. Sir Stafford Cripps, a “left” Labourite reputed to be sympathetic to the Indian national cause was despatched to offer some meagre and insulting divide-and-rule concessions. Even Gandhi called them “a post dated cheque on a bank that was failing.” Then as Charles Wesley Ervin related in his “Trotskyism in India: Origins through World War Two (1935-1945)”: “On 8 August 1942 Congress called for mass civil disobedience to pressurise the British to ‘quit India.’ The British panicked. Within twelve hours every important Congress leader was in jail or on his way. News of the arrests brought thousands onto the streets of Bombay.... The August Struggle had begun” (Revolutionary History Vol. 1, No. 4, Winter 1988-89).
Arguing that Congress should form a temporary national government in collaboration with the Muslim League, the CPI bitterly opposed the “Quit India” resolution and in the ensuing struggles denounced Congress for its “sabotage.” Even in its mendacious retrospective, the CPI’s “Guidelines” admit: “It adopted an antistruggle antistrike line. A line of avoiding [!] mass struggles was worked out on the plea that they would damage the war effort or help profascist elements to sabotage it, eg. CC [Central Committee] plenum reports, articles in weekly People’s War. Quit India movement was opposed on the same basis [as] the Forward Bloc [Subhas Chandra Bose’s split] and socialists who attacked communists as ‘British agents’ were denounced in retaliation as fifth column and fascist agents.”
The newly formed BLPI plunged into the August events. Key cadre came from exiled Ceylonese Trotskyists who had escaped arrest and imprisonment in Ceylon, after the British crackdown on their party for its revolutionary defeatist stance on the imperialist war and their organising of militant struggles among the strategic Tamil plantation workers. As the heroic Trotskyists argued in their Bombay leaflet the very day the historic “August Action” began:
“The slogans of ‘Abolition of Landlordism without Compensation’ and ‘Cancellation of Peasant Debt’ must be leading slogans of the struggle. Not only no-tax campaigns against the government, but also no-rent campaigns against all landlords, must be commenced on the widest possible scale, leading to the seizure of land by the peasants through Peasants’ Committees.
“Manning the nerve centres of the economy, the workers are in the position to deal the most devastating blows against imperialism.... A mass general political strike against British imperialism will paralyse and bring to a stop the whole carefully built up machinery of imperialist administration.
“The Indian soldiers, who are peasants in uniform, cannot fail to be affected by the agrarian struggle against landlordism and imperialism.”
Many BLPI militants were imprisoned in the immediate aftermath. The British were not the only ones out to crush them, either; the CPI press “viciously slandered the Trotskyists as ‘criminals and gangsters who help the Fascists’ by allegedly calling for ‘strikes, sabotage, food riots and all forms of anarchy’ and ‘attempting to stir up trouble in all war industries’.... Stalinists from Ceylon were brought over to India to hunt for Samasamajists [Ceylonese Trotskyists], and CPI stool-pigeons fingered militants to the police during the war” (Ervin, ibid).
The BLPI’s draft programme made an eloquent exposition of Leninist tactics in the second imperialist war:
“With the mass slaughter, the unparalleled destruction and untold sufferings entailed by the war, the international proletariat and the oppressed masses of the colonies are being driven to the point where they will see in revolution the only way out. ‘The chief enemy of the people is in its own country.’ The prime task of proletarian revolutionaries in the present imperialist conflict is to follow the policy of revolutionary defeatism in relation to their ‘own’ government and to help develop the class struggle to the point of civil war regardless of the possibility of such a course leading to the defeat of one’s ‘own’ government....
“International developments are governed by two main contradictions. The first is the contradiction of the existence of a workers’ state (the Soviet Union) in a capitalist world. The second is the inter-imperialist rivalry which has now broken out openly into war.... But the supercession of the capitalist-workers’ state antagonism by the inter-imperialist antagonism and the temporary postponement of a united capitalist war of intervention against the Soviet Union by no means removed the danger of an attack on the Soviet Union by one of the parties in the inter-imperialist embroilment....
“But the parties of the Fourth International, while defending the Soviet Union from imperialist attack, do not for a single moment give up the struggle against the Stalinist apparatus. Incapable of carrying out the real defence of the Soviet Union, the Stalinist bureaucracy seeks the aid not of the international proletariat, but exclusively of Anglo-American Imperialism.... The workers’ state will be able to emerge victorious from the holocaust of war only under one condition, and that is, if it is assisted by the revolution in the West or in the East.”
Thus the BLPI stood out as a revolutionary pole during the Second World War. Despite its exemplary work, programmatic soundness and significant local successes, the small and overwhelmingly clandestine forces of the BLPI were insufficient to take advantage of the revolutionary crisis. The Congress leaders feared the unleashing of the workers and peasants against the capitalists and landlords many times more than they desired to enforce the demand to “Quit India” on the British imperialists; the Stalinists with their grovelling before Churchill had made themselves for a key period of time “the most universally detested political organisation in India.” The intervention of a revolutionary Trotskyist party with some real weight in the proletariat was at this juncture the decisive element in whether the question of India was solved along the October model or left after post-war “independence” to the bloody partition designed by the British imperialists.
During this period of subordination to Churchill and in line with the British divide-and-rule stratagems, the CPI flirted with the feudalist, British-backed Muslim League. It even decided there was a Muslim “nation” and adopted for some time the project of Pakistan. Later, they would shift back to fawning blandishments to Gandhi’s Congress. We will take up in greater detail these and other concrete examples of their perfidy and how Stalinist betrayal helped pave the way for the “solution” of the Churchills, Mountbattens and Cripps in the second and concluding part of this article.
PART TWO
In their efforts to crush the Indian independence struggle and radical social struggle, imperialist Britain, Churchill’s wartime coalition and Attlee’s Labour government alike, and the bourgeois-landlord lackeys in the Congress and Muslim League were fully aided and abetted by the treacherous Stalinist trinity of the Kremlin, the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Communist Party of India. The first part of this article concluded:
“During this period of subordination to Churchill and in line with the British divide-and-rule stratagems, the CPI flirted with the feudalist, British-backed Muslim League. It even decided there was a Muslim ‘nation’ and adopted for some time the project of Pakistan. Later, they would shift back to fawning blandishments to Gandhi’s Congress. We will take up in greater detail these and other concrete examples of their perfidy and how Stalinist betrayal helped pave the way for the ‘solution’ of the Churchills, Mountbattens and Cripps in the second and concluding part of this article.”
Before turning to the CPI’s own contribution to the horrors of the Partition, it is worth reviewing the line of the Communist Party of Great Britain on India during World War II, not least because the CPGB were the agency for enforcing the subordination of the struggle for independence to Churchill’s war in its “mentor” role to the Indian Communists.
Having enlisted enthusiastically in the “People’s War” the Communist Parties not only insisted on “sacrifices” (i.e., no strike pledges, cessation of social struggle) from the working classes within the “democratic” imperialist countries but also from the colonial slaves of those imperialisms. Thus, when resistance to British rule broke out in India, the British Stalinists (as well as the CPI) denounced the struggle as playing “into the hands of the Axis powers” (Black, Stalinism in Britain). CPGB leader Harry Pollitt wrote to Churchill with the following advice: “our [!] paramount aim must be to win the willing co-operation of the Indian nation in the common struggle against Fascism.” At its Congress in 1944 the CPGB emphatically rejected independence before the war ended, instructing the Indian masses that: “Establishment of a representative Indian National Government as an ally of the United Nations during the war, and freedom for the Indian people to choose their own form of Government after the war” was the order of the day. Black’s description of these Stalinists as the “Empire builders of the British ‘Communist’ Party” is apt.
The Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India, revolutionary Trotskyists, described the situation in India during the war:
“British imperialism has instituted a system of repressive legislation, progressively inaugurating a gendarme regime not less systematic and ruthless than that of Russian czarism or German fascism. Since the commencement of the imperialist war, repression has been many times intensified. Even those nominal rights previously possessed by the masses have been openly withdrawn, and a naked rule of terror substituted through the Defense of India Act.... The press has been gagged by a series of iniquitous Press Acts and a systematic police censorship of all publications. Rights of free speech and assembly have been so curtailed that they are practically non-existent. Radical and revolutionary political parties are compelled to lead an underground existence.
“The right to strike no longer exists in all ‘essential war industries’.... Thousands of militant mass leaders have been imprisoned on flimsy pretexts or detained without trial. The restriction of individual movement by means of externment and internment orders has become a commonplace...” (quoted in Henry Judd, India in Revolt).
By contrast the ban on the CPI was lifted by a grateful British Raj in 1942 and a government circular of 20 September 1943 praised the CPI as “almost the only Party which fought for victory.” A CPI self-criticism produced years later is damning enough about what this meant:
“It adopted an antistruggle antistrike line. A line of avoiding mass struggles was worked out on the plea that they would damage the war effort or help profascist elements to sabotage it, eg. CC plenum reports, articles in weekly People’s War. Quit India movement was opposed, on the same basis the Forward Bloc and socialists who attacked communists as ‘British agents’ were denounced in retaliation as fifth column and fascist agents. In B.T. Ranadive’s report to the first congress on ‘Working Class and National Defence’ it was stated that production is ‘a sacred trust’ and ‘conditional support of production was a left-nationalist deviation’ therefore ‘strikes should be firmly prevented’.”
In addition to its self-confessed “anti-struggle” line during the war, the CPI as well played straight into the hands of British imperialism’s schemes to consciously promote communalist divisions.
CPI and Britain’s “Divide-and-Rule”
From the outset, all Indian nationalism was “a theme scored with religious, class, caste, and regional variations” (Wolpert, A New History of India), which given its social origins, was dominantly Hindu and upper-caste-based and frequently openly reactionary. A prime example was the early Congress “Extremist” leader B.G. Tilak, who first made his mark when he opposed the token reformist 1891 “Age of Consent” Bill (raising the age of statutory rape of child brides from ten to twelve) under the war cry “Religion in danger!” Gandhi alienated vast numbers of Muslims with his explicitly Hindu-myth and scripture-based rhetoric, describing his utopia as Ram Rajya (“the kingdom of Ram”—the Hindu epic hero-god). Such themes are the basis for subsequent fascistic Hindu chauvinism, such as the BJP/RSS [Bharatiya Janata Party/Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh] combine today. In the absence of a communist leadership consciously able to transcend and combat it by bringing the revolutionary proletarian, anti-communal, integrated class axis decisively to bear on the events leading up to 1947, this poison was bound to skewer any possibility of a progressive solution to India’s complex internal problems.
Far from communalism being an “eternal” feature of the Indian landscape, as the racist imperialist apologists would have it, it was the British who, through their systematic backing of one community against another to subjugate both, consciously nurtured this phenomenon as well as other caste, religious and national differences. Following the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny (significantly sparked by the refusal by Muslim and upper-caste Hindu sepoys [soldiers] alike to bite a new cartridge coated with animal fat), which far exceeded the bounds of the initial triggering episodes and revealed the depth of anti-British anger in the country, Governor General Elphinstone urged: “Our endeavor should be to uphold in full force the (for us) fortunate separation which exists between the different religions and races: not to endeavor to amalgamate them” (Henry Judd, India in Revolt). From this to the creation of separate Hindu and Muslim electorates in 1905-6 and thence to a series of other notorious “Communal Awards” culminating in the Partition: the imperialist logic of “divide-and-rule” was clear.
The novel Tamas no doubt truly portrays the efforts of CPI militants in the Punjab to fight the communalist slaughter during the Partition, but that blood-bath was prepared both by the CPI’s general support to the bourgeois nationalists and its particular wartime policies with respect to the Muslim question. One aspect of the Cripps’ Mission proposals in 1942 was a concession aimed at the Muslim League that areas could “opt out.” Given that Jinnah’s Muslim League had pledged “benevolent neutrality” in the imperialist war and the importance of recruitment from Muslim Punjabis, Pathans and Baluchis for the British Indian Army, this was a crucial divide-and-rule attempt to uphold the British war effort. The CPI, in its Central Party Education Department’s Guidelines of the History of the Communist Party of India (1974) admits the “serious mistake our party made on the question of Pakistan”:
“With the antistruggle line referred to above went the right-opportunist approach to the question of Congress-League (or national) unity, logically culminating in our support to Pakistan and the akali demand for sikh homeland. Failure to build up enough pressure on British imperialists and to build unity from below led to helpless reliance on unity from above. ‘Destiny of the nation depends on national unity—Congress-League unity’ which with Jinnah adamant on his demand for Pakistan led to trailing behind the Muslim League in order to bring Gandhi-Jinnah together.”
The CPI went from denouncing the Muslim League as reactionary and communalist (which it was) to generally giving it more favourable coverage than Congress. Muslim League General Secretary Liaquat Ali Khan for example praised the CPI for its “ceaseless efforts to convince the Hindu masses of the justice of the demand for the rights of self-determination to Muslims.” And CPI leader Joshi argued in August 1944 for strong and independent Muslim states in the north-west and north-east. Additionally in late 1944 the CPI argued for separate electorates for Untouchables, exactly in line with British imperialist “divide-and-rule” manoeuvres at that time.
The CPI’s flirtation with the Muslim League and Pakistan was not some healthy attempt to grapple with the complexities of the national question as some apologists have suggested, but a direct product of the alliance with Churchill and their efforts to cement that alliance. After all the Muslim League was also opposed to the “Quit India” struggles. And when the CPI “corrected” its flirtation with the feudalist Muslim League it was only to swing back to bourgeois Congress, policies that led directly to the CPI and CPI(M)’s [Communist Party of India (Marxist)] refusal today to defend legitimate national struggles such as those of the Kashmiris and the Sikhs.
