The blue afterwards:Mourning for Marilyn, Parts 1-3, By Felix Shafer / The Rag Blog / January 13, 2011- Honor Marilyn Buck-Honor All Class-War Prisoners-Past And Present

The blue afterwards:Mourning for Marilyn

By Felix Shafer / The Rag Blog / January 13, 2011

First of three parts

[On December 13, Marilyn Buck, U.S. anti-imperialist political prisoner, acclaimed poet, former Austinite, and former original Ragstaffer, would have been 63 years of age. Scheduled for parole last August after nearly 30 years in federal prisons, Marilyn planned to live and work in New York. She looked forward to trying her hand at photography again, taking salsa lessons, and simply being able to walk in the park and visit freely with friends.

Instead, after 20 days of freedom, Marilyn died of a virulent cancer.

Her death was a great blow to her friends and supporters, to fellow poets around the world, and to the many women she mentored while a prisoner, teaching literacy, solidarity, and survival skills without condescension or pride. In Oakland and New York and Dallas, hundreds gathered to mourn her and to celebrate her life. As a poet of oppression, as a friend, and in fortitude and selflessness, she had no peer.

Yet the acts of violence for which she was sent to prison cloud Marilyn Buck’s revolutionary legacy. Was she a mixed-up kid who had good intentions but fell in with the wrong crowd? Was she a cold-blooded terrorist? Will she be remembered only for her remarkable empathy with the oppressed? Or will she come to be seen as a revolutionary icon worthy of respect for her mind as well as her heart?

Here, a long-time friend and artistic collaborator sets out to mourn Marilyn in a manner appropriate to her life, placing her in the context of her times and showing how she rose above the crowd.

This is the first of three parts.

-- Mariann G. Wizard / The Rag Blog]


You've gone past us now.

beloved comrade:
north american revolutionary
and political prisoner
My sister and friend of these 40 years,
it's over
Marilyn Buck gone
through the wire
out into the last whirlwind.

With time's increasing distance from her moment of death on the afternoon of August 3, 2010, at home in Brooklyn, New York, the more that I have felt impelled to write a cohesive essay about Marilyn, the less possible such a project has become. She died at 62 years of age, surrounded by people who loved and still love her truly. She died just 20 days after being released from Carswell federal prison in Texas. Marilyn lived nearly 30 years behind bars. It was the determined effort of Soffiyah Elijah, her attorney and close friend of more than a quarter century that got her out of that prison system at all.

Her loss leaves a wound that insists she must be more than a memory and still so much more than a name circulating in the bluest afterwards. If writing is one way of holding on to Marilyn, it also ramifies a crazed loneliness. Shadows lie down in unsayable places. I'm a minor player in the story who wants to be scribbling side by side with her in a cafe or perched together overlooking the Hudson from a side road along the Palisades.

This work of mourning is fragmentary, impossible, subjective, politically unofficial, lovingly biased, flush with anxieties over (mis)representation, hopefully evocative of some of the "multitude" of Marilyns contained within her soul, strange and curiously punctuated by shifts into reverie and poetic time.

It's my hope that others, who also take her life and death personally, will publish rivers of articles, reminiscences, essays, tributes, poems, in print and online. May the painters paint, the ceramicists shape clay, and the doers do works and with her spirit!

Will someone come to write a book-length biography, one capable of fairly transmitting Marilyn Buck's many sided significance: her character, political commitments, creative accomplishment, and all-too-human failings, to people who never knew about her life? Is such a work possible about someone who lived nearly 30 years behind bars?

Shift: From the back pews of reverie a tinny reel-to-reel replays my voice in 1975 chanting the words of the legendary early 20th century labor organizer and member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Joe Hill: "Don't mourn, Organize!" But right now, across the cemetery of dogmas, I have neither strength nor militant nostalgia for any such renunciation of mourning. Others may, but I cannot exhort myself or anyone else to refuse the dolorous walk.

Her precise twang shreds the air: cautioning against overindulgence, saying, Felix, brother, you better chill. I know you're sentimental just don't you dare go too far. It's true. I'm from schmaltzy Brooklyn and she's straight out of the lanky plains of west Texas. (As her friends say: "the Buck started here.")

Parts of this piece are written with a 1960s-1970s vocab and it's more my own writerly failing than anything else, because for sure she's not a relic of the bygone at all. If I write that she was amazing would it be better to say awesome?

Marilyn was a writer, a dialectical materialist, a freedom fighter, yoga teacher and Buddhist meditator, who did not suffer fools gladly. She was modest and graceful. Behind the wall she was a teacher and a mentor to young women new to being locked up. Decade after decade in the drab visiting rooms of MCC-NY, DC Jail, Marianna Florida, Dublin-Pleasanton California, dressed first in her own clothes -- then later in mandatory uniform khaki -- she emanated dignified Marilynness: that unforgettable, natural style.

Nowadays, when things go inexplicably lost in the house or pictures fall from the walls of her studio my partner Miranda (who was Marilyn's commune roommate in 1969-1970) says... oh that's Marbu moving stuff around again... One night in late September, I dreamed that a note was slipped under our front door. It read:

Dear anguish, you know an end is not the end it’s never only an end at all
When I woke up I wrote: Keywords: woman, sister, freedom lover, contra racismo y sexismo, yogi, theorist from internal exile, poet, collective worker, student, madrina, artist, reader/writer, comrade-compañera, john brown, antigone, she who cuts through revolutionary enemy of the state


Marilyn Buck in 1971. Photo by Jeff Blankfort.

Accounts of mourning sometimes cross over or, more accurately because mourning is a resistant and achingly tender verb, create a transient bridge from the bereaved privacy of the self -- to some sense of shared community. Some will, accurately, point out that this human connection is always a bridge-too-far but even so, gaps and all, it's what we have.

While she was alive and even more humbly now, I find myself in far reaching debt to Marilyn Buck and hope through the process of writing to move closer to what this relation means and might aspire to. Debt implies relationship. In ancient times, the symbol of suspended balance scales signified a weighing of life/death, good/evil and justice/injustice, not money-debt. It's no accident that in western myth and culture these scales are balanced by the figure of a woman -- often blindfolded to signify impartiality and holding a sword, which represents the power to enforce justice (re-balance).

In her fascinating 2008 non-fiction book, Payback (Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth) Margaret Atwood clarifies that in ancient Egyptian Africa a miniature of the goddess Ma'at (or her feather -- representing justice and truth) was used on the cosmic scale to weigh good and evil in the heart of one who has died. The heart needed to be as light as a feather for the soul to be granted eternal life.

Atwood goes on to say that, along with justice and truth, Ma'at meant balance, the proper comportment towards others, and moral standards of behavior. I don't know if Marilyn ever read about Ma'at, but she tried her best to embody these principles in steady resistance to our death-driven culture, which equates human value with money.

In our culture, psychologically "normal" citizens are produced to be consumers in the market. That's the bottom line for this dang shabang. Wrap around, cradle-to-the grave conditioning (branding) creates a default position for the self that our worth=money. People are left fearful, commodified, and habitually driven: hating the never-ending lack (of money, power, status, looks, products, sex) in themselves and envying one another.

Marxists refer to this as commodity fetishism. The tragic human dimension of vulnerability, loss, failing, mortality, and mourning, which is also at the core of our being, is manically denied.

Remember how after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, the government exhorted everyone to go out shopping to show that our society was unbowed? Then we were taken into a seemingly endless series of wars. Without the humility of mourning there is no learning from experience. Along with the three interlocking oppressions more traditionally named by the left -- race, class, and gender -- envy and the avoidance of mourning constitute a base from which evil acts and fascist movements spring.

Marilyn worked to renounce this deathly dynamic and sustained, in her everyday life, a radical ethic of gratitude, care, and equality among people. She studied history/herstory and understood that human rights must be fought for and defended if they are to exist at all. There was nothing bogus about her.

I do not believe that I'm alone, among the many, many people who visited and whom she befriended after she was captured, in this feeling of a political and personal obligation to, or better to say: with Marilyn.

Those of us fortunate enough to have known her before she became "notorious" and "iconic" -- representations that never sat well with her and which being in Marilyn's presence were easily dispelled -- remember how serious, determined, outspoken, beautiful, and far from perfect she was. It's no secret that she made political mistakes along the way. The collective political-resistance project she was part of was defeated. Its members paid and some are still paying a very high price.


She came of age in the red-hot crucible of the 1960s and '70s when large movements from every corner of the earth were on the upsurge, challenging capitalist-imperialism with demands for revolution. It was an era of overturnings and extremes. Marilyn grew up in Texas -- where racist and sexist dominator culture combined the toxic violence of america’s segregated south and cowboy west. She witnessed racism everyday and, by high school and college, grew determined to do something to help bring an end to war and white supremacy.

keywords: Mercurial time, oh old space Capsule: Go ahead crack the kernel's hard discontinuous shell; revisit our more innocent and less destitute history with this bite-sized Almanac backgrounder:

When Marilyn left home to find her way into the popular movement(s), Dylan was singing The Times They Are A Changin' & Masters of War, the SNCC Freedom Singers, Motown, R&B galore and Nina Simone's thunderous Mississippi Goddamn! got people up and moving.

It was the overflowing era of Vietnam, Black, Brown, Native American, and Asian people's power movements, the war of the cities: Watts, Detroit, Newark, and hundreds of urban rebellions brought the fire this time.

Draft cards were torched and many G.I.'s revolted against the war. Feminism and Gay Liberation insisted that the personal-is-political. Student and youth cultural revolt(s) on a worldwide scale (including, although quite uniquely, the massive Chinese cultural revolution) had not yet been pacified and co-opted by the market.

National liberation movements in Southern Africa were bringing an end to direct, foreign, and settler-colonial domination of their countries. The Palestinian people began asserting their national rights. Revolutionary organizations and guerrilla movements, partly inspired by the Cuban example, were organizing above and below ground to strike against "imperialismo yanqui" in Latin America. Radicals spoke of creating "2,3 many Vietnams" against empire.

Inside the United States, the vital foundation of all radical cultural and political developments was the civil rights and Black Liberation struggle. Black people sang, "I aint scared of your jail 'cause I want my freedom!" This movement's organizing cries of Black Is Beautiful and Black Power! actually inspired people all over the world to throw off internalized oppression and fight the power.

Marilyn joined SDS (Students for a Democratic Society -- the country's largest student organization), worked with The Rag in Austin, and then helped edit the SDS newspaper New Left Notes in Chicago. She stood up against sexism in the organization.

Moving to the Bay Area in late 1968, Marilyn joined in building the San Francisco Newsreel collective, which, like its counterpart in New York, made and distributed radical film documentaries about contemporary struggles. Some influential S.F. Newsreel films taught people about the Black Panther Party; the San Francisco State student strike (led by a coalition of Third World organizations, this was the longest student strike in U.S. history); the Richmond California oil refinery worker's strike ("On Strike"); the Mission High School Rebellion; and many others. These films, used by organizers spreading news across the country, were an important part of an alternative press movement made up of hundreds of underground newspapers, radio, and press services.

In western Europe and the USA, especially, white people in motion mainly expressed a middle class idealism, rage, and utopian aspiration. Some younger white folks were learning that struggling in alliance with Third World peoples at home and abroad could actually help end the genocidal war in Vietnam, and advance civil and human rights. A new left was born.

For many radical activists, leadership flowed -- not from the Democratic Party -- but from movements of color and figures like Dr. King, Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Fannie Lou Hamer, Cesar Chavez. Importantly, we worked with and looked to grassroots leaders of color -- in our schools, workplaces, and communities -- for direction.

We challenged our personal racism and the social system of white supremacy. Consciousness raising and women's liberation broke through to identify and challenge patriarchy. By the later 1960s, lesbian and gay liberation was gathering force.


Marilyn Buck.

This was a cultural revolution(s) involving radically new, alternative sources of authority and legitimation which threatened the (mostly white, male, straight) powers that be. The rejection of 1950's Jim Crow apartheid/segregation and northern white suburbia, begun by the civil rights movement in the South, communist resisters to McCarthyism, early 2nd-wave feminism, and artists from the beat/hip/hippie generation(s) ignited a mix and mojo that many people, including yours truly, embraced.

You might say, without falling for romantic nostalgia, that a historical crack opened up and it seemed just possible to break through the myopia, prejudice, and privilege of empire into a better world. Or put it another way we, and this was by no means limited or merely conditioned by the exuberance of youth, had the experience of being deeply engaged with living history.

Even as society was fast becoming more of a spectacle, during this brief pre-postmodern, pre-internet era, we knew that we wanted to be more than spectators. It was as if sleepwalkers in death's hollow empire were suddenly waking up.

In the advanced capitalist areas of Europe, Japan, and the U.S. anti-empire activity led some small yet significant sectors of the new lefts to move towards increased clandestine militancy, including bombings and armed actions against their repressive governments.*

Inside the U.S. solidarity with Black, Puerto Rican, Native American, Chicano/ Mexicano as well as international liberation movements, were a powerful motivating force for Marilyn and others.

The spirit of this global, historical moment is revealed by Karma Nabulsi, a Palestinian, writing about being a young revolutionary in the 1960s and 70s working to free his country:
The experience of revolutionary life is difficult to describe. It is as much metaphysical as imaginative, combining urgency, purposefulness, seriousness and hard work, with a near celebratory sense of adventure and overriding optimism -- a sort of carnival atmosphere of citizens’ rule. Key to its success is that this heightened state is consciously and collectively maintained by tens of thousands of people at the same time. If you get tired for a few hours or days, you know others are holding the ring. (2)


keywords: the hammer this time

Within the Unites States, all movements, organizations, and individuals ranging from Dr. King to Malcolm X, from artists Nina Simone to John Lennon, were targeted because they inspired people to organize for real change. Under the rubric of FBI-COINTELPRO (short for Counter-Intelligence Program) a vast campaign of ruthless and unconstitutional counter-insurgency against the people was sanctioned by both Democratic and Republican Whitehouses.

Far from a "rogue" program led by a "racist and demented" J. Edgar Hoover, what we call COINTELPRO grew to involve the coordination of Pentagon, CIA, local and state police, as well as the FBI. Its mandate was destroy/neutralize radical leaders, organizations and grass roots people through assassinations, fratricidal murders, frame-ups, psychological warfare and forced exile.(3)

Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Fred Hampton, scores of Panthers and American Indian Movement members were assassinated, as were some key members of the Chicano/Mexicano and Puerto Rican movements. Several Black Panther members were tortured so badly in New Orleans -- in a manner consistent with current government torture practices -- that trial courts threw out cases against them.

The federal government unleashed a wave of high profile conspiracy trials, most of which, after sowing fear and draining resources, ended in acquittals. Nasty blackmails and bribery were used to recruit informers. This low intensity warfare, along with inner city drug plagues, wars on drugs leading to criminalization of black and brown youth, concessionary pacification (i.e., temporary poverty programs) and the end of the Vietnam war, succeeded in halting much of our forward motion. We were young idealists and we didn't see this coming.

Vastly expanded federal and state prison systems became the leading form of long-term social control over people of color. Today, with at least 2 million people warehoused under criminal justice control, the U.S. has the world's highest incarceration rate. One result of the hidden, domestic war is that there are over 100 political prisoners, essentially COINTELPRO captives of the FBI, courts, and prisons, who have remained locked up for the past 25-40 years. They are some of the longest held political prisoners on earth.(4)

There are also people in permanent foreign exile, one of whom died recently at 63 years of age in Zambia. Michael Cetewayo Tabor was a former Black Panther leader in New York, a member of the Panther 21 conspiracy case (of which all were acquitted) and author of the incisive pamphlet: "Capitalism Plus Dope Equals Genocide." While countries the world over have released their political prisoners from the 1960s and '70s, some through amnesty and others paroled after serving long sentences, the U.S. still refuses to do so.

