On The 150th Anniversary Of The Beginning Of The American Civil War – Karl Marx On The American Civil War-In Honor Of The Union Side

Markin comment:

I am always amazed when I run into some younger leftists, or even older radicals who may have not read much Marx and Engels, and find that they are surprised, very surprised to see that Marx and Engels were avid partisans of the Abraham Lincoln-led Union side in the American Civil War. In the age of advanced imperialism, of which the United States is currently the prime example, and villain, we are almost always negative about capitalism’s role in world politics. And are always harping on the need to overthrow the system in order to bring forth a new socialist reconstruction of society. Thus one could be excused for forgetting that at earlier points in history capitalism played a progressive role. A role that Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and other leading Marxists, if not applauded, then at least understood represented human progress. Of course, one does not expect everyone to be a historical materialist and therefore know that in the Marxist scheme of things both the struggle to bring America under a unitary state that would create a national capitalist market by virtue of a Union victory and the historically more important struggle to abolish slavery that turned out to a necessary outcome of that Union struggle were progressive in our eyes. Read on.
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Articles by Karl Marx in Die Presse 1861

The Anglo-American Conflict

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Written: November, 1861
Source: Marx/Engels Collected Works, Volume 19;
Publisher: Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1964;
First Published: Die Presse No. 332, December 3, 1861;
Online Version: Marxists.org 1999;
Transcribed: S. Ryan;
HTML Markup: Tim Delaney.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

London, November 29, 1861
The law officers of the Crown had yesterday to give their opinion on the naval incident in the Bahama Channel. Their records of the case consisted of the written reports of the British officers who have remained on board the Trent and of the oral testimony of Commodore Williams, who was on board the Trent as Admiralty agent, but disembarked from the La Plata on November 27 at Southampton, whence he was immediately summoned by telegraph to London. The law officers of the Crown acknowledged the right of the San Jacinto to visit and search the Trent. Since Queen Victoria's proclamation of neutrality on the outbreak of the American Civil War expressly lists dispatches among articles of contraband, there could be no doubt on this point either. There remained, then, the question whether Messrs. Mason, Slidell and Co. were themselves contraband and therefore confiscable. The law officers of the Crown appear to hold this view, for they have dropped the material legal question entirely. According to the report of The Times, their opinion blames the commander of the San Jacinto only for an error in procedure. Instead of Messrs. Mason, Slidell and Co., he should have taken the Trent herself in tow as a prize, brought her to the nearest American port and there submitted her to the judgment of a North American prize court. This is incontestably the procedure corresponding to British and therefore to North American maritime law.

It is equally incontestable that the British frequently violated this rule during the anti-Jacobin war and proceeded in the summary fashion of the San Jacinto. However that may be, the whole conflict is reduced by this opinion of the law officers of the Crown to a technical error and consequently deprived of any immediate import. Two circumstances make it easy for the Union government to accept this point of view and therefore to afford formal satisfaction. In the first place, Captain Wilkes, the commander of the San Jacinto, could have received no direct instructions from Washington. On the voyage home from Africa to New York, he called on November 2 at Havana, which he left again on November 4, whilst his encounter with the Trent took place on the high seas on November 8. Captain Wilkes's stay of only two days in Havana did not permit any exchange of notes between him and his government. The consul of the Union was the only American authority with whom he could deal. In the second place, however, he had obviously lost his head, as his failure to insist on the surrender of the dispatches proves.

The importance of the incident lies in its moral effect on the English people and in the political capital that can easily be made out of it by the British cotton friends of secession. Characteristic of the latter is the Liverpool protest meeting organised by them and previously mentioned by me. The meeting took place on November 27 at three in the afternoon, in the cotton auction-rooms of the Liverpool Exchange, an hour after the alarming telegram from Southampton had arrived.

After vain attempts to press the chairmanship on Mr. Cunard, the owner of the Cunard steamships plying between Liverpool and New York, and other high trade officials, a young merchant named Spence, notorious for a work he wrote in support of the slave republic, took the chair. Contrary to the rules of English meetings, he, the chairman, himself proposed the motion to call on "the government to preserve the dignity of the British flag by demanding prompt satisfaction for this affront." Tremendous applause, clapping and cheers upon cheers! The main argument of the opening speaker for the slave republic was that slave ships had hitherto been protected by the American flag from the right of search claimed by Britain. And then this philanthropist launched a furious attack on the slave trade! He admitted that England had brought about the war of 1812-14 with the United States by insisting on searching for deserters from the British Navy on Union warships.

"But," he continued with wonderful dialectic, "but there is a difference between the right of search to recover deserters from the British Navy and the right to seize passengers, like Mr. Mason and Mr. Slidell, men of the highest respectability, regardless of the fact that they were protected by the British flag!"

He played his highest trump, however, at the close of his diatribe.

"The other day," he bellowed, "while I was on the European Continent, I heard an observation made as to the course of our conduct in regard to the United States, and I was unable to reply to the allusion without a blush -- that the feeling of every intelligent man upon the Continent was that we would submit to any outrage and suffer every indignity offered to us by the Government of the United States. But the pitcher goes so often to the well that it is broken at last. Our patience had been exercised long enough! At last we have arrived at facts: this is a very hard and startling fact [!] and it is the duty of every Englishman to apprise the Government of how strong and unanimous is the feeling of this great community of the outrage offered to our flag."

This senseless rigamarole was greeted with a peal of applause. Opposing voices were howled down and hissed down and stamped down. To the remark of a Mr. Campbell that the whole meeting was irregular, the inexorable Spence replied: "I perfectly agree with you that it is a little irregular but at the same time the fact that we have met to consider is rather an irregular fact." To the proposal of a Mr. Turner to adjourn the meeting to the following day, in order that "the city of Liverpool can have its say and not a clique of cotton brokers usurp its name", cries of "Collar him, throw him out!" resounded from all sides. Unperturbed, Mr. Turner repeated his motion, which, however, was not put to the vote, again contrary to all the rules of English meetings. Spence triumphed. But, as a matter of fact, nothing has done more to cool London's temper than the news of Mr. Spence's triumph.

From The Bob Feldman 68 Blog- "Ben Davis" (Black Communist Councilman From New York City)

Click on the headline to link to a Bob Feldman 68 post for his protest song, Ben Davis

Ben Davis

My name it is Ben Davis and I’m in a prison cell
In Terre Haute, Indiana, that’s where I’m forced to dwell
In a segregated section of the penitentiary
And while I’m locked in solitary, I write my life story.

“I grew up in Jim Crow, Georgia and became a people’s lawyer
I defended Angelo Herndon when he organized workers
They wished to execute him for uniting Black and white
To march to the county courthouse and demand `jobs or relief.’

“For defending the free speech rights of a 19-year-old communist
They threatened me with `contempt of court’ and to lynch me by the neck
Inspired by Angelo’s testimony, his Party I did join
And four years after his rigged trial, the verdict was overturned.

“I worked to build the Party and moved up to Harlem
I rented an apartment and owned no stocks and bonds
I found myself elected in 1943
To serve the working people in the Council of New York City.

“I fought discrimination by Metropolitan Life
And demanded that the major leagues cease to be lily-white
I fought against the fare increase and protected rent control
And denounced police brutality and applied the housing code.

“They could not defeat me at the polls in two elections
So they spent a lot of money to change the regulations
Then in July of 1948, while writing in my home,
Six FBI agents did appear and dragged me from Harlem.

“Although I was elected by the people of New York
They threw me in a prison and charged me in their court
An unconstitutional Smith Act, they used to imprison me
And expelled me from the Council in the name of `democracy.’

“Locked inside this prison by Truman, the `Democrat',
I received a 5-year sentence, just because I’m a communist
Along with other comrades, I’m jailed for my beliefs
And this book I write in prison, they vow they won’t release.

“Yes, my name it is Ben Davis and I’m in a prison cell
In Terre Haute, Indiana, that’s where I’m forced to dwell
In a segregated section of the penitentiary
And while I’m locked in solitary, I write my life story.”

To listen to this song, you can go to following music site link:

http://www.last.fm/music/Bob+A.+Feldman/More+Biographical+Folk+Songs/Ben+Davis

The Ben Davis biographical protest folk song lyrics were written a few years ago, after I read the book Communist Councilman From Harlem: Autobiographical Notes Written in a Federal Penitentiary by Benjamin Davis, and are sung to the traditional Scottish folk song tune of “Come, All Ye Tramps and Hawkers”. Prior to Ben Davis’s release from prison the manuscript of his autobiography was seized by U.S. prison authorities and kept by the Bureau of Prisons until after Ben Davis’s death in 1964—before the autobiographical manuscript was finally allowed by U.S. government officials to be published in 1969 by International Publishers.

