Click on the headline to link to the Partisan Defense Committee website.
Reposted from the American Left History blog, dated December 1, 2010.
Markin comment:
I like to think of myself as a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the working class and, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program. Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year, however, in light of the addition of Attorney Lynne Stewart (yes, I know, she has been disbarred but that does not make her less of a people’s attorney in my eyes) to the stipend program, I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class struggle defense in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).
That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson, present class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers, as represented here by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their better days and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today; the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.
That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.
And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly.
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Workers Vanguard No. 991 25 November 2011
Free the Class-War Prisoners!
26th Annual PDC Holiday Appeal
An Injury to One Is an Injury to All!
(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)
The holiday season is once again upon us. Any day now, we’ll be assaulted 24/7 with commercials hawking the latest PlayStations, full-page newspaper ads featuring Christmas lingerie and jewelry, sitcoms with oafish dads sporting hideous Christmas ties and endless broadcasts of the movie about the Midwestern banker who, thanks to his guardian angel Clarence, discovers that “It’s a Wonderful Life.” For most, this year’s holidays mean that the bosses are in the Bahamas sucking up single malt scotch while paychecks are replaced with pink slips and the Santa shimmying down the chimney is a marshal serving a foreclosure notice. At the same time, poor families debate whether the small bit of money set aside for the holidays will be spent on presents or a bus ticket to visit their loved ones behind bars.
For us, this time of year is an occasion to redouble our commitment to those among the inhabitants of America’s vast network of prisons who were singled out for standing up to racist capitalist oppression—the class-war prisoners. Twenty-six years ago, the Partisan Defense Committee revived the program of the early International Labor Defense (ILD) under its secretary, James P. Cannon, of sending stipends to the class-war prisoners—irrespective of their political views or affiliations. As Cannon wrote:
“In one sense of the word the whole of capitalist society is a prison. For the great mass of people who do the hard, useful work there is no such word as freedom. They come and go at the order of a few. Their lives are regulated according to the needs and wishes of a few. A censorship is put upon their words and deeds. The fruits of their labor are taken from them. And if, by chance, they have the instinct and spirit to rebel, if they take their place in the vanguard of the fight for justice, the prisons are waiting.”
—James P. Cannon, “The Cause that Passes Through a Prison” (Labor Defender, September 1926)
We provide monthly stipends to 16 class-war prisoners and holiday gifts for them and their families. The $25 monthly stipends help ease a little bit the horrors of “life” in capitalist dungeons. More importantly, they are a necessary expression of solidarity with these prisoners—a message that they are not forgotten.
Since we initiated this program in 1986, we have provided stipends to over 30 class-war prisoners around the world. Among the first was former Black Panther leader Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt), who spent 27 years in prison, for a crime that the state authorities knew that he did not commit, before being released in 1997. Geronimo died in June, an untimely death undoubtedly linked to his many years in prison.
Most of the class-war prisoners who receive PDC stipends have already spent decades in prison, and the capitalist rulers are determined not only to see them die behind bars but also to repeatedly subject them to harassment and degradation. American Indian Movement leader Leonard Peltier wrote us about his recent transfer to a prison in Florida far from his family and supporters, where the authorities placed him in a cell with a skinhead sporting on his back a tattoo of a KKK nightrider!
For those behind bars, the human tragedies that befall us all are made ever more acute by the enforced separation from family and friends. Jaan Laaman recently informed us of the death of his son Rick. Earlier this year, death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal lost his sister, Lydia Barashango, who was a tireless activist in Mumia’s fight for freedom. Mumia also had the bittersweet experience of seeing his son, Jamal Hart, railroaded to prison on bogus gun-possession charges in retaliation for speaking out on his father’s behalf, finally released from prison after serving every single day of his 15 and a half year sentence.
Persecution of those imprisoned for their political views and actions has not only continued unabated, but Obama and his top cop, Attorney General Eric Holder, are making reservations for many more to join those already behind bars. The Obama administration has expanded the repressive measures adopted during the Clinton/Bush years that are being wielded against those who propelled him into office—labor, blacks, immigrants and liberal youth. Obama has used the “anti-terror” laws to target leftist supporters of Latin American guerrillas and oppressed Palestinians, far surpassed the Bush regime in deporting immigrants and carried out the assassination abroad of an American citizen without even the pretense of charges or a trial.
The struggle to free the class-war prisoners is critical to educating a new generation of fighters against exploitation and oppression—a schooling centered on the role of the capitalist state, comprising the military, cops, courts and prisons. In recent weeks, the young activists of the “Occupy” protests have been on the receiving end of pepper spray, tear gas and police truncheons, with thousands arrested—a small taste not only of the daily hell of life for black people in this country but also what the bosses’ government unleashes against workers when they engage in class struggle. This was seen in the brutal cop attacks and arrests this September of over 130 leaders, members and supporters of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) in Longview, Washington. In its battle with the giant union-busting EGT grain exporter, the union has engaged in the kind of militant labor actions that built this country’s industrial unions. A defeat in Longview would be a body blow against the ILWU as a whole.
The 16 class-war prisoners receiving stipends from the PDC are listed below:
Mumia Abu-Jamal is a former Black Panther Party spokesman, a well-known supporter of the MOVE organization and an award-winning journalist known as “the voice of the voiceless.” This year the Philadelphia district attorney’s office unsuccessfully petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to reinstate the death penalty for this class-war prisoner. The D.A. now has until mid April to convene a new sentencing hearing, the sole purpose of which would be to determine whether Mumia is to be again sentenced to death or will rot in prison for life.
This December marks the 30th anniversary of Mumia’s arrest for a killing that the cops know he did not commit. Mumia was framed up for the 1981 killing of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner and sentenced to death explicitly for his political views. Mountains of documentation proving Mumia’s innocence, including the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed Faulkner, have been submitted to the courts. But from top to bottom, the courts have repeatedly refused to hear this overwhelming evidence.
While others plead with the current U.S. president and his attorney general to “investigate” violations of Mumia’s “civil rights,” the PDC says that Mumia’s fate cannot be left in the hands of the government of the capitalists. The racist rulers hate Mumia because they see in him the spectre of black revolt. The stakes are high and the situation is grim, but any real fight for Mumia’s freedom must be based on class-struggle opposition to the capitalist rulers, who have entombed this innocent black man for more than half his life.
Leonard Peltier is an internationally renowned class-war prisoner. Peltier’s incarceration for his activism in the American Indian Movement has come to symbolize this country’s racist repression of its native peoples, the survivors of centuries of genocidal oppression. Peltier’s frame-up trial, for the 1975 deaths of two marauding FBI agents in what had become a war zone on the South Dakota Pine Ridge Reservation, shows what capitalist “justice” is all about. Although the lead government attorney has admitted, “We can’t prove who shot those agents,” and the courts have acknowledged blatant prosecutorial misconduct, the 67-year-old Peltier is still locked away. This year, Peltier, who suffers from multiple serious medical conditions, was thrown into solitary confinement and then transferred to Florida, far from his family. He is not scheduled to be reconsidered for parole for another 13 years.
Eight MOVE members—Chuck Africa, Michael Africa, Debbie Africa, Janet Africa, Janine Africa, Delbert Africa, Eddie Africa and Phil Africa—are in their 34th year in prison. They were sentenced to 30 to 100 years after the 8 August 1978 siege of their Philadelphia home by over 600 heavily armed cops, having been falsely convicted of killing a police officer who died in the cops’ own cross fire. In 1985, eleven of their MOVE family members, including five children, were massacred by Philly cops in collaboration with the Feds. After more than three decades of unjust incarceration, most of these innocent prisoners had parole hearings this year, but none were released.
Lynne Stewart is a radical lawyer incarcerated for defending her client, a blind Egyptian cleric imprisoned for an alleged plot to blow up New York City landmarks in the early 1990s. Last year, she was resentenced to ten years, more than quadrupling her earlier sentence, in a loud affirmation by the Obama administration that there will be no let-up in the massive attack on democratic rights under the “war on terror.” Stewart, now over 72 years old and suffering from breast cancer, is known for her defense of Black Panthers, radical leftists and others reviled by the capitalist state.
Jaan Laaman and Thomas Manning are the two remaining anti-imperialist activists known as the Ohio 7 still in prison, convicted for their roles in a radical group that took credit for bank “expropriations” and bombings of symbols of U.S. imperialism, such as military and corporate offices, in the late 1970s and ’80s. Before their arrests in 1984 and 1985, the Ohio 7 were targets of massive manhunts. Their children were kidnapped at gunpoint by the Feds.
The Ohio 7’s politics were once shared by thousands of radicals during the Vietnam antiwar movement and by New Leftists who wrote off the possibility of winning the working class to a revolutionary program and saw themselves as an auxiliary of Third World liberation movements. But, like the Weathermen before them, the Ohio 7 were spurned by the “respectable” left. From a proletarian standpoint, the actions of these leftist activists against imperialism and racist injustice are not a crime. They should not have served a day in prison.
Ed Poindexter and Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa are former Black Panther supporters and leaders of the Omaha, Nebraska, National Committee to Combat Fascism. They were victims of the FBI’s deadly COINTELPRO operation under which 38 Black Panther Party members were killed and hundreds more imprisoned on frame-up charges. Poindexter and Mondo were railroaded to prison and sentenced to life for a 1970 explosion that killed a cop, and they have now served more than 40 years in jail. Nebraska courts have repeatedly denied Poindexter and Mondo new trials despite the fact that a crucial piece of evidence excluded from the original trial, a 911 audio tape long suppressed by the FBI, proved that testimony of the state’s key witness was perjured.
Hugo Pinell, the last of the San Quentin 6 still in prison, has been in solitary isolation for more than four decades. He was a militant anti-racist leader of prison rights organizing along with George Jackson, his comrade and mentor, who was gunned down by prison guards in 1971. Despite numerous letters of support and no disciplinary write-ups for over 28 years, Pinell was again denied parole in 2009. Now in his 60s, Pinell continues to serve a life sentence at the notorious torture chamber, Pelican Bay Security Housing Unit in California, a focal point for two recent hunger strikes against grotesquely inhuman conditions.
Contribute now! All proceeds from the Holiday Appeals will go to the Class-War Prisoners Stipend Fund. This is not charity but an elementary act of solidarity with those imprisoned for their opposition to racist capitalism and imperialist depredations. Send your contributions to: PDC, P.O. Box 99, Canal Street Station, New York, NY 10013; (212) 406-4252.
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Out In The Be-Bop Rock 1950s Schoolboy Night- School’s Out, Man-"Blackboard Jungle"- A Film Review
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Bill Halley and The Comets performing Rock Around The Clock, a song feature in the film under review, Blackboard Jungle, and the first time that be-bop rock served as the soundtrack for a film. Whee!
DVD Review
Blackboard Jungle, starring Glenn Ford, Anne Francis, Vince Morrow, Sidney Portier, 1955
Film noir as a genre came in all shapes and sizes, mainly the best being the crime noir saga. Occasionally though other subjects received royal treatment, as here on the troubling rise of juvenile delinquency in the cities (and maybe elsewhere too) of America in the film under review, Blackboard Jungle. Although a re-viewing of this classic noir reveals some pretty ham-handed notions about the subject of JD's and about schools it still has some “socially redeeming qualities." For one, as the vehicle that connected film with the emerging be-bop rock sound being heard on the AM radio in the early 1950s, at least as heard in some places, through the use of Billy Halley and the Comets’ smash hit of 1955, Rock Around The Clock. Beyond that some of the performances, especially that of Sidney Portier, as a young alienated, “talented tenth” black student who could go either way, fame or crime also sticks out.
The plot of this thing though even for its red scare- moral uplift-we-had better-get-a-handle-on-these-troubled-youth-or-the-Russkies-will-beat us time seems well, corny. Corny because the characters from Glenn Ford’s worldly-wise but idealistic and frustrated young teacher to the white (represented by Vince Morrow), black (Portier), Spanish and other city ethnic group students are wooden when I compare them to my own similar working-poor neighborhood (minus the blacks) of the time. In short, youth here are merely misunderstood and with the right formula (some version of tough love and a peek at Ozzie and Harriet) they will, except those few rotten apples who we will put in stir for good, change their ways.
A little plot summary will give you an idea of what I mean. Ford, hires on in a deeply troubled urban (New York but could have been a lot of places, including on a smaller scale my hometown, North Adamsville) school beset by racial, ethnic, class and social tensions. He is just idealistic enough, like many before and after him, to try to make a difference despite the heavy odds against him. Of course the first rule of teaching, thugs or princes, is who rules the classroom. For much of the film that is an open question as he seeks allies among the motley crew of students, especially Portier. Of course not everybody makes it, student or teacher alike. The be-bop jazz-loving nerdish math teacher (played by Richard Kiley) and the Irish gang leader thug (played by Vince Morrow)to name two. But in the end the key figures have an epiphany and the uphill education struggle goes on.