All this was a long time ago, but I believe that in many telling ways, when applied to empire and resistance, what the writer, William Faulkner, said in another context is true:
The past is not dead. In fact, it isn't even past.
In the introductory essay to her translation of Christina Peri Rossi's poetry book, State of Exile (5), Marilyn writes of the trauma of imprisonment as an exile:
Exile may also be collective, as in the case of the Palestinian people, forced from their homeland, or the people of Darfur, murdered and driven from their lands. And there is another form of exile as well -- internal exile -- in which one is taken from the location of one's home and life and is transported to some other outlying, isolated region of their own country. We think of the gulags of the former Soviet Union, for example, or stories from centuries past, but the fact is that internal exile exists here and now, in the United States a country of exiles, refugees and survivors. Prison is a state of exile.

...I a political militant did not choose external exile in time and was captured. I became a U.S. political prisoner and was sentenced to internal exile, where I remain after more than twenty years.

More to come

[Felix Shafer became an anti-imperialist/human rights activist while in high school during the late 1960's and has worked around prisons and political prisoners for over 30 years. He is a psychotherapist in San Francisco and can be reached at felixir999@gmail.com.]
Read earlier articles about Marilyn Buck on The Rag Blog.

Footnotes:

(1)This is a very incomplete and utterly heterogeneous list. UK: The Angry Brigade; France: Accion Directe; West Germany: Red Army Faction & Revolutionary Cells; Italy: Red Brigade & Prima Linea. Japan: United Red Army; The IRA in Ireland and the Basque ETA in Spain (both larger and with more support) grew out of centuries long colonization. Within the U.S. some of the revolutionary armed organizations were: Black Liberation Army, Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion Nacional & EPB-Macheteros(Puerto Rico), Weather Underground, Symbionese Liberation Army, New World Liberation Front, George Jackson Brigade, Red Guerrilla Resistance and United Freedom Front. To my knowledge, there has been no serious historical study of this global phenomenon

(2)London Review of Books, Vol. 32, No. 20 21 October 2010

(3)See the books: Agents of Repression & The Cointelpro Papers, by Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall. The Reports of the U.S. Senate Hearings (The Church Committee) 1975, U.S. Government Printing Office. And, the new film, Cointelpro 101 available from www.freedomarchives.org.

(4)The Jericho Amnesty Campaign has been involved in efforts to win amnesty for many years. A campaign is underway to win the release of N.Y. State political prisoners.

(5)City Light Books Pocket Poets Series Number 58, San Francisco, 2008.

*********
The blue afterwards:
Mourning for Marilyn, Part II

By Felix Shafer / The Rag Blog / January 13, 2011

Part two of three

[On December 13, Marilyn Buck, U.S. anti-imperialist political prisoner, acclaimed poet, former Austinite, and former original Ragstaffer, would have been 63 years of age. Scheduled for parole last August after nearly 30 years in federal prisons, Marilyn planned to live and work in New York. She looked forward to trying her hand at photography again, taking salsa lessons, and simply being able to walk in the park and visit freely with friends.

Instead, after 20 days of freedom, Marilyn died of a virulent cancer.

In the first part of this essay, Felix Shafer wrote about the pain of losing his friend and artistic collaborator, Marilyn Buck, to cancer, and his determination to mourn her in some way appropriate to her life, accepting and experiencing grief as fully as great friendship demands.

He evoked the heady, seemingly revolutionary days of the late 1960s, and Marilyn’s simultaneous coming of age with a generation that wanted to change the world for the better and instead found itself criminalized in the councils of government and power. Buck’s experiences, and her fundamental identification with people over profits, led her increasingly to seek effective ways to oppose injustice, and, inevitably, brought her under official scrutiny.

But the 1960s proved to be a pre-revolutionary decade, and, along with others who refused to read the repressive writing on the wall, Marilyn Buck became an “internal exile”: a political prisoner of the State.

-- Mariann G. Wizard / The Rag Blog]


keywords: revolutionary. enemy of the state. Alive !

After the terms revolution, liberation, resistance, freedom were thoroughly drained of signifying power by the predatory, vampire-like cartels in advertising and Hollywood, they could be banished to the merely unfashionable passé. It's not solely a question of who "speaks" like this anymore but where in our society are these goals even considered to have meaning?

Today, enemy of the state probably sounds more like a dark shiny movie title or an album download than something serious and politically contentful. Its most likely association is to enemy combatant -- people whom U.S. state power locks up and can torture in lawless offshore dead zones like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. After 9-11 they stripped a huge layer of constitutional protection off.

Yet throughout history, empires and their regimes have singled out for attack and removal all who stood up for the disempowered to challenge the obscene "order of things." It remains a point of historical fact that Marilyn Buck was an enemy of empire and an enemy of the state. The national security state (laws, courts, prisons, police, FBI, military intelligence, and other armed/security bodies) has long treated her, and the other political prisoners, as people to be buried alive.

To get a sense of this it's instructive to look at a very abbreviated account of what the government charged and convicted her of:


1 In 1973 Marilyn was convicted in San Francisco of two counts of buying two boxes of legal ammunition while using a false ID. At that time, her sentence of 10 years in federal prison was the longest -- by far -- for this offense in U.S. history. Many people believe that this disproportionate sentence came because the government was well aware of her close support for the freedom struggle of black people in this country, particularly the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army. During the early 1970's, the Black Panthers were under military, political, and media attack by the FBI's COINTELPRO, as of course was Marilyn.

Marilyn was particularly hated because she was a young radical white woman from the South who crossed the line against racial privilege and white supremacy. She was unwilling to stand on the sidelines while good people were being hunted down and destroyed by our government. She was explicitly seen as a race traitor, a "n----r lover" by the FBI/police, and the state moved to make an example of her to frighten others, especially radicalized white women, from following this path.

It was during this time that the FBI began to characterize Marilyn as the "sole white member of the Black Liberation Army (BLA)." And, in typical J. Edgar Hoover character assassination style, the bureau began saying that she had a "Joan of Arc complex."

Inside the Alderson, West Virginia, federal prison, Marilyn met the great Puerto Rican political prisoner and national (s)hero Lolita Lebron -- who along with her comrades would be pardoned in 1979 by President Carter after they'd served 25 years. (1)

Marilyn integrated herself into the community of women prisoners who did their best to support each other. She worked at staying attuned to outside events, from Watergate to the persistence of radical movements and the U.S. withdrawal in defeat from Vietnam. After serving four years of her sentence, Marilyn received a furlough in 1977 and did not return to prison. Between 1977 and 1985 we must assume that she lived and worked underground.

2 Recaptured in 1985, at the height of the Reagan era, Marilyn underwent a total of four trials, including two prosecutions for conspiracy, based on charges from the clandestine years. As a member of the "Resistance Conspiracy" case she, along with Linda Evans, Laura Whitehorn, Susan Rosenberg, Tim Blunk, and Alan Berkman, were accused of taking actions to
influence, change and protest policies and practices of the United States Government concerning various international and domestic matters through the use of violent and illegal means.
Among the alleged actions (in which no one was injured) were bombings of: the U.S. Capitol building to protest the illegal invasion of Grenada; three military installations in the D.C. area to protest U.S. backing of the Central American death squads; the apartheid-era South African consulate; the Israeli Aircraft Industries building; and the Patrolman's Benevolent Association (to protest police murders of people of color).

While underground, Marilyn was also charged with conspiracy in the successful 1979 liberation of political prisoner Assata Shakur (2) and the 1981 expropriation of a Brinks armored car in which two police officers and a security guard were killed. The government contended that the conspiracy brought together black and white North American radicals, under black leadership.

To my knowledge, this was the first time since the pre-Civil War era of John Brown that blacks and whites stood accused of joining together to conduct guerrilla activities. In this case, Marilyn was convicted of conspiracy; however, neither she nor her co-defendant Dr.Mutulu Shakur (stepfather of slain musician and actor Tupac Shakur) was convicted of any murders. Dr. Shakur was an original member of the Republic of New Afrika and a founder of the Lincoln Detox center in New York, which pioneered the use of acupuncture to help break drug addiction in the black and brown communities.

I feel a certain defensive avoidance about commenting, in shorthand, on this era's underground movements of the left, which, after all, came to their historical end many years ago. This is an essay of mourning and homage to Marilyn Buck who lived this struggle for many years; it's not an assessment of politics and strategy. Her clandestine years are held in protective secrecy by those who shared them. For her to have kept a journal would have been to put collective security in unacceptable jeopardy.

Nonetheless, at minimum, it seems to me, we ought to recognize more about these contributions than a basic recitation of her charges and convictions. But the post 9-11 "war on terror" has had a chilling effect on such conversations, despite the fact that these organizations had absolutely zero in common with Al- Q'aeda or similar terror killers.

During Marilyn's powerful memorial celebration in Oakland, California, on November 7, 2010, it was revealing to hear members of the Black Panther Party tell how her underground skills helped them survive the onslaught of COINTELPRO. Marilyn's tribute in New York was held a week later at the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Center (formerly the Audubon Ballroom) in Harlem. As nearly 500 people jammed the room where Malcolm was assassinated, a moving message was read from political prisoner/POW and freedom fighter Sekou Odinga -- who was also convicted for the liberation of Assata:
She was someone who would give you her last without any thought about her own welfare. I remember one time when she shared her last few dollars with a comrade of ours, and later I was in her kitchen and opened her refrigerator to find nothing in it and almost no food in the house. I told her she had to let comrades know when she was in need, and stop giving when she didn't have it to give. But she never stopped because that's just who she was.

There have been very few actions to liberate PP/POW's and Marilyn was involved with more than one. The roles she played were critical in not only liberation of POWs, but also in making sure they remained free, never thinking about the great threat and danger to herself.
For the most part, what remains of the left today dismisses these efforts as worthless adventurism or ignores them altogether. While there's much of real value and importance in some of these critiques, the fact that empire rests on its capacity to inflict unlimited violence with impunity is rarely mentioned as something to organize against.

Isn't it frankly obscene that ex-President Bush and high officials -- obvious war criminals -- who illegally invaded Iraq under a web of lies, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths, can walk free and add to their fortunes? Or that the top CIA executives who destroyed more than 90 hours of videotape (an illegal act in itself) showing their torture of suspects in contravention of International Law, won't be prosecuted by the Justice Department.

Isn't it beyond acceptable that central components of the permanent government, the CIA and Pentagon, stand exposed before the entire world as conducting an illegal, organized program of torture against prisoners, deemed "enemy combatants," yet for which no one is brought to trial? Marilyn thought so. In her last year and a half she began writing a novella, partially set in Guantanamo, about torture and imprisonment.

The many-sided crisis of global capitalism, run-away environmental damage, and the decline of the U.S. empire, makes it likely that we are entering a new age of rivalry and upheaval. Not only is the U.S. deeply at war(s) in the Muslim and Arab world, conducting or backing counterinsurgency campaigns in many more regions, but the rise of both Blackwater style mercenaries and a mass gun-glorifying, fascistically-inclined Tea Party movement means that real violent momentum is on the right.

On an immediate note, as I write this in late 2010, the news comes in that Johannes Mehserle, the white terroristic cop, whose murder of Oscar Grant, an unarmed prone and handcuffed African-American, at an Oakland BART Station on New Years 2009 was captured on video, has been sentenced to only two years in jail. Counting the 140 days he already did before making bail, he is expected to serve in the neighborhood of just six months. In contrast, the African-American football star, Michael Vick, got four years for the violent crime of organizing brutal dogfights. This isn't a post-racial society. Once more the obvious: it's open season on black and brown people.

Although I'm not aware of any formal written self-evaluation of her underground political strategy, I do know that Marilyn engaged in ongoing reflection and complex dialogues with trusted comrades about this. When possible she tried to convey lessons to today's new movements facing infiltration, grand juries, and conspiracy trials as a result of their militancy. Marilyn didn't romanticize the underground struggle and counseled activists strongly against militarist and adventurist approaches. She changed as times changed AND she stuck to her principles.


Marilyn Buck at Dublin FCI, 1994. Photo by Mariann G. Wizard / The Rag Blog.


keywords: Midlife- art and cutting through

By the end of the 1980's, while many of Marilyn's contemporaries were going through midlife crises, occasioned by our fortieth birthdays, she faced the ugly, cramped, totalitarian, arbitrary, cruel, violent, life-sucking, and repetitive regime of prison life. After all the court trials, she would be sentenced to 80 years.

What she had hoped was the bright glow of a revolutionary dawn would turn out to be the brief, fiery sunset of the passing era which had launched her.

Marilyn Buck was becoming a member of that extraordinary global minority: people who are imprisoned by the state for their political actions and beliefs. She sustained and was, in turn, sustained by this community of comrades and their strong webs of outside supporters and friends.

In the Bay Area her diverse circle grew wide, warm, and deep. The group Friends of Marilyn Buck was formed over a decade ago and is going strong today. Members of her family reconnected with her. While her physical range was totally restricted, the world came to her through amazing visitors from many continents and people's movements.

She loved and mentored the children of activists, some of whom grew up visiting her. She helped raise her godchildren, Salim, Tanya, and Gemma. Day in day out, Marilyn participated with, learned from, mentored, and hung out, suffered, and stood with women -- social prisoners and politicals -- in every prison where she lived for the past quarter century. And she is being mourned behind those walls by people who knew her and those who knew of her.(3)

When she was captured and imprisoned in 1985, I was a member of the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee and spent time in Washington, DC, working as a paralegal on the Resistance Conspiracy case. Around this time, I began to bring my three year old daughter Gemma on social visits with Marilyn. Over the next 25 years, the tender alchemy of love between them grew into a strong family relation of their own.

I imagine that many people spoke with Marilyn about what, along with political solidarity, might help sustain her over the long haul. Prisons are soul-murdering places and it is a testament to human creativity and spirit that many, many prisoners refuse to give in.

From early on we shared poetry and she sent me this poem, beloved by political prisoners the world over. Written in 1949, it's by the Turkish revolutionary poet Nazim Hikmet. In its entirety:
Some Advice to Those Who Will Serve Time in Prison

If instead of being hanged by the neck
you're thrown inside
for not giving up hope
in the world, your country, your people,
if you do ten or fifteen years
apart from the time you have left,
you won't say,
"Better I had swung from the end of a rope
like a flag" --
You'll put your foot down and live.
It may not be a pleasure exactly,
but it's your solemn duty
to live one more day
to spite the enemy.
Part of you may live alone inside,
like a tone at the bottom of a well.
But the other part
must be so caught up
in the flurry of the world
that you shiver there inside
when outside, at forty days' distance, a leaf moves.
To wait for letters inside,
to sing sad songs,
or to lie awake all night staring at the ceiling
is sweet but dangerous.
Look at your face from shave to shave,
forget your age,
watch out for lice
and for spring nights,
and always remember
to eat every last piece of bread--
also, don't forget to laugh heartily.
And who knows,
the woman you love may stop loving you.
Don't say it's no big thing:
it's like the snapping of a green branch
to the man inside.
To think of roses and gardens inside is bad,
to think of seas and mountains is good.
Read and write without rest,
and I also advise weaving
and making mirrors.


I mean, it's not that you can't pass
ten or fifteen years inside
and more --
you can,
as long as the jewel
on the left side of your chest doesn't lose it's luster!
Marilyn Buck read poetry and wrote hundreds of poems in her lifetime. She's beloved by poets both within and beyond the borders of this country.


keywords: transformation is her talent for living

The high tide movements in this country and worldwide, which so moved Marilyn to transform herself, had definitively ebbed. Not only had the political maps changed but also the rate of change accelerated. She kept abreast by reading voraciously, talking with visitors, and conducting a far ranging correspondence.

While by no means a traditional Soviet-style leftist, she watched the Berlin Wall fall in 1989 and then the consequences of the Soviet Union's collapse. The Reagan-Daddy Bush era death squads and counterrevolutionary wars, from Central America to Angola, had bathed regions in blood to blunt popular revolutionary initiatives and, with the Chinese government and party's embrace of greed, the "socialist alternative" all but disappeared. Revolutionary forces laid down their arms. Marilyn loved Cuba and followed events on this brave, unrepentant island closely. The bombs of the first Iraq war rained down.