In the service of tailing Congress, CPI leader P.C. Joshi reached new depths of Stalinist prostration before the leader of India’s Kuomintang. At the time of Gandhi’s release from prison in 1944, Joshi declared:
“Gandhiji, the beloved leader of the greatest patriotic organisation of our people, the mighty Indian National Congress is back in our midst again.... Every son and daughter of India, every patriotic organisation of our land, is looking to the greatest son of our nation to take it out of the bog in which none is safe.”
Amidst this record of sordid betrayal, acknowledged by the Stalinists’ own self-criticisms, about the only thing left for them to point to in that period is the relief work that the CPI organised during the Bengal famine. That famine in 1943 was a direct result of the imperialist war: wartime inflation, grain speculation and hoarding exacerbated by the loss of grain from Burma led to mass starvation. The arrogant indifference of the colonial administration was compounded by Churchill’s decision to cut back shipping to India. A.J.P. Taylor noted “A million and a half Indians died of starvation for the sake of a white man’s quarrel in North Africa” (English History 1914-1945).
The CPI’s famine relief work was not part of some revolutionary agitation against the war, but linked closely to its “war effort” on the food production “front.” Even if it did assist many in dire straits, the CPI’s famine relief work was a variant of Salvation Army mission work for Winston Churchill. In Bengal the CPI lost cadre because of its flirtation with the Muslim League, and it is noteworthy that in areas where the CPI dominated the peasant associations such as eastern Bengal and Telangana the peasant struggles over land and usury were restrained during the war compared to other areas.
The situation in Bengal impinges directly on the question of Subhas Chandra Bose and the Indian National Army (INA). There are Stalinoid critics of Gandhi’s Congress (and thus presumably its CPI tails) who look to Bose’s INA as a revolutionary alternative. At one time a left critic within Congress and elected as its head over the objections of Gandhi et al., Bose split to form the Forward Bloc Party in Bengal. Forward Bloc was banned and Bose arrested in 1940; he escaped on the eve of his trial in 1941 and travelled across northern India to Afghanistan, from there to Moscow. During the pre-June Russo-German alliance, Bose was welcomed by Hitler and “given high-powered radio facilities to beam daily broadcasts to India...urging his countrymen to rise in revolt against British tyranny” (Wolpert). In the spring of 1943, Bose travelled to Southeast Asia whereupon Tojo turned over all his Indian POWs to Bose’s command. In January 1944 he started his Indian National Army on their march north crossing the borders of India and reached the outskirts of Tripura’s state capital, Imphal, by May. Defeated by the British garrison, the INA surrendered in Rangoon and Bose escaped on the last Japanese plane to leave Saigon. He died in Formosa after a crash landing. When the captured officers of Bose’s INA went on trial in the winter of 1945-6 they were widely heralded as nationalist martyrs. On 18 February 1946 the Royal Indian Navy mutinied in Bombay harbour; the mutiny spread to Karachi. The British stepped up their attempts to extricate themselves from India.
Undoubtedly the INA was popular, particularly in Bengal, and among its ranks were those seeking a way to fight British imperialism rather than “turning the other cheek” Ã la Gandhi. However the paeans offered to Bose in, for example, a feature article in the 4 August Asian Times as achieving “a signal victory” and providing “the last nail in the coffin of British rule in India” miss the point that larger world events had intervened and in fact Bose had subordinated himself to the Axis powers who were Britain’s imperialist rivals during the war. Where the CPI bowed before Churchill, the INA functioned at the behest of and under the protection of the Japanese imperialists. As the Japanese forces scored victories in rapid succession at Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore and Burma the possibility of a Japanese invasion and victory in India was strongly felt. Bose had thrown his lot in with another would-be colonial conqueror. The INA fought in Burma—just as Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang fought on the other side with American imperialism. Both the Kuomintang and the INA subordinated the national struggle to their respective imperialist overlords. In China and in Southeast Asia the colonial masses very quickly learnt that the Japanese masters were no better than their deeply hated English, American, Dutch and French masters. The tragedy in India, and especially Bengal, was that the masses were given no choice but subordination to one or another imperialist.
These betrayals in India expose those such as the Stalinists of the Lalkar publication of the Indian Workers Association who absurdly insist that “revisionism” began with Khrushchev’s reign. For them, “So long as Comrade Stalin was in the leadership of the CPSU and was organising the tireless vigilance that needed to be exercised” “trounc[ing]” “the reactionary Trotskyite and Bukharinite opposition” all was well! (In fact, the CPI(M) still celebrates Stalin’s birthday in Calcutta.) And the Stalinists today prefer not to talk too much about their record in India during the Second World War, not only because it is such an affront to the revolutionary aspirations of the masses but also because they continue to pursue a class-collaborationist alliance with the Indian bourgeoisie.
Instead they seek to hide behind the figure of Stalin as a great war leader who defeated fascist barbarism. Somehow the Stalinist sins in India are to be exonerated on the basis that Stalin saved mankind. To this end, Lalkar’s Harpal Brar turgidly regurgitates all the old Stalinist lies about Tukhachevsky being an agent of Hitler to justify his murder and the purge of the Red Army officer corps in his book Perestroika: The Complete Collapse of Revisionism. In the course of these bloody purges—between 1937 and 1939 (i.e., beginning during the popular front period)—the Red Army lost three of its five Marshals, all eleven of its Deputy Commissars for Defence, 75 of 80 of its members of the Military soviet, all its military district commanders who held that post in June 1937. The naval and air chiefs of staff were killed. Thirteen out of 15 army commanders were shot, 57 out of 85 corps commanders were shot, as were 110 out of the 195 divisional commanders. In the Far Eastern forces, over 80 per cent of the staff were purged. Tukhachevsky had predicted an attack like Operation Barbarossa and he and his comrades had a lively sense of technological innovation. These experienced and talented veterans of the Civil War were replaced by incompetent cronies of Stalin, who abolished the Red Army’s tank units—one of these replacements thought automatic weapons were just for policemen.
Right up to the day of the invasion Stalin was shipping vital raw materials to Germany. Warnings and precise intelligence from [Leopold] Trepper’s Red Orchestra and Richard Sorge in Japan were labelled as “English provocations” and not passed on to the general staff. Stalin forbade the dispersal of the air force (and it was consequently massacred on the ground) and ruled out any effective planning of defence in depth. Even after the invasion had begun, Stalin countermanded orders for the artillery to return fire, and forbade air-raid precautions in cities under attack. The criminal conduct of Stalin and his gang directly led to the loss of two and a half million soldiers in 1941, huge areas of territory (including important industrial plants which Stalin had refused to locate east of the Volga until that summer) and an almost fatal blow being delivered to the workers state.
The Soviet Union survived because despite Stalin the Red Army fought tooth and nail to stop the onslaught. In December 1941 Zhukov’s effective counterattack was wrecked by Stalin’s personal meddling and as late as the summer of 1942 the simple incompetence of Stalin and one of his toadies led to the loss of 200,000 men in the Crimea. It was only with the emergence of a competent layer of generals not liable to listen so much to Stalin that the heroism of the Red Army and Soviet peoples was turned into the liberation of the Soviet homeland and Eastern Europe from the Nazi scourge. Not only did Stalin’s general policies of “socialism in one country” lead to near fatal catastrophe but his particular military contribution was disastrous.
For a Revolutionary Proletarian Solution!
At independence the subcontinent faced the unspeakable horrors of Partition and today it remains one of the most impoverished, oppressed and exploited areas in the world, a veritable prison-house for national minorities, women and lower castes. The communalist slaughters engulfing Partition killed between one and two million Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus (mainly in Punjab and Bengal) and the forced migrations in its aftermath displaced over eleven million. A New York Times correspondent, Robert Trumbull, reported of the Partition: “In India today blood flows oftener than rain falls. I have seen dead by the hundreds and, worst of all, thousands of Indians without eyes, feet or hands. Death by shooting is merciful and uncommon” (quoted in Collins and Lapierre, Freedom at Midnight). Muslim babies were discovered “roasted like piglets on spits” and the 45-mile road from Lahore to Amritsar became such an “open graveyard” that, according to one British officer, “The vultures had become so bloated by their feasts they could no longer fly.” A stationmaster at Amritsar recounted what had initially seemed to be a “phantom train,” one of many rolling into Punjabi stations at the time: “The floor of the compartment before him was a mass of human bodies, throats cut, skulls smashed, bodies eviscerated. Arms, legs, trunks of bodies were strewn along the corridors of compartments.... He turned to look back at the train. As he did, he saw in great white-washed letters on the flank of the last car the [Pakistani] Moslem assassins’ calling card. ‘This train is our Independence gift to [Indian Congress nationalists] Nehru and Patel’” (ibid).
The lessons of the struggle for Indian independence and the social liberation of India’s toiling masses are crucial not only for revolutionaries on the subcontinent but in all those countries where the permanent revolution applies, from South Africa to Iran. A Leninist-Trotskyist party must be built in irreconcilable struggle against every kind of nationalism and popular frontism, counterposing a revolutionary programme for the emancipation and reconstruction of the oppressed nation under the dictatorship of the proletariat. Writing in 1915 of the tasks for Russian revolutionaries Leon Trotsky called for “a revolutionary workers’ government, the conquest of power by the Russian proletariat”:
“But revolution is first and foremost a question of power—not of the state form (constituent assembly, republic, united states) but of the social content of the government. The demands for a constituent assembly and the confiscation of land under present conditions lose all direct revolutionary significance without the readiness of the proletariat to fight for the conquest of power....” (“The Struggle for Power”)
Because the Bolsheviks were committed to such a programme, the Russian Revolution of 1917 produced the first workers state on the planet. The USSR stood then as a beacon for the colonial and semi-colonial masses struggling for their liberation, as well as for the exploited working masses in the imperialist countries. Lenin and Trotsky’s Third International, later to be destroyed by Stalin, sought to bring the lessons of October to the workers of every land.
Today we in the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) fight to forge a revolutionary international which Lenin and Trotsky would recognise as their own. It will be an especially gratifying victory when the workers of the entire Indian subcontinent lead all the oppressed in throwing off the chains of neocolonial enslavement through victorious socialist revolution.
Markin comment:
This article goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist future mentioned in this day's other posts.
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Workers Vanguard No. 970
3 December 2010
The 1940s “Quit India” Movement
Stalinist Alliance with Churchill Betrayed Indian Revolution
The following originally appeared as a two-part article in Workers Hammer Nos. 131 and 132 (September/October and November/December 1992), newspaper of the Spartacist League/Britain, section of the International Communist League. Both parts are reprinted below, incorporating a minor factual correction.
PART ONE
“The Indian scene [in 1947] was heavy with menace, but one thing at least gave [British Labour prime minister Major Clement] Attlee great satisfaction. How gratifying it was, he noted, that an old Haileybury School boy like himself [Sir Cyril Radcliffe] was being sent out to take on the task of drawing a line through the [Punjabi] homelands of eighty-eight million human beings.”
“In India, Sikhs and Hindus prowled the cars of ambushed trains slaughtering every circumcised male they found. In Pakistan, Moslems raced along the trains they had stopped, murdering every male who was not circumcised.”
—Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, Freedom at Midnight
Fifty years ago India’s struggle for independence from Britain entered its final, decisive phase. Commonly known as the “Quit India” movement after the main slogan put out by Mohandas Karamchand (“Mahatma” or “great soul”) Gandhi’s bourgeois Indian National Congress in August 1942, this phase swelled to a crescendo between 1945 and 1946. Soon after this, the subcontinent was arbitrarily partitioned into an 80 per cent Hindu-dominated India and an Islamic-confessional Pakistan; a horrendous communal blood-bath was unleashed. The movement’s denouement in February 1948 presented an appropriately bizarre neocolonial spectacle: Britain’s last troops in India, the Somerset Light Infantry, disappeared marching westward through Bombay’s arched Gateway of India (where the “King Emperor” George V had landed in 1911) to the strains of “God Save the King” and “Auld Lang Syne,” played in parting salute by an Indian Navy honour guard band of Sikhs and Gurkhas.
Yet, at its tumultuous peak the mass upheaval, for a few crucial historic moments far outstripping the planned limits of its self-appointed minders and misleaders, had rocked the entire subcontinent, lifting it on to the very precipice of revolution. Millions of workers, soldiers, peasants, students and women, many flying Communist red flags alongside the Congress tricolour and the Muslim League’s green flag, defying British tank and machine-gun fire and even naval and aerial bombardment, jammed the streets and fields from Karachi to Calcutta. Cries of “Inquilab Zindabad!” (Long live the revolution!) filled the air. Armed peasants started forcibly seizing land and setting up “soviets.” And in February 1946 a powerful strike by ratings (enlisted men) of the Royal Indian Navy in Bombay touched off an armed uprising by hundreds of thousands, including Royal Indian Air Force men, in that port and across the whole, electrified country, bringing it to a virtual standstill.
Britain had lost control. Posed pointblank was not only India’s political independence from two hundred and fifty years of the British jackboot; the social liberation of India’s toiling masses from millennia of indigenous caste, gender, communal and class oppression was also now suddenly within grasp. What was needed was a revolutionary vanguard party of India’s small but strategic and modern, urbanised industrial working class which could rally and draw behind it the millions of peasant poor and other oppressed, oust the British, and put the native capitalist-landlord alliance out of business, launching a direct offensive for both national and social liberation through capturing proletarian state power.
This policy, that of the Permanent Revolution, had been the programme of Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks in the victorious October Revolution, thirty years earlier. That revolution had brought national and social liberation to the masses of backward Tsarist Russia, whose Tadzhik, Uzbek and other Central Asian peoples just on the other side of the Himalayan Pamirs from northern Kashmir) had been catapulted from the seventh century into the twentieth as a result. In India the toiling masses had seen the Russian Revolution as a beacon of hope.
