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.
*****
Works of Frederick Engels 1886
The Condition of the Working Class in England 1886 Appendix to the American Edition
Source: The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, New York, 1887;
Transcribed: by Tony Brown.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The book which is herewith submitted to the English-speaking public in its own language, was written rather more than forty years ago. The author, at the time, was young, twenty-four years of age, and his production bears the stamp of his youth with its good and its faulty features, of neither of which he feels ashamed. That it is now translated into English, is not in any way due to his initiative. Still he may be allowed to say a few words, “to show cause” why this translation should not be prevented from seeing the light of day.
The state of things described in this book belongs to-day in many respects to the past, as far as England is concerned. Though not expressly stated in our recognized treatises, it is still a law of modern Political Economy that the larger the scale on which Capitalistic Production is carried on, the less can it support the petty devices of swindling and pilfering which characterize its early stages. The pettifogging business-tricks of the Polish Jew, the representative in Europe of commerce in its lowest stage, those tricks that serve him so well in his own country, and are generally practiced there, he finds to be out of date and out of place when he comes to Hamburg or Berlin; and again the Commission Agent, who hails from Berlin or Hamburg, Jew or Christian, after frequenting the Manchester Exchange for a few months, finds out that in order to buy cotton-yarn or cloth cheap, he, too, had better drop those slightly more refined but still miserable wiles and subterfuges which are considered the acme of cleverness in his native country. The fact is, those tricks do not pay any longer in a large market, where time is money, and where a certain standard of commercial morality is unavoidably developed, purely as a means of saving time and trouble. And it is the same with the relation between the manufacturer and his “hands.” The repeal of the Corn-laws, the discovery of the Californian and Australian gold-fields, the almost complete crushing-out of domestic handweaving in India, the increasing access to the Chinese market, the rapid multiplication of railways and steam-ships all over the world, and other minor causes have given to English manufacturing industry such a colossal development, that the status of 1844 now appears to us as comparatively primitive and insignificant. And in proportion as this increase took place, in the same proportion did manufacturing industry become apparently moralized. The competition of manufacturer against manufacturer by means of petty thefts upon the workpeople did no longer pay. Trade had outgrown such low means of making money; they were not worth while practicing for the manufacturing millionaire, and served merely to keep alive the competition of smaller traders, thankful to pick up a penny wherever they could. Thus the truck-system was suppressed; the Ten Hours’ Bill was enacted, and a number of other secondary reforms introduced — much against the spirit of Free Trade and unbridled competition, but quite as much in favor of the giant-capitalist in his competition with his less favored brother. Moreover, the larger the concern, and with it the number of hands, the greater the loss and inconvenience caused by every conflict between master and men; and thus a new spirit came over the masters, especially the large ones, which taught them to avoid unnecessary squabbles, to acquiesce in the existence and power of Trades Unions, and finally even to discover in strikes — at opportune times — a powerful means to serve their own ends. The largest manufacturers, formerly the leaders of the war against the working-class, were now the foremost to preach peace and harmony. And for a very good reason, The fact is, that all these concessions to justice and philanthropy were nothing else but means to accelerate the concentration of capital in the hands of the few, for whom the niggardly extra extortions of former years had lost all importance and had become actual nuisances; and to crush all the quicker and all the safer their smaller competitors who could not make both ends meet without such perquisites. Thus the development of production on the basis of the capitalistic system has of itself sufficed — at least in the leading industries, for in the more unimportant branches this is far from being the case — to do away with all those minor grievances which aggravated the workman’s fate during its earlier stages. And thus it renders more and more evident the great central fact, that the cause of the miserable condition of the working class is to be sought, not in these minor grievances, but in the Capitalistic System itself. The wage-worker sells to the capitalist his labor-force for a certain daily sum. After a few hours’ work he has reproduced the value of that sum; but the substance of his contract is, that he has to work another series of hours to complete his working day; and the value he produces during these additional hours of surplus labor is surplus value which costs the capitalist nothing but yet goes into his pocket. That is the basis of the system which tends more and more to split up civilized society into a few Vanderbilts, the owners of all the means of production and subsistence, on the one hand, and an immense number of wage-workers, the owners of nothing but their labor-force, on the other. And that this result is caused, not by this or that secondary grievance, but by the system itself — this fact has been brought out in bold relief by the development of Capitalism in England since 1847.
Again, the repeated visitations of cholera, typhus, small-pox and other epidemics have shown the British bourgeois the urgent necessity of sanitation in his towns and cities, if he wishes to save himself and family from falling victims to such diseases. Accordingly, the most crying abuses described in this book have either disappeared or have been made less conspicuous. Drainage has been introduced or improved, wide avenues have been opened out athwart many of the worst “slums” I had to describe. “Little Ireland” has disappeared and the “Seven Dials,” are next on the list for sweeping away. But what of that? Whole districts which in 1844 I could describe as almost idyllic have now, with the growth of the towns, fallen into the same state of dilapidation, discomfort and misery. Only the pigs and the heaps of refuse are no longer tolerated. The bourgeoisie have made further progress in the art of hiding the distress of the working class. But that, in regard to their dwellings, no substantial improvement has taken place, is amply proved by the Report of the Royal Commission “on the Housing of the Poor,” 1885. And this is the case, too, in other respects. Police regulations have been plentiful as blackberries; but they can only hedge in the distress of the workers, they cannot remove it.
But while England has thus outgrown the juvenile state of capitalist exploitation described by me, other countries have only just attained it. France, Germany, and especially America, are the formidable competitors who at this moment — as foreseen by me in 1844 — are more and more breaking up England’s industrial monopoly. Their manufactures are young as compared with those of England, but increasing at a far more rapid rate than the latter; but curious enough, they have at this moment arrived at about the same phase of development as English manufacture in 1844. With regard to America, the parallel is indeed most striking. True, the external surroundings in which the working class is placed in America are very different, but the same economical laws are at work, and the results, if not identical in every respect, must still be of the same order. Hence we find in America the same struggles for a shorter working-day, for a legal limitation of the working time, especially of women and children in factories; we find the truck system in full blossom, and the cottage-system, in rural districts, made use of by the “bosses” as a means of domination over the workers. At this very moment I am receiving the American papers with accounts of the great strike of 12,000 Pennsylvanian coal-miners in the Connellsville district, and I seem but to read my own description of the North of England colliers’ strike of 1844. The same cheating of the work-people by false measure; the same truck system; the same attempt to break the miners’ resistance by the Capitalists’ last, but crushing, resource, the eviction of the men out of their dwellings, the cottages owned by the companies.
There were two circumstances which for a long time prevented the unavoidable consequences of the Capitalist system from showing themselves in the full glare of day in America. These were the easy access to the ownership of cheap land, and the influx of immigration. They allowed, for many years, the great mass of the native American population to “retire” in early manhood from wage-labor and to become farmers, dealers, or employers of labor, while the hard work for wages, the position of a proletarian for life, mostly fell to the lot of immigrants. But America has outgrown this early stage. The boundless backwoods have disappeared, and the still more boundless prairies are fast and faster passing from the hands of the Nation and the States into those of private owners. The great safety-valve against the formation of a permanent proletarian class has practically ceased to act. A class of life-long and even hereditary proletarians exists at this hour in America. A nation of sixty millions striving hard to become — and with every chance of success, too — the leading manufacturing nation of the world — such a nation cannot permanently import its own wage-working class; not even if immigrants pour in at the rate of half a million a year. The tendency of the Capitalist system towards the ultimate splitting-up of society into two classes, a few millionaires on the one hand, and a great mass of mere wage-workers on the other, this tendency, though constantly crossed and counteracted by other social agencies, works nowhere with greater force than in America; and the result has been the production of a class of native American wage-workers, who form, indeed, the aristocracy of the wage-working class as compared with the immigrants, but who become conscious more and more every day of their solidarity with the latter and who feel all the more acutely their present condemnation to life-long wage-toil, because they still remember the bygone days, when it was comparatively easy to rise to a higher social level. Accordingly the working class movement, in America, has started with truly American vigor, and as on that side of the Atlantic things march with at least double the European speed, we may yet live to see America take the lead in this respect too.
I have not attempted, in this translation, to bring the book up to date, to point out in detail all the changes that have taken place since 1844. And for two reasons: Firstly, to do this properly, the size of the book must be about doubled, and the translation came upon me too suddenly to admit of my undertaking such a work. And secondly, the first volume of “Das Kapital,” by Karl Marx, an English translation of which is about to appear, contains a very ample description of the state of the British working class, as it was about 1865, that is to say, at the time when British industrial prosperity reached its culminating point. I should, then, have been obliged again to go over the ground already covered by Marx’s celebrated work.
It will be hardly necessary to point out that the general theoretical standpoint of this book — philosophical, economical, political — does not exactly coincide with my standpoint of to-day. Modern international Socialism, since fully developed as a science, chiefly and almost exclusively through the efforts of Marx, did not as yet exist in 1844. My book represents one of the phases of its embryonic development; and as the human embryo, in its early stages, still reproduces the gill-arches of our fish ancestors, so this book exhibits everywhere the traces of the descent of Modern Socialism from one of its ancestors, German philosophy. Thus great stress is laid on the dictum that Communism is not a mere party doctrine of the working class, but a theory compassing the emancipation of society at large, including the Capitalist class, from its present narrow conditions. This is true enough in the abstract, but absolutely useless, and worse, in practice. So long as the wealthy classes not only do not feel the want of any emancipation, but strenuously oppose the self-emancipation of the working class, so long the social revolution will have to be prepared and fought out by the working class alone. The French bourgeois of 1789, too, declared the emancipation of the bourgeoisie to be the emancipation of the whole human race; but the nobility and clergy would not see it; the proposition — though for the time being, with respect to feudalism, an abstract historical truth — soon became a mere sentimentalism, and disappeared from view altogether in the fire of the revolutionary struggle. And to-day, the very people who, from the impartiality of their “superior stand-point” preach to the workers a Socialism soaring high above their class interests and class struggles, and tending to reconcile in a higher humanity the interests of both the contending classes — these people are either neophytes, who have still to learn a great deal, or they are the worst enemies of the workers — wolves in sheeps’ clothing.
The recurring period of the great industrial crises is stated in the text as five years. This was the period apparently indicated by the course of events from 1825 to 1842. But the industrial history from 1842 to 1868 has shown that the real period is one of ten years; that the intermediate revolutions were secondary and tended more and more to disappear. Since 1868 the state of things has changed again, of which more anon.
I have taken care not to strike out of the text the many prophecies, amongst others that of an imminent social revolution in England, which my youthful ardor induced me to venture upon. The wonder is, not that a good many of them proved wrong, but that so many of them have proved right, and that the critical state of English trade, to be brought on by German and especially American competition, which I then foresaw — though in too short a period — has now actually come to pass. In this respect I can, and am bound to, bring the book up to date, by placing here an article which I published in the London “Commonweal” of March 1, 1885, under the heading: “England in 1845 and in 1885.” It gives at the same time a short outline of the history of the English working class during these forty years.
London, February 25, 1886
Frederick Engels
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Via Boston IndyMedia-Troy Davis' final letter to his supporters-Down With The Barbaric Death Penalty- Never Forget The Execution Of Troy Davis
Click on headline to link, via Boston IndyMedia, to Troy Davis' final letter to his supporters.
Markin comment:
Down With The Barbaric Death Penalty- Never Forget The Execution Of Troy Davis
Markin comment:
Down With The Barbaric Death Penalty- Never Forget The Execution Of Troy Davis
From Boston IndyMedia-Video/photos--Boston Anti-War Activists Confront War Criminal Donald Rumsfeld
Click on the headline to link to a Boston IndyMedia entry for Video/photos--Boston Anti-War Activists Confront War Criminal Donald Rumsfeld on September 26, 2011.
Markin comment:
One of the anti-war activist slogans said it all on this dead-ender-Rumsfeld should be doing time, not making profits for his crime! Send him to Iraq (or Afghanistan) to face a tribunal of his victims. Then we would have a smidgen of justice. Just a smidgen.
Markin comment:
One of the anti-war activist slogans said it all on this dead-ender-Rumsfeld should be doing time, not making profits for his crime! Send him to Iraq (or Afghanistan) to face a tribunal of his victims. Then we would have a smidgen of justice. Just a smidgen.
“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)-"Trotsky's Struggle for the Fourth International"
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.
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.
Labor's Untold Story-From The Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Archives-The Struggle For Working Class Organization-Engels. The Condition of the Working Class in England-Preface to the American Edition
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.
*****
Engels. The Condition of the Working Class in England
Preface to the American Edition
Source: Marx Engels On Britain, Progress Publishers 1953;
Written: by Frederick Engels, London, January 26, 1887;
First Published: in the American edition of The Condition of the Working-Class in England, New York, 1887;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.
The Labor Movement in America
Ten months have elapsed since, at the translator’s wish, I wrote the Appendix[1] to this book; and during these ten months, a revolution has been accomplished in American society such as, in any other country, would have taken at least ten years. In February 1885, American public opinion was almost unanimous on this one point; that there was no working class, in the European sense of the word, in America; that consequently no class struggle between workmen and capitalists, such as tore European society to pieces, was possible in the American Republic; and that, therefore, Socialism was a thing of foreign importation which could never take root on American soil.[2] And yet, at that moment, the coming class struggle was casting its gigantic shadow before it in the strikes of the Pennsylvania coal-miners, and of many other trades, and especially in the preparations, all over the country, for the great Eight Hours’ movement which was to come off, and did come off, in the May following. That I then duly appreciated these symptoms, that I anticipated a working-class movement on a national scale, my “Appendix” shows; but no one could then foresee that in such a short time the movement would burst out with such irresistible force, would spread with the rapidity of a prairie-fire, would shake American society to its very foundations.
The fact is there, stubborn and indisputable. To what an extent it had struck with terror the American ruling classes, was revealed to me, in an amusing way, by American journalists who did me the honor of calling on me last summer; the “new departure” had put them into a state of helpless fright and perplexity. But at that time the movement was only just on the start; there was but a series of confused and apparently disconnected upheavals of that class which, by the suppression of negro slavery and the rapid development of manufactures, had become the lowest stratum of American society. Before the year closed, these bewildering social convulsions began to take a definite direction. The spontaneous, instinctive movements of these vast masses of working people, over a vast extent of country, the simultaneous outburst of their common discontent with a miserable social condition, the same everywhere and due .to the same causes, made them conscious of the fact, that they formed a new and distinct class of American society; a class of — practically speaking — more or less hereditary wage-workers, proletarians. And with true American instinct this consciousness led them at once to take the next step towards their deliverance: the formation of a political working-men’s party, with a platform of its own, and with the conquest of the Capitol and the White House for its goal. In May the struggle for the Eight Hours’ working-day, the troubles in Chicago, Milwaukee, etc., the attempts of the ruling class to crush the nascent uprising of Labor by brute force and brutal class-justice; in November the new Labor Party organized in all great centres, and the New York, Chicago and Milwaukee elections. May and November have hitherto reminded the American bourgeoisie only of the payment of coupons of U.S. bonds; henceforth May and November will remind them, too, of the dates on which the American working-class presented their coupons for payment.
In European countries, it took the working class years and years before they fully realized the fact that they formed a distinct and, under the existing social conditions, a permanent class of modern society; and it took years again until this class consciousness led them to form themselves into a distinct political party, independent of, and opposed to, all the old political parties formed by the various sections of the ruling classes. On the more favored soil of America, where no mediæval ruins bar the way, where history begins with the elements of modern bourgeois society as evolved in the seventeenth century, the working class passed through these two stages of its development within ten months.,
Still, all this is but a beginning. That the laboring masses should feel their community of grievances and of interests, their solidarity as a class in opposition to all other classes; that in order to give expression and effect to this feeling, they should set in motion the political machinery provided for that purpose in every free country — that is the first step only. The next step is to find the common remedy for these common grievances, and to embody it in the platform of the new Labor Party. And this — the most important and the most difficult step in the movement — has yet to be taken in America.
