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Workers Hammer No. 215
Summer 2011
Kenya's independence struggle in the 1950s
The Mau Mau uprising against British imperialism
In April four elderly black Kenyans appeared in the High Court in London seeking recognition of atrocities committed against them during British imperialism’s brutal colonial rule. The Kenyan claimants, Ndiku Mutua, Paulo Nzili, Wambugu Wa Nyingi and Jane Muthoni Mara are survivors of the barbaric torture that was meted out to countless thousands of black Africans in detention camps between 1952 and 1961. Of the four claimants (a fifth died before the High Court hearing) Jane Mara was subjected to sexual abuse, one man was castrated and another was beaten unconscious during an atrocity in which eleven men were clubbed to death. British imperialism pillaged and exploited Kenya and used savage repression to crush the anti-colonial revolt known as the Mau Mau uprising.
The survivors are demanding that the British state take responsibility for their treatment in the camps and that the government pay around £2 million, a trifling sum, into a welfare fund. With swinish racist arrogance, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) insists that Britain cannot be held responsible, and that any atrocities that may have been committed under colonial rule became the responsibility of the Kenyan government that took over at the time of independence in 1963. Furthermore, says the FCO, too much time has elapsed for the claims to be valid.
The High Court has yet to decide whether or not the case will proceed to trial. But if the British state had got its way, the evidence in this case would never have seen the light of day. Since independence, the former colonial overlords have kept a tight lid on the documentary record of repression in Kenya. Nonetheless, much effort by researchers and advocates for the survivors has resulted in a significant victory. In May the FCO was forced to hand over 300 boxes of files, some 17,000 pages, including material relating to the suppression of the Mau Mau revolt. The departing colonialists destroyed many of the files at independence and removed others, having “made a calculated decision not to hand over any of its colonial era files to the Kenyan government” (guardian.co.uk, 5 April). A letter dated 7 November 1967, issued under Harold Wilson’s Labour government, explains that the general practice at independence was not to hand over files that “might embarrass HMG [Her Majesty’s Government] or other governments” or members of the police or military forces (guardian.co.uk, 5 April).
The mass torture and imprisonment of Kenyans during the uprising has long been documented by historians. To this day, any attempt to expose the truth of what happened has been sharply contested by apologists for imperialism. Caroline Elkins, author of the book Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (2005), who is an expert witness for the survivors in the current court case, noted that: “My book was resoundingly criticised at the time of its publication. Historian Andrew Roberts wrote that I had committed ‘blood libels against Britain’” (Guardian, 14 April). Elkins estimates that between 160,000 and 320,000 people were detained in camps and at least 100,000 killed. David Anderson, author of another major work, Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s dirty war in Kenya and the end of the Empire (2005), documents 1090 hangings of alleged Mau Mau. Mark Curtis in Web of Deceit (2003) estimates that 150,000 black Kenyans died as a result of British policy in this period.
The British capitalist rulers have carried out mass murder and torture on an immense scale, from the brutal occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq to the bombing of Libya today. Much of the wealth that laid the foundations of British capitalism was acquired from trade in African slaves. Brutal subjugation of the colonial world was part and parcel of imperialism’s drive to secure world markets, cheap labour and raw materials. From Kenya to Aden, Cyprus, Malaya, Nigeria and the Indian subcontinent, the globe is strewn with colonial victims of the British Empire’s pursuit of profits.
In Kenya the colonial rulers imprisoned in concentration camps a large proportion of the million and a half Kikuyu people, the country’s largest ethnic group. The Mau Mau rebellion was essentially a peasant-based revolt of the landless Kikuyu people against colonial rule that had dispossessed them of their lands, the basis of their existence. Although it was ultimately defeated, the uprising forced an end to colonial rule. In its terminal years, British rule consisted of naked state repression, culminating in an official “State of Emergency” lasting from 1952 to 1960. Arrayed against the Mau Mau was the armed might of the British colonialists combined with that of their Kenyan stooges, including the Home Guard and other forces. The colonial regime co-opted a layer of rich peasants composed of land-owning, educated Christians. These “loyalist” Kenyans included Kikuyu landowners who were deeply hostile to the landless Kikuyu masses and supported the British in suppressing them. This deep social polarisation within Kenyan society is key to understanding the independence struggle in Kenya and its outcome.
With independence in 1963 British imperialism was forced to relinquish direct rule over Kenya, just as it had been driven out of many of its other colonial holdings in Africa and Asia following World War II. Reverting to indirect domination, the imperialists now relied on the national bourgeoisie which in turn became more directly the oppressor of the masses. Nationalist leader Jomo Kenyatta, who had been locked up for supposed Mau Mau sympathies, was released from prison in 1961. He was correctly regarded by the imperialists as safe hands for maintaining their interests in the region. Kenyatta had denounced the Mau Mau and was regarded by the more militant leaders of the movement as a traitor to their goals of land and freedom, which indeed he was.
The national bourgeoisie that came to power in Kenya was incapable of resolving any of the fundamental problems forced on the Kenyan masses by imperialist subjugation — dire poverty, lack of education and all the attendant social and economic backwardness. The land-hungry peasants did not regain their lost lands; the plantations and large white-owned farms were not expropriated. The outcome of the Kenyan independence struggle confirms in the negative the programme of permanent revolution codified by Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky, who with Lenin led the 1917 October Revolution in Russia. The Bolshevik Revolution established the dictatorship of the proletariat, expropriated the landlords and capitalists and granted land to the peasants. The programme of permanent revolution means that in the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the proletariat must draw behind it the millions of peasant poor to oust the colonial powers in a struggle for a socialist revolution against the local bourgeoisie. This requires a Leninist-Trotskyist party dedicated to international proletarian revolution both in the neo-colonial countries and in the imperialist centres.
Imperialist subjugation of Kenya
Britain first laid claim to Kenya and other East African territory when Africa was carved up by the imperialist powers in the 1880s. The rapid expansion of the system of world trade fuelled competition between dominant capitalist powers to establish spheres of influence and to control land, raw materials, markets and sources of cheap labour. In contrast to Congo and South Africa, where the imperialists extracted enormous mineral wealth, British interest in Kenya was mainly strategic. To control access to the source of the Nile, the British built a railroad from Mombasa on the Indian Ocean coast to Lake Victoria in inland Kenya. Completed in 1901, the railway was financed by loans from the British government. The colonial overlords decided the loans would be repaid, and the cost of administering the colony would be met, through profitably farming the millions of acres of land through which the railway ran. To make this land productive, they brought in white settlers, mainly from Britain but also from South Africa, to produce cash crops.
The first British settlers arrived in 1902, lured by the British government’s promise of cheap land and unlimited cheap labour. Writer Colin Leys describes the rationale behind it thus: “The settlers would invest capital and produce crops; the railway would earn revenue by carrying them to the coast, and by carrying the imports inland they would earn abroad”, while “the government would finance its activities by levying tariffs on these imports”. The British capitalist rulers were determined to force the toiling black masses to bear the cost of imperialist domination over them. As Leys describes it:
“The highlands were ‘alienated’ to Europeans; that is, Europeans bought the land at nominal prices from the colonial administration. But at first they had neither the knowledge nor the capital to farm it very differently from the Africans on their land. They had not, moreover, come to Kenya to work as peasants. Their ‘farms’ were extremely large — an average of over 2,400 acres per ‘occupier’ in 1932. There was therefore only one solution, to make the Africans work for them. This the Africans had no reason to do, unless the Europeans had been willing to pay in wages more than Africans could earn from farming on their own account. But such wages would have meant little or no profit for the Europeans. Therefore Africans had to be compelled to work, partly by force, partly by taxation, and partly by preventing them from having access to enough land or profitable crops to enable them to pay taxes without working for wages.”
— Underdevelopment in Kenya (1975)
Roots of nationalist revolt
In order to claim the farmlands of the Central Highlands, part of the Great Rift Valley, the British slaughtered Kikuyus by the thousands. Many indigenous Kenyans driven off their lands were pushed onto “native reserves” set up by the colonial regime in 1915. These reserves were separated by ethnic grouping as part of reinforcing divisions among the Kenyans. As the population in the Kikuyu reserves grew and more British settlers seized the arable land, subsistence became even more difficult. The landless and impoverished black population was subjected to a system of racist laws regulating land, as well as a poll tax and a hut tax. There were also pass laws (kipande) like those in South Africa, prohibiting free movement including in the search for employment. Access to education for the poorest was nil; a small privileged layer was able to attend schools run by Christian churches.
The early British settlers were heavily drawn from the notoriously racist aristocracy. According to Robert Edgerton (Mau Mau, An African Crucible, 1990) “the Norfolk hotel, where they congregated when they visited Nairobi, quickly became known as the ‘House of Lords’” and “their goal was to recreate the Virginia plantocracy in which white gentlemen of breeding and leisure oversaw vast plantations worked by black men”. Sir Charles Eliot, the High Commissioner appointed to rule the East Africa Protectorate, as it was then known, proclaimed Kenya a “white man’s country”.
Outside the reserves other displaced Kikuyu became squatters on the white settlers’ farms in conditions akin to serfdom, raising their own livestock and crops for local sale in return for working the settler’s plantation. Beginning in 1925, with a surplus of available workers, the colonial government and settlers turned the screw on squatters. Rights of tenancy and to own livestock were cut back to the point where squatters laboured for the white farmers for below-subsistence wages. During the depression and World War II, forced labour was instituted to keep the settlers’ plantations functioning. By the mid-1940s there were over 200,000 registered squatters in the so-called White Highlands. With market prices for their produce set far below what the settlers earned for the same crop, the squatters were reduced to starvation conditions. Floggings by landlords were commonplace and squatters were evicted if they refused to sign new labour contracts on worse terms.
In the years leading up to the revolt the squatters were transformed from independent tenant-producers to rural, desperately impoverished wage labourers. Resistance among squatters took the form of illegal cultivation and sale of produce, mass refusal to sign new contracts and in some areas organised strikes. As described in a study by Frank Furedi, by the late 1940s, this resistance became “transformed into a militant wing of Kenyan nationalism”. The Mau Mau revolt was “the last stand of the Kikuyu squatter before his final destruction as an independent peasant producer” (The Mau Mau War in Perspective, 1989).
Although there were other ethnic groups among the squatter population, the Kikuyus were the most numerous and were subjected to special repressive measures. Pastoral groups such as the Nandi people, who included many police, were regarded by the colonialists as potential allies and largely exempted from the anti-squatter measures. By the late 1940s the movement of resistance among the squatters had linked up with resistance in the reserves and Kikuyu radicals in Nairobi.
Kenya’s agricultural resources — principally coffee, tea and sisal — were profitable cash crops grown for the export market. World War II led to increased British investment in mechanisation, resulting in vastly increased profits for the settlers while forcing more black labourers off the farms and onto the reserves, which were already unable to support their population. This fed the disparity between the landed elite and the desperate and landless masses among the black population. By 1948 the population of the colony comprised some 30,000 European settlers, 5.2 million indigenous black Africans, and 98,000 Asians who were brought in as cheap labour but were banned from owning arable land and composed a mercantile layer. The White Highlands — the best farmland in the colony — was in the hands of the white settlers, some 0.7 per cent of the population.
During WWII more than 75,000 black Kenyans joined the British Army and fought in the King’s African Rifles and other regiments in Africa, Asia and the Near East. But in contrast to white settlers who served in the British Army and were rewarded with land and low-interest loans, blacks returned to worse conditions than when they left. Many returning black soldiers were inspired by independence movements like those sweeping the Indian subcontinent. With no land, some gravitated to Nairobi where the scarcity of jobs and housing forced many into an urban lumpenproletariat. Amid mounting bitterness towards the colonial power for which they had risked their lives, landless war veterans formed an organisation called the Forty Group which would go on to play a key role in the Mau Mau.
Divisions within African nationalism
The Kikuyu Central Association (KCA) had been founded in 1924 in opposition to the theft of Kikuyu land and lack of education. Jomo Kenyatta, an educated Kikuyu who had spent some 16 years in Europe, was a leading member of the KCA at this time. On behalf of the KCA he went to London in 1929 to pressure the colonial government for better terms for the Kikuyu. But contrary to a perspective for independence, his programme was for “meaningful cooperation between the colonial state and his people” (Mau Mau and Kenya, Wunyabari Maloba, 1993). Kenyatta returned to Kenya in 1946 where he was widely revered as the Kikuyus’ leader, the “Burning Spear” who symbolised the growing anti-colonial sentiment among the black population. After the KCA was outlawed in 1941 the Kenya African Union (KAU) was formed in 1944. In 1947 Kenyatta became the leader of the KAU, nominally a nationalist party of all African ethnic groups but dominated by the Kikuyu. The KAU included some trade union militants; its leaders were educated and some had lived abroad. Its demands centred on better conditions for the black population under colonial rule. Although the KAU was for independence in principle it did not see this as attainable in the near future.
The organised working class was relatively weak, but was young and combative. The trade union component of the KAU leadership represented urban workers including government clerks, taxi drivers, shop workers and others. The African Workers Federation was formed by Chege Kibachia, who organised a strike of dockers — a potentially strategic workforce — in the port city of Mombasa. He was arrested in 1947 while fighting for a general strike in Nairobi and detained in a remote outpost for ten years. In 1949 the East African Trade Union Congress was formed by Fred Kubai, who was later imprisoned, and an Asian communist, Makhan Singh. This organisation was banned in 1950 and Singh was deported and held in a remote area near the Ethiopian border for eleven years.
By late 1947 evicted squatters had become frustrated at the lack of any gains through the gradualist methods of the KAU. Members of the KCA led a militant illegal society and began using the Kikuyu oath to cement unity in struggle. The Kikuyu fighters referred to themselves as the Land Freedom Army or “the movement” but came to be called Mau Mau. The colonial rulers seized on the oathing to demonise Mau Mau and to legitimise savage repression against the Kikuyu people. The Mau Mau became the vehicle for mass resistance to the eviction of squatters from white farms. The core of the guerrilla fighters, led by WWII veterans, trained and lived in the forests of the Aberdare Mountains and Mount Kenya. Their weaponry was sparse and they were barely fed and clothed — and then only due to the heroic efforts of sympathisers in the reserves.
It is impossible to overstate the extent of racist hysteria among the settlers and colonial government, which reverberated in the pages of the Daily Mail in Britain. Whole pseudoscientific theories were concocted about the “illness” particular to black Africans. Typical was the ranting of colonial secretary Oliver Lyttelton who wrote: “The Mau Mau oath is the most bestial, filthy, nauseating incantation which perverted minds can ever have brewed” (quoted in Mau Mau, An African Crucible).
The colonial state used widespread repression between 1950-52. However, the audacious daylight killing by Mau Mau of a prominent loyalist chief in October 1952 was seized on by the new colonial governor, Evelyn Baring, as a pretext for declaring a State of Emergency and letting loose a reign of terror by the security forces. Kenyatta and other KAU leaders were imprisoned and later convicted of masterminding Mau Mau in a sensationalised and rigged show trial.
The deep division between wealthy loyalist Kikuyu and the landless poor was brought home in the Lari massacre in March 1953. Lari, near the Aberdare forest not far from Nairobi, symbolised the dispossession of land once farmed by peasants and systematically stolen, much of it now in the hands of wealthy loyalists. Mau Mau fighters killed a major loyalist chief and some 97 others at Lari, indiscriminately targeting families, including many women and children. In retaliation, up to 400 Kikuyu were slaughtered by the government forces, including the Home Guard, which was a key military force alongside the British Army and the colonial forces. Eventually 71 people were hanged for the Lari killings. This episode sharply fed the racist frenzy among the settlers and in Britain and increased the polarisation among the Kikuyu people.
Under the State of Emergency the settlers, British Army and Home Guard were permitted to summarily execute anyone who failed to stop when ordered. Thousands of Kikuyu were shot on sight. The Kenya Regiment and Kenya Police Reserve, both made up of settlers, were notoriously brutal. However, many authors also stress the extreme brutality of the Home Guard, loyalists who often had personal scores to settle with their neighbours. And they were not few: there was in fact an aspect of civil war to the Mau Mau uprising, between those who had benefited from co-operation with colonialism and those who were dispossessed and recipients only of brutality and exploitation. There is a similarity to the French colonial war in Algeria that took place at the same time, in which the French imperialists killed a million people — over a tenth of the population. In both cases there was a colonial settler population and a large loyalist militia co-opted from among the indigenous population.