Moral uplift and due regard for the efforts of generations of teacher to make a different aside you can see where the holes in the plot shine through. The hard reality is that, like at my school, the thugs were weeded out long before high school, or they ran the show, mostly the former. This brings to mind a character from my working class streets, "Stewball" Stu (we never called him that to his face because we would have been shivved but that is what we called him among our younger set because the guy was a heavy, heavy whiskey drinker, day and night, walking or driving). Stu dropped out, or rather was kicked out of school, in the ninth grade, I think. But he had a “boss” ’57 Chevy when they were the rage, about ten million girls around him (and no “dogs” either) and all kind of criminal enterprises running. The reason that he got kicked out of school? Oh ya, he threw a teacher, and not a small one out the window, fortunately it was only from the first floor. And they never did squat about it. So see that moral uplift stuff is good for the 1950s movies but just yawn stuff in the real world. Oh ya, Stu's luck ran out later, like sometimes happens but in the 1950s he was the be-bop max daddy king of the jungle. And no blackboard jungle either. Later, fortunately, more realistic troubled youth films were made, like the film adaptations of S.E. Hinton’s works, and made without the heavy-handed cautionary tale.
be-bop night, growing up absurd in the 1950's, high school confidential, Bill Haley and The Comets,
DVD Review
Blackboard Jungle, starring Glenn Ford, Anne Francis, Vince Morrow, Sidney Portier, 1955
Film noir as a genre came in all shapes and sizes, mainly the best being the crime noir saga. Occasionally though other subjects received royal treatment, as here on the troubling rise of juvenile delinquency in the cities (and maybe elsewhere too) of America in the film under review, Blackboard Jungle. Although a re-viewing of this classic noir reveals some pretty ham-handed notions about the subject of JD's and about schools it still has some “socially redeeming qualities." For one, as the vehicle that connected film with the emerging be-bop rock sound being heard on the AM radio in the early 1950s, at least as heard in some places, through the use of Billy Halley and the Comets’ smash hit of 1955, Rock Around The Clock. Beyond that some of the performances, especially that of Sidney Portier, as a young alienated, “talented tenth” black student who could go either way, fame or crime also sticks out.
The plot of this thing though even for its red scare- moral uplift-we-had better-get-a-handle-on-these-troubled-youth-or-the-Russkies-will-beat us time seems well, corny. Corny because the characters from Glenn Ford’s worldly-wise but idealistic and frustrated young teacher to the white (represented by Vince Morrow), black (Portier), Spanish and other city ethnic group students are wooden when I compare them to my own similar working-poor neighborhood (minus the blacks) of the time. In short, youth here are merely misunderstood and with the right formula (some version of tough love and a peek at Ozzie and Harriet) they will, except those few rotten apples who we will put in stir for good, change their ways.
A little plot summary will give you an idea of what I mean. Ford, hires on in a deeply troubled urban (New York but could have been a lot of places, including on a smaller scale my hometown, North Adamsville) school beset by racial, ethnic, class and social tensions. He is just idealistic enough, like many before and after him, to try to make a difference despite the heavy odds against him. Of course the first rule of teaching, thugs or princes, is who rules the classroom. For much of the film that is an open question as he seeks allies among the motley crew of students, especially Portier. Of course not everybody makes it, student or teacher alike. The be-bop jazz-loving nerdish math teacher (played by Richard Kiley) and the Irish gang leader thug (played by Vince Morrow)to name two. But in the end the key figures have an epiphany and the uphill education struggle goes on.
Moral uplift and due regard for the efforts of generations of teacher to make a different aside you can see where the holes in the plot shine through. The hard reality is that, like at my school, the thugs were weeded out long before high school, or they ran the show, mostly the former. This brings to mind a character from my working class streets, "Stewball" Stu (we never called him that to his face because we would have been shivved but that is what we called him among our younger set because the guy was a heavy, heavy whiskey drinker, day and night, walking or driving). Stu dropped out, or rather was kicked out of school, in the ninth grade, I think. But he had a “boss” ’57 Chevy when they were the rage, about ten million girls around him (and no “dogs” either) and all kind of criminal enterprises running. The reason that he got kicked out of school? Oh ya, he threw a teacher, and not a small one out the window, fortunately it was only from the first floor. And they never did squat about it. So see that moral uplift stuff is good for the 1950s movies but just yawn stuff in the real world. Oh ya, Stu's luck ran out later, like sometimes happens but in the 1950s he was the be-bop max daddy king of the jungle. And no blackboard jungle either. Later, fortunately, more realistic troubled youth films were made, like the film adaptations of S.E. Hinton’s works, and made without the heavy-handed cautionary tale.
be-bop night, growing up absurd in the 1950's, high school confidential, Bill Haley and The Comets,
The Latest From "The National Committee to Free the Cuban Five" Website -Free The Five Ahora! -The Defense Of The Cuban Revolution Begins With The Defense Of The Cuban Five
Click on the title to link to the website mentioned in the headline for the latest news and opinion from that site.
Markin comment (re-post from July 26, 2011):
On a day, July 26th, important in the history of the Cuban revolutionary movement it is also important, as always, to remember that the defense of the Cuban revolution here in the United States, the "heart of the beast", starts with the defense of the Cuban Five.
Markin comment (re-post from July 26, 2011):
On a day, July 26th, important in the history of the Cuban revolutionary movement it is also important, as always, to remember that the defense of the Cuban revolution here in the United States, the "heart of the beast", starts with the defense of the Cuban Five.
From The "Free Jaan Laaman" Blog- "Jaan's Running Down the Walls 2011 Shoutout" - Free Jaan Laaman And Tom Manning The Last Of The Imprisoned Ohio 7
Click on the headline to link to the Ohio 7's Free Jaan Laaman blog for the latest.
Markin comment:
Generation of '68ers we have some unfinished business around taking care of our own. Agree with their politics or not, the fought the anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist fight. Not that far removed from the stuff we believed in then, and some of us now. Free Jaan Laaman and Tom Manning the last of the imprisoned Ohio 7. They must not die in jail.
Markin comment:
Generation of '68ers we have some unfinished business around taking care of our own. Agree with their politics or not, the fought the anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist fight. Not that far removed from the stuff we believed in then, and some of us now. Free Jaan Laaman and Tom Manning the last of the imprisoned Ohio 7. They must not die in jail.
The Latest From The “Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox” Blog
Click on the headline to link to Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox blog for the latest from her site.
Markin comment:
I find Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox rather a mishmash of eclectic politics and basic old time left-liberal/radical thinking. Not enough, not nearly enough, in our troubled times but enough to take the time to read about and get a sense of the pulse (if any) of that segment of the left to which she is appealing. One though should always remember, despite our political differences, her heroic action in going down to hell-hole Texas to confront one President George W. Bush when many others were resigned to accepting the lies of that administration or who “folded” their tents when the expected end to the Iraq War did not materialize. Hats off on that one, Cindy Sheehan.
Markin comment:
I find Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox rather a mishmash of eclectic politics and basic old time left-liberal/radical thinking. Not enough, not nearly enough, in our troubled times but enough to take the time to read about and get a sense of the pulse (if any) of that segment of the left to which she is appealing. One though should always remember, despite our political differences, her heroic action in going down to hell-hole Texas to confront one President George W. Bush when many others were resigned to accepting the lies of that administration or who “folded” their tents when the expected end to the Iraq War did not materialize. Hats off on that one, Cindy Sheehan.
From #Occupied Boston (#Tomemonos Boston)-This Is Class War-We Say No More- Defend The Occupy Movement!-Defend All Our Unions! - Take The Offensive!
Click on the headline to link to updates from the Occupy Boston website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011. I will post important updates as they appear on that site.
Markin comment:
We know that we are only at the very start of an upsurge in the labor movement as witness the stellar exemplary actions by the West Coast activists on December 12, 2011. As I have pointed out in my remarks below this is the way forward as we struggle against the ruling class for a different more equitable society. Not everything went as well, or as well-attended, as expected including our rally in solidarity in Boston but we are still exhibiting growing pains in the post-encampment era.
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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend All The Occupation Sites And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Protesters Everywhere!
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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was this high in the American labor force. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work. Work that would be divided through local representative workers’ councils which would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work. Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing so that it will, in the end, be necessary to fight for and win a workers government to implement this demand.
Organize the unorganized is a demand that cries out for solution today now that the organized sectors of the labor movement, both public and private, in America are at historic lows, just over ten percent of the workforce. Part of the task is to reorganize some of the old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. The other part is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the service industries, hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that have become a dominant aspect of the American economy.
Organize the South-this low wage area, this consciously low-wage area, where many industries land before heading off-shore to even lower wage places cries out for organizing, especially among black and Hispanic workers who form the bulk of this industrial workforce. A corollary to organizing the South is obviously to organize internationally to keep the “race to the bottom” from continually occurring short of being resolved in favor of an international commonwealth of workers’ governments. Nobody said it was going to be easy.
Organize Wal-mart- millions of workers, thousands of trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A victory here would be the springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement just as auto and steel lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant. Well, that’s a thought.
Defend the right of public and private workers to unionize. Simple-No more Wisconsins, no more attacks on collective bargaining the hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, or bourgeois recall elections either. Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.
* Defend the independence of the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. In 2008 labor, organized labor, spent around 450 million dollars trying to elect Barack Obama and other Democrats (mainly). The results speak for themselves. For those bogus efforts the labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea then was (and is, as we come up to another presidential election cycle) that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of labor.” The past period of cuts-backs, cut-in-the back give backs should put paid to that notion. Although anyone who is politically savvy at all knows that is not true, not true for the labor skates at the top of the movement.
The hard reality is that the labor skates, not used to any form of class struggle or any kind of struggle, know no other way than class-collaboration, arbitration, courts, and every other way to avoid the appearance of strife, strife in defense of the bosses’ profits. The most egregious recent example- the return of the Verizon workers to work after two weeks last summer when they had the company on the run and the subsequent announcement by the company of record profits. That sellout strategy may have worked for the bureaucrats, or rather their “fathers” for a time back in the 1950s “golden age” of labor but now we are in a very hard and open class war. The rank and file must demand an end to using their precious dues payments period for bourgeois candidates all of whom have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor from Obama on down.
This does not mean not using union dues for political purposes though. On the contrary we need to use them now more than ever in the class battles ahead. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized, organizing the South, organizing Wal-Mart, and other pro-labor causes. Think, for example, of the dough spent on the successful November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio. That type of activity is where labor’s money and other resources should go.
*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. Labor and the oppressed must rule!
Markin comment:
We know that we are only at the very start of an upsurge in the labor movement as witness the stellar exemplary actions by the West Coast activists on December 12, 2011. As I have pointed out in my remarks below this is the way forward as we struggle against the ruling class for a different more equitable society. Not everything went as well, or as well-attended, as expected including our rally in solidarity in Boston but we are still exhibiting growing pains in the post-encampment era.
***********
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend All The Occupation Sites And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Protesters Everywhere!
********
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
********
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was this high in the American labor force. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work. Work that would be divided through local representative workers’ councils which would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work. Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing so that it will, in the end, be necessary to fight for and win a workers government to implement this demand.
Organize the unorganized is a demand that cries out for solution today now that the organized sectors of the labor movement, both public and private, in America are at historic lows, just over ten percent of the workforce. Part of the task is to reorganize some of the old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. The other part is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the service industries, hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that have become a dominant aspect of the American economy.
Organize the South-this low wage area, this consciously low-wage area, where many industries land before heading off-shore to even lower wage places cries out for organizing, especially among black and Hispanic workers who form the bulk of this industrial workforce. A corollary to organizing the South is obviously to organize internationally to keep the “race to the bottom” from continually occurring short of being resolved in favor of an international commonwealth of workers’ governments. Nobody said it was going to be easy.
Organize Wal-mart- millions of workers, thousands of trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A victory here would be the springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement just as auto and steel lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant. Well, that’s a thought.
Defend the right of public and private workers to unionize. Simple-No more Wisconsins, no more attacks on collective bargaining the hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, or bourgeois recall elections either. Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.
* Defend the independence of the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. In 2008 labor, organized labor, spent around 450 million dollars trying to elect Barack Obama and other Democrats (mainly). The results speak for themselves. For those bogus efforts the labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea then was (and is, as we come up to another presidential election cycle) that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of labor.” The past period of cuts-backs, cut-in-the back give backs should put paid to that notion. Although anyone who is politically savvy at all knows that is not true, not true for the labor skates at the top of the movement.
The hard reality is that the labor skates, not used to any form of class struggle or any kind of struggle, know no other way than class-collaboration, arbitration, courts, and every other way to avoid the appearance of strife, strife in defense of the bosses’ profits. The most egregious recent example- the return of the Verizon workers to work after two weeks last summer when they had the company on the run and the subsequent announcement by the company of record profits. That sellout strategy may have worked for the bureaucrats, or rather their “fathers” for a time back in the 1950s “golden age” of labor but now we are in a very hard and open class war. The rank and file must demand an end to using their precious dues payments period for bourgeois candidates all of whom have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor from Obama on down.
This does not mean not using union dues for political purposes though. On the contrary we need to use them now more than ever in the class battles ahead. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized, organizing the South, organizing Wal-Mart, and other pro-labor causes. Think, for example, of the dough spent on the successful November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio. That type of activity is where labor’s money and other resources should go.
*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. Labor and the oppressed must rule!
Monday, December 19, 2011
The Latest From The SteveLendmanBlog
Markin comment:
I am always happy to post material from the SteveLendmanBlog, although I am not always in agreement with his analysis. I am always interested in getting a left-liberal/radical perspective on some issues that I don’t generally have time to cover in full like the question of Palestine, the Middle East in general, and civil rights and economic issues here in America and elsewhere. Moreover the blog provides plenty of useful links to other sources of information about the subject under discussion.
I am always happy to post material from the SteveLendmanBlog, although I am not always in agreement with his analysis. I am always interested in getting a left-liberal/radical perspective on some issues that I don’t generally have time to cover in full like the question of Palestine, the Middle East in general, and civil rights and economic issues here in America and elsewhere. Moreover the blog provides plenty of useful links to other sources of information about the subject under discussion.
The Latest From The Rag Blog
Click on the headline to link to The Rag Blog website.
Markin comment:
I find this The Rag Blog very useful to monitor for the latest in what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody, with some kind of name, who is still around from the 1960s has found a home here. So the remembrances and recollections are helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least ones that would help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time left politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of the last forty plus years. Still this is a must read blog for today’s left militants.
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Markin comment:
I find this The Rag Blog very useful to monitor for the latest in what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody, with some kind of name, who is still around from the 1960s has found a home here. So the remembrances and recollections are helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least ones that would help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time left politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of the last forty plus years. Still this is a must read blog for today’s left militants.