Yet by midnight of 14 August 1947, when Congress prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru rose to address “free” India’s parliament of capitalists, landlords and princes, the spectacular upsurge had been derailed. Instead, a pro-imperialist alliance of the Congress bourgeoisie and the Muslim League landlords had successfully diverted the revolutionary momentum into British imperialism’s waiting trap, the nightmare of communalist Partition. India’s working masses had paid with their lives—and were now about to pay even more—for the absence of a revolutionary party to lead its millions in an independent struggle for workers power.
The new Muslim theocratic state of Pakistan (whose Punjabi-dominated west wing and Bengali east wing looked at each other across 1,000 miles of hostile Hindu Indian territory) was carved out of the living bodies of thoroughly interpenetrated peoples, precipitating the biggest forced population transfers and one of the ghastliest communal slaughters in history. And in this crime, the Labour government of imperialist Britain and their bourgeois-landlord alliance of lackeys in the Congress and Muslim League were fully aided and abetted by the treacherous Stalinist trinity of the Kremlin, the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Communist Party of India. For in this historic betrayal, Stalin was the mover, the CPGB the enforcer and the CPI the executor on the spot.
Lessons of the Chinese Revolution
The developing militant wave and the advent of World War II could have signalled the opening of great possibilities for a revolutionary party the size of the CPI. Instead the second imperialist war was to bring the nadir of Stalinist betrayal in India. To understand the CPI’s treachery on behalf of Churchill’s war effort it is necessary to take up the positions adopted by the Stalinised Comintern as against the Leninist tradition upheld by Trotsky and the Left Opposition.
The Russian Revolution in 1917 fully confirmed Trotsky’s prognosis that “the complete victory of the democratic revolution in Russia is conceivable only in the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, leaning on the peasantry. The dictatorship of the proletariat, which would inevitably place on the order of the day not only democratic but socialistic tasks as well, would at the same time give a powerful impetus to the international socialist revolution. Only the victory of the proletariat in the West could protect Russia from bourgeois restoration and assure it the possibility of rounding out the establishment of socialism” (“Three Concepts of the Russian Revolution” [1939]).
Under the slogan of “socialism in one country” embraced by the conservative, nationalist Stalinist bureaucracy which had risen in the context of the isolated, war-weary and encircled Soviet workers state, the struggle for the extension of the revolution internationally was shelved in favour of “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism. This translated into defeat after defeat for the world proletariat and eventually transformed—after ruthless purges in most cases—the parties of the (Third) Communist International into tools of class-collaboration with their “own” bourgeoisies. In the colonial and neocolonial world it meant rejecting the lessons of October and resuscitating the old Menshevik formula of “two-stage” revolution. As in China earlier, this was to have a devastating effect on the revolutionary proletariat of India.
The tragedy of the Chinese Revolution of 1927-28 was a powerful negative confirmation of the permanent revolution, and it was over China that Trotsky extended his correct prognosis in Russia to all of the backward, colonial countries. The debate on China was whether or not to subordinate the Chinese workers and peasants to the native bourgeoisie in the form of Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang in which the CP [Communist Party] was operating. When the Chinese CP proposed to leave the Kuomintang the plan was vetoed by the Comintern Executive on Stalin’s instruction. They were directed to hold down the class struggle against the “anti-imperialist” bourgeoisie in the cities and contain the peasant movement in the countryside. In early 1926 the Kuomintang itself was admitted to the International as an associate party. Only a few weeks later, on 20 March, Chiang carried out his first anti-communist coup, barring CP members from all leadership posts and demanding a list of all CP members in the Kuomintang. Under orders, the CP complied! After a challenge from the United Opposition leaders Trotsky and Zinoviev and during the crucial days of the Shanghai insurrection which began in March 1927, Stalin stuck to the policy. The main task in China for the Communists was “the further development of the Kuomintang.” On 12 April the Kuomintang army carried out a massacre which cost the lives of tens of thousands of Communists and militant workers who had laid down their arms at Stalin’s orders. This was “socialism in one country” in practice!
Congress—the Indian “Kuomintang”—and the CPI
“India,” Trotsky had noted in May 1930, “is the classic colonial country as Britain is the classic metropolis. All the viciousness of the ruling classes and every form of oppression that capitalism has used against the backward people of the East is most completely and frightfully summed up in the history of the gigantic colony on which the British imperialists have settled themselves like leeches for the past century and a half” (“The Revolution in India, Its Tasks and Dangers,” Writings of Leon Trotsky [1930]). Like pre-revolutionary Russia and China, the road to national liberation, agrarian reform, social equality and advancement lay in the programme of proletarian revolution, requiring a vanguard party defending the political independence of the working class. The weak national bourgeoisie, tied by a thousand threads to imperialism, could in no way carry out even the “democratic” tasks posed.
The Indian industrial bourgeoisie, which started growing towards the very end of the 19th century and expanded considerably during World War I, was still no match for British industrial and finance capital. The Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India (BLPI—Indian section of the Trotskyist Fourth International) pointed out:
“Despite the advance of Indian capital, British capital remains in effective monopolist domination in banking, commerce, exchange, insurance, shipping, in the tea, coffee and rubber plantations, and in the jute industry. In iron and steel, Indian capital has been forced to come to terms with British capital, and even in the cotton industry, the home of Indian capital, the control of British capital through the managing agency system is very great.”
—BLPI Draft Programme
Indian reality emphatically underlined the revolutionary correctness of the perspective of permanent revolution. The Indian Trotskyists drew the correct conclusion that “the Indian bourgeoisie, shackled as it is to Imperialism, cannot play the historical role of the West-European bourgeoisie in liberating and developing the productive forces. The industrial advance of India demands absolutely the overthrow of Imperialism, with which Indian bourgeois interests are indissolubly bound, and the overthrow of which they are bound to resist” (ibid).
Faced with British imperialist intransigence, the weak and dependent Indian bourgeoisie sought methods of struggle that could pressure the colonial masters to make concessions without disturbing the social order by unleashing struggles of the masses that would threaten not just the British but also the Indian capitalists and their landlord brothers. The origins of Congress are instructive in this regard.
An English ex-civil servant of the Empire, A.O. Hume, was a founder of the Indian National Congress in 1885. Its stated third aim was “THE CONSOLIDATION OF THE UNION BETWEEN ENGLAND AND INDIA, BY SECURING THE MODIFICATION OF SUCH OF ITS CONDITIONS AS MAY BE UNJUST OR INJURIOUS TO THE LATTER COUNTRY” (The Indian Nationalist Movement, 1885-1947: Select documents, ed. B.N. Pandey). As its first president, W.C. Bonnerjee explained:
“Lord Dufferin...said there was no body of persons in this country who performed the functions which Her Majesty’s Opposition did in England...and as the English were necessarily ignorant of what was thought of them and their policy in native circles, it would be very desirable in the interests as well of the rulers as of the ruled that Indian politicians should meet yearly and point out to the Government in what respects the administration was defective and how it could be improved” (ibid).
Enter Gandhi. At the time he arrived on the nationalist political scene at the start of World War I, Gandhi could be found enthusiastically urging London’s Indians to “think imperially” and organising a Field Ambulance Training Corps as his personal contribution to the interimperialist war “effort.” Gandhi’s job was to extract as much as possible from the British, in the common interests of saving capitalism, while keeping the burgeoning and now increasingly militant struggles of the workers and peasants at bay. The textile magnate Ambalal Sarabhai put it succinctly when he said Gandhi “was the best guarantee against communism which India possessed” (D.A. Low, Congress and the Raj).
It was only after World War I that India’s modern proletariat, numbering five million by the second imperialist world war, emerged as a distinct force. The first great wave of strikes (1918-21) was triggered by mass immiseration under war conditions, a flu epidemic that killed 14 million, the Amritsar massacre in the wake of the draconian Rowlatt Act, and the impact of the 1917 Revolution. And it was the backdrop to Gandhi’s 1920-21 mass civil disobedience campaign for minimal constitutional reforms. The first six months of 1920 saw 200 strikes involving half a million workers, along with growing peasant struggles. Gandhi got cold feet, declaring that he had committed a “blunder of Himalayan proportions which had enabled ill-disposed persons, not true passive resisters at all, to perpetrate disorders.” In February 1922, on the eve of another passive resistance crawl, when 22 policemen were killed in the course of a peasant anti-rent agitation, Gandhi called off the entire non-cooperation movement, essentially going into purdah over the next decade. And the Congress told its supporters that withholding rent to the zemindars [landlords] was contrary to its policies and “the best interests of the country.” Gandhi re-emerged in the thirties when new waves of militant struggles broke out. He reiterated his opposition to “class war” and called for the “harmonious cooperation of labour and capital, the landlord and tenant.”
The situation in India not only cried out for a revolutionary solution but provided great opportunities for building a communist-led movement against colonial oppression and to overthrow capitalism. The prestige of the October Revolution was immense among the toiling masses. Founded among other places in revolutionary Tashkent in 1920, the CPI had early succumbed to the global anti-revolutionary policies emanating from Stalin’s Comintern after 1924; Stalin’s search for “peaceful coexistence” did not help the Indian Communists. In the late twenties they employed themselves with generally rightist plans for front organisations and multi-class parties. Then the “Third Period” had them pursuing sterile sectarian policies which condemned the Indian nationalists equally with the British imperialists.
In the popular front period (1935-39) they accepted the leadership of the Congress and “Gandhiji” as necessary for the first “democratic” stage of the revolution. And moreover, because Stalin was pursuing an alliance with “democratic” imperialist Britain, the CPI soft-pedalled the struggle against British imperialism, placing the emphasis on reforms and gradualist change. At the Seventh Congress of the Third International in Moscow in July-August 1935, the CPI was denounced for long-standing “left” sectarian errors and for using slogans such as “an Indian Workers’ and Peasants’ Soviet Republic,” and “confiscation of lands belonging to the zemindars (landlords) without compensation.” Even as late as March 1936 the Congress was characterised as “definitely a class organisation of the Indian bourgeoisie” in a CPI publication, but the new class-collaborationist line laid down by “India experts” for the CPGB, R. Palme Dutt and Ben Bradley, was:
“The National Congress can play a great part and a foremost part in the work of realising the anti-imperialist People’s Front. It is even possible that the National Congress by the further transformation of its organisation and programme may become the form of realisation of the anti-imperialist People’s Front” (quoted in S. Tagore, Against the Stream).
The CPI supported the Congress in the provincial elections of 1937. In 1936 a miserable and tokenistic Congress proposal for agricultural reform was lauded. In fact the Congress ministries of this period did next to nothing to alleviate the condition of the peasantry. Indicatively the only places where Congress ministries even talked about land reform were in areas where the landlords were to a large extent Muslims and the peasants Hindus, such as the United Provinces, Bihar and Madras.
At the same time the inception of Congress ministries in some parts of India gave the CPI more room to organise, and with growing mass disillusionment with Congress the CPI began to grow significantly. It developed strong roots in the working class in major industrial cities like Bombay, and considerable influence in student and peasant organisations. But it held the struggles back in the interests of the alliance with Congress. In November 1938, after the shootings of workers protesting anti-trade-union legislation introduced by the Congress ministry in Bombay, one “Congress Communist” (CPI entrist in Congress) told a protest rally: “Anger and sorrow have been kindled in our minds by the oppression that has been perpetrated on the workers of Bombay. Still, we are proceeding with restraint with our eyes fixed on national solidarity and unity.”
The CPI in World War II
During the period of the Stalin-Hitler pact the CPI as all the other parties of the Comintern (which would be formally liquidated by Stalin in 1943) denounced the “democratic” facade of the British imperialists in their war against Germany. Indeed in contrast to the Stalinists of His Majesty’s CPGB who displayed visible discomfort at Stalin’s about face (with its pro-German tilt), many militants of the CPI appear to have relished the opportunity to take a full-blooded stance against their hated main enemy. In the context of mounting anti-imperialist militancy, this line would have come increasingly into contradiction with the CPI’s continuing adherence to the Stalinist policy of a “first” “democratic” stage in alliance with the bourgeois Congress, provoking splits and opportunities for revolutionary regroupment. But when Hitler’s “Operation Barbarossa” was launched against the Soviet Union in June 1941 and the wartime alliance between Britain and the USSR was sealed, the Comintern instructed another sharp turn to the “People’s War Against Fascism” and all-out support for the war effort in the imperialist countries and their colonies. As late as July 1941 the CPI, lacking precise instructions from Stalin via the CPGB, however, had adopted a line which distinguished between the interimperialist war between the Allied and Axis powers and the need to defend the Soviet Union. A CPI manifesto issued at the time read in part:
“The Communist Party declares that the only way in which the Indian people can help in the just war which the Soviet is waging, is by fighting all the more vigorously for their own emancipation from the imperialist yoke. Our attitude towards the British Government and the imperialist war remains what it was.... We can render really effective aid to the Soviet Union, only as a free people. That is why our campaign for the demonstration of our support and solidarity with the Soviet Union, must be coupled with the exposure of the imperialist hypocrisy of the Churchills and Roosevelts with the demand for the intensification of our struggle for independence” (quoted in David N. Druhe, Soviet Russia and Indian Communism).
But the CPI leadership, after the years of its popular front treachery, were not going to oppose Stalin’s dictates. They soon embraced the Allied war effort. In the Guidelines of the History of the Communist Party of India, by the Central Party Education Department, the CPI noted the July position, adding: “Then a document proposing change of line was sent by the comrades in Deoli camp in December 1941. In February 1942 the PB said in a resolution: ‘Make the Indian people play a people’s role in the people’s war.’ In July 1942 the ban on the CPI was lifted and releases started. The main slogans were correct: ‘National government for national defence.’ ‘National unity for national government’.”
