*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-Youth, Class and Party (1971)

Markin comment:

One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.

There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.

The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.

Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:

"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."

This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
*******
Youth, Class and Party

From RCY Newsletter, No. 9, October-November 1971

"Youth" in itself is neither revolutionary nor a class. The "youth" consists of young workers, future petty-bourgeois technocrats and administrators, members of the ruling class, as well as radical intellectuals and future communists. Hitler, Trotsky, Mao and Nixon were all young once. The currently popular notion of the "Red University" and all forms of youth vanguardism reflect a conscious adaptation to the theory that students (youth) are somehow a revolutionary social group. The youth conference held at Essen, West Germany over July 3-4, sponsored by groups affiliated to the International Committee of the Fourth International (IC), also reflected an adaptation to this idea of the undifferentiated youth as inherently revolutionary.

Youth and the Working Class

The present period of economic crisis and resulting heightened class m
militancy requires absolute clarity on the relation of youth to the revolutionary movement. First, one must differentiate "youth" into its social components. While they share certain generational problems affecting all youth, nevertheless young workers see their interests as primarily tied to those of the working class as a whole. Particularly in America, where there are only vestigial traces of an apprentice system such as the European one, young workers tend to be integrated directly into the working class. There are, however, specially oppressed layers. Black youth, for example, because of their extreme economic dislocation, which freezes many of them out of the labor movement, are an essential layer of American society which the communist youth movement strives to reach directly. In other circumstances, too, young workers may be open to direct recruitment as youth by the communist youth movement; for example, where a bureaucratic union freezes out young workers from its ranks, in tightly closed industries, or during periods of mass unemployment which strike particularly hard at young workers, forcing them outside the organized framework of the labor movement.

Youth Radicalism—What Direction?

However, the main arena for "youth radicalism" in America continues to be the campuses. Students overwhelmingly reflect petty-bourgeois aspirations and ideas. Despite a certain interpenetration of working class and petty-bourgeois youth in junior and community colleges, the higher education system is primarily a training ground for the future technocrats and administrators of the capitalist state, cultural and scientific institutions, and corporate bureaucracies. As Trotsky pointed out in his analysis of the rise of fascism, the petty bourgeoisie is not an independent class and thus cannot pursue its own class politics but is forced to choose between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Students, as the most volatile section of the petty bourgeoisie, will play an active role in all "radical" movements, whether of the left or right. The Nazis were vastly stronger in the German universities in the ‘30s than either the communists or social democrats. Moslem students in Indonesia butchered thousands of communist workers and peasants. Today one sees certain implications for the "worldwide radicalization of the youth" in the rise of the right-wing, repulsive phenomena of the "Jesus freaks" and the Jewish Defense League.

As Trotsky pointed out, "...under conditions of capitalist disintegration and of the impasse in the economic situation, the petty bourgeoisie strives, seeks, attempts to tear itself loose from the fetters of the old masters and rulers of society. It is quite capable of linking up its fate with the proletariat. For that, only one thing is needed: the petty bourgeoisie must acquire faith in the ability of the proletariat to lead society onto a new road." (The Only Road for Germany, 1932). The petty bourgeoisie can break from its origins and ally its interests to those of the proletariat. But for this, decisive leadership must be taken by the working class and its highest organized expression in struggle, the revolutionary vanguard party.

The radical intelligentsia, primarily campus-based in America, can play an essential and valuable role in the building of the revolutionary party, once broken from its class origins. Gramsci wrote: "One of the most important characteristics of every class which develops toward power is its struggle to assimilate and conquer ideologically the traditional intellectuals." It is to this struggle that the RCY is dedicated. We seek to develop young radicals into lifetime communist militants, through socialist education and struggle, and to organize and link them, through the vanguard party, to the working class. The European Young Communist Leagues of the early ‘20s, while struggling to become mass organizations of working-class youth, made their primary contribution in the full and all-sided training of young communist cadres. We follow in this tradition.

Youth and the Revolutionary Party

The RCY stands in the tradition of the first four Congresses of the Communist International, which worked out the full Leninist conception of youth-party relations. The leadership of the working class, the only class with the social power to smash the capitalist state, is decisive. The organized framework of proletarian struggle is that of the revolutionary vanguard party. Any conception of a youth movement as independent of this struggle is a capitulation to petty-bourgeois illusions.

The struggles of all oppressed sections of society, and all opposition to imperialism, must be linked to this driving force of revolution if they are to be successful. To cut the revolutionary youth movement off from the party, which embodies the historical experience of the revolutionary proletarian movement, is to cripple it and doom it to flounder in a classless swamp. But each generation comes to socialism in its own way, as Lenin said, and must work out its own ideas. For this an arena must be provided for the freest and fullest discussion of all political questions. Political education also involves the experiences of decision and action, so the revolutionary youth must have the organized means to carry out its program in practice.

These considerations--the need for young communists to explore the burning questions of the socialist movement and acquire the experiences of decision and action, and the need to link this struggle to the highest form of revolutionary organization, the vanguard party--resulted in the concept of the relation of the revolutionary youth movement to the party as "organizationally independent and politically subordinate." The revolutionary party as the vanguard of the working class is also the leadership of the revolutionary movement as a whole. Since we as a communist youth organization are also a part of this revolutionary movement, we must necessarily place ourselves under its common discipline, in order to achieve the necessary unity in action.

The Spartacist League

At our first national conference over Labor Day, the RCY voted to become the youth section of the Spartacist League. The Spartacist League is the nucleus of the revolutionary party in this country. The politics of the Spartacist League uniquely embody the communist program for working-class revolution—Trotskyism, the modern development of Marxism-Leninism. We base ourselves on the traditions of the early Communist International and on the experience of the American Trotskyist movement. Our development into a revolutionary youth organization has been made easier by the experiences and working out in practice of the Leninist conceptions of youth-party relations in the founding of the YSA. The degeneration of the YSA, after the expulsion of its original leadership, into a reformist front-group of the SWP was the result of a long process of political disintegration on the part of the SWP. The SWP lost faith in its ability to lead the working class, and substituted tailing after Third Worldism, youth radicalism, etc. This inability to struggle against revisionism led the SWP to organizationally strangle the youth, being unable to lead it politically.

Internationalism

Youth-Party relations have international implications, since the overriding task of the revolutionary movement in all countries is to struggle for the rebuilding of the Fourth International of Trotsky. Youth organizations would function essentially as auxiliaries to the particular national sections of the world party, the Fourth International. A youth international would reflect on an international scale the same relationship the national youth organization has to its national section of the world party. This conception has nothing in common with the "Revolutionary Youth International" proposed by the Essen conference, which is to be unaffiliated to any party formation and whose politics are to be explicitly "non-Trotskyist" so as not to alienate "radical" petty-bourgeois youth.

Crisis of Leadership

"The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterized by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat." (Transitional Program, 1938) The task of communists is to build and develop this leadership. The historical choice posed before humanity is indeed that of socialism or barbarism. The RCY as the youth section of the revolutionary nucleus, the Spartacist League, will devote itself to preparing the cadres for the day when we can help lead the battle for world socialism

*In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!- The MOVE Prisoners-Charles Simms Africa, Debbie Sims Africa, Delbert Orr Africa, Edward Goodman Africa, Janet Holloway Africa, Janine Phillips Africa, Michael Davis Africa, William Phillips Africa

Click on the headline to link to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.

Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month

Markin comment (reposted from 2010)

In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.

That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long time supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.

Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!

*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-For a Revolutionary Socialist Youth Movement!(1970)

Markin comment:

One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.

There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.

The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.

Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:

"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."

This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
***********
For a Revolutionary Socialist Youth Movement!

From Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter, No. 5, December 1970

The need for a revolutionary socialist youth organization, open to all political tendencies seeking revolutionary change, was clearly demonstrated by the spontaneous upsurge of students and workers over the Cambodia-Kent State crisis. Whether SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] can develop into such an organization depends both on its internal structure and its ability to put forth a long-term revolutionary perspective. American society cannot be revolutionized through campus based activity, but only through a mass, working-class socialist party. As part of its socialist propaganda, SDS should fight for the formation of such a party. While SDS cannot substitute itself for the Leninist party, substantial sectors of radicalized youth can center their activities around those vital issues—imperialism, chauvinism, nationalism, workers’ power—which will contribute to the development of such a vanguard organization.