Virtually the entire population of one and a half million Kikuyu were rounded up and “screened” during the Emergency. In Nairobi, where the rebel command was based, the colonial forces carried out a devastating month-long siege in April 1954 known as Operation Anvil, in which all Kikuyu in the city were rounded up and up to 30,000 were taken away for further “interrogation”. Screenings were usually performed by loyalist Kikuyu who wore hoods to conceal their identities from people they had often known their entire lives. With a nod of the head, these stooges sent their neighbours to detention camps. The camps were part of a vast system of prisons, interrogation centres and torture outposts known as the “Pipeline”. This included over a hundred camps and prisons, not counting the camps run by individual loyalist chiefs and white settlers throughout the Rift Valley and central provinces. In the camps, jails and screening centres Kikuyu were starved, beaten and tortured until they “confessed”.
In 1954 the government began the “villagisation” policy of uprooting Kikuyu and resettling them in new villages — actually barbed wire-enclosed concentration camps under the control of the Home Guard and military. The villages the Kikuyu left behind were burned down and their livestock confiscated. The aim was to cut off the Mau Mau fighters’ supply lines by virtually imprisoning that part of the Kikuyu population not already in detention camps. Between June 1954 and October 1955, 1,077,500 Kikuyu were relocated to 854 “villages”. One survivor recounted to Caroline Elkins the treatment of the “villagers” by the Home Guard and British:
“some people who had refused to confess were being put in sacks, one covering the lower part of their bodies while the other covered the upper part. Then petrol or paraffin would be poured over the sacks, and those in charge would order them to be lit. The people inside would die writhing in the flames. Many people were dying every day. And it was the people who refused to confess, even after all the bad things that were being done to them; they were always killed in order to instill fear into others who might think of concealing the truth.”
— The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya
By 1954-55, the colonial government undertook a programme of land consolidation called the Swynnerton Plan which anticipated the land settlement that would be agreed at independence. The plan aimed to reinforce class divisions, rewarding loyalists with large parcels of land, declaring: “Former government policy will be reversed and able, energetic or rich Africans will be able to acquire more land and bad or poor farmers less, creating a landed and a landless class. This is a normal step in the evolution of a country” (quoted in Underdevelopment in Kenya).
By late 1956 the guerrillas had been militarily defeated but mass detention and torture continued into 1959. That same year, public opinion in Britain turned sharply against colonial rule in Kenya when evidence came to light of a massacre in Hola camp, a particularly brutal detention centre for Mau Mau, in which eleven men were beaten to death in March.
Kenya achieved independence in an international context in which British imperialism had suffered profound decline following WWII and national independence struggles had forced an end to colonial rule in India and were raging throughout Africa. The war on the part of Britain, France, Germany, Japan and the United States was an interimperialist conflict in which the working people and oppressed masses had no side. The working class did however have a side in defence of the Soviet workers state. The Soviet Union was no longer the revolutionary workers state that it was under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky, having undergone a political degeneration, beginning 1923-1924, under the bureaucratic caste led by Joseph Stalin. Nevertheless it remained a degenerated workers state until counterrevolution triumphed in 1991-92. It was the Soviet army’s victory over the imperialist armies of Nazi Germany that ended the carnage of WWII.
Following the war the imperialists ramped up their anti-Soviet Cold War and in the 1950s a central preoccupation of the colonial powers in Africa was to curtail the influence of the Soviet Union, which had provided support to nationalist movements, albeit within the framework of “peaceful co-existence” with imperialism. At the time, “anti-imperialist” rhetoric poured forth from bourgeois-nationalist leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah, leader of newly independent Ghana, and Patrice Lumumba in the former Belgian Congo, who was murdered by the CIA in 1961. In 1960 South African troops massacred 69 black activists at Sharpeville who were protesting the hated apartheid pass laws. The CIA worked with South African armed forces and in 1962 tipped them off to Nelson Mandela’s whereabouts, leading to his 27-year imprisonment.
Kenyatta: henchman of imperialism
In a 1957 speech then British prime minister Harold Macmillan said, referring to the peoples of Africa, “if they are exposed to the full force of nationalism, it is up to us to see that they are steered away from Communism” (quoted in African Affairs, January 1970). Jomo Kenyatta was certainly an asset to the imperialists in that regard. When released from detention in August 1961 he was still widely revered by the masses and seen as the leader who would take Kenya to Uhuru (freedom). As the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who was imprisoned for his outspoken criticisms of the Kenyatta government, noted: “Looking at Kenyatta people tended to see what they wanted to see rather than what there was: petty bourgeois vacillations and opportunism” (quoted in Maloba, Mau Mau and Kenya).
Kenyatta preached “forgiveness” towards the murderous chiefs and Home Guard who had been the eager jailers and torturers of the Kikuyu masses, saying they were “all brothers and sisters and there should be no revenge”. He assured the European landowners their property rights were safe. He became the leader of the Kenya African National Union party, composed of mainly Kikuyu and Luo people, which saw itself as successor to the KAU and which was voted into government in 1963. Formal independence of Kenya was granted in December of that year.
With regard to the all-important question of land ownership, Kenyatta & Co accepted a rotten deal which allowed for the rich Kikuyu to buy land from the white settlers, for which they could obtain loans from the British government. The large plantations and ranches owned by foreign capital were untouched. Needless to say the mass of peasants remained landless. Kenyatta and his cronies were prepared to give the white settlers everything; the black peasants received only continued poverty and repression. Mau Mau veterans who rejected the deal formed a new Kenya Land and Freedom Army demanding the return of stolen lands. The Kenyatta government cracked down on these fighters, sentencing them to long prison terms. As one of the former leaders of the radical wing of the KAU, BM Kaggia, commented bitterly: “We were struggling to regain our own lands which were stolen by the British colonial government. We were not fighting for the right to buy our own land ” (East African Standard, 22 April 1965). Kenyatta turned to the police and army, just like the British who had detained him. A famous anecdote tells of a meeting two years after independence between president Kenyatta and former colonial governor Baring who was visiting. Baring said: “By the way, I was sitting at that actual desk when I signed your detention order twenty years ago.” Kenyatta replied: “If I had been in your shoes at the time I would have done exactly the same.”
Under capitalist rule, much of the wealth of the former colony continued to flow into the coffers of the erstwhile colonial masters. After independence Britain continued to dominate the economy in Kenya. The rising black bourgeoisie were at one with the propertied settlers in stifling the Asian entrepreneurs and ensuring racist economic policies and legislation discriminating against Asian-owned enterprise. Such policies culminated in the mass expulsion of Asians in 1967-68 in Kenya under so-called “Africanisation”. Soon after in Uganda, this same policy was carried out by Idi Amin to a particularly brutal degree.
The bourgeois nationalists who came to power in Kenya reinforced tribal divisions and upheld backward anti-woman practices. From the 1920s, the Kikuyu-based KCA was a vigorous defender of female genital mutilation (FGM). In response to a 1929 campaign waged by the Christian churches in Kenya in alliance with the educated elite against FGM, the KCA and Kenyatta defended FGM as part of “African culture”, thus condoning this retrograde and barbaric practice which is widespread today in parts of Africa, Asia and the Near East. There is nothing new in the British imperialist rulers hypocritically purporting to defend women’s rights in the colonial world — such as opposing suttee (immolation of widows) in India and the veil in the Islamic world — as a cynical ploy to dress up imperialist occupation as a “civilising mission”. While we fight every aspect of imperialist oppression, we vehemently oppose practices such as FGM, an especially brutal aspect of the oppression of women which maims them and means a lifetime of excruciating pain. (See “The Crime of Female Genital Mutilation”, Women and Revolution no 41, Summer/Autumn 1992.)
For permanent revolution throughout Africa
To this day Kenyan society is riven by murderous tribal and ethnic violence which is a legacy of colonial rule. At the time of Kenyatta’s death we wrote that the “Grand Old Man” of Kenya rose to the residency as a Kikuyu tribalist. We added:
“An Oxford-educated elite may be at home in the capitals of Europe, but as soon as any serious social unrest breaks out, the underlying tribalism and other indices of backwardness are quickly bared. This is not merely a holdover from the past: imperialism actually intensified and formalized ethnic rivalries with its divide-and-rule policies. Today the same patterns are fostered by the requirements of maintaining a political base in an environment of massive poverty.”
— Workers Vanguard no 214, 8 September 1978
A workers and peasants government in Kenya would expropriate the highly mechanised and capital-intensive large white-owned farms and transform them into modern large-scale collective and state farms. Councils of workers and rural toilers would decide on land distribution. A collectivised economy must be extended to neighbouring countries in the context of a socialist federation in sub-Saharan Africa.
The proletariat is the only class with the social power to bring the capitalist system to its knees and replace it with the dictatorship of the proletariat. The powerful South African proletariat is key to a revolutionary perspective in the whole region. Our comrades of Spartacist South Africa (SSA) fight to build a Leninist-Trotskyist party to lead the struggle for socialist revolution — for a black-centred workers government. Adequate housing for the millions in the townships, squatter camps and villages, electricity and water for the entire population, free quality education, the eradication of lobola (bride price) and other traditional patriarchal practices oppressive to women: these desperately needed measures require the socialist transformation of the economy and society under the dictatorship of the proletariat, fighting to promote socialist revolution throughout the African continent and worldwide. As a recent article written by the SSA said:
“As part of a socialist federation of Southern Africa, a black-centred workers government would fight to extend revolution to the imperialist centres of the U.S., West Europe and Japan. It will take an international socialist planned economy to lift the urban and rural masses out of poverty and create a classless society of material abundance — the beginning of a communist society. This is the essence of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution.”
— Workers Vanguard no 964, 10 September 2010
Monday, September 26, 2011
From The Pages Of "Spartacist Canada"-Protest Roundup of Montreal Leftists!
Spartacist Canada No. 170
Fall 2011
Protest Roundup of Montreal Leftists!
The following statement was issued on August 28 by the Partisan Defense Committee, the class-struggle legal and social defense organization associated with the Trotskyist League/Ligue trotskyste.
The Partisan Defense Committee denounces the arrests of eight leftists this summer by the “anti-gang” unit of the Montreal police. On June 29, Patrice Legendre, a supporter of the Parti Communiste Révolutionnaire (PCR), and three other militants were arrested in an operation involving some 30 cops. Over the next few weeks, four more activists—members and leaders of the Association pour une Solidarité Syndicale Étudiante (ASSÉ), a 40,000-strong student union—were also picked up. The ASSÉ activists face between four and nine charges each in connection with protests against tuition fee increases last March, when students occupied the offices of the Quebec finance minister and the Conference of Rectors and Principals of Quebec Universities.
These arrests, part of a broader campaign of disruption and provocation, are the result of the dirty deeds of a police “anti-gang” squad called GAMMA (Guet des Activités et des Mouvements Marginaux et Anarchistes—Surveillance of Activities of Marginal and Anarchist Movements). The creation of this agency in January, along with the eight arrests, marks an intensification of a long-running war on the left by the Montreal cops.
The pretext for the first round of arrests was an altercation at this year’s May Day demonstration organized by Anti-Capitalist Convergence (CLAC). The Montreal cops routinely stage provocations against May Day protesters; this year they tried to arrest a photographer associated with Partisan, the PCR’s newspaper. As the PCR reports, “dozens of protesters responded by confronting the police, telling them to release the activist.” The cops backed off. Now police have thrown numerous serious charges against demonstrators including “assault with a weapon” and “assaulting a police officer.”
Ominously, it appears that the cops are also trying to implicate PCR supporters in an incident that occurred in Trois-Rivières a year ago in which the doors of a Canadian Forces recruitment centre were shattered by an explosive device. The PCR notes that the day after the June 29 arrests the Integrated National Security Enforcement Team (INSET) installed itself in Trois-Rivières, flashing photos of the four arrested leftists. INSET, a joint “anti-terror” agency of the RCMP, CSIS, Canadian Border Services and provincial and municipal police forces in Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa and Vancouver, has harassed numerous Quebec activists, including PCR supporters.
The Montreal crackdown is part of a broader ruling-class offensive against leftists which includes the mass arrests and brutalization of G20 protesters in Toronto in 2010. Many anti-G20 activists and organizers still face trumped-up charges. This is all aimed at intimidating those who oppose the violence, poverty and war that are endemic to the system of capitalist exploitation. This system, in which a tiny minority exploits the labour of the many, cannot be maintained except by force, and that is the core purpose of the capitalist state, with its repressive laws and its cops, courts and jails.
We have many political differences with the Maoist PCR and with the political views of the ASSÉ student leaders. But in the face of this state repression, our watchword is: “An injury to one is an injury to all!” It is in the interest of the entire labour movement to defend these activists and demand an end to the witchhunt. As we have always insisted, the ultimate target of such political repression, supplemented by the bogus “war on terror,” is the multiracial working class and its struggles. The working class alone has the potential social power and material interest to be the gravediggers of the capitalist order. Drop all charges against the arrested leftists!
Fall 2011
Protest Roundup of Montreal Leftists!
The following statement was issued on August 28 by the Partisan Defense Committee, the class-struggle legal and social defense organization associated with the Trotskyist League/Ligue trotskyste.
The Partisan Defense Committee denounces the arrests of eight leftists this summer by the “anti-gang” unit of the Montreal police. On June 29, Patrice Legendre, a supporter of the Parti Communiste Révolutionnaire (PCR), and three other militants were arrested in an operation involving some 30 cops. Over the next few weeks, four more activists—members and leaders of the Association pour une Solidarité Syndicale Étudiante (ASSÉ), a 40,000-strong student union—were also picked up. The ASSÉ activists face between four and nine charges each in connection with protests against tuition fee increases last March, when students occupied the offices of the Quebec finance minister and the Conference of Rectors and Principals of Quebec Universities.
These arrests, part of a broader campaign of disruption and provocation, are the result of the dirty deeds of a police “anti-gang” squad called GAMMA (Guet des Activités et des Mouvements Marginaux et Anarchistes—Surveillance of Activities of Marginal and Anarchist Movements). The creation of this agency in January, along with the eight arrests, marks an intensification of a long-running war on the left by the Montreal cops.
The pretext for the first round of arrests was an altercation at this year’s May Day demonstration organized by Anti-Capitalist Convergence (CLAC). The Montreal cops routinely stage provocations against May Day protesters; this year they tried to arrest a photographer associated with Partisan, the PCR’s newspaper. As the PCR reports, “dozens of protesters responded by confronting the police, telling them to release the activist.” The cops backed off. Now police have thrown numerous serious charges against demonstrators including “assault with a weapon” and “assaulting a police officer.”
Ominously, it appears that the cops are also trying to implicate PCR supporters in an incident that occurred in Trois-Rivières a year ago in which the doors of a Canadian Forces recruitment centre were shattered by an explosive device. The PCR notes that the day after the June 29 arrests the Integrated National Security Enforcement Team (INSET) installed itself in Trois-Rivières, flashing photos of the four arrested leftists. INSET, a joint “anti-terror” agency of the RCMP, CSIS, Canadian Border Services and provincial and municipal police forces in Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa and Vancouver, has harassed numerous Quebec activists, including PCR supporters.
The Montreal crackdown is part of a broader ruling-class offensive against leftists which includes the mass arrests and brutalization of G20 protesters in Toronto in 2010. Many anti-G20 activists and organizers still face trumped-up charges. This is all aimed at intimidating those who oppose the violence, poverty and war that are endemic to the system of capitalist exploitation. This system, in which a tiny minority exploits the labour of the many, cannot be maintained except by force, and that is the core purpose of the capitalist state, with its repressive laws and its cops, courts and jails.
We have many political differences with the Maoist PCR and with the political views of the ASSÉ student leaders. But in the face of this state repression, our watchword is: “An injury to one is an injury to all!” It is in the interest of the entire labour movement to defend these activists and demand an end to the witchhunt. As we have always insisted, the ultimate target of such political repression, supplemented by the bogus “war on terror,” is the multiracial working class and its struggles. The working class alone has the potential social power and material interest to be the gravediggers of the capitalist order. Drop all charges against the arrested leftists!
From The Pages Of "Spartacist Canada"-Defeat Capitalist War on Public Sector Workers!
Spartacist Canada No. 170
Fall 2011
For a Class-Struggle Leadership of the Unions!
Defeat Capitalist War on Public Sector Workers!