Let’s be clear. The emissaries from the Comintern responsible for dealing with the CPI—the Communist Party of Great Britain—broke the news to their Indian comrades that they were out of line. Harry Pollitt’s letter announcing this was even deliberately permitted by the British authorities to be passed to the Communists incarcerated in Deoli prison. Debate ensued and there were those who broke with the CPI rather than scab on the struggle against British imperialism for the sake of the “People’s War” but the CPI leaders accepted the new line. Their support to the war would now be “unqualified, wholehearted and full-throated.”
For its part Congress’ formal position was that its support to the war was conditional on being granted independence from Britain. What this boiled down to was “demanding” some concessions in exchange for producing cannon fodder for the imperialist war effort. Then, emboldened by Britain’s difficulties as Japan advanced through the Pacific and into Burma and cognisant that they might soon need to deal with another imperialist overlord, Congress went from conditional support to open opposition, seeking to force a settlement with British imperialism. Even arch-reactionary Churchill was compelled to recognise that concessions were needed to shore up the shaky Raj. Sir Stafford Cripps, a “left” Labourite reputed to be sympathetic to the Indian national cause was despatched to offer some meagre and insulting divide-and-rule concessions. Even Gandhi called them “a post dated cheque on a bank that was failing.” Then as Charles Wesley Ervin related in his “Trotskyism in India: Origins through World War Two (1935-1945)”: “On 8 August 1942 Congress called for mass civil disobedience to pressurise the British to ‘quit India.’ The British panicked. Within twelve hours every important Congress leader was in jail or on his way. News of the arrests brought thousands onto the streets of Bombay.... The August Struggle had begun” (Revolutionary History Vol. 1, No. 4, Winter 1988-89).
Arguing that Congress should form a temporary national government in collaboration with the Muslim League, the CPI bitterly opposed the “Quit India” resolution and in the ensuing struggles denounced Congress for its “sabotage.” Even in its mendacious retrospective, the CPI’s “Guidelines” admit: “It adopted an antistruggle antistrike line. A line of avoiding [!] mass struggles was worked out on the plea that they would damage the war effort or help profascist elements to sabotage it, eg. CC [Central Committee] plenum reports, articles in weekly People’s War. Quit India movement was opposed on the same basis [as] the Forward Bloc [Subhas Chandra Bose’s split] and socialists who attacked communists as ‘British agents’ were denounced in retaliation as fifth column and fascist agents.”
The newly formed BLPI plunged into the August events. Key cadre came from exiled Ceylonese Trotskyists who had escaped arrest and imprisonment in Ceylon, after the British crackdown on their party for its revolutionary defeatist stance on the imperialist war and their organising of militant struggles among the strategic Tamil plantation workers. As the heroic Trotskyists argued in their Bombay leaflet the very day the historic “August Action” began:
“The slogans of ‘Abolition of Landlordism without Compensation’ and ‘Cancellation of Peasant Debt’ must be leading slogans of the struggle. Not only no-tax campaigns against the government, but also no-rent campaigns against all landlords, must be commenced on the widest possible scale, leading to the seizure of land by the peasants through Peasants’ Committees.
“Manning the nerve centres of the economy, the workers are in the position to deal the most devastating blows against imperialism.... A mass general political strike against British imperialism will paralyse and bring to a stop the whole carefully built up machinery of imperialist administration.
“The Indian soldiers, who are peasants in uniform, cannot fail to be affected by the agrarian struggle against landlordism and imperialism.”
Many BLPI militants were imprisoned in the immediate aftermath. The British were not the only ones out to crush them, either; the CPI press “viciously slandered the Trotskyists as ‘criminals and gangsters who help the Fascists’ by allegedly calling for ‘strikes, sabotage, food riots and all forms of anarchy’ and ‘attempting to stir up trouble in all war industries’.... Stalinists from Ceylon were brought over to India to hunt for Samasamajists [Ceylonese Trotskyists], and CPI stool-pigeons fingered militants to the police during the war” (Ervin, ibid).
The BLPI’s draft programme made an eloquent exposition of Leninist tactics in the second imperialist war:
“With the mass slaughter, the unparalleled destruction and untold sufferings entailed by the war, the international proletariat and the oppressed masses of the colonies are being driven to the point where they will see in revolution the only way out. ‘The chief enemy of the people is in its own country.’ The prime task of proletarian revolutionaries in the present imperialist conflict is to follow the policy of revolutionary defeatism in relation to their ‘own’ government and to help develop the class struggle to the point of civil war regardless of the possibility of such a course leading to the defeat of one’s ‘own’ government....
“International developments are governed by two main contradictions. The first is the contradiction of the existence of a workers’ state (the Soviet Union) in a capitalist world. The second is the inter-imperialist rivalry which has now broken out openly into war.... But the supercession of the capitalist-workers’ state antagonism by the inter-imperialist antagonism and the temporary postponement of a united capitalist war of intervention against the Soviet Union by no means removed the danger of an attack on the Soviet Union by one of the parties in the inter-imperialist embroilment....
“But the parties of the Fourth International, while defending the Soviet Union from imperialist attack, do not for a single moment give up the struggle against the Stalinist apparatus. Incapable of carrying out the real defence of the Soviet Union, the Stalinist bureaucracy seeks the aid not of the international proletariat, but exclusively of Anglo-American Imperialism.... The workers’ state will be able to emerge victorious from the holocaust of war only under one condition, and that is, if it is assisted by the revolution in the West or in the East.”
Thus the BLPI stood out as a revolutionary pole during the Second World War. Despite its exemplary work, programmatic soundness and significant local successes, the small and overwhelmingly clandestine forces of the BLPI were insufficient to take advantage of the revolutionary crisis. The Congress leaders feared the unleashing of the workers and peasants against the capitalists and landlords many times more than they desired to enforce the demand to “Quit India” on the British imperialists; the Stalinists with their grovelling before Churchill had made themselves for a key period of time “the most universally detested political organisation in India.” The intervention of a revolutionary Trotskyist party with some real weight in the proletariat was at this juncture the decisive element in whether the question of India was solved along the October model or left after post-war “independence” to the bloody partition designed by the British imperialists.
During this period of subordination to Churchill and in line with the British divide-and-rule stratagems, the CPI flirted with the feudalist, British-backed Muslim League. It even decided there was a Muslim “nation” and adopted for some time the project of Pakistan. Later, they would shift back to fawning blandishments to Gandhi’s Congress. We will take up in greater detail these and other concrete examples of their perfidy and how Stalinist betrayal helped pave the way for the “solution” of the Churchills, Mountbattens and Cripps in the second and concluding part of this article.
PART TWO
In their efforts to crush the Indian independence struggle and radical social struggle, imperialist Britain, Churchill’s wartime coalition and Attlee’s Labour government alike, and the bourgeois-landlord lackeys in the Congress and Muslim League were fully aided and abetted by the treacherous Stalinist trinity of the Kremlin, the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Communist Party of India. The first part of this article concluded:
“During this period of subordination to Churchill and in line with the British divide-and-rule stratagems, the CPI flirted with the feudalist, British-backed Muslim League. It even decided there was a Muslim ‘nation’ and adopted for some time the project of Pakistan. Later, they would shift back to fawning blandishments to Gandhi’s Congress. We will take up in greater detail these and other concrete examples of their perfidy and how Stalinist betrayal helped pave the way for the ‘solution’ of the Churchills, Mountbattens and Cripps in the second and concluding part of this article.”
Before turning to the CPI’s own contribution to the horrors of the Partition, it is worth reviewing the line of the Communist Party of Great Britain on India during World War II, not least because the CPGB were the agency for enforcing the subordination of the struggle for independence to Churchill’s war in its “mentor” role to the Indian Communists.
Having enlisted enthusiastically in the “People’s War” the Communist Parties not only insisted on “sacrifices” (i.e., no strike pledges, cessation of social struggle) from the working classes within the “democratic” imperialist countries but also from the colonial slaves of those imperialisms. Thus, when resistance to British rule broke out in India, the British Stalinists (as well as the CPI) denounced the struggle as playing “into the hands of the Axis powers” (Black, Stalinism in Britain). CPGB leader Harry Pollitt wrote to Churchill with the following advice: “our [!] paramount aim must be to win the willing co-operation of the Indian nation in the common struggle against Fascism.” At its Congress in 1944 the CPGB emphatically rejected independence before the war ended, instructing the Indian masses that: “Establishment of a representative Indian National Government as an ally of the United Nations during the war, and freedom for the Indian people to choose their own form of Government after the war” was the order of the day. Black’s description of these Stalinists as the “Empire builders of the British ‘Communist’ Party” is apt.
The Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India, revolutionary Trotskyists, described the situation in India during the war:
“British imperialism has instituted a system of repressive legislation, progressively inaugurating a gendarme regime not less systematic and ruthless than that of Russian czarism or German fascism. Since the commencement of the imperialist war, repression has been many times intensified. Even those nominal rights previously possessed by the masses have been openly withdrawn, and a naked rule of terror substituted through the Defense of India Act.... The press has been gagged by a series of iniquitous Press Acts and a systematic police censorship of all publications. Rights of free speech and assembly have been so curtailed that they are practically non-existent. Radical and revolutionary political parties are compelled to lead an underground existence.
“The right to strike no longer exists in all ‘essential war industries’.... Thousands of militant mass leaders have been imprisoned on flimsy pretexts or detained without trial. The restriction of individual movement by means of externment and internment orders has become a commonplace...” (quoted in Henry Judd, India in Revolt).
By contrast the ban on the CPI was lifted by a grateful British Raj in 1942 and a government circular of 20 September 1943 praised the CPI as “almost the only Party which fought for victory.” A CPI self-criticism produced years later is damning enough about what this meant:
“It adopted an antistruggle antistrike line. A line of avoiding mass struggles was worked out on the plea that they would damage the war effort or help profascist elements to sabotage it, eg. CC plenum reports, articles in weekly People’s War. Quit India movement was opposed, on the same basis the Forward Bloc and socialists who attacked communists as ‘British agents’ were denounced in retaliation as fifth column and fascist agents. In B.T. Ranadive’s report to the first congress on ‘Working Class and National Defence’ it was stated that production is ‘a sacred trust’ and ‘conditional support of production was a left-nationalist deviation’ therefore ‘strikes should be firmly prevented’.”
In addition to its self-confessed “anti-struggle” line during the war, the CPI as well played straight into the hands of British imperialism’s schemes to consciously promote communalist divisions.
CPI and Britain’s “Divide-and-Rule”
From the outset, all Indian nationalism was “a theme scored with religious, class, caste, and regional variations” (Wolpert, A New History of India), which given its social origins, was dominantly Hindu and upper-caste-based and frequently openly reactionary. A prime example was the early Congress “Extremist” leader B.G. Tilak, who first made his mark when he opposed the token reformist 1891 “Age of Consent” Bill (raising the age of statutory rape of child brides from ten to twelve) under the war cry “Religion in danger!” Gandhi alienated vast numbers of Muslims with his explicitly Hindu-myth and scripture-based rhetoric, describing his utopia as Ram Rajya (“the kingdom of Ram”—the Hindu epic hero-god). Such themes are the basis for subsequent fascistic Hindu chauvinism, such as the BJP/RSS [Bharatiya Janata Party/Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh] combine today. In the absence of a communist leadership consciously able to transcend and combat it by bringing the revolutionary proletarian, anti-communal, integrated class axis decisively to bear on the events leading up to 1947, this poison was bound to skewer any possibility of a progressive solution to India’s complex internal problems.
Far from communalism being an “eternal” feature of the Indian landscape, as the racist imperialist apologists would have it, it was the British who, through their systematic backing of one community against another to subjugate both, consciously nurtured this phenomenon as well as other caste, religious and national differences. Following the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny (significantly sparked by the refusal by Muslim and upper-caste Hindu sepoys [soldiers] alike to bite a new cartridge coated with animal fat), which far exceeded the bounds of the initial triggering episodes and revealed the depth of anti-British anger in the country, Governor General Elphinstone urged: “Our endeavor should be to uphold in full force the (for us) fortunate separation which exists between the different religions and races: not to endeavor to amalgamate them” (Henry Judd, India in Revolt). From this to the creation of separate Hindu and Muslim electorates in 1905-6 and thence to a series of other notorious “Communal Awards” culminating in the Partition: the imperialist logic of “divide-and-rule” was clear.
The novel Tamas no doubt truly portrays the efforts of CPI militants in the Punjab to fight the communalist slaughter during the Partition, but that blood-bath was prepared both by the CPI’s general support to the bourgeois nationalists and its particular wartime policies with respect to the Muslim question. One aspect of the Cripps’ Mission proposals in 1942 was a concession aimed at the Muslim League that areas could “opt out.” Given that Jinnah’s Muslim League had pledged “benevolent neutrality” in the imperialist war and the importance of recruitment from Muslim Punjabis, Pathans and Baluchis for the British Indian Army, this was a crucial divide-and-rule attempt to uphold the British war effort. The CPI, in its Central Party Education Department’s Guidelines of the History of the Communist Party of India (1974) admits the “serious mistake our party made on the question of Pakistan”:
“With the antistruggle line referred to above went the right-opportunist approach to the question of Congress-League (or national) unity, logically culminating in our support to Pakistan and the akali demand for sikh homeland. Failure to build up enough pressure on British imperialists and to build unity from below led to helpless reliance on unity from above. ‘Destiny of the nation depends on national unity—Congress-League unity’ which with Jinnah adamant on his demand for Pakistan led to trailing behind the Muslim League in order to bring Gandhi-Jinnah together.”
