Out In The 1940s Crime Noir Night- Gold Digger’s Lament –Scarlet Street- A Film Review
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarlet_Street
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the crime noir Scarlet Street.
DVD Review
Scarlet Street, starring Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, Dan Duryea, directed by Fritz Lang, 1945
Personally, I like my femme fatales and round-heel gold-diggers wherever they may have come from down the social ladder to have a little pizzazz, a little class if you will. I definitely do not want them chewing bubble gum or Wrigleys' for that matter, putting out their ruby-red lipstick-ringed cigarette butts on the good carpet, or leaving a pile of dishes in the sink (or on that same carpeted floor) when company calls. I’m funny that way but that’s just my little thing because low-rent or not I know a girl has got to do what a girl has to do to survive in this wicked old world. And that is what the plot line of this 1940s crime noir, Scarlet Street centers on. As well as, of course, the old adage that we have been hearing about since we were in diapers, crime doesn’t pay, although here with an odd twist.
As for the girl who has to do what a girl has to do part, Kitty (played by a low-rent life loving Joan Bennett), is in love. No big deal there except she is in love with a classic grifter, Johnny (played by caddish-aficionado Dan Duryea), who is ready to make that nice big score to put them on easy street. If he only had some kale, dough, moola or whatever you want to call it to grease the way. And that is where Christopher Cross(played in a somewhat stilted Walter-Mitty like way by Edawrd g. Robinson last seen breaking legs in the gangster classics of the 1930s, but I guess 1940s times were tough), a no dough guy with a big front but a real talent for painting, no not house- painting, painting, but high if primitive art. Already this looks like no where right?
Right, except old Cal makes the fatal mistake of helping Kitty out of a few jams and falling in love with her in the meantime. And our boy Johnny ever quick to see the main chance tells Ms. Kitty to string Chris along on the assumption that he has dough. Well Chris doesn’t but he does have that artistic talent that Johnny (and Kitty) parley into their version of easy street, for a while. See Cal’s primitive art takes off as the big new thing except he can’t take credit for it because Johnny in his infinite wisdom has told the critics who are crazy for the stuff Kitty did the work. And Cal, foolish head-over heals in love, plays along with it. Plays along with it until he finally gets hip to the hard fact that Kitty is using him to keep her Johnny in clover. Then things turn ugly, as one would except when one has been played for the patsy.
But you have to be careful with the Walter Mittys of the world. When they turn you do not which way they might go. Cal goes for the heart, literally, and kills Kitty in a rage. Here is where the sweet, sweet for his part come in though, he sets up Johnny, Johnny whose whole life is aimed in this direction, for the fall. And brother he takes it, big time in the big house and the chair. And Cal? He gets his square guy mistreated revenge alright. Hey, you haven’t been paying attention to the subtext of this genre. Crime does not pay. And although Cal is finished as an artist, finished as a rational man, he can find no salvation even when he tries to cop to the crime. So he is left to wander, babbling in the mean New York streets waiting for his hellish end to come. See, there are a lot of ways to play the crime doesn’t pay story. This one had a lot of holes in the plot that made it rather surreal in places (Chris's marriage situation, for one) and Robinson falls down as the meek inheritor of the earth but that is that.
be-bop, femme fatales
Saturday, December 24, 2011
The Latest From The British Leftist Blog-"Histomat: Adventures in Historical Materialism"
Click on the headline to link to the latest from the British Leftist blog-Histomat: Adventures in Historical Materialism
Markin comment:
While from the tenor of the articles, leftist authors featured, and other items it is not clear to me that this blog is faithful to any sense of historical materialism that Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin or Leon Trotsky would recognize I am always more than willing to "steal" material from the site. Or investigate leads provided there for material of interest to the radical public-whatever that seemingly dwindling public may be these days.
Markin comment:
While from the tenor of the articles, leftist authors featured, and other items it is not clear to me that this blog is faithful to any sense of historical materialism that Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin or Leon Trotsky would recognize I am always more than willing to "steal" material from the site. Or investigate leads provided there for material of interest to the radical public-whatever that seemingly dwindling public may be these days.
From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-From The Pages Of Young Spartacus-1,500 Protest McNamara:Ship Him To Vietnam To Be Tried By His Victims! November (1978)
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.
*******
Markin comment:
The question of academic (or other non-governmental) positions for those who have been direct actors in implementing American imperialist policies is a serious one. We Marxists draw a sharpe distinction between those who are "merely" reactionary academics and those whose actions would actually qualify them to stand in front of some international criminal tribunal. No, not the bourgeois ones as constituted now but tribunals of their victims in places like Iraq, Afghanistan and wherever else their hubris takes them.