To listen to some of the other protest folk songs that I’ve written since the late 1960s, you can check out the “Columbia Songs for a Democratic Society” music site at the following link:

http://www.myspace.com/bobafeldman68music

From The Bob Feldman 68 Blog -"Chuck Turner" (Boston)Protest Folk Song

"Chuck Turner" Protest Folk Song
by bobf

(No verified email address) 28 Mar 2011

Modified: 11:47:01 AM

"Chuck Turner" public domain protest folk song tells story of the recent illegal expulsion from Boston's City Council and imprisonment of Boston City Councilor Chuck Turner

Chuck Turner (sung to the tune of traditional Scottish folk song, "Come All Ye Tramps and Hawkers")

"Oh, my name it is Chuck Turner
And I'm in a prison cell
Far away in West Virginia
That's where I'm forced to dwell
In a lonely section
Of the penitentiary
And while I'm locked behind the wall,
I recall what they did to me.

"I grew up in Cincinnati
Then attended Harvard U.
I became an organizer
And to Roxbury I did move
To the Boston City Council
The people did vote me
And as their representative
I served diligently

"I fought discrimination
By the universities
And demanded that developers
Cease to be greedy
I fought to regulate their rents
And for Boston tenants' rights
And denounced police brutality
And the wars Bush launched at night.

"They could not defeat me at the polls
In six elections
So Ashcroft's partner and the FBI
Began a collaboration
They paid an informant thirty grand
To tape me secretly
And illegally tried to entrap me
For proposing a public hearing.

"Although I was elected
By the people of Roxbury
A corrupt U.S. Attorney
Charged me with `bribe-taking'
To cover-up his misconduct
The Feds arrested me
And from Boston's City Council
I was expelled illegally.

"Then after a press-rigged trial
The biased judge sentenced me
And because I pleaded innocent
He accused me of `perjury'
And added more months in prison
`Cause I spoke at some meetings
And imprisoned me for three long years
`Though my age is seventy.

Yes, my name is Chuck Turner
And I'm in a prison cell
Far away in West Virginia
That's where I'm forced to dwell
In a lonely section
Of the penitentiary
And although I'm locked behind the wall
Boston now wants me FREE!"
See also:
http://bfeldman68.blogspot.com/2008/05/ben-davis.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3r3FBigdvGc

On The 150th Anniversary Of The Beginning Of The American Civil War – Karl Marx On The American Civil War-In Honor Of The Union Side

Markin comment:

I am always amazed when I run into some younger leftists, or even older radicals who may have not read much Marx and Engels, and find that they are surprised, very surprised to see that Marx and Engels were avid partisans of the Abraham Lincoln-led Union side in the American Civil War. In the age of advanced imperialism, of which the United States is currently the prime example, and villain, we are almost always negative about capitalism’s role in world politics. And are always harping on the need to overthrow the system in order to bring forth a new socialist reconstruction of society. Thus one could be excused for forgetting that at earlier points in history capitalism played a progressive role. A role that Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and other leading Marxists, if not applauded, then at least understood represented human progress. Of course, one does not expect everyone to be a historical materialist and therefore know that in the Marxist scheme of things both the struggle to bring America under a unitary state that would create a national capitalist market by virtue of a Union victory and the historically more important struggle to abolish slavery that turned out to a necessary outcome of that Union struggle were progressive in our eyes. Read on.
*****
Articles by Karl Marx in Die Presse 1861

The Trent Case


Written: November, 1861;
Source: Marx/Engels Collected Works, Volume 19;
Publisher: Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1964;
First Published: Die Presse No. 331, December 2, 1861;
Online Version: Marxists.org, 1999;
Transcribed: S. Ryan;
HTML Markup: Tim Delaney 1999.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

London, November 28, 1861
The conflict of the English mail ship Trent with the North American warship San Jacinto in the narrow passage of the Old Bahama Channel is the lion among the events of the day. In the afternoon of November 27 the mail ship La Plata brought the news of the incident to Southampton, where the electric telegraph at once flashed it to all parts of Great Britain. The same evening the London Stock Exchange was the stage of stormy scenes similar to those at the time of the announcement of the Italian war. Quotations for government stock sank three-quarters to one per cent. The wildest rumours circulated in London. The American Ambassador, Adams, was said to have been given his passport, an embargo to have been imposed on all American ships in the Thames, etc. At the same time a protest meeting of merchants was held at the Stock Exchange in Liverpool, to demand measures from the British Government for the satisfaction of the violated honour of the British flag. Every sound-minded Englishman went to bed with the conviction that he would go to sleep in a state of peace but wake up in a state of war.

Nevertheless, the fact is well-nigh categorically established that the conflict between the Trent and the San Jacinto brings no war in its train. The semi-official press, like The Times and The Morning Post, strikes a peaceful note and pours juridically cool deductions on the flickerings of passion. Papers like the Daily Telegraph, which at the faintest mot d'ordre roar for the British lion, are true models of moderation. Only the Tory opposition press, The Morning Herald and The Standard, hits out. These facts force every expert to conclude that the ministry has already decided not to make a casus belli out of the untoward event.

It must be added that the event, if not the details of its enactment, was anticipated. On October 12, Messrs. Slidell, Confederacy emissary to France, and Mason, Confederacy emissary to England, together with their secretaries Eustis and MacFarland, had run the blockade of Charleston on the steamship Theodora and sailed for Havana, there to seek the opportunity of a passage under the British flag. In England their arrival was expected daily. North American warships had set out from Liverpool to intercept the gentlemen, with their dispatches, on this side of the Atlantic Ocean. The British ministry had already submitted the question whether the North Americans were entitled to take such a step to its official jurisconsults for their opinion. Their answer is said to have been in the affirmative.

The legal question turns in a narrow circle. Since the foundation of the United States, North America has adopted British maritime law in all its rigour. A major principle of this maritime law is that all neutral merchantmen are subject to search by the belligerent parties.

"This right, " said Lord Stowell in a judgment which has become famous, "offers the sole security that no contraband is carried on neutral ships."

The greatest American authority, Kent, states in the same sense:

"The right of self-preservation gives belligerent nations this right. The doctrine of the British admiralty on the right of visitation and search ... has been recognised in its fullest extent by the courts of justice in our country."

It was not opposition to the right of search, as is sometimes erroneously suggested, that brought about the Anglo-American War of 1812 to 1814. Rather, America declared war because England unlawfully presumed to search even American warships, on the pretext of catching deserters from the British Navy.

The San Jacinto, therefore, had the right to search the Trent and to confiscate any contraband stowed aboard her. That dispatches in the possession of Mason, Slidell and Co. come under the category of contraband even The Times, The Morning Post, etc., admit. There remains the question whether Messrs. Mason, Slidell and Co. were themselves contraband and might consequently be confiscated! The point is a ticklish one and differences of opinion prevail among the doctors of law. Pratt, the most distinguished British authority on "Contraband", in the section on "Quasi-Contraband, Dispatches, Passengers" specifically refers to "communication of information and orders from a belligerent government to its officers abroad, or the conveyance of military passengers". Messrs. Mason and Slidell, if not officers, were just as little ambassadors, since their governments are recognised neither by Britain nor by France. What are they, then? In justification of the very broad conceptions of contraband asserted by Britain in the Anglo-French wars, Jefferson already remarks in his memoirs that contraband, by its nature, precludes any exhaustive definition and necessarily leaves great scope for arbitrariness. In any event, however, one sees that from the standpoint of English law the legal question dwindles to a Duns Scotus controversy, the explosive force of which will not go beyond exchange of diplomatic notes.

The political aspect of the North American procedure was estimated quite correctly by The Times in these words:

"Even Mr. Seward himself must know that the voices of the Southern commissioners, sounding from their captivity, are a thousand times more eloquent in London and in Paris than they would have been if they had been heard in St. James's and the Tuileries."

And is not the Confederacy already represented in London by Messrs. Yancey and Mann?

We regard this latest operation of Mr. Seward as a characteristic act of tactlessnesses by self-conscious weakness simulating strength. If the naval incident hastens Seward's removal from the Washington Cabinet, the United States will have no reason to record it as an "untoward event" in the annals of its Civil War.

*On The 150th Anniversary Of The Beginning Of American Civil War- All Honor To Those Black Militants Who Fought For Their Freedom- The Soldiers Of The 1st South Carolina Volunteers

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the 1st South Carolina Volunteers (American Civil War).

Markin comment:
This year, the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the American Civil War, an event that ended chattel slavery in this country, some of the entries used to celebrate Black History Month in February can serve double-duty to honor the black militants who fought, and in some cases, laid down their heads on some lonesome battlefield for black freedom.

*****
Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. February is Black History Month and is a time for reflection on our black forebears who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this February , and in future Februarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.

Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (Labor’s Untold Story, Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, the black liberation struggle here and elsewhere, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.

Photos From The April 9th New York City Anti-War Rally

Click on on the headline to link to a Boston Indymedia entry for the April 9, 2011 New York City Anti-war Rally.

From The Pages Of "Women And Revolution"- Women and the East German Deformed Workers State

Workers Vanguard No. 976
18 March 2011

For Women’s Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!

Women and the East German Deformed Workers State

Part One

(Women and Revolution pages)

The following article was translated from Spartakist No. 185 (October 2010), which is published by the Spartakist Workers Party, German section of the International Communist League. It is based on an International Women’s Day 2010 presentation by Barbara Köhler in Hamburg.