The CPI went from denouncing the Muslim League as reactionary and communalist (which it was) to generally giving it more favourable coverage than Congress. Muslim League General Secretary Liaquat Ali Khan for example praised the CPI for its “ceaseless efforts to convince the Hindu masses of the justice of the demand for the rights of self-determination to Muslims.” And CPI leader Joshi argued in August 1944 for strong and independent Muslim states in the north-west and north-east. Additionally in late 1944 the CPI argued for separate electorates for Untouchables, exactly in line with British imperialist “divide-and-rule” manoeuvres at that time.
The CPI’s flirtation with the Muslim League and Pakistan was not some healthy attempt to grapple with the complexities of the national question as some apologists have suggested, but a direct product of the alliance with Churchill and their efforts to cement that alliance. After all the Muslim League was also opposed to the “Quit India” struggles. And when the CPI “corrected” its flirtation with the feudalist Muslim League it was only to swing back to bourgeois Congress, policies that led directly to the CPI and CPI(M)’s [Communist Party of India (Marxist)] refusal today to defend legitimate national struggles such as those of the Kashmiris and the Sikhs.
In the service of tailing Congress, CPI leader P.C. Joshi reached new depths of Stalinist prostration before the leader of India’s Kuomintang. At the time of Gandhi’s release from prison in 1944, Joshi declared:
“Gandhiji, the beloved leader of the greatest patriotic organisation of our people, the mighty Indian National Congress is back in our midst again.... Every son and daughter of India, every patriotic organisation of our land, is looking to the greatest son of our nation to take it out of the bog in which none is safe.”
Amidst this record of sordid betrayal, acknowledged by the Stalinists’ own self-criticisms, about the only thing left for them to point to in that period is the relief work that the CPI organised during the Bengal famine. That famine in 1943 was a direct result of the imperialist war: wartime inflation, grain speculation and hoarding exacerbated by the loss of grain from Burma led to mass starvation. The arrogant indifference of the colonial administration was compounded by Churchill’s decision to cut back shipping to India. A.J.P. Taylor noted “A million and a half Indians died of starvation for the sake of a white man’s quarrel in North Africa” (English History 1914-1945).
The CPI’s famine relief work was not part of some revolutionary agitation against the war, but linked closely to its “war effort” on the food production “front.” Even if it did assist many in dire straits, the CPI’s famine relief work was a variant of Salvation Army mission work for Winston Churchill. In Bengal the CPI lost cadre because of its flirtation with the Muslim League, and it is noteworthy that in areas where the CPI dominated the peasant associations such as eastern Bengal and Telangana the peasant struggles over land and usury were restrained during the war compared to other areas.
The situation in Bengal impinges directly on the question of Subhas Chandra Bose and the Indian National Army (INA). There are Stalinoid critics of Gandhi’s Congress (and thus presumably its CPI tails) who look to Bose’s INA as a revolutionary alternative. At one time a left critic within Congress and elected as its head over the objections of Gandhi et al., Bose split to form the Forward Bloc Party in Bengal. Forward Bloc was banned and Bose arrested in 1940; he escaped on the eve of his trial in 1941 and travelled across northern India to Afghanistan, from there to Moscow. During the pre-June Russo-German alliance, Bose was welcomed by Hitler and “given high-powered radio facilities to beam daily broadcasts to India...urging his countrymen to rise in revolt against British tyranny” (Wolpert). In the spring of 1943, Bose travelled to Southeast Asia whereupon Tojo turned over all his Indian POWs to Bose’s command. In January 1944 he started his Indian National Army on their march north crossing the borders of India and reached the outskirts of Tripura’s state capital, Imphal, by May. Defeated by the British garrison, the INA surrendered in Rangoon and Bose escaped on the last Japanese plane to leave Saigon. He died in Formosa after a crash landing. When the captured officers of Bose’s INA went on trial in the winter of 1945-6 they were widely heralded as nationalist martyrs. On 18 February 1946 the Royal Indian Navy mutinied in Bombay harbour; the mutiny spread to Karachi. The British stepped up their attempts to extricate themselves from India.
Undoubtedly the INA was popular, particularly in Bengal, and among its ranks were those seeking a way to fight British imperialism rather than “turning the other cheek” Ã la Gandhi. However the paeans offered to Bose in, for example, a feature article in the 4 August Asian Times as achieving “a signal victory” and providing “the last nail in the coffin of British rule in India” miss the point that larger world events had intervened and in fact Bose had subordinated himself to the Axis powers who were Britain’s imperialist rivals during the war. Where the CPI bowed before Churchill, the INA functioned at the behest of and under the protection of the Japanese imperialists. As the Japanese forces scored victories in rapid succession at Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore and Burma the possibility of a Japanese invasion and victory in India was strongly felt. Bose had thrown his lot in with another would-be colonial conqueror. The INA fought in Burma—just as Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang fought on the other side with American imperialism. Both the Kuomintang and the INA subordinated the national struggle to their respective imperialist overlords. In China and in Southeast Asia the colonial masses very quickly learnt that the Japanese masters were no better than their deeply hated English, American, Dutch and French masters. The tragedy in India, and especially Bengal, was that the masses were given no choice but subordination to one or another imperialist.
These betrayals in India expose those such as the Stalinists of the Lalkar publication of the Indian Workers Association who absurdly insist that “revisionism” began with Khrushchev’s reign. For them, “So long as Comrade Stalin was in the leadership of the CPSU and was organising the tireless vigilance that needed to be exercised” “trounc[ing]” “the reactionary Trotskyite and Bukharinite opposition” all was well! (In fact, the CPI(M) still celebrates Stalin’s birthday in Calcutta.) And the Stalinists today prefer not to talk too much about their record in India during the Second World War, not only because it is such an affront to the revolutionary aspirations of the masses but also because they continue to pursue a class-collaborationist alliance with the Indian bourgeoisie.
Instead they seek to hide behind the figure of Stalin as a great war leader who defeated fascist barbarism. Somehow the Stalinist sins in India are to be exonerated on the basis that Stalin saved mankind. To this end, Lalkar’s Harpal Brar turgidly regurgitates all the old Stalinist lies about Tukhachevsky being an agent of Hitler to justify his murder and the purge of the Red Army officer corps in his book Perestroika: The Complete Collapse of Revisionism. In the course of these bloody purges—between 1937 and 1939 (i.e., beginning during the popular front period)—the Red Army lost three of its five Marshals, all eleven of its Deputy Commissars for Defence, 75 of 80 of its members of the Military soviet, all its military district commanders who held that post in June 1937. The naval and air chiefs of staff were killed. Thirteen out of 15 army commanders were shot, 57 out of 85 corps commanders were shot, as were 110 out of the 195 divisional commanders. In the Far Eastern forces, over 80 per cent of the staff were purged. Tukhachevsky had predicted an attack like Operation Barbarossa and he and his comrades had a lively sense of technological innovation. These experienced and talented veterans of the Civil War were replaced by incompetent cronies of Stalin, who abolished the Red Army’s tank units—one of these replacements thought automatic weapons were just for policemen.
Right up to the day of the invasion Stalin was shipping vital raw materials to Germany. Warnings and precise intelligence from [Leopold] Trepper’s Red Orchestra and Richard Sorge in Japan were labelled as “English provocations” and not passed on to the general staff. Stalin forbade the dispersal of the air force (and it was consequently massacred on the ground) and ruled out any effective planning of defence in depth. Even after the invasion had begun, Stalin countermanded orders for the artillery to return fire, and forbade air-raid precautions in cities under attack. The criminal conduct of Stalin and his gang directly led to the loss of two and a half million soldiers in 1941, huge areas of territory (including important industrial plants which Stalin had refused to locate east of the Volga until that summer) and an almost fatal blow being delivered to the workers state.
The Soviet Union survived because despite Stalin the Red Army fought tooth and nail to stop the onslaught. In December 1941 Zhukov’s effective counterattack was wrecked by Stalin’s personal meddling and as late as the summer of 1942 the simple incompetence of Stalin and one of his toadies led to the loss of 200,000 men in the Crimea. It was only with the emergence of a competent layer of generals not liable to listen so much to Stalin that the heroism of the Red Army and Soviet peoples was turned into the liberation of the Soviet homeland and Eastern Europe from the Nazi scourge. Not only did Stalin’s general policies of “socialism in one country” lead to near fatal catastrophe but his particular military contribution was disastrous.
For a Revolutionary Proletarian Solution!
At independence the subcontinent faced the unspeakable horrors of Partition and today it remains one of the most impoverished, oppressed and exploited areas in the world, a veritable prison-house for national minorities, women and lower castes. The communalist slaughters engulfing Partition killed between one and two million Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus (mainly in Punjab and Bengal) and the forced migrations in its aftermath displaced over eleven million. A New York Times correspondent, Robert Trumbull, reported of the Partition: “In India today blood flows oftener than rain falls. I have seen dead by the hundreds and, worst of all, thousands of Indians without eyes, feet or hands. Death by shooting is merciful and uncommon” (quoted in Collins and Lapierre, Freedom at Midnight). Muslim babies were discovered “roasted like piglets on spits” and the 45-mile road from Lahore to Amritsar became such an “open graveyard” that, according to one British officer, “The vultures had become so bloated by their feasts they could no longer fly.” A stationmaster at Amritsar recounted what had initially seemed to be a “phantom train,” one of many rolling into Punjabi stations at the time: “The floor of the compartment before him was a mass of human bodies, throats cut, skulls smashed, bodies eviscerated. Arms, legs, trunks of bodies were strewn along the corridors of compartments.... He turned to look back at the train. As he did, he saw in great white-washed letters on the flank of the last car the [Pakistani] Moslem assassins’ calling card. ‘This train is our Independence gift to [Indian Congress nationalists] Nehru and Patel’” (ibid).
The lessons of the struggle for Indian independence and the social liberation of India’s toiling masses are crucial not only for revolutionaries on the subcontinent but in all those countries where the permanent revolution applies, from South Africa to Iran. A Leninist-Trotskyist party must be built in irreconcilable struggle against every kind of nationalism and popular frontism, counterposing a revolutionary programme for the emancipation and reconstruction of the oppressed nation under the dictatorship of the proletariat. Writing in 1915 of the tasks for Russian revolutionaries Leon Trotsky called for “a revolutionary workers’ government, the conquest of power by the Russian proletariat”:
“But revolution is first and foremost a question of power—not of the state form (constituent assembly, republic, united states) but of the social content of the government. The demands for a constituent assembly and the confiscation of land under present conditions lose all direct revolutionary significance without the readiness of the proletariat to fight for the conquest of power....” (“The Struggle for Power”)
Because the Bolsheviks were committed to such a programme, the Russian Revolution of 1917 produced the first workers state on the planet. The USSR stood then as a beacon for the colonial and semi-colonial masses struggling for their liberation, as well as for the exploited working masses in the imperialist countries. Lenin and Trotsky’s Third International, later to be destroyed by Stalin, sought to bring the lessons of October to the workers of every land.
Today we in the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) fight to forge a revolutionary international which Lenin and Trotsky would recognise as their own. It will be an especially gratifying victory when the workers of the entire Indian subcontinent lead all the oppressed in throwing off the chains of neocolonial enslavement through victorious socialist revolution.
*A December 16th Veterans-Led March In Washington To Stop The Wars In Afghanistan And Iraq -From The "Stop These Wars" Website-All Out In Support Of The Vets
Click on the headline to link to the End These Wars Website.
Markin comment:
On November 11, 2010, Veterans Day, I marched with a contingent of Veterans For Peace in the Boston Veterans Day parade and posted an entry in this space about my take on the event. (See, A Stroll In The Park On Veterans Day- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops From Iraq and Afghanistan!, dated November 11, 2010). As part of that commentary I noted the following:
“Listen, I have been to many marches and demonstrations for democratic, progressive, socialist and communist causes in my long political life. However, of all those events none, by far, has been more satisfying that to march alongside my fellow ex-soldiers who have “switched” over to the other side and are now part of the struggle against war, the hard, hard struggle against the permanent war machine that this imperial system has embarked upon. From as far back as in the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) days I have always felt that ex-soldiers (hell, active soldiers too, if you can get them) have had just a little bit more “street cred” on the war issue than the professors, pacifists and little old ladies in tennis sneakers who have traditionally led the anti-war movements. Maybe those brothers (and in my generation it was mainly only brothers) and now sisters may not quite pose the questions of war and peace the way I do, or the way that I would like them to do, but they are kindred spirits.”
Now comes word (see announcement below) that veterans are leading an action in Washington, D.C. on December 16, 2010 in front of the White House under the rubric of Peace On Earth. There is no question that I, the anti-imperialist committee that I am a member of in Boston, any self-respecting radical or, hell, any self-respecting little old lady in tennis sneakers for that matter, could endorse this thing. If for no other reason that it begs, literally begs, Warmonger-In-Chief Obama (of the double troop escalations in Afghanistan with nobody holding a gun to his head remember) to “do the right thing.”
That said, the sentiment expressed above in that Veterans Day commentary still holds true. So, I , and all I can gather to go with me, will be in Washington on December 16th. too. I will hold my nose in doing so although not my tongue trying to get my fellow vets to change course. In my hand I will hold this slogan-Obama-Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops From Iraq and Afghanistan! And I won’t be begging him about it, no way.
************
WELCOME TO STOP THESE WARS Join Us For Peace on Earth!
Posted on November 19, 2010 by admin
During the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King called our government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” True then—and even more so today.