Working people everywhere have paid with their jobs, benefits and pensions to bail out the bankers and corporate magnates whose financial swindles kicked off the worst economic crisis since the 1930s. Amid this devastation, profits are soaring once again along with CEO salaries and bonuses. Having bilked the public purse of billions for this “recovery,” the capitalist rulers are whipping up an outcry against public sector workers and their unions as supposedly living high off the hog at the taxpayers’ expense.
The industrial unions in this country have been ravaged by deindustrialization and a one-sided class war by the ruling class. Two years ago, leaders of the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) surrendered some $20 an hour in wages and benefits to help bail out Chrysler and General Motors, a demoralizing defeat that helped set the stage for broader attacks. Nickel miners in Sudbury went through a year-long lockout in 2009-10 that ended with major concessions by the union. Steelworkers in Hamilton remain locked out in a bitter battle over pensions that began late last year. The workforces in both these industries, which once numbered in the tens of thousands, have been decimated by many years of job cuts.
With fewer than one in six workers in the private sector now in unions, public sector workers—71 percent of whom are organized—now make up by far the largest proportion of union members in Canada. Yet many public sector unions remain constrained by the bosses’ laws from going on strike. Without the ability collectively to withdraw their labour, the workers are left at the mercy of the employer. A union that can’t (or won’t) strike is like a lion without claws or teeth.
Governments at all levels, led by the Harper Conservatives, are now moving to further curtail the right to strike. Emboldened by their majority status, the Tories brought down legislation in early summer that forced nearly 50,000 members of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) to take down picket lines and return to work or face huge fines and the seizure of union assets. In addition to banning strikes for four years and kicking Canada Post’s rollback demands to a government-appointed “arbitrator,” the law imposed a wage settlement even lower than the corporation’s last offer.
CUPW leaders had launched city-by-city rotating strikes in early June. When workers in Toronto and Montreal were brought out simultaneously in a one-day strike on June 14, the company responded with a countrywide lockout. The Tory back-to-work edict came less than a day later, an unconcealed act of collusion with union-busting management. Making clear that it was declaring war on all union struggles, the government also moved to break a strike by 3,800 Air Canada customer service agents. In this case, the CAW union leaders quickly abandoned the strike, signing a deal that accepted multiple concessions, notably on pensions, the central issue in the strike.
Such attacks are not only coming from the federal Tories. Earlier this year, the Ontario Liberal government banned strikes by Toronto transit workers at the behest of the city’s right-wing mayor Rob Ford, who is preparing a frontal assault on city workers through outsourcing and job and service cuts. From coast to coast, the rulers are bringing down the austerity axe on tens of thousands more jobs, claiming this is necessary to “balance the budget” and “keep Canada competitive.”
Labour Tops and NDP: Obstacles to Struggle
The unions are elementary defense organizations of the working class against unbridled exploitation. But struggle against the onslaught of the ruling class has been undermined by a labour leadership that accepts the inevitability of capitalist austerity while seeking to soften the blows. The union tops couple this with fealty to the NDP social democrats, or in some cases the Liberals, around a program of Canadian nationalism and protectionism which falsely asserts that the workers share a common interest with Canadian big business and governments.
The New Democrats, now Her Majesty’s Official Opposition in parliament, postured against the Tories’ recent back-to-work laws. But the NDP’s claim to stand on the side of striking workers is sheer hypocrisy, as shown by its record of breaking strikes and jailing union leaders while running governments in various provinces. In 1975 the first-ever NDP government in B.C. broke the strikes of pulp workers, railworkers, supermarket employees and propane truck drivers. A generation later, in 2000, they broke a strike by school support staff. In Ontario, an NDP regime jailed the president of CUPW’s Toronto local for defending picket lines in a 1991 strike, and in 2008 the Ontario New Democrats endorsed Liberal legislation breaking a strike by Toronto transit workers.
Down-the-line supporters of Canadian capitalism, in the midst of the postal showdown the NDP endorsed Harper’s call for a three-month extension of support to the brutal NATO military assault on neocolonial Libya. The very day CUPW members were forced back to work, foreign affairs minister John Baird visited Canadian NATO troops in Italy, where he signed a bomb destined for use against Libya that included the message, “This postal service don’t strike.” This powerfully underscores the link between imperialist war abroad and attacks on workers at home.
The eulogies from ruling-class spokesmen for NDP leader Jack Layton following his recent death from cancer are a measure of the services rendered to Canadian capitalism by the New Democrats, and by Layton in particular. The Tory government gave Layton an official state funeral, while Stephen Harper saluted his “dedication to public life.” It is instructive to contrast the bourgeoisie’s laudatory treatment of the late NDP leader to its unconcealed contempt for the poor and unemployed; its racist repression of immigrants and refugees; its imperialist pillage of the semicolonial world. The social role of the NDP has been, and remains, to tie the working people to supporting the rulers’ violent and barbaric social system, perhaps cushioned by a few cosmetic and highly reversible reforms.
Unchain the Unions!
The social power of public sector workers is not that of industrial workers, who can directly stop the wheels of production and thus of profit from turning. But public sector unions include transportation, utility and other workers who provide the means and services by which the economy runs—the infrastructure vital for a modern society. While the capitalist media whips up a propaganda barrage about “public outrage” against these unions, the truth is that some hard class struggle would win plenty of allies among the unemployed, immigrants and all those who have been thrown under the bus by the ruling class.
“Public opinion” is, in the end, determined by the ebbs and flows of the class struggle. As V.I. Lenin, leader of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, stressed: “Whereas the liberals (and the liquidators) tell the workers: ‘You are strong when you have the sympathy of “society”,’ the Marxist tells the workers something different, namely: ‘You have the sympathy of “society” when you are strong’” (“Economic and Political Strikes,” 1912).
In the face of the rulers’ savage offensive, the number of strikes has plummeted. Last year saw the fewest in more than half a century; by some measures, labour struggle in Canada is at its lowest ebb since the 1930s. What stands in the way of the necessary militant class struggle is the union bureaucracy, which has for the most part surrendered abjectly in the face of the austerity onslaught, the continuation of decades of bowing before the bosses.
Leaders of the Amalgamated Transit Union in Toronto rolled over with barely a peep of protest when the Ontario government banned their right to strike. Two months after the short-lived CAW strike at Air Canada, Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) leaders called on the airline’s flight attendants to accept a tentative deal that threatens their pension plan. A letter by the president of CUPE’s Air Canada Component, Jeff Taylor, sought to justify the betrayal: “One of the main deciding factors is the Conservative government, a government that would rather enforce back-to-work legislation than allow your union to strike. This was a key reality that drove the bargaining committee’s decision” (Toronto Star, 21 August). The union tops preach that struggle is not possible, that workers will just have to eat it. Nonetheless, 87 percent of the union voted down the sellout deal.
In the case of CUPW, while the union’s leaders refused to swallow Canada Post’s outrageous demands, they at no time sought to unleash the full power of the union on the picket lines. Their strategy of rotating strikes meant that the mail kept flowing until the company moved to shut down operations in preparation for the government intervention. The CUPW tops even offered to call off the strikes if management reinstated the old, expired contract. And once the lockout began, their only response was a series of punchless rallies featuring stale “solidarity” rhetoric from union bureaucrats and NDPers.
The miserable defeatism that characterizes today’s union misleaders threatens disaster for the workers. Labour has never won anything by meekly accepting the bosses’ rules. Once, unions themselves were illegal under the capitalists’ laws. It took “illegal” strikes, notably by postal workers, to win the right to organize for hundreds of thousands of government workers in the 1960s. The best working-class leaders recognized the need to face down state repression and go to jail if necessary for the workers’ cause. As we wrote last issue, in an article titled “All Labour Must Stand With CUPW!” which was distributed heavily at postal worker pickets, rallies and meetings:
“It is in the interests of the entire working class that CUPW beat back the bosses’ onslaught. If the union movement is to wage the battles necessary for defense of the workers and all the oppressed, a political struggle is necessary to get rid of the sellouts atop the labour movement who strangle the workers’ fighting spirit. It is in the crucible of the class struggle that a new leadership of the unions can be forged.”
—SC No. 169, Summer 2011
For a Revolutionary Workers Party!
The question of turning the unions into fighting organizations for the working class is fundamentally a political one. In an article written more than 70 years ago, the Marxist leader Leon Trotsky wrote: “The trade unions of our time can either serve as secondary instruments of imperialist capitalism for the subordination and disciplining of workers and for obstructing the revolution, or, on the contrary, the trade unions can become the instruments of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat” (“Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay,” 1940).
The economic devastation that now stalks the capitalist world is the product of the workings of a deeply unjust and irrational social system based on production for profit derived from the exploitation of the working class. The obscenely wealthy capitalists appropriate the results of the workers’ labour as their own, while working people are left to wonder if they will have a job tomorrow. Many feel that the best they can do is to try to hold onto their jobs. But the same conditions that grind down the workers and set them one against the other in a fight to survive can and will also propel them forward to unity in battle against the class enemy.
What are the obstacles to such united class struggle? First and foremost is the lie that there is a “common interest” or possible “partnership” between the exploited and the exploiters. The working class must champion its own interests, which are also the interests of all the oppressed. Thus in this country the labour movement must defend the national rights of Quebec against the chauvinist Canadian rulers and their NDP handmaidens. Anti-Quebec bigotry divides the working class, with workers in English Canada rallied behind their “own” exploiters and those in Quebec pulled into the framework of bourgeois nationalism. The New Democrats have a long history of supporting “united Canada” chauvinism against Quebec. This includes endorsing the Clarity Act, which seeks to ban Quebec’s democratic right to national self-determination. They have renounced none of this.
Various reformist leftists (echoing bourgeois commentators) assert that the NDP’s surge in Quebec in the federal election means that national antagonisms are a thing of the past. But nothing could be further from the truth. The continued significance of the national question was underlined in its own way by the furor whipped up in English Canada when it emerged that the NDP’s new interim leader, former federal public sector union leader Nycole Turmel, was until recently a member of the Bloc Québécois. While Turmel asserted that she has always backed “Canadian unity” and only joined the Bloc because it was a purportedly “progressive” force in her native Quebec, this was of no consequence to the witchhunters of the Canadian ruling class, for whom even a hint of possible support to “separatism” is tantamount to sedition. As revolutionary internationalist opponents of chauvinism and oppression in all their manifestations, we Marxists advocate independence for Quebec.
To unite the working class in anti-capitalist struggle, it is necessary to champion the rights of immigrants and oppose the rulers’ stepped-up campaigns for deportations and the detention of refugees. It is necessary to fight for women’s rights including free 24-hour child care and free abortion on demand. It is necessary to oppose Ottawa’s repressive “anti-crime” hysteria and the “war on terror” hysteria against Muslims and other minorities. The working class must take up the cause of all the oppressed!
The labour bureaucrats and New Democrats claim that the workers must “sacrifice” to preserve the profits and rule of Canadian capitalism. This road has led to disaster. It is necessary to fight for the perspective of mobilizing labour’s immense potential power against the exploiters, taking up such demands as jobs for all through sharing the available work at no loss in pay; a massive program of public works to rebuild crumbling roads, hospitals, schools and transit systems; for decent pensions, health care and other social services for everyone, fully guaranteed by the state. Such measures will not be granted by the capitalist ruling class, whose only interest lies in maintaining its profits and privileges.
The achievement of such basic measures, and more, requires a fight for the workers to wrest power from the hands of the exploiters through socialist revolution. Only then can we begin the rational reorganization of society in the interests of the vast majority. The fight for a class-struggle leadership to rebuild the unions is linked inextricably to the fight to forge a binational, multiracial revolutionary workers party including through political struggle against NDP-style social democracy. The need for revolutionary Marxist leadership is today posed acutely, not only to defend the working class against the menace of its own devastation, but to do away with the source of that devastation, the capitalist system itself.
Fall 2011
For a Class-Struggle Leadership of the Unions!
Defeat Capitalist War on Public Sector Workers!
Working people everywhere have paid with their jobs, benefits and pensions to bail out the bankers and corporate magnates whose financial swindles kicked off the worst economic crisis since the 1930s. Amid this devastation, profits are soaring once again along with CEO salaries and bonuses. Having bilked the public purse of billions for this “recovery,” the capitalist rulers are whipping up an outcry against public sector workers and their unions as supposedly living high off the hog at the taxpayers’ expense.
The industrial unions in this country have been ravaged by deindustrialization and a one-sided class war by the ruling class. Two years ago, leaders of the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) surrendered some $20 an hour in wages and benefits to help bail out Chrysler and General Motors, a demoralizing defeat that helped set the stage for broader attacks. Nickel miners in Sudbury went through a year-long lockout in 2009-10 that ended with major concessions by the union. Steelworkers in Hamilton remain locked out in a bitter battle over pensions that began late last year. The workforces in both these industries, which once numbered in the tens of thousands, have been decimated by many years of job cuts.
With fewer than one in six workers in the private sector now in unions, public sector workers—71 percent of whom are organized—now make up by far the largest proportion of union members in Canada. Yet many public sector unions remain constrained by the bosses’ laws from going on strike. Without the ability collectively to withdraw their labour, the workers are left at the mercy of the employer. A union that can’t (or won’t) strike is like a lion without claws or teeth.
Governments at all levels, led by the Harper Conservatives, are now moving to further curtail the right to strike. Emboldened by their majority status, the Tories brought down legislation in early summer that forced nearly 50,000 members of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) to take down picket lines and return to work or face huge fines and the seizure of union assets. In addition to banning strikes for four years and kicking Canada Post’s rollback demands to a government-appointed “arbitrator,” the law imposed a wage settlement even lower than the corporation’s last offer.
CUPW leaders had launched city-by-city rotating strikes in early June. When workers in Toronto and Montreal were brought out simultaneously in a one-day strike on June 14, the company responded with a countrywide lockout. The Tory back-to-work edict came less than a day later, an unconcealed act of collusion with union-busting management. Making clear that it was declaring war on all union struggles, the government also moved to break a strike by 3,800 Air Canada customer service agents. In this case, the CAW union leaders quickly abandoned the strike, signing a deal that accepted multiple concessions, notably on pensions, the central issue in the strike.
Such attacks are not only coming from the federal Tories. Earlier this year, the Ontario Liberal government banned strikes by Toronto transit workers at the behest of the city’s right-wing mayor Rob Ford, who is preparing a frontal assault on city workers through outsourcing and job and service cuts. From coast to coast, the rulers are bringing down the austerity axe on tens of thousands more jobs, claiming this is necessary to “balance the budget” and “keep Canada competitive.”
Labour Tops and NDP: Obstacles to Struggle
The unions are elementary defense organizations of the working class against unbridled exploitation. But struggle against the onslaught of the ruling class has been undermined by a labour leadership that accepts the inevitability of capitalist austerity while seeking to soften the blows. The union tops couple this with fealty to the NDP social democrats, or in some cases the Liberals, around a program of Canadian nationalism and protectionism which falsely asserts that the workers share a common interest with Canadian big business and governments.
The New Democrats, now Her Majesty’s Official Opposition in parliament, postured against the Tories’ recent back-to-work laws. But the NDP’s claim to stand on the side of striking workers is sheer hypocrisy, as shown by its record of breaking strikes and jailing union leaders while running governments in various provinces. In 1975 the first-ever NDP government in B.C. broke the strikes of pulp workers, railworkers, supermarket employees and propane truck drivers. A generation later, in 2000, they broke a strike by school support staff. In Ontario, an NDP regime jailed the president of CUPW’s Toronto local for defending picket lines in a 1991 strike, and in 2008 the Ontario New Democrats endorsed Liberal legislation breaking a strike by Toronto transit workers.
Down-the-line supporters of Canadian capitalism, in the midst of the postal showdown the NDP endorsed Harper’s call for a three-month extension of support to the brutal NATO military assault on neocolonial Libya. The very day CUPW members were forced back to work, foreign affairs minister John Baird visited Canadian NATO troops in Italy, where he signed a bomb destined for use against Libya that included the message, “This postal service don’t strike.” This powerfully underscores the link between imperialist war abroad and attacks on workers at home.
The eulogies from ruling-class spokesmen for NDP leader Jack Layton following his recent death from cancer are a measure of the services rendered to Canadian capitalism by the New Democrats, and by Layton in particular. The Tory government gave Layton an official state funeral, while Stephen Harper saluted his “dedication to public life.” It is instructive to contrast the bourgeoisie’s laudatory treatment of the late NDP leader to its unconcealed contempt for the poor and unemployed; its racist repression of immigrants and refugees; its imperialist pillage of the semicolonial world. The social role of the NDP has been, and remains, to tie the working people to supporting the rulers’ violent and barbaric social system, perhaps cushioned by a few cosmetic and highly reversible reforms.