The last few years have seen increasing fragmentation and exclusionism on the left. Blacks and other minorities have limited themselves to their ethnically exclusive organizations. Many radical women have focused groups exclusively concerned with the issue of women’s oppression. The left is beginning to look like a group of capitalist firms competing for scarce natural resources, as if there were a limited pool of resources available to fight oppression and each political group had to justify its claims on that pool. Thus, SDS has witnessed meaningless debates about whether the oppression of women is as important as the oppression of blacks in American society. It’s obvious that the trade union movement would never have been built if coal miners and steel workers had spent their time arguing which of the two groups was more exploited. When the left becomes divided along social group lines, it is inevitable that a sense of hostile competition will develop. Many women’s liberation activists see working-class-oriented groups as blind to the social oppression of women. Many black militants regard the women’s liberation movement as a middle-class diversion or implicit mockery of what they see as their more vital struggle. SDS cannot think of itself purely in negative terms—anti-imperialist, anti-racist, anti-sexist, etc. Our goal is not to fight particular aspects of social oppression, but to end them all by overthrowing capitalism and constructing a socialist society. An end to the oppression of blacks and other minorities, the abolition of the "second sex" position of women in society, as well as an end to the exploitation of workers cannot be achieved through pressure group politics, but only through socialist revolution. If the left and SDS is not to become a collection of competing interest groups, it is necessary to affirm that struggles against particular forms and aspects of oppression must be part of an overall strategy to establish a socialist world order.

Why Proletarian Socialism?

Progressive Labor members have often argued that SDS should support workers’ struggles because workers are the most oppressed section of American society. This is not true. Groups such as welfare recipients, sharecroppers, convicts, and reservation Indians are poorer and more degraded than the typical factory worker. Workers’ struggles are decisive not because workers are "worse off" than other groups, but because private property and the exploitation of labor is the central axis on which this society rests. Social power depends on control of’ productive resources. Only the working class is capable of destroying the power of the capitalist class and reconstructing society for the benefit of all of humanity.

If one speaks of being "pro-working-class", one should want the working class to have power and not simply endlessly fight their exploiters. Workers’ power, whatever one may call it, is socialism. To describe oneself as "pro-working-class", without having a socialist perspective, is, at best, to be an advocate of trade union militancy, and, at worst, to accept the permanent exploitation of the working class.

The "Socialist Issue" in SDS

SDS should define itself as an anti-imperialist, anti-racist socialist youth organization with a working class perspective. It has been argued by Progressive Labor that SDS should not call itself socialist since everybody in SDS does not have to be a socialist. In fact, this is dishonest since the overwhelming majority of SDSers are socialists and many of our leaflets and articles talk about imperialism and capitalism, thereby implying a socialist analysis of society. Agitation against the ruling class and for workers’ control must play an important part in our program. This does not mean that every SDS member will agree with it. Taking a stand in favor of a socialist solution to the oppression we fight will not prevent us from recruiting many newly radicalized young people who do not yet understand the need for a socialist perspective but want to participate in SDS. Having a set of secret positions which we do not forthrightly acknowledge is more likely to drive them away.

SDS’s fear of the word "socialist" is made ridiculous by the example of the Young Socialist Alliance, a group which is to the right of SDS on every single issue, and yet calls itself "socialist". Despite its being politically to the right of SDS, the YSA is able to pretend to be more radical than SDS by its willingness to break with capitalist ideology. The YSA has been quite successful in recruiting newly radicalized youth who see that the only solution to the problems of war, racism, and misery caused by capitalism is socialism.

As already noted, for the past few years most SDS members have considered themselves socialists—and revolutionary socialists, at that. Why then has the organization failed to come out for socialism? Most of the responsibility falls on the shoulders of Progressive Labor (PL), the current SDS leadership. As self-avowed Leninists, one would think PL would take a lead in fighting for a socialist perspective in SDS. Instead, they have done everything in their power to oppose one. A major reason for this is a desire to keep SDS at a low political level so that "really serious" people who want to be socialists are more attracted to PL, the self-styled revolutionary party.

Members of PL in SDS usually act as if PL were the mass party of the American working class, to which every serious socialist in SDS naturally owed their allegiance. Apart from its incorrect and continually changing politics, PL’s claims to be a working class party are downright laughable. PL has far less than 500 members, the overwhelming majority of whom are students or college educated white collar workers. PL doesn’t lead as much as a single trade union local anywhere in the country and couldn’t get one percent of the vote for any electoral position anywhere. Lenin advised the British communists, who were twenty times larger and fifty times more proletarian than PL, to join the British Labor Party, the party of the British working class, as a revolutionary faction.

There is no real working class party in this country. One has to be built. Members and supporters of Progressive Labor would do a genuine service to the cause of the American revolution if they gave up their self-deluding posturing and joined with revolutionary socialists, in SDS and elsewhere, to build a workers’ party, in reality and not merely in name.

For Non-Exclusionism

Non-exclusionism is one of SDS’s most valuable assets and one which its membership must constantly fight to protect. The former SDS leadership almost destroyed SDS by trying to turn it into their own "party"-type organization. Recognizing the need for some kind of democratic-centralist vanguard party, they decided to purge "outside cadres" (particularly Progressive Labor) from SDS and turn the large and politically heterogeneous organization into a party with their politics. While it is clear we need a vanguard party which has the correct Marxist-Leninist program, we also need SDS as a non-exclusionist group of many tendencies and independent radicals in which each tendency can seek to win adherents to its politics and to convince a majority of the SDS membership to follow its leadership. In this way, SDS can continue to attract newly-radicalized youth who can participate in united action (anti-war, anti-racism, strike support, etc.) while continuing to discuss political views upon which they do not all agree.

Since SDS members hold widely differing views on politics and tactics on almost every subject, every political and tactical position SDS takes (except for the vaguest formulations like "We fight racism") will necessarily not find unanimous agreement among the membership. Does this mean that SDS should not take clear political positions? Of course not. If we tried to do this we would restrict ourselves to low level actions and campaigns. Moreover, any political organization has politics. To claim otherwise just means SDS’s politics would be submerged, making a mockery of open discussion and democratic determination of policy. Anyone who has been in SDS for several years knows that in most SDS chapters, talk about "participatory democracy" was simply camouflage for subterranean maneuvering by leadership cliques.

If we are to put forth intelligent programs and undertake struggles, then we must not be afraid to put forward political positions. Since we will never be unanimously agreed on every issue, this means the politics of the majority of the membership will dominate so long as they are the majority. SDSers who disagree should be able to argue for their positions and try to win over a majority of the members to them, and must be assured full representation, proportionate to their strength at the time, on all SDS leading bodies and a forum for their views in New Left Notes. In fact, however, the successive leaderships of SDS have never pursued this kind of policy. New Left Notes is not now and never has been representative of the differing opinions inside SDS. At the 1968 SDS Convention, the grouping which later became the WSA caucus was not able to elect even one member to SDS’s leading committee although they represented a substantial minority of the Convention delegates. Our organizational set-up is not noticeably different now.

Leninists and Independents

Since its inception, the relationship between SDS and outside alleged revolutionary organizations, particularly those practicing "democratic centralist" discipline, has been controversial. The early SDS excluded reds out of cold-war anti-communism. The Klonsky-Dohrn faction tried to counter Progressive Labor/WSA’s attack on main-stream New Leftism by expelling all members of "outside cadre organizations".

Members of SDS in "external cadre organizations" certainly have the right and responsibility to publicize their group activities within SDS, to recruit independents, to fight for their political line and to play a leading role in the organization. What they do not have is the right to turn SDS into a de facto youth group of their own organization. Since becoming the leadership of’ SDS, members of PL have tried to force through a privileged relation between PL and SDS. Internal SDS meetings have been used to organize Challenge sales. PL has been the only adult revolutionary organization invited to speak at rallies organized by SDS. In the November 21, 1970 issue of New Left Notes, there is an article entitled PLP, CLP, and Liga Socialista Celebrate Workers International Solidarity Day, which begins, "For hundreds of SDS members, who are members or friends of Progressive Labor Party..." (and what of the hundreds of SDSers who are not members or friends of PL—do they get equal time?). These kinds of articles in NLN clearly give the impression to an unknowing person that SDS is PL’s student group.

SDS has also witnessed the opposite political attitude—that members of outside revolutionary groups are second class citizens to be tolerated as long as they work hard and don’t make trouble. Students new to radical politics and serious independents should welcome the presence in SDS of politically experienced groups, offering comprehensive and definite policies for SDS.

It has been argued that Leninists in SDS have an advantage because adhering to democratic centralism, they vote as a bloc. This was one of the Klonsky-Dohrn faction’s arguments for expelling members of PL. The history of SDS shows that this argument is a red herring. Throughout SDS’s history like-minded members, with no ties to outside organizations have formed factional groupings with whatever discipline was needed to push their politics. The old SDS had the Praxis group, the Revolutionary Union, RYM II and the Weathermen. SDS now has such factional groupings as the Revolutionary People’s Caucus and the Midnight Special group. Disciplined caucuses, open to all SDS members and based on a definite program, are far more democratic than the clique politics all too common in the radical student movement.