A new party must have a distinct positive platform; a platform which may vary in details as circumstances vary and as the party itself develops, but still one upon which the party, for the time being, is agreed. So long as such a platform has not been worked out, or exists but in a rudimentary form, so long the new party, too, will have but a rudimentary existence; it may exist locally but not. yet nationally, it will be a party potentially but not actually.
That platform, whatever may be its first shape, must develop in a direction which may be determined beforehand. The causes that brought into existence the abyss between the working class and the capitalist class are the same in America as in Europe; the means of filling up that abyss are equally the same everywhere. Consequently, the platform of the American proletariat will in the long run coincide, as to the ultimate end to be attained, with the one which, after sixty years of dissensions and discussions, has become the adopted platform of the great mass of the European militant proletariat. It will proclaim, as the ultimate end, the conquest of political supremacy by the working class, in order to effect the direct appropriation of all means of production — land, railways, mines, machinery, etc. — by society at large, to be worked in common by all for the account and benefit of all.
But if the new American party, like all political parties everywhere, by the very fact of its formation aspires to the conquest of political power, it is as yet far from agreed upon what to do with that power when once attained. In New York and the other great cities of the East, the organization of the working class has proceeded upon the lines of Trades’ Societies, forming in each city a powerful Central Labor Union. In New York the Central Labor Union, last November, chose for its standard-bearer Henry George, and consequently its temporary electoral platform has been largely imbued with his principles. In the great cities of the North-West the electoral battle was fought upon a rather indefinite labor platform, and the influence of Henry George’s theories was scarcely, if at all, visible. And while in these great centres of population and of industry the new class movement came to a political head, we find all over the country two wide-spread labor organizations: the “Knights of Labor” and the “Socialist Labor Party,” of which only the latter has a platform in harmony with the modern European standpoint as summarized above.
Of the three more or less definite forms under which the American labor movement thus presents itself, the first, the Henry George movement in New York, is for the moment of a chiefly local significance. No doubt New York is by far the most important city of the States; but New York is not Paris and the United States are not France. And it seems to me that the Henry George platform, in its present shape, is too narrow to form the basis for anything but a local movement, or at best for a short-lived phase of the general movement. To Henry George, the expropriation of the mass of the people from the land is the great and universal cause of the splitting up of the people into Rich and Poor. Now this is not quite correct historically. In Asiatic and classical antiquity, the predominant form of class oppression was slavery, that is to say, not so much the expropriation of the masses from the land as the appropriation of their persons. When, in the decline of the Roman Republic, the free Italian peasants were expropriated from their farms, they formed a class of “poor whites” similar to that of the Southern Slave States before 1861; and between slaves and poor whites, two classes equally unfit for self-emancipation, the old world went to pieces. In the middle ages, it was not the expropriation of the people from, but on the contrary, their appropriation to the land which became the source of feudal oppression. The peasant retained his land, but was attached to it as a serf or villein, and made liable to tribute to the lord in labor and in produce. It was only at the dawn of modern times, towards the end of the fifteenth century, that the expropriation of the peasantry on a large scale laid the foundation .for the modern class of wage-workers who possess nothing but their labor-power and can live only by the selling of that labor-power to others. But if the expropriation from the land brought this class into existence, it was the development of capitalist production, of modern industry and agriculture on a large scale which perpetuated it, increased it, and shaped it into a distinct class with distinct interests and a distinct historical mission. All this has been fully expounded by Marx (“Capital,” Part VIII: “The So-Called Primitive Accumulation”). According to Marx, the cause of the present antagonism of the classes and of the social degradation of the working class is their expropriation from all means of production, in which the land is of course included.
If Henry George declares land-monopolization to be the sole cause of poverty and misery, he naturally finds the remedy in the resumption of the land by society at large. Now, the Socialists of the school of Marx, too, demand the resumption, by society, of the land, and not only of the land but of all other means of production likewise. But even if we leave these out of the question, there is another difference. What is to be done with the land? Modern Socialists, as represented by Marx, demand that it should be held and worked in common and for common account, and the same with all other means of social production, mines, railways, factories, etc.; Henry George would confine himself to letting it out to individuals as at present, merely regulating its distribution and applying the rents for public, instead of, as at present, for private purposes. What the Socialists demand, implies a total revolution of the whole system of social production; what Henry George demands, leaves the present mode of social production untouched, and has, in fact, been anticipated by the extreme section of Ricardian bourgeois economists who, too, demanded the confiscation of the rent of land by the State.
It would of course be unfair to suppose that Henry George has said his last word once for all. But I am bound to take his theory as I find it.
The second great section of the American movement is formed by the Knights of Labor.[3] And that seems to be the section most typical of the present state of the movement, as it is undoubtedly by far the strongest. An immense association spread over an immense extent of country in innumerable “assemblies,” representing all shades of individual and local opinion within the working class; the whole of them sheltered under a platform of corresponding indistinctness and held together much less by their impracticable constitution than by the instinctive feeling that the very fact of their clubbing together for their common aspiration makes them a great power in the country; a truly American paradox clothing the most modern tendencies in the most mediaeval mummeries, and hiding the most democratic and even rebellious spirit behind an apparent, but really powerless despotism — such is the picture the Knights of Labor offer to a European observer. But if we are not arrested by mere outside whimsicalities, we cannot help seeing in this vast agglomeration an immense amount of potential energy evolving slowly but surely into actual force. The Knights of Labor are the first national organization created by the American working class as a whole; whatever be their origin and history, whatever their shortcomings and little absurdities, whatever their platform and their constitution, here they are, the work of practically the whole class of American wage-workers, the only national bond that holds them together, that makes their strength felt to themselves not less than to their enemies, and that fills them with the proud hope of future victories. For it would not be exact to say, that the Knights of Labor are liable to development. They are constantly in full process of development and revolution; a heaving, fermenting mass of plastic material seeking the shape and form appropriate to its inherent nature. That form will be attained as surely as historical evolution has, like natural evolution, its own immanent laws. Whether the Knights of Labor will then retain their present name or not, makes no difference, but to an outsider it appears evident that here is the raw material out of which the future of the American working-class movement, and along with it, the future of American society at large, has to be shaped.
The third section consists of the Socialist Labor Party.[4] This section is a party but in name, for nowhere in America has it, up to now, been able actually to take its stand as a political party. It is, moreover, to a certain extent foreign to America, having until lately been made up almost exclusively by German immigrants, using their own language and for the most part, conversant with the common language of the country. But if it came from a foreign stock, it came, at the same time, armed with the experience earned during long years of class struggle in Europe, and with an insight into the general conditions of working-class emancipation, far superior to that hitherto gained by American working-men. This is a fortunate circumstance for the American proletarians who thus are enabled to appropriate, and to take advantage of, the intellectual and moral fruits of the forty years’ struggle of their European classmates, and thus to hasten on the time of their own victory. For, as I said before, there cannot be any doubt that the ultimate platform of the American working class must and will be essentially the same as that now adopted by the whole militant working class of Europe, the same as that of the German-American Socialist Labor Party. In so far this party is called upon to play a very important part in the movement. But in order to do so they will have to doff every remnant of their foreign garb. They will have to become out and out American. They cannot expect the Americans to come to them; they, the minority and the immigrants, must go to the Americans, who are the vast majority and the natives. And to do that, they must above all things learn English.
The process of fusing together these various elements of the vast moving mass — elements not really discordant, but indeed mutually isolated by their various starting-points — will take some time and will not come off without a deal of friction, such as is visible at different points even now. The Knights of Labor, for instance, are here and there, in the Eastern cities, locally at war with the organized Trades Unions. But then this same friction exists within the Knights of Labor themselves, where there is anything but peace and harmony. These are not symptoms of decay, for capitalists to crow over. They are merely signs that the innumerable hosts of workers, for the first time set in motion in a common direction, have as yet found out neither the adequate expression for their common interests, nor the form of organization best adapted to the struggle, nor the discipline required to insure victory. They are as yet the first levies en masse of the great revolutionary war, raised and equipped locally and independently, all converging to form one common army, but as yet without regular organization and common plan of campaign. The converging columns cross each other here and there: confusion, angry disputes, even threats of conflict arise. But the community of ultimate purpose in the end overcomes all minor troubles; ere long the straggling and squabbling battalions will be formed in a long line of battle array, presenting to the enemy a well-ordered front, ominously silent under their glittering arms, supported by bold skirmishers in front and by unshakeable reserves in the rear.
To bring about this result, the unification of the various independent bodies into one national Labor Army, with no matter how inadequate a provisional platform, provided it be a truly working-class platform — that is the next great step to be accomplished in America. To effect this, and to make that platform worthy of the cause, the Socialist Labor Party can contribute a great deal, if they will only act in the same way as the European Socialists have acted at the time when they were but a small minority of the working class. That line of action was first laid down in the “Communist Manifesto” of 1847 in the following words:
“The Communists” — that was the name we took at the time and which even now we are far from repudiating — “the Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working-class parties.
“They have no interests separate and apart from the interests of the whole working class.
“They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and model the proletarian movement.
“The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries they point out, and bring to the front, the common interests of the whole proletariat, interests independent of all nationality; 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the capitalist class has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.
“The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of all countries, that section which ever pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have, over the great mass of the proletarians, the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.
“Thus they fight for the attainment of the immediate ends, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they represent and take care of the future of the movement.”
That is the line of action which the great founder of Modern Socialism, Karl Marx, and with him, I and the Socialists of all nations who worked along with us, have followed for more than forty years, with the result that it has led to victory everywhere, and that at this moment the mass of European Socialists, in Germany and in France, in Belgium, Holland and Switzerland, in Denmark and Sweden as well as in Spain and Portugal, are fighting as one common army under one and the same flag.
Notes
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1. The Appendix to the American edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England was, except for the paragraph quoted in the next footnote, used by Engels as the basis of his Preface to the English edition of 1892. (See present volume, pp. 17-33.)
2. In the Appendix Engels wrote:
“There were two circumstances which for a long time prevented the unavoidable consequences of the Capitalist system from showing themselves in the full glare of day in America. These were the easy access to the ownership of cheap land, and the influx of immigration. They allowed, for many years, the great mass of the native American population to “retire” in early manhood from wage-labour and to become’ farmers, dealers, or employers of labour, while the hard work for wages, the position of a proletarian for life, mostly fell to the lot of immigrants. But America has outgrown this early stage. The boundless backwoods have disappeared, and the still more boundless prairies are faster and faster passing from the hands of the Nation and the States into those of private owners. The great safety-valve against the formation of a permanent proletarian class has practically ceased to act. A class of life-long and even hereditary proletarians exists at this hour in America. A nation of sixty millions striving hard to become — and with every chance of success, too — the leading manufacturing nation of the world — such a nation cannot permanently import its own wage-working class; riot even if immigrants pour in at the rate of half a million a year. The tendency of the Capitalist system towards the ultimate splitting-up of society into two classes, a few millionaires on the one hand, and a great mass of mere wage-workers on the other, this tendency, though constantly crossed and counteracted by other social agencies, works nowhere with greater force than in America; and the result has been the production of a class of native American wage-workers, who form, indeed, the aristocracy of the wage-working class as compared with the immigrants, but who become conscious more and more every day of their solidarity with the latter and who feel all the more acutely their present condemnation to life-long wage-toil, because they still remember the bygone days, when it was comparatively easy to rise to a higher social level.”
3. The Noble Order of the Knights of Labour: A working-class organisation founded in Philadelphia in 1869. Existing illegally until 1878 it observed a semi-mysterial ritual. That year the organisation emerged from the underground, retaining some of its secret features. The Knights of Labour aimed at the liberation of the workers by means of co-operatives. They took in all skilled and even unskilled trades, without discrimination on account of sex, race, nationality or religion. The organisation reached the highest point of its activity during the eighties, when, under the pressure of the masses, the leaders of the Order were compelled to consent to an extensive strike movement. Its membership at that time was over 700,000, including 60,000 Negroes. However, on account of the opportunist tactics of the leaders, who were opposed to revolutionary class struggle, the order forfeited its prestige among the masses. Its activity expired the next decade.
4. The Socialist Labour Party came into existence in 1876 as a result of the union of the American sections of the First International with other working-class socialist organisations in the United States. This party consisted mainly of immigrants, particularly Germans. Its activities were sectarian and its leaders were incapable of heading the mass movement of the American workers, as they refused to work in the trade unions.
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.
*****
Engels. The Condition of the Working Class in England
Preface to the American Edition
Source: Marx Engels On Britain, Progress Publishers 1953;
Written: by Frederick Engels, London, January 26, 1887;
First Published: in the American edition of The Condition of the Working-Class in England, New York, 1887;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.
The Labor Movement in America
Ten months have elapsed since, at the translator’s wish, I wrote the Appendix[1] to this book; and during these ten months, a revolution has been accomplished in American society such as, in any other country, would have taken at least ten years. In February 1885, American public opinion was almost unanimous on this one point; that there was no working class, in the European sense of the word, in America; that consequently no class struggle between workmen and capitalists, such as tore European society to pieces, was possible in the American Republic; and that, therefore, Socialism was a thing of foreign importation which could never take root on American soil.[2] And yet, at that moment, the coming class struggle was casting its gigantic shadow before it in the strikes of the Pennsylvania coal-miners, and of many other trades, and especially in the preparations, all over the country, for the great Eight Hours’ movement which was to come off, and did come off, in the May following. That I then duly appreciated these symptoms, that I anticipated a working-class movement on a national scale, my “Appendix” shows; but no one could then foresee that in such a short time the movement would burst out with such irresistible force, would spread with the rapidity of a prairie-fire, would shake American society to its very foundations.
The fact is there, stubborn and indisputable. To what an extent it had struck with terror the American ruling classes, was revealed to me, in an amusing way, by American journalists who did me the honor of calling on me last summer; the “new departure” had put them into a state of helpless fright and perplexity. But at that time the movement was only just on the start; there was but a series of confused and apparently disconnected upheavals of that class which, by the suppression of negro slavery and the rapid development of manufactures, had become the lowest stratum of American society. Before the year closed, these bewildering social convulsions began to take a definite direction. The spontaneous, instinctive movements of these vast masses of working people, over a vast extent of country, the simultaneous outburst of their common discontent with a miserable social condition, the same everywhere and due .to the same causes, made them conscious of the fact, that they formed a new and distinct class of American society; a class of — practically speaking — more or less hereditary wage-workers, proletarians. And with true American instinct this consciousness led them at once to take the next step towards their deliverance: the formation of a political working-men’s party, with a platform of its own, and with the conquest of the Capitol and the White House for its goal. In May the struggle for the Eight Hours’ working-day, the troubles in Chicago, Milwaukee, etc., the attempts of the ruling class to crush the nascent uprising of Labor by brute force and brutal class-justice; in November the new Labor Party organized in all great centres, and the New York, Chicago and Milwaukee elections. May and November have hitherto reminded the American bourgeoisie only of the payment of coupons of U.S. bonds; henceforth May and November will remind them, too, of the dates on which the American working-class presented their coupons for payment.