This point was recently brought home when a number of us demontrated against ex-Bush Secretary Of War Donald Rumsfeld when he came to Boston on a "book tour" touting his memoirs. If people want to pay hard cash to buy the book at some book stalland read his gibberish that is one thing. It is another that he be allowed to move freely around to do so when by all that is rational he should be standing front and center in Iraq right now in a place like Baghdad facing some serious criminal human rights violations. Of course, his president Bush (either)and others should be crowding the docket with him.
*******
From The Pages Of Young Spartacus-1,500 Protest McNamara:Ship Him To Vietnam To Be Tried By His Victims! November (1978)
CHICAGO—When University of Chicago president Hanna Gray and the 'U of C trustees smugly announced their intention to award former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara$25,000and the first annual "Albert Pick Jr. Award" for promoting "international understanding," they learned that the memory of U.S. imperialism's campaign of slaughter against Vietnam is not dead. Twenty-five were arrested as 1,500 angry students, teachers and workers rallied on May 22 in one of the largest demonstrations here in over a decade. Highly visible was the largest organized contingent: 50-strong, the Spartacus Youth League and friends demanded: "No Award to Imperialist Butcher McNamara! Keep McNamara Off Campus! Ship Him To Vietnam To Be Tried By His Victims!"
The meaning of the obscene award presentation was clear: yet another fete to bury the ugly legacy of U.S. mass murder in Vietnam. CIA-liberal and Kennedy "Camelot" team member, McNamara helped to bring us the Bay of Pigs, Tonkin Gulf and the escalation of U.S. aggression in Indochina. For seven years Secretary of Defense (1961-68), this former Ford Motor Co. exec currently sits as tsar of the World Bank.
While no longer ordering troops into tie, McNamara is no less a key legist for U.S. imperialism. He presided over the World Bank when the lean economy was strangled by the imperialists in order to "destabilize" the Allende government, paving the way the Pinochet coup and the murder of 30,000 Chilean workers and peasants. The only possible contribution MacNamara could make to" international understanding" would be his trial by Vietnamese workers and peasants.
Why Mac Didn't Get the Knife...
It is outrageous that this war criminal collected his blood money basically without a hitch. Despite the fact that scores of protesters wanted to do more than stand across the street from the banquet hall and be treated to a litany of speeches droning on about the good old days, the organizers of the protest made sure that U of C "discipline guidelines" weren't broken as they provided marshals to police the crowd. They must have been overjoyed when President Gray gave kudos to the University staff, the Chicago cops and the "May 22 Committee, which organized the protest" and was "entirely forthright about its intentions and plans." Indeed, the Committee was quite "forthright" they made it clear from the very beginning that they wanted nothing more militant than a vigil.
The liberals went into a tizzy when the announcement of the award was made. But what they were fretting about was that it might "tarnish" the "image" of U of C. When 280 faculty members "dissociated" themselves from the award because it brought "politics" to the University, the May 22 Committee chirped in that the award was a "violation of the integrity of the University of Chicago."
What claptrap! Started up with the profits extorted by John D. Rockefeller, presided over by Hanna Gray, who smashed a 1977 campus workers strike at Yale, and once home to outright collaborators with the Chilean junta, Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger (see "SYL Campaigns Against Chilean Junta's Collaborators," Young Spartacus No. 37, November 1975)—the U of C is already "political" and has about as much integrity as Bert Lance. Just what do the liberals expect from one of the most elite private universities whose very job is to train the next generation of imperialist ideologues, capitalist administrators and "public servants'"?
A planning meeting on May 15 drew 175 people reflecting real outrage on the campus, especially among undergraduates. The core of the May 22 Committee leadership—a clique of former antiwar activists turned grad students and professors who had met in secrecy earlier—succeeded in voting down the SYL's proposal for a united-front committee open to all organizations and individuals who agreed with the slogans "No Award to Imperialist Butcher!" and "Keep McNamara Off Campus!" To suggest that McNamara should be run off campus was totally anathema to these people. In fact, the Committee was so worried about "tarnishing" their "image" that they even voted down a vague proposal that called for "civil disobedience" at the award dinner.