In Berlin, we held our forum on Women’s Day, and on my way to it the subway TV ran a news item that Alice Schwarzer, Germany’s icon of bourgeois feminism, had spoken. She stated that she was against Women’s Day, a “socialist invention” having something to do with striking women textile workers. In her own words: “It’s got absolutely nothing to do with feminism!”

Occasionally even this reactionary lady says something true. As a bourgeois movement, feminism makes men the hindrance to achieving women’s equality. Thereby it deepens the division of the proletariat fomented by the capitalists, setting men against women. We communists know that the oppression of women is inextricably tied to class rule and exploitation. We fight for mobilizing the entire proletariat, men as well as women, against the special oppression of women. Without women, no socialist revolution; without socialist revolution, no liberation of women!

Schwarzer was expressing the hostility of the bourgeoisie to the proletariat—International Women’s Day marks the strike of women textile workers in Manhattan on 8 March 1908. But what we think of above all is 8 March 1917 (February 23 according to the old Russian calendar)—the women textile workers strike in St. Petersburg. That was the beginning of the February Revolution in Russia. For us communists, March 8 commemorates a day of struggle by the entire working class.

Over the entire past year, we ran articles and gave forums counterposing our communist program to the bourgeois propaganda marking 20 years of counterrevolution in the former East German deformed workers state, the DDR, with which we were inundated all year long. It was with this same program that we intervened in 1989-90 in the incipient political revolution in the DDR. The central issues were defense of the DDR against imperialism, proletarian political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracy as well as socialist revolution in the West—the fight for a Red Germany ruled by workers councils (soviets).

The bourgeoisie would like to lay the DDR to rest once and for all, but it is still obsessively fixated on it. In German bourgeois circles, one of the most devastating labels you can apply is “DDR methods” or “socialism.” When Ursula von der Leyen was still Minister of Family Affairs, she came out for more kindergartens, but only because the German bourgeoisie wants to raise the low birthrate and simultaneously have well-trained women in professional life. And for this sin, even this top-echelon Christian Democratic display model of a mother was accused of DDR methods.

So everybody talks about it, but what was it really like for women in the DDR? As communists, we apply programmatic standards in order to understand and explain things. Thus we cite the utopian socialist Fourier as an authority on the woman question. Fourier stated, “The change in a historical epoch can always be determined by women’s progress towards freedom.... The degree of emancipation of woman is the natural measure of general emancipation.” Marx cites Fourier very approvingly in The Holy Family (1845). This is one of our guidelines. But at least equally central is Engels’ important insight in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884) that women’s oppression is rooted in the institution of the family, which is characteristic of all class societies. Engels explains that the first condition for the liberation of women is their integration into public industry and thus into public life, leading to “the abolition of the monogamous family as the economic unit of society.”

The DDR arguably constituted the most advanced society for women so far in the history of mankind. In important respects it was even more advanced than the young, revolutionary Soviet Union. While the Bolsheviks advanced a revolutionary program for women’s liberation aiming at replacing the functions of the family by socializing housework, the material poverty of the young workers state was a huge obstacle to actually putting this into practice. The DDR even at its founding, despite having emerged out of the Second World War and despite the reparations claimed by the Soviet Union, nonetheless possessed the basis for a highly industrialized society. This made a big difference.

At the end of the 1980s, over 90 percent of women in the DDR worked or were in training or ongoing education. They really had lots of economic and genuine personal independence. Women and men both acquired broad scientific training, with women working at highly skilled jobs, much more so than in the West. Among people up to 40 years old—all of whom were raised in the DDR—there were as many women as men in every form of training and education. And single mothers could be professionally active and have children because there was an extensive system of childcare facilities, often linked directly to the factories.

What made this possible in the DDR was the victory of the Red Army over Nazi Germany in 1945. The state machinery and economic power of the German bourgeoisie was smashed in the East and a state was founded based on socialized property forms—in Marxist terms, a workers state. However, this workers state was, as we Trotskyists say, deformed from the beginning because political power did not rest with the working class but with a Stalinist bureaucracy.

On the one hand, there was all this economic independence because women were active in production. But at the same time the institution of the family, which according to Engels is an institution for the oppression of women, existed in the DDR. Not only did the family exist, it was singled out and hailed. This is a contradiction that requires explanation. As Trotsky said in 1940 in regard to the Soviet Union, and is equally true of the DDR: “The workers’ state must be taken as it has emerged from the merciless laboratory of history and not as it is imagined by a ‘socialist’ professor, reflectively exploring his nose with his finger” (“Balance Sheet of the Finnish Events,” In Defense of Marxism).

The East German deformed workers state was Stalin’s “unloved child.” This was one instance of his betrayal of revolutionary opportunities in all of Europe and parts of Asia at the end of the Second World War, betrayals committed by Stalin for the sake of his agreements with his imperialist allies, the U.S. and Britain. For example, in Italy the Stalinist Communist Party made the partisans disarm and itself joined a capitalist popular-front government, thereby preventing a workers revolution and subjecting the workers to the U.S. command. In Germany, following the war the socialist aspirations of the proletariat were bureaucratically throttled. Initiatives by the workers to take over factories and towns and run them through embryonic workers councils—the anti-fascist committees—were suppressed.

The DDR and the other “people’s democracies” arising from these social transformations were deformed workers states that came into being as a defensive Soviet reaction to the imperialists’ escalating Cold War. Thus the DDR set out to build “socialism in one country” on the model of the Stalinist degenerated Soviet Union of the 1940s. The DDR bureaucracy was even willing to give it a try in half a country. This program of “socialism in one country” fundamentally contradicts Marxism, which states that socialism, as a preliminary stage to communism, must be an international social order with a material basis that transcends the bounds of even the most developed capitalist countries. To put it another way: You cannot construct socialism on the basis of material scarcity in an isolated country.

The October Revolution of 1917

Let’s go back to the program of the Bolsheviks that led the working class to victory in 1917. From the outset, their program posited that the revolution had to be extended internationally. They always saw the Russian Revolution as just the beginning of revolution on a worldwide scale, and it never even occurred to them that it could survive in isolation. Early Soviet legislation granted women wide-ranging equality and freedom that even today have not been realized by the economically most advanced “democratic” capitalist countries.

Some central characteristics: civil marriage was introduced, along with divorce at the request of either partner, and any and all laws against homosexuals were abolished. The director of the Moscow Institute for Social Hygiene reported in 1923 on the underlying principles of Soviet legislation: “It declares the absolute non-interference of the state and society into sexual matters, so long as nobody is injured and no one’s interests are encroached upon.” And in 1920 the young Soviet Union was the very first government on earth to overturn criminalization of abortion—really and truly a gain! For the first time, women were given the right to control their own bodies and were no longer degraded into reproductive machines.

The Bolsheviks were aware of the fact that the family, along with the social functions it fulfills in class society—raising children, taking care of food and clothing, seeing to education and looking after the elderly—could not simply be abolished by decree. Trotsky spoke of the “family as a shut-in petty enterprise.” These functions have to be replaced through the socialization of housework. In the major cities of the early Soviet Union, the first steps were taken to set up facilities for socializing housework such as kindergartens, canteens and the like, but the material basis for extending them simply was not there. But the Bolsheviks in the revolutionary period of the Soviet Union told workers the truth: the liberation of women will occur once we have been able to socialize housework; at the moment we cannot simply shake this out of our shirtsleeves, but we are fighting for the extension of the revolution to the economically advanced countries—this is the way to get there!

Degeneration of the Soviet Union and Its Effects on Women

These policies of the Soviet leadership changed because the leadership changed. In 1923-24, the hopes of the Russian working class for a speedy extension of the revolution were destroyed, particularly when a great opportunity for the working class to seize power in Germany was wasted. It was the German Communist Party’s policy of looking to the Social Democratic Party and waiting for it that blew it—as well as the Communist International’s hesitancy at this point in time (for more, see “A Trotskyist Critique of Germany 1923 and the Comintern,” Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 56, Spring 2001). Hence this great possibility for bringing the Soviet Union out of its isolation was allowed to slide by.

With the Russian working class broadly discouraged, a conservative bureaucracy under Stalin seized political power. Its program was to settle down within the status quo, constructing “socialism in one country” and seeking peaceful coexistence with imperialism. Thus the leadership no longer sought to extend the revolution but only reacted to the pressure of imperialism. This bureaucratic layer no longer strove for the extension of the revolution to eliminate material scarcity, instead functioning as kind of a gendarme to administer the existing generalized want.

With Trotsky, we say that this constituted a political counterrevolution in the Soviet Union. But the socialized property forms still existed. This is why we fought for a proletarian political revolution in the Soviet degenerated workers state and do so today in the remaining deformed workers states. This means that the imperative task is defending the social basis, the socialization of the means of production. But it is also necessary to drive out the leadership layer, this caste, and restore the entire power of the working class, including its political power. Leading the working class to this point, however, requires a revolutionary party, as in 1917.