In European countries, it took the working class years and years before they fully realized the fact that they formed a distinct and, under the existing social conditions, a permanent class of modern society; and it took years again until this class consciousness led them to form themselves into a distinct political party, independent of, and opposed to, all the old political parties formed by the various sections of the ruling classes. On the more favored soil of America, where no mediæval ruins bar the way, where history begins with the elements of modern bourgeois society as evolved in the seventeenth century, the working class passed through these two stages of its development within ten months.,
Still, all this is but a beginning. That the laboring masses should feel their community of grievances and of interests, their solidarity as a class in opposition to all other classes; that in order to give expression and effect to this feeling, they should set in motion the political machinery provided for that purpose in every free country — that is the first step only. The next step is to find the common remedy for these common grievances, and to embody it in the platform of the new Labor Party. And this — the most important and the most difficult step in the movement — has yet to be taken in America.
A new party must have a distinct positive platform; a platform which may vary in details as circumstances vary and as the party itself develops, but still one upon which the party, for the time being, is agreed. So long as such a platform has not been worked out, or exists but in a rudimentary form, so long the new party, too, will have but a rudimentary existence; it may exist locally but not. yet nationally, it will be a party potentially but not actually.
That platform, whatever may be its first shape, must develop in a direction which may be determined beforehand. The causes that brought into existence the abyss between the working class and the capitalist class are the same in America as in Europe; the means of filling up that abyss are equally the same everywhere. Consequently, the platform of the American proletariat will in the long run coincide, as to the ultimate end to be attained, with the one which, after sixty years of dissensions and discussions, has become the adopted platform of the great mass of the European militant proletariat. It will proclaim, as the ultimate end, the conquest of political supremacy by the working class, in order to effect the direct appropriation of all means of production — land, railways, mines, machinery, etc. — by society at large, to be worked in common by all for the account and benefit of all.
But if the new American party, like all political parties everywhere, by the very fact of its formation aspires to the conquest of political power, it is as yet far from agreed upon what to do with that power when once attained. In New York and the other great cities of the East, the organization of the working class has proceeded upon the lines of Trades’ Societies, forming in each city a powerful Central Labor Union. In New York the Central Labor Union, last November, chose for its standard-bearer Henry George, and consequently its temporary electoral platform has been largely imbued with his principles. In the great cities of the North-West the electoral battle was fought upon a rather indefinite labor platform, and the influence of Henry George’s theories was scarcely, if at all, visible. And while in these great centres of population and of industry the new class movement came to a political head, we find all over the country two wide-spread labor organizations: the “Knights of Labor” and the “Socialist Labor Party,” of which only the latter has a platform in harmony with the modern European standpoint as summarized above.
Of the three more or less definite forms under which the American labor movement thus presents itself, the first, the Henry George movement in New York, is for the moment of a chiefly local significance. No doubt New York is by far the most important city of the States; but New York is not Paris and the United States are not France. And it seems to me that the Henry George platform, in its present shape, is too narrow to form the basis for anything but a local movement, or at best for a short-lived phase of the general movement. To Henry George, the expropriation of the mass of the people from the land is the great and universal cause of the splitting up of the people into Rich and Poor. Now this is not quite correct historically. In Asiatic and classical antiquity, the predominant form of class oppression was slavery, that is to say, not so much the expropriation of the masses from the land as the appropriation of their persons. When, in the decline of the Roman Republic, the free Italian peasants were expropriated from their farms, they formed a class of “poor whites” similar to that of the Southern Slave States before 1861; and between slaves and poor whites, two classes equally unfit for self-emancipation, the old world went to pieces. In the middle ages, it was not the expropriation of the people from, but on the contrary, their appropriation to the land which became the source of feudal oppression. The peasant retained his land, but was attached to it as a serf or villein, and made liable to tribute to the lord in labor and in produce. It was only at the dawn of modern times, towards the end of the fifteenth century, that the expropriation of the peasantry on a large scale laid the foundation .for the modern class of wage-workers who possess nothing but their labor-power and can live only by the selling of that labor-power to others. But if the expropriation from the land brought this class into existence, it was the development of capitalist production, of modern industry and agriculture on a large scale which perpetuated it, increased it, and shaped it into a distinct class with distinct interests and a distinct historical mission. All this has been fully expounded by Marx (“Capital,” Part VIII: “The So-Called Primitive Accumulation”). According to Marx, the cause of the present antagonism of the classes and of the social degradation of the working class is their expropriation from all means of production, in which the land is of course included.
If Henry George declares land-monopolization to be the sole cause of poverty and misery, he naturally finds the remedy in the resumption of the land by society at large. Now, the Socialists of the school of Marx, too, demand the resumption, by society, of the land, and not only of the land but of all other means of production likewise. But even if we leave these out of the question, there is another difference. What is to be done with the land? Modern Socialists, as represented by Marx, demand that it should be held and worked in common and for common account, and the same with all other means of social production, mines, railways, factories, etc.; Henry George would confine himself to letting it out to individuals as at present, merely regulating its distribution and applying the rents for public, instead of, as at present, for private purposes. What the Socialists demand, implies a total revolution of the whole system of social production; what Henry George demands, leaves the present mode of social production untouched, and has, in fact, been anticipated by the extreme section of Ricardian bourgeois economists who, too, demanded the confiscation of the rent of land by the State.
It would of course be unfair to suppose that Henry George has said his last word once for all. But I am bound to take his theory as I find it.
The second great section of the American movement is formed by the Knights of Labor.[3] And that seems to be the section most typical of the present state of the movement, as it is undoubtedly by far the strongest. An immense association spread over an immense extent of country in innumerable “assemblies,” representing all shades of individual and local opinion within the working class; the whole of them sheltered under a platform of corresponding indistinctness and held together much less by their impracticable constitution than by the instinctive feeling that the very fact of their clubbing together for their common aspiration makes them a great power in the country; a truly American paradox clothing the most modern tendencies in the most mediaeval mummeries, and hiding the most democratic and even rebellious spirit behind an apparent, but really powerless despotism — such is the picture the Knights of Labor offer to a European observer. But if we are not arrested by mere outside whimsicalities, we cannot help seeing in this vast agglomeration an immense amount of potential energy evolving slowly but surely into actual force. The Knights of Labor are the first national organization created by the American working class as a whole; whatever be their origin and history, whatever their shortcomings and little absurdities, whatever their platform and their constitution, here they are, the work of practically the whole class of American wage-workers, the only national bond that holds them together, that makes their strength felt to themselves not less than to their enemies, and that fills them with the proud hope of future victories. For it would not be exact to say, that the Knights of Labor are liable to development. They are constantly in full process of development and revolution; a heaving, fermenting mass of plastic material seeking the shape and form appropriate to its inherent nature. That form will be attained as surely as historical evolution has, like natural evolution, its own immanent laws. Whether the Knights of Labor will then retain their present name or not, makes no difference, but to an outsider it appears evident that here is the raw material out of which the future of the American working-class movement, and along with it, the future of American society at large, has to be shaped.
The third section consists of the Socialist Labor Party.[4] This section is a party but in name, for nowhere in America has it, up to now, been able actually to take its stand as a political party. It is, moreover, to a certain extent foreign to America, having until lately been made up almost exclusively by German immigrants, using their own language and for the most part, conversant with the common language of the country. But if it came from a foreign stock, it came, at the same time, armed with the experience earned during long years of class struggle in Europe, and with an insight into the general conditions of working-class emancipation, far superior to that hitherto gained by American working-men. This is a fortunate circumstance for the American proletarians who thus are enabled to appropriate, and to take advantage of, the intellectual and moral fruits of the forty years’ struggle of their European classmates, and thus to hasten on the time of their own victory. For, as I said before, there cannot be any doubt that the ultimate platform of the American working class must and will be essentially the same as that now adopted by the whole militant working class of Europe, the same as that of the German-American Socialist Labor Party. In so far this party is called upon to play a very important part in the movement. But in order to do so they will have to doff every remnant of their foreign garb. They will have to become out and out American. They cannot expect the Americans to come to them; they, the minority and the immigrants, must go to the Americans, who are the vast majority and the natives. And to do that, they must above all things learn English.
The process of fusing together these various elements of the vast moving mass — elements not really discordant, but indeed mutually isolated by their various starting-points — will take some time and will not come off without a deal of friction, such as is visible at different points even now. The Knights of Labor, for instance, are here and there, in the Eastern cities, locally at war with the organized Trades Unions. But then this same friction exists within the Knights of Labor themselves, where there is anything but peace and harmony. These are not symptoms of decay, for capitalists to crow over. They are merely signs that the innumerable hosts of workers, for the first time set in motion in a common direction, have as yet found out neither the adequate expression for their common interests, nor the form of organization best adapted to the struggle, nor the discipline required to insure victory. They are as yet the first levies en masse of the great revolutionary war, raised and equipped locally and independently, all converging to form one common army, but as yet without regular organization and common plan of campaign. The converging columns cross each other here and there: confusion, angry disputes, even threats of conflict arise. But the community of ultimate purpose in the end overcomes all minor troubles; ere long the straggling and squabbling battalions will be formed in a long line of battle array, presenting to the enemy a well-ordered front, ominously silent under their glittering arms, supported by bold skirmishers in front and by unshakeable reserves in the rear.
To bring about this result, the unification of the various independent bodies into one national Labor Army, with no matter how inadequate a provisional platform, provided it be a truly working-class platform — that is the next great step to be accomplished in America. To effect this, and to make that platform worthy of the cause, the Socialist Labor Party can contribute a great deal, if they will only act in the same way as the European Socialists have acted at the time when they were but a small minority of the working class. That line of action was first laid down in the “Communist Manifesto” of 1847 in the following words:
“The Communists” — that was the name we took at the time and which even now we are far from repudiating — “the Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working-class parties.
“They have no interests separate and apart from the interests of the whole working class.
“They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and model the proletarian movement.
“The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries they point out, and bring to the front, the common interests of the whole proletariat, interests independent of all nationality; 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the capitalist class has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.
“The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of all countries, that section which ever pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have, over the great mass of the proletarians, the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.
“Thus they fight for the attainment of the immediate ends, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they represent and take care of the future of the movement.”
That is the line of action which the great founder of Modern Socialism, Karl Marx, and with him, I and the Socialists of all nations who worked along with us, have followed for more than forty years, with the result that it has led to victory everywhere, and that at this moment the mass of European Socialists, in Germany and in France, in Belgium, Holland and Switzerland, in Denmark and Sweden as well as in Spain and Portugal, are fighting as one common army under one and the same flag.
Notes
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1. The Appendix to the American edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England was, except for the paragraph quoted in the next footnote, used by Engels as the basis of his Preface to the English edition of 1892. (See present volume, pp. 17-33.)
2. In the Appendix Engels wrote:
“There were two circumstances which for a long time prevented the unavoidable consequences of the Capitalist system from showing themselves in the full glare of day in America. These were the easy access to the ownership of cheap land, and the influx of immigration. They allowed, for many years, the great mass of the native American population to “retire” in early manhood from wage-labour and to become’ farmers, dealers, or employers of labour, while the hard work for wages, the position of a proletarian for life, mostly fell to the lot of immigrants. But America has outgrown this early stage. The boundless backwoods have disappeared, and the still more boundless prairies are faster and faster passing from the hands of the Nation and the States into those of private owners. The great safety-valve against the formation of a permanent proletarian class has practically ceased to act. A class of life-long and even hereditary proletarians exists at this hour in America. A nation of sixty millions striving hard to become — and with every chance of success, too — the leading manufacturing nation of the world — such a nation cannot permanently import its own wage-working class; riot even if immigrants pour in at the rate of half a million a year. The tendency of the Capitalist system towards the ultimate splitting-up of society into two classes, a few millionaires on the one hand, and a great mass of mere wage-workers on the other, this tendency, though constantly crossed and counteracted by other social agencies, works nowhere with greater force than in America; and the result has been the production of a class of native American wage-workers, who form, indeed, the aristocracy of the wage-working class as compared with the immigrants, but who become conscious more and more every day of their solidarity with the latter and who feel all the more acutely their present condemnation to life-long wage-toil, because they still remember the bygone days, when it was comparatively easy to rise to a higher social level.”
3. The Noble Order of the Knights of Labour: A working-class organisation founded in Philadelphia in 1869. Existing illegally until 1878 it observed a semi-mysterial ritual. That year the organisation emerged from the underground, retaining some of its secret features. The Knights of Labour aimed at the liberation of the workers by means of co-operatives. They took in all skilled and even unskilled trades, without discrimination on account of sex, race, nationality or religion. The organisation reached the highest point of its activity during the eighties, when, under the pressure of the masses, the leaders of the Order were compelled to consent to an extensive strike movement. Its membership at that time was over 700,000, including 60,000 Negroes. However, on account of the opportunist tactics of the leaders, who were opposed to revolutionary class struggle, the order forfeited its prestige among the masses. Its activity expired the next decade.
4. The Socialist Labour Party came into existence in 1876 as a result of the union of the American sections of the First International with other working-class socialist organisations in the United States. This party consisted mainly of immigrants, particularly Germans. Its activities were sectarian and its leaders were incapable of heading the mass movement of the American workers, as they refused to work in the trade unions.
Tuesday, September 27, 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)-"How the Fourth International Was Conceived"
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.
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.
Labor's Untold Story-From The Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Archives-The Struggle For Working Class Organization-Political Indifferentism-1873
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.
*****
Works of Karl Marx 1873
Political Indifferentism-1873
Written: 1873;
Translated: from the French by Bignami;
Source: The Plebs, Vol. XIV, London 1922;
First Published: 1874 in the Italian, Almanacco Repubblicano per l'anno 1874;
“The working class must not constitute itself a political party; it must not, under any pretext, engage in political action, for to combat the state is to recognize the state: and this is contrary to eternal principles. Workers must not go on strike; for to struggle to increase one's wages or to prevent their decrease is like recognizing wages: and this is contrary to the eternal principles of the emancipation of the working class!
“If in the political struggle against the bourgeois state the workers succeed only in extracting concessions, then they are guilty of compromise; and this is contrary to eternal principles. All peaceful movements, such as those in which English and American workers have the bad habit of engaging, are therefore to be despised. Workers must not struggle to establish a legal limit to the working day, because this is to compromise with the masters, who can then only exploit them for ten or twelve hours, instead of fourteen or sixteen. They must not even exert themselves in order legally to prohibit the employment in factories of children under the age of ten, because by such means they do not bring to an end the exploitation of children over ten: they thus commit a new compromise, which stains the purity of the eternal principles.
“Workers should even less desire that, as happens in the United States of America, the state whose budget is swollen by what is taken from the working class should be obliged to give primary education to the workers' children; for primary education is not complete education. It is better that working men and working women should not be able to read or write or do sums than that they should receive education from a teacher in a school run by the state. It is far better that ignorance and a working day of sixteen hours should debase the working classes than that eternal principles should be violated.
“If the political struggle of the working class assumes violent forms and if the workers replace the dictatorship of the bourgeois class with their own revolutionary dictatorship, then they are guilty of the terrible crime of lèse-principe; for, in order to satisfy their miserable profane daily needs and to crush the resistance of the bourgeois class, they, instead of laying down their arms and abolishing the state, give to the state a revolutionary and transitory form. Workers must not even form single unions for every trade, for by so doing they perpetuate the social division of labour as they find it in bourgeois society; this division, which fragments the working class, is the true basis of their present enslavement.
“In a word, the workers should cross their arms and stop wasting time in political and economic movements. These movements can never produce anything more than short-term results. As truly religious men they should scorn daily needs and cry out with voices full of faith: "May our class be crucified, may our race perish, but let the eternal principles remain immaculate! As pious Christians they must believe the words of their pastor, despise the good things of this world and think only of going to Paradise. In place of Paradise read the social liquidation which is going to take place one day in some or other corner of the globe, no one knows how, or through whom, and the mystification is identical in all respects.