Joining the liberals in rejecting the SYL's strategy were supporters of several left organizations, among them the Maoists of the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade (RCYB), the ex-Trotskyist Young Socialist Alliance (YSA), the New American Movement (NAM) and the miniscule International Socialist Organization. NAM and the RCYB were rewarded for their services and were allowed to share the platform at a planned teach-in. The YSA, which had maintained a conspicuous absence from earlier planning meetings, arrived on the scene just in time to argue against the SYL having the right to speak. Instead, they wanted to hear... Eugene McCarthy! While the fake-lefts did their best to out-liberal the liberals, the SYL refused to endorse the bureaucratic, weak-kneed Committee and set about organizing a militant contingent for the demonstration.
I he activities on May 22 began with an "honor the dead" picnic on the quadrangles, complete with protest songs. Dave Dellinger (remember him?) extended his "turn the other cheek" philosophy to include McNamara, saying that he shouldn't be punished for his crimes! He then denounced the SYL's slogan of shipping him to Vietnam to be tried by his victims. Marshall Sahlins—a former antiwar activist—suggested that "next time" the protest movement should drape itself in the "stars and stripes" instead of burning it, as if the American flag could be something other than the symbol of the most brutal imperialist power.
After several hours of nostalgic left-liberal dribble which drove most of the students away in sheer boredom, an SYL speaker finally got to the floor to cut through the "movement is not dead" rhetoric;
"Unlike what many of the liberals have been saying, McNamara's crime is not that he helped deceive the public about a 'mistake' of the U .S. government. The war in Vietnam was no mistake, but part of U.S. imperialism's drive world wide. McNamara's crimes are those of a mass murderer.
"During the Vietnam war the Spartacist League and Spartacus Youth League recognized that there was a class war going on in Indochina and we took a firm stand for the military victory of the NLF/DRV. We called for labor strikes against the war and we said 'All Indochina Must Go Communist'....
Our program was in direct counterposition to the reformists of the Communist Party and Socialist Workers Party who sought to limit the movement to peace crawls and tie it to the Democratic Party—the party of McNamara and the war. The liberals and reformists have continued this policy today in their plans for tonight's demonstration
"The Maoists of the RSB and RCYB who today protest McNamara felt fine when Nixon sipped tea with Mao Tsetung in Peking while U.S. bombers rained death and destruction over Hanoi and Haiphong. Now the Chinese deformed workers state plays the role of cat's paw for U.S. imperialism with its invasion of Vietnam in a not-so-veiled attack against the Soviet Union—the main military/industrial powerhouse of the deformed and degenerated workers states.
"While the Maoists grovel in their alliance with U.S. imperialism and the RCYB lines up with imperialism's propaganda offensive against the Soviet Union, the SL/SYL defends all the deformed workers states against imperialism and struggles for a workers political revolution from Moscow to Peking to Hanoi to overthrow the counterrevolutionary bureaucracies.”The SYL is organizing the only contingent in the demonstration which will raise revolutionary politics. This award is an atrocity and McNamara should be kept off campus!"
Just one month after the SYL spokesman asserted that the U.S. invasion of Vietnam was "no mistake," the Carter administration called for military intervention to suppress a popular revolution against a hated rightist dictatorship. At the U.S. colonial bureau, the Organization of American States, Cyrus Vance proposed a "peace-keeping" force to prevent the Nicaragua rebels from overthrowing the Somoza dynasty.
If the day of speeches was frustrating for militant students, the evening's events must have been more so. While McNamara was being whisked into a side entrance by the cops, the protesters were being kept across the street by the May 22 Committee marshals.
The only interesting speech that came booming from the Committee's sound truck was given by Revolutionary Communist Party honcho Clark Kissinger— interesting because it was nuts: "This is the night of the living dead," he raved, "you know that you can't deal with a vampire with just a cross, you deal with him with a stake through the heart!"
Despite the predominant liberal politics, the crowd was in a militant mood. When the Chicago cops stepped in to put out a burning effigy of McNamara, the SYL's chant of "Cops Off Campus" was enthusiastically taken up. The chants of the militant SYL contingent also provided the only alternative to the insipid "McNamara, We Will Not Forget" moral witness politics of the rally organizers. "International Understanding the U of C Way— Butcher 'Honored' by Strike-Breaker Gray!"; "World Bank, CIA: Backers of Videla and Pinochet!" and "No to the Draft and Imperialist Slaughter! Capitalism Wants Us for Cannon Fodder!" echoed off the walls of Hutchinson Commons as McNamara was wined and dined.