In the Soviet Union, Stalin’s reactionary political line quickly became directed against women. In 1936, a new constitution was adopted that banned abortion and hailed the family as the so-called unit of socialism. In his fundamental work The Revolution Betrayed (1936), Trotsky explained the underlying mechanisms:

“Having revealed its inability to serve women who are compelled to resort to abortion with the necessary medical aid and sanitation, the state makes a sharp change of course, and takes the road of prohibition. And just as in other situations, the bureaucracy makes a virtue of necessity. One of the members of the highest Soviet court, Soltz, a specialist on matrimonial questions, bases the forthcoming prohibition of abortion on the fact that in a socialist society where there are no unemployed, etc., etc., a woman has no right to decline ‘the joys of motherhood.’ The philosophy of a priest endowed also with the powers of a gendarme.”

And so it was on the model of this Stalinized Soviet Union that the DDR was constructed.

The DDR: A Deformed Workers State from the Outset

In The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky explained the dual character of the Stalinist bureaucracy. An understanding of this is vital if you want to grasp the contradictions in the DDR’s policies toward women. The bureaucracy is a parasitic caste sitting atop the socialized means of production; it vacillates between fear of the working class and fear of imperialism, trying to maneuver between them so as to preserve its privileges. And though Trotsky’s book was written in 1936, in our intervention into the incipient political revolution in the DDR in 1989-90 we were often told it sounds like it was written about the DDR bureaucracy, as if it were an up-to-date handbook.

The proletarian 17 June 1953 uprising underlined the DDR bureaucracy’s contradictory character as a caste, rather than a class owning the means of production. With this uprising, the working class was attempting political revolution, that is, the overthrow of the leadership to gain political power while maintaining the economic foundation of the DDR. At that time, considerable sections of the Socialist Unity Party [ruling East German Stalinist party] went over to the side of the workers. One can hardly imagine a whole segment of the capitalist class going over to the side of the working class in the event of a socialist revolution! The bureaucracy was not a class but a caste, comparable to the bureaucracy in the trade unions.

Trotsky also explained in The Revolution Betrayed that the bureaucrats actually needed the family, namely for the social regimentation of the populace. Trotsky showed that families, far from being units of socialism, were units of social backwardness in which women, children and youth were held captive, an “archaic, stuffy and stagnant institution in which the woman of the toiling classes performs galley labor from childhood to death.” That was one reason the bureaucrats needed the family—as an instrument of regimentation—but they also needed it to provide the services that society was unable to provide, due to material causes. Here, of course, it is important to see that the leadership in the Soviet Union and later in the DDR generally did not have achieving this material basis as its goal, but rather constructing “socialism” within the confines of a single country.

A revolutionary leadership in the DDR would have presented an internationalist program to the working class. Like the Bolsheviks, it would have said: We want to extend the revolution, we want to expand our material basis; this cannot be done here at this point, but in the meantime we will simply do what is possible. But what is possible cannot be simply dictated by the bureaucracy. Instead, the workers, both men and women, taking the factories as their starting point, must determine the policies of the workers state through workers councils. In a struggle to construct such workers councils, a revolutionary leadership in the DDR would have based itself on the most advanced sections of the working class. That is Trotsky’s program and it’s our program as well. But of course that is just what the DDR bureaucracy did not do, since such a struggle for workers councils would have meant dissolving itself. Hence the family was pushed, presented as a fighting unit of socialism, thus reinforcing reactionary notions within society.

Over the years, kindergartens, canteens, laundries, etc. were unevenly but steadily expanded, with a significant part of these facilities directly linked to the factories. However, the DDR leadership promoted this not because they wanted to do something for women’s liberation but because it desperately needed young, well-educated women in the workforce who in return demanded that childcare be provided by society! The number of daycare slots for children up to three years jumped by leaps and bounds from a scant 4,700 in 1950 to over 50,000 in 1955.

This demonstrates the great effort to attract women into production in the early years of the DDR. There was another great leap between 1970 and 1975: from 166,000 to nearly 235,000 (Donna Harsch, Revenge of the Domestic, 2007). This was to fulfill [Erich] Honecker’s promise to raise the living standard, which in 1975 had been termed the “unity of economic and social policies.” Honecker had replaced [Walter] Ulbricht in 1970-71 following a series of scares the bureaucracy got from working-class actions, starting with the incipient proletarian political revolutions in the DDR in 1953 and Hungary in 1956, through the 1968 “Prague Spring,” to major strikes against price hikes in Poland in 1970.

The bureaucracy talked itself into believing that under Honecker it could eliminate the DDR’s ever-worsening performance vis-à-vis West German imperialism, in regard to the economy and living standards, by running up debts to Western bankers and increasingly cutting back on investment in many areas of the economy. The result was that in 1989 only 30 percent of the country’s machines were operational at any one time, while expenditures for housing construction expanded from year to year right up to 1989. This had brought the DDR to the brink of bankruptcy in the early ’80s, temporarily averted by selling DDR-processed Soviet oil to the West. But doing this caused the efficiency of the DDR economy to collapse even further.

In 1989, there was virtually one kindergarten place available per child, and in many towns the availability of daycare slots stood at over 80 percent. But in some locations women were unwilling or outright refused to use these slots out of concern that kindergarten care was inadequate. Things were even more critical in laundries, where the clothes were damaged or washing took far too long. Trotsky explained this the following way: If workers do not really have control over and cannot determine what they produce, how they do it, how they organize it, then this will impose a sort of gray curtain of indifference upon all labor. And simultaneously this whole stuffy, backward weight of the bureaucracy enveloped society like a suffocating blanket.

Also a problem with childcare facilities was that they generally were not open around the clock. The standard time they were open was approximately 6 a.m. to 6-7 p.m. This of course made it very hard for women working shifts, leaving many women unable to take jobs they would have liked, because the childcare was not there. We are for top-quality childcare around the clock. During our intervention into the incipient political revolution in 1989-90, we often had discussions with women who saw themselves as communists but had been so deeply molded by family propaganda—this mommy propaganda that the DDR bureaucracy constantly churned out—that some were against having round-the-clock childcare, arguing that mommy really should be caring for her children in the evening. This shows how, thanks to the intervention of the bureaucracy, backward notions were preserved and became deeply ingrained in people’s minds.

It is interesting and important to see that there were very many women who wanted to be heard. They felt, OK, we’re told it’s a socialist society, so we have the right to get more of these facilities, which replace housework for us. There were many protests directed at various levels of the bureaucracy, very many letters were addressed directly to Honecker, in which a woman worker would complain roughly: “Comrade Honecker, it’s unbelievable that in the major factory where I work I’m unable to shop for groceries at lunchtime because there’s nothing in the store. You absolutely have to change this.” A very large number of proletarian women, of working women, thought they had the right to more and that they could organize it themselves, and better.
******
Workers Vanguard No. 977
1 April 2011

For Women’s Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!

Women and the East German Deformed Workers State

Part Two

(Women and Revolution pages)

We print below the conclusion of this article, which was translated from Spartakist No. 185 (October 2010), published by our comrades of the Spartakist Workers Party of Germany. Part One appeared in WV No. 976 (18 March).

The Soviet Military Administration in Germany existed until November 1949, a month after the DDR [East German deformed workers state] was founded. Already in August 1946, the goal of drawing women into production—the so-called “Order 253”—had been promulgated, banning wage discrimination based on sex or age. A comparison: in West Germany such a law only came into existence ten years later. And of course under capitalism such a law—no wage discrimination—exists only on paper. Wage differentials are part and parcel of capitalism, a means of dividing the working class, particularly male and female workers. This is a fundamental component of the economic system.

Just a few days ago, there was a report in Der Spiegel with 2008 statistics showing wage differentials of over 23 percent between men and women. And simultaneously there has been a great increase in part-time work for women, who of course cannot survive on their wages but can’t work full-time, since they can’t get their children taken care of, etc. This law “against wage discrimination” has been in force in West Germany since 1956, but that signifies absolutely nothing.

Certainly, wage differences between men and women did exist in the DDR as well, but first of all they were not as shameless, since the wage range was not as wide and even the lowest wage groups had a secure living standard. It stemmed from bureaucratic misrule and was not inherent to the system. A government of workers soviets would have immediately annulled any wage differences, even if this would have meant opposing more backward elements in the working class.

Taking a look at the Democratic Women’s Federation of Germany (DFD) is instructive here. It was founded in the DDR in 1947, having originally emerged out of the anti-fascist women’s committees, i.e., out of committees that clearly in their own view—and by their very name—embraced a broader horizon. But the East German Stalinist party, the Socialist Unity Party (SED), increasingly tasked the DFD with dealing with “women’s matters.”

The DFD was affiliated with the so-called “National Front,” an attempt by the DDR bureaucracy to mimic West Germany’s “democratic” multiplicity of parties. This DDR formation contained all possible parties, from the Peasant Party to the Christian Democrats, but with the Stalinist bureaucracy setting the tone via the SED. In contrast to the situation under capitalism, this simply parodied a capitalist popular front, which always consists of a class alliance of bourgeois parties and workers parties. In the DDR, however, the bourgeoisie as a class had been overthrown and the National Front had only the appearance of a popular front.