“In expectation, therefore, of this famous social liquidation, the working class must behave itself in a respectable manner, like a flock of well-fed sheep; it must leave the government in peace, fear the police, respect the law and offer itself up uncomplaining as cannon-fodder.
“In the practical life of every day, workers must be the most obedient servants of the state; but in their hearts they must protest energetically against its very existence, and give proof of their profound theoretical contempt for it by acquiring and reading literary treatises on its abolition; they must further scrupulously refrain from putting up any resistance to the capitalist regime apart from declamations on the society of the future, when this hated regime will have ceased to exist!'
It cannot be denied that if the apostles of political indifferentism were to express themselves with such clarity, the working class would make short shrift of them and would resent being insulted by these doctrinaire bourgeois and displaced gentlemen, who are so stupid or so naive as to attempt to deny to the working class any real means of struggle. For all arms with which to fight must be drawn from society as it is and the fatal conditions of this struggle have the misfortune of not being easily adapted to the idealistic fantasies which these doctors in social science have exalted as divinities, under the names of Freedom, Autonomy, Anarchy. However the working-class movement is today so powerful that these philanthropic sectarians dare not repeat for the economic struggle those great truths which they used incessantly to proclaim on the subject of the political struggle. They are simply too cowardly to apply them any longer to strikes, combinations, single-craft unions, laws on the labour of women and children, on the limitation of the working day etc., etc.
Now let us see whether they are still able to be brought back to the good old traditions, to modesty, good faith and eternal principles.
The first socialists (Fourier, Owen, Saint-Simon, etc.), since social conditions were not sufficiently developed to allow the working class to constitute itself as a militant class, were necessarily obliged to limit themselves to dreams about the model society of the future and were led thus to condemn all the attempts such as strikes, combinations or political movements set in train by the workers to improve their lot. But while we cannot repudiate these patriarchs of socialism, just as chemists cannot repudiate their forebears the alchemists, we must at least avoid falling back into their mistakes, which, if we were to commit them, would be inexcusable.
Later, however, in 1839, when the political and economic struggle of the working class in England had taken on a fairly marked character, Bray, one of Owen's disciples and one of the many who long before Proudhon hit upon the idea of mutualism, published a book entitled Labour's Wrongs and Labour's Remedy.
In his chapter on the inefficacy of all the remedies aimed for by the present struggle, he makes a savage critique of all the activities, political or economic, of the English working class, condemns the political movement, strikes, the limitation of the working day, the restriction of the work of women and children in factories, since all this -- or so he claims -- instead of taking us out of the present state of society, keeps us there and does nothing but render the antagonisms more intense.
This brings us to the oracle of these doctors of social science, M. Proudhon. While the master had the courage to declare himself energetically opposed to all economic activities (combinations, strikes, etc.) which contradicted his redemptive theories of mutualism, at the same time through his writings and personal participation, he encouraged the working-class movement, and his disciples do not dare to declare themselves openly against it. As early as 1847, when the master's great work, The System of Economic Contradictions, had just appeared, I refuted his sophisms against the working-class movement. [2] None the less in 1864, after the loi Ollivier, which granted the French workers, in a very restrictive fashion, a certain right of combination, Proudhon returned to the charge in a book, The Political Capacities of the Working Classes, published a few days after his death.
The master's strictures were so much to the taste of the bourgeoisie that The Times, on the occasion of the great tailors' strike in London in 1866, did Proudhon the honour of translating him and of condemning the strikes with the master's very words. Here are some selections.
The miners of Rive-de-Gier went on strike; the soldiers were called in to bring them back to reason. Proudhon cries, 'The authority which had the miners of Rive-de-Gier shot acted disgracefully. But it was acting like Brutus of old caught between his paternal love and his consular duty: it was necessary to sacrifice his sons to save the Republic. Brutus did not hesitate, and posterity dare not condemn him.' [3] In all the memory of the proletariat there is no record of a bourgeois who has hesitated to sacrifice his workers to save his interests. What Brutuses the bourgeois must then be!
'Well, no: there is no right of combination, just as there is no right to defraud or steal or to commit incest or adultery.' [4] There is however all too clearly a right to stupidity.
What then are the eternal principles, in whose name the master fulminates his mystic anathema?
First eternal principle: 'Wage rates determine the price of commodities.'
Even those who have no knowledge of political economy and who are unaware that the great bourgeois economist Ricardo in his Principles of Political Economy, published in 1817, has refuted this long-standing error once and for all, are however aware of the remarkable fact that British industry can sell its products at a price far lower than that of any other nation, although wages are relatively higher in England than in any other European country.
Second eternal principle: 'The law which authorizes combinations is highly anti-juridical, anti-economic and contrary to any society and order.' [5] In a word 'contrary to the economic right of free competition'.
If the master had been a little less chauvinistic, he might have asked himself how it happened that forty years ago a law, thus contrary to the economic rights of free competition, was promulgated in England; and that as industry develops, and alongside it free competition, this law -- so contrary to any society and order - imposes itself as a necessity even to bourgeois states themselves. He might perhaps have discovered that this right (with capital R) exists only in the Economic Manuals written by the Brothers Ignoramus of bourgeois political economy, in which manuals are contained such pearls as this: 'Property is the fruit of labour' ('of the labour', they neglect to add, 'of others').
Third eternal principle: 'Therefore, under the pretext of raising the working class from its condition of so-called social inferiority, it will be necessary to start by denouncing a whole class of citizens, the class of bosses, entrepreneurs, masters and bourgeois; it will be necessary to rouse workers' democracy to despise and to hate these unworthy members of the middle class; it will be necessary to prefer mercantile and industrial war to legal repression, and class antagonism to the state police.' [6]
The master, in order to prevent the working class from escaping from its so-called social inferiority, condemns the combinations that constitute the working class as a class antagonistic to the respectable category of masters, entrepreneurs and bourgeois, who for their part certainly prefer, as does Proudhon, the state police to class antagonism. To avoid any offence to this respectable class, the good M. Proudhon recommends to the workers (up to the coming of the mutualist regime, and despite its serious disadvantages) freedom or competition, our 'only guarantee'. [7]
The master preached indifference in matters of economics -- so as to protect bourgeois freedom or competition, our only guarantee. His disciples preach indifference in matters of politics -- so as to protect bourgeois freedom, their only guarantee. If the early Christians, who also preached political indifferentism, needed an emperor's arm to transform themselves from oppressed into oppressors, so the modern apostles of political indifferentism do not believe that their own eternal principles impose on them abstinence from worldly pleasures and the temporal privileges of bourgeois society. However we must recognize that they display a stoicism worthy of the early Christian martyrs in supporting those fourteen or sixteen working hours such as overburden the workers in the factories.
Footnotes
2. P. J. Proudhon, Système des contradictions economiques, ou philosophie de la misère (1846). This was the work that Marx replied to with his book The Poverty of Philosophy (1847). Return to Text
3. De la Capacité politique des class ouvrières, Paris, 1865, p. 413. To give Proudhon his due, he was not so much justifying the actions of the French authorities as exposing the 'contradictions' he saw as an inevitable evil of the present social order. Return to Text
4. ibid., p. 421. Return to Text
5. ibid., p. 424. Return to Text
6. ibid., p. 426. Return to Text
7. ibid., p. 422. Return to Text
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.
*****
Works of Karl Marx 1873
Political Indifferentism-1873
Written: 1873;
Translated: from the French by Bignami;
Source: The Plebs, Vol. XIV, London 1922;
First Published: 1874 in the Italian, Almanacco Repubblicano per l'anno 1874;
“The working class must not constitute itself a political party; it must not, under any pretext, engage in political action, for to combat the state is to recognize the state: and this is contrary to eternal principles. Workers must not go on strike; for to struggle to increase one's wages or to prevent their decrease is like recognizing wages: and this is contrary to the eternal principles of the emancipation of the working class!
“If in the political struggle against the bourgeois state the workers succeed only in extracting concessions, then they are guilty of compromise; and this is contrary to eternal principles. All peaceful movements, such as those in which English and American workers have the bad habit of engaging, are therefore to be despised. Workers must not struggle to establish a legal limit to the working day, because this is to compromise with the masters, who can then only exploit them for ten or twelve hours, instead of fourteen or sixteen. They must not even exert themselves in order legally to prohibit the employment in factories of children under the age of ten, because by such means they do not bring to an end the exploitation of children over ten: they thus commit a new compromise, which stains the purity of the eternal principles.
“Workers should even less desire that, as happens in the United States of America, the state whose budget is swollen by what is taken from the working class should be obliged to give primary education to the workers' children; for primary education is not complete education. It is better that working men and working women should not be able to read or write or do sums than that they should receive education from a teacher in a school run by the state. It is far better that ignorance and a working day of sixteen hours should debase the working classes than that eternal principles should be violated.
“If the political struggle of the working class assumes violent forms and if the workers replace the dictatorship of the bourgeois class with their own revolutionary dictatorship, then they are guilty of the terrible crime of lèse-principe; for, in order to satisfy their miserable profane daily needs and to crush the resistance of the bourgeois class, they, instead of laying down their arms and abolishing the state, give to the state a revolutionary and transitory form. Workers must not even form single unions for every trade, for by so doing they perpetuate the social division of labour as they find it in bourgeois society; this division, which fragments the working class, is the true basis of their present enslavement.
“In a word, the workers should cross their arms and stop wasting time in political and economic movements. These movements can never produce anything more than short-term results. As truly religious men they should scorn daily needs and cry out with voices full of faith: "May our class be crucified, may our race perish, but let the eternal principles remain immaculate! As pious Christians they must believe the words of their pastor, despise the good things of this world and think only of going to Paradise. In place of Paradise read the social liquidation which is going to take place one day in some or other corner of the globe, no one knows how, or through whom, and the mystification is identical in all respects.
“In expectation, therefore, of this famous social liquidation, the working class must behave itself in a respectable manner, like a flock of well-fed sheep; it must leave the government in peace, fear the police, respect the law and offer itself up uncomplaining as cannon-fodder.
“In the practical life of every day, workers must be the most obedient servants of the state; but in their hearts they must protest energetically against its very existence, and give proof of their profound theoretical contempt for it by acquiring and reading literary treatises on its abolition; they must further scrupulously refrain from putting up any resistance to the capitalist regime apart from declamations on the society of the future, when this hated regime will have ceased to exist!'
It cannot be denied that if the apostles of political indifferentism were to express themselves with such clarity, the working class would make short shrift of them and would resent being insulted by these doctrinaire bourgeois and displaced gentlemen, who are so stupid or so naive as to attempt to deny to the working class any real means of struggle. For all arms with which to fight must be drawn from society as it is and the fatal conditions of this struggle have the misfortune of not being easily adapted to the idealistic fantasies which these doctors in social science have exalted as divinities, under the names of Freedom, Autonomy, Anarchy. However the working-class movement is today so powerful that these philanthropic sectarians dare not repeat for the economic struggle those great truths which they used incessantly to proclaim on the subject of the political struggle. They are simply too cowardly to apply them any longer to strikes, combinations, single-craft unions, laws on the labour of women and children, on the limitation of the working day etc., etc.
Now let us see whether they are still able to be brought back to the good old traditions, to modesty, good faith and eternal principles.
The first socialists (Fourier, Owen, Saint-Simon, etc.), since social conditions were not sufficiently developed to allow the working class to constitute itself as a militant class, were necessarily obliged to limit themselves to dreams about the model society of the future and were led thus to condemn all the attempts such as strikes, combinations or political movements set in train by the workers to improve their lot. But while we cannot repudiate these patriarchs of socialism, just as chemists cannot repudiate their forebears the alchemists, we must at least avoid falling back into their mistakes, which, if we were to commit them, would be inexcusable.
Later, however, in 1839, when the political and economic struggle of the working class in England had taken on a fairly marked character, Bray, one of Owen's disciples and one of the many who long before Proudhon hit upon the idea of mutualism, published a book entitled Labour's Wrongs and Labour's Remedy.
In his chapter on the inefficacy of all the remedies aimed for by the present struggle, he makes a savage critique of all the activities, political or economic, of the English working class, condemns the political movement, strikes, the limitation of the working day, the restriction of the work of women and children in factories, since all this -- or so he claims -- instead of taking us out of the present state of society, keeps us there and does nothing but render the antagonisms more intense.
This brings us to the oracle of these doctors of social science, M. Proudhon. While the master had the courage to declare himself energetically opposed to all economic activities (combinations, strikes, etc.) which contradicted his redemptive theories of mutualism, at the same time through his writings and personal participation, he encouraged the working-class movement, and his disciples do not dare to declare themselves openly against it. As early as 1847, when the master's great work, The System of Economic Contradictions, had just appeared, I refuted his sophisms against the working-class movement. [2] None the less in 1864, after the loi Ollivier, which granted the French workers, in a very restrictive fashion, a certain right of combination, Proudhon returned to the charge in a book, The Political Capacities of the Working Classes, published a few days after his death.
The master's strictures were so much to the taste of the bourgeoisie that The Times, on the occasion of the great tailors' strike in London in 1866, did Proudhon the honour of translating him and of condemning the strikes with the master's very words. Here are some selections.
The miners of Rive-de-Gier went on strike; the soldiers were called in to bring them back to reason. Proudhon cries, 'The authority which had the miners of Rive-de-Gier shot acted disgracefully. But it was acting like Brutus of old caught between his paternal love and his consular duty: it was necessary to sacrifice his sons to save the Republic. Brutus did not hesitate, and posterity dare not condemn him.' [3] In all the memory of the proletariat there is no record of a bourgeois who has hesitated to sacrifice his workers to save his interests. What Brutuses the bourgeois must then be!
'Well, no: there is no right of combination, just as there is no right to defraud or steal or to commit incest or adultery.' [4] There is however all too clearly a right to stupidity.
What then are the eternal principles, in whose name the master fulminates his mystic anathema?
First eternal principle: 'Wage rates determine the price of commodities.'
Even those who have no knowledge of political economy and who are unaware that the great bourgeois economist Ricardo in his Principles of Political Economy, published in 1817, has refuted this long-standing error once and for all, are however aware of the remarkable fact that British industry can sell its products at a price far lower than that of any other nation, although wages are relatively higher in England than in any other European country.
Second eternal principle: 'The law which authorizes combinations is highly anti-juridical, anti-economic and contrary to any society and order.' [5] In a word 'contrary to the economic right of free competition'.
If the master had been a little less chauvinistic, he might have asked himself how it happened that forty years ago a law, thus contrary to the economic rights of free competition, was promulgated in England; and that as industry develops, and alongside it free competition, this law -- so contrary to any society and order - imposes itself as a necessity even to bourgeois states themselves. He might perhaps have discovered that this right (with capital R) exists only in the Economic Manuals written by the Brothers Ignoramus of bourgeois political economy, in which manuals are contained such pearls as this: 'Property is the fruit of labour' ('of the labour', they neglect to add, 'of others').
Third eternal principle: 'Therefore, under the pretext of raising the working class from its condition of so-called social inferiority, it will be necessary to start by denouncing a whole class of citizens, the class of bosses, entrepreneurs, masters and bourgeois; it will be necessary to rouse workers' democracy to despise and to hate these unworthy members of the middle class; it will be necessary to prefer mercantile and industrial war to legal repression, and class antagonism to the state police.' [6]
The master, in order to prevent the working class from escaping from its so-called social inferiority, condemns the combinations that constitute the working class as a class antagonistic to the respectable category of masters, entrepreneurs and bourgeois, who for their part certainly prefer, as does Proudhon, the state police to class antagonism. To avoid any offence to this respectable class, the good M. Proudhon recommends to the workers (up to the coming of the mutualist regime, and despite its serious disadvantages) freedom or competition, our 'only guarantee'. [7]
The master preached indifference in matters of economics -- so as to protect bourgeois freedom or competition, our only guarantee. His disciples preach indifference in matters of politics -- so as to protect bourgeois freedom, their only guarantee. If the early Christians, who also preached political indifferentism, needed an emperor's arm to transform themselves from oppressed into oppressors, so the modern apostles of political indifferentism do not believe that their own eternal principles impose on them abstinence from worldly pleasures and the temporal privileges of bourgeois society. However we must recognize that they display a stoicism worthy of the early Christian martyrs in supporting those fourteen or sixteen working hours such as overburden the workers in the factories.