... But the Protesters Did
As the evening wore on the crowd began to dwindle away until only one third of the demonstrators were left. In an unsuccessful attempt to intercept McNamara's departure, several hundred protesters broke away and sat down on University Avenue for a "teach-in." As the cops moved in the one in charge got a pie thrown into his face and twenty-five protesters were hauled off to a waiting paddy wagon including a Vietnam veteran dragged off in his wheelchair.
Quickly 200 angry demonstrators marched to Hanna Gray's house where an SYL spokesman demanded that the charges against those arrested be immediately dropped, that there be no administration reprisals and that the cops get off campus. True to form, though, most of the May 22 steering committee members boycotted this rally.
While the 25 were being booked and fingerprinted it turned out that the Committee was busily debating the wording of a statement dissociating it from the sit-in! Some Committee members spoke against bailing out Kissinger and another RCYBer, baiting them for "violence-mongering." It was only after an angry SYLer intervened to condemn this crass anti-communism, to point out that it was the cops who were responsible for any "violence" and to demand that all those arrested be defended that the Committee relented and voted to bail out all the arrestees.
The day after the arrests, however, the wretched Committee made it clear that accolades from Hanna Gray meant more to them than defense of the arrested protesters. After refusing to endorse a rally hastily called by the RCYB, the Committee sent its water- j boy, a YSAer, to read an "official" statement. Applauding the participants who had "rigorously observed the policy of the peaceful and legal discussion and demonstration decided upon -by the Committee and its marshals," the YSAer then shamelessly called upon all those present to disperse! The YSAer could only look on in dismay as 150 demonstrators remained and the continued.
Both at the rally and at a heavily attended meeting that night the SYL exposed the Committee's despicable attempt to distance itself from those arrested, and proposed that a united-front defense demonstration be held. Despite the desire of many of those present to protest the arrests, the motion failed—largely due to the arguments of a number of defendants that the arrests themselves had made the "point" and to the fact that the RCYB preferred to stick with the liberals and thus sabotage its own defense!
In the absence of effective, militant protests, the Chicago courts were able to place 24 of those arrested under one-year "court supervision," which means that it any are arrested again within a year they will face the charges of disorderly conduct. The alleged pie thrower still faces a count of battery on a policeman. These attacks must not go unchallenged! Ten years ago, as soon as widespread student protest died down, the U of C administration expelled 42 students and suspended 120 others. The threat of reprisals still remains.
For a meeting called on May 29 the SYL distributed a leaflet entitled "Drop the Charges! For Militant Protest!" "The question is on everyone's lips. Were the events of May 22nd a victory or a defeat, and for whom? .The SYL says that it was significant and important that 1500 people were drawn from the apolitical mire of the 'me-decade' to protest the award to imperialist butcher McNamara. However, it is no victory that McNamara did receive the award and that 25 people were arrested."
This analysis was clearly shared by many of the frustrated demonstrators. The meeting, called to form a new "progressive" organization voted to hear SL Central Committee member Tweet Carter. As a former regional organizer for SDS she noted that even at its worst, SDS was far to the left of the May 22 Committee and its "left" pals. As the SYL leaflet explained: "There has been a lot of talk about bringing back the student movement of the New Left and creating a new student coalition to deal with the various 'issues.' Don't repeat the mistakes of the sixties! The reason that SDS and the New Left fell apart was because it did not have a leadership with a revolutionary working-class program which could guide the movement beyond student-power illusions and sectoralist politics. As a result, many students got channeled into the Democratic Party reformist politics of McGovern or became disillusioned with politics entirely. The Revolutionary Marxist Caucus, the precursor of the SYL, fought for a working-class perspective within SDS, winning over militants to Trotskyism. What is needed now is not another grab-bag liberal coalition like the May 22 Committee under another name, but a party of professional revolutionaries committed to a socialist future.
"The Spartacist League and its youth group, the SYL, are fighting to build a Trotskyist vanguard party. Such a party would mobilize the labor movement to fight for the establishment of a workers government which would expropriate the capitalists and run society for the working people. Join the SYL!"
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.
*******
Markin comment:
The question of academic (or other non-governmental) positions for those who have been direct actors in implementing American imperialist policies is a serious one. We Marxists draw a sharpe distinction between those who are "merely" reactionary academics and those whose actions would actually qualify them to stand in front of some international criminal tribunal. No, not the bourgeois ones as constituted now but tribunals of their victims in places like Iraq, Afghanistan and wherever else their hubris takes them.