RESOLVED:

SDS should define itself as an anti-imperialist, anti-racist socialist youth organization with a working class perspective.

SDS must constantly reaffirm its non-exclusionist principle in practice. This means guaranteeing proportional representation to all political viewpoints within SDS on leading bodies and in the pages of New Left Notes.

SDS should not have a privileged relationship with any adult "revolutionary" organization, e.g., SDS business meetings should not be used to organize sales of publications of such "revolutionary" groups.

If SDS organizes a united front rally, all groups should be invited to speak on the basis of agreement with the demands of that rally.

The Old Man’s Old Sea- In Honor Of Our Homeland The Ocean

The Old Man’s Old Sea- In Honor Of Our Homeland, The Ocean

It is dawn, or maybe just those few minutes before the dawn, those dark light minutes when the sun’s battle for the day is set. The waves splash, today not so innocently, against the waiting sand, sand beaten down since time immemorial. This beach, this northern clime beach, the far end of Saco, Maine beach, is filled with empty clam shells waiting sandification, abandoned and mislaid lobster traps, occasional oil slicks spilled from the trawlers, working trawlers nearby, the flotsam and jetsam streamed here of a thousand ships, cargoes, careless throwaways and conscious, very conscious dumpings, like the sea was just another land-fill wanting filling. Today though I am ready, ready for the hundredth hundredth time to walk the walk, the ocean walk that has defined more parts of me than heaven will ever know. As I button up my slicker against the April winds that come here more often than not I see, see faintly in the distance, a figure, a fellow traveler taking his, her or its (don’t laugh I have seen horses, unridden horses, trotting these beaches, although no sea monsters), maybe also hundredth hundredth walk along the ocean sidewalk, and maybe, just maybe, for the same reason.

Today, hundredth, hundredth walk or not, I am in a remembering mood, a high dudgeon remembering mood that always gets triggered by proximity, fifty mile proximity if the truth be known, to the ocean. I have just finished up a piece of work that reminded me of seas, sea-sides, sea walks, sea rocks, ocean-side carnival amusement parks placed as if to mock the intrinsic interest that one would have in the sea, our homeland the sea, and I need to sort this out, also for that now familiar ten-thousandth time. But I best begin at the beginning, or try to, so I will be finished in that hour or so that it will take me to walk this walk, this rambling ocean walk, and I will pass that solitary walker coming the other way and be obliged under some law of the sea to break my train of thought and remark on the nature of the day, the nature of the ocean, and the joys of oceanness brought forth by old King Neptune to that passing stranger.

Ah, memory, jesus, just the names, Taffrail Road, Yardarm Lane, Captain's Walk, Quarterdeck Road, Sextant Circle, and the Snug Harbor Elementary School tell a story all on their own. Yes, those names, those seemingly misplaced, misbegotten names and places from the old housing project down in Adamsville, my old hometown, and where I came of age surely evoke imagines of the sea, of long ago sailing ships, and of desperate, high stakes battles fought off shrouded, mist-covered coasts by those hearty enough to seek fame and fortune. And agile enough to keep it. Almost from my first wobbly, halting baby steps down at “the projects” I have been physically drawn to the sea, a seductive, foam-flecked siren call that has never left me.

Needless to say, ever since I was a toddler my imagination, my sense of imagery, my sense of the nature of the world has been driven by the sea as well. Not so much of pirates and prizes, although those drove my youth a bit but of the power of nature, for good or evil. And on those long ago days, just like now, I dressed against the impending inclement weather with my mustard yellow rain slicker(French’s mustard color not Guiden’s, okay) complete with Gloucester fisherman’s rain floppy rain hat of the same color and rubber boots, black, knee-length boots that go squish, squish and have since before time immemorial.

Of course, anybody with any sense knows that anyone who had even a passing attachment to a place like Adamsville, tucked in a bay, an Atlantic bay, had to have an almost instinctual love of the sea; and, a fear of its furies when old Mother Nature turns her back on us. Yes, the endless sea, our homeland the sea, the mother we never knew, the sea... But, enough of those imaginings. If being determines consciousness, and if you love the ocean, then it does not hurt to have been brought up in Adamsiville with its ready access to the bay and water on three sides. That said, the focal point for any experience with the ocean in Adamsville centered, naturally, around its longest stretch of beach, Adamsville Central Beach. Puny by Saco beach far-as-the-eye-can-see standards, and Saco puny by Carlsbad (California Carlsbad) farther-than-the-eye-can-see standards but place to learn the ropes of how to deal with the sea, with its pitfalls, its mysteries, it lure, and its lore.

For many of us of a certain age brought forth by the sea, including this writer, one cannot discuss Adamsville Central Beach properly without reference to such spots such as Howard Johnson's famous landmark ice cream stand (now a woe-begotten clam shack of no repute). For those who are clueless as to what I speak of, or have only heard about it in mythological terms from older relatives, or worst, have written it off as just another ice cream joint you can only dream of such heavens although someone, not me, not me today as I remembrance with a broad stroke and have no time for pretty descriptions, for literary flourishes, should really do themselves proud and write the history, ya, the child’s view history of that establishment. And make the theme, make the theme if you will, the bond between New England love of ice cream and of the sea (yes, it is true, other parts of the country, other ocean parts of the country as well, are, well, nonplussed by the ice cream idea, and it shows in their product).

Know this for now though: many a hot, muggy, sultry, sweaty summer evening was spent in line impatiently, and perhaps, on occasion, beyond impatience, waiting for one of those 27 (or was it 28?) flavors to cool off with. In those days the prize went to cherry vanilla in a sugar cone (backup: frozen pudding). I will not bore the reader with superlative terms and “they don’t make them like they use to”, especially for those who only know “HoJo’s” from the later, pale imitation franchise days out on some forsaken turnpike highway, but at that moment I was in very heaven.

Nor can one forget those stumbling, fumbling, fierce childish efforts, bare-footed against all motherly caution about the dreaded jellyfish, pail and shovel in hand, to dig for seemingly non-existent clams down toward the South Adamsville end of the beach at the, in those days, just slightly oil-slicked, sulfuric low tide. Or the smell of charcoal-flavored hot dogs on those occasional family barbecues (when one in a series of old jalopies that my father drove worked well enough to get us there) at the then just recently constructed old Treasure Island (now named after some fallen Marine) that were some of the too few times when my family acted as a family. Or the memory of roasted, really burnt, sticky marshmallows sticking to the roof of my mouth.

But those thoughts and smells are not the only ones that interest me today. No trip down memory lane would be complete without at least a passing reference to high school Adamsville Central Beach. The sea brings out many emotions: humankind's struggle against nature, some Zen notions of oneness with the universe, the calming effect of the thundering waves, thoughts of mortality, and so on. But it also brings out the primordial longings for companionship. And no one longs for companionship more than teenagers. So the draw of the ocean is not just in its cosmic appeal but hormonal, as well. Mind you, however, we are not discussing here the nighttime Adamsville Beach, the time of "parking" and the "submarine races". Our thoughts are now pure as the driven snow. Here we will confine ourselves to the day time beach.

Virtually from the day we got out of school for the summer vacation I headed for the beach. And not just any section of that beach but the section directly between the John Adams and John Quincy Adams Yacht Clubs. Now was situating myself in that spot done so that I could watch all the fine boats at anchor? Or was this the best swimming location on the beach? Hell no, this is where we heard (and here I include my old running pal and classmate, Frankie, Francis Xavier Riley) all the "babes" were. We were, apparently, under the influence of "Beach Blanket Bingo" or some such teenage beach film. (For those who are again clueless this was a grade B ‘boy meets girl’ saga the plot behind a thousand Hollywood films, except on the beach.)

Well, for those who expected a movie-like happy ending to this section of the remembrance piece, you know, where I meet a youthful "Ms. Right" to the strains of the song "Sea of Love", forget it. (That is the original “Sea of Love”, by the way, not the one used in the movie of the same name sung by Tom Waits at the end, and a cover that you should listen to on “YouTube”.) I will keep the gory details short, though. As fate would have it there may have been "babes" aplenty down there but not for this lad. I don't know about you but I was just too socially awkward (read, tongue-tied) to get up the nerve to talk to girls (female readers substitute boys here). And on reflection, if the truth were to be known, I would not have known what to do about such a situation in any case. No job, no money and, most importantly, no car for a date to watch one of those legendary "submarine races" that we have all agreed that we will not discuss here. But we can hardly fault the sea for that, right?