Footnotes
2. P. J. Proudhon, Système des contradictions economiques, ou philosophie de la misère (1846). This was the work that Marx replied to with his book The Poverty of Philosophy (1847). Return to Text
3. De la Capacité politique des class ouvrières, Paris, 1865, p. 413. To give Proudhon his due, he was not so much justifying the actions of the French authorities as exposing the 'contradictions' he saw as an inevitable evil of the present social order. Return to Text
4. ibid., p. 421. Return to Text
5. ibid., p. 424. Return to Text
6. ibid., p. 426. Return to Text
7. ibid., p. 422. Return to Text
The "Projects" Boys... And Girls-For Denny And All The Other Adamsville Housing Authority Survivors From The Class Of 1964-With Tom Waits In Mind
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Tom Waits performing Jersey Girl
"Ain't Got No Time For The Corner Boys, Down In The Streets Making All That Noise"- The first line from Tom Waits classic working class love song, Jersey Girl. The best version of the song by Tom Waits is the one that you can link to on YouTube above.
***********
Peter Paul Markin, Adamsville Housing Authority Alumnus and North Adamsville, Class Of 1964, (although most AHA alumni graduated from cross-town rival, Adamsville High) comment:
Funny how some stories get their start. A few years back one of my old Adamsville South Elementary corner boys, Denny Romano, he of the squeaky burgeoning tenor in our impromptu 1950s back end of the school-yard summer nights doo wop group (and I of the squeaky bass, low, very low bass) “connected” with me again. He did so not through this site but through one of those looking for old high school graduate-based Internet sites that relentlessly track you down just as, in your dotage; you think you have finally gotten out from under that last remnant speck of fighting off the last forty years of your teen alienation and teen angst.
Denny asked me to speak of the old “corner boy” days down at “the projects,” the Adamsville Housing Authority low-rent housing where the desperately poor, temporarily so or not, were warehoused in our town in the post-World War II good night when some returning veteran fathers needed a helping hand to get them going back into civilian life. Corner boys, in case you were clueless (or too young to know of anything but mall rat-dom), were guys, mainly, who “hung out” together. Poor boy, no money, no other place to go, or with no transportation to get some place, hung out in front of a million mom and pop variety corner variety stores, corner pizza parlors, corner bowling alleys, corner fast food joints, hell, even corner gas stations in some real small towns from what some guys have told me when I asked them. Here is the odd part though. Ya, we were corner boys even that young, although we had no corner, no official corner like a corner mom and pop variety store, or a pizza parlor like I did later at Doc’s Drugstore in middle school and then as the king hell king’s scribe to Frankie Riley in front of Salducci’s Pizza Parlor but just the back end of the elementary school, as long as we were quiet and nobody cried murder and mayhem to the cops. The following, in any case, a little revised, represents my “homage” to Denny and the gang from those by-gone days and even the girls that ninety-three point four percent of the time I was scared to death of/ fascinated by. Well, some things haven’t changed anyway.
*******
Taffrail Road, Yardarm Lane, Captain's Walk, Quarterdeck Road, Sextant Circle, the Old Sailor’s Home, the Shipyard (abandoned now) and Sea Street. Yes, those streets and places from the old public housing project down in the Germantown section of Adamsville surely evoke imagines of the near-by sea that touched its edges, of long ago sailing ships, and of battles fought off some mist-driven coast by those hearty enough to seek fame and fortune. And with the wherewithal to hold on to their booty (no, not that booty, dough, prizes, stuff like that) But, of course, we know that anyone with even a passing attachment to Adamsville had to have an instinctual love of the sea, and fear of its furies when old Mother Nature turns her back on us. Yes, the endless sea, our homeland the sea, the mother we never knew, the sea... But, enough of those imaginings.
Today I look to the landward side of that troubled housing project peninsula, that isolated expanse of land jutting out of the water and filled with wreckage of another kind, the human kind . No, this will not be a sociological survey of working class pathologies made inevitable by the relentless struggle to scramble for life's necessities, the culture of poverty, or the like. Nor will it be a political screed about rising against the monsters that held us down, or the need for such a rising. Nor even about the poetic license necessary to cobble pretty words together to speak of the death of dreams, dreamless dreams or, maybe, just accepting small dreams to fit a small life. Rather, I am driven by the jumble of images that passed through the thoughts of a ragamuffin of a project boy as he tried to make sense out of a world that he did not create, and that he had no say in.
Ah, the scenes. Warm, sticky, humid summer nights, the air filled with the pungent, overpowering soapy fragrance from the Proctor & Gamble factory across the channel that never quite left one's nostrils. Waking up each morning to face the now vanished Fore River Shipyard superstructure; hearing the distant clang of metals being worked to shape; and, the sight of flickering welding torches binding metals together. The endless rust-encrusted, low-riding oil tankers coming through the channel guided to port by high whistle-blowing tugs.
The interminable wait for the lifeline, seemingly never on time, Eastern Mass bus that took one and all in and out through that single Palmer Street escape route to greater Adamsville. Or that then imposing central housing authority building where I was sent by my mother, too proud to go herself, with the monthly rent, usually short. Oh, did I mention Carter's Variety Store, the sole store for us all the way to Sea Street but police take notice off limits to corners boys young or old, another lifeline. Many a time I reached in Ma's pocketbook to steal money, or committed other small hoodlum wanna-be larcenies, in order to hike down that long road and get my sugar-drenched stash (candy bars, soda, a.k.a. tonic but that word is long gone, Twinkles, Moon Pies, and so on, sugar-drenched all)
And the kids. Well, the idea in those “golden” post-war days was that the projects were a way-station to better things, or at least that was the hope. So there was plenty of turn-over of friends but there was a core of kids, kids like me and my brothers, who stayed long enough to learn the ropes. Or get beaten down by guys just a little hungrier, a little stronger, or with just a little bigger chip on their shoulder. Every guy had to prove himself, tough or not, by hanging with guys that were "really" tough. That was the ethos, and "thems were the rules." Rules that seemed to come out of eternity’s time, and like eternity never challenged.
I took my fair share of nicks but also, for a moment, well for more than a moment as it turned out, I was swayed by the gangster lifestyle. Hell, it looked easy. With old elementary school classmate Rickie B., Denny knows who I am talking about, who, later, served twenty years, maybe more for all know, for a series of armed robberies, I worked my first "clip" in some downtown Adamsville Square jewelry store, Sid’s I think, the one with all the onyx rings on display in the front and the twelve signs about how you could have anything in the place on very easy terms, only a million installments (with interest piling up, of course). No, thanks. The clip, again for the clueless, is nothing but kids’ stuff, strictly for amateurs because no professional thief would risk his or her good name for such a low-rent payoff. The deal was one guy went in and got the salesperson’s attention while the other guy ripped off whatever was “hanging low on the tree.” In that arrangement I was usually the “tree” guy not because I had quick hands, although come to think of it I did (and big eyes, big greedy eyes for all the booty, and you know what booty means here now since I told you before), but because I didn’t have the knack of talking gibberish to adults. Hell, you probably did the clip yourself, maybe for kicks. And then forgot about it for some other less screwy kick. Not me.
Okay, so at that point maybe every kid, every curious kid ready in whatever manner to challenge authority and I (and most of my then corner boys, although not Denny if I recall correctly) are even. Here is the tie-breaker though. Moving on, I was the "holder" for more expansive enterprises with George H. (who, later, got killed when a drug deal he was promoting, a lonely gringo deal down in Mexico, went south on him). See George was a true artist, a true sneak thief who was able to get into any house by stealth and sheer determination. Mainly houses up in Adams Shore where people actually had stuff worth stealing unlike in the projects where the stuff was so much Bargain Center specials (the local Wal-Mart-like operation of its day). He needed me for two, no three, things. First, I was the “look-out” and even the clueless know what that means. Secondly, I actually held and carried some of the loot that he passed to me out of the window or door, and one time out a backyard bulkhead (the good stuff, televisions, silverware, a stamp collection, a coin collection, and some other stuff that I have forgotten about, was in the basement family room). Lastly, as George started to draw school and police attention I actually “held” the stuff in a safe location (which I will not disclose here just in case the various statutes of limitations have not run out). That went on for a while but George got busted for something else, some unruly child baloney rap thing, and that was that.
That was just a kid’s gangster moment, right? It was not all larcenies and kid dreams of some “big score” to get himself, and his family, out from under though. It couldn’t be for a kid, or the whole world, poor as it was, would have just collapsed over my head, and I would not be here to honor Denny’s request.
Oh, the different things that came up. Oddball things like Christmas tree bonfires on New Year’s Eve where we scurried like rats just as soon as neighbors put their trees out to be taken away in order to assemble them on the beach ready to be fired up and welcome in the new year. Or annual Halloween hooliganism where we, in a sugar frenzy, worked the neighborhood trick or treat racket hitting every house like the 82nd Airborne Division, or some such elite unit running amok in Baghdad or some Iraqi town ...
Hey, wait a minute, all this is so much eyewash because what, at least in my memory's eye, is the driving "projects" image is the "great awakening." Girls. Girls turning from sticks to shapes just around the time that I started to notice the difference, and being interested in that different if not always sure about what it meant. You don’t need a book to figure that out, although maybe it would have helped. And being fascinated and ill at ease at the same time around them, and being a moonstruck kid on every girl that gave me a passing glance, or what I thought was a passing glance, and the shoe leather-wearing out marathon walking, thinking about what to do about them, especially when the intelligence-gatherers told you about a girl who liked you. And the innocent, mostly dreaded, little petting parties, in dank little basements that served as 'family rooms' for each apartment, trying to be picked by the one you want to pick you and, well, you get the drift. Remind me to tell you some time, and here is where Denny comes in, how we put together, a bunch of corner-less corner boys, a ragtag doo wop group one summer for the express, the sole, the only purpose of, well, luring girls to the back of the school where we hung out. And it worked.
Now a lot of this is stuff any kid goes through, except just not in "the projects." And some of it is truly "projects" stuff - which way will he go, good or bad? But this next thing kind of ties it together. Just about the time when I was seriously committed to a petty criminal lifestyle, that “holding” stuff with my corner boy comrade George, I found the Thomas Crane Library branch that was then in the Adamsville South Elementary School (now further up the street toward Adamsville Square). And one summer I just started to read every biography or other interesting book they had in the Children's Section. While looking, longingly, over at the forbidden Adult Section on the other side of the room for the good stuff. And I dreamed. Yes, I am a "projects" boy, and I survived to tell the tale. Is that good enough for you, Denny?
Tom Waits Jersey Girl Lyrics
Got no time for the corner boys,
Down in the street makin' all that noise,
Don't want no whores on eighth avenue,
Cause tonight i'm gonna be with you.
'cause tonight i'm gonna take that ride,
Across the river to the jersey side,
Take my baby to the carnival,
And i'll take you all on the rides.
Down the shore everything's alright,
You're with your baby on a saturday night,
Don't you know that all my dreams come true,
When i'm walkin' down the street with you,
Sing sha la la la la la sha la la la.
You know she thrills me with all her charms,
When i'm wrapped up in my baby's arms,
My little angel gives me everything,
I know someday that she'll wear my ring.
So don't bother me cause i got no time,
I'm on my way to see that girl of mine,
Nothin' else matters in this whole wide world,
When you're in love with a jersey girl,
Sing sha la la la la la la.
And i call your name, i can't sleep at night,
Sha la la la la la la.
"Ain't Got No Time For The Corner Boys, Down In The Streets Making All That Noise"- The first line from Tom Waits classic working class love song, Jersey Girl. The best version of the song by Tom Waits is the one that you can link to on YouTube above.
***********
Peter Paul Markin, Adamsville Housing Authority Alumnus and North Adamsville, Class Of 1964, (although most AHA alumni graduated from cross-town rival, Adamsville High) comment:
Funny how some stories get their start. A few years back one of my old Adamsville South Elementary corner boys, Denny Romano, he of the squeaky burgeoning tenor in our impromptu 1950s back end of the school-yard summer nights doo wop group (and I of the squeaky bass, low, very low bass) “connected” with me again. He did so not through this site but through one of those looking for old high school graduate-based Internet sites that relentlessly track you down just as, in your dotage; you think you have finally gotten out from under that last remnant speck of fighting off the last forty years of your teen alienation and teen angst.
Denny asked me to speak of the old “corner boy” days down at “the projects,” the Adamsville Housing Authority low-rent housing where the desperately poor, temporarily so or not, were warehoused in our town in the post-World War II good night when some returning veteran fathers needed a helping hand to get them going back into civilian life. Corner boys, in case you were clueless (or too young to know of anything but mall rat-dom), were guys, mainly, who “hung out” together. Poor boy, no money, no other place to go, or with no transportation to get some place, hung out in front of a million mom and pop variety corner variety stores, corner pizza parlors, corner bowling alleys, corner fast food joints, hell, even corner gas stations in some real small towns from what some guys have told me when I asked them. Here is the odd part though. Ya, we were corner boys even that young, although we had no corner, no official corner like a corner mom and pop variety store, or a pizza parlor like I did later at Doc’s Drugstore in middle school and then as the king hell king’s scribe to Frankie Riley in front of Salducci’s Pizza Parlor but just the back end of the elementary school, as long as we were quiet and nobody cried murder and mayhem to the cops. The following, in any case, a little revised, represents my “homage” to Denny and the gang from those by-gone days and even the girls that ninety-three point four percent of the time I was scared to death of/ fascinated by. Well, some things haven’t changed anyway.
*******
Taffrail Road, Yardarm Lane, Captain's Walk, Quarterdeck Road, Sextant Circle, the Old Sailor’s Home, the Shipyard (abandoned now) and Sea Street. Yes, those streets and places from the old public housing project down in the Germantown section of Adamsville surely evoke imagines of the near-by sea that touched its edges, of long ago sailing ships, and of battles fought off some mist-driven coast by those hearty enough to seek fame and fortune. And with the wherewithal to hold on to their booty (no, not that booty, dough, prizes, stuff like that) But, of course, we know that anyone with even a passing attachment to Adamsville had to have an instinctual love of the sea, and fear of its furies when old Mother Nature turns her back on us. Yes, the endless sea, our homeland the sea, the mother we never knew, the sea... But, enough of those imaginings.
Today I look to the landward side of that troubled housing project peninsula, that isolated expanse of land jutting out of the water and filled with wreckage of another kind, the human kind . No, this will not be a sociological survey of working class pathologies made inevitable by the relentless struggle to scramble for life's necessities, the culture of poverty, or the like. Nor will it be a political screed about rising against the monsters that held us down, or the need for such a rising. Nor even about the poetic license necessary to cobble pretty words together to speak of the death of dreams, dreamless dreams or, maybe, just accepting small dreams to fit a small life. Rather, I am driven by the jumble of images that passed through the thoughts of a ragamuffin of a project boy as he tried to make sense out of a world that he did not create, and that he had no say in.