Unchain the Unions!
The social power of public sector workers is not that of industrial workers, who can directly stop the wheels of production and thus of profit from turning. But public sector unions include transportation, utility and other workers who provide the means and services by which the economy runs—the infrastructure vital for a modern society. While the capitalist media whips up a propaganda barrage about “public outrage” against these unions, the truth is that some hard class struggle would win plenty of allies among the unemployed, immigrants and all those who have been thrown under the bus by the ruling class.
“Public opinion” is, in the end, determined by the ebbs and flows of the class struggle. As V.I. Lenin, leader of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, stressed: “Whereas the liberals (and the liquidators) tell the workers: ‘You are strong when you have the sympathy of “society”,’ the Marxist tells the workers something different, namely: ‘You have the sympathy of “society” when you are strong’” (“Economic and Political Strikes,” 1912).
In the face of the rulers’ savage offensive, the number of strikes has plummeted. Last year saw the fewest in more than half a century; by some measures, labour struggle in Canada is at its lowest ebb since the 1930s. What stands in the way of the necessary militant class struggle is the union bureaucracy, which has for the most part surrendered abjectly in the face of the austerity onslaught, the continuation of decades of bowing before the bosses.
Leaders of the Amalgamated Transit Union in Toronto rolled over with barely a peep of protest when the Ontario government banned their right to strike. Two months after the short-lived CAW strike at Air Canada, Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) leaders called on the airline’s flight attendants to accept a tentative deal that threatens their pension plan. A letter by the president of CUPE’s Air Canada Component, Jeff Taylor, sought to justify the betrayal: “One of the main deciding factors is the Conservative government, a government that would rather enforce back-to-work legislation than allow your union to strike. This was a key reality that drove the bargaining committee’s decision” (Toronto Star, 21 August). The union tops preach that struggle is not possible, that workers will just have to eat it. Nonetheless, 87 percent of the union voted down the sellout deal.
In the case of CUPW, while the union’s leaders refused to swallow Canada Post’s outrageous demands, they at no time sought to unleash the full power of the union on the picket lines. Their strategy of rotating strikes meant that the mail kept flowing until the company moved to shut down operations in preparation for the government intervention. The CUPW tops even offered to call off the strikes if management reinstated the old, expired contract. And once the lockout began, their only response was a series of punchless rallies featuring stale “solidarity” rhetoric from union bureaucrats and NDPers.
The miserable defeatism that characterizes today’s union misleaders threatens disaster for the workers. Labour has never won anything by meekly accepting the bosses’ rules. Once, unions themselves were illegal under the capitalists’ laws. It took “illegal” strikes, notably by postal workers, to win the right to organize for hundreds of thousands of government workers in the 1960s. The best working-class leaders recognized the need to face down state repression and go to jail if necessary for the workers’ cause. As we wrote last issue, in an article titled “All Labour Must Stand With CUPW!” which was distributed heavily at postal worker pickets, rallies and meetings:
“It is in the interests of the entire working class that CUPW beat back the bosses’ onslaught. If the union movement is to wage the battles necessary for defense of the workers and all the oppressed, a political struggle is necessary to get rid of the sellouts atop the labour movement who strangle the workers’ fighting spirit. It is in the crucible of the class struggle that a new leadership of the unions can be forged.”
—SC No. 169, Summer 2011
For a Revolutionary Workers Party!
The question of turning the unions into fighting organizations for the working class is fundamentally a political one. In an article written more than 70 years ago, the Marxist leader Leon Trotsky wrote: “The trade unions of our time can either serve as secondary instruments of imperialist capitalism for the subordination and disciplining of workers and for obstructing the revolution, or, on the contrary, the trade unions can become the instruments of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat” (“Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay,” 1940).
The economic devastation that now stalks the capitalist world is the product of the workings of a deeply unjust and irrational social system based on production for profit derived from the exploitation of the working class. The obscenely wealthy capitalists appropriate the results of the workers’ labour as their own, while working people are left to wonder if they will have a job tomorrow. Many feel that the best they can do is to try to hold onto their jobs. But the same conditions that grind down the workers and set them one against the other in a fight to survive can and will also propel them forward to unity in battle against the class enemy.
What are the obstacles to such united class struggle? First and foremost is the lie that there is a “common interest” or possible “partnership” between the exploited and the exploiters. The working class must champion its own interests, which are also the interests of all the oppressed. Thus in this country the labour movement must defend the national rights of Quebec against the chauvinist Canadian rulers and their NDP handmaidens. Anti-Quebec bigotry divides the working class, with workers in English Canada rallied behind their “own” exploiters and those in Quebec pulled into the framework of bourgeois nationalism. The New Democrats have a long history of supporting “united Canada” chauvinism against Quebec. This includes endorsing the Clarity Act, which seeks to ban Quebec’s democratic right to national self-determination. They have renounced none of this.
Various reformist leftists (echoing bourgeois commentators) assert that the NDP’s surge in Quebec in the federal election means that national antagonisms are a thing of the past. But nothing could be further from the truth. The continued significance of the national question was underlined in its own way by the furor whipped up in English Canada when it emerged that the NDP’s new interim leader, former federal public sector union leader Nycole Turmel, was until recently a member of the Bloc Québécois. While Turmel asserted that she has always backed “Canadian unity” and only joined the Bloc because it was a purportedly “progressive” force in her native Quebec, this was of no consequence to the witchhunters of the Canadian ruling class, for whom even a hint of possible support to “separatism” is tantamount to sedition. As revolutionary internationalist opponents of chauvinism and oppression in all their manifestations, we Marxists advocate independence for Quebec.
To unite the working class in anti-capitalist struggle, it is necessary to champion the rights of immigrants and oppose the rulers’ stepped-up campaigns for deportations and the detention of refugees. It is necessary to fight for women’s rights including free 24-hour child care and free abortion on demand. It is necessary to oppose Ottawa’s repressive “anti-crime” hysteria and the “war on terror” hysteria against Muslims and other minorities. The working class must take up the cause of all the oppressed!
The labour bureaucrats and New Democrats claim that the workers must “sacrifice” to preserve the profits and rule of Canadian capitalism. This road has led to disaster. It is necessary to fight for the perspective of mobilizing labour’s immense potential power against the exploiters, taking up such demands as jobs for all through sharing the available work at no loss in pay; a massive program of public works to rebuild crumbling roads, hospitals, schools and transit systems; for decent pensions, health care and other social services for everyone, fully guaranteed by the state. Such measures will not be granted by the capitalist ruling class, whose only interest lies in maintaining its profits and privileges.
The achievement of such basic measures, and more, requires a fight for the workers to wrest power from the hands of the exploiters through socialist revolution. Only then can we begin the rational reorganization of society in the interests of the vast majority. The fight for a class-struggle leadership to rebuild the unions is linked inextricably to the fight to forge a binational, multiracial revolutionary workers party including through political struggle against NDP-style social democracy. The need for revolutionary Marxist leadership is today posed acutely, not only to defend the working class against the menace of its own devastation, but to do away with the source of that devastation, the capitalist system itself.
From The Annals Of Marxism- V.I. Lenin On The Revolutionary Newspaper
Workers Vanguard No. 986
16 September 2011
The Revolutionary Newspaper
(Quote of the Week)
In one of his earliest writings, V.I. Lenin explained the crucial importance of the Marxist press in building a revolutionary workers party. The article was written for the fourth issue of Iskra, newspaper of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party’s revolutionary Marxist tendency, which would later develop into the Bolshevik Party.
The immediate task of our Party is not to summon all available forces for the attack right now, but to call for the formation of a revolutionary organisation capable of uniting all forces and guiding the movement in actual practice and not in name alone, that is, an organisation ready at any time to support every protest and every outbreak and use it to build up and consolidate the fighting forces suitable for the decisive struggle….
A newspaper is what we most of all need; without it we cannot conduct that systematic, all-round propaganda and agitation, consistent in principle, which is the chief and permanent task of Social-Democracy in general and, in particular, the pressing task of the moment, when interest in politics and in questions of socialism has been aroused among the broadest strata of the population….
The role of a newspaper, however, is not limited solely to the dissemination of ideas, to political education, and to the enlistment of political allies. A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, it is also a collective organiser. In this last respect it may be likened to the scaffolding round a building under construction, which marks the contours of the structure and facilitates communication between the builders, enabling them to distribute the work and to view the common results achieved by their organised labour. With the aid of the newspaper, and through it, a permanent organisation will naturally take shape that will engage, not only in local activities, but in regular general work, and will train its members to follow political events carefully, appraise their significance and their effect on the various strata of the population, and develop effective means for the revolutionary party to influence those events.
—V.I. Lenin, “Where to Begin?” May 1901, Collected Works, Vol. 5
16 September 2011
The Revolutionary Newspaper
(Quote of the Week)
In one of his earliest writings, V.I. Lenin explained the crucial importance of the Marxist press in building a revolutionary workers party. The article was written for the fourth issue of Iskra, newspaper of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party’s revolutionary Marxist tendency, which would later develop into the Bolshevik Party.
The immediate task of our Party is not to summon all available forces for the attack right now, but to call for the formation of a revolutionary organisation capable of uniting all forces and guiding the movement in actual practice and not in name alone, that is, an organisation ready at any time to support every protest and every outbreak and use it to build up and consolidate the fighting forces suitable for the decisive struggle….
A newspaper is what we most of all need; without it we cannot conduct that systematic, all-round propaganda and agitation, consistent in principle, which is the chief and permanent task of Social-Democracy in general and, in particular, the pressing task of the moment, when interest in politics and in questions of socialism has been aroused among the broadest strata of the population….
The role of a newspaper, however, is not limited solely to the dissemination of ideas, to political education, and to the enlistment of political allies. A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, it is also a collective organiser. In this last respect it may be likened to the scaffolding round a building under construction, which marks the contours of the structure and facilitates communication between the builders, enabling them to distribute the work and to view the common results achieved by their organised labour. With the aid of the newspaper, and through it, a permanent organisation will naturally take shape that will engage, not only in local activities, but in regular general work, and will train its members to follow political events carefully, appraise their significance and their effect on the various strata of the population, and develop effective means for the revolutionary party to influence those events.
—V.I. Lenin, “Where to Begin?” May 1901, Collected Works, Vol. 5
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Longshoremen Play Hardball in Longview, Washington-ILWU Fights Deadly Threat
Workers Vanguard No. 986
16 September 2011
Longshoremen Play Hardball in Longview, Washington
ILWU Fights Deadly Threat
SEPTEMBER 13—For decades the unions in this country have been taking it in the teeth, their leadership lying down in the face of a union-busting juggernaut launched when the PATCO air traffic controllers were smashed in 1981. But on September 8, in the port town of Longview, Washington, members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) and their allies in other unions mobilized the kind of militant labor action that built the union movement in this country.
In the early hours of the morning, a picket of more than 500 unionists massed outside the newly built $200 million grain terminal of the giant EGT Development conglomerate, which wants to keep the ILWU out. Police who had earlier clubbed and pepper-sprayed picketers decided to take a hike. Faced with hundreds of longshoremen, the Longview police chief said, the cops had “used the better part of discretion.” The company’s security guard thugs also fled under police escort. Now EGT is complaining that grain cargo aboard a 107-car Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) train that had pulled into the terminal earlier was dumped on the tracks and that the train’s brake lines were cut. Later that day, a federal judge who had brought down a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) injunction against “aggressive picketing” in Longview complained that he felt “like a paper tiger.”
For months, ILWU Local 21, which has controlled all work loading and unloading ships in Longview for more than 70 years, has fought the EGT union-busters. In mid July, a mass picket of hundreds of ILWUers and other unionists stopped a BNSF train from delivering grain to the terminal (see “ILWU Battles Union Busters,” WV No. 984, 5 August). BNSF suspended service to the terminal. Then, on September 7, the company tried to move in a train carrying grain from Minnesota. At the port of Vancouver, Washington, just up the Columbia River from Longview, the train was blocked by 200 picketers occupying the tracks. While the unionists temporarily prevailed, later that day the train was on the way to Longview, where 300 longshoremen and their allies massed on the tracks to stop it.
Attacked by riot-equipped cops wielding clubs, tear gas and guns loaded with rubber bullets, the picketers stood down. ILWU International president Bob McEllrath was brutally manhandled by a gang of cops. Calling on the workers to disperse for now, he argued, “You can get maced and tear-gassed and clubbed” or wait for the backing of other longshoremen. ILWU members were outraged by pictures of McEllrath being roughed up and detained by the cops—an attack reminiscent of PATCO leaders being led away in shackles. The ports of Seattle, Tacoma and Everett were shut down as union members walked off the job early on September 8.
Hours later, there were reinforcements on the Longview picket lines. EGT, its hired thugs and the cops got a real taste of union power. Even the New York Times (9 September) acknowledged: “The longshoremen’s actions were a rare show of union militancy, reminiscent of labor actions a century ago.” Today it was reported that two pro-union protesters have been arrested, one of them on four felony charges, with the police threatening more arrests. All labor must back the ILWU and demand that all charges against the unionists and their supporters be dropped.
The stakes in this battle are high. Negotiations for a new Northwest Grainhandlers Agreement between the ILWU and the giant conglomerates that dominate the grain business begin this month. EGT—a joint venture between St. Louis-based Bunge North America, the Japanese Itochu Corp. and the South Korean shipping giant STX Pan Ocean—is Bunge’s first foray into the Pacific Northwest. If EGT gets away with keeping the ILWU out at Longview, it will be a declaration to other grain companies that it’s open season on the union. A defeat at Longview would be a body blow against this powerful union, whose core longshore division contract is up in 2014.
Behind EGT stands the power of the capitalist state. In August, the NLRB filed for an injunction seeking to stop “aggressive picketing” at the Longview terminal and challenging the ILWU’s right to the jobs at EGT. On the afternoon of the September 8 action, a federal judge made permanent the injunction requested by the NLRB, although he refused the NLRB request that all picketing be banned. Carrying fines of $25,000 per violation, the injunction was extended to cover the entire ILWU. The union now faces a “contempt of court” hearing. Nationwide, the hired pens of the capitalist media have unleashed a rabid, labor-hating barrage against the ILWU, slamming it as a pack of “thugs.”
The ILWU demonstrated the power of labor that lies in its collective organization, discipline and above all its capacity to shut down the flow of goods. Working people around the country, whose unions, jobs, wages and working conditions have been ravaged in a one-sided class war that has hit especially hard during the current economic crisis, cheered the ILWU’s action: Finally, a union is standing up and fighting back! To be sure, it is not easy to win in the face of the forces of the capitalist state. But it is better to fight on your feet than die on your knees! And when an important strike is won, it can dramatically alter the entire situation. In 1934, the San Francisco general strike that forged the ILWU and the mass strikes in Toledo and Minneapolis—all led by reds—set the stage for the 1937 Flint sitdown strike against General Motors and the rise of the CIO.
Labor Traitor Trumka Stabs ILWU in the Back
The ILWU must not stand alone! Unions must be mobilized in concrete actions of solidarity, beginning with the Teamsters-affiliated Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen who drive the BNSF trains. Nothing should move in or out of the EGT facility! The International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), which organizes longshoremen on East Coast and Gulf ports, issued a statement of solidarity with the ILWU, condemning the police attack on McEllrath and other union members. The Washington Federation of State Employees (AFSCME Council 28) did likewise, condemning “the management actions to break the ILWU at Longview or any port along the West Coast.” It’s going to take more than words to stop the EGT union-busters.
Outrageously, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka has come out in opposition to the defense of the ILWU! Instead, Trumka is peddling the lie that what’s involved in Longview is a “jurisdictional dispute” between the ILWU and International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE) Local 701, whose members are scabbing on the ILWU. Trumka’s “jurisdictional dispute” line is the same one being pushed by EGT as a fig leaf for its union-busting. While the company went through a show of negotiating with the ILWU, it’s been clear from the beginning that EGT wants a non-union facility.