Even from behind the wire there were bright moments. On February 11, 1990, Nelson Mandela walked out of a South African prison and shortly thereafter was resoundingly elected president of his country. I remember visiting Marilyn in 1990 at the Marianna, Florida, maximum-security prison with my young daughters, Ona and Gemma, and cheering his release.(4) As we slowly walked from the visiting room that day, they said, as they had many times before and would into the future, "We want her to come home with us."

By 1993, she was transferred to FCI Dublin in Pleasanton, California -- in the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area -- where she would live until the last months of her life. Over the years in Dublin she was incarcerated with many political prisoners.(5) As the 21st century got under her skin, Marilyn grew increasingly into a woman of many voices, passions, and fundamental, lifelong commitments. She somehow bore bitter setbacks and crushing disappointments to the limit, with deliberation.

Tendencies towards dogmatism and rigidity softened and this, I believe, made her stronger. She had the capacity to actively turn from spells of frank despair -- which could go on for a period of time -- towards renewal, creative experimentation, and her practical stance of being of use to others. This capacity to make a small and decisive inner turn away from the soul-murdering, isolating regime of prison towards a freedom of mutuality and care was, I believe, one of her great talents..

At her New York memorial tribute former political prisoner Linda Evans spoke about Marilyn's AIDS educational work among women inside. She also told us about how Marilyn organized a benefit in the prison chapel to raise funds for black churches in the South which were being burned to the ground. This was her practice many times over.

Linked to this was her breadth of interest and penetration of thought. She read widely in natural sciences and literature. People who visited and corresponded with her know how engaged she was in thinking through the decline of revolutionary ideologies and movements over the past quarter-century and how well she knew answers for the future would not come easy.

Fluent in Spanish, she followed with great enthusiasm the new heterogeneous radicalism that has emerged in Latin America -- Venezuela, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Paraguay -- over the past decade or so. When I sent her some photos taken by a friend who documented the FMLN electoral victory in March 2009, she wrote back expressing her joy. In recent times as part of her ongoing effort to grasp how the world was changing beyond prison walls, she studied political economy with a group of women on the outside who were close supporters.

Earlier, somewhere around the late 1990's, I helped Marilyn reenter college. Returning to school in midlife had been good for me and I hoped it could assist her growth in unforeseeable and surprising ways. She enrolled in New College of California where she went on to earn a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and her Master of Fine Arts Degree in Poetics with an emphasis on translation.

One of her teachers, Tom Parsons -- who coordinated her distance learning process, which involved sending tapes of classes to her so she could hear and do course work -- told me she was the most gifted student he'd seen. Two of her other teachers -- the poet David Meltzer and Latin American literature professor Graciela Trevisan -- spoke at her Bay Memorial Celebration and have played important roles in the publication of her work.

Marilyn’s interest in women and feminism, poetics, literature, science, psychology, and cultural studies began to flourish, allowing new bridges to unfold across the last 10 years of her life. Those of us fortunate enough to visit and correspond with her found ourselves growing along with her in surprising ways. Marilyn, locked down in the totally controlled penitentiary space was, paradoxically, our breath of fresh air.

More to come

[Felix Shafer became an anti-imperialist/human rights activist while in high school during the late 1960's and has worked around prisons and political prisoners for over 30 years. He is a psychotherapist in San Francisco and can be reached at felixir999@gmail.com.]
See "Felix Shafer: Mourning for Marilyn Buck, Part I" / The Rag Blog / January 13, 2011
Read earlier articles about Marilyn Buck on The Rag Blog.

Footnotes:

(1)Lolita Lebron, Andres Figueroa Cordero, Irvin Flores and Rafael Cancel Miranda assaulted the U.S. Congress in 1954 to bring attention to the colonial plight and harsh repression of Puerto Rico. Along with Oscar Collazo, imprisoned for an earlier attack on the residence of president Truman in 1950, they were released after serving more than 25 years in prison. Lolita Lebron died at 90 years of age on August 1, 2010 -- two days before Marilyn.

(2)Assata Shakur was freed from prison by an armed clandestine action in which no one was harmed. Granted political refugee status, she lives in Cuba. Her autobiography, Assata, is available for people who want to learn about her life in the time prior to her liberation from prison. The website assatashakur.org contains valuable information. On the day before she died, Marilyn received a tender, personal audio message from Assata deeply thanking her for her life and contributions.

(3)In the soon-to-be published (March 1, 2011) book, An American Radical: Political Prisoner in My Own Country, Susan Rosenberg, Marilyn's co-defendant, writes about daily life in the remarkable communities created by women in prison.

(4)Marilyn was imprisoned in Marianna FL with North American anti-imperialist political prisoners Laura Whitehorn, Susan Rosenberg, and Silvia Baraldini.

(5)Some of the women political prisoners she did time with in Dublin: Ida Luz Rodríguez and Alicia Rodríguez, Carmen Valentín, Dylcia Pagán, Ida Robinson McCray, Linda Evans, Laura Whitehorn, Donna Willmott, and women from the Ploughshares and environmental movements.

*******
The blue afterwards:
Mourning for Marilyn, Part III

By Felix Shafer / The Rag Blog / January 13, 2011

Part three of three

[Marilyn Buck -- political prisoner, acclaimed poet, former Austinite, and former original Ragstaffer -- was paroled last August after spending 30 years in federal prisons. But, after only 20 days of freedom, Marilyn died of a virulent cancer.

In the first part of this essay, Felix Shafer wrote about the pain of losing his friend and artistic collaborator to cancer, and his determination to mourn her in some way appropriate to her life, accepting and experiencing grief as fully as great friendship demands.

In part two Felix discussed the specific criminal charges for which Marilyn Buck served nearly 30 years in federal prisons, demonstrating that her acts were actually specific responses to the repression of Black and anti-imperialist activists across the country.

While many today dismiss such acts as adventuristic and self-defeating, the consensus among Black activists, especially members of the Black Panther Party and others who have themselves been victims of government repression, is that Marilyn Buck was a principled freedom fighter. While Marilyn’s thinking on tactics certainly changed over time, her commitment to human rights and equal justice never wavered.

Facing an 80 year sentence, Marilyn had to come to grips with life inside the walls. Until the end of her life, she refused all attempts to treat her case as special, but identified with and walked the same paths as thousands of other incarcerated women. Their daily struggles for simple dignity became her field of endeavor, and fodder for her creativity.

Shafer recalled Marilyn’s emergence as a poet, fighting to maintain her own humanity in the spirit-crushing prison environment. As the so-called “free world” hurtled onward to the distressing present, for a growing community of friends and supporters on the outside, Marilyn Buck, from a steel cell, became increasingly “our breath of fresh air.”

-- Mariann G Wizard / The Rag Blog]


keywords: a revolutionary who dreams like a poet

The 21st century opened up and Marilyn was finding her own way towards a style in which humor, theory, art and the ironic began to dance with her politically radical common sense. From this dynamic a momentum grew within her, which allowed for tremendous personal change.

For the long-term imprisoned revolutionary this can be an agonizing process. It is incredibly difficult to risk overturning dogmas, re-examining cherished beliefs, while taking responsibility for how your actions -- for better and worse -- define you.

There is the repressive State power, not as an abstraction but an everyday presence, which studies each political prisoner's psychology -- emotions, vulnerabilities, moods, doubts, questions -- in order to determine pressure points to exploit.[1]

The continuing goal, long after any hope of getting politicals to give up "actionable intelligence" (to further repression) was gone, becomes to break the resister so s/he will repent and discredit human principles of liberation. To have broken the imprisoned revolutionary's soul is a key objective of the authorities because any healthy counter-example to their total power is threatening.

On this battlefield, and make no mistake it is a battlefield -- a last ditch of significance -- political prisoners, like Marilyn and her comrades, must be on the alert against psychological destabilization. Deeply questioning ideology, strategy and tactics in conditions of isolation (and political prisoners are often kept isolated from each other) and, in periods when the struggle is at very low ebb, is a risky and painful journey.

This long excerpt from Marilyn's incisive and raw essay, On Self Censorship[2], reveals some of the way she thinks -- with feeling.
Women are subject to censorship in a very distinct way from men prisoners. There is a disapproval of who we are as women and as human beings. We are viewed as having challenged gender definitions and sex roles of passivity and obedience. We have transgressed much more than written laws. We are judged even before trial as immoral and contemptible -- fallen women. For a woman to be imprisoned casts her beyond the boundaries of what little human dignity and personal right to self-determination we already have...

It becomes difficult to maintain personal relations because all forms of communication are subject to total intervention -- all under the guise of security. We have no privacy -- our phone conversations are recorded, every word we write or that is written to us is scrutinized, especially as "high profile prisoners."

Being locked up is physically and psychically invasive. All body parts are subject to physical surveillance and possible "inspection." Never ending strip searches... one must dissociate oneself psychically, step outside that naked body under scrutiny by some guard who really knows nothing about us, but who fears us because we are prisoners, and therefore dangerous; political prisoners, and therefore "terrorists."

The guard stands before the prisoner, violating the privacy of her body, observing with dispassionate contempt. It affects each of us. There is a profound sense of violation, humiliation, anger. It takes an enormous amount of self control not to erupt in rage at the degradation of the non-ending assault. I do not think I will ever get used to it. However, being conscious political women enables us to understand and articulate the experience in terms of the very real psychic censorship.

Every time I talk on the phone I have to decide what I will say. I refuse to let the government know how I really am; but I do not want to cut myself off emotionally either. How can I keep saying, "Everything is fine"? It is not believable; and, it would promote the official position that these high-tech prisons are fine places, especially these maximum security prisons with their veneer of civility. It would be a declaration that no, there are no violations of human rights here. It is a dilemma.

I express my interior life in poetry when I have the wherewithal to put the lines down... I write a letter and reread it. I clench. I have a crisis of judgment about whether to send it as is. Should I say this? I do not mail the letter that day. By the time morning arrives again I decide to rewrite it. To couch my thoughts in vaguer terms. Will my vagueness and abstractions frustrate the reader?

I feel like I am diffusing, becoming abstract. I am censoring myself. Like a painter who disguises her statement in an abstract play of colors and forms on canvas... Only she is certain of the voice that is speaking and what she is conveying. And if the observer misses what is being said?

Self-censorship is an oppressive, but necessary part of my life now. For more than six years it has infringed upon my soul, limiting, constraining self-expression. Yet, it is a studied response -- a self-defense -- against the ubiquitous, insistent, directive to destroy our political identities, and therefore us.


Mural of Marilyn Buck on storefront in Mission District, San Francisco. Photo by Gary Soup.


keyword: artist

Marilyn is one for whom the word revolutionary is truly earned and, yet, it's also far short of encompassing. She was a woman with probing interests in the arts, culture, and natural sciences. She was a wordsmith who loved to sink her hands into the clay, making ceramic art that she sent out to people all over the country.

Marilyn was a prolific writer: well over 300 poems along with scores of essays and articles, which were widely published both inside the U.S. and abroad. Her master's thesis became the translation of Christina Peri Rossi's, State of Exile, published by City Lights in 2008. She won prizes from the international writer's organization PEN and published the chapbook, Rescue the Word, and the CD, "Wild Poppies," in which she (via phone recording) joined celebrated poets reading her work.[3]

In late 1999, together with Miranda Bergman and Jane Norling, artists and comrades she'd known since 1969, Marilyn formed surreal sisters -- a trio to explore art-making and surrealism. This informal group continued doing art, studying, and occasionally writing, for nearly 10 years. In an unpublished (collective) 2003 essay, "Coincidence in Three Voices," Marilyn writes:
Three of us had been sister political activists, friends, housemates in the late 1960s and early 70s. Miranda and Jane were artists and activists. I was a political activist who had not yet discovered artistry, at least for myself. By the time the three of us convened in the visiting room of the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) at Dublin CA I had my artist self, though it had taken me half my lifetime to realize that I was and needed to be an artist.

Three women, I behind steel gates and triple barbed wire, Jane and Miranda outside, both painters and muralists. What could we achieve as women dedicated to creating new visions, a new world through collective imagination?

As a prisoner, I feel flattened, forever categorized as only a prisoner -- nothing more. I want to scream I am not one dimension of a box, a box inside of a box! What shall I draw to express this?
When I think about Marilyn Buck, I see a revolutionary who dreams like a poet.

One paradoxical feature of the "obvious" is that not everyone takes the time to see it. We nod our heads at some outline, then say, oh I already knew that, and move on. So, at the risk of stating the obvious: under the most restrictive of circumstances, Marilyn continued to throw herself into processes of human transformation.

Becoming an artist -- and being an artist is always a process of becoming -- was very much part of her destiny. She was neither a propagandist nor a left wing copywriter -- though she could fulfill these functions when she felt called to do so. Her art making was valuable in, of and for itself.

Art is a particular area of freedom: a disciplined work/living space of engaged feeling, thinking, and doing. Arts come to be created and live in a transitional space between self and others that is at the heart of all human cultures.

Confined in prison, Marilyn was able to use art-making to express a full range of feelings, desires and relationships that became her powerful, alive response to the death-driven system in which she was forced to exist. Her great capacity for hard work was channeled into highly productive and creative pathways.

She loved this part of her life and had plans to continue the creative work of writing and translation after she was released from captivity. There was the novella she'd begun writing. Skilled in the arts of translation-a bridge building art par excellence-she was working on a translation of Christina Peri Rossi's work: Desastres Intimos.


When you think of Marilyn Buck: the revolutionary
I hope you also discover Marilyn Buck: the artist

From late 2007 to a month before her death Marilyn was involved, with a few of us on the outside, preparing her selected poems for publication. The idea for the book began in conversation with Raul Salinas, a great advocate of Chicano and Native American resistance, a former long-term federal prisoner, poet, and writer who passed away in Austin in February 2008.

The volume, tentatively titled: Inside Shadows[4] is a collective labor of love that we all believed would widen her readership beyond the label, "prisoner poet." Together we daydreamed plans for a public launch and readings. The last letter I received from Marilyn came about a month before she died when she was very ill with little energy left for work. It was pure Marilyn: an engagingly lucid three pages of comments and revisions to the book's table of contents.


keyword: She who links us

Beneath the distorted balance sheets of credit card, mortgage and International Monetary Fund debt, after the loan sharks and the default dreads have been (momentarily) cleared from our mindset, there remains a debt between Marilyn and her communities that isn't about money at all. It's my belief that Marilyn's commitment to human solidarity with freedom struggles of Black and other (neo-) colonized peoples on the global plantation, with women and all who are oppressed, was her genuine effort to help balance the scales of justice in a world thrown terribly out of joint by empire.

Over the years and, it seems especially these last months, some people have compared Marilyn to the anti-slavery warrior John Brown. The first person I ever heard say this was Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael) who visited Marilyn in FCI Dublin and corresponded with her. At her Bay Area Memorial on November 7, 2010, former Black Panther and member of the San Francisco 8 Hank Jones spoke movingly of her as a John Brown of our time. At her memorial in Harlem, a number of Black revolutionaries honored her with this comparison.

The essence of their point is not whether she played a comparable historic role but that she was one of the all-too-few who fought shoulder to shoulder with the Black movement. In speaking about white allies in the freedom struggle, Malcolm X called on people to fight like John Brown. It is in the historic context of what was the largest upsurge for Black liberation since the Civil War, that veterans of the Black struggle honor her today.

Along with John Brown, there is another older, historic personage who comes to my mind when I think of our sister Marilyn. This is a near mythic figure of someone we, in the left, don't talk much about: The woman Antigone, whose story was dramatized thousands of years ago in ancient, classical Greece.

Briefly, Antigone was a young woman of privilege who was part of the royal court. Her two brothers slew each other in a conflict over the fate of the kingdom. The king decreed that the body of one brother, who had opposed him, must lie in the dust to rot and not be given decent funeral rites. Antigone -- following an older just tradition -- defied the king's command and buried him -- thus providing him entry into the afterworld. She dared to act and broke what she considered the patriarch's unjust law.