Ah, the scenes. Warm, sticky, humid summer nights, the air filled with the pungent, overpowering soapy fragrance from the Proctor & Gamble factory across the channel that never quite left one's nostrils. Waking up each morning to face the now vanished Fore River Shipyard superstructure; hearing the distant clang of metals being worked to shape; and, the sight of flickering welding torches binding metals together. The endless rust-encrusted, low-riding oil tankers coming through the channel guided to port by high whistle-blowing tugs.
The interminable wait for the lifeline, seemingly never on time, Eastern Mass bus that took one and all in and out through that single Palmer Street escape route to greater Adamsville. Or that then imposing central housing authority building where I was sent by my mother, too proud to go herself, with the monthly rent, usually short. Oh, did I mention Carter's Variety Store, the sole store for us all the way to Sea Street but police take notice off limits to corners boys young or old, another lifeline. Many a time I reached in Ma's pocketbook to steal money, or committed other small hoodlum wanna-be larcenies, in order to hike down that long road and get my sugar-drenched stash (candy bars, soda, a.k.a. tonic but that word is long gone, Twinkles, Moon Pies, and so on, sugar-drenched all)
And the kids. Well, the idea in those “golden” post-war days was that the projects were a way-station to better things, or at least that was the hope. So there was plenty of turn-over of friends but there was a core of kids, kids like me and my brothers, who stayed long enough to learn the ropes. Or get beaten down by guys just a little hungrier, a little stronger, or with just a little bigger chip on their shoulder. Every guy had to prove himself, tough or not, by hanging with guys that were "really" tough. That was the ethos, and "thems were the rules." Rules that seemed to come out of eternity’s time, and like eternity never challenged.
I took my fair share of nicks but also, for a moment, well for more than a moment as it turned out, I was swayed by the gangster lifestyle. Hell, it looked easy. With old elementary school classmate Rickie B., Denny knows who I am talking about, who, later, served twenty years, maybe more for all know, for a series of armed robberies, I worked my first "clip" in some downtown Adamsville Square jewelry store, Sid’s I think, the one with all the onyx rings on display in the front and the twelve signs about how you could have anything in the place on very easy terms, only a million installments (with interest piling up, of course). No, thanks. The clip, again for the clueless, is nothing but kids’ stuff, strictly for amateurs because no professional thief would risk his or her good name for such a low-rent payoff. The deal was one guy went in and got the salesperson’s attention while the other guy ripped off whatever was “hanging low on the tree.” In that arrangement I was usually the “tree” guy not because I had quick hands, although come to think of it I did (and big eyes, big greedy eyes for all the booty, and you know what booty means here now since I told you before), but because I didn’t have the knack of talking gibberish to adults. Hell, you probably did the clip yourself, maybe for kicks. And then forgot about it for some other less screwy kick. Not me.
Okay, so at that point maybe every kid, every curious kid ready in whatever manner to challenge authority and I (and most of my then corner boys, although not Denny if I recall correctly) are even. Here is the tie-breaker though. Moving on, I was the "holder" for more expansive enterprises with George H. (who, later, got killed when a drug deal he was promoting, a lonely gringo deal down in Mexico, went south on him). See George was a true artist, a true sneak thief who was able to get into any house by stealth and sheer determination. Mainly houses up in Adams Shore where people actually had stuff worth stealing unlike in the projects where the stuff was so much Bargain Center specials (the local Wal-Mart-like operation of its day). He needed me for two, no three, things. First, I was the “look-out” and even the clueless know what that means. Secondly, I actually held and carried some of the loot that he passed to me out of the window or door, and one time out a backyard bulkhead (the good stuff, televisions, silverware, a stamp collection, a coin collection, and some other stuff that I have forgotten about, was in the basement family room). Lastly, as George started to draw school and police attention I actually “held” the stuff in a safe location (which I will not disclose here just in case the various statutes of limitations have not run out). That went on for a while but George got busted for something else, some unruly child baloney rap thing, and that was that.
That was just a kid’s gangster moment, right? It was not all larcenies and kid dreams of some “big score” to get himself, and his family, out from under though. It couldn’t be for a kid, or the whole world, poor as it was, would have just collapsed over my head, and I would not be here to honor Denny’s request.
Oh, the different things that came up. Oddball things like Christmas tree bonfires on New Year’s Eve where we scurried like rats just as soon as neighbors put their trees out to be taken away in order to assemble them on the beach ready to be fired up and welcome in the new year. Or annual Halloween hooliganism where we, in a sugar frenzy, worked the neighborhood trick or treat racket hitting every house like the 82nd Airborne Division, or some such elite unit running amok in Baghdad or some Iraqi town ...
Hey, wait a minute, all this is so much eyewash because what, at least in my memory's eye, is the driving "projects" image is the "great awakening." Girls. Girls turning from sticks to shapes just around the time that I started to notice the difference, and being interested in that different if not always sure about what it meant. You don’t need a book to figure that out, although maybe it would have helped. And being fascinated and ill at ease at the same time around them, and being a moonstruck kid on every girl that gave me a passing glance, or what I thought was a passing glance, and the shoe leather-wearing out marathon walking, thinking about what to do about them, especially when the intelligence-gatherers told you about a girl who liked you. And the innocent, mostly dreaded, little petting parties, in dank little basements that served as 'family rooms' for each apartment, trying to be picked by the one you want to pick you and, well, you get the drift. Remind me to tell you some time, and here is where Denny comes in, how we put together, a bunch of corner-less corner boys, a ragtag doo wop group one summer for the express, the sole, the only purpose of, well, luring girls to the back of the school where we hung out. And it worked.
Now a lot of this is stuff any kid goes through, except just not in "the projects." And some of it is truly "projects" stuff - which way will he go, good or bad? But this next thing kind of ties it together. Just about the time when I was seriously committed to a petty criminal lifestyle, that “holding” stuff with my corner boy comrade George, I found the Thomas Crane Library branch that was then in the Adamsville South Elementary School (now further up the street toward Adamsville Square). And one summer I just started to read every biography or other interesting book they had in the Children's Section. While looking, longingly, over at the forbidden Adult Section on the other side of the room for the good stuff. And I dreamed. Yes, I am a "projects" boy, and I survived to tell the tale. Is that good enough for you, Denny?
Tom Waits Jersey Girl Lyrics
Got no time for the corner boys,
Down in the street makin' all that noise,
Don't want no whores on eighth avenue,
Cause tonight i'm gonna be with you.
'cause tonight i'm gonna take that ride,
Across the river to the jersey side,
Take my baby to the carnival,
And i'll take you all on the rides.
Down the shore everything's alright,
You're with your baby on a saturday night,
Don't you know that all my dreams come true,
When i'm walkin' down the street with you,
Sing sha la la la la la sha la la la.
You know she thrills me with all her charms,
When i'm wrapped up in my baby's arms,
My little angel gives me everything,
I know someday that she'll wear my ring.
So don't bother me cause i got no time,
I'm on my way to see that girl of mine,
Nothin' else matters in this whole wide world,
When you're in love with a jersey girl,
Sing sha la la la la la la.
And i call your name, i can't sleep at night,
Sha la la la la la la.
Shoot ‘Em Up, Bang “Em Up- Johnny Depp’s (Antonio Banderas And Salma Hayek Too)-“One Upon A Time In Mexico"- A Film Review
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Once Upon A Time In Mexico.
DVD Review
Once Upon A Time In Mexico, starring Johnny Depp, Antonio Banderas, Salma Hayek, 2004
This one may be a little too close for comfort these days what with the almost daily carnage reported from the drug wars in Mexico but anything that has Johnny Depp in it will at least get my attention. Although Johnny is not always up to par, Sweeney Todd seemed, well, too bizarre even for him, he is not afraid to take on quirky roles in the interest of making some memorable characters. Here he plays an upfront (literally) CIA agent down in Mexico to help defuse what looks like an attempt by the bad guys to knock off what passes for a good guy el presidente there and take over the government. To do, whatever. Yes, I know the plot sounds very familiar. Also familiar in this third part of the trilogy is the Angel-Diablo avenger of the people’s wrongs, and his own personal wrongs (wife, played by Salma Hayek, in flash-backs killed by the bad guys), Antonio Banderas. Of course that means plenty of shoot ‘em up, bang ‘em up as the two sides fire every thing they have at each other. And equally true, of course, the bad guys get their just desserts. Johnny will get a citation from the bosses at Langley for this one for sure.
P.S. Here is one thing that has always intrigued about shoot 'em up movies and it was really obvious here. Now I am no expert of weaponry, although I know how to handle a gun but Antonio Banderas’ shooting from every hip at random would seem to be foolhardy. Not only that but his chances of hitting anybody in the real world that way would seem minimal. On the other hand even the elite forces of the opponent seem, always, to be something out of the gang that could not shoot straight. The good guys must have the angels on their side, right?
DVD Review
Once Upon A Time In Mexico, starring Johnny Depp, Antonio Banderas, Salma Hayek, 2004
This one may be a little too close for comfort these days what with the almost daily carnage reported from the drug wars in Mexico but anything that has Johnny Depp in it will at least get my attention. Although Johnny is not always up to par, Sweeney Todd seemed, well, too bizarre even for him, he is not afraid to take on quirky roles in the interest of making some memorable characters. Here he plays an upfront (literally) CIA agent down in Mexico to help defuse what looks like an attempt by the bad guys to knock off what passes for a good guy el presidente there and take over the government. To do, whatever. Yes, I know the plot sounds very familiar. Also familiar in this third part of the trilogy is the Angel-Diablo avenger of the people’s wrongs, and his own personal wrongs (wife, played by Salma Hayek, in flash-backs killed by the bad guys), Antonio Banderas. Of course that means plenty of shoot ‘em up, bang ‘em up as the two sides fire every thing they have at each other. And equally true, of course, the bad guys get their just desserts. Johnny will get a citation from the bosses at Langley for this one for sure.
P.S. Here is one thing that has always intrigued about shoot 'em up movies and it was really obvious here. Now I am no expert of weaponry, although I know how to handle a gun but Antonio Banderas’ shooting from every hip at random would seem to be foolhardy. Not only that but his chances of hitting anybody in the real world that way would seem minimal. On the other hand even the elite forces of the opponent seem, always, to be something out of the gang that could not shoot straight. The good guys must have the angels on their side, right?
Monday, September 26, 2011
From The Pages Of "Australasian Spartacist"-Drop the Charges Against Refugee Protesters!-No Deportations!
Australasian Spartacist No. 213
Winter 2011
Drop the Charges Against Refugee Protesters!
No Deportations!
We reprint below a Partisan Defence Committee (PDC) letter sent to the federal Attorney-General on 26 May protesting the charging of refugees over demonstrations at Villawood on 20 April. Since then, on 9 June, federal police again fired “bean-bag” bullets and used capsicum spray to suppress an angry protest by refugees at the Christmas Island detention centre. The protest reportedly erupted in response to further rejections of asylum claims. Shortly afterwards, federal police charged 18 asylum seekers over the earlier 13 March Christmas Island protest. As with those charged following the Villawood protests, they face being denied a permanent visa if convicted.
Refugees are kept imprisoned for months, and even years, under constant threat of being deported to countries where they can face brutal punishment, persecution and death. This torture of desperate people, many seeking asylum from reactionary terror, has led to growing acts of self-harm. There have been numerous deaths in detention. This does not include the hundreds who have died making the treacherous sea voyage, such as the estimated 50 men, women and children who horrifically drowned when their boat crashed on rocks off Christmas Island on 15 December last year.
We say: Drop all the charges against the refugee protesters! No deportations! The trade unions must be mobilised to defend refugees and immigrants, and fight against all the government’s racist immigration laws.
The PDC is a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defence organisation associated with the Spartacist League.
* * *
We protest the federal Labor government’s brutal crackdown following a wave of desperate protests by refugees including at the remote Christmas Island and Sydney Villawood detention centres.
On 13 March up to 300 protesting detainees at Christmas Island were tear-gassed and fired upon by federal police using “bean-bag” bullets, reportedly breaking the leg of one detainee. On 20 April up to 100 protested at the Villawood detention centre, culminating in an eleven-day rooftop protest. Following the Villawood protests, 22 men were taken to Silverwater jail and held in solitary confinement. Seven have been charged with offences including affray and destroying or damaging property by fire. Outrageously some of those charged could face up to twelve years imprisonment. Two refugees from Christmas Island are also threatened with charges from separate alleged incidents. Meanwhile the government has vindictively put in place measures that deny permanent visas to those it deems to have committed an offence while in custody. But the real crime is that the government incarcerates and denies basic rights to desperate people who have already risked their lives fleeing poverty, oppression and war.
Under the Labor government’s grotesque regime of mandatory detention some 7,000 men, women and children languish in the many refugee detention centres across the country. There have been at least six deaths in these hellholes in the last eight months. It is a measure of the racist barbarism of the Australian capitalist state that it incarcerates and seeks to deport Iraqi, Afghan and Tamil refugees back to countries that the Australian imperialist military has directly taken part in the destruction of, in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, or, in the case of Sri Lanka, where the Australian government backed the Sinhala-chauvinist government in its murderous war against the Tamil population.
We condemn the federal government’s persecution and repression of defiant refugees and demand: Drop the charges against the detention centre detainees! No deportations! Release the refugees! Close the detention centres! Full citizenship rights for all who have made it here!
Winter 2011
Drop the Charges Against Refugee Protesters!
No Deportations!
We reprint below a Partisan Defence Committee (PDC) letter sent to the federal Attorney-General on 26 May protesting the charging of refugees over demonstrations at Villawood on 20 April. Since then, on 9 June, federal police again fired “bean-bag” bullets and used capsicum spray to suppress an angry protest by refugees at the Christmas Island detention centre. The protest reportedly erupted in response to further rejections of asylum claims. Shortly afterwards, federal police charged 18 asylum seekers over the earlier 13 March Christmas Island protest. As with those charged following the Villawood protests, they face being denied a permanent visa if convicted.
Refugees are kept imprisoned for months, and even years, under constant threat of being deported to countries where they can face brutal punishment, persecution and death. This torture of desperate people, many seeking asylum from reactionary terror, has led to growing acts of self-harm. There have been numerous deaths in detention. This does not include the hundreds who have died making the treacherous sea voyage, such as the estimated 50 men, women and children who horrifically drowned when their boat crashed on rocks off Christmas Island on 15 December last year.
We say: Drop all the charges against the refugee protesters! No deportations! The trade unions must be mobilised to defend refugees and immigrants, and fight against all the government’s racist immigration laws.
The PDC is a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defence organisation associated with the Spartacist League.
* * *
We protest the federal Labor government’s brutal crackdown following a wave of desperate protests by refugees including at the remote Christmas Island and Sydney Villawood detention centres.
On 13 March up to 300 protesting detainees at Christmas Island were tear-gassed and fired upon by federal police using “bean-bag” bullets, reportedly breaking the leg of one detainee. On 20 April up to 100 protested at the Villawood detention centre, culminating in an eleven-day rooftop protest. Following the Villawood protests, 22 men were taken to Silverwater jail and held in solitary confinement. Seven have been charged with offences including affray and destroying or damaging property by fire. Outrageously some of those charged could face up to twelve years imprisonment. Two refugees from Christmas Island are also threatened with charges from separate alleged incidents. Meanwhile the government has vindictively put in place measures that deny permanent visas to those it deems to have committed an offence while in custody. But the real crime is that the government incarcerates and denies basic rights to desperate people who have already risked their lives fleeing poverty, oppression and war.