In January, EGT filed a court suit against the provision in its lease with the Port of Longview mandating that the company employ ILWU Local 21 members, arguing that “the lease did not impose any obligation whatsoever upon EGT to utilize union labor at the terminal” (our emphasis). After longshoremen shut down the BNSF grain shipment in July, EGT turned around and hired a subcontractor which employs Local 701 labor. Ever since, these scabs have been crossing the ILWU’s picket lines, while EGT cynically boasts that it is providing “local, family-wage” union jobs. Only a company dupe could buy this line.
The executive committee of the Oregon AFL-CIO passed a resolution condemning the IUOE “scab labor actions” at Longview despite the attempt by state federation president Tom Chamberlain to rule it out of order. In August, Trumka sent a letter backing Chamberlain, arguing that “the resolution should be considered void, and no action should be taken by the state federation under the resolution.” Trumka wants the ILWU to call off its fight and submit to a complicated hearing under the AFL-CIO’s provision for jurisdictional disputes. The only “jurisdictional” dispute in Longview is between capital and labor! And Trumka has taken the side of the bosses.
While the ILWU was fighting for its life in Longview on September 8, Trumka was a guest of honor at Barack Obama’s “fight for jobs” speech to Congress. The AFL-CIO president is especially concerned that militancy at Longview could ignite a class battle that would threaten Obama’s re-election. The Wall Street Journal sees the same possible outcome. In a September 9 editorial headlined “A Union Goes Too Far,” this mouthpiece for the corporations and bankers declared: “If ILWU shops begin slowdowns in sympathy with the union in Washington state…the events yesterday will become a national issue demanding the attention of a President who is desperately trying to hold his union base together. This one is worth watching.”
The price that has been paid for the bureaucrats’ subordination of the unions to the Democratic Party—which less crudely than the Republicans represents the interests of the capitalist class—can be seen in decades of broken unions and busted strikes. Such class collaboration is a central obstacle to the workers waging the kind of class battles needed to defend their interests. The AFL-CIO officialdom’s commitment to the Democratic Party is equally shared by the ILWU International leadership. But with the very existence of the union on the line, McEllrath has been propelled into an episode of the class struggle that is inevitable in a society based on the exploitation of the many for the profits of the few.
“There Are No Neutrals There”
The ILWU’s battles in Longview have starkly laid bare the irreconcilable class divide between the workers and the capitalist class enemy. But this is obscured by presenting it as a fight of the Longview “community” against a giant multinational conglomerate. The refrain of the old coal miners’ Harlan County fighting song asks: “Which Side Are You On?” This question is being increasingly posed in Longview, where shopkeepers are under pressure to remove signs supporting the ILWU from their windows. The local newspaper ran an appeal from Cowlitz County sheriff Mark Nelson to turn in union militants involved in the September 8 struggle. Defense of the “community” has fed “outside agitator” baiting by the cops, directed against ILWU members from outside Longview, including McEllrath.
Illusions that the cops are just regular community folks are suicidal. The job of the police is to “serve and protect” the interests of the corporations, as was more than amply demonstrated in their brutal assault on ILWU picketers. Every hard-fought labor struggle in the history of this country has been a pitched battle with the capitalists’ strikebreaking thugs, from cops and company goons to National Guardsmen and other scabherders. Behind them stand the courts and other state agencies. These are all part of the machinery of the capitalist state, whose purpose is to defend the property and profits of the capitalist owners through the suppression of the working class.
This machinery includes the NLRB, which was created under the Democratic Party administration of that “friend of labor” icon, Franklin Roosevelt, to head off and co-opt the class battles of the 1930s. The NLRB exists to tie the unions up in endless legal machinations in order to prevent workers from using their collective power to organize, stop work and stop the flow of profits. Today, the suit against the ILWU by the NLRB—two of whose three current members were appointed by Democrats—is a brief for EGT union-busting.
The lie peddled by the union tops that the state can be pressured to serve the workers’ interests is matched by their promotion of the interests of American capitalism against its overseas competitors. In a press statement, ILWU spokeswoman Jennifer Sargent said that the purpose of militant actions by longshoremen in Longview is “to stand up to a foreign company that’s trying to get a foothold in Washington and undermine the grain industry.” Agriculture is big business in America, and one of the few where the U.S. has a competitive advantage. But anyone who thinks that this has benefited U.S. agricultural or other workers is severely deluded. No less than their foreign counterparts, American corporations are in business for one reason only, and that is to generate profits. The workers have no interest in promoting the profitability of their “own” capitalist rulers, which is purchased through the increasingly brutal exploitation of labor. U.S. grain bosses are just as eager as EGT’s non-American components to bust the ILWU.
For longshoremen whose very jobs are dependent on foreign trade—both imports and exports—to wave the red-white-and-blue “made in the U.S.A.” banner is particularly ludicrous. Unlike the Trumka leadership of the AFL-CIO, the International Transport Workers’ Federation has issued a statement in support of the ILWU. Whether or not the ILWU wins this battle might well depend on support actions by port and maritime workers throughout Asia refusing to handle scab EGT grain shipments. The ILWU isn’t going to win such support by waving the flag of U.S. imperialism, which is soaked in the blood of countless workers and oppressed masses around the globe.
Break with the Democrats! Build a Workers Party!
With their backs against the wall, the ILWU leadership has taken some bold action. The fight has been engaged and there’s no going back. The strength of the union lies in its multiracial coastwide membership. The Pacific Maritime Association bosses have long tried to pit one port against another, playing the overwhelmingly white Pacific Northwest locals, the largely black San Francisco local and the largely Latino membership in Los Angeles/Long Beach against each other. It is crucial that the union stand as one and fight to galvanize the rest of the labor movement in struggle behind it.
Trumka’s treachery vividly illustrates the role of the labor bureaucracy as the bosses’ agents in the unions, in which they serve as a central obstacle to working-class struggle. In 1921, in the face of an “open shop” offensive that was decimating the unions, James P. Cannon, then a leader of the Communist movement and later the founder of American Trotskyism, described the political program necessary to reforge the labor movement:
“The ‘open shop’ campaign is one of the manifestations of a state of war that exists in society between two opposing classes: the producers and the parasites. This war cuts through the whole population like a great dividing sword; it creates two hostile camps and puts every man in his place in one or the other….
“Let the unions put aside their illusions; let them face the issue squarely and fight it out on the basis of the class struggle. Instead of seeking peace when there is no peace, and ‘understanding’ with those who do not want to understand, let them declare war on the whole capitalist regime. That is the way to save the unions and to make them grow in the face of adversity and become powerful war engines for the destruction of capitalism and the reorganization of society on the foundation of working class control in industry and government.”
— “Who Can Save the Unions?” (7 May 1921), reprinted in James P. Cannon and the Early Years of American Communism (Prometheus Research Library, 1992)
In 1934, Cannon and his party would provide the leadership for the series of strikes in Minneapolis that forged the Teamsters as an industrial union.
There is massive discontent at the base of American society that can be galvanized through class battles like that at Longview. But to realize this potential poses the question of leadership. The current labor misleadership must be ousted and replaced with workers’ leaders who link the fight to defend the unions to building a multiracial revolutionary workers party. The Spartacist League/U.S. uniquely puts forward the program to build such a party, the necessary instrument to lead the working class in the fight to do away with the entire system of capitalist wage slavery through socialist revolution.
16 September 2011
Longshoremen Play Hardball in Longview, Washington
ILWU Fights Deadly Threat
SEPTEMBER 13—For decades the unions in this country have been taking it in the teeth, their leadership lying down in the face of a union-busting juggernaut launched when the PATCO air traffic controllers were smashed in 1981. But on September 8, in the port town of Longview, Washington, members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) and their allies in other unions mobilized the kind of militant labor action that built the union movement in this country.
In the early hours of the morning, a picket of more than 500 unionists massed outside the newly built $200 million grain terminal of the giant EGT Development conglomerate, which wants to keep the ILWU out. Police who had earlier clubbed and pepper-sprayed picketers decided to take a hike. Faced with hundreds of longshoremen, the Longview police chief said, the cops had “used the better part of discretion.” The company’s security guard thugs also fled under police escort. Now EGT is complaining that grain cargo aboard a 107-car Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) train that had pulled into the terminal earlier was dumped on the tracks and that the train’s brake lines were cut. Later that day, a federal judge who had brought down a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) injunction against “aggressive picketing” in Longview complained that he felt “like a paper tiger.”
For months, ILWU Local 21, which has controlled all work loading and unloading ships in Longview for more than 70 years, has fought the EGT union-busters. In mid July, a mass picket of hundreds of ILWUers and other unionists stopped a BNSF train from delivering grain to the terminal (see “ILWU Battles Union Busters,” WV No. 984, 5 August). BNSF suspended service to the terminal. Then, on September 7, the company tried to move in a train carrying grain from Minnesota. At the port of Vancouver, Washington, just up the Columbia River from Longview, the train was blocked by 200 picketers occupying the tracks. While the unionists temporarily prevailed, later that day the train was on the way to Longview, where 300 longshoremen and their allies massed on the tracks to stop it.
Attacked by riot-equipped cops wielding clubs, tear gas and guns loaded with rubber bullets, the picketers stood down. ILWU International president Bob McEllrath was brutally manhandled by a gang of cops. Calling on the workers to disperse for now, he argued, “You can get maced and tear-gassed and clubbed” or wait for the backing of other longshoremen. ILWU members were outraged by pictures of McEllrath being roughed up and detained by the cops—an attack reminiscent of PATCO leaders being led away in shackles. The ports of Seattle, Tacoma and Everett were shut down as union members walked off the job early on September 8.
Hours later, there were reinforcements on the Longview picket lines. EGT, its hired thugs and the cops got a real taste of union power. Even the New York Times (9 September) acknowledged: “The longshoremen’s actions were a rare show of union militancy, reminiscent of labor actions a century ago.” Today it was reported that two pro-union protesters have been arrested, one of them on four felony charges, with the police threatening more arrests. All labor must back the ILWU and demand that all charges against the unionists and their supporters be dropped.
The stakes in this battle are high. Negotiations for a new Northwest Grainhandlers Agreement between the ILWU and the giant conglomerates that dominate the grain business begin this month. EGT—a joint venture between St. Louis-based Bunge North America, the Japanese Itochu Corp. and the South Korean shipping giant STX Pan Ocean—is Bunge’s first foray into the Pacific Northwest. If EGT gets away with keeping the ILWU out at Longview, it will be a declaration to other grain companies that it’s open season on the union. A defeat at Longview would be a body blow against this powerful union, whose core longshore division contract is up in 2014.
Behind EGT stands the power of the capitalist state. In August, the NLRB filed for an injunction seeking to stop “aggressive picketing” at the Longview terminal and challenging the ILWU’s right to the jobs at EGT. On the afternoon of the September 8 action, a federal judge made permanent the injunction requested by the NLRB, although he refused the NLRB request that all picketing be banned. Carrying fines of $25,000 per violation, the injunction was extended to cover the entire ILWU. The union now faces a “contempt of court” hearing. Nationwide, the hired pens of the capitalist media have unleashed a rabid, labor-hating barrage against the ILWU, slamming it as a pack of “thugs.”
The ILWU demonstrated the power of labor that lies in its collective organization, discipline and above all its capacity to shut down the flow of goods. Working people around the country, whose unions, jobs, wages and working conditions have been ravaged in a one-sided class war that has hit especially hard during the current economic crisis, cheered the ILWU’s action: Finally, a union is standing up and fighting back! To be sure, it is not easy to win in the face of the forces of the capitalist state. But it is better to fight on your feet than die on your knees! And when an important strike is won, it can dramatically alter the entire situation. In 1934, the San Francisco general strike that forged the ILWU and the mass strikes in Toledo and Minneapolis—all led by reds—set the stage for the 1937 Flint sitdown strike against General Motors and the rise of the CIO.
Labor Traitor Trumka Stabs ILWU in the Back
The ILWU must not stand alone! Unions must be mobilized in concrete actions of solidarity, beginning with the Teamsters-affiliated Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen who drive the BNSF trains. Nothing should move in or out of the EGT facility! The International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), which organizes longshoremen on East Coast and Gulf ports, issued a statement of solidarity with the ILWU, condemning the police attack on McEllrath and other union members. The Washington Federation of State Employees (AFSCME Council 28) did likewise, condemning “the management actions to break the ILWU at Longview or any port along the West Coast.” It’s going to take more than words to stop the EGT union-busters.
Outrageously, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka has come out in opposition to the defense of the ILWU! Instead, Trumka is peddling the lie that what’s involved in Longview is a “jurisdictional dispute” between the ILWU and International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE) Local 701, whose members are scabbing on the ILWU. Trumka’s “jurisdictional dispute” line is the same one being pushed by EGT as a fig leaf for its union-busting. While the company went through a show of negotiating with the ILWU, it’s been clear from the beginning that EGT wants a non-union facility.
In January, EGT filed a court suit against the provision in its lease with the Port of Longview mandating that the company employ ILWU Local 21 members, arguing that “the lease did not impose any obligation whatsoever upon EGT to utilize union labor at the terminal” (our emphasis). After longshoremen shut down the BNSF grain shipment in July, EGT turned around and hired a subcontractor which employs Local 701 labor. Ever since, these scabs have been crossing the ILWU’s picket lines, while EGT cynically boasts that it is providing “local, family-wage” union jobs. Only a company dupe could buy this line.
The executive committee of the Oregon AFL-CIO passed a resolution condemning the IUOE “scab labor actions” at Longview despite the attempt by state federation president Tom Chamberlain to rule it out of order. In August, Trumka sent a letter backing Chamberlain, arguing that “the resolution should be considered void, and no action should be taken by the state federation under the resolution.” Trumka wants the ILWU to call off its fight and submit to a complicated hearing under the AFL-CIO’s provision for jurisdictional disputes. The only “jurisdictional” dispute in Longview is between capital and labor! And Trumka has taken the side of the bosses.
While the ILWU was fighting for its life in Longview on September 8, Trumka was a guest of honor at Barack Obama’s “fight for jobs” speech to Congress. The AFL-CIO president is especially concerned that militancy at Longview could ignite a class battle that would threaten Obama’s re-election. The Wall Street Journal sees the same possible outcome. In a September 9 editorial headlined “A Union Goes Too Far,” this mouthpiece for the corporations and bankers declared: “If ILWU shops begin slowdowns in sympathy with the union in Washington state…the events yesterday will become a national issue demanding the attention of a President who is desperately trying to hold his union base together. This one is worth watching.”
The price that has been paid for the bureaucrats’ subordination of the unions to the Democratic Party—which less crudely than the Republicans represents the interests of the capitalist class—can be seen in decades of broken unions and busted strikes. Such class collaboration is a central obstacle to the workers waging the kind of class battles needed to defend their interests. The AFL-CIO officialdom’s commitment to the Democratic Party is equally shared by the ILWU International leadership. But with the very existence of the union on the line, McEllrath has been propelled into an episode of the class struggle that is inevitable in a society based on the exploitation of the many for the profits of the few.
“There Are No Neutrals There”
The ILWU’s battles in Longview have starkly laid bare the irreconcilable class divide between the workers and the capitalist class enemy. But this is obscured by presenting it as a fight of the Longview “community” against a giant multinational conglomerate. The refrain of the old coal miners’ Harlan County fighting song asks: “Which Side Are You On?” This question is being increasingly posed in Longview, where shopkeepers are under pressure to remove signs supporting the ILWU from their windows. The local newspaper ran an appeal from Cowlitz County sheriff Mark Nelson to turn in union militants involved in the September 8 struggle. Defense of the “community” has fed “outside agitator” baiting by the cops, directed against ILWU members from outside Longview, including McEllrath.
Illusions that the cops are just regular community folks are suicidal. The job of the police is to “serve and protect” the interests of the corporations, as was more than amply demonstrated in their brutal assault on ILWU picketers. Every hard-fought labor struggle in the history of this country has been a pitched battle with the capitalists’ strikebreaking thugs, from cops and company goons to National Guardsmen and other scabherders. Behind them stand the courts and other state agencies. These are all part of the machinery of the capitalist state, whose purpose is to defend the property and profits of the capitalist owners through the suppression of the working class.
This machinery includes the NLRB, which was created under the Democratic Party administration of that “friend of labor” icon, Franklin Roosevelt, to head off and co-opt the class battles of the 1930s. The NLRB exists to tie the unions up in endless legal machinations in order to prevent workers from using their collective power to organize, stop work and stop the flow of profits. Today, the suit against the ILWU by the NLRB—two of whose three current members were appointed by Democrats—is a brief for EGT union-busting.