Popular-frontist politics are a deception of the working class, politically disarming the workers by creating the illusion that they have no independent class interests and talking only about an undifferentiated “people.” Internationally this meant that the Stalinist bureaucracies cozied up to bourgeois forces. For workers following Stalinist leadership, all too often this meant deadly defeats—as in the Chinese Revolution in 1927 and the Spanish Revolution in the 1930s, to cite only a couple of examples. For Marxists, the DDR was a dictatorship of the proletariat—albeit bureaucratically deformed —that rested on socialized relations of production, since the bourgeoisie had been expropriated. Within this framework, the National Front was one part of the programmatic propaganda of the DDR bureaucracy, which did not want its working class to come up with the idea that it had its own class interests, namely running the workers state itself via workers councils.

Nonetheless, the following is interesting as a fact: In the DDR, the DFD was a mass organization. These anti-fascist committees and DFD groups had originally existed in all of Germany. In the West, an association arose out of individual state associations in 1952; it was unceremoniously banned by the German bourgeoisie in 1957.

A couple more facts comparing the situation of women in these two countries, East and West Germany. In 1965, a compendium of family law appeared in the DDR stating: “Both spouses must do their part in the education and care of their children and running the household. The relations of the spouses to each other should take such a form that the woman can reconcile her professional activity and her activity in society with motherhood.” While this meant exalting the “holy family,” it still emphasized the equal status of women. In a 1966 report, the government of West Germany set forth that: “A care-giver and comforter is what women should be; an image of modest harmony, a factor for order in the uniquely dependable private sphere; women should enter into gainful employment and social engagement only when the demands placed on them by the family permit them to do so.” In accord with this is the fact that up till 1977 a West German law stated that a wife could not get a job without her husband’s consent.

It was, of course, the socialized relations of production in the DDR that were responsible for these differences. Furthermore, an important aspect was that inheritance played no role in the DDR, since private ownership of the means of production no longer existed. After all, Engels had explained that what had originally been central to the entire institution and ideology of the family was that the husband wanted to know unambiguously: Are these my children or has my wife been playing the field? I want to bequeath solely to my children. That is the root of it.

All this simply played no role anymore in the DDR: There was nothing to bequeath, and thereby this function of the family under capitalism essentially dissolved. But the Stalinist leadership, these backward types, nonetheless kept trying to maintain the ideology of the family, attempting again and again to glue its ideological fragments together. One further aspect of the family is the regimentation of children, and this eroded as well in the DDR due to the socialized relations of production. In the DDR, since 1950 the age of majority had been set at 18; in West Germany this has been the case only since 1975!

Women’s Day was always celebrated with flowers, accompanied with calls for the husband to make his wife a super-duper breakfast on this day and generally to be very supportive, etc. Such calls only made more obvious what was generally the rule: that women had to work a second shift to keep the household going and look after the children. The DDR leadership was truly seeking to drain International Women’s Day of any trace of its being a day of struggle for the entire working class.

When protests from proletarian women over their overly heavy burden of work and the “second shift” got too loud, there were divergent reactions. On the one hand, the bureaucracy sought to make more consumer goods available to lighten the burden of housework, particularly from the early 1970s on. For example, production of family washing machines was promoted. Perhaps it would have been more rational to massively increase the number of public laundromats and equip them better. There were also widespread campaigns for the husband to do more around the house. In fact, for the husband to help in the household was far more widespread in the DDR than in the West. Since 1952, a “Household Day” had existed in the DDR—one free day per month for household chores, but typically granted only to women. Only from 1977 on was it partially accorded to men as well.

“Socialism in (Half of) One Country”

Housing was a scarce commodity in the DDR. The essential reason was that the resources to build adequate housing simply didn’t exist in this half a country, under siege by vengeance-seeking German imperialism, which was continually brooding over how to regain this territory in which it no longer had the say. It is also important to recall that after 1945 West Germany had been beefed up by U.S. imperialism. Moreover, heavy industry plus the entire Ruhr region—i.e., the center of industry—were in the West. That is an important factor.

But the Stalinist bureaucracy in the DDR was unwilling to utter this home truth, instead making a virtue of necessity. “Socialism in one country” meant that the bureaucracy wanted to produce as “autarkically” as possible. Thus 70 percent of the products available on the world market were produced in the DDR, often of poor quality and at inflated cost, while the imperialists could base themselves on a division of labor in the world market, which they dominated. Married couples had first dibs on apartments, again putting pressure on people to get married. The bureaucracy did not proceed linearly here and kept changing its procedures; officially, single mothers and unmarried couples could also lay claim to an apartment. But the feeling among young people was generally that they had greater chances if they got married, strengthening the functions of the family within society.

An important and particularly unattractive aspect of the Stalinist bureaucracies’ program of “socialism in one country”—in their own individual countries and apart from all others—is that it meant nationalism. While the DDR bureaucracy campaigned strongly for marriage and having children, this generally did not apply to contract workers from Mozambique, Cuba or Vietnam: these had no citizenship rights and were often segregated in specific residential areas. If a Vietnamese woman became pregnant, she usually had to get an abortion or return home, leave the country. This was a genuine, major, true piece of piggishness on the part of the bureaucracy. For us communists, it goes without saying, the central slogan is always “full citizenship rights for all immigrants,” as was true for the early Soviet Union: anyone who lived and worked there had citizenship rights.

Down With Paragraph 218!

The notorious [anti-abortion] Paragraph 218 constitutes an extremely important aspect of the woman and family question. This paragraph has existed since the time of Bismarck, since 1871. In the Weimar Republic, the Communist Party [KPD] was well known for its fight against Paragraph 218. There are some expressive posters, for example by Käthe Kollwitz, who for a couple of years was a member of the International Workers’ Aid, the defense organization linked to the KPD. In the Weimar Republic, the KPD repeatedly introduced motions in the Reichstag [parliament] demanding: Down with this paragraph! All were quashed.

The first alteration after 1871 occurred in 1926, through a Social Democratic Party (SPD) motion that did pass. Abortion continued to be punishable under law, both for the woman and for the person performing it, but now it was “only” punished by a jail term and not by sending the perpetrators to a high-security prison. The fact that under the Nazis the death penalty was imposed for abortion—unless it served to prevent the “reproduction of inferior racial groups”—demonstrates the power exercised by the bourgeoisie via Paragraph 218 and just how deeply it cut into people’s lives.

In 1945, the Nazi regime was smashed by the Red Army, through incredible sacrifice by the Soviet soldiers and people. After 1945, in both the East and the West, the Nazi law—i.e., the death penalty—was rescinded, but otherwise the old paragraph in the penal code was left standing. In the East, that is, in what became the DDR, this occurred with a direct reference to the legal code in the Soviet Union, where abortion had been forbidden by the 1936 Soviet constitution. In the areas under the Soviet Military Administration, the 1926 version of the paragraph was in force. Additionally, in some East German states, there was an “indication system,” requiring that certain social or medical conditions be met, e.g., citing rape. There were a couple of minor different possibilities for how a woman might get an abortion, but they still fell under criminal law.

At this time, West Germany often had even stricter penalties for abortion. But before the erection of the Berlin Wall in August 1961, women from the DDR went to West Berlin for abortions! The West Berlin Senate, usually in the hands of the SPD, obviously kept its eyes closed in the hope of damaging the DDR. This is such an utterly damning judgment on the Stalinists, for women to have to go to the capitalist part of Berlin for an abortion! And later women from the DDR went to Poland and Hungary for abortions: In Poland, a first-trimester law existed, while today, following capitalist counterrevolution, Poland has one of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe, with ongoing attempts to ban abortion entirely. This is a result of counterrevolution. But before first-trimester abortions were permitted in the DDR, women really did go to Poland and Hungary, where abortions were more readily available, as well as better and safer.

The question of the pill is also important and interesting. In the West, Schering introduced the pill to the German market in June 1961. In the DDR, there was a lengthy research period, with the pill appearing only in 1965. But it was then distributed free of charge, which made a huge difference. In West Germany in 1965, years after the pill had already been on the market, doctors were still denouncing this “state-promoted lack of restraint.” In the DDR, Professor Mehlan was one of the pioneers of birth control. In 1965, the West German magazine Stern asked him the provocative question: Now tell us honestly—is it true that where you come from, abortion really is not murder? This is the way West Germany was in the 1960s, and even today this is far from being the unfortunate distant past. The Catholic church and other bigots continue to call abortion “murder.” In the U.S., doctors who carry out abortions have been murdered. This rests on the notion purveyed by all churches that the will of God has already endowed the fertilized egg with the “soul” of the future human being.

In general, the Stalinist leadership in the DDR wobbled on the question of abortion and the pill. On the one hand, it cited the KPD in the Weimar Republic, which had fought Paragraph 218. On the other, it pushed the institution of the family; it needed population growth and additional labor and had to attract women into production, which in turn generated problems if women had no access to rational family planning. With their conservative program, the Stalinists were reacting on the one hand to pressure from the proletariat, including proletarian women, on the other to imperialism—they were, so to speak, attempting a wall-balancing act before the Berlin Wall even existed. Here again it is important to state that we Trotskyists defended the Wall, a bureaucratic measure (after all, that’s how the bureaucracy works!) but also, however, a defensive measure to stop the DDR from being bled white of acutely needed skilled workers. Thus we defended the Wall against imperialism.