Under the Labor government’s grotesque regime of mandatory detention some 7,000 men, women and children languish in the many refugee detention centres across the country. There have been at least six deaths in these hellholes in the last eight months. It is a measure of the racist barbarism of the Australian capitalist state that it incarcerates and seeks to deport Iraqi, Afghan and Tamil refugees back to countries that the Australian imperialist military has directly taken part in the destruction of, in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, or, in the case of Sri Lanka, where the Australian government backed the Sinhala-chauvinist government in its murderous war against the Tamil population.
We condemn the federal government’s persecution and repression of defiant refugees and demand: Drop the charges against the detention centre detainees! No deportations! Release the refugees! Close the detention centres! Full citizenship rights for all who have made it here!
From The Pages Of "Australasian Spartacist"- ALP Government's War on Workers and Oppressed
Click on the headline to link to other articles from this issue of Australasian Spartacist
Australasian Spartacist No. 213
Winter 2011
Federal Budget Pummels the Poor
ALP Government's War on Workers and Oppressed
We Need a Multiracial Revolutionary Workers Party!
From its draconian anti-union legislation to its brutal treatment of refugees and bloody militarism abroad, the minority federal ALP government, propped up by the Greens and “independents,” is an enemy of working people and the oppressed. That this government is thoroughly dedicated to administering in the interests of the Australian capitalist rulers was driven home yet again by the May federal budget. In aiming to slash $22 billion in spending over the next four years, the budget is framed to make workers and the poor pay for the massive deficit racked up by the government in its attempts to “save capitalism” with the onset of the global financial crisis in 2008.
Pushing mantras such as getting the budget “back in the black,” the government is targeting the neediest for cruel welfare cuts. In some cases this will not only threaten the livelihoods but the very lives of recipients. Under punitive new regulations access to the disabilities pension will be sharply curtailed. Disabled people deemed capable of working by the government are threatened with losing their pensions unless they submit to demeaning quarterly Centrelink interviews to prove they have been looking for work. Unemployed youth under 21 years of age will lose $43 a week from their benefits while poverty-stricken single parents (overwhelmingly women) will have their paltry pensions slashed by $56 per week when their child turns twelve. Alongside this, the government aims to slash more than 1,200 jobs from Medicare, Centrelink and Child Support services. These attacks on the poor take place as the cost of living for basic items such as electricity, water, groceries, education, health and accommodation are escalating. With soaring housing costs, including skyrocketing rents, thousands have been thrown onto the streets. As for public transport and hospitals, they sink deeper into disrepair.
Meanwhile the government’s punitive and racist welfare “quarantining” that accompanied the 2007 police and military occupation of Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory is being extended to more communities in Queensland and Western Australia. This extension of welfare “quarantining,” which in NT Aboriginal communities combines with puritanical prohibition on alcohol and pornography, is in the service of an ever-increasing state intervention into the lives of the oppressed and working people.
Prime Minister Gillard openly competes with the Liberal/National opposition leader Tony Abbott over who can put forward the most reactionary social and economic policies. The current budget cuts targeting single parents and unemployed youth are designed to reinforce the grip of the family on women and youth. A key prop for the maintenance of capitalist rule and source of women’s oppression, the institution of the family, backed by church and state, is upheld to instil conservative obedience to the “values” of bourgeois morality and to raise the next generation of wage slaves for industry and cannon fodder for future imperialist wars. In Australia, where wife-beating is rife and a woman is killed almost every week by a male partner or ex-partner, the cuts to the single-parent benefit will help drive women and children back to the horror of domestic violence. Meanwhile, as the mining giants and banks rake in record profits, the bourgeois media is aggressively demanding deeper cuts to welfare as the ruling class worries about the effects of a future bust of the resources boom on the budget bottom line.
In representing the interests of the bourgeoisie, Gillard has long been a crusader against welfare. In 2007, speaking at a meeting of the Sydney Institute, she announced, “The old days of passive welfare for those able to contribute are gone.” Today this threat comes under the guise of what she now calls “The Dignity of Work.” This is the modern version of the cruder “dole bludgers” moniker used to single out, blame and victimise the unemployed and all welfare recipients for the failings of the capitalist system to provide decent education, training and jobs. Thus the budget also targeted the estimated 230,000 long-term unemployed, who will be required to do 11 months of work-for-the-dole or lose their payments from July next year.
By forcing people off welfare the government aims to create an even larger pool of desperate people for the bosses to ruthlessly exploit and to use as a wedge to drive down the conditions of all workers. With workers shackled at every turn by the union tops’ kow-towing to Labor’s anti-union legislation, for many the “dignity of work” means being exploited in a casual and/or part-time job for barely subsistence wages under a dictatorial boss, usually backed by vicious supervisors who enforce unsafe working conditions. Hundreds of workers are killed every year at work. Amidst this increasing denigration and brutalisation of the working class, slashing of welfare and blaming the victims of this irrational profit-gouging system, the budget assured a new round of company tax cuts.
All over the capitalist world, workers have been suffering the impact of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. With unemployment and house foreclosures threatening the lives of millions, capitalist governments have ramped up union-busting attacks and vicious austerity measures. In response, workers across Europe, from Britain, to Spain, France and Greece, have mobilised in massive defensive struggles, including strikes and protests, against these attacks. But, simultaneously, the misleaders of the working class have pushed parliamentary reformist illusions and virulent protectionism. This serves to tie the proletariat and their unions to “their” own capitalist rulers while whipping up racist reaction and dividing workers along national lines.
Resources Boom Masks Rotting Capitalist System
In Australia, the effects of the global economic crisis have been masked by the ongoing massive demand for resources, above all by the Chinese bureaucratically deformed workers state, which has pushed the terms of trade to the highest level in 140 years. But the economy that exists outside the resources sector is stagnant or going backwards. And it is being made sicker by the resources boom, which has sent the dollar soaring, creating inflationary pressures and driving up the cost of exports. Together these factors have contributed to downturns in retail, construction and manufacturing.
Exacerbated by recent natural disasters, the Australian economy just experienced its biggest quarterly contraction in 20 years. And it is the workers who are being made to pay. The official unemployment rate of 4.9 percent hides the real level of joblessness, estimated at around 6.9 percent and growing daily. Hardly a week goes by where a manufacturing plant or retail store doesn’t close and/or hundreds don’t lose their jobs. In June, the clothing chain Colorado announced that it would close 140 stores across the country, shedding more than 1,000 jobs. More than 100,000 jobs have disappeared in manufacturing in the last three years.
The ALP government, with help from the pro-capitalist trade-union tops, has held the economic crisis up as a club against workers’ struggles, arguing that any proletarian struggle would sabotage the national economy. Such nationalist class-collaborationist poison serves to derail class struggle by instilling in the proletariat the lie that workers, who are forced to sell their labour power to survive, and the capitalists, who grow fat profiting from the wealth produced by the workers, have fundamental interests in common.
There is a burning need for class-struggle opposition to the bourgeoisie’s onslaughts. With its hands on the levers of production the proletariat uniquely has the potential social power and interest to sweep away this irrational exploitative system. What’s needed is a revolutionary workers party that fights to unleash the proletariat’s social power in a struggle not just for its own class interests but for all the oppressed. Based on the understanding that the interests of the working class and the capitalist rulers are irreconcilably counterposed, such a leadership would not only seek to defend and improve the present conditions of the proletariat but fight to lead the working class in sweeping away the entire system of capitalist wage slavery.
The only way out of the endless cycle of capitalist economic crises and imperialist wars was shown by the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, when the workers took power in their own hands, seizing the banks, the factories, mines, mills and other means of production from the hands of the capitalists, and established a proletarian state based on workers soviets (councils) and an internationalist program. It will take world socialist revolution, leading to the collectivisation of the means of production and economic planning on an international scale, to provide a future for humanity.
For a Class-Struggle Fight Against Racist Capitalism
While slashing welfare, Labor’s federal budget also showered in excess of one billion dollars on “border security,” including the vile campaign to demonise and punish the small numbers of refugees arriving by boat. The mandatory and long-term incarceration of refugees in inhumane detention centres, often ending in deportation, has driven many detainees to repeated desperate protests (see article, page 1). The May budget coincided with the Labor government announcing its despicable proposed deal with the Malaysian government to barter 800 asylum seekers currently in detention in Australia for “resettling” 1,000 refugees per year from Malaysia for the next four years. The bourgeoisie’s hysterical campaign against refugees is being used to promote xenophobic nationalism and inflame racial hostilities in order to keep the working class divided and to deflect it from the much needed struggle against the capitalist rulers who are driving down the conditions of all. Sharp opposition to racism and chauvinism is vital to the unity and integrity of the working class and to combat the bosses’ divide-and-rule schemes. We say: Down with the bi-partisan war on refugees! No deportations! Close the detention camps! Full citizenship rights for all who have made it here!
There is deep-seated worker hostility to the capitalist rulers’ all-sided attacks. On 8 June, thousands of women community sector workers, who assist the disabled and downtrodden, marched for equal pay in major cities across the country. A week later, angry New South Wales public sector workers rallied in their thousands against the Liberal state government’s legislation effectively imposing pay cuts. Pilots, engineers and transport workers are seething at Qantas management’s union-busting attempts to outsource jobs and drive down working conditions. And waterside workers, fed up with unsafe work conditions, have struck against the vicious union-busters at Patrick Stevedores.
To carry out the needed class-struggle fight against the government’s and bosses’ anti-worker attacks requires a political struggle against the pro-capitalist union bureaucrats who channel workers’ anger into support for the ALP and the bosses’ courts while sowing nationalism and protectionist poison. In May, when Patrick Stevedores provocatively closed down its container terminals and refused to pay wharfies in response to union bans in defence of job safety and a wage rise, the hidebound MUA bureaucrats quickly took a dive. Faced with Patrick’s provocation, they called off the bans and appealed to the “national” interest, seeking to appease the exporters who were baying for union blood. MUA national secretary, Paddy Crumlin, grovelled “We’ve listened to the concerns of the rural community and responded accordingly,” while his deputy, Mick Doleman, played the nationalist card railing that Patrick was “unAustralian” and “owns the decision to shut down the ports...” (“MUA Saves Patrick from itself,” MUA web site, 27 May). The MUA tops’ response is a far cry from the militant class-struggle actions—including solid strikes with mass pickets to shut down the ports—that helped build the waterfront unions. As the bosses’ labour lieutenants, union bureaucrats throughout the country have increasingly sacrificed class-struggle weapons. As a result, the union movement has shrunk to only 18 percent of the workforce as the bosses escalate their attacks.
Rather than mobilising their worker base in a fight against the capitalist rulers, the union tops invest great energy and purpose into promoting the bosses’ reactionary defence of state and nation. In the face of Qantas management’s open union-busting threats, Transport Workers Union honcho Tony Sheldon recently linked his opposition to Qantas’ attempts to cut costs by outsourcing labour, to “security” and “border protection” at Australian airports. As reported in the Weekend Australian Financial Review (7-8 May), Sheldon despicably ranted at a recent union-sponsored aviation forum that “there were ‘gaping holes’ in the system for ensuring that workers allowed into the secure sections of airports were subject to background checks and held an Aviation Security Identity Card.” Pro-capitalist to the core, Sheldon told the AFR that he was “of the strong view, to put to our delegates and our members, that we should take industrial action over that matter because it’s fundamental to frontline security of the aviation industry and it’s one that Qantas has avoided for a very long time.”
Helping to enforce the “security” of fortress “White Australia” is the kiss of death for the trade unions. It buys into the government’s reactionary “war on terror,” which has not only served to divide the working class by whipping up anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim hatred, but has shredded civil liberties while greatly expanding the repressive powers of the state, targeting all working people. The draconian powers of the witchhunting Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC), which targets militant construction unionists for persecution and fines, are modelled on “anti-terror” laws introduced under the former Liberal/Coalition government of John Howard with the avid backing of the ALP Opposition.
In seeking to endear themselves to the bourgeoisie by trumpeting their defence of national borders and “protecting” Australian industry, class-collaborationist union misleaders poison potential for working-class solidarity at home and with workers’ struggles abroad. Understanding that it is not overseas workers but the irrational capitalist system that causes unemployment and exploitation, a class-struggle leadership of the unions would take up the fight to defend jobs at the bosses’ expense and seek to unite the employed and unemployed in common struggles around common demands. In opposition to sackings it would fight for jobs for all through a shorter work week at no loss in pay and for a massive program of public works to rebuild the crumbling infrastructure of decaying capitalist society. It would fight to organise non-unionised workers and for union hiring and training, with all workers (women, youth and immigrants) on union wages and conditions.
A revolutionary leadership would be first and foremost internationalist. In fighting for solidarity actions between workers across national boundaries, it would draw on immigrant workers’ experience of class struggle abroad and their living links to workers overseas. It would stand sharply opposed to the union tops’ nationalist bile and cringing loyalty to the capitalist state. Consisting at its core of the military, police, prisons and courts, the bourgeois state is an instrument of organised violence that exists to defend the capitalist exploiters against the strivings of the proletariat and oppressed. As Russian revolutionary leader V. I. Lenin explained in his powerful 1917 treatise, The State and Revolution, the capitalist state cannot be reformed or wielded in the interests of the working class and oppressed; it must be shattered through workers revolution.
Not Laborite Reformism But a Communist Perspective
Following the release of the budget, the reformist opponents of revolutionary Marxism brayed in unison about the attacks by Labor. “Federal Budget 2011-12 Lies and deception” wrote the Communist Party’s The Guardian. “Budget 2011: A budget for billionaires” declared Green Left Weekly. In their article “Desperately seeking surplus,” Socialist Alternative (SAlt) sagely warned “By embracing the rhetoric about public debt and the importance of budget surplus, the Gillard government has signalled the likelihood of more savage cuts in the future....” True enough. But who do the cynical hacks who lead these organisations think they are kidding? For all their moaning about the federal ALP government’s attacks, these reformist groups gave back-handed support to the ALP in last October’s federal elections through the preferential voting system or, in the case of SAlt, simply advocated “giving a first preference vote to either Labor, the Greens or others who are genuinely left-wing...” (SAlt election statement, 9 July 2010).
The CPA, Socialist Alliance and SAlt, each with their own particular brand of liberal-reformist program, all push the lie that, with enough pressure from the masses, the capitalist state, particularly when administered by Labor, can serve the interests of the working class. But whichever party is in power under capitalism it serves to administer capitalism on behalf of the capitalist class. In contrast, fighting for an independent proletarian-centred program, we in the Spartacist League forthrightly called for “No Vote to Labor! No Vote to Bourgeois Greens!” in the 2010 elections. Noting that both the Liberal/National Coalition and Labor were in a reactionary race to sell themselves to the capitalist rulers we wrote, “For the working class and oppressed, the only thing on offer in the upcoming Australian federal election is more capitalist austerity and reaction” (see “‘White Australia’ Elections: Racism, Austerity, Repression,” ASp No. 210, Spring 2010).
We fight to win militant workers, revolutionary-minded youth and anti-racist fighters to the perspective of building a revolutionary workers party. Such a party can only be built in opposition to, and in struggle against, the politics of the ALP and Laborite trade-union bureaucrats who sap and derail the fighting power of the working class by pushing the lie that there can be a partnership between labour and capital. The ALP is what Marxists term a bourgeois workers party, historically based on the trade unions but thoroughly committed to maintaining the capitalist order. It is necessary to replace the misleaders in the unions with a class-struggle leadership, linked to a multiracial revolutionary workers party that is committed to smashing capitalist rule and establishing a new social order run by those who produce the wealth: the working class.
The drive to extract ever greater profit from workers’ labour, the racist oppression of Aboriginal people and refugees, the blood-drenched imperialist carnage from Iraq to Afghanistan, the all-sided social bigotry targeting women and gays—all these are part of the system of capitalist rule. That system must be destroyed root and branch by workers revolution. Proletarian seizure of state power would abolish private ownership of the means of production, collectivise industry and establish a planned socialist economy. Only then will the wealth and productive capacity of society serve the needs of the majority and not the profits of a tiny layer. Ultimately only international working-class rule based on the fight for communism can eliminate the poverty, oppression and misery endemic to this decaying and barbaric capitalist order.