The lie peddled by the union tops that the state can be pressured to serve the workers’ interests is matched by their promotion of the interests of American capitalism against its overseas competitors. In a press statement, ILWU spokeswoman Jennifer Sargent said that the purpose of militant actions by longshoremen in Longview is “to stand up to a foreign company that’s trying to get a foothold in Washington and undermine the grain industry.” Agriculture is big business in America, and one of the few where the U.S. has a competitive advantage. But anyone who thinks that this has benefited U.S. agricultural or other workers is severely deluded. No less than their foreign counterparts, American corporations are in business for one reason only, and that is to generate profits. The workers have no interest in promoting the profitability of their “own” capitalist rulers, which is purchased through the increasingly brutal exploitation of labor. U.S. grain bosses are just as eager as EGT’s non-American components to bust the ILWU.
For longshoremen whose very jobs are dependent on foreign trade—both imports and exports—to wave the red-white-and-blue “made in the U.S.A.” banner is particularly ludicrous. Unlike the Trumka leadership of the AFL-CIO, the International Transport Workers’ Federation has issued a statement in support of the ILWU. Whether or not the ILWU wins this battle might well depend on support actions by port and maritime workers throughout Asia refusing to handle scab EGT grain shipments. The ILWU isn’t going to win such support by waving the flag of U.S. imperialism, which is soaked in the blood of countless workers and oppressed masses around the globe.
Break with the Democrats! Build a Workers Party!
With their backs against the wall, the ILWU leadership has taken some bold action. The fight has been engaged and there’s no going back. The strength of the union lies in its multiracial coastwide membership. The Pacific Maritime Association bosses have long tried to pit one port against another, playing the overwhelmingly white Pacific Northwest locals, the largely black San Francisco local and the largely Latino membership in Los Angeles/Long Beach against each other. It is crucial that the union stand as one and fight to galvanize the rest of the labor movement in struggle behind it.
Trumka’s treachery vividly illustrates the role of the labor bureaucracy as the bosses’ agents in the unions, in which they serve as a central obstacle to working-class struggle. In 1921, in the face of an “open shop” offensive that was decimating the unions, James P. Cannon, then a leader of the Communist movement and later the founder of American Trotskyism, described the political program necessary to reforge the labor movement:
“The ‘open shop’ campaign is one of the manifestations of a state of war that exists in society between two opposing classes: the producers and the parasites. This war cuts through the whole population like a great dividing sword; it creates two hostile camps and puts every man in his place in one or the other….
“Let the unions put aside their illusions; let them face the issue squarely and fight it out on the basis of the class struggle. Instead of seeking peace when there is no peace, and ‘understanding’ with those who do not want to understand, let them declare war on the whole capitalist regime. That is the way to save the unions and to make them grow in the face of adversity and become powerful war engines for the destruction of capitalism and the reorganization of society on the foundation of working class control in industry and government.”
— “Who Can Save the Unions?” (7 May 1921), reprinted in James P. Cannon and the Early Years of American Communism (Prometheus Research Library, 1992)
In 1934, Cannon and his party would provide the leadership for the series of strikes in Minneapolis that forged the Teamsters as an industrial union.
There is massive discontent at the base of American society that can be galvanized through class battles like that at Longview. But to realize this potential poses the question of leadership. The current labor misleadership must be ousted and replaced with workers’ leaders who link the fight to defend the unions to building a multiracial revolutionary workers party. The Spartacist League/U.S. uniquely puts forward the program to build such a party, the necessary instrument to lead the working class in the fight to do away with the entire system of capitalist wage slavery through socialist revolution.
“Workers of The World Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains”-The Struggle For Trotsky's Fourth (Communist) International-From The Archives-The Founding Conference Of The Fourth International (1938)-"Resolution On Youth"
Click on the headline to link to the Toward A History Of The Fourth International website for the article listed above.
Markin comment (repost from September 2010):
Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward
The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.
With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
********
Markin comment on this document
Everybody, and that most notably included Leon Trotsky, knew something was going awry with the Bolshevik Revolution by 1923 for many reasons, some of them beyond correction outside of an international extension of the revolution, especially to Germany that would provide the vital industrial infrastructure to aid the struggling Soviet Union. Nevertheless, and this is important to note about serious revolutionary politics and politicians in general, the fight in 1923 still needed to aimed at winning the party cadre over. That was the failing point of many oppositionists, inside and outside the party, then.
By 1933, with the rise of the virtually unopposed rise and consolidation of Nazism in Germany clearly putting paid to the Communist International’s (read: Stalin’s) erroneous strategy, working inside the party, or acting as an expelled fraction of the party, was no longer tenable. Like earlier with the First and Second Internationals the Communist International was now dead as a revolutionary organizational center. Time now to gather, by fits and starts, the cadre for a new international- the Fourth International
Needless to say in trying to organize a new international in tough times, with not enough seasoned cadre, not enough not-Leon Trotsky leadership, not enough money, and not enough, well, of anything internal bickering and personality disputes are going to slow down any efforts.
This youth resolution looks very much like it could have with updates been written today.
*******
Founding Conference of the 4th International: "Resolution on Youth"
Introduction from Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter, No. 17, May-June 1973
Trotsky was always keenly aware of what he called the problem of generations. He began the New Course (1923), his opening shot in the struggle against the bureaucratic degeneration of the Russian Revolution, with a discussion of the "question of the party generations," and in the most important document among the founding resolutions of the Fourth International (FI), The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International: The Transitional Program, Trotsky stated the problem of generations in the following way:
"When a program or organization wears out, the generation which carried it on its shoulders wears out with it. The movement is revitalized by the youth who are free of responsibility for the past… Only the fresh enthusiasm and aggressive spirit of the youth can guarantee the preliminary successes in the struggle; only these successes can return the best elements of the older generation to the road of revolution."
—p. 45, Pathfinder Press edition
Trotsky had not forgotten the lesson of the collapse of the Second International and the building of the Third. When the leading parties of the Second International capitulated to the national chauvinism of WWI, it was the militants primarily concentrated in the Socialist youth and women’s groups (representing a more oppressed stratum of the working class than the privileged labor aristocracy—the most influential component of the Western European Socialist parties) who carried the banner of internationalism against the tide of national chauvinism. It was these militants who, under the impact of the Russian October, provided the precious founding cadre for the new Communist International (CI), With the destruction of the CI as a world revolutionary party under the heavy blows of the failure of the German Revolution, the bureaucratic degeneration of the Bolshevik Revolution, the rise of fascism and the impending renewal of imperialist world war, the tasks of creating a new international were placed on the agenda. Trotsky, one of the creators of the CI who had authored its founding manifesto, turned to the generation of young workers, unscarred by the defeats and betrayals of the past. Hence, the founding manifesto of the FI ends with a clarion call to "Open the Road to the Woman Worker! Open the Road to the Youth!"
The seriousness with which Trotskyists undertook this necessary historical exhortation to find the road to the next generation of revolutionaries was displayed by the fact that—though the founding of the FI took place under the most difficult conditions requiring careful preparation and secrecy, at a time when the Trotskyists had meager resources and were being hounded throughout the world by the police and agents of all wings of the bourgeoisie from the fascists to the most "democratic" and, with special vehemence, by Stalin’s secret police—nonetheless the Founding Conference was followed one week later by the "World Youth Conference of the Fourth International." Both Conferences were held in September 1938; the former was attended by 21 delegates representing 11 countries, while the Youth Conference was attended by 19 delegates from 7 countries (Poland, Austria, Belgium, Holland, England, the U.S. and France). There was a considerable overlap in delegations and, in addition, the International Bureau of the FI, elected at the party Conference, sent three delegates to the Youth Conference. Besides adopting the "Resolution on the Youth," the World Youth Conference endorsed the Transitional Program and voted to affiliate as the official youth section of the FI.
As Nathan Gould, the youth delegate from the U.S., reported in the weekly organ of the then-revolutionary Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Appeal (22 October 1938):
"The resolution on relations between the youth and adult Internationals accepted the classical Leninist concept of these relations. The Youth International, which accepts the proletarian revolutionary international leadership of its adult body is to be politically subordinate to and organizationally autonomous of the Fourth International."
Gould then stated that all decisions and resolutions of the Youth Conference, including the "Resolution on the Youth" flow "from and are subordinated to the demands of the theses on The Death Agony of Capitalism." Indeed, the capitalist death agony developed with such rapidity and acuteness that the "youth question" was soon superceded by the "military question." The principal concerns of working-class youth in civilian life under capitalism—the lack of jobs, education and social equality, problems with which the "Resolution on the Youth" were mainly concerned—were soon to be transcended as imperialist war gave these youth the "jobs," "education" and "social equality" of the barracks. Within the context of universal militarism, the Trotskyists conducted themselves with exemplary valor, e.g., building revolutionary cells within the German Army. But the objective conditions forced the FI to temporarily abandon the tasks set out in the "Resolution on the Youth" and the struggle for a Trotskyist youth international.
Rise of Pabloism
After WWII, the Trotskyist movement, decimated by fascism and Stalinism, tried to regroup and reorient itself. However, the destruction of a whole generation of Trotskyist cadre, including Trotsky himself, left the FI theoretically unarmed and isolated from the working class. The untested and inexperienced cadre that rose to the leadership of the FI, personified by Michel Pablo, were overtaken by the post-war pre-revolutionary upheavals whose course their weak forces could not significantly influence. These cadre were further disoriented by the apparent stabilization of capitalism on the one hand, and the growth of Stalinism and social democracy on the other (see "Genesis of Pabloism," Spartacist No. 21). Pabloism meant the abandonment of the struggle to build independent Trotskyist parties and the liquidation of Trotskyist cadre into the existing Stalinist and social-democratic formations which were seen as playing an eventual revolutionary role under the impact of the "objective process." The corollary for Trotskyist youth was the command that they should bury themselves in the Stalinist and social-democratic youth groups and wait for the "objective process" to unfold.
Thus the "Resolution on the Youth" and the prospects for a Trotskyist youth international were abandoned when the FI succumbed to Pabloism. Although many of the specific demands and slogans of the "Resolution on the Youth" are clearly dated, the resolution possesses more than just historical interest. The document, especially section 14 entitled "The Revolutionary Program," is a valuable reaffirmation of the programmatic criteria governing youth work as Lenin, Trotsky and the early CI and FI conceived it. Such a reaffirmation is particularly important today when so many political tendencies claiming to be Trotskyist display the most elementary confusion on this question. The early CI and Young Communist International, and the Founding Conference of the FI and corresponding Youth Conference were explicit and insistent that the Leninist-Trotskyist youth group must be a section of the vanguard party which embodies the continuity, tested political leadership and developed programmatic clarity of the revolutionary movement. The program of the youth section must be developed within the framework of the party’s program, as the "Youth Resolution" states: "It is within the framework of the transitional programme of the Fourth International that the present programme should be developed and applied." "Youth" is not a class, there is no "youth program" as such. The program which addresses itself to the objective needs and special oppression of youth is part and parcel of the program for proletarian power. "The struggle for these demands cannot be separated from the struggle for the demands of workers as a whole, both employed and unemployed" ["Youth Resolution"].
Youth Vanguardism From the SWP to the WL
The various pretenders to the banner of Trotskyism all reject Trotsky’s class approach to the youth question—namely, that the question of special oppression and needs of youth must be subordinated to and integrated into the revolutionary program for the working class, the Transitional Program. Modern Pabloism, embodied in organizations like the SWP, the International Marxist Group in England, the Ligue Communiste in France, and personified by "theoreticians" like Ernest Mandel and "activists" like Tariq Ali, after years of self-internment in reformist organizations, have recoiled from entrism and have tried, in their various ways, to jump on the bandwagon of the "international youth radicalisation." Starting from the proposition that we live not in the era of capitalist decay but in the era of "neo-capitalism," i.e., capitalist crises stabilized by state intervention into the economy (e.g., debt expansion), they come to the conclusion that therefore the "epicenter" of world revolution has shifted from the industrial to the colonial countries, or from the industrial working class to more peripheral "sectors" of the work force such as white-collar workers and white-collar "apprentices" (i.e., students). They see the industrial working class as hopelessly bureaucratized and bourgeoisified, only approachable from the "peripheries" of guerrilla warfare in the colonial countries and youth and petty-bourgeois vanguardism in the industrial countries. The SWP has surpassed Pabloism in adopting a non-proletarian ideology. It has lifted the "cultural autonomy" slogan from the Austro-Marxists and applied it to the present by having each oppressed "sector" of the population independently "self-determine" itself, into that pure realm of freedom which is, of course, obtainable only on the gilded comfort of the college campus. Each "sector" of society (students, blacks, Chicanos, women and yes, even the working class) is provided by the revisionists with its very own "transitional" program.
Departing from Trotskyism and proletarian revolution on another road, a road akin to "third-period" Stalinism, is the Socialist Labour League, its gang in the U.S., the Workers League, and their corresponding youth groups, both called "Young Socialist." Starting from a radical perspective—that capitalist productive forces can no longer grow and, therefore, capitalism can no longer grant long-lasting reforms—they draw a reformist conclusion, i.e., that the struggle for such reforms is inherently revolutionary. In fact, this is simply inverted social democracy—that socialism can be won through piecemeal reform struggles. The Transitional Program on the other hand, raises demands that flow from the real objective needs of the proletariat, but also prepare and mobilize the workers for the revolutionary struggle for proletarian power.
The WL’s treatment of the youth question is completely opportunist: Ignoring the heterogeneous social composition of youth, the WL calls upon youth (all youth) to pressure union bureaucrats to build a labor party, and presents transitional demands for youth, as an undifferentiated mass, to carry out. The WL’s line embodies classless youth vanguardism. The irony of the WL’s constant exhortations to the "youth" to build a labor party, create general strikes, etc., is that in the WL’s propaganda to the working class (e.g., in their auto program for 1973, Bulletin, 12 February, p. 18) it often "forgets" to mention the labor party as well as other key transitional demands like nationalization of industry under workers control. Its youth group, furthermore, has no internal political life but is a front group manipulated by the WL.
The Revolutionary Communist Youth, as the youth section of the Spartacist League, continues the traditions of the early CI and FI, the traditions of Lenin and Trotsky, that the youth section must be programmatically linked and united to the vanguard party ("politically subordinate and organizationally autonomous"), that the special demands which address themselves to the problems of the youth must flow from the Transitional Program and must link the struggles of youth to the struggle of the proletariat for power.
—RCYN Editorial Board
Markin comment (repost from September 2010):
Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward
The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.
With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
********
Markin comment on this document
Everybody, and that most notably included Leon Trotsky, knew something was going awry with the Bolshevik Revolution by 1923 for many reasons, some of them beyond correction outside of an international extension of the revolution, especially to Germany that would provide the vital industrial infrastructure to aid the struggling Soviet Union. Nevertheless, and this is important to note about serious revolutionary politics and politicians in general, the fight in 1923 still needed to aimed at winning the party cadre over. That was the failing point of many oppositionists, inside and outside the party, then.
By 1933, with the rise of the virtually unopposed rise and consolidation of Nazism in Germany clearly putting paid to the Communist International’s (read: Stalin’s) erroneous strategy, working inside the party, or acting as an expelled fraction of the party, was no longer tenable. Like earlier with the First and Second Internationals the Communist International was now dead as a revolutionary organizational center. Time now to gather, by fits and starts, the cadre for a new international- the Fourth International
Needless to say in trying to organize a new international in tough times, with not enough seasoned cadre, not enough not-Leon Trotsky leadership, not enough money, and not enough, well, of anything internal bickering and personality disputes are going to slow down any efforts.
This youth resolution looks very much like it could have with updates been written today.
*******
Founding Conference of the 4th International: "Resolution on Youth"
Introduction from Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter, No. 17, May-June 1973
Trotsky was always keenly aware of what he called the problem of generations. He began the New Course (1923), his opening shot in the struggle against the bureaucratic degeneration of the Russian Revolution, with a discussion of the "question of the party generations," and in the most important document among the founding resolutions of the Fourth International (FI), The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International: The Transitional Program, Trotsky stated the problem of generations in the following way:
"When a program or organization wears out, the generation which carried it on its shoulders wears out with it. The movement is revitalized by the youth who are free of responsibility for the past… Only the fresh enthusiasm and aggressive spirit of the youth can guarantee the preliminary successes in the struggle; only these successes can return the best elements of the older generation to the road of revolution."