But visions of nearly one-half century ago hardly exhaust the lure of the sea. And, speaking of visions, that fellow sea-seeker I mentioned a while ago, coming from the other end of the beach is starting to take shape, it is a he, I can tell by the walk, by the sea walk that men put on when they are alone with their thoughts, although beyond that he is too far away for me to determine age, class (this is a very democratic beach, in most spots, with few vulgar and almost universally disregarded no-trespassing-private property-keep out-beware-of-dogs-police-take-notice signs), or physical description, as the suppressed light from the cloudy morning day gets a little brighter

Funny, some people I have known, including those I grew up with, grew up with breathing ocean air and who started with a love of the sea much as I did, moved to Kansas, Omaha, Peoria, Winnemucca or some such place, some such distinctly non-ocean place and never looked back. Christ, as is well known by one and all who know me I get very nervous even now when, as a city boy, I go to the country and do not have the feel of city lights to comfort me. Not as well known is the fact, the hard fact that I get nervous, very nervous, when I am not within driving distance of some ocean, say that fifty miles mentioned above. So keep, please keep, your Kansas, your Omaha, your Peoria, and your damn blessed Winnemucca and let me be, be in places like Bar Harbor, Maine, Peggy’s Cove, Nova Scotia, Sanibel Island, Florida, Carlsbad, California (hell no, not the New Mexico one ), Mendocino, ditto California, Seattle, Washington just to name a few places on this continent, and there are many others, and on other continents, or the edges of other continents, as well. And stories, plenty of stories, which I don’t have time to tell you now except for one that will stand in as an exemplar for what I mean. By the way that form, that mannish form, coming toward me is looking more like a young man by the speed of his walk, and he too seems to have on a the favored sea dog yellow rain jacket.
****
January 1970 visions of Angelica, Angelica of the homeland sea.

I waved good-bye to Angelica, once again, as she drove off from the ocean front campsite that we had been camping out on, the Leo Carrillo State Park near Point Magoo about fifty miles or so north of Los Angeles. She will now drive the road back in her green Ford Hertz unlimited mileage, mid-size rental (paid for, as she explained one night, by her parents whose golden age of the automobile-frenzied minds counted it as a strike against me, a very big strike, that when I had “kidnapped” their daughter on the 1969 blue-pink summer road west down in Steubenville, Ohio I didn’t even have a car). She planned (on my advise) to drive back mostly on the ocean-abutted, white-capped waves smashing against jagged ancient shore rocks, Pacific Coast Highway down through Malibu and Santa Monica to take one last look at the Pacific Ocean as the final point on her first look ocean trip, on the way to LAX to take a flight back to school days Muncie, Indiana.

She will also be driving back to the airport and getting on that miserable plane east knowing as I do since we talked about it incessantly during her stay, that some right things, or at least some maybe right things, like our being together last summer heading free west and for these two January weeks in front of the sea, our homeland the sea, before her classes started again, got caught up in the curious web of the human drama. For no understandable reason. Hey, you already knew this if you have ever had even that one teeny-weeny, tiny, minuscule love affair that just had no place to go, or no time to take root, or just got caught out there in the blue-pink night. Ya, you know that story. But let me take some minutes to tell you this one. If it seems very familiar and you “know” the plot line well then just move on.

To get you up to speed after Angelica and I had been on the heartland hitchhike road (and places like Moline, Neola, and Omaha are nothing but the heartland, good or bad), she, well, she just got tired of it, tired of the lacks, tired of the uncertainties of the road. Hell hell-on-wheels, I was getting tired of it myself except I was a man on a mission. The nature of that mission is contained in the words “search for the blue-pink great American West night” so the particulars of that mission need not detain us here. So in Neola, Iowa, Neola, Iowa of all places aided by “fairy grandmother” Aunt Betty, who ran the local diner where Angelica worked to help make us some dough to move on, and her own sense of dreams she called it quits back in September. Aunt Betty drove us to Omaha where Angelica took the bus back east, Indiana east from Nebraska, to hometown Muncie and I hit Interstate 80 West headed first to Denver before the snows, or so I hoped.

Honestly, although we exchanged addresses and telephone numbers where messages could be left, or where we could speak to each other (her parents’ house not being one of them), and made big plans to reunite in California in January during her school break, I didn’t really think that once we were off the road together that those plans would pan out.
Now I may not remember all my reasoning at the time this far removed, the now of my telling this story many years later, but I had had enough relationships with women to sense this one was good, very good, while it lasted but it could no survive the parting. Not one of those overused “absence makes the heart grow fonder” things you hear about. And, truth to tell, because I thought that was the way things would play out, I started getting focused back on Boston Joyel more than a little as I walked a lot, stood at the shoulder of the hitchhike road a lot, and fitfully got my rides on the road west.

But see this is where you think you have something figured out just so and then it goes awry. Angelica called, left messages, sent letters, even a telegram, to Denver (to the commune where, Jack and Mattie, my traveling companions on the final leg west whom I had met earlier in the spring on a different trip down to D.C., were staying). She sent more communications in early December saying that she was still coming to Los Angeles as well where we three stayed with a few artistic friends of Jack and Mattie’s. Cinema-crazed artistic friends, including one budding film director who, moreover, had great dope connections right into the heart of Mexico. This is where they would stay while I planned to push the hitchhike road north heading to San Francisco.

I once, in running through one of the scenes in this hitchhike road show, oh ya, it was the Neola scene, mentioned that in Angelica what you saw was what you got, what she said was what she meant, and both those were good things indeed. And so if I had thought about it a minute of course she was coming to California in January and staying with me for her two week break, and maybe longer. So when January came she contacted me though John and Mattie, who like I said were now staying with this very interesting experimental film-maker, David, in the Hollywood hills and canyons. I started back south to L.A. in order to meet her at the airport. From there I had it planned that we would go to Point Magoo and camp out like in the “old days” at an ocean front state park.

Needless to say when I greeted her at LAX we both were all smiles, I was in more than all smiles mode, because I had been “stag” for a while and she was, well, fetching as always, or almost always. Here though is where I noticed that the road really is not for everyone. In Neola, and later getting on the bus back home in Omaha, poor Angelica looked pretty haggard but at the airport, well like I said, she was fetching.

And, guess what, she brought her sleeping bag that we got for her in a Lexington, Kentucky Army-Navy Store when we first seriously started on the road west. And the first thing she said about it was, referring to a little in-joke between us, “it fits two, in a pinch.” Be still my heart. So we gathered up her stuff, did the airport exit stuff (easier in those days) and picked up the outside shuttle to the Hertz car rental terminal. We were jabbering away like crazy, but best of all, we were like, a little, those first days last summer back in that old-time Steubenville truck stop diner and cabin when I first met her.

Of course, part of the trip for her, part of what she went as far as she could with me on the hitchhike road for, was to get to California and see what it was all about, and what the ocean was all about since she was a heartland girl who had never seen the ocean before. When we got to Point Magoo she flipped out, she flipped out mostly at the idea that we would stay, could stay right on the beach in front of the ocean. And just like a kid, just like I did when I was kid and saw the ocean, when she saw the Pacific, she jumped right in. Hell, she was so excited she almost got caught in a small riptide. I had to go drag her out. I won’t say we had fun every minute of those weeks acting out our ocean nomad existence, but most minutes, and I could see that she felt the same way.

Naturally, as time drifted away toward her return flight date we talked more and more about what the future, if any, held in store for us. She was adamant about not going back on the road, she was adamant as well that she wanted to finish school and make something of herself. I had no serious defense against that practical wisdom. And, truthfully, I wasn’t, toward the end of her stay, pushing the issue, partially because even I could see that it made sense but also, we had had a “flare-up” over the Boston Joyel question (I am being polite here).

But it was more than that; the flat out, hungry truth was that I really didn’t know how to deal with a Midwestern what you see is what you get woman like Angelica. I was more used to virtuous Irish Catholic girls who drove me crazy as a kid getting me all twisted up about religion, about nice girls, and about duplicity when I found out what the real score was with this type of young girl/ woman later. I was also, and Joyel was the epitome of this type, totally in sync (well, as much as a man can be) with the Harvard Square folksy, intellectual, abstract idealist, let’s-look-at-everything-from-twenty-two different angles, what is the meaning of human relationships 24/7 kind of woman. And fatally attracted to them (and still am). This Angelica look at things only a couple of ways, let’s work things out easy-like, heavens, let’s not analyze everything to the nth degree flipped me out. Angelica was a breath of fresh air and, maybe, maybe, about ten years later, and two divorces later to boot, I would have had that enough sense god gave geese to hold onto her with both hands, tightly, very tightly. But I was in my blue-pink search phase and not to be detoured.