Under interrogation her sister begged her to lie and deny the act in order to save herself. This she would not do. Antigone's punishment was to be entombed/buried alive in a cave without food or water until she starved to death. The citizens had great sympathy for Antigone and the king's son loved her. Fearing for the legitimacy of his rule, the king had his soldiers open the crypt but it was too late. Antigone had chosen to take her own life rather than die by starvation.

Through the ages, Antigone has been a symbol of women's resistance. I believe that by representing collective struggle with thought-through programs for liberation, Marilyn stood on the shoulders of Antigone.

If Marilyn links you in your own way, as she does me, with time's rich legacy of freedom struggle -- she also links us with our losses.

Questions of who she was for/with each of us, how she lived, what she tried to accomplish and what commitments were willingly shared, must neither be quickly resolved nor stubbornly avoided. The work of mourning involves, along with other things, how each person finds meaningful answers, individually and with others, to the question of what Marilyn's memory and spirit calls us to do and be. I feel that this is what honoring her legacy means.

For now, the traumatic circumstances of Marilyn Buck's final year make all this exceedingly difficult.

When she died, some months before her 63rd birthday, she had served a total of nearly 30 years behind bars. The last 25 years were a continuous long march from arrest/capture in 1985 to her release in mid July 2010. Severely weakened by cancer, she finally left the prison camps and was able to live among us, outside the wire, for 20 days.

During this time Marilyn visited with a lot of dear friends, supporters and family. She got to embrace some of her co-defendants who'd been released years earlier. She spoke on the phone, corresponded by email with more, and was cared for by deeply loving people among whom were my daughters, Ona and Gemma. As she has been for the past quarter century, her close comrade and attorney, Soffiyah Elijah, was a constant protecting presence.

There's just no getting around the great misfortune of her life's ending only 20 days after she left that federal prison system which had held her continuously under the gun since 1985. Her will power was enormous and to remain vitally alive it had to be.

Can we even allow an hour to extend our imagination towards all the wonderful everyday things that she hoped to be able to do? What it would mean to be able to eat a good salad, to sit in the park, to spend as much time as she wanted with whomever she wanted, to walk outside in moonlight, to go dancing?

She could stretch out in her own home; one that wasn't controlled by heavily armed state authorities. She was thinking about what kind of j-o-b might work out. Marilyn's family, people in the Bay Area and around the country, political prisoners and social prisoners with whom she'd spent much of her life, all expected her long internal exile to end in celebration and happiness. Above all. Above all this. Marilyn wanted to live.

She'd been thinking about how to heal herself from the chronic, complex stress of prison and what she wanted to accomplish with her life. In other words: during the early part of the last year and a half, Marilyn had begun allowing herself to really believe that she was finally getting out.


Marilyn Buck with Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael) at Dublin FCI, 1994.

I think sometimes that even those of us who do prison work and have visited political prisoners over many years may not always consider how difficult it can be, for people enduring very, very long sentences in hardened institutions, to dwell on their past and/or the future. No matter how many visiting rooms I enter, there is a real gap between people who live inside the wall and those of us outside. The weight of what has been lost and will never come to be can build melancholy and despair in the healthiest of hearts.

So when Marilyn could finally dare to consider what taking her dreams towards a real future outside might mean -- many of us felt her exhilarating gust. As political supporters and friends we had an emotional stake in her freedom and in her victory over the FBI and Bureau of Prisons. This national political police-prison regime, so central to the deep, permanent state structure of Empire, has never stopped trying to break her and the more than 100 other U.S. political prisoners down.

I can feel Marilyn resisting the hint of any effort to make her heartbreak and suffering special by reminding us that
what's happening to me is what happens to thousands of imprisoned women and men who get sick in the system... remember that there are 2 million people caught somewhere in the prison-industrial complex -- if you're going to write about me, remember I stand and fall with them.
Even as a release date of August 8, 2010 came into range, Marilyn's medical symptoms were emerging with force. She was acutely aware that other political prisoners with legally sound parole dates had, at the last minute, been denied release due to political pressure and legal trickery.

One of the well-known agonies of imprisonment is that medical care -- as it is for millions of the non-insured -- is often atrocious. I live in California where the state prison system, which holds nearly 200,000 people, has been under a court appointed special receiver for years because of woefully inadequate medical facilities.

Political prisoners with life threatening illness have faced foot dragging, neglect, and worse from their jailers. Lolita Lebron spoke about the severe medical abuse and radiation burns suffered by Puerto Rican Nationalist Party leader, Don Pedro Albizu Campos, when he was held in U.S. prisons more than a half century ago. My dear comrade, Black Panther/BLA political prisoner Bashir Hameed, who died of cancer in 2008 was, at one point, assaulted by police in his hospital room.

From her own experience, and knowledgeable of the cruel battles other political prisoners have waged for treatment, Marilyn was constantly forced to weigh how to effectively advance her health care needs before a totalitarian administration adept at both routine and calculated neglect.[5]

After MANY months of worsening symptoms during which she regularly requested and insisted on evaluation/treatment AND WAS DENIED, she finally received a cancer diagnosis around New Year 2010. Major surgery followed about three weeks later and Marilyn reported that she was told the doctors were optimistic that they'd removed the malignancy.

To my limited knowledge she had no follow up scans or any professional post surgical care by her doctors for well over a month. It's difficult to see how this can be said to meet any standard of acceptable medical practice. She received help changing her postoperative dressing from fellow prisoners. The Bureau of Prisons was very slow to diagnose her. They were slow to move and treat her. On March 12th she was informed the cancer had metastasized to her lungs.

Very early on the morning of March 13, 2010 -- the day of the Spark's Fly gathering in Oakland (an annual event organized by women to support women political prisoners) which drew nearly 500 supporters from around the country to celebrate her impending release and the dawn of a new life -- I was one of the friends she called to tell the devastating news. In only six months time, plans for life after prison turned into a last ditch battle to survive and get out at all.

Soon thereafter, Marilyn went to the Carswell federal medical facility in a suburb of Fort Worth, Texas. She would be transported from this medical prison to a local hospital for cancer treatment. Two women who she knew well were also being held at Carswell and they helped her very much.

Miranda and I were able to visit Marilyn in Texas on May 1, 2010. We spent time together on Mayday and the next. Marilyn said, "if it was up to my will, I'd have this thing beat." Gaunt and fatigued she used oxygen to help with breathing. She held herself with that incredible dignity and steadiness all who know her have experienced.

Marilyn said, "so many women here are medicalized into the role of patient and the setup here is about making us this way. I do not want to become this. I think about how my mother kept herself out of the hospital until nearly the end because she didn't want to become like that." She went on to confirm that, "In the eight weeks after surgery in Stanford (Stanford University in California) when I had no follow up tests -- the cancer ran wild."

She was very very sick and we could see with our untrained eyes that this was a battle our elegant sister was unlikely to survive.

The question of government's role in Marilyn's death is in the air. It merits a real discussion about whether and how we might hold the state responsible for its (mis)treatment of her. This stark tragedy and rupture of hope has led some to believe she was killed by the government. Others dismiss this way of looking at it as conspiracy theorizing and paranoia. I have heard people, including former political prisoners, express either of these opposing viewpoints.

In a way this process parallels the anger and sadness I feel. Saying "they did it" mobilizes rage against the system, honestly recognizing the very difficult prognosis of people with leiomyosarcoma, even under the best treatment situations, brings me to powerlessness and great sorrow. Ultimately, while this polarized way of looking and feeling is not so helpful, grieving -- for me -- involves allowing myself to go through all of it.

We do know that living for long periods in hostile institutional environments of deprivation and stress degrades the immune system, damages emotional well-being and can shorten the lifespan. Marilyn respected her doctor in Texas, felt that she had her best interests at heart and was giving her the right chemotherapy treatment. We do know that a stress-free, loving environment, excellent diet and adjunctive treatments were not available. We do know that personnel at Carswell made cruel comments to her expressing "surprise" that she was still alive.

Last year, during the many months prior to her diagnosis, when she was working through her own channels to get the administration to act, Marilyn didn't want her supporters to launch a public pressure campaign. I know that during the summer and fall of 2009 when this possibility was raised, her response was to tell us to wait. She was concerned that such a mode of action could be counterproductive.

Throughout her life Marilyn took responsibility for her choices. And although I have kicked myself for not struggling with her more about this, it was her decision. In the face of our real powerlessness to reverse the outcome, her traumatic reality needs to be suffered, held, and borne.

But what we can refuse to accept -- and work to change -- is the incarceration of the remaining political prisoners. We can come together to free them and to try our best to make sure that no more die behind the walls. We can hold the repressive apparatus responsible. By doing so we contribute to a political and ethical environment that will help the untold resisters of today and the future who will undoubtedly rise and be jailed by our government. By holding the state responsible we challenge their vast, malignant system of social control that holds more than 2 million people: the majority of whom are poor and people of color.


keyword: She put her foot down and lived

Marilyn was out of prison for 20 days and in this time she lived to the loving limits of the possible. Miranda and I were honored to be able to visit her as I know others were. We brought the glorious quilt, Marilyn Freedom, made by women in the Bay Area, and presented it to her. I said, Marilyn you always were my John Brown. It pleased her when I thanked her for getting our comrades and me out of a Junction, Texas, jail in March 1969 (with a lawyer and bail) where we'd been held for a week.

We were on our way to the SDS national council meeting in Austin and were busted at a roadblock. Things looked like they might turn violent in a small town Texas way. She laughed in that knowing, sly way of hers. Miranda gave her a long massage and the three of us held each other in silence, sharing a deep recognition of love and farewell.

Now, months later, on fog-glistened evenings like this in San Francisco when I can only bear to be alone -- and when solitude too is unbearable -- great rip tides of grief keep on coming in as though pulled by the pull of the weeping moon.

The moon is water. A sob throws open windows to the monsoon. Fragments of breath drift off. A house of living spaces falls into silence; memories of Marilyn's last year hurling past into that unforeseen horizon. Her-eyes-on us. I spray-paint the wall red: she deserved more.

From the websites and the blogs I feel the many who are weeping and honoring yet, in this same moment, can't those who knew or met her even once hear her voice speaking directly without panic, as though she has not fallen?

If I could I would organize a demo of we small earthlings against her death and we'd storm heaven to return her to live among us.

Yesterday, the sky over the city was enormous. A woman in a wheelchair was shopping for marigolds at the farmer's market. Open my eyes. The mirage builds itself; it is weightless and real.

Marilyn's articulate face turns from a wheelchair backlit by the sun of freedom in Brooklyn.

I want to impress her face into the great wall of the universe so that she can be seen from all points, accessible deep into tomorrow.


In 2004, Marilyn wrote an essay, The Freedom to Breathe[6]
I am skinny-dipping. Stripping off my clothes, running into the water, diving down naked to disappear for a few breaths from the shouts and sounds of the world. Shedding clothes, embarrassments, care. The surface breaks as I return for air. For a few moments, I am free, opened, beyond place, beyond space...

Deepening my breath, lengthening my spine, I learn to discard my preconceptions and expectations – all the many hopes and fears and attachments that have given shape to my life. I learn to lay aside anxiety about what I am missing, what I do not have, what might happen to me in here. I confront the fact that I am, in truth, uncertain about whether I really want to release my fears, my anger. I am conflicted. Without the armor of my anger and self-righteousness, I become intimate with the many forms of suffering in this prison world – and so I feel vulnerable, exposed.

Each day presents a new confrontation with reality. I want to run; instead, I breathe. One breath – the freedom to choose my response in that moment. In sitting, I encounter joy; I know that through this practice I can arrive at a place of genuine peace. The path is before me. It is my choice to follow.
In the "everywhen," which comes late at night when I cannot sleep, I see Marilyn walking under a wide canopy of amiable stars. She's not in this world, but I can see her very clearly from here in San Francisco.

A woman of 62 years, whole, restored, vigorous, and trembling with excitement. She's talking with other animated souls of the big-hearted revolutionary dead from all the ages that have come and gone on earth. They're wondering together about how they might assist us.

I'm still running with her chimes of freedom.

[Felix Shafer became an anti-imperialist/human rights activist while in high school during the late 1960's and has worked around prisons and political prisoners for over 30 years. He is a psychotherapist in San Francisco and can be reached at felixir999@gmail.com.]
See "Felix Shafer: Mourning for Marilyn Buck, Part I" / The Rag Blog / January 13, 2011
and "Felix Shafer: Mourning for Marilyn Buck, Part II / The Rag Blog / January 26, 2011
Read earlier articles about Marilyn Buck on The Rag Blog.

Footnotes

[1]Two of Marilyn's comrades, Susan Rosenberg and Silvia Baraldini together with Puerto Rican Independence fighter and teacher Alejandrina Torres, were held in the underground Lexington (Control) High Security Unit, which was condemned by Amnesty International and denounced as a psychological torture center by the campaign which eventually forced its closure of in 1988. As this unit was being forced to close, the Bureau of Prisons was building many more control unit prisons. See the 1990 documentary film, Through the Wire, by Nina Rosenblum, on PBS.

[2]On Self-censorship, by Marilyn Buck. Published by Parenthesis Writing Series. ISBN 1-879342-06-5. 1991. Currently out of print.

[3]See her CD: Wild Poppies available from Freedom Archives & chapbook: Rescue the Word available from Friends of Marilyn Buck at marilynbuck.com

[4]Her poetic collaborators intend to see Inside Shadows published by a major poetry press sometime in 2011. This is one aspect of our continuing collaboration with Marilyn. Check www.marilynbuck.com for this and other important ongoing information.

[5]A growing number of U.S. political prisoners have died of cancer and other illnesses in prison. An incomplete list: Albert Nuh Washington, Kuwasi Balagoon, Merle Africa, Teddy 'Jah' Heath, Richard Williams, and Bashir Hameed. Others have faced and are facing life-threatening challenges both inside and after release on parole.

[6]Tricycle: The Buddhist Review,
Vol. XIII, No.3, page 84, Spring 2004

The Rag Blog

Wisconsin: For a General Strike Now!- From The Internationalist Group

Markin comment:

Over the past few week as the events concerning the fate of collective bargaining rights, the core of any union’s reason for existence, of Wisconsin’s public workers unions have unfolded I had joined the voices of those who have argued that passage of the ant-iunion legislation by the Republican Senate majority should trigger the call for a one day general strike of all Wisconsin as the start of a push back. Well that day has arrived and every pro-labor militant from Madison to Cairo (Illinois or Egypt, it matters not) should be joining their voices in that call, and agitating in their unions and other organization to carry it out. The lines could not be more clearly drawn, the survival of the Wisconsin public workers unions are at stake, the survival of all public workers unions are now at stake, and the survival of unionism in the United States as well. This is only the start of the right-wing onslaught. Let Wisconsin’s labor response make it the end. Fight for a one day general strike now!


Wisconsin: For a General Strike Now!-by Internationalist Group

Email: internationalistgroup (nospam) msn.com (unverified!)
Phone: 212-460-0983
Address: Box 3321 Church Street Station, New York, NY 10008 USA 15 Mar 2011
A law challenging the very existence unions of government workers has just been rammed through the legislature in Wisconsin. In addition, wages have been slashed by up to 10 percent to make up for cuts to health insurance and pensions. The labor movement and workers nationwide and internationally are vividly aware of the stakes. There has been a lot of talk in the last three weeks about a general strike. The Wisconsin South Central Labor Federation even voted to authorize one. But now that the moment of truth has arrived, the union bureaucrats have gotten cold feet. They are doing everything to prevent strike action and instead to divert anger at this vicious law into a drive to recall Republican senators, to be replaced by Democrats, whose “alternative” budget bill would also have drastically slashed wages and benefits. There should be no delay: this is the hour for powerful labor action. A general strike is needed to shut down Wisconsin now!
Defeat Governor’s Legislative Coup d’État
Wisconsin: For a General Strike Now!
Break with the Democrats, Republicans and All Capitalist Parties!
Build a Class-Struggle Workers Party!