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From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-Lessons From History: Founding Conference Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International-"Resolution On The Youth"
Markin comment on this series:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
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From the Revolutionary Communist Newsletter, May-June 1973
Lessons From History: Founding Conference Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International-"Resolution On The Youth"
Trotsky was always keenly aware of what he called the problem of generations. He began the New Course (1923), his opening shot in the struggle against the bureaucratic degeneration of the Russian Revolution, with a discussion of the "question of the party generations, "and in the most important document among the founding resolutions of the Fourth International (Fl), The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International: The Transitional Program, Trotsky stated the problem of generations in the following way:
"When a program or organization wears out, the generation which carried it on its shoulders wears out with it. The movement is revitalized by the youth who are free of responsibility for the past. Only the fresh enthusiasm and aggressive spirit of the youth can guarantee the preliminary successes in the struggle; only these successes can return the best elements of the older generation to the road of revolution."
—p45, Pathfinder Press edition
Trotsky had not forgotten the lesson of the collapse of the Second International and the building of the Third. When the leading parties of the Second International capitulated to the national chauvinism of WW I, it was the militants primarily concentrated in the Socialist youth and women's groups (representing a more oppressed stratum of the working class than the privileged labor aristocracy—the most influential component of the Western European Socialist parties) who carried the banner of internationalism against the tide of national chauvinism,, It was these militants who, under the impact of the Russian October, provided the precious founding cadre for the new Communist International (Cl). With the destruction of the CI as a world revolutionary party under the heavy blows of the failure of the German Revolution, the bureaucratic degeneration of the Bolshevik Revolution, the rise of fascism and the impending renewal of imperialist world war, the tasks of creating a new international were placed on the agenda, Trotsky, one of the creators of the Cl who had authored its founding manifesto, turned to the generation of young workers, unscarred by the defeats and betrayals of the past. Hence, the founding manifesto of the FI ends with a clarion call to "Open the Road to the Woman Worker-' Open the Road to the Youth.'"
As Nathan Gould, the youth delegate from the U.S., reported in the weekly organ of the then-revolutionary Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Appeal (22 October 1938):
"The resolution on relations between the youth and adult Internationals accepted the classical Leninist concept of these relations. The Youth International, which accepts the proletarian revolutionary international leadership of its adult body is to be politically subordinate to and organizationally autonomous of the Fourth International."
Gould then stated that all decisions and resolutions of the Youth Conference, including the "Resolution on the Youth" flow "from and are subordinated to the demands of the theses on The Death Agony of Capitalism." Indeed, the capitalist death agony developed with such rapidity and acuteness that the "youth question" was soon superseded by the "military question.” The principal concerns of working-class youth in civilian life under capitalism—the lack of jobs, education and social equality, problems with which the "Resolution on the Youth" were mainly concerned—were soon to be transcended as imperialist war gave these youth the "jobs," "education" and "social equality’ of the barracks. Within the context of universal militarism, the Trotskyists conducted themselves with exemplary valor, e.g., building revolutionary cells within the German Army. But the objective conditions forced the Fl to temporarily abandon the tasks set out in the "Resolution on the Youth" and the struggle for a Trotskyist youth international.
The seriousness with which Trotskyists undertook this necessary historical exhortation to find the road to the next generation of revolutionaries was displayed by the fact that-though the founding of the Fl took place under the most difficult conditions requiring careful preparation and secrecy, at a time when the Trotskyists had meager resources and were being hounded throughout the world by the police and agents of all wings of the bourgeoisie from the fascists to the most "democratic" and, with special vehemence, by Stalin's secret police—nonetheless the Founding Conference was followed one week later by the "World Youth Conference of the Fourth International." Both Conferences were held in September 1938; the former was attended by 21 delegates representing 11 countries, while the Youth Conference was attended by 19 delegates from 7 countries (Poland, Austria, Belgium, Holland, England, the U.S. and France). There was a considerable overlap in delegations and, in addition, the International Bureau of the Fl, elected at the party Conference, sent three delegates to the Youth Conference. Besides adopting the "Resolution on the Youth," the world Youth Conference endorsed the Transitional Program and voted to affiliate as the official youth section of the Fl.
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Rise of Pabloism
After WW II, the Trotskyist movement, decimated by fascism and Stalinism, tried to regroup and reorient itself. However, the destruction of a whole generation of Trotskyist cadre, including Trotsky himself, left the Fl theoretically unarmed and isolated from the working class. The untested and inexperienced cadre that rose to the leadership of the Fl, personified by Michel Pablo, were overtaken by the post-war pre-revolutionary upheavals whose course their weak forces could not significantly influence. These cadre were further disoriented by the apparent stabilization of capitalism on the one hand, and the growth of Stalinism and social democracy on the other (see "Genesis of Pabloism," Spartacist No. 21 )„ Pabloism meant the abandonment of the struggle to build independent Trotskyist parties and the liquidation of Trotskyist cadre into the existing Stalinist and social-democratic formations which were seen as playing an eventual revolutionary role under the impact of the "objective process," The corollary for Trotskyist youth was the command that they should bury themselves in the Stalinist and social-democratic youth groups and wait for the "objective process" to unfold.
Thus the "Resolution on the Youth" and the prospects for a Trotskyist youth international were abandoned when the Fl succumbed to Pabloism. Although many of the specific demands and slogans of the "Resolution on the Youth" are clearly dated, the resolution possesses more than just historical interest. The document, especially section 14 entitled "The Revolutionary Program," is a valuable reaffirmation of the programmatic criteria governing youth work as Lenin, Trotsky and the early Cl and Fl conceived it0 Such a reaffirmation is particularly important today when so many political tendencies claiming to be Trotskyist display the most elementary confusion on this question. The early Cl and Young Communist International, and the Founding Conference of the Fl and corresponding Youth Conference were explicit and insistent that the Leninist-Trotskyist youth group must be a section of the vanguard party which embodies the continuity, tested political leadership and developed programmatic clarity of the revolutionary movement,, The program of the youth section must be developed within the framework of the party's program, as the "Youth Resolution" states: "It is within the framework of the transitional programmed of the Fourth International that the present programme should be developed and applied." "Youth" is not a class, there is no "youth program" as such. The program which addresses itself to the objective needs and special oppression of youth is part and parcel of the program for proletarian power. "The struggle for these demands cannot be separated from the struggle for the demands of workers as a whole, both employed and unemployed" ["Youth Resolution"].
Youth Vanguard ism From the SWP to the WL
The various pretenders to the banner of Trotskyism all reject Trotsky’s class approach to the youth question—namely, that the question of special oppression and needs of youth must be subordinated to and integrated into the revolutionary program for the working class, the Transitional Program. Modern Pabloism, embodied in organizations like the SWP, the International Marxist Group in England, the Ligue Communiste in France, and personified by "theoreticians" like Ernest Mandel and "activists" like Tariq Ali, after years of self-internment in reformist organizations, have recoiled from entrism and have tried, in their various ways, to jump on the bandwagon of the "international youth radicalization." Starting from the proposition that we live not in the era of capitalist decay but in the era of "neo-capitalism," i.e., capitalist crises stabilized by state intervention into the economy (e.g., debt expansion), they come to the conclusion that therefore the "epicenter" of world revolution has shifted from the industrial to the colonial countries, or from the industrial working class to more peripheral "sectors" of the work force such as white-collar workers and white-collar "apprentices" (i.e., students). They see the industrial working class as hopelessly bureaucratized and bourgeoisified, only approachable from the "peripheries" of guerrilla warfare in the colonial countries and youth and petty-bourgeois vanguardism in the industrial countries. The SWP has surpassed Pabloism in adopting a non-proletarian ideology. It has lifted the "cultural autonomy" slogan from the Austro-Marxists and applied it to the present by having each oppressed "sector" of the population independently "self-determine" itself, into that pure realm of freedom which is, of course, obtainable only on the gilded comfort of the college campus. Each "sector" of society (students, blacks, Chicanos, women and yes, even the working class) is provided by the revisionists with its very own "transitional" program. Departing from Trotskyism and proletarian revolution on another road, a road akin to "third-period" Stalinism, is the Socialist Labour League, its gang in the U.S., the Workers League, and their corresponding youth groups, both called "Young Socialist.” Starting from a radical perspective—that capitalist productive forces can no longer grow and, therefore, capitalism can no longer grant long-lasting reforms—they draw a reformist conclusion, i.e., that the struggle for such reforms is inherently revolutionary. In fact, this is simply inverted social democracy—that socialism can be won through piecemeal reform struggles. The Transitional Program, on the other hand, raises demands that flow from the real objective needs of the proletariat, but also prepare and mobilize the workers for the revolutionary struggle for proletarian power.
The WL's treatment of the youth question is completely opportunist: Ignoring the heterogeneous social composition of youth, the WL calls upon youth (all youth) to pressure union bureaucrats to build a labor party, and presents transitional demands for youth, as an undifferentiated mass, to carry out. The WL's line embodies classless youth vanguardism. The irony of the WL's constant exhortations to the "youth" to build a labor party, create general strikes, etc., is that in the WL's propaganda to the working class (e.g., in their auto program for 1973, Bulletin. 12 February, p. 18) it often "forgets" to mention the labor party as well as other key transitional demands like nationalization of industry under workers control. Its youth group, furthermore, has no internal political life taut is a front group manipulated by the WL0
The Revolutionary Communist Youth, as the youth section of the Spartacist League, continues the traditions of the early Cl and Fl, the traditions of Lenin and Trotsky, that the youth section must be programmatically linked and united to the vanguard party ("politically subordinate and organizationally autonomous"),that the special demands which address themselves to the problems of the youth must flow from the Transitional Program ram and must link the struggles of youth to the struggle of the proletariat for power.
-RCYN Editorial Board
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Founding Conference of the Fourth International 1938
Resolution On Youth
The Capitalist Impasse
1) Capitalism, Whether it be authoritarian or liberal, admits the inability to bring the slightest relief to the misery and sufferings of working class youth. The young want a trade, and when (rarely enough!) it consents to give them one, it is only to chain them the better to a machine which tomorrow will stop and let them starve beside the very riches they have produced. The young want to work, to produce with their hands, to use theft strength, and capitalism offers them the perspective of unemployment or of “the execution of work in conditions other than the normal conditions of production,” according to the excellent hypocritical definition of labor camps by the League of Nations, or of armament production, which engenders destruction rather than improvement. The young want to learn, and the way to culture is barred to them. The young want to live, and the only future offered them is that of dying of hunger or rotting on the barbed wire of a new imperialist war. The young want to create a new world, and they are permitted only to maintain or to consolidate a rotting world that is falling to pieces. The young want to know what tomorrow will be, and capitalism's only reply to them is: “Today you've got to tighten your belt another notch; tomorrow, we'll see . . . . In any case, perhaps you're not going to have any tomorrow.”
Give Youth a Future Give the World a Future
2) That is why youth will rally under the flag of those who bring it a future. Only the Fourth International, because it represents the historical interests of the only class which can reorganize tile world upon new bases, only the Bolshevik-Leninists can promise youth a future in which it can put its abilities to full use. Only they can say to the youth: “Together with you, we want to make a new world, where everyone works and is proud to work well, to know his job down to the smallest details; a world where everyone will eat according to his hunger, for production will be regulated according to the needs of the workers and not those of profit; a world where one must constantly learn, in order the better to subordinate the forces of nature to the will of man; a world where, by ceaselessly extending the domain of the application of science, humanity’s theoretic knowledge will be daily increased; a new world, a new man who can make real all the hopes and powers he bears within him” It is under the banner of a new world and a new humanity that the Fourth International and its youth organizations must go on to win the working class youth; it is under that banner that they will win that youth.
The Struggle for a Future the Struggle for Bread
3) The promise of a better future would be only demagogy if the Bolshevik-Leninists were not fighting for an immediate improvement in the situation of working class youth, if they were not formulating youth’s immediate demands, if they were not spreading word of the necessity for working class youth to fight by class struggle methods for the satisfaction of these demands, and if, through this struggle and on the basis of the experience gained therein, they were not demonstrating to exploited youth that its demands could be finally satisfied only by establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat, that the struggle for these demands must be transformed into a struggle for power by means of a struggle for the control and management of the economic system.
We Demand the Right to Work!
4) For the young workers engaged in production the Bolshevik-Leninists put forward slogans with the aim of a) measuring the work done by the young not according to the desire to drag as much profit as possible out of it, but, on the contrary, according to their degree of physical development; b) assuring them of a standard of living equal to that of adults, by that very fact assuring them of economic independence; c) raising their technical qualifications as far as possible; d) against the equal opportunity for young and old to be exploited in, capitalism, setting up their equal rights.
For the young under twenty, they also formulate the following demands:
Reduced working week, with schedules allowing young workers to engage in sports in the open air;
At least one month’s paid vacation per year;
The organizing, by factories, or groups of factories, of training courses, at the bosses’ expense and under workers’ control;
Hours of craft training taken out of the working week, and paid for at regular rates;
Application of the principle “equal pay for equal work” under workers’ control;
The fixing of a minimum living wage for young workers; fixing of the wages of young workers under the control of all the workers taken as a whole;
Prohibition of night work, of overlaborious, unhealthy, or unwholesome tasks; workers’ control over the use of young labor.
Equality for Youth in Social Legislation
All Together for the Struggle!
5) In order to take the defense of their demands into their own hands, the young workers should have the right to choose their own delegates, whose task is above all to draw the attention of the adult delegates and of the workers in general to youth’s specific demands, to tie up the struggle for these particular demands with the struggle for the general demands of the working class. In the same way, in all branches of trade union organizations, union youth commissions must be created and imposed upon the trade union bureaucracy, whose task shall be to study the demands of the youth, and to recruit and educate young workers. The task of the Bolshevik-Leninists is to take the lead in the organization of such commissions.
In order to throw trade union doors wide open to exploited youth, the Bolshevik-Leninists demand the establishment of reduced dues for young workers.
We Want a Trade!