A few years before that, in 1964 Mario Savio made his great speech at Berkeley; at the end he says, “There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”
There are children being orphaned, maimed or killed every day, in our name, with our tax dollars; there are soldiers and civilians dying or being maimed for life, in order to generate profits for the most odious imperialistic corporate war machine ever, again in our name. How long are we going to let this go on? Until it is too late, until this destructive machine destroys all of us and the planet to boot?
Wikileaks has revealed the documented horror of U.S. war-making, beyond what any of us imagined. It’s time veterans and others express our resistance directly and powerfully by putting ourselves on the line, once again—honestly, courageously and without one drop of apology for doing so. It is not we who are the murderers, torturers or pillagers of the earth.
Profit and power-hungry warmongers are destroying everything we hold dear and sacred.
In the early thirties, WW1 vets descended on Washington, D.C., to demand their promised bonuses, it being the depths of the Depression. General Douglas MacArthur and his sidekick Dwight Eisenhower disregarded President Herbert Hoover’s order and burned their encampment down and drove the vets out of town at bayonet point.
We are today’s bonus marchers, and we’re coming to claim our bonus–PEACE.
Join activist veterans marching in solidarity to the White House, refusing to move, demanding the end of U.S. wars, which includes U.S. support—financial and tactical—for the Israeli war machine as well.
If we can gather enough courageous souls, nonviolently refusing to leave the White House, willing to be dragged away and arrested if necessary, we will send a message that will be seen worldwide. “End these wars – now!” We will carry forward a flame of resistance to the war machine that will not diminish as we effectively begin to place ourselves, as Mario Savio said, “upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus.” and we will make it stop.
We believe that the power of courageous, committed people is greater than that of corporate warmongers. But we will only see our power when we use it collectively, when we stand together.
With courage, persistence, boldness and numbers, we can eventually make this monstrous war machine grind to a halt, so that our children and all children everywhere can grow up in a peaceful world.
Join us at the White House on December 16th!
For a world in peace,
Nic Abramson, Veterans For Peace; Elliott Adams, Past President, Veterans For Peace; Laurie Arbeiter, Activist Response Team; Ken Ashe, Veterans For Peace; Ellen Barfield, Veterans For Peace; Brian Becker, National Coordinator, ANSWER Coalition; Medea Benjamin, Co-Founder, CODEPINK for Peace; Frida Berrigan, War Resisters League; Bruce Berry, Veterans For Peace; Leah Bolger, Veterans For Peace; Elaine Brower, Anti-war Military Mom and World Can’t Wait; Scott Camil, Veterans For Peace; Ross Caputi, Justice For Fallujah Project; Kim Carlyle, Veterans For Peace; Armen Chakerian, Coalition to Stop the $30 Billion to Israel; Matthis Chiroux, Iraq War Resister Veteran; Gerry Condon, Veterans For Peace; Will Covert, Veterans For Peace; Dave Culver, Veterans For Peace; Matt Daloisio, Witness Against Torture; Ellen Davidson, War Resisters League; Mike Ferner, President, Veterans For Peace; Nate Goldshlag, Veterans For Peace; Clare Hanrahan, War Crimes Times; Mike Hearington, Veterans For Peace; Mark Johnson, Executive Director. Fellowship of Reconciliation; Tarak Kauff begin_of_the_skype_highlighting end_of_the_skype_highlighting, Veterans For Peace; Kathy Kelly, Voices For Creative Nonviolence; Sandy Kelson, Veterans For Peace; Joel Kovel, Veterans For Peace; Erik Lobo, Veterans For Peace; Joe Lombardo, United National Antiwar Committee; Ken Mayers, Veterans For Peace; Nancy Munger, Co-President, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom; Fred Nagel, Veterans For Peace; Pat O’Brien, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom; Bill Perry, Vietnam Veterans Against the War; Vito Piccininno, Veterans For Peace; Mike Prysner, Co-Founder, March Forward; Ward Reilly, Veterans For Peace; Laura Roskos, Co-President, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom; Cindy Sheehan, Founder, Peace of the Action; David Swanson, author; Debra Sweet, National Director, World Can’t Wait; Mike Tork, Veterans For Peace; Hart Viges, Iraq Veterans Against the War; Father Louie Vitale, SOA Watch; Jay Wenk, Veterans For Peace; Linda Wiener, Veterans For Peace; Diane Wilson, Veterans For Peace; Col. Ann Wright, Veterans For Peace; Doug Zachary, Veterans For Peace
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Endorsers of the December 16 Veteran-Led Civil Resistance against War
Posted on November 19, 2010 by admin
■Veterans For Peace
■ANSWER
■CodePink
■Fellowship of Reconciliation
■March Forward
■Peace of the Action
■Peace Action Montgomery
■United National Anti-War Committee
■Voices for Creative Non-Violence
■Voters for Peace
■War Resisters League
■Washington Peace Center
■Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom
■World Can’t Wait
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Veterans Speak Out on December 16 Action
Posted on November 13, 2010 by admin
Fred Nagel
“Those who know the full extent of America’s imperial reach have a unique obligation to let their fellow citizens know what is being done in all of our names. But it is more than an obligation for veterans, since many of us have served in America’s invasions and occupations abroad. Perhaps it is also a privilege, another chance to express our love for this country, this time putting their bodies on the line to demand that America once again join the peace loving nations of this world.”—Fred Nagel, radio host and member, Veterans For Peace
Jay Wenk
“I listened today to Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech given at New York’s Riverside Church in 1967, “Why I Oppose the Vietnam War.” If any of us don’t know it, make it a point to hear it. His truth is timeless. When I hear it, I feel as deeply as possible, the necessity and the responsibility to be a Veteran For Peace. My conscience, my refusal to let the world change me are in the forefront of my existence. I will be with my brothers and sisters on Dec. 16.”—Jay Wenk, member, Veterans For Peace
Leah Bolger
“I am shamed by the actions of my government and I will do everything in my power to make it stop killing innocent people in my name.”—Leah Bolger, CDR, USN (Ret), 1980-2000; National Vice-President, Veterans For Peace
“‘….to protect and defend the Constitution…’ I took that oath as a sailor, and later as a police officer. I don’t consider that oath to have an expiration date because I believe in accountability, justice and peace. Where I come from, we say: ‘You don’t have to stand tall, but you’ve GOT to stand up.’ Stand up December 16, 2010, at the White House.”—Erik Lobo, member, Veterans For Peace
“War for empire, endless and cruel war, resulting in untold suffering, destruction and death for millions, a war economy here at home that steals from ordinary citizens and makes the few enormously wealthy, these are powerful reasons for us to put our bodies on the wheels, the levers, the apparatus of this vile war-making machine and demand that it stop. Enough is enough. There is no glory, no heroism, no good wars, no justification whatsoever, it is all, all of it, based on lies. I’ll be in Washington on December 16 with other veterans, resisting this war mentality, demanding its end.—Tarak Kauff, Veterans For Peace
Markin comment:
On November 11, 2010, Veterans Day, I marched with a contingent of Veterans For Peace in the Boston Veterans Day parade and posted an entry in this space about my take on the event. (See, A Stroll In The Park On Veterans Day- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops From Iraq and Afghanistan!, dated November 11, 2010). As part of that commentary I noted the following:
“Listen, I have been to many marches and demonstrations for democratic, progressive, socialist and communist causes in my long political life. However, of all those events none, by far, has been more satisfying that to march alongside my fellow ex-soldiers who have “switched” over to the other side and are now part of the struggle against war, the hard, hard struggle against the permanent war machine that this imperial system has embarked upon. From as far back as in the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) days I have always felt that ex-soldiers (hell, active soldiers too, if you can get them) have had just a little bit more “street cred” on the war issue than the professors, pacifists and little old ladies in tennis sneakers who have traditionally led the anti-war movements. Maybe those brothers (and in my generation it was mainly only brothers) and now sisters may not quite pose the questions of war and peace the way I do, or the way that I would like them to do, but they are kindred spirits.”
Now comes word (see announcement below) that veterans are leading an action in Washington, D.C. on December 16, 2010 in front of the White House under the rubric of Peace On Earth. There is no question that I, the anti-imperialist committee that I am a member of in Boston, any self-respecting radical or, hell, any self-respecting little old lady in tennis sneakers for that matter, could endorse this thing. If for no other reason that it begs, literally begs, Warmonger-In-Chief Obama (of the double troop escalations in Afghanistan with nobody holding a gun to his head remember) to “do the right thing.”
That said, the sentiment expressed above in that Veterans Day commentary still holds true. So, I , and all I can gather to go with me, will be in Washington on December 16th. too. I will hold my nose in doing so although not my tongue trying to get my fellow vets to change course. In my hand I will hold this slogan-Obama-Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops From Iraq and Afghanistan! And I won’t be begging him about it, no way.
************
WELCOME TO STOP THESE WARS Join Us For Peace on Earth!
Posted on November 19, 2010 by admin
During the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King called our government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” True then—and even more so today.
A few years before that, in 1964 Mario Savio made his great speech at Berkeley; at the end he says, “There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”
There are children being orphaned, maimed or killed every day, in our name, with our tax dollars; there are soldiers and civilians dying or being maimed for life, in order to generate profits for the most odious imperialistic corporate war machine ever, again in our name. How long are we going to let this go on? Until it is too late, until this destructive machine destroys all of us and the planet to boot?
Wikileaks has revealed the documented horror of U.S. war-making, beyond what any of us imagined. It’s time veterans and others express our resistance directly and powerfully by putting ourselves on the line, once again—honestly, courageously and without one drop of apology for doing so. It is not we who are the murderers, torturers or pillagers of the earth.
Profit and power-hungry warmongers are destroying everything we hold dear and sacred.
In the early thirties, WW1 vets descended on Washington, D.C., to demand their promised bonuses, it being the depths of the Depression. General Douglas MacArthur and his sidekick Dwight Eisenhower disregarded President Herbert Hoover’s order and burned their encampment down and drove the vets out of town at bayonet point.
We are today’s bonus marchers, and we’re coming to claim our bonus–PEACE.
Join activist veterans marching in solidarity to the White House, refusing to move, demanding the end of U.S. wars, which includes U.S. support—financial and tactical—for the Israeli war machine as well.
If we can gather enough courageous souls, nonviolently refusing to leave the White House, willing to be dragged away and arrested if necessary, we will send a message that will be seen worldwide. “End these wars – now!” We will carry forward a flame of resistance to the war machine that will not diminish as we effectively begin to place ourselves, as Mario Savio said, “upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus.” and we will make it stop.
We believe that the power of courageous, committed people is greater than that of corporate warmongers. But we will only see our power when we use it collectively, when we stand together.
With courage, persistence, boldness and numbers, we can eventually make this monstrous war machine grind to a halt, so that our children and all children everywhere can grow up in a peaceful world.
Join us at the White House on December 16th!
For a world in peace,
Nic Abramson, Veterans For Peace; Elliott Adams, Past President, Veterans For Peace; Laurie Arbeiter, Activist Response Team; Ken Ashe, Veterans For Peace; Ellen Barfield, Veterans For Peace; Brian Becker, National Coordinator, ANSWER Coalition; Medea Benjamin, Co-Founder, CODEPINK for Peace; Frida Berrigan, War Resisters League; Bruce Berry, Veterans For Peace; Leah Bolger, Veterans For Peace; Elaine Brower, Anti-war Military Mom and World Can’t Wait; Scott Camil, Veterans For Peace; Ross Caputi, Justice For Fallujah Project; Kim Carlyle, Veterans For Peace; Armen Chakerian, Coalition to Stop the $30 Billion to Israel; Matthis Chiroux, Iraq War Resister Veteran; Gerry Condon, Veterans For Peace; Will Covert, Veterans For Peace; Dave Culver, Veterans For Peace; Matt Daloisio, Witness Against Torture; Ellen Davidson, War Resisters League; Mike Ferner, President, Veterans For Peace; Nate Goldshlag, Veterans For Peace; Clare Hanrahan, War Crimes Times; Mike Hearington, Veterans For Peace; Mark Johnson, Executive Director. Fellowship of Reconciliation; Tarak Kauff begin_of_the_skype_highlighting end_of_the_skype_highlighting, Veterans For Peace; Kathy Kelly, Voices For Creative Nonviolence; Sandy Kelson, Veterans For Peace; Joel Kovel, Veterans For Peace; Erik Lobo, Veterans For Peace; Joe Lombardo, United National Antiwar Committee; Ken Mayers, Veterans For Peace; Nancy Munger, Co-President, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom; Fred Nagel, Veterans For Peace; Pat O’Brien, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom; Bill Perry, Vietnam Veterans Against the War; Vito Piccininno, Veterans For Peace; Mike Prysner, Co-Founder, March Forward; Ward Reilly, Veterans For Peace; Laura Roskos, Co-President, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom; Cindy Sheehan, Founder, Peace of the Action; David Swanson, author; Debra Sweet, National Director, World Can’t Wait; Mike Tork, Veterans For Peace; Hart Viges, Iraq Veterans Against the War; Father Louie Vitale, SOA Watch; Jay Wenk, Veterans For Peace; Linda Wiener, Veterans For Peace; Diane Wilson, Veterans For Peace; Col. Ann Wright, Veterans For Peace; Doug Zachary, Veterans For Peace
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Endorsers of the December 16 Veteran-Led Civil Resistance against War
Posted on November 19, 2010 by admin
■Veterans For Peace
■ANSWER
■CodePink
■Fellowship of Reconciliation
■March Forward
■Peace of the Action
■Peace Action Montgomery
■United National Anti-War Committee
■Voices for Creative Non-Violence
■Voters for Peace
■War Resisters League
■Washington Peace Center
■Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom
■World Can’t Wait
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Veterans Speak Out on December 16 Action
Posted on November 13, 2010 by admin
Fred Nagel
“Those who know the full extent of America’s imperial reach have a unique obligation to let their fellow citizens know what is being done in all of our names. But it is more than an obligation for veterans, since many of us have served in America’s invasions and occupations abroad. Perhaps it is also a privilege, another chance to express our love for this country, this time putting their bodies on the line to demand that America once again join the peace loving nations of this world.”—Fred Nagel, radio host and member, Veterans For Peace
Jay Wenk
“I listened today to Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech given at New York’s Riverside Church in 1967, “Why I Oppose the Vietnam War.” If any of us don’t know it, make it a point to hear it. His truth is timeless. When I hear it, I feel as deeply as possible, the necessity and the responsibility to be a Veteran For Peace. My conscience, my refusal to let the world change me are in the forefront of my existence. I will be with my brothers and sisters on Dec. 16.”—Jay Wenk, member, Veterans For Peace
Leah Bolger
“I am shamed by the actions of my government and I will do everything in my power to make it stop killing innocent people in my name.”—Leah Bolger, CDR, USN (Ret), 1980-2000; National Vice-President, Veterans For Peace
“‘….to protect and defend the Constitution…’ I took that oath as a sailor, and later as a police officer. I don’t consider that oath to have an expiration date because I believe in accountability, justice and peace. Where I come from, we say: ‘You don’t have to stand tall, but you’ve GOT to stand up.’ Stand up December 16, 2010, at the White House.”—Erik Lobo, member, Veterans For Peace
“War for empire, endless and cruel war, resulting in untold suffering, destruction and death for millions, a war economy here at home that steals from ordinary citizens and makes the few enormously wealthy, these are powerful reasons for us to put our bodies on the wheels, the levers, the apparatus of this vile war-making machine and demand that it stop. Enough is enough. There is no glory, no heroism, no good wars, no justification whatsoever, it is all, all of it, based on lies. I’ll be in Washington on December 16 with other veterans, resisting this war mentality, demanding its end.—Tarak Kauff, Veterans For Peace
*Not Ready For Prime Time Class Struggle- “What We Have Here Is A Failure To Communicate”- “Cool Hand Luke”- A Film Review
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the famous "failure to communicate" scene from Cool Hand Luke.