A law challenging the very existence unions of government workers has just been rammed through the legislature in Wisconsin. In addition, wages have been slashed by up to 10 percent to make up for cuts to health insurance and pensions. The labor movement and workers nationwide and internationally are vividly aware of the stakes. There has been a lot of talk in the last three weeks about a general strike. The Wisconsin South Central Labor Federation even voted to authorize one. But now that the moment of truth has arrived, the union bureaucrats have gotten cold feet. They are doing everything to prevent strike action and instead to divert anger at this vicious law into a drive to recall Republican senators. To be replaced by whom? The Democrats’ “alternative” budget bill would also have drastically slashed wages and benefits.

We have said from the outset that “It will take nothing less than a statewide general strike to defeat labor hater Walker.” But we warned , “union leaders block militant action as they chain workers to the Democrats” (The Internationalist leaflet, 18 February). There should be no delay: this is the hour for powerful labor action. For a general strike to shut down Wisconsin now!

When Governor Scott Walker announced on February 11 a bill to eliminate collective bargaining rights for almost all state, county and municipal employees, except for the Wisconsin State Patrol and firefighters, it was a blatant attempt to destroy public-sector unions. Using a phony state “fiscal crisis” as an excuse, its intent was to rip up a half-century of workers’ hard-won rights. Walker and his Republican cohorts tried to ram this draconian union-busting law through the state legislature in a matter of a couple days, declaring an end to hearings of the joint finance committee after only a few hours. But the working people of Wisconsin reacted angrily and massively, taking to the streets in huge numbers to emphatically demand, “Kill the Bill!”

Walker’s position, as one commentator put it, was “my way or the highway” – so the Democratic state senators took him at his word and drove off to Illinois, depriving the governor of the enhanced quorum required to vote on fiscal bills. As thousands of protesters occupied the state Capitol for more than two weeks and tens of thousands repeatedly protested outside (more than 100,000 ringing the square on three Saturdays running), the wannabe Duce of Madison was stymied, and increasingly frustrated. Sending police across the state line to kidnap legislators was ruled out. He admittedly considered sending provocateurs into the protests, but dropped that for tactical reasons. Finally on Wednesday, March 9 the governor decided he had had enough of democratic niceties and proceeded to carry out what can only be called legislative coup d’état.

Walker had aides take scissors to slice out the budgetary provisions of the bill, hoping to do away with the need for a “superquorum” (while also eliminating the supposed reason for such draconian action). The Senate majority leader then called a vote on less than two hours notice, and at 6 p.m. held a hurried Senate-Assembly conference committee that lasted only a few minutes. Moments later, the Senate gaveled through the excised “budget repair” bill by an 18-1 vote with no Democrats present. On Thursday, the Assembly dutifully voted the anti-labor, and on Friday the governor signed it, hoping to cancel union rights with a stroke of a pen. But the issue will not be decided by parliamentary sleight of hand – workers’ rights can only be won and defended through hard class struggle on the streets and in the plants.

Working people and defenders of democratic rights in Wisconsin are ready and willing to fight. The minute word leaked about the plan to drum the bill through the Senate, people headed to the Capitol in droves to try and stop this outrage. The Wisconsin State Journal (10 March) headlined the next day: “Thousands Storm Capitol As GOP Takes Action.” The article described the pandemonium:

“Thousands of protesters rushed to the state Capitol Wednesday night, forcing their way through doors, crawling through windows and jamming corridors, as word spread of hastily called votes on Gov. Scott Walker's controversial bill limiting collective bargaining rights for public workers….

“Shortly after 8 p.m. Wednesday, hundreds of protesters gathered outside the locked King Street entrance to the Capitol, chanting ‘Break down the door!’ and ‘General strike!’

“Moments later, police ceded control of the State Street doors and allowed the crowd to surge inside, joining thousands who had already gathered in the Capitol to protest the votes….

“At one point, officials estimated up to 7,000 people had spilled into the Capitol, some coming through doors and windows opened from the inside, including one legislative office and several bathrooms. Some door knobs and door handles were removed….”

Union officials issued angry statements: Marty Beil, executive director of the Wisconsin State Employees Union, said that the governor and his cronies had turned Wisconsin into a “banana republic.” Phil Neuenfeldt, president of the Wisconsin State AFL-CIO, said that “Senate Republicans have exercised the nuclear option to ram through their bill attacking Wisconsin's working families in the dark of night.” But when it comes to labor action, it’s a different story. Even as protesters were chanting “general strike” while trying to break down the doors of the Capitol, the union tops were preaching caution.

The next day the Wisconsin State Journal (11 March) reported, “‘General strike’ has been one of the chants that resounded through the Capitol during massive protests Wednesday and Thursday after the Legislature passed a bill that would remove bargaining rights for about 175,000 workers and create major obstacles to basic operations for unions representing teachers, state workers and local government employees.” But, the paper said, “Union leaders say the Republicans' fast-track passage of the bill has fueled strike talk, but for now most are urging legal measures such as recall of Republican legislators as a way to repeal the law.”

Teachers are a main target of Walker’s law. Even though enough Madison teachers called in sick four school days to shut down the schools, and many others around the state did likewise so they could join the protests at the Capitol, Wisconsin State Education Association Council president Mary Bell urged her union’s 98,000 members not to walk out. Instead, the Madison teachers union, MTI, concentrated on negotiating a concessionary contract with the local school board before Walker’s new law kicks in. The agreement, which would extend the contract through mid-2013, would take an estimated $3,900 annually out of the pay check of the average teacher, amounting to a 7.35% wage cut.

A number of other contracts have been extended, some until 2014, but those covering 39,000 state workers expire today (March 13), because two Democratic senators voted against them (one was later rewarded by Walker with a plum state government job). Currently the union tops are pushing to recall Republican legislators, and various legal actions. Suits have been announced charging that Walker violated the state law on open meetings, since the public was excluded from the Senate vote; the conference committee and Senate vote violated a provision of the state Constitution requiring 24 hours notice before a vote by a government body. The Madison district attorney says he is investigating, etc. But at most such tactics would only delay the law.

Usually when union leaders want to drag their heels and head off militant action, they put the blame on the membership, saying the ranks aren’t ready. Certainly, to undertake a general strike in this country that hasn’t seen one in more than 60 years would take a lot of guts and gumption. But of all the times in recent memory, right now, as workers stand to lose thousands of dollars in wages and any semblance of job security, is when they are most likely to take such a bold step. And many are ready. “General strike” was once again a frequent chant among the 150,000 trade-unionists and supporters (including quite a few from neighboring and far-away states) who filled Capitol Square and all the way down State Street on Saturday

Talk of a general strike has not just been whistling in the wind. On February 21 the South Central Labor Federation voted that “SCFL endorses a general strike, possibly for the day Walker signs his budget repair bill.” At the same time it set up an education committee to prepare materials for union locals about how to fight “this naked class war waged upon us.” A history professor at Macalester College (St. Paul, MN), Peter Rachleff, prepared a brief history of general strikes, pointing to the 1886 May Day struggles for the eight-hour work day. In Milwaukee, the governor called out the National Guard to squelch a strike that shut down virtually every factory in the city (as Walker threatens to do today), killing seven strikers. Thus serious preparation for a strike should include organizing workers defense guards.

The SCFL educational materials include a “how to” guide on strike preparations by Dan La Botz of Labor Notes on the series of “Days of Action” in various cities in Ontario in 1995-98. Like many one-day “general strikes” in Europe, these were not real general strikes which pose a contest for power, over which class shall rule, but rather a series of labor demonstrations whose ultimate purpose was to moderate the anti-labor policies of the provincial government of Tory (Conservative) premier Mike Harris. La Botz doesn’t mention that they failed to do that. But even if they had brought down Harris, what was the alternative: the discredited labor-backed New Democratic Party? The NDP was voted out of office after imposing a wage freeze and curtailing bargaining rights of public sector workers?

This underlines that a general strike is ultimately and inevitably political. Many in Wisconsin portray the battle as one against the Republican governor and legislators and reactionary forces such as the Tea Party movement and Americans for Prosperity, the political action committee of Charles and David Koch, millionaire funders of ultra-rightist outfits who were Walker’s biggest financial backers. The toilet paper kings (Koch Industries owns the Georgia-Pacific paper company) are sinister for sure, but the far right are not the only ones going after labor these days. In New York state, a liberal Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, got elected on a union-bashing platform and is demanding $450 million in givebacks while threatening 10,000 layoffs. And nationally Barack Obama has imposed a wage freeze on federal workers while spearheading attacks on teachers, even supporting the firing of an entire district teaching staff in Rhode Island.

Illusions in the Democratic Party are a big problem in Wisconsin. As a result of their grandstand play of decamping to Rockford, Illinois, the 14 Democratic senators were hailed by the protesters demonstrating against Walker’s union-busting bill. On Saturday, when they returned to Madison, supporters chanted “Fab(ulous) 14, our heroes.” They then paraded in a line around the Capitol with senators and the crowd chanting “thank you” to each other. State Assembly Democrats sported their orange T-shirts claiming to support Wisconsin working families. But for all their phony “friend of labor” rhetoric, the Democrats were prepared to vote for all the budget cuts the governor wanted. They only want to preserve the unions’ bargaining rights (and dues check-off), because labor is a key source of funds for this capitalist party.

Just about every left-wing and self-proclaimed socialist group in the country has written about the events in Wisconsin, which are the biggest upsurge in labor struggle in decades in the U.S. Mostly it is just cheerleading, ducking the key issue of the Democrats. In 20 articles on Wisconsin, the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), a Stalinoid-reformist outfit, assiduously avoiding taking on the Democratic Party. Its main activity in Wisconsin was circulating a petition to “tax the rich,” lending credence to Walker’s talk of a budget deficit. (While claiming there was a $137 million budget shortfall this year, right after taking office he legislated $140 million in tax breaks for businesses, banks and industry.)

The problem is not lack of money – right now the Federal Reserve is funneling tens of billions of dollars to the banks at essentially 0% interest, not to mention the trillions they gave to Wall Street for the “bailout” and hundreds of billions paid to business under the “stimulus” bill. It is not the job of revolutionaries to give helpful hints to the bosses’ government about its budget priorities and how to finance them. We have nothing against taxing the rich, but a “millionaires tax” will not do a thing to defend working people. To think that it would is to promote illusions that the capitalist pols would spend money on education, workers pensions, health care if only they had the dough. We need to mobilize our power to defeat the attacks on working people, poor, oppressed minorities and other victims of capital.

The social-democratic International Socialist Organization (ISO), one of the biggest pushers of the “tax the rich” nostrum, just published an editorial, titled “Now is the time to fight.” But according to the ISO, a general strike is not the way. It argues that “given the low level of strike activity in the last decade, and the overall decline of the labor movement over the past 30 years,” therefore “calling for a general strike – no matter how enthusiastically it is received – is unlikely to get very far.” Its alternative is to “build union activity in the workplaces” by “organizing pickets before work or noontime marches to other unionized workplaces.” In other words, do anything but don’t strike during working hours. So here the ISO, is actively aiding the sellout bureaucrats in suppressing calls for militant union action.

Another group, the Workers Socialist Web Site, which also goes under the name of the Socialist Equality Party (WSWS/SEP), takes a somewhat different tack. The WSWS chimes in on the need for a general strike, and criticizes the Democrats and union bureaucrats for trying to squelch struggle. But in numerous articles, while referring to Walker’s “anti-worker” law, it never mentions the fact that this is union-busting legislation. The reason why not is simple: the WSWS opposes unions as inherently bourgeois. They support scabbing, and tell workers not to vote for unions in union recognition votes. These scab socialists try to hide this fact by denouncing the bureaucrats, who have hamstrung workers’ struggle for decades. But the unions remain workers organizations, even though they are betrayed by the union misleaders who tie them to the capitalist parties, principally the Democrats.

That is why it is necessary to build a class-struggle opposition in the unions, to oust the pro-capitalist bureaucrats and break with the Democrats and bourgeois politics overall. The Wisconsin union-busting law, by outlawing collective bargaining for government workers aims at destroying public sector unions. Following the decimation of many private sector unions over the last three decades, these are the mainstay of what is left of the labor movement. Walker & Co. would certainly make impossible the class-collaboration policies of business unionists who are willing to sacrifice all sorts of union gains as long as they get to negotiate the sellout. Class-struggle unionists do not call for or rely on such mechanisms as a dues check-off, precisely because the government and the bosses can use it as a weapon to cripple labor by cutting off its finances. But we oppose anti-union attacks as an assault of workers’ rights and gains.

A statewide general strike is urgently needed in Wisconsin, and the time is now. To win against all the union-bashers, it is necessary to promote the political independence of the workers movement and break with both Democrats and Republicans, the partner parties of American capitalism, as well as minor bourgeois parties such as the Greens and sundry reformists (of which the social-democratic NDP in Canada is an extreme example) who only seek to modify the workings of the capitalist system rather than bringing it down. Thus the Internationalist Group, in calling for a general strike in Wisconsin links this to the need to build a class-struggle workers party to lead the fight for a workers government and socialist revolution. ■

Battleground Wisconsin: Corporate Power v. Worker Rights - by Stephen Lendman

Battleground Wisconsin: Corporate Power v. Worker Rights

Battleground Wisconsin: Corporate Power v. Worker Rights - by Stephen Lendman

The issue in Wisconsin and across America is simple and straightforward - a corporate-financed offensive to crush unions, returning workers to 19th century harshness with no rights whatever.

As a result, well-funded union busting organizations want collective bargaining rights abolished, social benefits ended, wages kept low as possible, and corporations allowed to exploit workers freely, unimpeded by legal protections and rights.

A previous article discussed right-wing think tanks infesting America's landscape, accessed through the following link:

http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2011/03/waging-war-on-working-americans.html

Generously funded, they include the Koch Family Foundations (established by David, Charles and Claude R. Lambe), several Scaife ones, John M. Olin Foundation, Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Smith Richardson Foundation, various others, and George Soros' Open Society Foundations, pretending to be liberal, when, in fact, he supports everything smelling money.

Their agenda includes marketplace sovereignty, deregulation, privatization of government services, ending popular entitlements, social spending, and affirmative action, prioritizing business friendly policies, waging class war, controlling electoral politics and supportive media backing everything on their wish list.

Among many others, their beneficiaries include the American Enterprise Institute, Cato Institute, Federalist Society, Heritage Foundation, Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, and Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, founded in 1919 by Herbert Hoover, best known for inaction while America sank into depression while he was president.

Less known ones include:

American Crossroads

Founded by Karl Rove, it's "dedicated to renewing America's commitment to individual liberty, limited government, free enterprise, and a strong national defense," entirely benefitting business at the expense of workers.

Americans for Job Security

An anti-labor insurance industry front group backing unrestricted free enterprise, tax cuts for the rich, job-killing trade agreements, and worker rights ended for greater profits.

The Club for Growth

A neofascist organization wanting Medicare and Medicaid abolished, Social Security privatized, unions eliminated, and business given unimpeded power to plunder and exploit freely.

Americans for Prosperity

A virulently anti-labor group backing all of the above and more, including the right to destroy US jobs by offshoring them freely to the world's lowest wage locations.

Freedom Works

Led by former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey, it conducts aggressive campaigns against worker rights nationally.

Center for Union Facts

Led by pro-business lobbyist Richard Berman, it focuses on anti-union propaganda, destroying worker rights, obstructing organizing efforts, and promoting other anti-union initiatives.

National Right to Work Foundation and Committee

America's oldest anti-union organization, it bogusly claims pro-worker credentials. In fact, it's extremely hostile to high wages, essential benefits, job safety, and favorable working conditions, considered impediments to profits.

Public Service Research Foundation and Public Service Research Council

Composed of small organizations nationwide, they oppose collective bargaining rights for teachers and other public sector workers. In 1981, PSRF led the campaign to fire PATCO strikers, a watershed event weakening organized labor overall.

For-Profit Unionbusters

Describing themselves as "union avoidance firms," "management consultants," or "labor consultants," they use lawyers and other credentialed professionals to manipulate labor laws to subvert organizing efforts and worker rights overall.