6) In the fight against unemployment the slogans raise the school age, organize apprenticeship, make sense only to the extent that the weight of this must be borne not by the working class but by the big capitalists. Hence the Bolshevik-Leninists owe it to themselves to formulate the demands of working class youth in this field as follows:
Prolongation of the school age to 16, with a grant for family support in working class and small farmer families.
Reorganization of the school in cooperation with the factory:
the school should prepare children for life and work; it should weld the youth to the older generations; hence the demand for control by workers’ organizations over technical education.
Reduction of the period of apprenticeship to a maximum of two years.
Forbidding of all work not connected with the actual apprenticeship.
The setting up, at the expense of the bosses, in connection with every business or group of businesses engaged in manufacturing, mining, or trade, of apprentice schools, with an attendance of at least 3 percent of the personnel employed in the business or group of businesses.
Choosing of the instructors by the labor unions.
Control of these schools by a mixed commission of workers’ delegates and delegates of the apprentices themselves.
We Demand Our Right to Live!
7) The task of saving the unemployed youth from misery, despair, and fascist demagogy, of working them back into production and thereby binding them closely to the working class, is a vital task for the future of the proletariat. Revolutionaries must struggle to force capitalism (a) to undertake to work the unemployed youth back into production through the organization of technical education and guidance; (b) to put the unemployed youth back immediately into productive activity; (c) to organize such work not according to semimilitary methods but on the basis of regular wages: Down with labor camps, either voluntary or obligatory!; (d) to furnish youth, which it is throwing into misery, the wherewithal to live. Hence the Bolshevik-Leninists put forward the following demands:
Unemployment benefits on the adult scale for all young unemployed, manual or intellectual, immediately upon their finishing school;
Forcing the big bosses to open technical reeducation centers under workers’ control;
Technical reeducation organized according to the needs of production, under the general control of the trade unions and. the congresses of workers’ delegates;
Reopening of the shutdown factories;
Commencement of large-scale public works (hospitals, schools, lowcost housing projects, sports fields, stadiums, swimming pools, electric power stations), paid at trade union scales and under workers’ control from top to bottom.
For Our Brothers on the Farms! 8) The misery of the farm youth is no less than that of the industrial youth. For farm youth the Bolshevik-Leninists formulate the following general demands:
Strict application of all the above named laws and social measures in the country just as in the city;
Suppression of the domestic exploitation of young children;
Particularly strict application of the principle: “Equal pay for equal work";
District organization of technical education at the expense of the big finance capital farm owners;
Healthy food and lodging for young farm workers living in their bosses’ houses;
Cheap credit for small-scale farmers, and especially for small-scale farmers with family responsibilities.
For Our Countryside
9) The industrial and farm youth are the most exploited part of all working class youth. The youth organizations of the Fourth International must draw particular attention to the following demands: Strict application of the principle “Equal pay for equal work!";
An extra day off per month;
The right to voluntary maternity;
A six month leave of absence for maternity;
Maternity grants for young mothers.
Open the Schools and Universities!
10) One of the necessary conditions for the progress of humanity is that large sections of working class youth should have access to culture and science. The Bolshevik-Leninists put forward the following slogans:
Open the schools and universities to all the young who are willing to study.
Free education and support for workers’ and farmers’ sons and daughters. Bread, Books, and Civil Rights for Coolies!
11) In colonial and semi colonial countries, laboring youth are the victims of a double exploitation capitalist and patriarchal. In these, and in imperialist countries, the defense of the demands of the young colonial workers and peasants is the first duty in the fight against imperialism. This fight is carried on around the general slogan: The same rights for colonial youth as for the youth of the imperialist capital city.
Organization of hygiene and similar care in all villages.
Organization of homes for young workers, peasants, and coolies, under the control of labor and nationalist organizations.
Schools for native children; teaching in the native language.
Open the government administration to native language.
Open the government administration to native intellectuals.
Take the necessary financial credits from the war and police budgets and imperialist privileges.
12) The bourgeoisie recognizes working youth’s right to be exploited; but refuses it the right to have anything to say about that exploitation, and deprives it of all political rights; in certain countries it even forbids youth under eighteen to have any political activity whatever. The working class replies to these measures by saying: Whoever has the right to be exploited has also the right to struggle against the system which exploits him. Full political rights to young workers and peasants!
The right to vote beginning at 18, just as much in legislative and municipal elections as in the election of delegates.
Abolition of special laws forbidding youth to engage in political activity.
We Demand Our Right to Happiness!
13) Working class youth’s need for relaxation is utilized by the bourgeoisie either to stupefy it or make it submit to an even tighter discipline. The duty of the working class is to help create a youth that is strong and capable of throwing all its physical and mental strength into the fight against capitalism; to aid it in using what leisure capitalism gives it to learn to understand the world better, in order to be better able to change it. Hence the Bolshevik-Leninists demand:
Free access to all sports fields, stadiums, museums, libraries, theaters, and movies for all young workers and unemployed;
The ordering of their leisure by the young unemployed themselves;
The using of young unemployed intellectuals for the organization of lectures and discussions, etc. on physics, chemistry, mechanics, mathematics, political economy, history of the labor movement, art, literature, etc.;
The establishment of homes open to the working and unemployed youth, where the young will not only have the opportunity to be amused and instructed, but can also study out for themselves the social problems with which they are faced; these homes to be managed by working class youth itself under the supervision of the local trade union organizations.
The Revolutionary program
14) The struggle for these demands cannot be separated from the struggle for the demands of workers as a whole, both employed and unemployed. The final disappearance of unemployment among the youth is closely linked to the disappearance of general unemployment. The struggle for raising the school age and for compulsory technical reeducation is closely linked with the struggle for the sliding scale in wages and in working hours. The straggle to drag out of capitalism those reforms which aim at developing the class consciousness of working youth is closely linked with the struggle for workers’ control of industry and factory committees. The struggle for public works is closely linked with the fight for the expropriation of monopolies, for the nationalization of credit, banks, and key industries. The struggle to smash back all efforts to militarize is closely linked to the struggle against the development of authoritarian state tendencies and against fascism, the struggle for the organization of workers’ militias. It is within the framework of the transitional program of the Fourth International that the present program should be developed and applied. It is under the banner of the proletariat fighting for power that the Fourth International will win the demands of exploited youth.
The International Conference of the Youth of the Fourth International
Lausanne, September 11, 1938
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
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From the Revolutionary Communist Newsletter, May-June 1973
Lessons From History: Founding Conference Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International-"Resolution On The Youth"
Trotsky was always keenly aware of what he called the problem of generations. He began the New Course (1923), his opening shot in the struggle against the bureaucratic degeneration of the Russian Revolution, with a discussion of the "question of the party generations, "and in the most important document among the founding resolutions of the Fourth International (Fl), The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International: The Transitional Program, Trotsky stated the problem of generations in the following way:
"When a program or organization wears out, the generation which carried it on its shoulders wears out with it. The movement is revitalized by the youth who are free of responsibility for the past. Only the fresh enthusiasm and aggressive spirit of the youth can guarantee the preliminary successes in the struggle; only these successes can return the best elements of the older generation to the road of revolution."
—p45, Pathfinder Press edition
Trotsky had not forgotten the lesson of the collapse of the Second International and the building of the Third. When the leading parties of the Second International capitulated to the national chauvinism of WW I, it was the militants primarily concentrated in the Socialist youth and women's groups (representing a more oppressed stratum of the working class than the privileged labor aristocracy—the most influential component of the Western European Socialist parties) who carried the banner of internationalism against the tide of national chauvinism,, It was these militants who, under the impact of the Russian October, provided the precious founding cadre for the new Communist International (Cl). With the destruction of the CI as a world revolutionary party under the heavy blows of the failure of the German Revolution, the bureaucratic degeneration of the Bolshevik Revolution, the rise of fascism and the impending renewal of imperialist world war, the tasks of creating a new international were placed on the agenda, Trotsky, one of the creators of the Cl who had authored its founding manifesto, turned to the generation of young workers, unscarred by the defeats and betrayals of the past. Hence, the founding manifesto of the FI ends with a clarion call to "Open the Road to the Woman Worker-' Open the Road to the Youth.'"
As Nathan Gould, the youth delegate from the U.S., reported in the weekly organ of the then-revolutionary Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Appeal (22 October 1938):
"The resolution on relations between the youth and adult Internationals accepted the classical Leninist concept of these relations. The Youth International, which accepts the proletarian revolutionary international leadership of its adult body is to be politically subordinate to and organizationally autonomous of the Fourth International."
Gould then stated that all decisions and resolutions of the Youth Conference, including the "Resolution on the Youth" flow "from and are subordinated to the demands of the theses on The Death Agony of Capitalism." Indeed, the capitalist death agony developed with such rapidity and acuteness that the "youth question" was soon superseded by the "military question.” The principal concerns of working-class youth in civilian life under capitalism—the lack of jobs, education and social equality, problems with which the "Resolution on the Youth" were mainly concerned—were soon to be transcended as imperialist war gave these youth the "jobs," "education" and "social equality’ of the barracks. Within the context of universal militarism, the Trotskyists conducted themselves with exemplary valor, e.g., building revolutionary cells within the German Army. But the objective conditions forced the Fl to temporarily abandon the tasks set out in the "Resolution on the Youth" and the struggle for a Trotskyist youth international.
The seriousness with which Trotskyists undertook this necessary historical exhortation to find the road to the next generation of revolutionaries was displayed by the fact that-though the founding of the Fl took place under the most difficult conditions requiring careful preparation and secrecy, at a time when the Trotskyists had meager resources and were being hounded throughout the world by the police and agents of all wings of the bourgeoisie from the fascists to the most "democratic" and, with special vehemence, by Stalin's secret police—nonetheless the Founding Conference was followed one week later by the "World Youth Conference of the Fourth International." Both Conferences were held in September 1938; the former was attended by 21 delegates representing 11 countries, while the Youth Conference was attended by 19 delegates from 7 countries (Poland, Austria, Belgium, Holland, England, the U.S. and France). There was a considerable overlap in delegations and, in addition, the International Bureau of the Fl, elected at the party Conference, sent three delegates to the Youth Conference. Besides adopting the "Resolution on the Youth," the world Youth Conference endorsed the Transitional Program and voted to affiliate as the official youth section of the Fl.
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Rise of Pabloism
After WW II, the Trotskyist movement, decimated by fascism and Stalinism, tried to regroup and reorient itself. However, the destruction of a whole generation of Trotskyist cadre, including Trotsky himself, left the Fl theoretically unarmed and isolated from the working class. The untested and inexperienced cadre that rose to the leadership of the Fl, personified by Michel Pablo, were overtaken by the post-war pre-revolutionary upheavals whose course their weak forces could not significantly influence. These cadre were further disoriented by the apparent stabilization of capitalism on the one hand, and the growth of Stalinism and social democracy on the other (see "Genesis of Pabloism," Spartacist No. 21 )„ Pabloism meant the abandonment of the struggle to build independent Trotskyist parties and the liquidation of Trotskyist cadre into the existing Stalinist and social-democratic formations which were seen as playing an eventual revolutionary role under the impact of the "objective process," The corollary for Trotskyist youth was the command that they should bury themselves in the Stalinist and social-democratic youth groups and wait for the "objective process" to unfold.
Thus the "Resolution on the Youth" and the prospects for a Trotskyist youth international were abandoned when the Fl succumbed to Pabloism. Although many of the specific demands and slogans of the "Resolution on the Youth" are clearly dated, the resolution possesses more than just historical interest. The document, especially section 14 entitled "The Revolutionary Program," is a valuable reaffirmation of the programmatic criteria governing youth work as Lenin, Trotsky and the early Cl and Fl conceived it0 Such a reaffirmation is particularly important today when so many political tendencies claiming to be Trotskyist display the most elementary confusion on this question. The early Cl and Young Communist International, and the Founding Conference of the Fl and corresponding Youth Conference were explicit and insistent that the Leninist-Trotskyist youth group must be a section of the vanguard party which embodies the continuity, tested political leadership and developed programmatic clarity of the revolutionary movement,, The program of the youth section must be developed within the framework of the party's program, as the "Youth Resolution" states: "It is within the framework of the transitional programmed of the Fourth International that the present programme should be developed and applied." "Youth" is not a class, there is no "youth program" as such. The program which addresses itself to the objective needs and special oppression of youth is part and parcel of the program for proletarian power. "The struggle for these demands cannot be separated from the struggle for the demands of workers as a whole, both employed and unemployed" ["Youth Resolution"].
Youth Vanguard ism From the SWP to the WL
The various pretenders to the banner of Trotskyism all reject Trotsky’s class approach to the youth question—namely, that the question of special oppression and needs of youth must be subordinated to and integrated into the revolutionary program for the working class, the Transitional Program. Modern Pabloism, embodied in organizations like the SWP, the International Marxist Group in England, the Ligue Communiste in France, and personified by "theoreticians" like Ernest Mandel and "activists" like Tariq Ali, after years of self-internment in reformist organizations, have recoiled from entrism and have tried, in their various ways, to jump on the bandwagon of the "international youth radicalization." Starting from the proposition that we live not in the era of capitalist decay but in the era of "neo-capitalism," i.e., capitalist crises stabilized by state intervention into the economy (e.g., debt expansion), they come to the conclusion that therefore the "epicenter" of world revolution has shifted from the industrial to the colonial countries, or from the industrial working class to more peripheral "sectors" of the work force such as white-collar workers and white-collar "apprentices" (i.e., students). They see the industrial working class as hopelessly bureaucratized and bourgeoisified, only approachable from the "peripheries" of guerrilla warfare in the colonial countries and youth and petty-bourgeois vanguardism in the industrial countries. The SWP has surpassed Pabloism in adopting a non-proletarian ideology. It has lifted the "cultural autonomy" slogan from the Austro-Marxists and applied it to the present by having each oppressed "sector" of the population independently "self-determine" itself, into that pure realm of freedom which is, of course, obtainable only on the gilded comfort of the college campus. Each "sector" of society (students, blacks, Chicanos, women and yes, even the working class) is provided by the revisionists with its very own "transitional" program. Departing from Trotskyism and proletarian revolution on another road, a road akin to "third-period" Stalinism, is the Socialist Labour League, its gang in the U.S., the Workers League, and their corresponding youth groups, both called "Young Socialist.” Starting from a radical perspective—that capitalist productive forces can no longer grow and, therefore, capitalism can no longer grant long-lasting reforms—they draw a reformist conclusion, i.e., that the struggle for such reforms is inherently revolutionary. In fact, this is simply inverted social democracy—that socialism can be won through piecemeal reform struggles. The Transitional Program, on the other hand, raises demands that flow from the real objective needs of the proletariat, but also prepare and mobilize the workers for the revolutionary struggle for proletarian power.