Of course all this hard work of trying to understand where we stood put a little crack in our reason for being together in the first place. The search for, search for something. Maybe, for her, it was just that life minute at the ocean and then on to regular life minutes out in the thickets of the white picket fences. She never said it then in so many words but that seemed to be the aim. And to be truthful, although I was only just barely thinking about it at the time, as the social turmoil of the times got weird, diffuse, and began to evaporate things started to lose steam. As we were, seemingly, endlessly taking our one-sided beatings as those in charge started a counter-offensive ( a counter-offensive still going on) people, good people, but people made of human clay nevertheless got tired of the this and that existence, even Joyel. Joyel of Harvard Square folksy, intellectual, abstract idealist, let’s-look-at-everything-from-twenty-two different angles, what is the meaning of relationships 24/7 was also weary and wary of what was next and where she fit into “square” society. Christ, enough of that, we know, or knew, that song too well.

A couple of days before Angelica was to leave, and on a day when the sun seemed especially bright, especially bright for then smog-filled Los Angeles January, and warm, not resident warm but Boston and Muncie warm, sat like two seals sunning ourselves in the glow of mother ocean she nudged me and asked me if I had a joint. Now Angelica liked a little vino now and then but I can’t recall her ever doing a joint (grass, marijuana, herb, ganja, whatever you call it in your woods). So this is new. The problem, although not a big one in ocean-side state park 1970 Southern California, was that I was not “holding.” No problem though, a few spots down the beach was an old well-traveled, kind of beat-up Volkswagen van that I knew, knew just as sure as I was standing on that white sand beach, was “holding.” I went over, asked around, and “bingo” two nice big joints came traveling with me back to our campsite. Oh, daddy, daddy out in the be-bop blue-pink night thank you brother van man. For just a minute, just that 1970 California minute, the righteous did inherit the earth.

Back at our camp site Angelica awaited the outcome of my quest, although she also wanted to wait until later, until the day’s sun started going down a bit more to go into that smoked-filled good night. When that later came Angelica was scared/ thrilled, as she tried to smoke the one I lit up for her and started coughing like crazy, but that was nothing then. Everybody, at least everybody I knew, went through that same baptism. But Jesus, did we get mellow, that stuff, as was most stuff then, was primo, not your ragweed bull stuff that ran the rounds later. And why should it have not been so as we were so close to the then sane Mexican border of those days to get the good stuff.

But all of this build-up over this dope scene is so much filler, filler in those days when if you didn’t at least take a pipe full (inhale or not, like it or not) you were a square “squared.” What the stuff did for Angelica, and through Angelica to me, got her to open up a little. No, not about family, or old boyfriends, or her this and that problems. No, but kind of deep, kind of deep somewhere that she maybe didn’t know existed. Deep as I had ever heard her before. She talked about her fate, the fate of the fates, about what was going on in the world, no, not politics; she was organically incapable of that. Mystics stuff, getting in touch with the sea homeland stuff, earth mother stuff too in a way. Dope-edged stuff sure but when she compared the splashing foam-flecked waves to some cosmic force that I forget how she put it (remember I was dope-addled as well) then for just that moment, just that moment when the old red-balled sun started to dip to the horizon on one of those fairly rare days when it met the ocean I swear that Angelica knew, knew in her heart, knew in her soul even, what the blue-pink American West dream stuff I had bombarded her with was all about. That was our moment, and we both knew it.

So when leaving came a couple of days later and we both knew, I think, as we packed up her things, including that well-used sleeping bag, we had come to a parting of the roads. As I put her stuff in the rental car she sweetly blurted out something I was also thinking, “I’ll always remember that night we made the earth under the cabin in Steubenville shake.” And I thought I bet she will, although she forgot the part about the making the roof of the cabin move too. And so there I was, waving as she drove off to her Angelica dreams. And I never saw her again.

*********
But enough of ancient thoughts, of ancient sea thoughts, and ancient sea loves because just now I see that previously distant figure is none other than a young boy, a young boy of maybe six or seven, not older I am sure. About fifty yards away he stops, as boys and girls will when confronted with the endless treasures of the sea, and is intently looking at some sea object although I can not make it out from this distance. What I can make out, make out very plainly, is that he is wearing a mustard yellow rain slicker (French’s mustard color not Guiden’s) complete with a Gloucester fisherman’s floppy rain hat of the same color and knee-deep rubber boots, black, of course. As we approach each other I notice that he has that determined sea walk that I have carried with me since childhood. I look at him intensely, he looks at me intensely, and we nod as we pass each other. No words, no remarks on the nature of the day, the nature of the ocean, and the joys of oceanness brought forth by old King Neptune need be spoken between us. The nod, the ocean swell, and the ocean sound as the waves crashed almost to the sand beneath our feet, spoke for us. The torch had been passed.

The Latest From The Private Bradley Manning Defense Committee-June 4, 2011-Veterans and supporters rally for Bradley at Fort Leavenworth

Click on the headline to link to the Private Bradley Manning Support Network website.

Veterans and supporters rally for Bradley at Fort Leavenworth

June 4th, 2011. Approximately 250 supporters —including many veterans—converged today at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas to rally for Bradley Manning. Supporters arrived from across the country and held large colorful signs that said, “Free Bradley Manning, Hero, Whistle-Blower.” They gathered at Bob Dougherty Memorial Park where they staged a rally with speakers and music for one hour. Then they marched several blocks to the main entrance of Fort Leavenworth, where Bradley Manning is being held.

During the rally, speakers called on the Obama Administration to protect whistle-blowers and to drop all charges against the Army private.

This was the first large public rally to support Bradley Manning since he was transferred to Fort Leavenworth. He was transferred on April 20, 2011, after having suffered under extreme and unusual confinement conditions at US Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia. During the nine months at Quantico, Manning was denied meaningful exercise, social interaction, and sunlight, and was at times kept completely naked.

The Bradley Manning Support Network worked with other local and national groups to organize the rally. Members from two veterans’ organizations—Veterans For Peace and Iraq Veterans Against the War—comprised a large part of the turnout, including members of Operation Recovery, soldiers opposing the redeployment of traumatized troops, who drove from Fort Hood, Texas, to attend the rally.

“Bradley Manning is a fellow soldier,” said Brian Wolfe, a Lawrence Kansas-based Army Veteran who served in Operation Iraqi Freedom. “If a fellow soldier is punished for taking his oath to defend the constitution seriously, what does that mean for our military and for our democracy?”

The information that Bradley Manning is accused of revealing includes the videotaped massacre of Reuters journalists and Iraqi civilians, as well as diplomatic cables that experts believe helped to catalyze democratic revolts across the Middle East this spring.

Referencing the “Arab Spring”, a 16-foot high banner read, “Freedom for Bradley Manning, American Hero. Let Freedom Ring from Leavenworth to Tahrir, Egypt.”

“The information Bradley Manning is accused of releasing should have been in the public domain. Whoever revealed it is an American hero.” said Jeff Paterson, who spoke at the rally on behalf of the Bradley Manning Support Network. “Our leaders in Washington need to return to American principles of transparent and accountable government. That starts with protecting—not prosecuting—whistle-blowers and dropping all charges against Bradley Manning.”

Supporters and campaign organizers from a variety of organizations will be meeting after the rally to talk about next steps in the campaign.

PFC Bradley Manning, 23-years-old, was detained in Iraq one year ago on May 26, 2010. He still awaits his first public court hearing, now expected to begin later this summer. Today’s rally is part of an escalating campaign to show broad public support for PFC Bradley Manning. Over 4,300 individuals have contributed $333,000 towards PFC Manning’s legal fees and related public education efforts. The Bradley Manning Support Network is dedicated to securing due process and a public trial for PFC Manning — and to eventually winning his freedom.

From The Archives Of The International Communist League- Proletarian Military Policy (The SWP's In The 1940s) (1972)

Markin comment:

In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement than in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.

After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Debs' Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.

I am continuing today  what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.

However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
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Proletarian Military Policy

Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter, No. 13, August-September 1972

The sharpening inter-imperialist antagonisms upsurge in imperialist rivalry and "surprising" new alignments pose for the third time in this century the specter of a world war, this time with thermonuclear weaponry. Imperialist war has always been a decisive test for the communist movement. Such wars are the consummate expression of the inability of capitalism to transcend the contradiction between the productive forces, which have outgrown both national boundaries and private property relations, and the relations of production which define the two great classes of modern society, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Imperialist war brings only increased misery, enslavement and suffering to the working class, exacerbating the tensions of class society to a fever pitch. Marxists seek to use these periodic violent disruptions of decaying capitalism to bring about the liberation of the proletariat. This is due not to a "the worse the better" outlook, but rather is the necessary recognition of the objective conditions of crisis weakening bourgeois society which Marxists must seek to utilize in order to drive forward to the socialist revolution.