—p. 45, Pathfinder Press edition
Trotsky had not forgotten the lesson of the collapse of the Second International and the building of the Third. When the leading parties of the Second International capitulated to the national chauvinism of WWI, it was the militants primarily concentrated in the Socialist youth and women’s groups (representing a more oppressed stratum of the working class than the privileged labor aristocracy—the most influential component of the Western European Socialist parties) who carried the banner of internationalism against the tide of national chauvinism. It was these militants who, under the impact of the Russian October, provided the precious founding cadre for the new Communist International (CI), With the destruction of the CI as a world revolutionary party under the heavy blows of the failure of the German Revolution, the bureaucratic degeneration of the Bolshevik Revolution, the rise of fascism and the impending renewal of imperialist world war, the tasks of creating a new international were placed on the agenda. Trotsky, one of the creators of the CI who had authored its founding manifesto, turned to the generation of young workers, unscarred by the defeats and betrayals of the past. Hence, the founding manifesto of the FI ends with a clarion call to "Open the Road to the Woman Worker! Open the Road to the Youth!"
The seriousness with which Trotskyists undertook this necessary historical exhortation to find the road to the next generation of revolutionaries was displayed by the fact that—though the founding of the FI took place under the most difficult conditions requiring careful preparation and secrecy, at a time when the Trotskyists had meager resources and were being hounded throughout the world by the police and agents of all wings of the bourgeoisie from the fascists to the most "democratic" and, with special vehemence, by Stalin’s secret police—nonetheless the Founding Conference was followed one week later by the "World Youth Conference of the Fourth International." Both Conferences were held in September 1938; the former was attended by 21 delegates representing 11 countries, while the Youth Conference was attended by 19 delegates from 7 countries (Poland, Austria, Belgium, Holland, England, the U.S. and France). There was a considerable overlap in delegations and, in addition, the International Bureau of the FI, elected at the party Conference, sent three delegates to the Youth Conference. Besides adopting the "Resolution on the Youth," the World Youth Conference endorsed the Transitional Program and voted to affiliate as the official youth section of the FI.
As Nathan Gould, the youth delegate from the U.S., reported in the weekly organ of the then-revolutionary Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Appeal (22 October 1938):
"The resolution on relations between the youth and adult Internationals accepted the classical Leninist concept of these relations. The Youth International, which accepts the proletarian revolutionary international leadership of its adult body is to be politically subordinate to and organizationally autonomous of the Fourth International."
Gould then stated that all decisions and resolutions of the Youth Conference, including the "Resolution on the Youth" flow "from and are subordinated to the demands of the theses on The Death Agony of Capitalism." Indeed, the capitalist death agony developed with such rapidity and acuteness that the "youth question" was soon superceded by the "military question." The principal concerns of working-class youth in civilian life under capitalism—the lack of jobs, education and social equality, problems with which the "Resolution on the Youth" were mainly concerned—were soon to be transcended as imperialist war gave these youth the "jobs," "education" and "social equality" of the barracks. Within the context of universal militarism, the Trotskyists conducted themselves with exemplary valor, e.g., building revolutionary cells within the German Army. But the objective conditions forced the FI to temporarily abandon the tasks set out in the "Resolution on the Youth" and the struggle for a Trotskyist youth international.
Rise of Pabloism
After WWII, the Trotskyist movement, decimated by fascism and Stalinism, tried to regroup and reorient itself. However, the destruction of a whole generation of Trotskyist cadre, including Trotsky himself, left the FI theoretically unarmed and isolated from the working class. The untested and inexperienced cadre that rose to the leadership of the FI, personified by Michel Pablo, were overtaken by the post-war pre-revolutionary upheavals whose course their weak forces could not significantly influence. These cadre were further disoriented by the apparent stabilization of capitalism on the one hand, and the growth of Stalinism and social democracy on the other (see "Genesis of Pabloism," Spartacist No. 21). Pabloism meant the abandonment of the struggle to build independent Trotskyist parties and the liquidation of Trotskyist cadre into the existing Stalinist and social-democratic formations which were seen as playing an eventual revolutionary role under the impact of the "objective process." The corollary for Trotskyist youth was the command that they should bury themselves in the Stalinist and social-democratic youth groups and wait for the "objective process" to unfold.
Thus the "Resolution on the Youth" and the prospects for a Trotskyist youth international were abandoned when the FI succumbed to Pabloism. Although many of the specific demands and slogans of the "Resolution on the Youth" are clearly dated, the resolution possesses more than just historical interest. The document, especially section 14 entitled "The Revolutionary Program," is a valuable reaffirmation of the programmatic criteria governing youth work as Lenin, Trotsky and the early CI and FI conceived it. Such a reaffirmation is particularly important today when so many political tendencies claiming to be Trotskyist display the most elementary confusion on this question. The early CI and Young Communist International, and the Founding Conference of the FI and corresponding Youth Conference were explicit and insistent that the Leninist-Trotskyist youth group must be a section of the vanguard party which embodies the continuity, tested political leadership and developed programmatic clarity of the revolutionary movement. The program of the youth section must be developed within the framework of the party’s program, as the "Youth Resolution" states: "It is within the framework of the transitional programme of the Fourth International that the present programme should be developed and applied." "Youth" is not a class, there is no "youth program" as such. The program which addresses itself to the objective needs and special oppression of youth is part and parcel of the program for proletarian power. "The struggle for these demands cannot be separated from the struggle for the demands of workers as a whole, both employed and unemployed" ["Youth Resolution"].
Youth Vanguardism From the SWP to the WL
The various pretenders to the banner of Trotskyism all reject Trotsky’s class approach to the youth question—namely, that the question of special oppression and needs of youth must be subordinated to and integrated into the revolutionary program for the working class, the Transitional Program. Modern Pabloism, embodied in organizations like the SWP, the International Marxist Group in England, the Ligue Communiste in France, and personified by "theoreticians" like Ernest Mandel and "activists" like Tariq Ali, after years of self-internment in reformist organizations, have recoiled from entrism and have tried, in their various ways, to jump on the bandwagon of the "international youth radicalisation." Starting from the proposition that we live not in the era of capitalist decay but in the era of "neo-capitalism," i.e., capitalist crises stabilized by state intervention into the economy (e.g., debt expansion), they come to the conclusion that therefore the "epicenter" of world revolution has shifted from the industrial to the colonial countries, or from the industrial working class to more peripheral "sectors" of the work force such as white-collar workers and white-collar "apprentices" (i.e., students). They see the industrial working class as hopelessly bureaucratized and bourgeoisified, only approachable from the "peripheries" of guerrilla warfare in the colonial countries and youth and petty-bourgeois vanguardism in the industrial countries. The SWP has surpassed Pabloism in adopting a non-proletarian ideology. It has lifted the "cultural autonomy" slogan from the Austro-Marxists and applied it to the present by having each oppressed "sector" of the population independently "self-determine" itself, into that pure realm of freedom which is, of course, obtainable only on the gilded comfort of the college campus. Each "sector" of society (students, blacks, Chicanos, women and yes, even the working class) is provided by the revisionists with its very own "transitional" program.
Departing from Trotskyism and proletarian revolution on another road, a road akin to "third-period" Stalinism, is the Socialist Labour League, its gang in the U.S., the Workers League, and their corresponding youth groups, both called "Young Socialist." Starting from a radical perspective—that capitalist productive forces can no longer grow and, therefore, capitalism can no longer grant long-lasting reforms—they draw a reformist conclusion, i.e., that the struggle for such reforms is inherently revolutionary. In fact, this is simply inverted social democracy—that socialism can be won through piecemeal reform struggles. The Transitional Program on the other hand, raises demands that flow from the real objective needs of the proletariat, but also prepare and mobilize the workers for the revolutionary struggle for proletarian power.
The WL’s treatment of the youth question is completely opportunist: Ignoring the heterogeneous social composition of youth, the WL calls upon youth (all youth) to pressure union bureaucrats to build a labor party, and presents transitional demands for youth, as an undifferentiated mass, to carry out. The WL’s line embodies classless youth vanguardism. The irony of the WL’s constant exhortations to the "youth" to build a labor party, create general strikes, etc., is that in the WL’s propaganda to the working class (e.g., in their auto program for 1973, Bulletin, 12 February, p. 18) it often "forgets" to mention the labor party as well as other key transitional demands like nationalization of industry under workers control. Its youth group, furthermore, has no internal political life but is a front group manipulated by the WL.
The Revolutionary Communist Youth, as the youth section of the Spartacist League, continues the traditions of the early CI and FI, the traditions of Lenin and Trotsky, that the youth section must be programmatically linked and united to the vanguard party ("politically subordinate and organizationally autonomous"), that the special demands which address themselves to the problems of the youth must flow from the Transitional Program and must link the struggles of youth to the struggle of the proletariat for power.
—RCYN Editorial Board
Labor's Untold Story-From The Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Archives-The Struggle For Working Class Organization-Engels to Florence Kelley Wischnewetsky-1886
Markin comment:
Every Month Is Labor History MonthThis post is part of an on-going series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
Other Septembers in this series I have concentrated on various sometimes now obscure leaders and rank and file militants in the international working class movement, especially those who made contributions here in America like "Big Bill" Haywood and Eugene V. Debs. This year, given the pressing need for clarity around the labor party question in America (algebraically expressed in our movement as the struggle for a workers party that fights for a workers government) I have gone back to the sources-Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and their correspondence on working class organization with various associates and opponents. Strangely, or maybe not so strangely given the state of working class organization here these days, many of their comments, taken in due regard for changed times and circumstances, are germane today. This correspondence is only a start and should just whet the reader's appetite to research further.
*****
Marx-Engels Correspondence 1886
Engels to Florence Kelley Wischnewetsky-1886
In Zurich
Abstract
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;
Publisher: International Publishers (1968);
First Published: Gestamtausgabe;
Translated: Donna Torr;
Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 2000.
HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
London, December 28, 1886
My preface will of course turn entirely on the immense stride made by the American working man in the last ten months, and naturally also touch H.G. [Henry George] and his land scheme. But it cannot pretend to deal exhaustively with it. Nor do I think the time has come for that. It is far more important that the movement should spread, proceed harmoniously, take root and embrace as much as possible the whole American proletariat, than that it should start and proceed from the beginning on theoretically perfectly correct lines. There is no better road to theoretical clearness of comprehension than "durch Schaden klug tererden" [to learn by one's own mistakes]. And for a whole large class, there is no other road, especially for a nation so eminently practical as the Americans. The great thing is to get the working class to move as a class; that once obtained, they will soon find the right direction, and all who resist, H.G. or Powderly, will be left out in the cold with small sects of their own. Therefore I think also the K[nights] of L[abour] a most important factor in the movement which ought not to be pooh-poohed from without but to be revolutionised from within, and I consider that many of the Germans there have made a grievous mistake when they tried, in face of a mighty and glorious movement not of their creation, to make of their imported and not always understood theory a kind of alleinseligmachendes dogma and to keep aloof from any movement which did not accept that dogma. Our theory is not a dogma but the exposition of a process of evolution, and that process involves successive phases. To expect that the Americans will start with the full consciousness of the theory worked out in older industrial countries is to expect the impossible. What the Germans ought to do is to act up to their own theory --if they understand it, as we did in 1845 and 1848--to go in for any real general working-class movement, accept its faktische starting points as such and work it gradually up to the theoretical level by pointing out how every mistake made, every reverse suffered, was a necessary consequence of mistaken theoretical views in the original programme; they ought, in the words of The Communist Manifesto, to represent the movement of the future in the movement of the present. But above all give the movement time to consolidate, do not make the inevitable confusion of the first start worse confounded by forcing down people's throats things which at present they cannot properly understand, but which they soon will learn. A million or two of workingmen's votes next November for a bona fide workingmen's party is worth infinitely more at present than a hundred thousand votes for a doctrinally perfect platform. The very first attempt--soon to be made if the movement progresses--to consolidate the moving masses on a national basis will bring them all face to face, Georgites, K. of L., Trade Unionists, and all; and if our German friends by that time have learnt enough of the language of the country to go in for a discussion, then will be the time for them to criticise the views of the others and thus, by showing up the inconsistencies of the various standpoints, to bring them gradually to understand their own actual position, the position made for them by the correlation of capital and wage labour. But anything that might delay or prevent that national consolidation of the workingmen's party--no matter what platform--I should consider a great mistake, and therefore I do not think the time has arrived to speak out fully and exhaustively either with regard to H.G. or the K. of L.
Every Month Is Labor History MonthThis post is part of an on-going series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
Other Septembers in this series I have concentrated on various sometimes now obscure leaders and rank and file militants in the international working class movement, especially those who made contributions here in America like "Big Bill" Haywood and Eugene V. Debs. This year, given the pressing need for clarity around the labor party question in America (algebraically expressed in our movement as the struggle for a workers party that fights for a workers government) I have gone back to the sources-Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and their correspondence on working class organization with various associates and opponents. Strangely, or maybe not so strangely given the state of working class organization here these days, many of their comments, taken in due regard for changed times and circumstances, are germane today. This correspondence is only a start and should just whet the reader's appetite to research further.
*****
Marx-Engels Correspondence 1886
Engels to Florence Kelley Wischnewetsky-1886
In Zurich
Abstract
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;
Publisher: International Publishers (1968);
First Published: Gestamtausgabe;
Translated: Donna Torr;
Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 2000.
HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
London, December 28, 1886
My preface will of course turn entirely on the immense stride made by the American working man in the last ten months, and naturally also touch H.G. [Henry George] and his land scheme. But it cannot pretend to deal exhaustively with it. Nor do I think the time has come for that. It is far more important that the movement should spread, proceed harmoniously, take root and embrace as much as possible the whole American proletariat, than that it should start and proceed from the beginning on theoretically perfectly correct lines. There is no better road to theoretical clearness of comprehension than "durch Schaden klug tererden" [to learn by one's own mistakes]. And for a whole large class, there is no other road, especially for a nation so eminently practical as the Americans. The great thing is to get the working class to move as a class; that once obtained, they will soon find the right direction, and all who resist, H.G. or Powderly, will be left out in the cold with small sects of their own. Therefore I think also the K[nights] of L[abour] a most important factor in the movement which ought not to be pooh-poohed from without but to be revolutionised from within, and I consider that many of the Germans there have made a grievous mistake when they tried, in face of a mighty and glorious movement not of their creation, to make of their imported and not always understood theory a kind of alleinseligmachendes dogma and to keep aloof from any movement which did not accept that dogma. Our theory is not a dogma but the exposition of a process of evolution, and that process involves successive phases. To expect that the Americans will start with the full consciousness of the theory worked out in older industrial countries is to expect the impossible. What the Germans ought to do is to act up to their own theory --if they understand it, as we did in 1845 and 1848--to go in for any real general working-class movement, accept its faktische starting points as such and work it gradually up to the theoretical level by pointing out how every mistake made, every reverse suffered, was a necessary consequence of mistaken theoretical views in the original programme; they ought, in the words of The Communist Manifesto, to represent the movement of the future in the movement of the present. But above all give the movement time to consolidate, do not make the inevitable confusion of the first start worse confounded by forcing down people's throats things which at present they cannot properly understand, but which they soon will learn. A million or two of workingmen's votes next November for a bona fide workingmen's party is worth infinitely more at present than a hundred thousand votes for a doctrinally perfect platform. The very first attempt--soon to be made if the movement progresses--to consolidate the moving masses on a national basis will bring them all face to face, Georgites, K. of L., Trade Unionists, and all; and if our German friends by that time have learnt enough of the language of the country to go in for a discussion, then will be the time for them to criticise the views of the others and thus, by showing up the inconsistencies of the various standpoints, to bring them gradually to understand their own actual position, the position made for them by the correlation of capital and wage labour. But anything that might delay or prevent that national consolidation of the workingmen's party--no matter what platform--I should consider a great mistake, and therefore I do not think the time has arrived to speak out fully and exhaustively either with regard to H.G. or the K. of L.
***Labor’s Untold Story- A Personal View Of The Class Wars In The Kentucky Hills And Hollows-"Once Again, Hard Times In Babylon- Growing-Up Working Poor"
Click on title to link to my blog entry of September 27, 2007 reposted here in honor of the struggle in Kentucky coal country entitled Once Again, Hard Times In Babylon for a link to information from that period.