The WL's treatment of the youth question is completely opportunist: Ignoring the heterogeneous social composition of youth, the WL calls upon youth (all youth) to pressure union bureaucrats to build a labor party, and presents transitional demands for youth, as an undifferentiated mass, to carry out. The WL's line embodies classless youth vanguardism. The irony of the WL's constant exhortations to the "youth" to build a labor party, create general strikes, etc., is that in the WL's propaganda to the working class (e.g., in their auto program for 1973, Bulletin. 12 February, p. 18) it often "forgets" to mention the labor party as well as other key transitional demands like nationalization of industry under workers control. Its youth group, furthermore, has no internal political life taut is a front group manipulated by the WL0
The Revolutionary Communist Youth, as the youth section of the Spartacist League, continues the traditions of the early Cl and Fl, the traditions of Lenin and Trotsky, that the youth section must be programmatically linked and united to the vanguard party ("politically subordinate and organizationally autonomous"),that the special demands which address themselves to the problems of the youth must flow from the Transitional Program ram and must link the struggles of youth to the struggle of the proletariat for power.
-RCYN Editorial Board
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Founding Conference of the Fourth International 1938
Resolution On Youth
The Capitalist Impasse
1) Capitalism, Whether it be authoritarian or liberal, admits the inability to bring the slightest relief to the misery and sufferings of working class youth. The young want a trade, and when (rarely enough!) it consents to give them one, it is only to chain them the better to a machine which tomorrow will stop and let them starve beside the very riches they have produced. The young want to work, to produce with their hands, to use theft strength, and capitalism offers them the perspective of unemployment or of “the execution of work in conditions other than the normal conditions of production,” according to the excellent hypocritical definition of labor camps by the League of Nations, or of armament production, which engenders destruction rather than improvement. The young want to learn, and the way to culture is barred to them. The young want to live, and the only future offered them is that of dying of hunger or rotting on the barbed wire of a new imperialist war. The young want to create a new world, and they are permitted only to maintain or to consolidate a rotting world that is falling to pieces. The young want to know what tomorrow will be, and capitalism's only reply to them is: “Today you've got to tighten your belt another notch; tomorrow, we'll see . . . . In any case, perhaps you're not going to have any tomorrow.”
Give Youth a Future Give the World a Future
2) That is why youth will rally under the flag of those who bring it a future. Only the Fourth International, because it represents the historical interests of the only class which can reorganize tile world upon new bases, only the Bolshevik-Leninists can promise youth a future in which it can put its abilities to full use. Only they can say to the youth: “Together with you, we want to make a new world, where everyone works and is proud to work well, to know his job down to the smallest details; a world where everyone will eat according to his hunger, for production will be regulated according to the needs of the workers and not those of profit; a world where one must constantly learn, in order the better to subordinate the forces of nature to the will of man; a world where, by ceaselessly extending the domain of the application of science, humanity’s theoretic knowledge will be daily increased; a new world, a new man who can make real all the hopes and powers he bears within him” It is under the banner of a new world and a new humanity that the Fourth International and its youth organizations must go on to win the working class youth; it is under that banner that they will win that youth.
The Struggle for a Future the Struggle for Bread
3) The promise of a better future would be only demagogy if the Bolshevik-Leninists were not fighting for an immediate improvement in the situation of working class youth, if they were not formulating youth’s immediate demands, if they were not spreading word of the necessity for working class youth to fight by class struggle methods for the satisfaction of these demands, and if, through this struggle and on the basis of the experience gained therein, they were not demonstrating to exploited youth that its demands could be finally satisfied only by establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat, that the struggle for these demands must be transformed into a struggle for power by means of a struggle for the control and management of the economic system.
We Demand the Right to Work!
4) For the young workers engaged in production the Bolshevik-Leninists put forward slogans with the aim of a) measuring the work done by the young not according to the desire to drag as much profit as possible out of it, but, on the contrary, according to their degree of physical development; b) assuring them of a standard of living equal to that of adults, by that very fact assuring them of economic independence; c) raising their technical qualifications as far as possible; d) against the equal opportunity for young and old to be exploited in, capitalism, setting up their equal rights.
For the young under twenty, they also formulate the following demands:
Reduced working week, with schedules allowing young workers to engage in sports in the open air;
At least one month’s paid vacation per year;
The organizing, by factories, or groups of factories, of training courses, at the bosses’ expense and under workers’ control;
Hours of craft training taken out of the working week, and paid for at regular rates;
Application of the principle “equal pay for equal work” under workers’ control;
The fixing of a minimum living wage for young workers; fixing of the wages of young workers under the control of all the workers taken as a whole;
Prohibition of night work, of overlaborious, unhealthy, or unwholesome tasks; workers’ control over the use of young labor.
Equality for Youth in Social Legislation
All Together for the Struggle!
5) In order to take the defense of their demands into their own hands, the young workers should have the right to choose their own delegates, whose task is above all to draw the attention of the adult delegates and of the workers in general to youth’s specific demands, to tie up the struggle for these particular demands with the struggle for the general demands of the working class. In the same way, in all branches of trade union organizations, union youth commissions must be created and imposed upon the trade union bureaucracy, whose task shall be to study the demands of the youth, and to recruit and educate young workers. The task of the Bolshevik-Leninists is to take the lead in the organization of such commissions.
In order to throw trade union doors wide open to exploited youth, the Bolshevik-Leninists demand the establishment of reduced dues for young workers.
We Want a Trade!
6) In the fight against unemployment the slogans raise the school age, organize apprenticeship, make sense only to the extent that the weight of this must be borne not by the working class but by the big capitalists. Hence the Bolshevik-Leninists owe it to themselves to formulate the demands of working class youth in this field as follows:
Prolongation of the school age to 16, with a grant for family support in working class and small farmer families.
Reorganization of the school in cooperation with the factory:
the school should prepare children for life and work; it should weld the youth to the older generations; hence the demand for control by workers’ organizations over technical education.
Reduction of the period of apprenticeship to a maximum of two years.
Forbidding of all work not connected with the actual apprenticeship.
The setting up, at the expense of the bosses, in connection with every business or group of businesses engaged in manufacturing, mining, or trade, of apprentice schools, with an attendance of at least 3 percent of the personnel employed in the business or group of businesses.
Choosing of the instructors by the labor unions.
Control of these schools by a mixed commission of workers’ delegates and delegates of the apprentices themselves.
We Demand Our Right to Live!
7) The task of saving the unemployed youth from misery, despair, and fascist demagogy, of working them back into production and thereby binding them closely to the working class, is a vital task for the future of the proletariat. Revolutionaries must struggle to force capitalism (a) to undertake to work the unemployed youth back into production through the organization of technical education and guidance; (b) to put the unemployed youth back immediately into productive activity; (c) to organize such work not according to semimilitary methods but on the basis of regular wages: Down with labor camps, either voluntary or obligatory!; (d) to furnish youth, which it is throwing into misery, the wherewithal to live. Hence the Bolshevik-Leninists put forward the following demands:
Unemployment benefits on the adult scale for all young unemployed, manual or intellectual, immediately upon their finishing school;
Forcing the big bosses to open technical reeducation centers under workers’ control;
Technical reeducation organized according to the needs of production, under the general control of the trade unions and. the congresses of workers’ delegates;
Reopening of the shutdown factories;
Commencement of large-scale public works (hospitals, schools, lowcost housing projects, sports fields, stadiums, swimming pools, electric power stations), paid at trade union scales and under workers’ control from top to bottom.
For Our Brothers on the Farms! 8) The misery of the farm youth is no less than that of the industrial youth. For farm youth the Bolshevik-Leninists formulate the following general demands:
Strict application of all the above named laws and social measures in the country just as in the city;
Suppression of the domestic exploitation of young children;
Particularly strict application of the principle: “Equal pay for equal work";
District organization of technical education at the expense of the big finance capital farm owners;
Healthy food and lodging for young farm workers living in their bosses’ houses;
Cheap credit for small-scale farmers, and especially for small-scale farmers with family responsibilities.
For Our Countryside
9) The industrial and farm youth are the most exploited part of all working class youth. The youth organizations of the Fourth International must draw particular attention to the following demands: Strict application of the principle “Equal pay for equal work!";
An extra day off per month;
The right to voluntary maternity;
A six month leave of absence for maternity;
Maternity grants for young mothers.
Open the Schools and Universities!
10) One of the necessary conditions for the progress of humanity is that large sections of working class youth should have access to culture and science. The Bolshevik-Leninists put forward the following slogans:
Open the schools and universities to all the young who are willing to study.
Free education and support for workers’ and farmers’ sons and daughters. Bread, Books, and Civil Rights for Coolies!
11) In colonial and semi colonial countries, laboring youth are the victims of a double exploitation capitalist and patriarchal. In these, and in imperialist countries, the defense of the demands of the young colonial workers and peasants is the first duty in the fight against imperialism. This fight is carried on around the general slogan: The same rights for colonial youth as for the youth of the imperialist capital city.
Organization of hygiene and similar care in all villages.
Organization of homes for young workers, peasants, and coolies, under the control of labor and nationalist organizations.
Schools for native children; teaching in the native language.
Open the government administration to native language.
Open the government administration to native intellectuals.
Take the necessary financial credits from the war and police budgets and imperialist privileges.
12) The bourgeoisie recognizes working youth’s right to be exploited; but refuses it the right to have anything to say about that exploitation, and deprives it of all political rights; in certain countries it even forbids youth under eighteen to have any political activity whatever. The working class replies to these measures by saying: Whoever has the right to be exploited has also the right to struggle against the system which exploits him. Full political rights to young workers and peasants!
The right to vote beginning at 18, just as much in legislative and municipal elections as in the election of delegates.
Abolition of special laws forbidding youth to engage in political activity.
We Demand Our Right to Happiness!
13) Working class youth’s need for relaxation is utilized by the bourgeoisie either to stupefy it or make it submit to an even tighter discipline. The duty of the working class is to help create a youth that is strong and capable of throwing all its physical and mental strength into the fight against capitalism; to aid it in using what leisure capitalism gives it to learn to understand the world better, in order to be better able to change it. Hence the Bolshevik-Leninists demand:
Free access to all sports fields, stadiums, museums, libraries, theaters, and movies for all young workers and unemployed;
The ordering of their leisure by the young unemployed themselves;
The using of young unemployed intellectuals for the organization of lectures and discussions, etc. on physics, chemistry, mechanics, mathematics, political economy, history of the labor movement, art, literature, etc.;
The establishment of homes open to the working and unemployed youth, where the young will not only have the opportunity to be amused and instructed, but can also study out for themselves the social problems with which they are faced; these homes to be managed by working class youth itself under the supervision of the local trade union organizations.
The Revolutionary program
14) The struggle for these demands cannot be separated from the struggle for the demands of workers as a whole, both employed and unemployed. The final disappearance of unemployment among the youth is closely linked to the disappearance of general unemployment. The struggle for raising the school age and for compulsory technical reeducation is closely linked with the struggle for the sliding scale in wages and in working hours. The straggle to drag out of capitalism those reforms which aim at developing the class consciousness of working youth is closely linked with the struggle for workers’ control of industry and factory committees. The struggle for public works is closely linked with the fight for the expropriation of monopolies, for the nationalization of credit, banks, and key industries. The struggle to smash back all efforts to militarize is closely linked to the struggle against the development of authoritarian state tendencies and against fascism, the struggle for the organization of workers’ militias. It is within the framework of the transitional program of the Fourth International that the present program should be developed and applied. It is under the banner of the proletariat fighting for power that the Fourth International will win the demands of exploited youth.
The International Conference of the Youth of the Fourth International
Lausanne, September 11, 1938
The Latest From The “Occupy Oakland” Website-This Is Class War-We Say No More-Take The Offensive- Make The “Occupy” Movement Streets Labor’s Streets-Defend The Oakland Commune!
Click on the headline to link to Occupy Oakland website for the latest from the Bay Area vanguard battleground in the struggle for social justice.
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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend All The Occupation Sites And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Protesters Everywhere!
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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around. Organize the unorganized- Organize the South- Organize Wal-mart- Defend the right for public and private workers to unionize.
* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized and other labor-specific causes (example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio).
*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. Labor and the oppressed must rule!
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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend All The Occupation Sites And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Protesters Everywhere!
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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around. Organize the unorganized- Organize the South- Organize Wal-mart- Defend the right for public and private workers to unionize.
* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized and other labor-specific causes (example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio).
*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. Labor and the oppressed must rule!
The Latest From The Lynne Stewart Defense Committee- Free Lynne Stewart Now And Her Co-Workers Now!
Click on the headline to link to the Justice For Lynn Stewart Defense Committee for the latest in her case.
Markin comment:
Free Lynne Stewart and her co-workers! Free Grandma Now!
Markin comment:
Free Lynne Stewart and her co-workers! Free Grandma Now!