As the outlines and alignments of yet a third global inter-imperialist war begin to take shape, it is essential to examine the policy of the Trotskyist movement in World War II and to understand the role and nature of the modern bourgeois state and its army, in order to prepare ourselves for the coming period of increasing international conflicts and war. Failure to take the basic Leninist conception of the state as a starting point for any strategy towards the bourgeois army leads almost inevitably to major theoretical errors, as was the case with the Socialist Workers Party’s adoption of the "Proletarian Military Policy" (PMP) in 1940. A study of the PMP and of Trotsky’s writings on the coming war, fascism and military policy in 1940 reveal a sliding off from basic Leninist concepts of the bourgeois state and army.

The PMP was a misdirected attempt to turn the American working class’s desire to fight fascism into a revolutionary perspective of overthrowing its "own" imperialist state. The core of the PMP was a call for trade union control of the compulsory military training being instituted by the state. The SWP resolution on "Proletarian Military Policy" adopted at the SWP’s Plenum-Conference in Chicago in September 1940 states:

"We fight against sending the worker-soldiers into battle without proper training and equipment. We oppose the military direction of worker-soldiers by bourgeois officers who have no regard for their treatment, their protection and their lives. We demand federal funds for the military training of workers and worker-officers under the control of the trade unions. Military appropriations? Yes–but only for the establishment and equipment of worker training camps! Compulsory military training of workers? Yes–but only under the control of the trade unions!"

James P. Cannon, leader of the SWP, defended the policy, primarily against the criticisms of Max Shachtman who had recently broken from the SWP and founded the Workers Party. Essentially, the PMP contained a reformist thrust; it implied that it was possible for the working class to control the bourgeois army. The logic of the PMP leads to reformist concepts of workers’ control of the state–which stand in opposition to the Marxist understanding that the proletariat must smash the organs of bourgeois state power in order to carry through a socialist revolution.

Cannon "Telescopes" the Tasks

It is necessary to see the background against which the PMP was developed, and what the expectations of the SWP and Trotsky were in World War II, as these expectations were the assumptions which led them to the PMP. Cannon said at the 1940 SWP Conference:

"We didn’t visualize a world situation in which whole countries would be conquered by fascist armies. The workers don't want to be conquered by foreign invaders, above all by the fascists. They require a program of military struggle against foreign invaders which assures their class independence. That is the gist of the problem.

"Many times in the past we were put to a certain disadvantage: the demagogy of the social democrats against us was effective to a certain extent. They said: ‘You have no answer to the question of how to fight Hitler...’ Well, we answered in a general way, the workers will fight to overthrow the bourgeoisie at home, and then they will take care of invaders. That was a good program, but the workers did not make the revolution in time. Now the two tasks must be telescoped and carried out simultaneously….

"We are willing to fight Hitler. No worker wants to see that gang of fascist barbarians overrun this country or any country. But we want to fight fascism under a leadership we can trust."

Cannon strongly emphasized that capitalism has plunged the world into an epoch of universal militarism, and that from now on, "great questions can be decided only by military means." For Cannon, "anti-militarism was all right when we were fighting against war in time of peace. But here you have a new situation of universal militarism."

Trotsky and the SWP were attempting to take advantage of the intersection of the "universal militarism" of the bourgeois states’ preparation for imperialist war with the genuine anti-fascist sentiment of the masses. Trotsky’s writings of 1939-40 reveal an apocalyptic vision of the coming war which led him to see the need to develop some strategy to fairly immediately win over the army. Trotsky and the SWP vastly overestimated the extent to which the processes of the war itself would rip the facade off the (Anglo-American) bourgeoisie’s ideology of "democracy" fighting "dictatorship." Trotsky, in conversations with SWP leaders in Mexico in 1940, said, "If the bourgeoisie could preserve democracy, good, but within a year they will impose a dictatorship. Naturally in principle we would overthrow so-called bourgeois democracy given the opportunity but the bourgeoisie won’t give us time" (discussion with Trotsky, 12 June 1940, Writings Leon Trotsky, 1939-40).

"Reformism Cannot Live Today"

As part of his projection, Trotsky also believed that reformism had exhausted all its possibilities: "At one time America was rich in reformist tendencies, but the New Deal was the last flareup. Now with the war it is clear that the New Deal exhausted all the reformist and democratic possibilities and created incomparably more favorable possibilities for revolution." The SWP developed the viewpoint that as a result of the crisis resulting from the war, reformism could not survive. A section of the SWP Resolution titled "Reformism Cannot Live Today" stated, "In the first place the victories of the fascist war machine of Hitler have destroyed every plausible basis for the illusion that a serious struggle against fascism can be conducted under the leadership of a bourgeois democratic regime." But following World War II, because of the hatred of the working class for fascism and the broad strike wave, the bourgeoisie was forced to reinstate liberal reformist ideology and parliamentary politics, in an effort to mollify the workers.

The Trotskyists took as the basis and starting point of their new policy, the deeply popular working class sentiment against fascism. The working class was being conscripted, and part of their acceptance of this conscription was based on their desire to fight fascism, the SWP reasoned, so therefore their acceptance of conscription has a "progressive" character. The PMP was based on the belief that the bourgeoisie would be forced to institute military dictatorships and thus would be forced to expose its reactionary character in the midst of war, in a situation when the working class was armed (by the state itself) and motivated by deeply anti-dictatorship and anti-fascist feelings. This would lead inevitably to a revolutionary situation, and very quickly at that. These were the primary assumptions of Trotsky and the SWP. They do not serve to justify the adoption of the PMP, however, but rather only illuminate the background against which it was developed.

The slogan, "For trade union control of military training," implies trade union control of the bourgeois army. The PMP slid over the particular nature and role of the imperialist army as the bulwark of capitalism. Shachtman caught the core of the PMP’s reformist thrust and this sliding over when he wrote:

"I characterized his [Cannon’s] formula as essentially social-patriotic… Cannon used to say: We will be defensists when we have a country to defend, that is, when the workers have taken power in the land, for then it will not be an imperialist war we are waging but rather a revolutionary war against imperialist assailants.… Now he says something different, because the revolution did not come in time. Now the two tasks–the task of bringing about the socialist revolution and defending the fatherland–‘must be telescoped and carried out simultaneously.’"
-"Working Class Policy in War and Peace," The New International, January, 1941

In 1941 Shachtman had not yet been a year on his uneven eighteen-year-long centrist course from revolutionary Marxism to social democracy. In the first years Shachtman’s Workers Party claimed to be a section of the Fourth International and argued for the "conditional defense" of the Soviet Union whose "bureaucratic collectivism"–as he designated the degenerated workers state–was still progressive relative to capitalism. And as late as 1947 the issue of unification between the SWP and the Workers Party was sharply posed. His revisionist break with Marxism was nonetheless profound from the outset: a complete repudiation of its philosophic methodology coupled with the concrete betrayal of the Soviet Union in the real wars that took place, first with Finland in 1939 and then the German invasion in 1941. Thus the SWP’s departure from the clear principled thrust of Leninism in advancing the ambiguous PMP was for the early revisionist Shachtman a gift which he was able to exploit because it did not center on his own areas of decisive departure from Marxism.

Ten years later, however, under the pressures of the Korean War, Shachtman’s revisionism had become all-encompassing and he advanced a grotesquely reactionary version of the PMP of his own. Writing of the anticipated Third World War he asserted that "the only greater disaster than the war itself… would be the victory of Stalinism as the outcome of the war." From this he concluded that "socialist policy must be based upon the idea of transforming the imperialist war into a democratic war [against Stalinism]." And to achieve this transformation he looked to "a workers’ government, no matter how modest its aims would be at the beginning, no matter how far removed from a consistently socialist objective" ("Socialist Policy in the War," New International, 1951). Shachtman’s "workers’ government" is clearly no dictatorship of the proletariat–without socialist aims!–but rather the blood relative of Major Atlee’s British Labour government, fantasized into an American labor government headed by Walter Reuther. Here the class character of the state has been disappeared with a vengeance. (Shachtman’s group, by 1949 the Independent Socialist League, entered the Socialist Party-Social Democratic Federation in 1958. In the early 1960’s nostalgic ISL types, most notably Hal Draper, gradually separated from the SP–especially after Shachtman himself defended the Cuban Bay of Pigs invasion. Draper et al. went on to found what has now become the present-day International Socialists.)

Trotsky on the PMP

The fragmentary material that Trotsky wrote on the subject in his last few months makes it clear that he bears responsibility for initiating the PMP; however, he was murdered prior to its full-blown public inauguration and development by the SWP. Trotsky’s prediction that the bourgeoisie would not give the workers time to overthrow the bourgeois state before they had to fight against fascism feeds directly into Cannon’s ambiguity over revolutionary defeatism and the "telescoping" process of combining national defense with the workers’ fight against fascism.