DVD Review
Cool Hand Luke, starring Paul Newman, George Kennedy, Strother Martin, 1967I hope, even when we have a much more equitable society than we do now, we still have “free spirits” like Cool Hand Luke (played, and played well with just enough 1960s sneer and ‘devil take the hinter post’ bravado by the late Paul Newman). No, not the hard- scrabble, mad mother-loved, growing up kid part, not the wise, too wise, before his age part that made him cynical, not the world-weary and world- wary before his time part but the crafty, fidgety, authority can go to hell part. That is a trait, as this film makes abundantly clear, no well-valued in current bourgeois society interested as it in the well-oiled machine, and a sullen by-the-numbers mass of humanity.
Of course, as the story line here unfolds, “free spirit”-types take more than their share of beatings in life, and no where is that more true than in a prison. And given old Luke’s brand of free spirit (and edginess) he was bound to wind up in prison, sooner or later, no matter how “street smart” he was, or brave in military service. However, nothing in his resume would make one think that even in prison, a notorious Southern work camp prison to boot, that old Luke would knuckle under. Something has to give. Throw in a sadistic warden (played by Strother Martin of the famous line used in the headline to this entry), some love/hate camaraderie with fellow inmates, especially “big lug” Oscar-winner George Kennedy and you have a volatile mix. Old Luke will keep running that rock up the mountain but you know in your bones, deep in your bones, that rock is coming back down one more time than it is going up. And right over him. Yet Luke still keeps doing it. Here’s one tip of the hat for the “free spirits” though.
DVD Review
Cool Hand Luke, starring Paul Newman, George Kennedy, Strother Martin, 1967I hope, even when we have a much more equitable society than we do now, we still have “free spirits” like Cool Hand Luke (played, and played well with just enough 1960s sneer and ‘devil take the hinter post’ bravado by the late Paul Newman). No, not the hard- scrabble, mad mother-loved, growing up kid part, not the wise, too wise, before his age part that made him cynical, not the world-weary and world- wary before his time part but the crafty, fidgety, authority can go to hell part. That is a trait, as this film makes abundantly clear, no well-valued in current bourgeois society interested as it in the well-oiled machine, and a sullen by-the-numbers mass of humanity.
Of course, as the story line here unfolds, “free spirit”-types take more than their share of beatings in life, and no where is that more true than in a prison. And given old Luke’s brand of free spirit (and edginess) he was bound to wind up in prison, sooner or later, no matter how “street smart” he was, or brave in military service. However, nothing in his resume would make one think that even in prison, a notorious Southern work camp prison to boot, that old Luke would knuckle under. Something has to give. Throw in a sadistic warden (played by Strother Martin of the famous line used in the headline to this entry), some love/hate camaraderie with fellow inmates, especially “big lug” Oscar-winner George Kennedy and you have a volatile mix. Old Luke will keep running that rock up the mountain but you know in your bones, deep in your bones, that rock is coming back down one more time than it is going up. And right over him. Yet Luke still keeps doing it. Here’s one tip of the hat for the “free spirits” though.
Sunday, December 12, 2010
*From The Partisan Defense Committee- The 25th Holiday Appeal In Support Of Class-War Prisoners
Markin comment:
December 2, 2010
I like to think of myself as a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the working class and, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program. Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year, however, in light of the addition of Attorney Lynne Stewart (yes, I know, she has been disbarred but that does not make her less of a people’s attorney in my eyes) to the stipend program, I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class struggle defense in the late 1960s (although I may have not used that exact term at the time).
That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson, present class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers, as represented here by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their better days and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today; the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.
That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.
And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly.
**********
Workers Vanguard No. 969
19 November 2010
Free the Class-War Prisoners!
25th Annual PDC Holiday Appeal
(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)
“The mills of capitalist justice grind out victims for the penitentiary....
“In one sense of the word the whole of capitalist society is a prison. For the great mass of people who do the hard, useful work there is no such word as freedom. They come and go at the order of a few. Their lives are regulated according to the needs and wishes of a few. A censorship is put upon their words and deeds. The fruits of their labor are taken from them. And if, by chance, they have the instinct and spirit to rebel, if they take their place in the vanguard of the fight for justice, the prisons are waiting.”
—James P. Cannon, “The Cause that Passes Through a Prison” (Labor Defender, September 1926)
Following in the tradition of Cannon’s International Labor Defense (ILD), the Partisan Defense Committee honors the class-war prisoners—those brave men and women railroaded to prison for standing up to racist capitalist oppression—irrespective of their particular political views or affiliation. Twenty-five years ago, the PDC revived the ILD program of providing monthly stipends to class-war prisoners and additional funds for their birthdays as well as holiday gifts for them and their families. We raise money for this unique and necessary program during the holiday season. Fund-raising efforts will include benefits in Chicago on December 18, New York City on January 21 and Toronto on January 28.
The $25 monthly stipends help ease a little bit the horrors of “life” in capitalist dungeons. More importantly, they are a necessary expression of solidarity with these prisoners—a message that they are not forgotten. In letters to the PDC before last year’s Holiday Appeal, the prisoners gave a glimpse of what the program means to them:
Hugo Pinell: “Your care and solidarity has provided me with extra strength and drive to keep on pushing and evolving and i hope that my company has served you well. I am with you, in life and struggle.”
Janine Africa: “I want to thank everybody for yalls support all of these years. I’m not just talking about the holiday donations, I’m talking about the work yall do for the release of political prisoners from prison.”
Jaan Laaman: “This solidarity and support is important and necessary for us political prisoners, especially as the years and decades of our captivity grind on.... Being in captivity is certainly harsh, and this includes the sufferings of our children and families and friends. But prison walls and sentences do not and can not stop struggle.”
Tom Manning, Laaman’s Ohio 7 comrade: “Just so you know, it [the stipend] goes for bags of mackerel and jars of peanut butter, to supplement my protein needs.”
The struggle to free all class-war prisoners is critical to educating a new generation of fighters for the oppressed. This is given added meaning as we build for this Holiday Appeal. Persecution of those imprisoned for their political views and actions has not only continued unabated, but Obama and his top cop, Attorney General Eric Holder, are making reservations for many more to join them. The Obama administration has launched an ominous escalation of state repression, accelerating the repressive measures adopted during the Clinton/Bush years that will be wielded against those who propelled him to office—labor, blacks, immigrants and leftist youth.
Mumia Abu-Jamal, whose case will again be a focus of the Holiday Appeal, is threatened with the reinstitution of the death sentence (see article, page 12). Seventy-one-year-old leftist lawyer Lynne Stewart has been resentenced to ten years in prison for the “crime” of representing her client. The PDC has added Stewart to the stipend recipients. In Chicago and Minneapolis, the FBI recently raided the homes of leftists, antiwar activists and unionists under the rubric of the “war on terrorism.” Among those targeted were members of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization and others, who have run afoul of Washington for their open support to leftist rebels in Colombia opposed to the U.S. puppet regime, the secular-nationalist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Iranian-backed Lebanese Hezbollah.
In February, Obama signed into law yet another extension of the USA Patriot Act with its provisions of indefinite detention, expansion of secret FBI searches of homes and offices and elimination of formal restrictions on domestic spying, wiretapping and Internet surveillance. The message to all who would fight against the ravages of the capitalist economic crisis, war and racist repression: This is what’s in store for you if you step out of line.
The PDC initiated the stipend program at the height of the reactionary Reagan years, defining features of which included the destruction of the PATCO air traffic controllers union, the bombing of the Philadelphia MOVE commune and efforts to classify leftists and union militants as terrorists and criminals. It was an important component of fighting efforts to criminalize leftist political dissent—and it remains so today, as the “war on terror” has given the government repressive powers that Reagan could only dream of.
We have provided stipends to over 30 prisoners, including eight union militants, on three continents. Many of these prisoners, largely victims of the racist rulers’ war against militant black activists, have been there from nearly the beginning of our stipends program. The government has repeatedly demonstrated its determination to make sure they die behind bars from old age or medical neglect—or in the case of Mumia, by legal lynching. In fighting for their freedom, we are dedicated to searing the injustice of these cases into the consciousness of the working masses—today and for generations to come. Regular features of the Holiday Appeal are presentations by PDC representatives to union locals in cities across the country. As Cannon noted, “The victory of the class-war prisoners is possible only when they are inseparably united with the living labor movement.” An injury to one is an injury to all!
The 17 class-war prisoners described below receive monthly stipends from the PDC.
Mumia Abu-Jamal is a former Black Panther Party spokesman, a well-known supporter of the MOVE organization and an award-winning journalist known as “the voice of the voiceless.” This past January, the U.S. Supreme Court took a big step toward the legal lynching of this innocent man. The Court vacated a March 2008 decision of the federal Third Circuit Court of Appeals that had upheld a 2001 decision by federal district court judge William Yohn overturning Mumia’s death sentence. The high court in essence gave marching orders to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals to reinstate the death penalty. A hearing was held in Philadelphia on November 9.
This December marks the 29th anniversary of Mumia’s arrest for a killing that the cops know he did not commit. Mumia was framed up for the 1981 killing of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner and sentenced to death explicitly for his political views. Mountains of evidence proving Mumia’s innocence, including the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed Faulkner, have been submitted to the courts. But to the racists in black robes, a court of law is no place for evidence of the innocence of this fighter for the oppressed.
While others plead with President Obama and his attorney general to “investigate” violations of Mumia’s “civil rights,” the PDC says that Mumia’s fate cannot be left in the hands of the government of the capitalists. The racist rulers hate Mumia because they see in him the spectre of black revolt. The stakes are high and the situation is grim, but any real fight for Mumia’s freedom must be based on a class-struggle opposition to the capitalist rulers, who have entombed this innocent black man for more than half his life.
Leonard Peltier is an internationally renowned class-war prisoner. Peltier’s incarceration for his activism in the American Indian Movement has come to symbolize this country’s racist repression of its native peoples, the survivors of centuries of genocidal oppression. Peltier’s frame-up trial, for the 1975 deaths of two marauding FBI agents in what had become a war zone on the South Dakota Pine Ridge Reservation, shows what capitalist “justice” is all about. Although the lead government attorney has admitted, “We can’t prove who shot those agents,” and the courts have acknowledged blatant prosecutorial misconduct, the 66-year-old Peltier is still locked away. Last year, the U.S. Parole Commission again turned down Peltier’s parole request and shockingly declared they would not reconsider his case for another 15 years.
Eight MOVE members—Chuck Africa, Michael Africa, Debbie Africa, Janet Africa, Janine Africa, Delbert Africa, Eddie Africa and Phil Africa—are in their 33rd year of prison. They were sentenced to 30-100 years after the 8 August 1978 siege of their Philadelphia home by over 600 heavily armed cops, having been falsely convicted of killing a police officer who died in the cops’ own cross fire. In 1985, eleven of their MOVE family members, including five children, were massacred by Philly cops. This year, again, after more than three decades of unjust incarceration, nearly all of these innocent prisoners had parole hearings, but none were released.
Lynne Stewart is a radical lawyer incarcerated for zealously defending her client, a blind Egyptian cleric imprisoned for an alleged plot to blow up New York City landmarks in the early 1990s. On July 15 she was resentenced to ten years—more than quadrupling her original sentence—in a loud affirmation by the Obama administration that there will be no let-up in the massive attack on democratic rights under the “war on terror.” Stewart, now 71 years old and suffering from breast cancer, is known for her defense of Black Panthers, radical leftists and others reviled by the capitalist state.