The DDR bureaucracy’s program of “peaceful coexistence” entails the rejection of workers revolution and the illusory search for “progressive” bourgeois forces in the imperialist countries. The Stalinists always thought and hoped that the SPD—the SPD in West Germany of all things!—might perhaps be an expression of such “progressive forces.” The Stalinists tended to fix their gaze on the SPD in the West the way a rabbit looks at a snake.

When first-trimester abortion was finally introduced in the DDR in 1972, it was also an attempt to trump the imperialist West and the SPD in the minds of women. For in the West in the summer of 1971, a well-known campaign had commenced with major involvement of SPD supporters: “We’ve had an abortion.” Women accused themselves of this “criminal act.” In all probability hastened by this, termination of a pregnancy in the first three months was finally allowed in the DDR. Incidentally, first-trimester abortions were introduced in West Germany in June 1974, only to be nullified the very same month by the Federal Constitutional Court on the grounds that abortion was in principle violating the constitution. Since May 1976, an “indication system” with all its contempt for humanity and with compulsory consultation, often carried out by church officials, has been the rule in West Germany. We communists fight for the unlimited right of women to free abortion on demand, with the best possible medical care!

As recently as 1988-89, a witchhunting trial took place in Memmingen, West Germany, where Dr. Theissen was hauled into court for having performed abortions—safe abortions, fine medical work. He felt that women had the right to decide for themselves. He was hauled into court and put in prison, and we intervened in his defense.

We also intervened for our position for the unconditional right to abortion in major demonstrations that took place in the former DDR following counterrevolution. These demonstrations were protesting introduction of West Germany’s “indication model,” where some guy poses inhumane questions and can judge you. These protests were for maintaining the DDR’s first-trimester laws. And they were so strong that even two years after the counterrevolution two different laws continued to exist in East and West. The bourgeoisie feared this question could spark stronger protests against the Anschluss [annexation] of the DDR. Two whole years, and then the indication system was pushed through in the former DDR as well.

DDR Bureaucracy Capitulates to SPD, Church

Twenty years after counterrevolution in the DDR, both state churches [Catholic and Protestant], whose church taxes are automatically collected by the bourgeois state, were complaining that too few people were attending church in the former DDR.

In the first years of the DDR, there was still quite a lot of support for the church, above all among women in the countryside. One of the first campaigns the church waged was for preservation of the old system of midwives, who attended families at home, and against the new state health centers. Women naturally realized the real advantages of obtaining better, more comprehensive medical treatment in a health center than a midwife could provide at home, and bit by bit the midwives were integrated into the health system. Between 1952 and 1959, in-hospital births rose from 50 to 86 percent. So the churches really lost out with this probing action. And then the churches intervened again massively over the DDR’s family legislation, namely against women in production—women had to remain with the family. This naturally did nothing for the church’s popularity, since women increasingly grasped how their participation in the production process led to more independence.

It really is a case of “being determines consciousness.” Any need for the church simply disappeared over time for women in the DDR. And then the church sought to rise up with a campaign against the first-trimester abortion law of 1971. For the first time, a considerable number of no votes and abstentions were cast in the Volkskammer [People’s Chamber, the DDR parliament] from the Christian Democratic Union, which had seats as a member of the National Front. But the forces of the church could not set the world on fire over this. Under capitalism, private ownership of the means of production, linked, as noted before, to inheritance laws and the bourgeois family, needs ideological sanctification by the church. Capitalism needs the church.

And in all class societies, this goes together with a more or less vigorous persecution of homosexuality. If private ownership of the means of production no longer exists, the church gradually loses its basis. Nobody has any use for it any longer, even though it may take years for its influence to diminish. In the DDR, this was such a long, drawn-out affair because the bureaucrats were hailing the family, thereby implicitly providing ammunition to the church! This glorification of the family in the DDR also brought with it ongoing, greater and lesser harassment of homosexuals, but there was a clear difference with the West and also with the East European states after counterrevolution: In the DDR there were no right-wing or Nazi bands roaming the streets terrorizing, for example, gay bars. There was some harassment, but it was really different from capitalism.

Then, in truly grotesque fashion, from the mid to late 1980s the DDR bureaucracy proceeded to provide ammunition to the church, which had basically been on its last legs with meager support—64 percent of the population did not belong to any denomination—through stupefying bureaucratic repression of all the dissatisfaction that was bubbling to the surface of society. In particular, the Protestant church, which was supported by the West German SPD right down to its last hymnal, made its “free zones” available for discussion and so was able to gain ground. While the Stalinist bureaucrats were rather hard on opponents from the left, they were oh-so-accommodating when it came to the rights and the “free zones” of the church. That’s just grotesque: they assisted the church in becoming a factor in people’s consciousness.

Drawing the Lessons: We Communists Are the Memory of the Working Class

From the outset, there were countless men and women of every age in the DDR who consciously devoted themselves to “constructing socialism,” to the extent that they understood it, even if their consciousness was often distorted. Literature, particularly from the first years of the DDR, shows people who were euphoric over the real possibilities for women and men that had suddenly become available to them, possibilities that their parents, especially their mothers, never had! In the 1960s, for example, many artists and writers sought to bring “art to the working class” and the working class to art—the “Bitterfeld Way”—with slogans like “Reach for the Pen, Mate!” or, conversely, “Writers into Production!” Even if these were in part official slogans of the DDR bureaucracy, they were often seized upon enthusiastically. There were loads of women—Brigitte Reimann, Christa Wolf, Maxi Wander, many others—who wrote very interesting stuff about the situation of women, both in the early years, in the midst of this setting off for new horizons, and afterward. It’s fascinating to read about this.

The proportion of women in the lower- and middle-functionary level in the SED and the state was quite high, among the people who actually kept things going and organized things. But the higher you went in the DDR hierarchy, in the Central Committee or the like, the fewer women there were. The essential reason was that most women in the DDR had a family and children and hence a “second shift” that rested on them like a heavy yoke, so that they simply lacked the energy to fight their way upward. The ossified DDR bureaucrats at the top also emphasized, consciously, the important role of the “mommy.” In the program of the Stalinists, the special oppression of women, which would have had to be fought through socializing housework, simply did not exist.

But the answer did not lie in making feminism palatable to the DDR bureaucracy, as suggested by West and East German feminists alike. The answer lay in counterposing a revolutionary Trotskyist program to the politically reactionary program of “socialism in one country.” This is what Trotsky did and what we did in 1989-90. In January 1990, there was a giant pro-socialist, pro-Soviet demonstration in Berlin against a Nazi desecration of the Treptow memorial to the Red Army. At this giant demonstration of 250,000, which we had initiated, our comrades stood on the speakers platform, and for the first time in all those decades it was possible for Trotskyists to deliver a speech before a mass public in a deformed workers state. We called for the defense of the DDR and Soviet Union, for a new, revolutionary party, for political revolution and for the extension of the revolution to the West.

On the other hand, look at the programmatic spirit that permeated the Stalinist bureaucracy. It was not during the counterrevolution that this manifested itself for the first time in the DDR, though at that point it became crystal-clear. The SED renamed itself the SED-PDS [Party of Democratic Socialism], later just the PDS. And once Mikhail Gorbachev had given the green light to capitalist reunification in the name of the Soviet bureaucracy, Hans Modrow, speaking for the SED-PDS, promulgated the slogan “Germany, united fatherland.” These Stalinist bureaucrats, who called themselves the leadership of the working class and who were seen by many DDR workers as such, suddenly told the workers that the sole possibility was capitalist Anschluss to West Germany.

This was not a sudden, panicked transformation; there was a whole history of this. For example, already in 1987 a joint declaration of the SPD and SED was published under the charming title “The Contest of Ideologies and Joint Security,” in which the Stalinists simply crawled on their bellies before the SPD, pledging not to doubt imperialism’s will for peace and foreswearing the “process of world revolution.” Of course, they had already done this decades before, but now they put it down in writing again, emphatically. All of this was a prelude to Gorbachev’s withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in the spring of 1989, leaving women in particular defenseless before the mujahedin, who had been financed by the CIA and imperialism. When the Soviet Army marched in, we said: “Hail Red Army in Afghanistan—Extend the gains of October to the Afghan peoples!” The woman question was an especially important aspect of our position. Gorbachev’s withdrawal was a criminal betrayal.

Today, the remnants of the PDS are in the Left Party, which constitutes the second reformist mass party in this country—in Lenin’s words, a bourgeois workers party. They are laboring alongside the SPD to chain the German working class to its imperialist exploiters by telling them that there is no alternative to capitalism.

Counterrevolution in the DDR, in the Soviet Union, in the East European deformed workers states hit women especially hard. This is something we have always emphasized. In the DDR, it particularly hit women with jobs in industry, which has been destroyed by an imperialist campaign of vengeance. The number of people who cannot find work and are today forced to survive on inhumanly low Hartz IV unemployment payments is particularly high in the former DDR, and it is single mothers who are especially hard-hit.