Trotsky writes in Some Questions on American Problems, "The American workers do not want to be conquered by Hitler and to those who say, ‘Let us have a peace program,’ we say, ‘We will defend the United States with a workers’ army, with workers’ officers, with a workers’ government, etc.’ If we are not pacifists, who wait for a better future, and if we are active revolutionists, our job is to penetrate into the whole military machine." What is left out of this agitational approach is significant. Marxists do not defend the U.S.! At least not until the U.S. is a socialist U. S., only after the bourgeoisie and all its institutions, including the army, have been crushed. Marxists must oppose imperialist war; World War II was being fought not for "democracy" against "fascism" but purely for redivision of the world for imperialist ends. The workers’ army Trotsky writes of cannot develop organically out of the bourgeois army, but must be built up under conditions of class tension and revolutionary crisis through independent workers militias and by polarization of the bourgeois armed forces–that is, as the counterposed military arm of the working class organizing itself as the state power dual to the capitalists’ government.

The PMP’s thrust was that of supporting a war against fascism without making clear whose class state was waging the war. Because of the popularity of a "democratic war against fascism," the actual effect of the PMP would have been merely to make the bourgeois state’s war more efficient and more democratically conducted.

Workers Control of the Army?

The logic of the PMP impelled the SWP to see the bourgeois army as only one more arena of working-class struggle, like a factory, rather than as the main coercive force of the bourgeois state. If Marxists can favor trade union control of industry, why not trade union control of military training? We agree that Marxists seek to fight oppression wherever it arises, including fighting for soldiers’ rights–but from this it does not follow that we should call for "workers’ control of the army" as a parallel slogan to "workers' control of the factories." There will always be a need for development of the forces of production; the proletarian revolution does not need to smash them for its own purposes. The army’s sole function is to maintain the dominant class in power through coercion and repression; during the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the revolutionary state will have its own army, organized to serve its own class purposes; a developed socialist society will have no need for this special repressive apparatus, which will gradually dissolve into the whole self-armed population, and then, like the state, it too will wither away. The army is not a class-neutral institution. As part of the "special bodies of armed men" which constitute the basis of the state, it cannot be a workers’ army unless it is the army of a workers’ state.

Similarly we do not delude the workers with slogans of "workers’ control" of the police or of the prisons either, since both are at the essence of the bourgeois state. If we called for "workers’ control of the prisons," the blood of Attica would be on our hands as well as Rockefeller’s. The storming of the Bastille represents the only possible form of "workers’ control" of the repressive apparatus of the state–i.e., smashing it utterly.

The PMP was a proposal for the unions to make the bourgeois army more democratic and efficient to prosecute the war "against fascism." But the bourgeoisie cannot fight fascism! The U.S. bourgeoisie wanted to fight the Germans and Japanese to further its own imperialist goals, not to "fight fascism."

The PMP error can be most clearly seen in the case of an unpopular war: should we demand trade union control of military training in order to better fight in Vietnam? Obviously not. But the point is the same. Only those social chauvinists who support "their" government’s war aims can reasonably raise the PMP.

As an SWP programmatic demand, the PMP never took life and shortly was shelved, because the SWP did oppose the second imperialist war and therefore the autonomous social-patriotic implications of the PMP did not take hold. But neither was the error corrected in those years, and it has been a source of disorientation ever since for those young militants who seek to counterpose en bloc the revolutionary SWP of the 1940’s to the wretched reformist vehicle which today still bears the initials SWP.

The whole authority of the state is based ultimately on its ability to successfully employ its coercive power, which rests on its standing army, police and prisons; the coercive power of the state is the very essence of its structure. This development of state power is linked directly to the development of class antagonisms, so that while the state appears to stand above and outside of class conflict, as a "neutral" third force, in reality it is nothing more than an agent of the dominant, more powerful class in society. These considerations give rise to two major premises of revolutionary strategy: (1) that the existing bourgeois state machinery, including its army, must be crushed, and (2) in order to successfully accomplish this, the bourgeois state must be unable to rely upon its own coercive power; it must be unable to use it successfully against the revolutionary forces who seek to fundamentally change the class structure upon which the state rests. It is impossible to use the bourgeois army for proletarian ends; it must be smashed. The destabilizing of the bourgeois army, turning a section of it to the side of the proletariat, is inseparably linked with, but not the same as, the process of arming the proletariat.

For the Independent Arming of the Working Class!

The SWP was trying to use the bourgeoisie’s militarism for its own ends, and so it dropped entirely any fight against bourgeois militarism and patriotism as the main danger to the working class, and instead of exposing the nature of the imperialist armies, concentrated on attacking pacifism. Had the working class had such pacifist illusions of peaceful resistance to war, one could find more justification for this emphasis–however, as Trotsky recognized, the workers were "95 to 98 percent patriotic" in 1940, and thus accepted conscription into the army, because they were willing to fight fascism. Since the workers were for conscription, the pressure on the SWP to blunt a defeatist policy was strong. The SWP should have counterposed at every step the independent arming of the proletariat; but instead it undercut opposition to bourgeois conscription. Cannon attacks the fight of the social-pacifists against conscription because it "overlooked realities and sowed illusions. The workers were for conscription…a certain amount of compulsion has always been invoked by the labor movement against the backward, the slackers…. Compulsion in the class war is a class necessity" (Cannon’s speech at 1940 SWP Conference). Yes, of course compulsion is a class necessity–but conscription into the bourgeois army is a class necessity for the bourgeois class. The fact that the workers may have supported it does not alter the class nature of the coercion being applied. It is not the job of the proletarian vanguard to help the bourgeoisie wage its imperialist wars, to provide it with cannon fodder. Communists must call for revolutionary defeatism and the overthrow of the bourgeoisie in wars between imperialist powers–not for the working class in each country to "control" the fighting arm of its "own" bourgeoisie. The call must be to "turn the guns the other way," not to control the military apparatus.

As Trotsky wrote in 1934 in his comprehensive systematization of the revolutionary Marxist experience in World War I in application to the approaching second World War, "War and the Fourth International":

"If the proletariat should find it beyond its power to prevent war by means of revolution–and this is the only means of preventing war–the workers, together with the whole people, will be forced to participate in the army and in war. Individualistic and anarchistic slogans of refusal to undergo military service, passive resistance, desertion, sabotage are in basic contradiction to the methods of the proletarian revolution. But just as in the factory the advanced worker feels himself a slave of capital, preparing for his liberation, so in the capitalist army too he feels himself a slave of imperialism. Compelled today to give his muscles and even his life, he does not surrender his revolutionary consciousness. He remains a fighter, learns how to use arms, explains even in the trenches the class meaning of war, groups around himself the discontented, connects them into cells, transmits the ideas and slogans of the party, watches closely the changes in the mood of the masses, the subsiding of the patriotic wave, the growth of indignation, and summons the soldiers to the aid of the workers at the critical moment."
-Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1933-34, Trotsky's emphasis

The bourgeois state will only arm the workers for its own purposes–while this contradiction can and must be exploited by Marxists, it is utopian to expect that the trade unions could be able to use the bourgeois army for their own purposes. The modern imperialist armies created by the state have a largely working-class composition, but their function is directly counterposed to the interests of the world proletariat. The crucial task of Marxists is to always and everywhere smash bourgeois ideology in the ranks of the working class, to call for the independent arming and struggle of the organizations of the working class.

FOR WORKERS’ SELF-DEFENSE GROUPS BASED ON THE TRADE UNIONS!

FOR UNITED CLASS DEFENSE OF MINORITIES AND THE UNEMPLOYED! FIGHT FOR SOLDIERS’ RIGHTS THROUGH SOLDIERS’ COUNCILS!

TOWARDS THE INDEPENDENT ORGANIZATION OF WORKERS’ MILITIAS!

Former Political Prisoner Geronimo Pratt Dies - by Stephen Lendman

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the late Black Panther leader, Geromino Pratt (ji-Jaga)

Sunday, June 05, 2011
Political Prisoner Geronimo Pratt Dies

Former Political Prisoner Geronimo Pratt Dies - by Stephen Lendman

Reporting his death, AP said:

"Former Black Panther Party leader Elmer 'Geronimo' Pratt" died at age 63 in a small (Tanzania village) "where he had lived for at least half a decade, a friend of Pratt's in Arusha, former Black Panther Pete O'Neal, said."

He lived a peaceful life in Tanzania, O'Neal explained, adding:

"He's my hero. He was and will continue to be. Geronimo was a symbol of steadfast resistance against all (he) considered wrong and improper. His whole life was dedicated to standing opposition to oppression and exploitation....He gave all that he had and his life, I believe, struggling, trying to help people lift themselves up."