From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-Lessons From History:From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky-"The New Course"-CHAPTER 1-The Question of the Party Generations (1923)
Markin comment on this series:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
***********
From the Revolutionary Communist Newsletter, May-June 1973
"Trotsky was always keenly aware of what he called the problem of generations. He began the New Course (1923), his opening shot in the struggle against the bureaucratic degeneration of the Russian Revolution, with a discussion of the "question of the party generations, "and in the most important document among the founding resolutions of the Fourth International (Fl), The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International: The Transitional Program, Trotsky stated the problem of generations in the following way:
"When a program or organization wears out, the generation which carried it on its shoulders wears out with it. The movement is revitalized by the youth who are free of responsibility for the past.Only the fresh enthusiasm and aggressive spirit of the youth can guarantee the preliminary successes in the struggle; only these successes can return the best elements of the older generation to the road of revolution."
—p45, Pathfinder Press edition
***********
Leon Trotsky-The New Course-CHAPTER 1-The Question of the Party Generations
None of the resolutions adopted during the discussion in Moscow, the complaint is made that the question of party democracy has been complicated by discussions on the relationships between the generations, personal attacks, etc. This complaint attests to a certain mental confusion. Personal attacks and the mutual relationships between generations are two entirely different things. To pose now the question of party democracy without analyzing the membership of the party, from the social point of view as well as from the point of view of age and political standing, would be to dissolve it into a void. It is not by accident that the question of party democracy rose up first of all as a question of relationships between the generations. It is the logical result of the whole evolution of our party. Its history may be divided schematically into four periods:
a.quarter of a century of preparation up to October, the only one in history;
b.October;
c.the period following October; and
d.the new course, that is, the period we are now entering.
Despite its richness, its complexity and the diversity of the stages through which it passed, the period prior to October, it is now realized, was only a preparatory period. October made it possible to check up on the ideology and the organization of the party and its membership. By October, we understand the acutest period of the struggle for power, which can be said to have started approximately with Lenin’s April Theses [1] and ended with the actual seizure of the state apparatus. Even though it lasted only a few months, it is no less important in content than the whole period of preparation which is measured in years and decades. October not only gave us an unfailing verification, unique in its kind, of the party’s great past, but it itself became a source of experience for the future. It was through October that the pre October party was able for the first time to assess itself at its true worth.
The conquest of power was followed by a rapid, even abnormal, growth of the party. A powerful magnet, the party attracted not only workers with little consciousness, but even certain elements plainly alien to its spirit: functionaries, careerists and political hangers on. In this chaotic period, it was able to preserve its Bolshevist nature only thanks to the internal dictatorship of the Old Guard, which had been tested in October. In the more or less important questions, the leadership of the older generation was then accepted almost unchallenged by the new members, not only by the proletarian ranks but by the alien elements. The climbers considered this docility the best way of establishing their own situation in the party. But they miscalculated. By a rigorous purging of its own ranks, the party rid itself of them. Its membership diminished, but its consciousness was enhanced. It may be said that this checkup on itself, this purge, made the post-October party feel itself for the first time a half million headed collectivity whose task was not simply to be led by the Old Guard but to examine and decide for itself the essential questions of policy. In this sense, the purge and the critical period linked with it are the preparation, as it were, of the profound change now manifesting itself in the life of the party and which will probably go down in its history under the name of “the new course.”
There is one thing that ought to be clearly understood from the start: the essence of the present disagreements and difficulties does not lie in the fact that the “secretaries” have overreached themselves on certain points and must be called back to order, but in the fact that the party as a whole is about to move on to a higher historical stage. The bulk of the communists are saying in effect to the leaders: “You, comrades, have the experience of before October, which most of us are lacking; but under your leadership we have acquired after October a great experience which is constantly growing in significance. And we not only want to be led by you but to participate with you in the leadership of the class. We want it not only because that is our right as party members but also because it is absolutely necessary to the working class as a whole. Without our modest experience, experience which should not merely be taken note of in the leading spheres but which must be introduced into the life of the party by ourselves, the leading party apparatus is growing bureaucratic, and we, rank-and-file communists, do not feel ourselves sufficiently well armed ideologically when confronting the non party people.” The present change is, as I have said, the result of the whole precedent evolution. Invisible at first glance, molecular processes in the lift and the consciousness of the party have long been at work preparing it. The market crisis gave a strong impetus to critical thought. The approach of the events in Germany set the party a quiver. Precisely at this moment it appeared with particular sharpness that the party was living, as it were, on two storeys: the upper storey, where things are decided, and the lower storey, where all you do is learn of the decisions. Nevertheless, the critical revision of the internal régime of the party was postponed by the anxious expectation of what seemed to be the imminent showdown in Germany. When it turned out that this showdown was delayed by the force of things, the party put the question of the “new course" on the order of the day.
As often happens in history, it is precisely during these last months that the “old course” revealed the most negative and most insufferable traits: apparatus cliquism, bureaucratic smugness, and complete disdain for the mood, the thoughts and the needs of the party. Out of bureaucratic inertia, it rejected, from the very beginning, and with an antagonistic violence, the initial attempts to put on the order of the day the question of the critical revision of the internal party régime. This does not mean, to be sure, that the apparatus is composed exclusively of bureaucratized elements, or even less, of confirmed and incorrigible bureaucrats. Not at all! The present critical period, whose meaning they will assimilate, will teach a good deal to the majority of the apparatus workers and will get them to abandon most of their errors. The ideological and organic regrouping that will come out of the present crisis, will, in the long run, have healthful consequences for the rank and file of the communists as well as for the apparatus. But in the latter, as it appeared on the threshold of the present crisis, Bureaucratism has reached an excessive, truly alarming development. And that is what gives the present ideological regrouping so acute a character as to engender legitimate fears.
It will suffice to point out that, two or three months ago, the mere mention of the Bureaucratism of the apparatus, of the excessive authority of the committees and the secretaries, was greeted by the responsible representatives of the “old course,” in the central and local organizations, with a shrug of the shoulders or by indignant protestations. Appointment as a system? Pure imagination! Formalism, Bureaucratism? Inventions, opposition solely for
the pleasure of making opposition, etc. These comrades, in all sincerity, did not notice the bureaucratic danger they themselves represent. It is only under pressure from the ranks that they began, little by little, to recognize that there actually were manifestations of Bureaucratism, but only somewhere at the organizational periphery, in certain regions and districts, that these were only a deviation in practice from the straight line, etc. According to them, Bureaucratism was nothing but a survival of the war period, that is, a phenomenon in the process of disappearing, only not fast enough. Needless to say how false are this approach to things and this explanation. Bureaucratism is not a fortuitous feature of certain provincial organizations, but a general phenomenon. It does not travel from the district to the central organization through the medium of the regional organization, but much rather from the central organization to the district through the medium of the regional organization. It is not at all a “survival” of the war period; it is the result of the transference to the party of the methods and the administrative manners accumulated during these last years. However exaggerated were the forms it sometimes assumed, the Bureaucratism of the war period was only child’s play in comparison with present day Bureaucratism which grew up in peacetime, while the apparatus, in spite of the ideological growth of the party, continued obstinately to think and decide for the party.
Hence, the unanimously adopted resolution of the Central Committee on the structure of the party has, from the standpoint of principle, an immense importance which the party must be clearly aware of. It would indeed be unworthy to consider that the profound meaning of the decisions taken boils down to a mere demand for more “mildness,” more “solicitousness” toward the masses on the part of the secretaries and the committees, and to some technical modifications in the organization. The resolution of the Central Committee speaks of a “new course, and not for nothing. The party is preparing to enter into a new phase of development. To be sure, it is not a Question of breaking the organizational principles of Bolshevism, as some are trying to have us believe, but to apply them to the conditions of the new stage in the development of the party. It is a question primarily of instituting healthier relations between the old cadres and the majority of the members who came to the party after October.
Theoretical preparation, revolutionary tempering, political experience, these represent the party’s basic political capital whose principal possessors, in the first place, are the old cadres of the party. On the other hand, the party is essentially a democratic organization, that is, a collectivity which decides upon its road by the thought and the will of all its members. It is completely clear that in the complicated situation of the period immediately following October, the party made its way all the better for the fact that it utilized to the full the experience accumulated by the older generation, to whose representatives it entrusted the most important positions in the organization.
On the other hand, the result of this state of things has been that, in playing the role of party leader and being absorbed by the Questions of administration, the old generation accustomed itself to think and to decide, as it still does, for the party. For the communist masses, it brings to the forefront purely bookish, pedagogical methods of participating in political life: elementary political training courses, examinations of the knowledge of its members, party schools, etc. Thence the bureaucratism of the apparatus, its cliquism, its exclusive internal life, in a word, all the traits that constitute the profoundly
negative side of the old course. The fact that the party lives on two separate storeys bears within it numerous dangers, which I spoke of in my letter on the old and the young. By “young,” I mean of course not simply the students, but the whole generation that came to the party after October, the factory cells in the first place. How did this increasingly marked uneasiness of the party manifest itself? In the majority of its members saying or feeling that: “Whether the apparatus thinks and decides well or badly, it continues to think and decide too often without us and for us. When we happen to display lack of understanding or doubts, to express an objection or a criticism, we are called to order, discipline is invoked; most often, we are accused of being obstructers or even of wanting to establish factions. We are devoted to the party to our very marrow and ready to make any sacrifice for it. But we want to participate actively and consciously in working out its views and in determining its course of action.” The first manifestations of this state of mind unmistakably passed by unperceived by the leading apparatus which took no account of it, and that was one of the main causes of the anti party groupings in the party. Their importance should certainly not be exaggerated, but neither should their meaning be minimized, for they ought to be a warning to us.
The chief danger of the old course, a result of general historical causes as well as of our own mistakes, is that the apparatus manifests a growing tendency to counterpose a few thousand comrades, who form the leading cadres, to the rest of the mass whom they look upon only as an object of action. If this régime should persist, it would threaten to provoke, in the long run, a degeneration of the party at both its poles, that is, among the party youth and among the leading cadres. As to the proletarian basis of the party, the factory cells, the students, etc., the character of the peril is clear. Not feeling that they are participating actively in the general work of the party and not getting a timely answer to their questions to the party, numerous communists start looking for a substitute for independent party activity in the form of groupings and factions of all sorts. It is in this sense precisely that we speak of the symptomatic importance of groupings like the “Workers’ Group.” [2]
But no less great is the danger, at the other pole, of the régime that has lasted too long and become synonymous in the party with bureaucratism. It would be ridiculous, and unworthy ostrich politics, not to understand, or not to want to see, that the accusation of bureaucratism formulated in the resolution of the Central Committee is directed precisely against the cadres of the party. It is not a question of isolated deviations in practice from the ideal line, but precisely of the general policy of the apparatus, of its bureaucratic tendency. Does bureaucratism bear within it a danger of degeneration, or doesn’t it? He would be blind who denied. In its prolonged development, bureaucratization threatens to detach the leaders from the masses, to bring them to concentrate their attention solely upon questions of administration, of appointments and transfers, of narrowing their horizon, of weakening their revolutionary spirit, that is, of provoking a more or less opportunistic degeneration of the Old Guard, or at the very least of a considerable part of it. Such processes develop slowly and almost imperceptibly, but reveal themselves abruptly. To see in this warning, based upon objective Marxian foresight, an “outrage,” an “assault,” etc., really requires the skittish susceptibility and arrogance of bureaucrats.
But, in actuality, is the danger of such a degeneration really great? The fact that the party has understood or felt this danger and has reacted to it energetically which is what was the specific cause of the resolution of the Central Committee bears witness to its profound vitality and by that very fact reveals the potent sources of antidote which it has at its disposal against bureaucratic poison. There lies the principal guarantee of its preservation as a revolutionary party. But if the old course should seek to maintain itself at all costs by tightening the reins, by increasingly artificial selection, by intimidation, in a word, by procedures indicating a distrust of the party, the actual danger of degeneration of a considerable part of the cadres would inevitably increase.
The party cannot live solely upon past reserves. It suffices that the past has prepared the present. But the present must be ideologically and practically up to the level of the past in order to prepare the future. The task of the present is to shift the center of party activity toward the masses of the party.
But, it may be said, this shifting of the center of gravity cannot be accomplished at one time, by a leap; the party cannot "put in the archives” the old generation and immediately start living a new life. It is scarcely worth while dwelling on such a stupidly demagogical argument. To want to put the old generation in the archives would be madness. What is needed is that precisey this old generation should change its orientation and, by virtue of that, guarantee in the future the preponderance of its influence upon all the independent activity of the party. It must consider the “new course” not as a maneuver, a diplomatic stroke, or a temporary concession, but as a new stage in the political development of the party. In this way, both the generation that leads the party and the party as a whole will reap the greatest benefit.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTES
1. The April Theses was delivered by Lenin upon return to Petrograd on April4, 1917. The April Theses was an attack on the Bolshevik leadership (Kamanev, Zinoviev and Stalin) for their conciliatory stand toward the capitalist government. The Theses reoriented the party for a working class siezure of power and against any attempts at compromise with the government.
2. The Workers Group was one of several dissident factions inside the Bolshevik Party that was opposed to the the leadership.
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
***********
From the Revolutionary Communist Newsletter, May-June 1973
"Trotsky was always keenly aware of what he called the problem of generations. He began the New Course (1923), his opening shot in the struggle against the bureaucratic degeneration of the Russian Revolution, with a discussion of the "question of the party generations, "and in the most important document among the founding resolutions of the Fourth International (Fl), The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International: The Transitional Program, Trotsky stated the problem of generations in the following way:
"When a program or organization wears out, the generation which carried it on its shoulders wears out with it. The movement is revitalized by the youth who are free of responsibility for the past.Only the fresh enthusiasm and aggressive spirit of the youth can guarantee the preliminary successes in the struggle; only these successes can return the best elements of the older generation to the road of revolution."