Now as before, we Trotskyists call for unconditional military defense of the states where capitalism no longer exists: today China, Vietnam, North Korea and Cuba. These deformed workers states represent a conquest for the entire working class worldwide. Our program is for the working class—men and women—to sweep out the bureaucrats through political revolution and return to the road and program of the October Revolution. In capitalist countries, the bourgeoisie must be expropriated by socialist revolution. It is with this aim in mind that we are building our international party. We are the memory of the working class. We must carry this forward. We want to draw the lessons and learn from them, to prepare ourselves for victories. Women’s liberation through socialist revolution!

From The Socialist Alternative' s "Justice -"Defend Workers' Rights from Corporate Assault"

Defend Workers' Rights from Corporate Assault

Mar 31, 2011
By Alan Jones

The corporate-funded attacks against public sector workers and labor unions are not confined to Wisconsin. Across dozens of states in the U.S., there is pending legislation that intends to weaken or destroy public services, unions and public education. These unprecedented attacks are taking place under the pretext of dealing with large budget deficits. In turn, these were caused by tax breaks for the rich and big business given by Democrats and Republicans and the economic crisis of capitalism, which affects the lives of tens of millions of working families.

In states like Arizona and Tennessee, the anti-worker legislation that is pending in state legislatures intends to strip public workers of even their most basic political rights in terms of political participation, and to ban collective bargaining. Arizona House Bill 2367 proposes that the state shall not “negotiate with a labor organization or employee association representing public employees.”


Other bills prohibit employees from engaging in “a sickout, slowdown, or strike that will disrupt delivery of service” and seek to establish a legal framework that is usually found in police dictatorships. Good examples are Arizona Senate Bill 1363 and Tennessee Senate Bill 1033, which would outlaw any sort of resistance to the corporations, including “unlawful picketing,” “unlawful mass assembly,” and “concerted interference with lawful exercise of business activity” (i.e., strikes) as part of an “employer protection law.”


Last year, Arizona introduced the racist legislation that profiles immigrants as part of the attacks against workers and democratic rights. Utah has now passed a similar anti-immigrant bill. Anti-immigrant legislation, including many bills patterned after Arizona’s racist law, is in the process of being introduced in 30 states, half of which are Republican-controlled.


In Tennessee, legislation is being passed that aims to “abolish teachers’ unions’ ability to negotiate” terms and conditions with local education boards. States like Iowa, Idaho, Indiana, Ohio, Kansas, Florida and Oklahoma have passed legislation that aims to end collective bargaining rights for most or all public sector workers. Republican-controlled states like Arizona, Florida, New Jersey, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Texas intend to pass legislation that would in effect seek to radically weaken or destroy public sector unions through eliminating automatic dues check-off, mandating recertification elections, and putting serious limitations on the use of union funds for political purposes. Maine, Michigan and Pennsylvania have introduced so-called “right to work” anti-union legislation.


One of the most drastic measures pushed by corporate CEOs and their Republican front men is what is called Michigan’s “financial martial law.” The so-called emergency management bill would allow Republican Governor Rick Snyder to declare a “financial emergency” in a city or school district in Michigan, declare it bankrupt, and appoint a manager with the power to fire local officials, break contracts, seize and sell assets, and eliminate services! Such measures will be used to accelerate the cuts and attacks on public services and public sector workers across the state, and to privatize public services.


Bills that would effectively restrict political participation of unions have been introduced in 15 states where Republicans control the legislature and hold the governor’s office. Legislation is being introduced in 19 states that aims to eliminate “prevailing wage” laws and project labor agreements that protect construction workers and entire communities from unscrupulous contractors on taxpayer-funded construction projects. These efforts are heavily funded by large construction CEOs who are looking to increase their profits.


Backlash
These attacks have provoked an angry response among large sections of workers. In Indianapolis, over 10,000 workers, including teachers, steelworkers and building trade workers, demonstrated against attacks on public education and collective bargaining in front of the Indiana Statehouse in March. The Republicans were forced to temporarily drop their efforts to pass anti-union “right to work” legislation.


Unfortunately, union leaders in Indiana have not called for further mobilizations and demonstrations to defeat the undemocratic attacks on public education and workers’ rights. Instead, they limited their efforts to praising the Democrats – who initially fled to Illinois in order to deprive the Republicans of a quorum – and token protests.


In Lansing, 5,000 teachers, nurses, autoworkers and young people demonstrated against budget cuts and the dictatorial emergency finance law signed by Michigan Governor Rick Snyder on March 17. There is enormous anger and bitterness against the $1.8 billion in tax cuts for the rich and corporations while funds for education and social services are cut and new taxes are forced on workers. The measures are widely expected to escalate conditions of poverty, homelessness and hunger in a state that is already suffering from widespread unemployment and poverty.


In a letter encouraging workers and young people to demonstrate against the measures, filmmaker Michael Moore said that Wall Street CEOs “see our state as one big fire sale – and they are licking their chops to get their hands on what is still a state rich in natural resources and industrial infrastructure.”


In Ohio, tens of thousands of workers have demonstrated in Columbus against Republican Governor John Kasich, who intends to slash spending on education and health care and create mass layoffs in order to cover an $8 billion state budget deficit. The budget cuts include a 25% reduction of state aid to cities and municipalities and massive cuts in Medicaid. Included in the governor’s measures is the privatization of the prison system.


Kasich has campaigned for the anti-worker Ohio Senate Bill 5 that was passed in March, which strips 350,000 public workers of collective bargaining rights and criminalizes resistance. The bill gives officials legal authority to prosecute workers who attempt to strike.


While tens of thousands of workers have shown their determination to challenge the plans of Republicans in Ohio and anger against the budget cuts is spreading across the Midwest, union leaders have failed to provide anything more than token resistance to the savage attacks against working people. Their main strategy remains to support the Democratic Party, which also agrees with the massive cuts in living standards and does not offer an alternative strategy. Both Republicans and Democrats agree with the budget cuts at the expense of workers and the poor, but the Democrats want to use the unions to implement the cuts while the Republicans want to destroy public unions, which tend to support Democrats in the elections.


Need for a Fight-Back
Under pressure from the size of these attacks, the Communications Workers of America (CWA) has issued a call for a nationwide “We Are One” day of action for April 4. The date was chosen to commemorate the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis 43 years ago while supporting a strike by city sanitation workers.


The AFL-CIO, the NAACP, student organizations and many individual unions, along with other organizations, support the initiative. While this is a good start, it will not be sufficient to stop the massive attacks against workers across the country. What is needed is a serious effort to urgently start organizing mass demonstrations at the local level in every state where workers face budget cuts, layoffs and attacks against their organizations. These demonstrations are needed in order to alert the wider public about what is going on, build public support, and prepare the ground for further escalation, including strike actions.


The Tea Party Republicans could be stopped dead in their tracks if their real agenda of making workers pay for the crisis is exposed. Anger is already widespread and it is likely that it would lead to massive demonstrations if the program of cuts was contrasted with the tax breaks and massive profiteering by the rich and big business. Such a struggle needs to be linked to a program that challenges the idea of making workers pay for a crisis they did not create, while the rich and big business are let off the hook. We should also demand a massive jobs program and an end to imperialist U.S. wars.


The union leadership is unlikely to mobilize serious opposition against the cuts because that brings them into immediate conflict with the Democrats, who also want to implement cuts. But on the basis of rising anger, radicalization, and widespread opposition to cuts, local coalitions of unions, socialists, community groups, and student and antiwar groups could be built at a city and state level to fight back. Conferences and local actions against budget cuts should be organized. On such a basis, it would be possible to run anti-cuts, independent candidates against Republicans and Democrats and to demand that big business pay for the crisis.

The Search For The Great Blue-Pink American West Night- Scene Seven A-"The Ballad Of Captain Cob And The S.S. Blue-Pink Night"

***The Search For The Great Blue-Pink American West Night- Scene Seven A-"The Ballad Of Captain Cob And The S.S. Blue-Pink Night"

This scene originally formed part of scene seven but with today's posting of the entire Search For The Blue-Pink Night series of scenes this seemed awkward to the flow of the whole story.

Scene Seven A-"The Ballad Of Captain Cob And The S.S. Blue-Pink Night"

Markin comment:

I already told you today the story about the Moline Meltdown that was part of the search in the old days for the great blue-pink American West night so I don’t have to repeat that here but I did start to think that the story of Captain Cob and the S.S. Blue-Pink Night that was part of it would be easier to tell and I would not get myself so balled up in the telling if it was done as a ballad. Shorter and more to the point, if nothing else. Also an important source for this story, or model for the story if you will, was Red Sovine’s Big Joe and Phantom 309 as translated by Tom Waits. And Big Joe was nothing but a “talking” ballad in the old Hank Williams or Woody Guthrie style. So I am in good company. Here goes:

The Ballad Of Captain Cob And The S.S. Blue-Pink Night

Okay, let me tell this thing straight through even though I know it will sound off-kilter to you anyway I say it, hell, it will sound half off-kilter to me and I lived through it:

See, back a few years ago, ya, it was back a few years ago when I was nothing but a summer-sweltered sixteen year old high school kid, a city boy high school kid, with no dough, no way to get dough, and nobody I knew who had dough to put a touch on, I went off the deep end.