His lawyer and longtime friend, Stuart Hanlon, who spent years working for his release, also announced his death, saying:

"What happened to him is the horror story of the United States. This became a microcosm of when the government decides what's politically right or wrong. The COINTELPRO program was awful. He became a symbol for what they did."

He had southern, rural roots, and hardworking parents who sent all their kids to college. "He (went) to the military, (fought) and (was awarded two Bronze Stars, a Silver Star, and two Purple Hearts) in Vietnam, (came) home, (and became) a football star in college. That would be an American hero. It was different because he was black and he became a Panther and then the road went the wrong way."

Calling Pratt one of his closest friends, Hanlon said his case "defined me as a lawyer."

David Hilliard helped recruit Pratt to provide leadership for the Los Angeles Panther chapter. "He symbolized the best human spirit," he said. "His spirit of endurance, his strength, his service to his people. He (was) very positive and a real example for young people who want to look into the direction of Che Guevara, Malcolm X and the leader of our party, Huey P. Newton. He (was) one of the true heros of our era. He dedicated his life to (serve) his people. There is nothing more honorable than that."

On June 3, Los Angeles Times writer Robert Lopez headlined, "Former Black Panther whose murder conviction was overturned dies at 63," saying:

He became "a symbol of racial injustices during the turbulent 1960s....a cause celebre for a range of supporters, including elected officials, activists, Amnesty International, clergy and celebrities, who believed he was framed by Los Angeles police and the FBI" because he was Black and a Panther member.

In fact, he was under FBI surveillance in Oakland when the murder he was convicted of happened in Santa Monica, hundreds of miles south. Nonetheless, he was unjustly framed and served 27 years until freed.

In 1970, he was arrested and falsely charged with Caroline Olsen's murder, a Los Angeles teacher. In 1968, she and her husband Kenneth were attacked on a Santa Monica tennis court by two Black men. Three years later, Kenneth said Pratt was one of the assailants, pressured to name him after first identifying three other suspects from LAPD photos. In 1972, he was falsely convicted.

In fact, Pratt was framed, victimized by LAPD authorities working with the FBI's illegal COINTELPRO counterintelligence program against political dissidents, including communists; anti-war, human and civil rights activists; the American Indian Movement; and Black Panther Party members, among others.

In their book "Agents of Repression," Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall said:

"(T)he term came to signify the whole context of clandestine (mostly illegal) political repression activities, (including) a massive surveillance (program via) wiretaps, surreptitious entries and burglaries, electronic devices, live 'tails' and....bogus mail" (to induce paranoia and) foster 'splits' within or between organizations."

Other tactics included black propaganda, disinformation or gray propaganda, rumor spreading, manufactured evidence, harassment arrests on bogus charges, and assassinations, notably against Fred Hampton and Mark Clark on December 4, 1969 by Chicago police while they slept.

In Pratt's case, Julius Butler was the prosecution's main witness, an FBI/LAPD informant, expelled from the Panthers by Pratt for advocating violence. At trial, he falsely claimed Pratt confessed to the killing.

Later, when Butler was outed as an informer, paid to lie, LA authorities denied Pratt a retrial, keeping him imprisoned wrongfully for another 20 years.

Moreover, according to former FBI agent Wesley Swearingen, Los Angeles Panther headquaters wiretap information showed Pratt was in Oakland when it happened, also confirmed by agency surveillance evidence there. Pratt's defense wasn't told. In addition, in both cities, tapes and other evidence were destroyed to keep an innocent man wrongfully imprisoned for 27 years, eight in solitary confinement, as well as parole denied 16 times.

Delayed Justice Finally Achieved

On May 29, 1997, Judge Everett W. Dickey (an Orange County Reagan appointee), in a sharply worded opinion, reversed Pratt's conviction, ruling prosecutors suppressed evidence to unjustly imprison him in ordering a new trial. At the time, he was America's longest held political prisoner, yet to be fully exonerated.

Over 30 years later in February 1999, it came in a four paragraph Los Angeles County District Attorney, Gil Garcetti, statement, saying:

"We accept the decision of the court of appeals. The murder at issue in this case occurred over 30 years ago. Most of the witnesses to the case are deceased. It would be virtually impossible to retry this case. In our professional judgment, there would be no reasonable likelihood of conviction."

Omitted was any admission of FBI, LAPD, or prosecutorial wrongdoing. In fact, Hanlon at the time said Garcetti fought him and fellow Pratt attorney Johnnie Cochran, Jr. "every step of the way," trying to keep him wrongfully imprisoned.

In May 2000, in a civil rights lawsuit, a federal judge awarded Pratt $4.5 million for false imprisonment, but couldn't return his 27 lost years, or undo the toll it took even on someone with his inner strength.

Journalist and author Jack Olsen wrote about Pratt's ordeal in his book titled, "Last Man Standing: The Tragedy and Triumph of Geronimo Pratt," recounting his southern roots, loving parents, self-reliance and dedication to right over wrong.

At UCLA, in fact, his awareness of police brutality and racial injustice inspired him to join the Panthers at a time FBI and local police harassed the organization nationally to undermine its solidarity by neutralizing its leaders. As a result, Pratt became a prime target, culminating in his arrest and wrongful conviction, nearly keeping him imprisoned for life.

While there, Olsen explained, he spent years in solitary confinement, his only toilet a hole in the floor that routinely backed up. In addition, he got only three hours of daylight a week, and was routinely harassed, beaten, drugged, moved from one "dungeon" to another, targeted for assassination at times, and falsely accused of other offenses, including attempted murder of guards, inciting riots, planning mass escapes, and masterminding Patty Hearst's kidnapping.

Only his inner strength saved him, using meditation, chanting, astral projection and yoga, along with studying law and other self-help practices to survive despite everything prison authorities threw at him to destroy him. They couldn't, but at age 63 he passed, a major loss to those who loved him, but not his spirit inspiring others to fight the good fight against injustice affecting anyone.

A Final Comment

In October 1966, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. It was progressive, activist, militantly for ethnic justice, racial emancipation, and real economic, social, and political equality across gender and color lines. Radical ideas then and now, the party's ten-point program stood for:

(1) freedom and "power to determine the destiny of our black community;"

(2) full employment for Black people and everyone;

(3) "an end to the robbery by the capitalists of our Black community;"

(4) decent housing;

(5) education to expose "the true nature of this decadent American society (and teach) us our true history and our role in the present-day society;"

(6) for "all Black men to be exempt from military service" at a time they were drafted for foreign wars;

(7) "an immediate end to police brutality and murder of Black people;"

(8) "freedom for all Black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails;"

(9) for Black people in court "to be tried....by a jury of their peer group or people from their Black communities;" and

(10) "land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace."

They also added words from the Declaration of Independence, saying:

-- "all men are created equal";

-- "to secure (their) rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed;"

-- "that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and institute a new government;"

-- "to throw off (despotism), and to provide new guards for (peoples') future security."

They believed in rule of law principles, published a newspaper with 250,000 readers, and articulated fundamental wants and needs. They also practiced what they preached with:

-- nutritious breakfasts for poor children;

-- food for needy families;

-- free clinics for medical care;

-- a free ambulance service;

-- help for the homeless;

-- free legal aids and bussing to prisons;

-- after-school and summer classes teaching Black history; and

-- Black voter registration drives.

They helped elect Oakland's first Black mayor, Lionel Wilson, in the city where the Panthers were founded.

They were young and idealistic, willing to put their lives on the line for their beliefs and activism. Their goal - to make the world a better place for Black people and everyone.

They were revolutionaries for justice, hostile to repression. In Huey Newton's words, they were "never a group of angry young militants full of fury toward the 'white establishment.' "

The Party, in fact, advocated love for Black people, not hate for Whites. They fought for change from over 30 branches throughout the country with over 2,000 members at their peak.

They wanted redress of longstanding grievances, including slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, discrimination, neglect and abuse. Practicing what Jefferson preached, they were targeted viciously and illegally for destruction, an agenda still ongoing against other activists and dissident groups to make America safe for wealth and power at the expense of beneficial social change, what heroic Panthers and others like them fought and died for and still do. What better reason to do it for than that.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.

posted by Steve Lendman @ 1:09 AM

*In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!- Sundiata Acoli

Click on the headline to link to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.

Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month

Markin comment (reposted from 2010)

In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.

That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long time supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.

Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!

*In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!- Haki Malik Abdullah, (s/n Michael Green)

Click on the headline to link to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.

Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month

Markin comment (reposted from 2010)

In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.

That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long time supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.

Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!