—p45, Pathfinder Press edition
***********
Leon Trotsky-The New Course-CHAPTER 1-The Question of the Party Generations
None of the resolutions adopted during the discussion in Moscow, the complaint is made that the question of party democracy has been complicated by discussions on the relationships between the generations, personal attacks, etc. This complaint attests to a certain mental confusion. Personal attacks and the mutual relationships between generations are two entirely different things. To pose now the question of party democracy without analyzing the membership of the party, from the social point of view as well as from the point of view of age and political standing, would be to dissolve it into a void. It is not by accident that the question of party democracy rose up first of all as a question of relationships between the generations. It is the logical result of the whole evolution of our party. Its history may be divided schematically into four periods:
a.quarter of a century of preparation up to October, the only one in history;
b.October;
c.the period following October; and
d.the new course, that is, the period we are now entering.
Despite its richness, its complexity and the diversity of the stages through which it passed, the period prior to October, it is now realized, was only a preparatory period. October made it possible to check up on the ideology and the organization of the party and its membership. By October, we understand the acutest period of the struggle for power, which can be said to have started approximately with Lenin’s April Theses [1] and ended with the actual seizure of the state apparatus. Even though it lasted only a few months, it is no less important in content than the whole period of preparation which is measured in years and decades. October not only gave us an unfailing verification, unique in its kind, of the party’s great past, but it itself became a source of experience for the future. It was through October that the pre October party was able for the first time to assess itself at its true worth.
The conquest of power was followed by a rapid, even abnormal, growth of the party. A powerful magnet, the party attracted not only workers with little consciousness, but even certain elements plainly alien to its spirit: functionaries, careerists and political hangers on. In this chaotic period, it was able to preserve its Bolshevist nature only thanks to the internal dictatorship of the Old Guard, which had been tested in October. In the more or less important questions, the leadership of the older generation was then accepted almost unchallenged by the new members, not only by the proletarian ranks but by the alien elements. The climbers considered this docility the best way of establishing their own situation in the party. But they miscalculated. By a rigorous purging of its own ranks, the party rid itself of them. Its membership diminished, but its consciousness was enhanced. It may be said that this checkup on itself, this purge, made the post-October party feel itself for the first time a half million headed collectivity whose task was not simply to be led by the Old Guard but to examine and decide for itself the essential questions of policy. In this sense, the purge and the critical period linked with it are the preparation, as it were, of the profound change now manifesting itself in the life of the party and which will probably go down in its history under the name of “the new course.”
There is one thing that ought to be clearly understood from the start: the essence of the present disagreements and difficulties does not lie in the fact that the “secretaries” have overreached themselves on certain points and must be called back to order, but in the fact that the party as a whole is about to move on to a higher historical stage. The bulk of the communists are saying in effect to the leaders: “You, comrades, have the experience of before October, which most of us are lacking; but under your leadership we have acquired after October a great experience which is constantly growing in significance. And we not only want to be led by you but to participate with you in the leadership of the class. We want it not only because that is our right as party members but also because it is absolutely necessary to the working class as a whole. Without our modest experience, experience which should not merely be taken note of in the leading spheres but which must be introduced into the life of the party by ourselves, the leading party apparatus is growing bureaucratic, and we, rank-and-file communists, do not feel ourselves sufficiently well armed ideologically when confronting the non party people.” The present change is, as I have said, the result of the whole precedent evolution. Invisible at first glance, molecular processes in the lift and the consciousness of the party have long been at work preparing it. The market crisis gave a strong impetus to critical thought. The approach of the events in Germany set the party a quiver. Precisely at this moment it appeared with particular sharpness that the party was living, as it were, on two storeys: the upper storey, where things are decided, and the lower storey, where all you do is learn of the decisions. Nevertheless, the critical revision of the internal régime of the party was postponed by the anxious expectation of what seemed to be the imminent showdown in Germany. When it turned out that this showdown was delayed by the force of things, the party put the question of the “new course" on the order of the day.
As often happens in history, it is precisely during these last months that the “old course” revealed the most negative and most insufferable traits: apparatus cliquism, bureaucratic smugness, and complete disdain for the mood, the thoughts and the needs of the party. Out of bureaucratic inertia, it rejected, from the very beginning, and with an antagonistic violence, the initial attempts to put on the order of the day the question of the critical revision of the internal party régime. This does not mean, to be sure, that the apparatus is composed exclusively of bureaucratized elements, or even less, of confirmed and incorrigible bureaucrats. Not at all! The present critical period, whose meaning they will assimilate, will teach a good deal to the majority of the apparatus workers and will get them to abandon most of their errors. The ideological and organic regrouping that will come out of the present crisis, will, in the long run, have healthful consequences for the rank and file of the communists as well as for the apparatus. But in the latter, as it appeared on the threshold of the present crisis, Bureaucratism has reached an excessive, truly alarming development. And that is what gives the present ideological regrouping so acute a character as to engender legitimate fears.
It will suffice to point out that, two or three months ago, the mere mention of the Bureaucratism of the apparatus, of the excessive authority of the committees and the secretaries, was greeted by the responsible representatives of the “old course,” in the central and local organizations, with a shrug of the shoulders or by indignant protestations. Appointment as a system? Pure imagination! Formalism, Bureaucratism? Inventions, opposition solely for
the pleasure of making opposition, etc. These comrades, in all sincerity, did not notice the bureaucratic danger they themselves represent. It is only under pressure from the ranks that they began, little by little, to recognize that there actually were manifestations of Bureaucratism, but only somewhere at the organizational periphery, in certain regions and districts, that these were only a deviation in practice from the straight line, etc. According to them, Bureaucratism was nothing but a survival of the war period, that is, a phenomenon in the process of disappearing, only not fast enough. Needless to say how false are this approach to things and this explanation. Bureaucratism is not a fortuitous feature of certain provincial organizations, but a general phenomenon. It does not travel from the district to the central organization through the medium of the regional organization, but much rather from the central organization to the district through the medium of the regional organization. It is not at all a “survival” of the war period; it is the result of the transference to the party of the methods and the administrative manners accumulated during these last years. However exaggerated were the forms it sometimes assumed, the Bureaucratism of the war period was only child’s play in comparison with present day Bureaucratism which grew up in peacetime, while the apparatus, in spite of the ideological growth of the party, continued obstinately to think and decide for the party.
Hence, the unanimously adopted resolution of the Central Committee on the structure of the party has, from the standpoint of principle, an immense importance which the party must be clearly aware of. It would indeed be unworthy to consider that the profound meaning of the decisions taken boils down to a mere demand for more “mildness,” more “solicitousness” toward the masses on the part of the secretaries and the committees, and to some technical modifications in the organization. The resolution of the Central Committee speaks of a “new course, and not for nothing. The party is preparing to enter into a new phase of development. To be sure, it is not a Question of breaking the organizational principles of Bolshevism, as some are trying to have us believe, but to apply them to the conditions of the new stage in the development of the party. It is a question primarily of instituting healthier relations between the old cadres and the majority of the members who came to the party after October.
Theoretical preparation, revolutionary tempering, political experience, these represent the party’s basic political capital whose principal possessors, in the first place, are the old cadres of the party. On the other hand, the party is essentially a democratic organization, that is, a collectivity which decides upon its road by the thought and the will of all its members. It is completely clear that in the complicated situation of the period immediately following October, the party made its way all the better for the fact that it utilized to the full the experience accumulated by the older generation, to whose representatives it entrusted the most important positions in the organization.
On the other hand, the result of this state of things has been that, in playing the role of party leader and being absorbed by the Questions of administration, the old generation accustomed itself to think and to decide, as it still does, for the party. For the communist masses, it brings to the forefront purely bookish, pedagogical methods of participating in political life: elementary political training courses, examinations of the knowledge of its members, party schools, etc. Thence the bureaucratism of the apparatus, its cliquism, its exclusive internal life, in a word, all the traits that constitute the profoundly
negative side of the old course. The fact that the party lives on two separate storeys bears within it numerous dangers, which I spoke of in my letter on the old and the young. By “young,” I mean of course not simply the students, but the whole generation that came to the party after October, the factory cells in the first place. How did this increasingly marked uneasiness of the party manifest itself? In the majority of its members saying or feeling that: “Whether the apparatus thinks and decides well or badly, it continues to think and decide too often without us and for us. When we happen to display lack of understanding or doubts, to express an objection or a criticism, we are called to order, discipline is invoked; most often, we are accused of being obstructers or even of wanting to establish factions. We are devoted to the party to our very marrow and ready to make any sacrifice for it. But we want to participate actively and consciously in working out its views and in determining its course of action.” The first manifestations of this state of mind unmistakably passed by unperceived by the leading apparatus which took no account of it, and that was one of the main causes of the anti party groupings in the party. Their importance should certainly not be exaggerated, but neither should their meaning be minimized, for they ought to be a warning to us.
The chief danger of the old course, a result of general historical causes as well as of our own mistakes, is that the apparatus manifests a growing tendency to counterpose a few thousand comrades, who form the leading cadres, to the rest of the mass whom they look upon only as an object of action. If this régime should persist, it would threaten to provoke, in the long run, a degeneration of the party at both its poles, that is, among the party youth and among the leading cadres. As to the proletarian basis of the party, the factory cells, the students, etc., the character of the peril is clear. Not feeling that they are participating actively in the general work of the party and not getting a timely answer to their questions to the party, numerous communists start looking for a substitute for independent party activity in the form of groupings and factions of all sorts. It is in this sense precisely that we speak of the symptomatic importance of groupings like the “Workers’ Group.” [2]
But no less great is the danger, at the other pole, of the régime that has lasted too long and become synonymous in the party with bureaucratism. It would be ridiculous, and unworthy ostrich politics, not to understand, or not to want to see, that the accusation of bureaucratism formulated in the resolution of the Central Committee is directed precisely against the cadres of the party. It is not a question of isolated deviations in practice from the ideal line, but precisely of the general policy of the apparatus, of its bureaucratic tendency. Does bureaucratism bear within it a danger of degeneration, or doesn’t it? He would be blind who denied. In its prolonged development, bureaucratization threatens to detach the leaders from the masses, to bring them to concentrate their attention solely upon questions of administration, of appointments and transfers, of narrowing their horizon, of weakening their revolutionary spirit, that is, of provoking a more or less opportunistic degeneration of the Old Guard, or at the very least of a considerable part of it. Such processes develop slowly and almost imperceptibly, but reveal themselves abruptly. To see in this warning, based upon objective Marxian foresight, an “outrage,” an “assault,” etc., really requires the skittish susceptibility and arrogance of bureaucrats.
But, in actuality, is the danger of such a degeneration really great? The fact that the party has understood or felt this danger and has reacted to it energetically which is what was the specific cause of the resolution of the Central Committee bears witness to its profound vitality and by that very fact reveals the potent sources of antidote which it has at its disposal against bureaucratic poison. There lies the principal guarantee of its preservation as a revolutionary party. But if the old course should seek to maintain itself at all costs by tightening the reins, by increasingly artificial selection, by intimidation, in a word, by procedures indicating a distrust of the party, the actual danger of degeneration of a considerable part of the cadres would inevitably increase.
The party cannot live solely upon past reserves. It suffices that the past has prepared the present. But the present must be ideologically and practically up to the level of the past in order to prepare the future. The task of the present is to shift the center of party activity toward the masses of the party.
But, it may be said, this shifting of the center of gravity cannot be accomplished at one time, by a leap; the party cannot "put in the archives” the old generation and immediately start living a new life. It is scarcely worth while dwelling on such a stupidly demagogical argument. To want to put the old generation in the archives would be madness. What is needed is that precisey this old generation should change its orientation and, by virtue of that, guarantee in the future the preponderance of its influence upon all the independent activity of the party. It must consider the “new course” not as a maneuver, a diplomatic stroke, or a temporary concession, but as a new stage in the political development of the party. In this way, both the generation that leads the party and the party as a whole will reap the greatest benefit.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTES
1. The April Theses was delivered by Lenin upon return to Petrograd on April4, 1917. The April Theses was an attack on the Bolshevik leadership (Kamanev, Zinoviev and Stalin) for their conciliatory stand toward the capitalist government. The Theses reoriented the party for a working class siezure of power and against any attempts at compromise with the government.
2. The Workers Group was one of several dissident factions inside the Bolshevik Party that was opposed to the the leadership.
The “Shame” Culture Of Poverty- Down In The Base Of Society Life Ain’t Pretty
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the late Irish-American writer and my muse on this post, Frank McCourt.
Peter Paul Markin comment:
A few years ago in reviewing Frank McCourt’s memoir of his childhood in Ireland, Angela’s Ashes, I noted that McCourt’s story was my story. I went on to explain that although time, geography, family composition and other factors were different, in some ways very different, the story that he told of the impoverished circumstances of his growing up “shanty” in Limerick, Ireland, taking all proportions into consideration, was amazingly similar to those I faced growing up “shanty” in a Boston, Massachusetts suburb, North Adamsville, a generation later. A recent re-reading of that work only confirms my previous appraisal. The common thread? Down at the base of modern industrial society, down at that place where the working poor meets what Karl Marx called the lumpenproletariat, the sheer fact of scarcity drives life very close to the bone. Poverty hurts, and hurts in more ways than are apparent to the eye. No Dorothea Lange Arkie/Okie Dust Bowl hollow-boned despair, hardship windowless, hell, door-less, hovel, no end in sight, no good end in sight photograph can find that place.
I also mentioned in that McCourt review that the dreams that came out of his Limerick childhood neighborhood, such as they were, were small dreams, very small steps up the mobility ladder from generation to generation. If that much, of step up that is. I immediately picked up on his references to what constituted “respectability” in that milieu- getting off the the soul-starving “dole” and getting a “soft” low-level governmental civil service job that after thirty some years would turn into a state pension in order to comfort oneself and one’s love ones in old age.
That, my friends, is a small dream by anybody’s standard but I am sure that any reader who grew up in a working poor home in America in the last couple of generations knows from where I speak. I can hear my mother’s voice urging me on to such a course as I have just described. The carping, “Why don’t you take the civil service exam?,” so on and so on. Escaping that white-walled nine-to-five, three-week vacation and a crooked back cubicle fate was a near thing though. The crushing out of big dreams for the working poor may not be the final indictment of what the capitalist system does to the denizens down at the base but it certainly will do for starters.