These and other groups have full-time staffs, lawyers, and other credentialed professionals conducting media campaigns, seminars, workshops, lobbying efforts, and other initiatives to subvert organized labor for business. Nothing unethical is avoided to accomplish ends they'll go to any extreme to achieve, within or outside the law they freely exploit advantageously, flush with cash to do it.

Annually, they spend tens of millions of dollars for anti-union initiatives, allied with the US Chamber of Commerce - "the world's largest business federation representing the interests of more than 3 million businesses of all sizes, sectors, and regions, as well as state and local chambers and industry associations."

Although most of its members are small enterprises, it overwhelmingly represents giant ones and their campaign for unimpeded free enterprise at the expense of worker rights and small competitors. As a result, it spends millions of dollars annually opposing them.

Wisconsin - Ground Zero Outside the Beltway

A previous article explained March 9 Wisconsin Senate maneuvers described as a corporate coup d'etat, accessed through the following link:

http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2011/03/corporate-coup-detat-in-wisconsin.html

In violation of Wisconsin's open meetings law, requiring "24 hours prior to the commencement of (special sessions) unless for good cause such notice is impossible or impractical," Republican senators passed Gov. Walker's union busting bill with no Democrat members present.

On March 10, Milwaukee Sentinel Journal (SJ) writers Jason Stein, Patrick Marley and Lee Bergquist headlined, "Collective bargaining bill passes; courts, recalls next," saying:

The epic battle ended along party lines after Wisconsin's State Assembly past Walker's anti-union bill 53 - 42, "but only after police carried demonstrators out of the Assembly antechamber." Going forward, "a wider war now remains for both sides, one expected to be fought in the courts and through recall efforts against 16 state senators."

After three hours, legislators cut off debate, refusing to recognize Democrats wanting to speak. They were ignored. Angry worker responses inside followed to no avail. Others there the night before were forced out of the Capitol. On the morning of the vote, they and Democrats were kept out, Rep. David Cullen saying he and others had to climb through a ground floor window to enter.

On March 10, the SJ's editorial headlined, 'Defining Moment," saying:

"Republicans were right to demand more of government workers (but) were wrong to demand this much." In fact, "(r)eason (took) a holiday in Wisconsin politics. Civility along with it....Republicans got what they wanted Thursday: a flawed and divisive bill," destroying hard-won collective bargaining rights and more. "Gov. Scott Walker (and his) party may now reap the whirlwind."

"This is a war of attrition now - one that has been nationalized because of the implications for a key Democratic constituency in a key battleground state with a presidential election coming."

Indeed so, and it might help congressional Democrats solidify control in both Houses and give a failed anti-populist president a second term by default, fearing a worse alternative when, in fact, there's not a dime's worth of difference between either party, especially on major issues.

On Thursday night, White House press secretary Jay Carney said Obama understands state budget problems but opposes "denigrat(ing) or vilify(ing) public sector employees." Noticeably, however, he said nothing publicly to support them, expressing silent approval for destroying their rights, a policy his administration endorses.

On March 11, Washington Post writer Karen Tumulty headlined, "Wisconsin governor wins his battle with unions on collective bargaining," saying:

The epic battle ended along party lines after Wisconsin's State Assembly past Walker's anti-union bill 53 - 42, "but only after police carried demonstrators out of the Assembly antechamber." Going forward, "a wider war now remains for both sides, one expected to be fought in the courts and through recall efforts against 16 state senators."

Despite winning legislatively, "the political battle over public employees and their rights to bargain is likely to continue - not only in Madison." Fervor is resonating among workers signaling "it's not over." In fact, the struggle just began with strong public support against Republican thuggishness.

On March 11, Murdoch's Wall Street Journal editorialized, "Taxpayers Win in Wisconsin," saying:

"Congratulations to Wisconsin Republicans, who held together this week to pass their government union reforms....maybe there's hope for taxpayers after all. (Walker's) reforms change the balance of negotiating power in ways that give taxpayers more protection."

In fact, over 200,000 Wisconsin public workers pay taxes, less of them ahead as their wages are cut, ranks thinned, and other rights lost, affecting them and their families, unimportant people for Murdoch's Journal, one-sidedly pro-business like the boss.

According to Democrat pollster Mark Mellman, Walker is "winning the battle through pure, uncompromising force, but he's losing the war."

Unless reversed, however, state workers are losing their rights. Besides collective bargaining, their healthcare and pension contributions will double, resulting in pay cuts ranging from 8 - 20% ahead of more planned reductions coming. Moreover, the measure reads:

"This bill authorizes a state agency to discharge any state employee who fails to report to work as scheduled for any three unexcused working days during a state emergency or who participates in a strike, work stoppage, sit-down, stay-in, slowdown, or other concerted activities to interrupt the operations or services of state government, including specifically purported mass resignations or sick calls. Under the bill, engaging in any of these actions constitutes just cause for discharge."

In addition, the governor may unilaterally declare "state of emergency" authority to fire striking workers, and under the section titled, "Discharge of State Employees," stating:

"The Governor may issue an executive order declaring a state of emergency for the state or any portion of the state if he or she determines that an emergency resulting from a disaster or imminent threat of a disaster exists."

In other words, he can unilaterally seize dictatorial power and do what he wishes, especially regarding public worker rights and job security. They're gone unless resurrected by a sustained, mobilized, united, and committed mass action statewide shutdown for rights too important to lose.

Nonetheless, Democrats and union bosses oppose it, focusing instead on recall campaigns and lawsuit challenges when, in fact, shutting down the whole state is essential and perhaps the only way to achieve justice.

However, in a March 9 conference call, Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC) president Mary Bell, representing 98,000 public education employees, told teachers "to be at work tomorrow as we determine the next step to have the voices of Wisconsin's workers to be heard."

Wisconsin Public Employees Union president Marty Beil said "peaceful demonstrations" and recall campaigns are the only way to "change the face of government" when doing so will take months and may fail.

Democrats were just as submissive, supporting every anti-worker provision except ending collective bargaining, and they were willing to compromise on that. So was Jesse Jackson. Ahead of the Assembly vote, he gave the official prayer, asking for Republican - Democrat unity, not joining protesters outside demanding justice. Instead, he urged them to "honor (Martin Luther King's) legacy" by voting for Democrats who betrayed them.

Planned Mass Actions

On Sunday, March 13, mass protests are being organized across the state, involving teachers, students, police, firefighters, small business men and women, farmers, unemployed men and women, lawyers, engineers and other professionals, community leaders, seniors, and others for worker justice.

Wisconsin Wave.org says:

"Forward! Not Backward! We won't pay for their crisis! We stand united as never before around a common sense of human dignity. Today we exercise our freedoms of speech and assembly to defend the Wisconsin that we love, its people, and its lands and waters. We call on" everyone to challenge government and "narrow corporate interests that are hijacking our democracy."

It calls for a "Wisconsin Wave of Resistance against corporatization and austerity and for democracy and shared prosperity." It wants all Wisconsinites involved in a common struggle affecting every working person in the state. Taking aim at corporate giants, it says:

"(W)e will not stand by and watch you destroy Wisconsin democracy, Wisconsin's economy, Wisconsin's schools, and Wisconsin's communities. We will not pay for your crisis. We will organize. We will march. We will nonviolently resist your policies and overcome your agenda."

So will courageous supporters, joined by private sector workers, united in a common struggle for justice. They're on their own knowing it's up to them to do what union bosses and Democrats won't - shutting down the entire state proactively. In Wisconsin and across America, nothing less can work. Battle lines are drawn to regain rights too important to lose, never without a fight!

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/.

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / March 12, 2011-In bitter cold rain:Thousands rally at Indianapolis State House

Markin comment: We need a fight to the finish this time. Fight for a general strike.

******
In bitter cold rain:Thousands rally at Indianapolis State House

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / March 12, 2011

INDIANAPOLIS --On Thursday morning, March 10, three buses left the parking lot of a large supermarket in Lafayette, Indiana bound for the huge workers rights rally at the Indianapolis State House.

The buses were sponsored by the United Steelworkers Local 115A and the NAACP. About 100 workers, teachers, and peace and justice activists were on the buses. About two miles away another three buses left for Indianapolis with 100 activists from the Building Trades Council of Tippecanoe County and the Northwest Central Labor Council (AFL-CIO).

The buses were warm, cozy, and the spirit of solidarity pervaded the atmosphere. Travelers were determined to demonstrate their outrage at the rightwing onslaught on workers and education being planned by Indiana Republicans. Arriving about one hour later, riders disembarked from the warm and fuzzy atmosphere of the trip to a bitterly cold, cloudy, and windy rally in downtown Indianapolis.

The rally consisted of speeches, chants, prayers, and exhortations. Thousands of Hoosier workers withstood the cold to express their anger and their clear realization that the quality of their lives was in jeopardy.

Local 115A passed out some literature to articulate the reasons for enduring the cold and shouting for economic justice. They said that:

The struggle in Indiana was inspired by the events in Wisconsin.

The rally was about worker rights, including so-called Right-to-Work legislation and proposals to eliminate the right of teachers to organize.

The right-to-work bill that was not dead as some media had reported would negatively impact workers in both the private and public sectors.

Public sector rights, which need to be defended, had already been weakened by Indiana’s governor, Mitch Daniels.

The struggle in Indiana was not a publicity stunt, copying the movement in Wisconsin. Democratic House members walked out of the legislature and traveled to Illinois to forestall the Indiana body from passing the draconian legislation.

Taxpayers of the state were not funding the walkout by State House Democrats.

The so-called Right-to-Work bill was not the only threat posed to workers in Indiana. One bill would eliminate the secret ballot in union certification elections. Another would remove the right to collective bargaining from public employees at the local level. Another bill would prohibit local communities from establishing living wage laws in excess of the state determined minimum wage.

The struggle in Indiana is about protecting public education. Bills would authorize private firms to be hired to evaluate teacher performance, without any teacher input. School funding could be used to provide vouchers for use in private schools. Schools that did not meet certain performance standards would be transferred to private for-profit corporations.

The campaign to protect public education also required resisting the cutting of funds for colleges and universities.

The struggle for workers rights was relevant to the economy of the entire state of Indiana, not just the 300,000 unionized workers.
Another USW Local 115 document made the motivation for action crystal clear:

We stand at the statehouse as one people, one labor movement, one united group of citizens. We are proud to be union members and union supporters because together we have built Indiana! Whether we are construction workers, teachers or students --whether we clean buildings, deliver health care or manufacture useful products -- we stand together!
There were different assessments of the State House rally in Indianapolis. The conservative Indianapolis Star, on the one hand estimated that only 8,000 workers rallied in Indianapolis, but on the other hand pointed out how cold, windy, and rainy the weather was, suggesting that attendees were truly committed.

One trade unionist, recalling the rally of 20,000 Building Trades workers in 1995 indicated that he could not tell if this rally was bigger or smaller than that one. Another worker said that we needed at least 100,000 at the rally to make a difference.

Several speakers expressed their appreciation for those that attended the rally. AFL-CIO leaders from Kentucky and Wisconsin pointed out that the Indiana struggle was part of a larger movement involving workers from Wisconsin, Ohio, Illinois, New Jersey, and everywhere that the basic standard of living of workers was being challenged.

Perhaps the most poignant statement came from an Iraq war vet who reminded the crowd that $3 trillion had been spent on two costly, foolish wars in the 21st century that helped create today’s economic crisis.

The outcome of the ferment, anger, and rebelliousness all around the world remains unclear. But one fine folk singer, after leading the crowd in a rendition of “This Land is Your Land,” wished the movement well. He recalled Woody Guthrie’s injunction: “Take it easy, but take it.” Perhaps that is where we are at today.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical.]

Just ask 100,000 people!A Perfect Day in Madison, Wisconsin-By Paul Beckett / The Rag Blog / March 13, 2011

Just ask 100,000 people!A Perfect Day in Madison, Wisconsin

By Paul Beckett / The Rag Blog / March 13, 2011

[This is the third of Paul Beckett's reports from Madison for The Rag Blog.]

MADISON, Wisconsin -- Saturday, March 12, 2011. The wind off the frozen lakes was often 20 miles an hour (or more) and from the north. Windchills were in the 20s. It was mainly cloudy. Here and there, old snow and ice remained, and where there was no ice, the Wisconsin Capitol grounds had been trampled into a slippery, muddy morass. And it was beautiful!

Absolutely unprecedented crowds gathered for a whole day of protest events. Police estimates were 100,000 (but exact estimates are impossible). The crowd filled the Capitol square streets, sidewalks and what once were lawns, and then flowed down State Street and Wisconsin Avenue.

This time, a powerful sound system was in place and you could hear the speeches from far out in the crowd. In fact, you could hear them twice as the sound reflected off the taller buildings.

The breadth of social groups protesting Governor Scott Walker’s “union-busting” and public service-cutting Budget Repair Bill was truly awesome. The private sector unions were there (often with major leadership figures). The public service unions (AFSCME and the teachers unions) were there. The firemen, policemen and prison staff were there. Teachers and workers had come from Michigan, where things are also bad.


Farmers staged a tractor parade during the massive Madison protest. Photo by Paul Beckett / The Rag Blog.

Farmers came in, protesting the planned cutbacks in the Medicaid-based programs on which so many of them depend. Late in the morning a tractor parade pushed through the already-dense crowds, festooned with anti-Walker signs (many of them referring to the animal waste that is so familiar to farmers).

But the dominant impression one got was just of PEOPLE: all kinds of people, from all over Wisconsin, unaffiliated, unorganized. Just people. A feeling of complete like-mindedness and shared values and interests linked 100,000 people together.

Thank you, Scott Walker.

By 3 p.m., when the main program began, no one could move. The 14 Democratic senators who had decamped to Illinois to thwart passage of Walker’s bill were welcomed back. Each gave a speech to tumultuous applause and chants of “Thank you! Thank you!” They had not, in fact, stopped the bill. But they had provided almost three weeks for understanding -- and protest -- to develop


Photo by Paul Beckett / The Rag Blog.

Also, the holdout of the “Fab 14” ultimately forced the Walker camp to “pass” their bill in an abrupt night-time procedure that was full of parliamentary improprieties, and perhaps downright illegal.

The speakers (besides the 14, they included Jesse Jackson, Tony Shalhoub, and Susan Sarandon) noted that now the battle continues, but the battlefield changes.

Suits are already being brought to challenge the legality of the law in the courts.

More important in the longer run are the recall campaigns . While “Recall Walker” was a constant theme in signs and chants, under Wisconsin law that effort can not begin until next year. But petitions against eight Republican Senators have been filed, with May 2 deadlines for completion. There was an enormous sense of energy for these yesterday.

Meanwhile, a Utah-based anti-immigration group has already invaded Wisconsin (it is perfectly legal, it seems) to organize recalls against members of the Democratic “Fab 14” who got so much thanks and appreciation yesterday.

Control of the Wisconsin Senate will be determined during the coming summer by the outcome of these efforts.

Those who participated Saturday went home elated and politically energized in a way that few of us have been for some time. But all understood, as well, that Saturday did not mark the end of a battle, but its beginning. It will be a long battle for the future of Wisconsin, and no one can be sure of the outcome. And Wisconsin, in turn, clearly is just one battleground in the broader struggle for the country’s future.

[Dr. Paul Beckett lives in Madison, Wisconsin. He can be reached at beckettpa@gmail.com.]

From The Renegade Eye Blog- IDM- Nepal: Which Way Forward?

Nepal: Which Way Forward?
Written by Adam Pal in Lahore, Pakistan
Friday, 11 March 2011

In Nepal the stalemate in power is continuing while the ideological battle inside the communist movement intensifies. The struggle for power through constitutional means by the largest party in parliament UCPN (M) faced another defeat when on November 1st parliament failed to elect a new Prime Minister for the 16th time. [Originally published in the Think India Quarterly]

Photo: izahorsky 2009The bourgeoisie and ruling elite of Nepal is putting up hurdles against the handing over of power to the Maoists and are using every available means to sabotage the process. The nine month short stint in power by the Maoists also came to a bitter end in May 2009 when they were unable to remove the Army chief.