Australasian Spartacist No. 213
Winter 2011
Federal Budget Pummels the Poor
ALP Government's War on Workers and Oppressed
We Need a Multiracial Revolutionary Workers Party!
From its draconian anti-union legislation to its brutal treatment of refugees and bloody militarism abroad, the minority federal ALP government, propped up by the Greens and “independents,” is an enemy of working people and the oppressed. That this government is thoroughly dedicated to administering in the interests of the Australian capitalist rulers was driven home yet again by the May federal budget. In aiming to slash $22 billion in spending over the next four years, the budget is framed to make workers and the poor pay for the massive deficit racked up by the government in its attempts to “save capitalism” with the onset of the global financial crisis in 2008.
Pushing mantras such as getting the budget “back in the black,” the government is targeting the neediest for cruel welfare cuts. In some cases this will not only threaten the livelihoods but the very lives of recipients. Under punitive new regulations access to the disabilities pension will be sharply curtailed. Disabled people deemed capable of working by the government are threatened with losing their pensions unless they submit to demeaning quarterly Centrelink interviews to prove they have been looking for work. Unemployed youth under 21 years of age will lose $43 a week from their benefits while poverty-stricken single parents (overwhelmingly women) will have their paltry pensions slashed by $56 per week when their child turns twelve. Alongside this, the government aims to slash more than 1,200 jobs from Medicare, Centrelink and Child Support services. These attacks on the poor take place as the cost of living for basic items such as electricity, water, groceries, education, health and accommodation are escalating. With soaring housing costs, including skyrocketing rents, thousands have been thrown onto the streets. As for public transport and hospitals, they sink deeper into disrepair.
Meanwhile the government’s punitive and racist welfare “quarantining” that accompanied the 2007 police and military occupation of Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory is being extended to more communities in Queensland and Western Australia. This extension of welfare “quarantining,” which in NT Aboriginal communities combines with puritanical prohibition on alcohol and pornography, is in the service of an ever-increasing state intervention into the lives of the oppressed and working people.
Prime Minister Gillard openly competes with the Liberal/National opposition leader Tony Abbott over who can put forward the most reactionary social and economic policies. The current budget cuts targeting single parents and unemployed youth are designed to reinforce the grip of the family on women and youth. A key prop for the maintenance of capitalist rule and source of women’s oppression, the institution of the family, backed by church and state, is upheld to instil conservative obedience to the “values” of bourgeois morality and to raise the next generation of wage slaves for industry and cannon fodder for future imperialist wars. In Australia, where wife-beating is rife and a woman is killed almost every week by a male partner or ex-partner, the cuts to the single-parent benefit will help drive women and children back to the horror of domestic violence. Meanwhile, as the mining giants and banks rake in record profits, the bourgeois media is aggressively demanding deeper cuts to welfare as the ruling class worries about the effects of a future bust of the resources boom on the budget bottom line.
In representing the interests of the bourgeoisie, Gillard has long been a crusader against welfare. In 2007, speaking at a meeting of the Sydney Institute, she announced, “The old days of passive welfare for those able to contribute are gone.” Today this threat comes under the guise of what she now calls “The Dignity of Work.” This is the modern version of the cruder “dole bludgers” moniker used to single out, blame and victimise the unemployed and all welfare recipients for the failings of the capitalist system to provide decent education, training and jobs. Thus the budget also targeted the estimated 230,000 long-term unemployed, who will be required to do 11 months of work-for-the-dole or lose their payments from July next year.
By forcing people off welfare the government aims to create an even larger pool of desperate people for the bosses to ruthlessly exploit and to use as a wedge to drive down the conditions of all workers. With workers shackled at every turn by the union tops’ kow-towing to Labor’s anti-union legislation, for many the “dignity of work” means being exploited in a casual and/or part-time job for barely subsistence wages under a dictatorial boss, usually backed by vicious supervisors who enforce unsafe working conditions. Hundreds of workers are killed every year at work. Amidst this increasing denigration and brutalisation of the working class, slashing of welfare and blaming the victims of this irrational profit-gouging system, the budget assured a new round of company tax cuts.
All over the capitalist world, workers have been suffering the impact of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. With unemployment and house foreclosures threatening the lives of millions, capitalist governments have ramped up union-busting attacks and vicious austerity measures. In response, workers across Europe, from Britain, to Spain, France and Greece, have mobilised in massive defensive struggles, including strikes and protests, against these attacks. But, simultaneously, the misleaders of the working class have pushed parliamentary reformist illusions and virulent protectionism. This serves to tie the proletariat and their unions to “their” own capitalist rulers while whipping up racist reaction and dividing workers along national lines.
Resources Boom Masks Rotting Capitalist System
In Australia, the effects of the global economic crisis have been masked by the ongoing massive demand for resources, above all by the Chinese bureaucratically deformed workers state, which has pushed the terms of trade to the highest level in 140 years. But the economy that exists outside the resources sector is stagnant or going backwards. And it is being made sicker by the resources boom, which has sent the dollar soaring, creating inflationary pressures and driving up the cost of exports. Together these factors have contributed to downturns in retail, construction and manufacturing.
Exacerbated by recent natural disasters, the Australian economy just experienced its biggest quarterly contraction in 20 years. And it is the workers who are being made to pay. The official unemployment rate of 4.9 percent hides the real level of joblessness, estimated at around 6.9 percent and growing daily. Hardly a week goes by where a manufacturing plant or retail store doesn’t close and/or hundreds don’t lose their jobs. In June, the clothing chain Colorado announced that it would close 140 stores across the country, shedding more than 1,000 jobs. More than 100,000 jobs have disappeared in manufacturing in the last three years.
The ALP government, with help from the pro-capitalist trade-union tops, has held the economic crisis up as a club against workers’ struggles, arguing that any proletarian struggle would sabotage the national economy. Such nationalist class-collaborationist poison serves to derail class struggle by instilling in the proletariat the lie that workers, who are forced to sell their labour power to survive, and the capitalists, who grow fat profiting from the wealth produced by the workers, have fundamental interests in common.
There is a burning need for class-struggle opposition to the bourgeoisie’s onslaughts. With its hands on the levers of production the proletariat uniquely has the potential social power and interest to sweep away this irrational exploitative system. What’s needed is a revolutionary workers party that fights to unleash the proletariat’s social power in a struggle not just for its own class interests but for all the oppressed. Based on the understanding that the interests of the working class and the capitalist rulers are irreconcilably counterposed, such a leadership would not only seek to defend and improve the present conditions of the proletariat but fight to lead the working class in sweeping away the entire system of capitalist wage slavery.
The only way out of the endless cycle of capitalist economic crises and imperialist wars was shown by the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, when the workers took power in their own hands, seizing the banks, the factories, mines, mills and other means of production from the hands of the capitalists, and established a proletarian state based on workers soviets (councils) and an internationalist program. It will take world socialist revolution, leading to the collectivisation of the means of production and economic planning on an international scale, to provide a future for humanity.
For a Class-Struggle Fight Against Racist Capitalism
While slashing welfare, Labor’s federal budget also showered in excess of one billion dollars on “border security,” including the vile campaign to demonise and punish the small numbers of refugees arriving by boat. The mandatory and long-term incarceration of refugees in inhumane detention centres, often ending in deportation, has driven many detainees to repeated desperate protests (see article, page 1). The May budget coincided with the Labor government announcing its despicable proposed deal with the Malaysian government to barter 800 asylum seekers currently in detention in Australia for “resettling” 1,000 refugees per year from Malaysia for the next four years. The bourgeoisie’s hysterical campaign against refugees is being used to promote xenophobic nationalism and inflame racial hostilities in order to keep the working class divided and to deflect it from the much needed struggle against the capitalist rulers who are driving down the conditions of all. Sharp opposition to racism and chauvinism is vital to the unity and integrity of the working class and to combat the bosses’ divide-and-rule schemes. We say: Down with the bi-partisan war on refugees! No deportations! Close the detention camps! Full citizenship rights for all who have made it here!
There is deep-seated worker hostility to the capitalist rulers’ all-sided attacks. On 8 June, thousands of women community sector workers, who assist the disabled and downtrodden, marched for equal pay in major cities across the country. A week later, angry New South Wales public sector workers rallied in their thousands against the Liberal state government’s legislation effectively imposing pay cuts. Pilots, engineers and transport workers are seething at Qantas management’s union-busting attempts to outsource jobs and drive down working conditions. And waterside workers, fed up with unsafe work conditions, have struck against the vicious union-busters at Patrick Stevedores.
To carry out the needed class-struggle fight against the government’s and bosses’ anti-worker attacks requires a political struggle against the pro-capitalist union bureaucrats who channel workers’ anger into support for the ALP and the bosses’ courts while sowing nationalism and protectionist poison. In May, when Patrick Stevedores provocatively closed down its container terminals and refused to pay wharfies in response to union bans in defence of job safety and a wage rise, the hidebound MUA bureaucrats quickly took a dive. Faced with Patrick’s provocation, they called off the bans and appealed to the “national” interest, seeking to appease the exporters who were baying for union blood. MUA national secretary, Paddy Crumlin, grovelled “We’ve listened to the concerns of the rural community and responded accordingly,” while his deputy, Mick Doleman, played the nationalist card railing that Patrick was “unAustralian” and “owns the decision to shut down the ports...” (“MUA Saves Patrick from itself,” MUA web site, 27 May). The MUA tops’ response is a far cry from the militant class-struggle actions—including solid strikes with mass pickets to shut down the ports—that helped build the waterfront unions. As the bosses’ labour lieutenants, union bureaucrats throughout the country have increasingly sacrificed class-struggle weapons. As a result, the union movement has shrunk to only 18 percent of the workforce as the bosses escalate their attacks.
Rather than mobilising their worker base in a fight against the capitalist rulers, the union tops invest great energy and purpose into promoting the bosses’ reactionary defence of state and nation. In the face of Qantas management’s open union-busting threats, Transport Workers Union honcho Tony Sheldon recently linked his opposition to Qantas’ attempts to cut costs by outsourcing labour, to “security” and “border protection” at Australian airports. As reported in the Weekend Australian Financial Review (7-8 May), Sheldon despicably ranted at a recent union-sponsored aviation forum that “there were ‘gaping holes’ in the system for ensuring that workers allowed into the secure sections of airports were subject to background checks and held an Aviation Security Identity Card.” Pro-capitalist to the core, Sheldon told the AFR that he was “of the strong view, to put to our delegates and our members, that we should take industrial action over that matter because it’s fundamental to frontline security of the aviation industry and it’s one that Qantas has avoided for a very long time.”
Helping to enforce the “security” of fortress “White Australia” is the kiss of death for the trade unions. It buys into the government’s reactionary “war on terror,” which has not only served to divide the working class by whipping up anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim hatred, but has shredded civil liberties while greatly expanding the repressive powers of the state, targeting all working people. The draconian powers of the witchhunting Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC), which targets militant construction unionists for persecution and fines, are modelled on “anti-terror” laws introduced under the former Liberal/Coalition government of John Howard with the avid backing of the ALP Opposition.
In seeking to endear themselves to the bourgeoisie by trumpeting their defence of national borders and “protecting” Australian industry, class-collaborationist union misleaders poison potential for working-class solidarity at home and with workers’ struggles abroad. Understanding that it is not overseas workers but the irrational capitalist system that causes unemployment and exploitation, a class-struggle leadership of the unions would take up the fight to defend jobs at the bosses’ expense and seek to unite the employed and unemployed in common struggles around common demands. In opposition to sackings it would fight for jobs for all through a shorter work week at no loss in pay and for a massive program of public works to rebuild the crumbling infrastructure of decaying capitalist society. It would fight to organise non-unionised workers and for union hiring and training, with all workers (women, youth and immigrants) on union wages and conditions.
A revolutionary leadership would be first and foremost internationalist. In fighting for solidarity actions between workers across national boundaries, it would draw on immigrant workers’ experience of class struggle abroad and their living links to workers overseas. It would stand sharply opposed to the union tops’ nationalist bile and cringing loyalty to the capitalist state. Consisting at its core of the military, police, prisons and courts, the bourgeois state is an instrument of organised violence that exists to defend the capitalist exploiters against the strivings of the proletariat and oppressed. As Russian revolutionary leader V. I. Lenin explained in his powerful 1917 treatise, The State and Revolution, the capitalist state cannot be reformed or wielded in the interests of the working class and oppressed; it must be shattered through workers revolution.
Not Laborite Reformism But a Communist Perspective
Following the release of the budget, the reformist opponents of revolutionary Marxism brayed in unison about the attacks by Labor. “Federal Budget 2011-12 Lies and deception” wrote the Communist Party’s The Guardian. “Budget 2011: A budget for billionaires” declared Green Left Weekly. In their article “Desperately seeking surplus,” Socialist Alternative (SAlt) sagely warned “By embracing the rhetoric about public debt and the importance of budget surplus, the Gillard government has signalled the likelihood of more savage cuts in the future....” True enough. But who do the cynical hacks who lead these organisations think they are kidding? For all their moaning about the federal ALP government’s attacks, these reformist groups gave back-handed support to the ALP in last October’s federal elections through the preferential voting system or, in the case of SAlt, simply advocated “giving a first preference vote to either Labor, the Greens or others who are genuinely left-wing...” (SAlt election statement, 9 July 2010).
The CPA, Socialist Alliance and SAlt, each with their own particular brand of liberal-reformist program, all push the lie that, with enough pressure from the masses, the capitalist state, particularly when administered by Labor, can serve the interests of the working class. But whichever party is in power under capitalism it serves to administer capitalism on behalf of the capitalist class. In contrast, fighting for an independent proletarian-centred program, we in the Spartacist League forthrightly called for “No Vote to Labor! No Vote to Bourgeois Greens!” in the 2010 elections. Noting that both the Liberal/National Coalition and Labor were in a reactionary race to sell themselves to the capitalist rulers we wrote, “For the working class and oppressed, the only thing on offer in the upcoming Australian federal election is more capitalist austerity and reaction” (see “‘White Australia’ Elections: Racism, Austerity, Repression,” ASp No. 210, Spring 2010).
We fight to win militant workers, revolutionary-minded youth and anti-racist fighters to the perspective of building a revolutionary workers party. Such a party can only be built in opposition to, and in struggle against, the politics of the ALP and Laborite trade-union bureaucrats who sap and derail the fighting power of the working class by pushing the lie that there can be a partnership between labour and capital. The ALP is what Marxists term a bourgeois workers party, historically based on the trade unions but thoroughly committed to maintaining the capitalist order. It is necessary to replace the misleaders in the unions with a class-struggle leadership, linked to a multiracial revolutionary workers party that is committed to smashing capitalist rule and establishing a new social order run by those who produce the wealth: the working class.
The drive to extract ever greater profit from workers’ labour, the racist oppression of Aboriginal people and refugees, the blood-drenched imperialist carnage from Iraq to Afghanistan, the all-sided social bigotry targeting women and gays—all these are part of the system of capitalist rule. That system must be destroyed root and branch by workers revolution. Proletarian seizure of state power would abolish private ownership of the means of production, collectivise industry and establish a planned socialist economy. Only then will the wealth and productive capacity of society serve the needs of the majority and not the profits of a tiny layer. Ultimately only international working-class rule based on the fight for communism can eliminate the poverty, oppression and misery endemic to this decaying and barbaric capitalist order.
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