In the recent past one of the unintended consequences of trying to recount my roots through contacting members of my high school class, North Adamsville High School Class of 1964, has been the release of a flood of memories from those bleak days of childhood that I had placed (or thought I had placed) way, way on the back burner of my brain. A couple of year ago I did a series of stories, Tales From The ‘Hood', on some of those earlier recalled incidents. Frank McCourt’s recounting of some of the incidents of his bedraggled ragamuffin upbringing brought other incidents back to me. In Angela’s Ashes he mentioned how he had to wear the same shirt through thick and thin. As nightwear, school wear, every wear. I remember my own scanty wardrobe and recounted in one of those stories in the series, A Coming Of Age Story, about ripping up the bottoms of a pair of precious pants, denims of course, one of about three pair that I rotated until they turned to shreds in the course of time, for a square dance demonstration for our parents in order to ‘impress’ a girl that I was smitten with at Adamsville South Elementary School. I caught holy hell, serious holy hell for weeks afterwards, for that (and missed, due to my mother’s public rage in front of everybody, my big chance with the youthful stick girl “femme fatale” as well-oh memory).
I have related elsewhere in discussing my high school experiences as also noted in that series mentioned above that one of the hardships of high school was (and is) the need , recognized or not, to be “in.” One of the ways to be “in,” at least for a guy in my post-World War II generation, the “Generation of ’68,” and the first generation to have some disposable income in hand was to have cool clothes, a cool car, and a cool girlfriend. “Cool,” you get it, right? Therefore the way to be the dreaded “out” was to be ….well, you know that answer. One way not to be cool was to wear hand-me-downs from an older brother, an older brother who was build larger than you and you had to kind of tuck in that and roll up that. Or to wear, mother–produced from some recessive poverty gene Bargain Center midnight fire discount sale, oddly colored (like purple or vermillion) or designed (pin-striped then not in style or curly-cues never in style) clothes. This is where not having enough of life’s goods hurts. Being doled out a couple of new sets of duds a year was not enough to break my social isolation from the “cool guys.” I remember the routine even now-new clothes for the start of the school year and then at Easter. Cheap stuff too, from some Wal-Mart-type store, like the Bargain Center mentioned above, of the day.
Top this all off the dead weight of the Roman Catholic Church better doing in the next world piled, pig-piled on one’s “soul,” as if the “sin” of being poor in the world was that mortal sin that would preclude heaven’s gate, heaven’s gate at all. Or the almost as equally dead weight of those pious poor as church mice brethren who looked down from their one niche up perch at we raggedy shanties as they strove, usually unsuccessfully, to “better” themselves. But worst, worst that all that were the unacknowledged sneers when one passed the better sort, especially the girls. Ya, I know, know now, it wasn’t just poor and raggedy boys who took the snub but why didn’t somebody give me the word.
All of this may be silly, in fact is silly in the great scale of things. But those drummed-in small dreams, that non-existent access to those always scarce “cool” items, those missed opportunities by not being ‘right,’ meaning respectable, added up. All of this created a “world” where crime, petty and large, seemed respectable as an alternative (a course that my own brothers followed, followed unsuccessfully for life, and that I did for a minute), where the closeness of neighbors was suffocating and where the vaunted “neighborhood community” was more like something out of “the night of the long knives.” If, as Thomas Hobbes postulated in his political works, especially "Levithan," in the 17th century, life is “nasty, short and brutish” then those factors are magnified many times over down at the base.
Contrary to Hobbes, however, the way forward is through more social solidarity, not more guards at the doors of the rich. All of this by way of saying that in the 21st century we need that social solidarity not less but more than ever. As I stated once in a commentary that I titled, Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?, one of the only virtues of growing up on the wrong side of the tracks among the working poor is that I am personally inured to the vicissitudes of the gyrations of the world capitalist economy. Hard times growing up were the only times. But many of my brothers and sisters are not so inured. For them I fight for the social solidarity of the future. In that future we may not be able to eliminate shame as an emotion but we can put a very big dent in the class-driven aspect of it.
Peter Paul Markin comment:
A few years ago in reviewing Frank McCourt’s memoir of his childhood in Ireland, Angela’s Ashes, I noted that McCourt’s story was my story. I went on to explain that although time, geography, family composition and other factors were different, in some ways very different, the story that he told of the impoverished circumstances of his growing up “shanty” in Limerick, Ireland, taking all proportions into consideration, was amazingly similar to those I faced growing up “shanty” in a Boston, Massachusetts suburb, North Adamsville, a generation later. A recent re-reading of that work only confirms my previous appraisal. The common thread? Down at the base of modern industrial society, down at that place where the working poor meets what Karl Marx called the lumpenproletariat, the sheer fact of scarcity drives life very close to the bone. Poverty hurts, and hurts in more ways than are apparent to the eye. No Dorothea Lange Arkie/Okie Dust Bowl hollow-boned despair, hardship windowless, hell, door-less, hovel, no end in sight, no good end in sight photograph can find that place.
I also mentioned in that McCourt review that the dreams that came out of his Limerick childhood neighborhood, such as they were, were small dreams, very small steps up the mobility ladder from generation to generation. If that much, of step up that is. I immediately picked up on his references to what constituted “respectability” in that milieu- getting off the the soul-starving “dole” and getting a “soft” low-level governmental civil service job that after thirty some years would turn into a state pension in order to comfort oneself and one’s love ones in old age.
That, my friends, is a small dream by anybody’s standard but I am sure that any reader who grew up in a working poor home in America in the last couple of generations knows from where I speak. I can hear my mother’s voice urging me on to such a course as I have just described. The carping, “Why don’t you take the civil service exam?,” so on and so on. Escaping that white-walled nine-to-five, three-week vacation and a crooked back cubicle fate was a near thing though. The crushing out of big dreams for the working poor may not be the final indictment of what the capitalist system does to the denizens down at the base but it certainly will do for starters.
In the recent past one of the unintended consequences of trying to recount my roots through contacting members of my high school class, North Adamsville High School Class of 1964, has been the release of a flood of memories from those bleak days of childhood that I had placed (or thought I had placed) way, way on the back burner of my brain. A couple of year ago I did a series of stories, Tales From The ‘Hood', on some of those earlier recalled incidents. Frank McCourt’s recounting of some of the incidents of his bedraggled ragamuffin upbringing brought other incidents back to me. In Angela’s Ashes he mentioned how he had to wear the same shirt through thick and thin. As nightwear, school wear, every wear. I remember my own scanty wardrobe and recounted in one of those stories in the series, A Coming Of Age Story, about ripping up the bottoms of a pair of precious pants, denims of course, one of about three pair that I rotated until they turned to shreds in the course of time, for a square dance demonstration for our parents in order to ‘impress’ a girl that I was smitten with at Adamsville South Elementary School. I caught holy hell, serious holy hell for weeks afterwards, for that (and missed, due to my mother’s public rage in front of everybody, my big chance with the youthful stick girl “femme fatale” as well-oh memory).
I have related elsewhere in discussing my high school experiences as also noted in that series mentioned above that one of the hardships of high school was (and is) the need , recognized or not, to be “in.” One of the ways to be “in,” at least for a guy in my post-World War II generation, the “Generation of ’68,” and the first generation to have some disposable income in hand was to have cool clothes, a cool car, and a cool girlfriend. “Cool,” you get it, right? Therefore the way to be the dreaded “out” was to be ….well, you know that answer. One way not to be cool was to wear hand-me-downs from an older brother, an older brother who was build larger than you and you had to kind of tuck in that and roll up that. Or to wear, mother–produced from some recessive poverty gene Bargain Center midnight fire discount sale, oddly colored (like purple or vermillion) or designed (pin-striped then not in style or curly-cues never in style) clothes. This is where not having enough of life’s goods hurts. Being doled out a couple of new sets of duds a year was not enough to break my social isolation from the “cool guys.” I remember the routine even now-new clothes for the start of the school year and then at Easter. Cheap stuff too, from some Wal-Mart-type store, like the Bargain Center mentioned above, of the day.
Top this all off the dead weight of the Roman Catholic Church better doing in the next world piled, pig-piled on one’s “soul,” as if the “sin” of being poor in the world was that mortal sin that would preclude heaven’s gate, heaven’s gate at all. Or the almost as equally dead weight of those pious poor as church mice brethren who looked down from their one niche up perch at we raggedy shanties as they strove, usually unsuccessfully, to “better” themselves. But worst, worst that all that were the unacknowledged sneers when one passed the better sort, especially the girls. Ya, I know, know now, it wasn’t just poor and raggedy boys who took the snub but why didn’t somebody give me the word.
All of this may be silly, in fact is silly in the great scale of things. But those drummed-in small dreams, that non-existent access to those always scarce “cool” items, those missed opportunities by not being ‘right,’ meaning respectable, added up. All of this created a “world” where crime, petty and large, seemed respectable as an alternative (a course that my own brothers followed, followed unsuccessfully for life, and that I did for a minute), where the closeness of neighbors was suffocating and where the vaunted “neighborhood community” was more like something out of “the night of the long knives.” If, as Thomas Hobbes postulated in his political works, especially "Levithan," in the 17th century, life is “nasty, short and brutish” then those factors are magnified many times over down at the base.
Contrary to Hobbes, however, the way forward is through more social solidarity, not more guards at the doors of the rich. All of this by way of saying that in the 21st century we need that social solidarity not less but more than ever. As I stated once in a commentary that I titled, Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?, one of the only virtues of growing up on the wrong side of the tracks among the working poor is that I am personally inured to the vicissitudes of the gyrations of the world capitalist economy. Hard times growing up were the only times. But many of my brothers and sisters are not so inured. For them I fight for the social solidarity of the future. In that future we may not be able to eliminate shame as an emotion but we can put a very big dent in the class-driven aspect of it.
From #Occupied Boston (#Tomemonos Boston)-This Is Class War-We Say No More- Defend The Occupy Movement!-Defend All Our Unions! - Take The Offensive!
Click on the headline to link to updates from the Occupy Boston website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011. I will post important updates as they appear on that site.
Markin comment:
We know that we are only at the very start of an upsurge in the labor movement as witness the stellar exemplary actions by the West Coast activists on December 12, 2011. As I have pointed out in my remarks below this is the way forward as we struggle against the ruling class for a different more equitable society. Not everything went as well, or as well-attended, as expected including our rally in solidarity in Boston but we are still exhibiting growing pains in the post-encampment era.
***********
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend All The Occupation Sites And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Protesters Everywhere!
********
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
********
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was this high in the American labor force. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work. Work that would be divided through local representative workers’ councils which would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work. Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing so that it will, in the end, be necessary to fight for and win a workers government to implement this demand.
Organize the unorganized is a demand that cries out for solution today now that the organized sectors of the labor movement, both public and private, in America are at historic lows, just over ten percent of the workforce. Part of the task is to reorganize some of the old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. The other part is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the service industries, hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that have become a dominant aspect of the American economy.
Organize the South-this low wage area, this consciously low-wage area, where many industries land before heading off-shore to even lower wage places cries out for organizing, especially among black and Hispanic workers who form the bulk of this industrial workforce. A corollary to organizing the South is obviously to organize internationally to keep the “race to the bottom” from continually occurring short of being resolved in favor of an international commonwealth of workers’ governments. Nobody said it was going to be easy.
Organize Wal-mart- millions of workers, thousands of trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A victory here would be the springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement just as auto and steel lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant. Well, that’s a thought.
Defend the right of public and private workers to unionize. Simple-No more Wisconsins, no more attacks on collective bargaining the hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, or bourgeois recall elections either. Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.
* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized and other labor-specific causes (example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio).
*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. Labor and the oppressed must rule!
Markin comment:
We know that we are only at the very start of an upsurge in the labor movement as witness the stellar exemplary actions by the West Coast activists on December 12, 2011. As I have pointed out in my remarks below this is the way forward as we struggle against the ruling class for a different more equitable society. Not everything went as well, or as well-attended, as expected including our rally in solidarity in Boston but we are still exhibiting growing pains in the post-encampment era.
***********
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend All The Occupation Sites And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Protesters Everywhere!
********
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
********
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was this high in the American labor force. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work. Work that would be divided through local representative workers’ councils which would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work. Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing so that it will, in the end, be necessary to fight for and win a workers government to implement this demand.
Organize the unorganized is a demand that cries out for solution today now that the organized sectors of the labor movement, both public and private, in America are at historic lows, just over ten percent of the workforce. Part of the task is to reorganize some of the old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. The other part is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the service industries, hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that have become a dominant aspect of the American economy.
Organize the South-this low wage area, this consciously low-wage area, where many industries land before heading off-shore to even lower wage places cries out for organizing, especially among black and Hispanic workers who form the bulk of this industrial workforce. A corollary to organizing the South is obviously to organize internationally to keep the “race to the bottom” from continually occurring short of being resolved in favor of an international commonwealth of workers’ governments. Nobody said it was going to be easy.
Organize Wal-mart- millions of workers, thousands of trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A victory here would be the springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement just as auto and steel lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant. Well, that’s a thought.
Defend the right of public and private workers to unionize. Simple-No more Wisconsins, no more attacks on collective bargaining the hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, or bourgeois recall elections either. Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.
* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized and other labor-specific causes (example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio).
*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. Labor and the oppressed must rule!
The Latest From The "Minnesota Hands Off Honduras Coalition" Blog
Click on the headline to link to the latest from the Minnesota Hands Off Honduras Coalition Blog
Markin comment:
This is a great site to follow the situation in Honduras that, no question, gets almost no bourgeois media play. In English and Spanish which is a great help to arouse our Hispanic brothers and sisters here in the "heart of the beast" to help out in the struggle.
Markin comment:
This is a great site to follow the situation in Honduras that, no question, gets almost no bourgeois media play. In English and Spanish which is a great help to arouse our Hispanic brothers and sisters here in the "heart of the beast" to help out in the struggle.
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