This point was recently brought home when a number of us demontrated against ex-Bush Secretary Of War Donald Rumsfeld when he came to Boston on a "book tour" touting his memoirs. If people want to pay hard cash to buy the book at some book stalland read his gibberish that is one thing. It is another that he be allowed to move freely around to do so when by all that is rational he should be standing front and center in Iraq right now in a place like Baghdad facing some serious criminal human rights violations. Of course, his president Bush (either)and others should be crowding the docket with him.
*******
From The Pages Of Young Spartacus-1,500 Protest McNamara:Ship Him To Vietnam To Be Tried By His Victims! November (1978)
CHICAGO—When University of Chicago president Hanna Gray and the 'U of C trustees smugly announced their intention to award former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara$25,000and the first annual "Albert Pick Jr. Award" for promoting "international understanding," they learned that the memory of U.S. imperialism's campaign of slaughter against Vietnam is not dead. Twenty-five were arrested as 1,500 angry students, teachers and workers rallied on May 22 in one of the largest demonstrations here in over a decade. Highly visible was the largest organized contingent: 50-strong, the Spartacus Youth League and friends demanded: "No Award to Imperialist Butcher McNamara! Keep McNamara Off Campus! Ship Him To Vietnam To Be Tried By His Victims!"
The meaning of the obscene award presentation was clear: yet another fete to bury the ugly legacy of U.S. mass murder in Vietnam. CIA-liberal and Kennedy "Camelot" team member, McNamara helped to bring us the Bay of Pigs, Tonkin Gulf and the escalation of U.S. aggression in Indochina. For seven years Secretary of Defense (1961-68), this former Ford Motor Co. exec currently sits as tsar of the World Bank.
While no longer ordering troops into tie, McNamara is no less a key legist for U.S. imperialism. He presided over the World Bank when the lean economy was strangled by the imperialists in order to "destabilize" the Allende government, paving the way the Pinochet coup and the murder of 30,000 Chilean workers and peasants. The only possible contribution MacNamara could make to" international understanding" would be his trial by Vietnamese workers and peasants.
Why Mac Didn't Get the Knife...
It is outrageous that this war criminal collected his blood money basically without a hitch. Despite the fact that scores of protesters wanted to do more than stand across the street from the banquet hall and be treated to a litany of speeches droning on about the good old days, the organizers of the protest made sure that U of C "discipline guidelines" weren't broken as they provided marshals to police the crowd. They must have been overjoyed when President Gray gave kudos to the University staff, the Chicago cops and the "May 22 Committee, which organized the protest" and was "entirely forthright about its intentions and plans." Indeed, the Committee was quite "forthright" they made it clear from the very beginning that they wanted nothing more militant than a vigil.
The liberals went into a tizzy when the announcement of the award was made. But what they were fretting about was that it might "tarnish" the "image" of U of C. When 280 faculty members "dissociated" themselves from the award because it brought "politics" to the University, the May 22 Committee chirped in that the award was a "violation of the integrity of the University of Chicago."
What claptrap! Started up with the profits extorted by John D. Rockefeller, presided over by Hanna Gray, who smashed a 1977 campus workers strike at Yale, and once home to outright collaborators with the Chilean junta, Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger (see "SYL Campaigns Against Chilean Junta's Collaborators," Young Spartacus No. 37, November 1975)—the U of C is already "political" and has about as much integrity as Bert Lance. Just what do the liberals expect from one of the most elite private universities whose very job is to train the next generation of imperialist ideologues, capitalist administrators and "public servants'"?
A planning meeting on May 15 drew 175 people reflecting real outrage on the campus, especially among undergraduates. The core of the May 22 Committee leadership—a clique of former antiwar activists turned grad students and professors who had met in secrecy earlier—succeeded in voting down the SYL's proposal for a united-front committee open to all organizations and individuals who agreed with the slogans "No Award to Imperialist Butcher!" and "Keep McNamara Off Campus!" To suggest that McNamara should be run off campus was totally anathema to these people. In fact, the Committee was so worried about "tarnishing" their "image" that they even voted down a vague proposal that called for "civil disobedience" at the award dinner.
Joining the liberals in rejecting the SYL's strategy were supporters of several left organizations, among them the Maoists of the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade (RCYB), the ex-Trotskyist Young Socialist Alliance (YSA), the New American Movement (NAM) and the miniscule International Socialist Organization. NAM and the RCYB were rewarded for their services and were allowed to share the platform at a planned teach-in. The YSA, which had maintained a conspicuous absence from earlier planning meetings, arrived on the scene just in time to argue against the SYL having the right to speak. Instead, they wanted to hear... Eugene McCarthy! While the fake-lefts did their best to out-liberal the liberals, the SYL refused to endorse the bureaucratic, weak-kneed Committee and set about organizing a militant contingent for the demonstration.