Once Again, Hard Times in Babylon-revised
Markin comment:
I had, several years ago, received a recent comment (not on this site) concerning my take on the labor movement these days. (See my entry at the American Left History blog, The AFL-CIO bureaucracy and the 2008 elections, dated September 25, 2007). The gist of the comment concerned my argument on the necessity of organizing (or rather, in effect, re-organizing) the coal miners, in the eastern and western sections of America (and elsewhere as well). As part of that comment I noted that one of the problems in such organization is the geographical and physical isolation of the mines. I also noted that the miners tend to be a parochial lot and mistrustful of outsiders, as a result. That seemed to have set the reader off. In short, that person questioned my ‘credentials’ to speak on the question. He or she, apparently, missed the sentences about my father’s experiences as a young coal-miner in Eastern Kentucky. That does not qualify me to be president of the United Mineworkers Union (which, I believe, at last look required five years in the mines before one could run for that office) but I know the ‘coal’ in an indirect way. Here’s a little bio sketch on that point.
GROWING UP DIRT POOR IN THE 1950’S
Several years ago I wrote a personal commentary about a childhood friend from back in the old neighborhood in North Adamsville where I grew up in the 1950’s who had passed away.(see An Uncounted Casualty of War,, May 8, 2007 archives). I had also at that time been re-reading the then recently deceased investigative journalist David Halberstam’s book, The Fifties, that covers that same basic period. Halberstam’s take on the trends of the period, in contrast to the reality of my own childhood experiences as a child of the working poor that missed most of the benefits of that ‘golden age,’ rekindled some memories, a few painful. It is no exaggeration to say that those were hard times in Babylon. Not so much for individual lacks like a steady (and reliable) family car to break out of the cramped quarters, house on house, where we lived once in a while. Or the inevitable hand-me-down clothes (all the way through high school, almost), or worst the Bargain Center bargains that were no bargains (the local “Wal-Mart” of the day to give you an idea of what I mean). Or even the always house coldness in winter (to save on precious fuel even in those cheap-priced heating oil times) and hotness in summer (ditto, save on electricity so no A/C, or fans).
They, and other such lacks, all had their place in the poor man’s pantheon, no question. No, what, in the end, turned things out badly was the sense of defeat that hung, hung heavily and almost daily over the household, the street, the neighborhood at a time when others, visibly and not so far away, were getting ahead. Some sociologist, some academic sociologist, for, sure, would call it the death of “rising expectations.” And for once they would be right, or at least on the right track. Thinking back on those times has also made me reflect on how the hard anti-communist politics of the period, the “red scare” left people like my parents high and dry, although they were as prone to support it as any American Legionaire. The defeat and destruction of the left-wing movement, principally pro-communist organizations, of that period has continued to leave a mark, and a gaping vacuum on today’s political landscape, and on this writer.
There are many myths about the 1950’s to be sure. However, one cannot deny that the key public myth was that those who had fought World War II and were afterwards enlisted in the anti-Soviet Cold War fight against communism were entitled to some breaks. The overwhelming desire for personal security and comfort on the part of those who had survived the Great Depression and fought the war (World War II just so there is no question about which in the long line of wars we are talking about) was not therefore totally irrational. That it came at the expense of other things like a more just and equitable society is a separate matter. Moreover, despite the public myth not everyone benefited from the ‘rising tide.' The experience of my parents is proof of that. Thus this commentary is really about what happened to those, like my parents, who did not make it and were left to their personal fates without a rudder to get them through the rough spots. Yes, my parents were of the now much ballyhooed and misnamed ‘greatest generation’ but they were not in it.
I will not go through all the details of my parents’ childhoods, courtship and marriage for such biographic details of the Depression and World War II are plentiful and theirs fits the pattern. One detail is, however, important and that is that my father grew up in the hills of eastern Kentucky, Hazard, near Harlan County to be exact, coal mining country made famous in song and story and by Michael Harrington in his 1960s book The Other America. This was, and is, hardscrabble country by any definition. Among whites these “hillbillies” were the poorest of the poor. There can be little wonder that when World War II began my father left the mines to join the Marines, did his fair share of fighting in the Pacific, settled in the Boston area and never looked back.
By all rights my father should have been able to take advantage of the G.I. Bill and enjoyed home and hearth like the denizens of Levittown (New York and elsewhere) described in Halberstam’s book and shown on such classic 1950s television shows as Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It To Beaver. But life did not go that way. Why? He had virtually no formal education. And moreover had three young sons born close together in the immediate post-war period. Furthermore he had no marketable skills usable in the Boston labor market. There was (and is) no call for coal-miners here. My father was a good man. He was a hard-working man; when he was able find work. He was an upright man. But he never drew a break. Unskilled labor, to which he was reduced, is notoriously unstable, and so his work life was one of barely making ends meet. Thus, well before the age when the two-parent working family became the necessary standard to get ahead, my mother went to work to supplement the family income. She too was an unskilled laborer. Thus, even with two people working we were always “dirt poor.” I have already run through enough of the litany of lacks to give an idea of what dirt poor meant in those hard times so we need not retrace those steps.
Our little family started life in the Adamsville housing projects, at that time not the notorious hell-holes of crime and deprivation that they later became but still a mark of being low, very low, on the social ladder at a time when others were heading to the Valhalla of the newly emerging suburbs. By clawing and scratching my parents saved enough money to buy an extremely modest single-family house. Hell, why pussyfoot about it, a shack. The house, moreover, was in a neighborhood that was, and is, one of those old working class neighborhoods where the houses are small, cramped, and seedy, the leavings of those who have moved on to bigger and better things. The neighborhood nevertheless reflected the desire of the working poor in the 1950’s, my parents and others, to own their own homes and not be shunted off into decrepit apartments or dilapidated housing projects, the fate of those just below them on the social ladder. This is social progress?
But enough of all that. Where in this story though is there a place for militant left-wing political class-consciousness to break the trap? Not the sense of social inferiority of the poor before the rich (or the merely middle class). Damn, there was plenty of that kind of consciousness in our house. A phrase from the time, and maybe today although I don’t hear it much, said it all “keeping up with the Jones.’” Or else. But where was there an avenue in the 1950’s, when it could have made a difference, for a man like my father to have his hurts explained and have something done about them? No where. So instead it went internally into the life of the family and it never got resolved. One of his sons, this writer, has had luxury of being able to fight essentially exemplary propaganda battles in small left-wing socialist circles and felt he has done good work in his life. My father’s hurts needed much more. The "red scare" aimed mainly against the American Communist Party but affecting wider layers of society decimated any possibility that he could get the kind of redress he needed. That dear reader, in a nutshell, is why I proudly bear the name communist today. And the task for me today? To insure that future young workers, unlike my parents in the 1950’s, will have their day of justice.
Once Again, Hard Times in Babylon-revised
Markin comment:
I had, several years ago, received a recent comment (not on this site) concerning my take on the labor movement these days. (See my entry at the American Left History blog, The AFL-CIO bureaucracy and the 2008 elections, dated September 25, 2007). The gist of the comment concerned my argument on the necessity of organizing (or rather, in effect, re-organizing) the coal miners, in the eastern and western sections of America (and elsewhere as well). As part of that comment I noted that one of the problems in such organization is the geographical and physical isolation of the mines. I also noted that the miners tend to be a parochial lot and mistrustful of outsiders, as a result. That seemed to have set the reader off. In short, that person questioned my ‘credentials’ to speak on the question. He or she, apparently, missed the sentences about my father’s experiences as a young coal-miner in Eastern Kentucky. That does not qualify me to be president of the United Mineworkers Union (which, I believe, at last look required five years in the mines before one could run for that office) but I know the ‘coal’ in an indirect way. Here’s a little bio sketch on that point.
GROWING UP DIRT POOR IN THE 1950’S
Several years ago I wrote a personal commentary about a childhood friend from back in the old neighborhood in North Adamsville where I grew up in the 1950’s who had passed away.(see An Uncounted Casualty of War,, May 8, 2007 archives). I had also at that time been re-reading the then recently deceased investigative journalist David Halberstam’s book, The Fifties, that covers that same basic period. Halberstam’s take on the trends of the period, in contrast to the reality of my own childhood experiences as a child of the working poor that missed most of the benefits of that ‘golden age,’ rekindled some memories, a few painful. It is no exaggeration to say that those were hard times in Babylon. Not so much for individual lacks like a steady (and reliable) family car to break out of the cramped quarters, house on house, where we lived once in a while. Or the inevitable hand-me-down clothes (all the way through high school, almost), or worst the Bargain Center bargains that were no bargains (the local “Wal-Mart” of the day to give you an idea of what I mean). Or even the always house coldness in winter (to save on precious fuel even in those cheap-priced heating oil times) and hotness in summer (ditto, save on electricity so no A/C, or fans).
They, and other such lacks, all had their place in the poor man’s pantheon, no question. No, what, in the end, turned things out badly was the sense of defeat that hung, hung heavily and almost daily over the household, the street, the neighborhood at a time when others, visibly and not so far away, were getting ahead. Some sociologist, some academic sociologist, for, sure, would call it the death of “rising expectations.” And for once they would be right, or at least on the right track. Thinking back on those times has also made me reflect on how the hard anti-communist politics of the period, the “red scare” left people like my parents high and dry, although they were as prone to support it as any American Legionaire. The defeat and destruction of the left-wing movement, principally pro-communist organizations, of that period has continued to leave a mark, and a gaping vacuum on today’s political landscape, and on this writer.
There are many myths about the 1950’s to be sure. However, one cannot deny that the key public myth was that those who had fought World War II and were afterwards enlisted in the anti-Soviet Cold War fight against communism were entitled to some breaks. The overwhelming desire for personal security and comfort on the part of those who had survived the Great Depression and fought the war (World War II just so there is no question about which in the long line of wars we are talking about) was not therefore totally irrational. That it came at the expense of other things like a more just and equitable society is a separate matter. Moreover, despite the public myth not everyone benefited from the ‘rising tide.' The experience of my parents is proof of that. Thus this commentary is really about what happened to those, like my parents, who did not make it and were left to their personal fates without a rudder to get them through the rough spots. Yes, my parents were of the now much ballyhooed and misnamed ‘greatest generation’ but they were not in it.
I will not go through all the details of my parents’ childhoods, courtship and marriage for such biographic details of the Depression and World War II are plentiful and theirs fits the pattern. One detail is, however, important and that is that my father grew up in the hills of eastern Kentucky, Hazard, near Harlan County to be exact, coal mining country made famous in song and story and by Michael Harrington in his 1960s book The Other America. This was, and is, hardscrabble country by any definition. Among whites these “hillbillies” were the poorest of the poor. There can be little wonder that when World War II began my father left the mines to join the Marines, did his fair share of fighting in the Pacific, settled in the Boston area and never looked back.
By all rights my father should have been able to take advantage of the G.I. Bill and enjoyed home and hearth like the denizens of Levittown (New York and elsewhere) described in Halberstam’s book and shown on such classic 1950s television shows as Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It To Beaver. But life did not go that way. Why? He had virtually no formal education. And moreover had three young sons born close together in the immediate post-war period. Furthermore he had no marketable skills usable in the Boston labor market. There was (and is) no call for coal-miners here. My father was a good man. He was a hard-working man; when he was able find work. He was an upright man. But he never drew a break. Unskilled labor, to which he was reduced, is notoriously unstable, and so his work life was one of barely making ends meet. Thus, well before the age when the two-parent working family became the necessary standard to get ahead, my mother went to work to supplement the family income. She too was an unskilled laborer. Thus, even with two people working we were always “dirt poor.” I have already run through enough of the litany of lacks to give an idea of what dirt poor meant in those hard times so we need not retrace those steps.
Our little family started life in the Adamsville housing projects, at that time not the notorious hell-holes of crime and deprivation that they later became but still a mark of being low, very low, on the social ladder at a time when others were heading to the Valhalla of the newly emerging suburbs. By clawing and scratching my parents saved enough money to buy an extremely modest single-family house. Hell, why pussyfoot about it, a shack. The house, moreover, was in a neighborhood that was, and is, one of those old working class neighborhoods where the houses are small, cramped, and seedy, the leavings of those who have moved on to bigger and better things. The neighborhood nevertheless reflected the desire of the working poor in the 1950’s, my parents and others, to own their own homes and not be shunted off into decrepit apartments or dilapidated housing projects, the fate of those just below them on the social ladder. This is social progress?
But enough of all that. Where in this story though is there a place for militant left-wing political class-consciousness to break the trap? Not the sense of social inferiority of the poor before the rich (or the merely middle class). Damn, there was plenty of that kind of consciousness in our house. A phrase from the time, and maybe today although I don’t hear it much, said it all “keeping up with the Jones.’” Or else. But where was there an avenue in the 1950’s, when it could have made a difference, for a man like my father to have his hurts explained and have something done about them? No where. So instead it went internally into the life of the family and it never got resolved. One of his sons, this writer, has had luxury of being able to fight essentially exemplary propaganda battles in small left-wing socialist circles and felt he has done good work in his life. My father’s hurts needed much more. The "red scare" aimed mainly against the American Communist Party but affecting wider layers of society decimated any possibility that he could get the kind of redress he needed. That dear reader, in a nutshell, is why I proudly bear the name communist today. And the task for me today? To insure that future young workers, unlike my parents in the 1950’s, will have their day of justice.
Sunday, September 25, 2011
“Workers of The World Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains”-The Struggle For Trotsky's Fourth (Communist) International-From The Archives-The Founding Conference Of The Fourth International (1938)-"On Organizing Defense And Relief For Persecuted Revolutionists"
Click on the headline to link to the Toward A History Of The Fourth International website for the article listed above.
Markin comment (repost from September 2010):
Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward
The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.
With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
*********
Markin comment on this document
Everybody, and that most notably included Leon Trotsky, knew something was going awry with the Bolshevik Revolution by 1923 for many reasons, some of them beyond correction outside of an international extension of the revolution, especially to Germany that would provide the vital industrial infrastructure to aid the struggling Soviet Union. Nevertheless, and this is important to note about serious revolutionary politics and politicians in general, the fight in 1923 still needed to aimed at winning the party cadre over. That was the failing point of many oppositionists, inside and outside the party, then.
By 1933, with the rise of the virtually unopposed rise and consolidation of Nazism in Germany clearly putting paid to the Communist International’s (read: Stalin’s) erroneous strategy, working inside the party, or acting as an expelled fraction of the party, was no longer tenable. Like earlier with the First and Second Internationals the Communist International was now dead as a revolutionary organizational center. Time now to gather, by fits and starts, the cadre for a new international- the Fourth International
Needless to say in trying to organize a new international in tough times, with not enough seasoned cadre, not enough not-Leon Trotsky leadership, not enough money, and not enough, well, of anything internal bickering and personality disputes are going to slow down any efforts.
A major task then, and now, was the preservation, protection and comfort of revolutionary militants-your own organization's and others. Some, like we here in the United States work under relatively easy conditions (for now anyway). Others work under incredible adversity. An injury to one is an injury to all as the old IWW (Wobblies) slogan went. That is about right.
Markin comment (repost from September 2010):
Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward
The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.
With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
*********
Markin comment on this document
Everybody, and that most notably included Leon Trotsky, knew something was going awry with the Bolshevik Revolution by 1923 for many reasons, some of them beyond correction outside of an international extension of the revolution, especially to Germany that would provide the vital industrial infrastructure to aid the struggling Soviet Union. Nevertheless, and this is important to note about serious revolutionary politics and politicians in general, the fight in 1923 still needed to aimed at winning the party cadre over. That was the failing point of many oppositionists, inside and outside the party, then.
By 1933, with the rise of the virtually unopposed rise and consolidation of Nazism in Germany clearly putting paid to the Communist International’s (read: Stalin’s) erroneous strategy, working inside the party, or acting as an expelled fraction of the party, was no longer tenable. Like earlier with the First and Second Internationals the Communist International was now dead as a revolutionary organizational center. Time now to gather, by fits and starts, the cadre for a new international- the Fourth International
Needless to say in trying to organize a new international in tough times, with not enough seasoned cadre, not enough not-Leon Trotsky leadership, not enough money, and not enough, well, of anything internal bickering and personality disputes are going to slow down any efforts.
A major task then, and now, was the preservation, protection and comfort of revolutionary militants-your own organization's and others. Some, like we here in the United States work under relatively easy conditions (for now anyway). Others work under incredible adversity. An injury to one is an injury to all as the old IWW (Wobblies) slogan went. That is about right.
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