Plus, plus I had had about thirty-six beefs with Ma, around par for the course for a whole summer but way too many for a couple of weeks in, and not even Fourth of July yet.

Worst, worst, if you can believe this, I had a few, two maybe, beefs with the old man, and having a beef with him with Ma the official flak-catcher meant things were tough, too tough to stay around.

Sure, I know, how tough can it be at sixteen to stay put waiting for the summer heat to break and maybe have some clean clear wind bring in a change of fortune. But don’t forget, don’t ever forget when I’m telling you this story that we are talking about a sixteen year old guy, with no dough and plenty of dreams, always plenty of dreams, whatever color they turned out to be.

I threw a few things together in an old green, beaten to hell knapsack, you know enough to get by until things break, that stuff and about three dollars, and I headed out the door like a lot of guys headed out that same kind of door before me in search of fame and fortune.

I hit the main street with a swagger and immediately start thumbing as if my life depended on it. Right away a car, I didn’t see where it had come from before it came into my view, a late model car, looked like a 1961 Ford, slowed down, the driver rolled down his passenger side window and asked where was I heading.

I said “west, I guess,” he said “I’m heading up to Maine to work. Too bad I can’t help you.” As he readied to make tracks I say, “Hey, wait a minute, I‘ll take that ride, North or West it’s all the same to me.”

This guy, if you are thinking otherwise, turned out to be pretty interesting, he wasn’t any fruit like a lot of guys who stop when they see a young guy with a dour, carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders pan like mind, and are ready to pounce on that fact.

Seems that Kenny, Kenny of a thousand ships, his name was, worked the boats, the ferries out of Portland and Bar Harbor over to Nova Scotia and filled the time we traveled with stories about different funny things that happened on the trips back and forth.

And there was this one story that I didn’t think anything about when he told it. He was going on a bit about how one time out in the misty mist his uncle, Captain Cob, Captain Caleb Cob, some old swamp Yankee, whom he served under in some boat saved a bunch of people off an island ferry, off of Portland Light, got them to shore, and went back out looking for more.

Well, he is telling his stories, and I am telling mine about this and that, but mainly about my love of the sea, and about going west to see the Pacific when I get tired of the Atlantic.

Suddenly, Kenny says out of the blue, “Hey, if you’re gonna bum around I’ll leave you off at Old Orchard Beach, right at the beach, there’s plenty of places to sleep without being bothered."

See, though this guy, Kenny, was so good, such a good guy, that when we get there he doesn’t just let me off on Route One and so I have to thumb another ride into town like most guys would do but takes me right down to the pier, the amusement park pier.

Then he says you know it is probably better to get away from this crowded area, let me take you down Route 9 to the Saco jetty where you can set yourself up in an empty boat.

Okay, that sounds right and besides it’s won’t be dark for hours yet and it’s not dark enough for me to make my big teenage city boy moves.

I could see right away that Kenny was right, this place was quiet and there were many rows of boats just waiting to be used for housekeeping purposes. But, what got my attention was, maybe fifty yards away, the start of the longest jetty in the world, or so I thought.

Hey, I have walked a few jetties and while you have to be careful for the ill-placed boulders when you get to the end you are feeling like the king of the sea, and old Neptune better step aside. I started walking out,

Christ this is tough going I must be a little tired from all the travel. Nah it’s more than that, the granite slaps are placed helter-skelter so you can’t bound from one to another and you practically have to scale them. After about a hundred yards of scraping my hands silly, and raw, I say the heck with this and head back.

But put sixteen, hunger for adventure, and hunger to beat old fellaheen king Neptune down together and you know this is not the end.

I go around looking at my boat selection just exactly like I am going to rent an apartment. Except before I set up housekeeping I am going to take an old skiff out along the jetty to the end. So I push one off the sand, jump in and start rowing.

Now I am an ocean guy, no question. And I know my way around boats, a little, so I don’t think much of anything except that I will go kind of slow as I work my way out.

Of course a skiff ain’t nothing but a glorified rowboat, if that. It’s all heavy lifting and no “hi tech” like navigation stuff or stuff that tells you how far the end of jetty is. Or even that there is a heavy afternoon fog starting to roll in on the horizon. Ya, but intrepid that’s me.

Hey, I’m not going to England just to the end of the jetty. I said that as the fog, the heavy dark fog as it turned out, enveloped the boat and its new-found captain. I started rowing a little harder and a little more, I ain’t afraid to say it, panic-stricken.

See I thought I was rowing back to shore but I know, know deep somewhere in my nautical brain, that I am drifting out to sea. I’m still rowing though, as the winds pick up and rain starts slashing away at the boat.

Of course, the seas have started swelling, water cresting over the sides. Christ, so this is the way it is going to finish up for me.

What seemed like a couple more hours and I just plain stopped rowing, maybe I will drift to shore but I sure as hell am not going to keep pushing out to sea. Tired, ya, tired as hell but with a little giddy feeling that old Neptune is going be seeing me soon so I decide to put my head down and rest.

Suddenly I am awakened by the distinct sound of a diesel engine, no about six diesels, and a big, flashing light coming around my bow. I yell out, “over here.” A voice answers, “I know.”

Next thing I know an old geezer, a real old geezer decked out in his captain’s gear, is putting a rope around the bow of my boat and telling me to get ready to come aboard.

After getting me a blanket, some water and asking if I wanted a nip of something (I said yes) he said I was lucky, lucky as hell that he came by. Then he asked what I was doing out here in the open sea with such a rig, and wasn’t I some kind of fool boy.

Well, I told my story, although he seemed to know it already like he made a daily habit of saving sixteen year old city boys from the sea, or themselves. So we swapped stories for a while as we headed in, and I had a nip or two more.

As we got close to Saco pier though he blurted out that he had to let me off before the dock because he had some other business on the Biddeford side.

Here is where it gets really weird though. He asked me, as we parted, did I know the name of his boat (a trawler, really). I said I couldn’t see it in all the fog and swirling sea. He told me she was the “S.S. Blue-Pink Night.”

I blurted out, “Strange name for a boat, what is it a symbol or something?”

Then he told me about how he started out long ago on land, as a kid just like me, maybe a little older, heading to California, and the warm weather and the strange blue-pink night skies and the dreams that come with them. I said how come you’re still here but he said he was pressed for time.

Here is the thing that really threw me off. He gave me a small dried sea shell, a clam shell really, that was painted on its inner surface and what was painted on it was a very intricate, subliminally beautiful scene of what could only be that blue-pink California sky.

I said, “Thanks; I’ll always remember you for this and the rescue.” He said, “Hell lad that ain’t nothing but an old clam shell. When you get over to that Saco café at the dock just show it to them and you can get a meal on it. That meal is what you’ll remember me by.” And off he went.

Hungry, no famished, I stumbled into the Saco café, although that was not its name but some sea name, and it was nothing but a diner if you though about it, a diner that served liquor to boot so there were plenty of guys, sea guys, nursing beers until the storm blew over, or whatever guys spend half the day in a gin mill waiting to blow over.

I stepped to the counter and told the waitress, no, I asked politely just in case this was a joke, whether this old clam shell from the captain of the “Blue-Pink Night” got me a meal, or just a call to take the air.

All of a sudden the whole place, small as it was, went quiet as guys put their heads down and pretended that they didn’t hear or else though the joint doubled up as a church.

I asked my question again and the waitress said, “What’ll you have?”

The she said did I know anything about the captain, and how did he look, and where did he meet me, and a whole bunch of questions like this was some mystery, and I guess maybe there was at that.

Then the waitress told me this (and I think every other guy in the room by the loudness of her voice),

“A few years back, yes, about six or seven years ago, there was a big storm that came through Portland Light, some say a perfect storm, I don’t know, but it was a howler.

Well, one of the small ferries capsized out there and somehow someone radioed that there were survivors clinging to the boat. Well, the old captain and his first mate, I think, started up the old “Blue-Pink Night” and headed out, headed out hard, headed out full of whiskey nips, and one way or another, got to the capsized boat and brought the survivors into shore and then headed out again.

And we never saw them again.

And here is the funny part; when he was unloading his passengers he kept talking, talking up a perfect storm about seeing the blue-pink night when he was out there before and how maybe it was still there.

I guess the booze got the best of him. But hear me son, old captain was square with every one in this place, he used to own it then, and some of his kin are sitting right here now. He was square with them too. So, eat up kid, eat up on the house, ‘cause I want you to save that old clam shell and any time you’re on your uppers you can always get a meal here. Just remember how you got it.”

“Thanks, ma’am,” I said.

Then I slowly, like my soul depended on it, asked, “Oh, by the way what was that old captain’s first mate's name?” and I said it in such a way that she knew, knew just as well as I did, that I knew the answer.

“Kenny, Kenny Cob, bless his soul.”