Jaan Laaman and Thomas Manning are the two remaining anti-imperialist activists known as the Ohio 7 still in prison, convicted for their roles in a radical group that took credit for bank “expropriations” and bombings of symbols of U.S. imperialism, such as military and corporate offices, in the late 1970s and ’80s. Before their arrests in 1984 and 1985, the Ohio 7 were targets of massive manhunts. Their children were kidnapped at gunpoint by the Feds.
The Ohio 7’s politics were once shared by thousands of radicals during the Vietnam antiwar movement and by New Leftists who wrote off the possibility of winning the working class to a revolutionary program and saw themselves as an auxiliary of Third World liberation movements. But, like the Weathermen before them, the Ohio 7 were spurned by the “respectable” left. From a proletarian standpoint, the actions of these leftist activists against imperialism and racist injustice are not crimes. They should not have served a day in prison.
Ed Poindexter and Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa are former Black Panther supporters and leaders of the Omaha, Nebraska, National Committee to Combat Fascism. They were victims of the FBI’s deadly COINTELPRO operation under which 38 Black Panther Party members were killed and hundreds more imprisoned on frame-up charges. Poindexter and Mondo were railroaded to prison and sentenced to life for a 1970 explosion that killed a cop, and they have now served more than 40 years in jail. Nebraska courts have repeatedly denied Poindexter and Mondo new trials despite the fact that a crucial piece of evidence excluded from the original trial, a 911 audiotape long-suppressed by the FBI, proved that testimony of the state’s key witness was perjured.
Hugo Pinell is the last of the San Quentin 6 still in prison. He was a militant anti-racist leader of prison rights organizing along with George Jackson, his comrade and mentor, who was gunned down by prison guards in 1971. Despite numerous letters of support and no disciplinary write-ups for over 28 years, Pinell was again denied parole last year. Now in his 60s, Pinell continues to serve a life sentence at the notorious Pelican Bay Security Housing Unit in California.
Jamal Hart, Mumia’s son, was sentenced in 1998 to 151/2 years without parole on bogus firearms possession charges. Hart was targeted for his prominent activism in the campaign to free his father. Although Hart was initially charged under Pennsylvania law, which would have meant a probationary sentence, Clinton’s Justice Department intervened to have Hart thrown into prison under federal law. The U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals has turned down Hart’s habeas corpus petition, and he has faced myriad bureaucratic obstacles and racist targeting throughout his incarceration.
Contribute now! All proceeds from the Holiday Appeals will go to the Class-War Prisoners Stipend Fund. This is not charity but an elementary act of solidarity with those imprisoned for their opposition to racist capitalism and imperialist depredations. Send your contributions to: PDC, P.O. Box 99, Canal Street Station, New York, NY 10013; (212) 406-4252.
December 2, 2010
I like to think of myself as a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the working class and, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program. Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year, however, in light of the addition of Attorney Lynne Stewart (yes, I know, she has been disbarred but that does not make her less of a people’s attorney in my eyes) to the stipend program, I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class struggle defense in the late 1960s (although I may have not used that exact term at the time).
That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson, present class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers, as represented here by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their better days and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today; the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.
That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.
And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly.
**********
Workers Vanguard No. 969
19 November 2010
Free the Class-War Prisoners!
25th Annual PDC Holiday Appeal
(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)
“The mills of capitalist justice grind out victims for the penitentiary....
“In one sense of the word the whole of capitalist society is a prison. For the great mass of people who do the hard, useful work there is no such word as freedom. They come and go at the order of a few. Their lives are regulated according to the needs and wishes of a few. A censorship is put upon their words and deeds. The fruits of their labor are taken from them. And if, by chance, they have the instinct and spirit to rebel, if they take their place in the vanguard of the fight for justice, the prisons are waiting.”
—James P. Cannon, “The Cause that Passes Through a Prison” (Labor Defender, September 1926)
Following in the tradition of Cannon’s International Labor Defense (ILD), the Partisan Defense Committee honors the class-war prisoners—those brave men and women railroaded to prison for standing up to racist capitalist oppression—irrespective of their particular political views or affiliation. Twenty-five years ago, the PDC revived the ILD program of providing monthly stipends to class-war prisoners and additional funds for their birthdays as well as holiday gifts for them and their families. We raise money for this unique and necessary program during the holiday season. Fund-raising efforts will include benefits in Chicago on December 18, New York City on January 21 and Toronto on January 28.
The $25 monthly stipends help ease a little bit the horrors of “life” in capitalist dungeons. More importantly, they are a necessary expression of solidarity with these prisoners—a message that they are not forgotten. In letters to the PDC before last year’s Holiday Appeal, the prisoners gave a glimpse of what the program means to them:
Hugo Pinell: “Your care and solidarity has provided me with extra strength and drive to keep on pushing and evolving and i hope that my company has served you well. I am with you, in life and struggle.”
Janine Africa: “I want to thank everybody for yalls support all of these years. I’m not just talking about the holiday donations, I’m talking about the work yall do for the release of political prisoners from prison.”
Jaan Laaman: “This solidarity and support is important and necessary for us political prisoners, especially as the years and decades of our captivity grind on.... Being in captivity is certainly harsh, and this includes the sufferings of our children and families and friends. But prison walls and sentences do not and can not stop struggle.”
Tom Manning, Laaman’s Ohio 7 comrade: “Just so you know, it [the stipend] goes for bags of mackerel and jars of peanut butter, to supplement my protein needs.”
The struggle to free all class-war prisoners is critical to educating a new generation of fighters for the oppressed. This is given added meaning as we build for this Holiday Appeal. Persecution of those imprisoned for their political views and actions has not only continued unabated, but Obama and his top cop, Attorney General Eric Holder, are making reservations for many more to join them. The Obama administration has launched an ominous escalation of state repression, accelerating the repressive measures adopted during the Clinton/Bush years that will be wielded against those who propelled him to office—labor, blacks, immigrants and leftist youth.
Mumia Abu-Jamal, whose case will again be a focus of the Holiday Appeal, is threatened with the reinstitution of the death sentence (see article, page 12). Seventy-one-year-old leftist lawyer Lynne Stewart has been resentenced to ten years in prison for the “crime” of representing her client. The PDC has added Stewart to the stipend recipients. In Chicago and Minneapolis, the FBI recently raided the homes of leftists, antiwar activists and unionists under the rubric of the “war on terrorism.” Among those targeted were members of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization and others, who have run afoul of Washington for their open support to leftist rebels in Colombia opposed to the U.S. puppet regime, the secular-nationalist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Iranian-backed Lebanese Hezbollah.
In February, Obama signed into law yet another extension of the USA Patriot Act with its provisions of indefinite detention, expansion of secret FBI searches of homes and offices and elimination of formal restrictions on domestic spying, wiretapping and Internet surveillance. The message to all who would fight against the ravages of the capitalist economic crisis, war and racist repression: This is what’s in store for you if you step out of line.
The PDC initiated the stipend program at the height of the reactionary Reagan years, defining features of which included the destruction of the PATCO air traffic controllers union, the bombing of the Philadelphia MOVE commune and efforts to classify leftists and union militants as terrorists and criminals. It was an important component of fighting efforts to criminalize leftist political dissent—and it remains so today, as the “war on terror” has given the government repressive powers that Reagan could only dream of.
We have provided stipends to over 30 prisoners, including eight union militants, on three continents. Many of these prisoners, largely victims of the racist rulers’ war against militant black activists, have been there from nearly the beginning of our stipends program. The government has repeatedly demonstrated its determination to make sure they die behind bars from old age or medical neglect—or in the case of Mumia, by legal lynching. In fighting for their freedom, we are dedicated to searing the injustice of these cases into the consciousness of the working masses—today and for generations to come. Regular features of the Holiday Appeal are presentations by PDC representatives to union locals in cities across the country. As Cannon noted, “The victory of the class-war prisoners is possible only when they are inseparably united with the living labor movement.” An injury to one is an injury to all!
The 17 class-war prisoners described below receive monthly stipends from the PDC.
Mumia Abu-Jamal is a former Black Panther Party spokesman, a well-known supporter of the MOVE organization and an award-winning journalist known as “the voice of the voiceless.” This past January, the U.S. Supreme Court took a big step toward the legal lynching of this innocent man. The Court vacated a March 2008 decision of the federal Third Circuit Court of Appeals that had upheld a 2001 decision by federal district court judge William Yohn overturning Mumia’s death sentence. The high court in essence gave marching orders to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals to reinstate the death penalty. A hearing was held in Philadelphia on November 9.
This December marks the 29th anniversary of Mumia’s arrest for a killing that the cops know he did not commit. Mumia was framed up for the 1981 killing of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner and sentenced to death explicitly for his political views. Mountains of evidence proving Mumia’s innocence, including the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed Faulkner, have been submitted to the courts. But to the racists in black robes, a court of law is no place for evidence of the innocence of this fighter for the oppressed.
While others plead with President Obama and his attorney general to “investigate” violations of Mumia’s “civil rights,” the PDC says that Mumia’s fate cannot be left in the hands of the government of the capitalists. The racist rulers hate Mumia because they see in him the spectre of black revolt. The stakes are high and the situation is grim, but any real fight for Mumia’s freedom must be based on a class-struggle opposition to the capitalist rulers, who have entombed this innocent black man for more than half his life.
Leonard Peltier is an internationally renowned class-war prisoner. Peltier’s incarceration for his activism in the American Indian Movement has come to symbolize this country’s racist repression of its native peoples, the survivors of centuries of genocidal oppression. Peltier’s frame-up trial, for the 1975 deaths of two marauding FBI agents in what had become a war zone on the South Dakota Pine Ridge Reservation, shows what capitalist “justice” is all about. Although the lead government attorney has admitted, “We can’t prove who shot those agents,” and the courts have acknowledged blatant prosecutorial misconduct, the 66-year-old Peltier is still locked away. Last year, the U.S. Parole Commission again turned down Peltier’s parole request and shockingly declared they would not reconsider his case for another 15 years.
Eight MOVE members—Chuck Africa, Michael Africa, Debbie Africa, Janet Africa, Janine Africa, Delbert Africa, Eddie Africa and Phil Africa—are in their 33rd year of prison. They were sentenced to 30-100 years after the 8 August 1978 siege of their Philadelphia home by over 600 heavily armed cops, having been falsely convicted of killing a police officer who died in the cops’ own cross fire. In 1985, eleven of their MOVE family members, including five children, were massacred by Philly cops. This year, again, after more than three decades of unjust incarceration, nearly all of these innocent prisoners had parole hearings, but none were released.
Lynne Stewart is a radical lawyer incarcerated for zealously defending her client, a blind Egyptian cleric imprisoned for an alleged plot to blow up New York City landmarks in the early 1990s. On July 15 she was resentenced to ten years—more than quadrupling her original sentence—in a loud affirmation by the Obama administration that there will be no let-up in the massive attack on democratic rights under the “war on terror.” Stewart, now 71 years old and suffering from breast cancer, is known for her defense of Black Panthers, radical leftists and others reviled by the capitalist state.
Jaan Laaman and Thomas Manning are the two remaining anti-imperialist activists known as the Ohio 7 still in prison, convicted for their roles in a radical group that took credit for bank “expropriations” and bombings of symbols of U.S. imperialism, such as military and corporate offices, in the late 1970s and ’80s. Before their arrests in 1984 and 1985, the Ohio 7 were targets of massive manhunts. Their children were kidnapped at gunpoint by the Feds.
The Ohio 7’s politics were once shared by thousands of radicals during the Vietnam antiwar movement and by New Leftists who wrote off the possibility of winning the working class to a revolutionary program and saw themselves as an auxiliary of Third World liberation movements. But, like the Weathermen before them, the Ohio 7 were spurned by the “respectable” left. From a proletarian standpoint, the actions of these leftist activists against imperialism and racist injustice are not crimes. They should not have served a day in prison.
Ed Poindexter and Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa are former Black Panther supporters and leaders of the Omaha, Nebraska, National Committee to Combat Fascism. They were victims of the FBI’s deadly COINTELPRO operation under which 38 Black Panther Party members were killed and hundreds more imprisoned on frame-up charges. Poindexter and Mondo were railroaded to prison and sentenced to life for a 1970 explosion that killed a cop, and they have now served more than 40 years in jail. Nebraska courts have repeatedly denied Poindexter and Mondo new trials despite the fact that a crucial piece of evidence excluded from the original trial, a 911 audiotape long-suppressed by the FBI, proved that testimony of the state’s key witness was perjured.
Hugo Pinell is the last of the San Quentin 6 still in prison. He was a militant anti-racist leader of prison rights organizing along with George Jackson, his comrade and mentor, who was gunned down by prison guards in 1971. Despite numerous letters of support and no disciplinary write-ups for over 28 years, Pinell was again denied parole last year. Now in his 60s, Pinell continues to serve a life sentence at the notorious Pelican Bay Security Housing Unit in California.
Jamal Hart, Mumia’s son, was sentenced in 1998 to 151/2 years without parole on bogus firearms possession charges. Hart was targeted for his prominent activism in the campaign to free his father. Although Hart was initially charged under Pennsylvania law, which would have meant a probationary sentence, Clinton’s Justice Department intervened to have Hart thrown into prison under federal law. The U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals has turned down Hart’s habeas corpus petition, and he has faced myriad bureaucratic obstacles and racist targeting throughout his incarceration.
Contribute now! All proceeds from the Holiday Appeals will go to the Class-War Prisoners Stipend Fund. This is not charity but an elementary act of solidarity with those imprisoned for their opposition to racist capitalism and imperialist depredations. Send your contributions to: PDC, P.O. Box 99, Canal Street Station, New York, NY 10013; (212) 406-4252.
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