The Maoists rose to power after they led the Jana Andolan-II in 2006. Hundreds of thousands of people came out onto the streets of Kathmandu and raised their voices against poverty, hunger, unemployment and the despotic rule of King Gyanendra. According to some estimates two and a half million people came out in this revolutionary movement. Power slipped from the hands of the King and was there in the streets to be picked up.

The reluctance of the Maoists to take this power led to a long series of discussions, meetings, walk outs and talks that have resulted in a painful lengthening of the process. Elections were held in April 2008 in which again the masses expressed full support for the Maoists and they emerged as the largest party in the Constituent Assembly.

But since then they proved unable not hold power as it shifts away from the capitalists and landlords that form the ruling elite of Nepal. The class balance of forces in Nepal is still swinging unless there is complete victory of one class over the other.

The ruling classes are unable to get complete grip on the situation as the masses have risen against their exploitation and have expressed a clear verdict against them time and again. Their capitulation to the imperialist masters and inability to carry out any reforms has exposed their true reactionary character in the eyes of the toiling masses. Currently 35 percent of the total population is living below the poverty line, earning less than one US dollar per day while one third of the population has no access to clean water and 85% of Nepalese don't have access to health services. It is one of the poorest countries of the world where 10% of the population has 50% of the wealth while the bottom 40% has only 10%. Prices of basic necessities are always increasing and inflation is very high.

The bourgeoisie even proved incapable of removing the age old monarchy, which could only be overthrown after the revolutionary movement of Loktantra Andolan. Due to their belated entrance onto the arena of history they can never play a progressive role and are destined to be a subservient slave of their imperialist countries. In Nepal even a country like India is acting as an imperialist state, where a big majority of the population lives in poverty and its own bourgeoisie is unable to carry out the historical tasks of the bourgeois revolution which were completed in 17th and 18th centuries in the advanced capitalist countries.

On the other hand the reluctance of the Maoists to take power completely into their hands and crush the ruling elite by expropriating the land, banks and industries in Nepal lies deep in their Stalinist ideology of the two stages. According to this theory the first stage of revolution is a democratic stage in which, supporting the so-called progressive bourgeoisie, the 'revolutionary' party has to complete the tasks of the capitalist revolution and after that at some later stage the path for socialism will be taken. This theory has revealed its bankruptcy time and again since it was propagated by Stalin and is actually a negation of Leninist principles. Lenin and Trotsky who led the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917 never relied on the so-called “progressive” bourgeoisie of Russia to complete its historical tasks but went forward to a socialist revolution under the leadership of the proletariat and completed not only the democratic tasks but built a workers’ state and a planned economy.

Lenin’s April Thesis and the Theory of Permanent Revolution by Trotsky both argue that in a backward country the only path forward is through a socialist revolution. It is the task of the proletariat to carry out the fundamental transformation of society and end poverty, hunger and misery by expropriating the imperialist assets and capital, local capitalists, landlords and nationalizing the commanding heights of the economy and putting them under the democratic control of the workers.

In Nepal we have seen that adhering to the Stalinist theory of two stages has solved nothing and though the monarchy has been abolished the fundamental character of the state is the same and is still a tool of oppression in the hands of the capitalists and landlords. The Maoists' tenure in power also could not change the class character of the state and they were thrown out of office as soon as the movement of the masses started to recede and the ruling classes recovered from their defeat. If the Maoists had gone forward to take socialist measures by expropriating the banks, industry and land, the real strength of these ruling classes could have been broken and the working classes could have been strengthened. As the masses could see the real transformation of society taking place they would have defended the gains of the revolution themselves. But here another important question arises about the dependence of the Nepalese economy on the imperialist powers. Also, with the presence of India and China on its borders how could this socialist revolution survive in a small country?

The bankruptcy of the Stalinist theory of “socialism in one country” again seems evident here which cannot answer this question. However, if we look at the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 we see that its leaders never had an idea of halting the process inside the boundaries of Russia but on the contrary their utmost desire was to spread it to the whole world rapidly. The socialist measures in Nepal can only find support in the proletariat and peasantry of the region and beyond. The Indian bourgeoisie and State can never tolerate such measures and will definitely use every means to sabotage and crush it. They would certainly fear the danger of spreading this revolution inside India’s borders and its proletariat following the example of their Nepalese counterpart and start doing the same. They even can't tolerate the current situation where a revolutionary process has unfolded and is challenging the class nature of Nepalese society. The arrival of the dethroned King Gyanendra in India for a two week visit on 15 November points in the same direction. According to Review Nepal he was going to meet Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh and Congress leader Sonia Gandhi. On the other hand the Chinese government seems to support the Maoist movement in this regard. But first of all a complete understanding of the character of the Chinese State should also be discussed.

In China the planned economy has been gradually dismantled over the last two decades and now it is one of the few largest capitalist economies in the world. Property relations in China have been restored on a capitalist basis and the market economy has taken the place of the planned economy. The Stalinist bureaucracy which emerged after a successful revolution in China has been transformed into a ruling class whose members are the latest billionaires of 21st century. The capitalist restoration in China has also given its State an imperialist character which is using all its potential to exploit as many resources in the world for its profit driven economy. The new emerging conflict between a weakening US imperialism and an infant Chinese imperialism is also creating ripples in the region. Obama's recent visit to Asia to empower other small economies against China has increased the tensions. But the recent conflict between China and US imperialism is quite the opposite to the cold war between the USSR and US where two opposite economies and modes of production were in conflict. Here both have same market economy in their country and therefore where they have conflicts with each other they have their interests tied together in many places. China is the largest exporter of goods to US and many US companies have their plants inside China. In this context China is using the peoples' movement in Nepal as a pawn for its imperialist interests against India and ultimately the US. They will try to restrain this movement inside the democratic farce and parliamentary cretinism.

In the case the movement should go forward towards the expropriation of land, industries and banks, the Chinese State would try its best to sabotage it and if it gets the opportunity it will join hands with the Indian State to crush the movement, as this movement can set an example for the Chinese proletariat who are already struggling for better living conditions and higher wages. The number of strikes and protests are increasing every day where the largest proletariat of the world exists and whose lives have turned into a living hell since the restoration of Capitalist economy. This proletariat is also the real ally of the revolutionary masses of Nepal who can support them by rising against their own ruling class in China. However, the decisive role has to be played by the poor peasants, workers and revolutionary youth of Nepal. More than that, the members and cadres of the UCPN (M) have to play a leading role.

Already a debate is heating up on similar lines inside UCPN (M) and after so many years of armed struggle, protests, strikes, elections and constitutional harping, no fundamental change in the lives of people can be seen. This is the reason for the current fractures opening up in the leadership of the UCPN (M) which held its week-long sixth plenum after five years in Palungtar, Gorkha District which started on 20 November. It was the largest meeting in the party's history in which more than 7000 members participated. In this plenum three documents were presented from the party leadership. The first document was present by the party chairman Prachanda. According to news reports he emphasized on the need for a serious dialogue to draft the constitution and to conclude the peace process. He also criticized the imperialist role of the Indian State. The other document was presented by Vice-Chairman Mohan Kiran Vaidya that challenged Prachanda's line and appealed for returning to the armed struggle. The third document was presented by another Vice-Chairman Baburam Bhattarai. Bhattarai has had differences with Prachanda for the last few years which has resulted in his demotion in the party along with his wife Hisila Yami and his other supporters. He was the Minister of Finance in the August 2008 coalition government.

In the summer of 2009 Bhattarai had openly written about the failure of Stalinist ideology clearly supporting Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution. In The Red Spark (Rato Jhilko), a journal of the UCPN (M) he wrote an article advocating Trotsky's position rejecting the party's line of Stalinist ideas. He wrote:

“Today, the globalization of imperialist capitalism has increased many-fold as compared to the period of the October Revolution. The development of information technology has converted the world into a global village. However, due to the unequal and extreme development inherent in capitalist imperialism this has created inequality between different nations. In this context, there is still (some) possibility of revolution in a single country similar to the October revolution; however, in order to sustain the revolution, we definitely need a global or at least a regional wave of revolution in a couple of countries. In this context, Marxist revolutionaries should recognize the fact that in the current context, Trotskyism has become more relevant than Stalinism to advance the cause of the proletariat”.

Bhattarai was, however, mistaken on one point. In 1917: neither Lenin, nor Trotsky, nor any other leader of the Bolshevik party (not even Stalin himself) considered that the revolution could be confined to one country. Nobody even mentioned this idea before it became the motto of Stalin from 1924 onwards. But regardless of this factual error of Bhattarai, the fact that a senior leader of a traditionally "Stalinist" party recognized the validity of the ideas of Trotsky was a very significant development. This has stimulated a very useful discussion within the Communist movement on the historical roots of Stalinism and the ideas of genuine Marxism.

In his article, Comrade Bhattarai, suggested new strategic directions for his party, summarized in the following points: There is a need to develop Marxism to a new level by analyzing and synthesizing the lessons of China, Russia, Nepal, India etc., and the new initiatives being taken in some countries in Latin America.

The current crisis of capitalism and the previous era of so-called “neo liberal” development have made many, like the Maoist leaders, realize that “today, the globalization of imperialist capitalism has increased many-fold as compared to the beginning of 20th century. Development of information technology has crossed national borders and transformed the world into a village. On the other hand, the inherent unequal and extreme development of capitalist imperialism has caused disparity among different nations”. This is a tentative step in explaining the theory of combined and uneven development. The Nepalese example shows that the country has a mixture of different historical formations within it (feudal, semi-capitalist, capitalist, etc). In the past, the Nepali Maoists used to blame “revisionism” introduced by Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Deng for the failure of socialism in Russia and China, but now they have put the blame squarely on Stalinism. This is a development that should be encouraged.

However, Dr Bhattarai's paper is not accepted by the Stalinist hardliners within the UCPN (M). They have argued that Leon Trotsky was “outside of the Marxist-Leninist ideological current” and his role in the proletarian revolution, as well as his commitment to Marxism, are doubtful and therefore comparing Stalin with Trotsky and drawing conclusions on that basis is subjective thinking and irrelevant.

In a recent paper, Central Committee member, comrade Kushal Pradhan wrote:

“If a simultaneous wave of revolution is necessary to sustain the revolution in each country and if such a position is in line with the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thought, then there is no point in dragging Trotsky into this debate. Secondly, the idea of revolution in a single country belongs to Lenin; and Stalin created the structure of the first socialist state. Stalin might have made some mistakes, but he was a great Marxist and Leninist practitioner and his contribution should not be underestimated.” (The Red Guard, September 2009, pp.18-20)

Comrade Pradhan also argues that the idea of world revolution or Permanent Revolution belongs to Marx and not to Leon Trotsky.

The ongoing debate and the recent inconclusive plenum on the strategic directions of the UCPN (M) has clearly placed the party in a big dilemma: the Nepali Maoists are neither in a position to return to the jungle to start the second edition of the “People's War”, nor are they able to deliver what they had promised to the people through the current “stage of peaceful development of the revolution”. In the past, the UCPN(M) had trained the party cadres exclusively on the basis of Maoism and Stalinism, but the lessons of their 10-year armed struggle have stressed the correctness of the principles of the Permanent Revolution (as synthesized by Dr Bhattarai) and refuted the Maoist-Stalinist theory of revolution, i.e. 'revolution in one country' and the 'two-stage theory'.

The confusion and rift inside the Maoist leadership could be seen in the general strike of May this year. First, a call for the general strike was made which was moving towards success and which had the potential to overthrow the present regime and move towards a Socialist revolution in Nepal. But after 5 days the strike was called off. The leadership 'explained' that the strike was off but the protests would continue. A general strike of such a nature poses the very question of power, of who governs the country. Instead it was used as a measure to put pressure on the government. However, subsequent events showed that the preparations for a general strike were not properly carried out. If the leadership discusses its internal weaknesses in basic ideology and the true ideals of Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 it can move again towards an indefinite general strike until the fall of the bourgeois government.

An indefinite general strike until the fall of a bourgeois government, organized by a communist organization that has the majority of the workers must be based on a serious evaluation of the mood of the masses and there must be serious preparation, campaigning in every workplace and mobilization for its successful turnout. And because such a powerful general strike, which mobilizes the whole of the mass movement, means that one must work not only for the victory of the strike one must be prepared for what comes next and prepare the masses for taking power through an insurrection, with the creation of strike committees in all corners of Nepal, linking the “liberated” areas with the main urban centres, issuing propaganda explaining that the only way to achieve a genuine Constitution that will liberate peasants and workers would be through the mobilization and participation of the masses themselves in the running of the state.

What is required is decisive and bold action to be taken to ensure that the old state apparatus is removed and a new power is built, firmly in the hands of the poor peasants, workers, youth and oppressed people. The conditions for this now exist. In the past the Maoists successfully organized the peasants and controlled large areas of the country. Now they have shown that the urban masses can also be mobilized. The general strike of May [2010] is proof of that. All the forces are lined up for the workers and peasants to take power. The UCPN (M) leaders should review their position and understand the historical task that lies on their shoulders. They are the leaders; they have the authority and they should use it. Otherwise we will have paralysis and the initiative could pass into the hands of the ruling elite.

By leading the masses to power and carrying through a genuine Socialist revolution in Nepal, they would be lighting a beacon in Asia that the downtrodden masses would look up to in countries like Pakistan, India, China, Bangladesh and beyond. Conditions for revolution are maturing well beyond the borders of Nepal. The present world crisis of capitalism is making unbearable living conditions even worse for many of the workers in these countries. They would instinctively move in the direction of solidarity with the Nepalese masses across the South-Asian subcontinent. Parliamentary politics in Nepal has reached its limits. The power is there for the taking and the working masses under the leadership of genuine communists must take it. This is a decisive moment in the history of the class struggle of Nepal.

Dispatch from Madison:Governor Walker’s putsch-By Paul Beckett / The Rag Blog / March 11, 2011

Dispatch from Madison:Governor Walker’s putsch

By Paul Beckett / The Rag Blog / March 11, 2011

[This is the second of Paul Beckett's reports from Madison for The Rag Blog.]

MADISON, Wisconson -- In less than 24 hours, in a series of shocking and unprecedented developments, public sector union and collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin have been eviscerated by a Republican legislative majority controlled by Governor Scott Walker.

What seemed to Democratic legislative members and to neutral observers (but there are few of those in Wisconsin now) a putsch, began about 6 p.m. on the evening of Wednesday, March 9. As coups go, this one clearly was carefully -- even brilliantly -- prepared. The surprise was absolute.

Governor Walker spoke to a news conference on Monday, March 7. He referred to meetings at the Illinois border his staff had had with some of the 14 Democratic state senators who had left Wisconsin on February 17 in order to prevent passage of the “union busting” legislation, SB11. (See my article, “Madison and the Revolution at Home," on The Rag Blog, March 8, 2010.)

A compromise was brewing, Walker implied. “The problem,” Walker said, “is Senator [Mark] Miller.” (Miller is the titular leader of the Senate Democrats.) Maybe it is time, Walker went on, for the Democratic caucus to elect a new leader.

All eyes turned to the Group of 14 Democratic senators: were they divided? Would one or more accept some form of compromise and enable the Republicans to complete their passage of SB11? (The presence of only ONE Democratic senator in the chamber would legitimate the vote passing SB11.] (Read the full text of SB11 here.)

Meanwhile, unperceived, Republicans prepared a trap that would snap shut on Wednesday. The complicated, 144-page “Budget Repair Bill” (SB11) was being taken apart by staff and reformulated, ostensibly to strip out everything BUT the collective bargaining provisions.

The result was labeled a conference amendment to SB11, and was only six pages shorter than the original. But the point was that this new version could be labeled as non-fiscal and would not carry the quorum requirement of the original.