I he activities on May 22 began with an "honor the dead" picnic on the quadrangles, complete with protest songs. Dave Dellinger (remember him?) extended his "turn the other cheek" philosophy to include McNamara, saying that he shouldn't be punished for his crimes! He then denounced the SYL's slogan of shipping him to Vietnam to be tried by his victims. Marshall Sahlins—a former antiwar activist—suggested that "next time" the protest movement should drape itself in the "stars and stripes" instead of burning it, as if the American flag could be something other than the symbol of the most brutal imperialist power.
After several hours of nostalgic left-liberal dribble which drove most of the students away in sheer boredom, an SYL speaker finally got to the floor to cut through the "movement is not dead" rhetoric;
"Unlike what many of the liberals have been saying, McNamara's crime is not that he helped deceive the public about a 'mistake' of the U .S. government. The war in Vietnam was no mistake, but part of U.S. imperialism's drive world wide. McNamara's crimes are those of a mass murderer.
"During the Vietnam war the Spartacist League and Spartacus Youth League recognized that there was a class war going on in Indochina and we took a firm stand for the military victory of the NLF/DRV. We called for labor strikes against the war and we said 'All Indochina Must Go Communist'....
Our program was in direct counterposition to the reformists of the Communist Party and Socialist Workers Party who sought to limit the movement to peace crawls and tie it to the Democratic Party—the party of McNamara and the war. The liberals and reformists have continued this policy today in their plans for tonight's demonstration
"The Maoists of the RSB and RCYB who today protest McNamara felt fine when Nixon sipped tea with Mao Tsetung in Peking while U.S. bombers rained death and destruction over Hanoi and Haiphong. Now the Chinese deformed workers state plays the role of cat's paw for U.S. imperialism with its invasion of Vietnam in a not-so-veiled attack against the Soviet Union—the main military/industrial powerhouse of the deformed and degenerated workers states.
"While the Maoists grovel in their alliance with U.S. imperialism and the RCYB lines up with imperialism's propaganda offensive against the Soviet Union, the SL/SYL defends all the deformed workers states against imperialism and struggles for a workers political revolution from Moscow to Peking to Hanoi to overthrow the counterrevolutionary bureaucracies.”The SYL is organizing the only contingent in the demonstration which will raise revolutionary politics. This award is an atrocity and McNamara should be kept off campus!"
Just one month after the SYL spokesman asserted that the U.S. invasion of Vietnam was "no mistake," the Carter administration called for military intervention to suppress a popular revolution against a hated rightist dictatorship. At the U.S. colonial bureau, the Organization of American States, Cyrus Vance proposed a "peace-keeping" force to prevent the Nicaragua rebels from overthrowing the Somoza dynasty.
If the day of speeches was frustrating for militant students, the evening's events must have been more so. While McNamara was being whisked into a side entrance by the cops, the protesters were being kept across the street by the May 22 Committee marshals.
The only interesting speech that came booming from the Committee's sound truck was given by Revolutionary Communist Party honcho Clark Kissinger— interesting because it was nuts: "This is the night of the living dead," he raved, "you know that you can't deal with a vampire with just a cross, you deal with him with a stake through the heart!"
Despite the predominant liberal politics, the crowd was in a militant mood. When the Chicago cops stepped in to put out a burning effigy of McNamara, the SYL's chant of "Cops Off Campus" was enthusiastically taken up. The chants of the militant SYL contingent also provided the only alternative to the insipid "McNamara, We Will Not Forget" moral witness politics of the rally organizers. "International Understanding the U of C Way— Butcher 'Honored' by Strike-Breaker Gray!"; "World Bank, CIA: Backers of Videla and Pinochet!" and "No to the Draft and Imperialist Slaughter! Capitalism Wants Us for Cannon Fodder!" echoed off the walls of Hutchinson Commons as McNamara was wined and dined.
... But the Protesters Did
As the evening wore on the crowd began to dwindle away until only one third of the demonstrators were left. In an unsuccessful attempt to intercept McNamara's departure, several hundred protesters broke away and sat down on University Avenue for a "teach-in." As the cops moved in the one in charge got a pie thrown into his face and twenty-five protesters were hauled off to a waiting paddy wagon including a Vietnam veteran dragged off in his wheelchair.