A bizarre reversal of positions was now apparent. Incorporation of the collective bargaining provisions within the Budget Repair Bill, very definitely a “fiscal” measure, had been stoutly justified by Governor Walker on the grounds that they were inseparable from the fiscal repair provisions. (Opponents had argued that the provisions had nothing to do with fiscal “repair” and should be taken out of the Budget Repair Bill and debated separately.)

Now, the Republican position was the opposite. The new version was NOT fiscal. With the quorum requirement changed, whether the Group of 14 were in the Chamber or in Illinois was immaterial. The bill could be passed with Republican votes alone.

The ambush worked perfectly. Democrats and protesters remained focused on the hold-out by the 14 Senators and on the possibility of compromise. Word of Walker’s plan leaked out only at the last minute, late on Wednesday afternoon. Beginning about 5:30 p.m. a cluster of emails, most of them billed “emergency,” appeared in my email inbox. The following, from the Dane County Democrats, is typical:
Breaking Update: Tonight at 6:00 pm in the Senate Parlor we are hearing that Senate GOP is going to split the budget repair bill, fiscal from non-fiscal, and ram it through in the dark of night. Given that they're attempting to ram through the bill without any media attention we wanted to let you know that very important developments are likely to occur tonight at 6:00 pm in the Senate Parlor.

Please be at the capital by 6:00PM TONIGHT!
Actually, I did not receive any of the emails until the next day. I was having a quick dinner a block away from the Capitol at Ian’s Pizza (an enterprise that has become known internationally for its role in keeping the protesters in the Capitol Rotunda sustained). I was on the way to a 7 p.m. debate between Madison’s two mayoral candidates.

Suddenly people were shouting, “To the Capitol. They’re going to pass the bill! Tonight!” People in groups of two, four, six, were hurrying up State Street toward the Capitol. I followed. At the top of State Street was a volcano-shaped mountain of snow (some five inches had fallen the night before). On its peak a tall young man stood shouting in an amazing voice: “Everyone to the Capitol! Everyone to the Capitol!” He waved us onward.

The word spread amazingly. By 6 p.m. hundreds were there; very soon thousands. It was dark. Everyone wanted to enter the Capitol. A long line formed at the only entrance that was (in a limited way) open. The line moved glacially. Inside, on the other side of the revolving door, protesters were packed, waiting, apparently, to be taken one-by-one through the security wanding procedure. Noise was deafening: “Whose house? Our house!”

Soon, however, any pretense of an open Capitol was abandoned; the police closed the doors absolutely, leaving some inside and thousands outside. People were angry.


Photo by Paul Beckett / The Rag Blog.

In the meantime, inside the Senate chamber, the deed was already done. In less than half an hour, a “conference committee” had reported out the revised bill. The committee Chair gaveled the meeting closed as the Democratic minority leader, Peter Barca, was shouting out the many ways in which the meeting was improper under the rules of the Legislature or illegal under state law.

The bill was then instantaneously passed (or “passed”) by the Senate Republicans.

By about 6:25 p.m. it was all done. The session was immediately adjourned, and the Republican Members were reportedly smuggled out of the Capitol building and beyond the crowds through a tunnel. (Their escape and removal by a special Madison Metro bus was not as secret as they would have liked.)

The word spread among the protesters and, more than any other time in the three weeks of protest, the mood was one of deep anger and frustration. Later in the evening some of the inside protesters opened an unguarded outside door. Crowds outside pushed in, brushing aside the police, who had raced to stop them. Thousands ended up inside, chanting, commiserating, venting. Most left by 2 or 3 a.m.

The expectation was that the building would open at 8 a.m. Thursday morning and that the Assembly would begin passage of the “conference amendment” by 9 a.m. In fact, the building did not reopen in the morning. The Department of Administration announced that an “assessment of building security requirements” was in progress. By 11 a trickle of protesters was permitted in as the Assembly slowly began to organize itself for the crucial session to pass the Senate version.

The session, billed a “Special Session” to allow more flexibility with rules and the traditions of the “Body” as it is always called, was brought to order at 12:34 p.m. Incongruously (considering he had been refused entry to the Capitol an hour or so earlier), the Reverend Jesse Jackson was allowed to deliver an opening prayer. He took no sides on the issues, and insisted that the legislators join hands (literally) across the aisle. They did, and then a bitter partisan verbal battle began.

A little over three hours of speeches were allowed. Most of these were from Democratic representatives clad in the bright orange T shirts proclaiming workers’ rights that they had adopted three weeks before. The session was broadcast by WisconsinEye and is available for viewing here.

The Democrats argued the illegality of procedures. They asserted that the bill before the Assembly was not the same one that had been before the Senate, and that senators (they were all Republican) had not been informed, had not been given copies of the new legislation, and could not have understood what they were voting for. They cited the shame brought on “this Body,” and on Wisconsin by all that had been done over the recent days and weeks.

More than that, they condemned the loss of workers’ rights and human rights, and the great harm that would be done to Wisconsin families and communities by the bill. Representative Tamara Grigsby, Democrat from the 18th District, delivered a particularly powerful and moving speech. (Had this reporter been a member of the Republican caucus he would have instantly moved across the aisle, sobbing with shame.)

To no avail. At 3:40 in the afternoon, abruptly, with some 20 representatives still to speak, the chair called for the vote (it is electronic and almost instantaneous), announced that the bill was passed, and adjourned the meeting.

The Republicans once again dematerialized mysteriously from the Capitol building.

It was over. Or, perhaps, just begun. The Democratic Party and labor unions are filing complaints and suits challenging the legality of the bill’s passage. The Governor’s use of the State Patrol (now under the direction of the father of Scott Fitzgerald, leader of the Senate Republicans, and his brother Jeff Fitzgerald, leader of the Assembly Republicans) to enforce the Capitol closures is being challenged.

But it has been understood from the beginning that this is less a legislative battle than a long-term political one that will touch every community and involve every important issue. It is not an exaggeration to say that the future of Wisconsin is at stake. And as Michael Moore has been saying so eloquently, the implications for the nation are huge.

Already planned for Saturday, March 12, is a major protest, bringing together farmers (who will mount a “tractorcade” around the Capitol square), labor, educators, students, liberal-progressives from all over the state, and many members of smaller communities that are becoming aware of the hit their schools and local governments are about to take from the Walker budget. Major speakers are invited, and it is reported that the 14 Democratic Senators will return to thank the public for their support.

Recall campaigns are planned on both sides. Under Wisconsin’s recall law almost a year must go by before a campaign to recall Scott Walker can begin. The same is true of Assembly members. So effectively, only senators are presently subject to recall. A bevy of progressive organizations are organizing campaigns directed against at least four of the Republican senators and, so far, there seems to be enormous energy behind these. Success would shift the Senate back to Democratic hands. The Republican recall campaigns, if they are pursued, would be directed against members of the “Group of 14” representing swing districts.

The political fallout of this tempestuous three weeks events will soon begin to be known. It is interesting, already, that one Republican senator and four Republican representatives voted against the “conference amendment.” And there is speculation that one reason that Scott Walker opted for this radical and legally risky legislative maneuver was that he sensed weakening on the part of other of the Republican senators.

[Dr. Paul Beckett lives in Madison, Wisconsin. He can be reached at beckettpa@gmail.com.]

Source

The Rag Blog

Posted by thorne dreyer at 6:00 PM
Labels: Direct Action, Labor Unions, Madison, Paul Beckett, Rag Bloggers, Reactionary Politcs, Scott Walker, Social Protest, Union Busting, Wisconsin

3 Make/read comments:
Extremist to the DHS said...
It is not an exaggeration to say that the future of Wisconsin is at stake.

Doubtful .... It is true that the future of the democratic party in WI, and to some extent elsewhere, is at stake. Without forced collection of union dues by governments, the slush fund to pay off democrat lawmakers with union money takes a hit. That affects both the unions, who get sweetheart deals from the democrat politicians they buy, and the democrat politicians themselves.

Other than that cast of characters, I am doubtful that anyone else is going to give a crap that public employees have to choose to write out a check to pay their union dues and no longer receive special job perks that average workers never see.

Mar 14, 2011 2:26:00 AM
Gaston Cantens said...
The Governor’s use of the State Patrol to enforce the Capitol closures is being challenged.

Mar 15, 2011 4:56:00 AM
Brother Jonah said...
Yeah, Extremist,we workers are just stupid and subhuman. Alle Sieg Heil am der Korporatisch Reich!

Mar 15, 2011 7:20:00 PM

From The Wisconsin War-Zone- The Lines Are Further Drawn- The Fight For A General Strike Of All Labor In Wisconsin Is Directly Posed-And Solidarity Actions By Those Outside The State- Wisconsin State AFL-CIO Get To It

Markin comment:

Over the past few week as the events concerning the fate of collective bargaining rights, the core of any union’s reason for existence, of Wisconsin’s public workers unions have unfolded I had joined the voices of those who have argued that passage of the ant-iunion legislation by the Republican Senate majority should trigger the call for a one day general strike of all Wisconsin as the start of a push back. Well that day has arrived and every pro-labor militant from Madison to Cairo (Illinois or Egypt, it matters not) should be joining their voices in that call, and agitating in their unions and other organization to carry it out. The lines could not be more clearly drawn, the survival of the Wisconsin public workers unions are at stake, the survival of all public workers unions are now at stake, and the survival of unionism in the United States as well. This is only the start of the right-wing onslaught. Let Wisconsin’s labor response make it the end. Fight for a one day general strike now!
******
Friday, March 04, 2011

On The Question Of General Strikes In Defense Of The Wisconsin Public Workers Unions- Don't Mourn, Organize- A Short Note

Click on the headline to link to a James P.Cannon Internet Archive online article about the lessons of the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934 mentioned in the post below.

Markin comment:

Recently, in the wake of the front-line struggle of the Wisconsin public workers unions (now heightened by the latest news that the Ohio Senate has also voted to curb collective bargaining rights in that state), I, along with others, have been agitating for a one day general strike by organized labor, unorganized, but desperately in need of being organized, workers, and other allies, in support of those efforts. I have also placed the propaganda of others, individuals and organizations, who are advocating this same general position in this space, and will continue to do so as I see it come up as I scan the leftist universe. Before I go on, just to make things clear on this issue, I would draw the reader’s attention to the distinction between propagandizing, the general task for communist organizers in this period pushing issues on behalf our communist future, and agitation which requires/requests some immediate action. The events in the public sector labor movement over the past several weeks, as they have rapidly unfolded, call for immediate action whether we can cause any motion on the issue or not.

That said, I would also note that I have framed my call to action in terms of posing the question of a general strike, the objective need for such action. That proposition is the axis of intervention for leftist and trade union militants today. And that is the rub. Of course, right this minute (and as the Ohio situation foretells maybe only this minute), any such one day general strike would, of necessity, have to be centered in Wisconsin, and the tactical choices would have to be made on the ground there ( how to make the strike effective, what unions to call in, what places to shut down, etc.). My original posting did not make a distinction on location(s)though, and I make none now, about whether such a strike would be localized or not. Certainly, given the centrally of the collective bargaining principle to the lifeblood of any union, and the drumbeat of other states like Ohio, it can hardly be precluded that it could not be a wider strike than just in Wisconsin.

And that is the rub, again. I am perfectly aware, after a lifetime of oppositional politics of one sort or another, that it is one thing to call for an action and another to have it heeded by some mass organization that can do something about it, or even have it taken for more than its propaganda value. And it is the somewhat fantastic quality of the proposition to many trade unionists that I have been running up against in my own efforts to present this demand. Now, as I have noted previously, in France this kind of strike is something of an art form, and other European working classes are catching on to the idea. Moreover, in the old days the anarchists, when they had some authority in the working class in places like Spain,thought nothing of calling such strikes. And some Marxists, like the martyred Rosa Luxemburg, saw the political general strike as the central strategic piece in the working class taking state power. However the low level of political consciousness here, or lack of it, or even of solid trade union consciousness, is what the substance of this note is about.

Although the Wisconsin public workers unions have galvanized segments of the American labor movement, particularly the organized sector (those who see what is coming down the road for them-or who have already been the subject of such victimizations in the roller coaster process of the de-industrialization of America) the hard fact is that it has been a very, very long time since this labor movement has seen a general strike. You have to go back to the 1930s and the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934, or to the San Francisco General Strike of that same year to even been able to provide an example to illustrate how it could take place in this country. That, my friends, is over seventy-five years ago, a long time in anybody’s political book and, more importantly, a couple of generations removed from the actual experience. Hell, it has been as far back as the period immediately after World War II since we have seen massive nation-wide industrial strikes. The closest situation that I can think of that would be widely remembered today, and that was also somewhat successful and well supported, was the UPS strike in the 1990s. All of this points to one conclusion, our class struggle skills are now rather rusty, and it shows.

How? Well, first look at the propaganda of various leftist and socialist groups. They, correctly, call for solidarity, for defense rallies and for more marches in support of the Wisconsin struggle. But I have seen relevantly little open advocacy for a one day general strike. That is damning. But here is the real kicker, the one that should give us all pause. The most recent Wisconsin support rally in Boston was attended by many trade union militants, many known (known to me from struggles over the years) leftist activists, and surprisingly, a significant segment of older, not currently active political ex-militants who either came out for old times sake, or understood that this is a do or die struggle and they wanted to help show their support. In short, a perfect audience before which a speaker could expect to get a favorable response on a call for a political general strike. And that call that day, was made not by me, and not by other socialists or communists, but by a militant from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a well-known union with plenty of militants in it. The response: a few claps in a crowd of over two thousand.

Time has been, is, and will be our enemy here as we struggle to win these pubic workers union fights. Why? Our sense of leftist legitimacy, our class struggle sense has so atrophied over the past several decades that people, political people, trade union political people and even leftist political people have lost their capacity to struggle to win. Still, the objective situation in Wisconsin, hell, in Boston and Columbus, requires that we continue to fight around a class struggle axis. And central to that fight- Fight for a one day general strike in support of the Wisconsin public workers unions!

Out Of The Be-Bop Film Noir Night- The Crime Noir “The Kiss of Death”

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the film noir classic, Kiss of Death.

DVD Review

Kiss of Death, Victor Mature, Coleen Gray, Richard Widmark, directed by Henry Hathaway, 20th Century Fox, 1947

Sure I am an aficionado of film noir, especially those 1940s detective epics like the film adaptations of Dashiell Hammet’s Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon and Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe in The Big Sleep. Nothing like that gritty black and white film, ominous musical background and shadowy moments to stir the imagination. Others in the genre like Gilda, The Lady From Shang-hai, and Out Of The Past rate a nod because, in addition to those attributes mentioned above, they have classic femme fatales to add a little off-hand spice to the plot line, and, oh ya, they look nice too. Beyond those classics this period (say, roughly from the mid-1940s to mid-1950s) produced many black and white film noir set pieces, some good, some not so good. For plot line, and plot interest, the film under review, Kiss of Death, is under that latter category.

But hold on though. Although the plot line is thin, mainly about a middle level career con gone wrong once again who, to save his kids from a fatherless and motherless future (mother having committed suicide), decides to play ball with the law. Thus, chump Nick Bianco (played pretty well by Victor Mature, given what he had to work with) turned stoolie, rat, fink, turncoat and the other ten thousand names for such a wrong gee and the rest of the plot hangs on that idea. Say idea being that it is not good business (and for all I know, maybe, unethical, unethical in the criminal code of conduct, although my own very small youthful experience is that it is "every man for himself") to turn stoolie, especially if the price of “freedom” is to tangle, tango, or whatever with one Tommy Udo. No way, no how, not for anything.

And that is what saves this thing as a crime noir classic, the performance of Richard Widmark as psycho-killer for hire Tommy Udo. Everything about him from minute one says wrong gee, don’t mess. Although, needless to say, Nick will mess (Tommy has threatened his kids and his new honey after all). Yes, although I was only a babe then I will give a retroactive vote to Richard Widmark for that 1947 Oscar he won for best supporting actor. There have been a lot of scary psycho-killers that have come down the pike since then but I would not, and would not advise others, to tangle with this guy. And you would too. Kudos.