Quickly 200 angry demonstrators marched to Hanna Gray's house where an SYL spokesman demanded that the charges against those arrested be immediately dropped, that there be no administration reprisals and that the cops get off campus. True to form, though, most of the May 22 steering committee members boycotted this rally.
While the 25 were being booked and fingerprinted it turned out that the Committee was busily debating the wording of a statement dissociating it from the sit-in! Some Committee members spoke against bailing out Kissinger and another RCYBer, baiting them for "violence-mongering." It was only after an angry SYLer intervened to condemn this crass anti-communism, to point out that it was the cops who were responsible for any "violence" and to demand that all those arrested be defended that the Committee relented and voted to bail out all the arrestees.
The day after the arrests, however, the wretched Committee made it clear that accolades from Hanna Gray meant more to them than defense of the arrested protesters. After refusing to endorse a rally hastily called by the RCYB, the Committee sent its water- j boy, a YSAer, to read an "official" statement. Applauding the participants who had "rigorously observed the policy of the peaceful and legal discussion and demonstration decided upon -by the Committee and its marshals," the YSAer then shamelessly called upon all those present to disperse! The YSAer could only look on in dismay as 150 demonstrators remained and the continued.
Both at the rally and at a heavily attended meeting that night the SYL exposed the Committee's despicable attempt to distance itself from those arrested, and proposed that a united-front defense demonstration be held. Despite the desire of many of those present to protest the arrests, the motion failed—largely due to the arguments of a number of defendants that the arrests themselves had made the "point" and to the fact that the RCYB preferred to stick with the liberals and thus sabotage its own defense!
In the absence of effective, militant protests, the Chicago courts were able to place 24 of those arrested under one-year "court supervision," which means that it any are arrested again within a year they will face the charges of disorderly conduct. The alleged pie thrower still faces a count of battery on a policeman. These attacks must not go unchallenged! Ten years ago, as soon as widespread student protest died down, the U of C administration expelled 42 students and suspended 120 others. The threat of reprisals still remains.
For a meeting called on May 29 the SYL distributed a leaflet entitled "Drop the Charges! For Militant Protest!" "The question is on everyone's lips. Were the events of May 22nd a victory or a defeat, and for whom? .The SYL says that it was significant and important that 1500 people were drawn from the apolitical mire of the 'me-decade' to protest the award to imperialist butcher McNamara. However, it is no victory that McNamara did receive the award and that 25 people were arrested."
This analysis was clearly shared by many of the frustrated demonstrators. The meeting, called to form a new "progressive" organization voted to hear SL Central Committee member Tweet Carter. As a former regional organizer for SDS she noted that even at its worst, SDS was far to the left of the May 22 Committee and its "left" pals. As the SYL leaflet explained: "There has been a lot of talk about bringing back the student movement of the New Left and creating a new student coalition to deal with the various 'issues.' Don't repeat the mistakes of the sixties! The reason that SDS and the New Left fell apart was because it did not have a leadership with a revolutionary working-class program which could guide the movement beyond student-power illusions and sectoralist politics. As a result, many students got channeled into the Democratic Party reformist politics of McGovern or became disillusioned with politics entirely. The Revolutionary Marxist Caucus, the precursor of the SYL, fought for a working-class perspective within SDS, winning over militants to Trotskyism. What is needed now is not another grab-bag liberal coalition like the May 22 Committee under another name, but a party of professional revolutionaries committed to a socialist future.
"The Spartacist League and its youth group, the SYL, are fighting to build a Trotskyist vanguard party. Such a party would mobilize the labor movement to fight for the establishment of a workers government which would expropriate the capitalists and run society for the working people. Join the SYL!"
The Latest From The “Occupy Oakland” Website-This Is Class War-We Say No More- Take The Offensive- Defend Our Unions!-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!
********
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!
****
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!
Friday, December 23, 2011
From The "Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives" Website- The Alba Blog
Click on the headline to link to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archive blog page for all kinds of interesting information about that important historic grouping.
Markin comment:
This blog had gotten my attention for two reasons: those rank and filers who fought to defend democracy, fight the fascists and fight for socialism in Spain for the most part, political opponents or not, were kindred spirits; and, those with first-hand knowledge of those times over seventy years ago are dwindling down to a precious few and so we had better listen to their stories while they are around to tell it. More, later.
Markin comment:
This blog had gotten my attention for two reasons: those rank and filers who fought to defend democracy, fight the fascists and fight for socialism in Spain for the most part, political opponents or not, were kindred spirits; and, those with first-hand knowledge of those times over seventy years ago are dwindling down to a precious few and so we had better listen to their stories while they are around to tell it. More, later.
From The Partisan Defense Committee-The 26th Holiday Appeal In Support Of Class-War Prisoners-Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, Free Leonard Peltier, Free Lynne Stewart And Her Co-Workers-Free The Remaining Ohio 7 Prisoners!
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.
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.
***********
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.
From #Un-Occupied Boston (#Un-Tomemonos Boston)-This Is Class War-We Say No More- Defend The Occupy Movement!-Defend Our Unions! - Defend The Boston Commune! 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 remarks previously made elsewhere as part of the Boston solidarity rally with the West Coast Port Shutdown this is the way forward as we struggle against the ruling class for a very different, more equitable society. Not everything went as well, or as well-attended, as expected including at our rally in solidarity in Boston but we are still exhibiting growing pains in the post-Occupy encampment era which will get sorted out in the future.
******
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy 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!- As the so-called draw-down of American and Allied troops in Iraq reaches it final stages, the draw down of non-mercenary forces anyway, we must recognize that we anti-warriors failed, and failed rather spectacularly, to affect that withdrawal after a promising start to our opposition in late 2002 and early 2003 (and a little in 2006). As the endless American-led wars (even if behind the scenes, as in Libya) continue we had better straighten out our anti-war, anti-imperialist front quickly if we are to have any effect on the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan!
U.S. Hands Off Iran!- American (and world) imperialists are ratcheting up their propaganda war (right now) and increased economic sanctions that are a prelude to war just this minute well before the dust has settled on the now unsettled situation in Iraq and well before they have even sniffed at an Afghan withdrawal of any import. We will hold our noses, as we did with the Saddam leadership in Iraq and on other occasions, and call for the defense of Iran against the monster. A victory for the Americans (and their junior partner, Israel) in Iran is not in the interests of the international working class. Especially here in the “belly of the beast” we are duty-bound to call not just for non-intervention but for defense of Iran. We will, believe me we will, deal with the mullahs, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Islamic fundamentalist in our own way in our own time.
U.S. Hands Off The World!- With the number of “hot spots” that the American imperialists, or one or another of their junior allies, have their hands on in this wicked old world this generic slogan would seem to fill the bill.
Down With The War Budget! Not One Penny, Not One Person For The Wars! Honor World War I German Social-Democratic Party MP, Karl Liebknecht, who did just that. The litmus test for every political candidate must be first opposition to the war budgets (let’s see, right now winding up Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran preparations, China preparations, etc. you get my drift). Then that big leap. The whole damn imperialist military budget. Again, no one said it would be simple. Revolution may be easier that depriving the imperialists of their military money. Well….okay.
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Free Quality Healthcare For All! This would be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The health and welfare of any society’s citizenry is the simple glue that holds that society together. It is no accident that one of the prime concerns of workers states like Cuba, whatever their other political problems, has been to place health care and education front and center and to provide to the best of their capacity for free, quality healthcare and education for all. Even the hide-bound social-democratic-run capitalist governments of Europe have, until recently anyway, placed the “welfare state” protections central to their programs.
Free, quality higher education for all! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! One Hundred, Two Hundred, Many Harvards!
This would again be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The struggle to increase the educational level of a society’s citizenry is another part of the simple glue that holds that society together. Today higher education is being placed out of reach for many working class and minority families. Hell, it is getting tough for the middle class as well.
Moreover the whole higher educational system is increasing skewed toward those who have better formal preparation and family lives leaving many deserving students in the wilderness. Take the resources of the private institutions and spread them around, throw in hundreds of billions from the government (take from the military budget and the bank bail-out money), get rid of the top heavy and useless college administration apparatuses, mix it up, and let students, teachers, and campus workers run the thing through councils on a democratic basis.
Forgive student debt! The latest reports indicate that college student debt is something like a trillion dollars, give or take a few billion but who is counting. The price of tuition and expenses has gone up dramatically while services have not kept pace. What has happened is that the future highly educated workforce that a modern society, and certainly a socialist society, desperately needs is going to be cast in some form of indentured servitude to the banks or other lending agencies for much of their young working lives. Let the banks take a “hit” for a change!
Stop housing foreclosures now! Hey, everybody, everywhere in the world not just in America should have a safe, clean roof over their heads. Hell, even a single family home that is part of the “American dream,” if that is what they want. We didn’t make the housing crisis in America (or elsewhere, like in Ireland, where the bubble has also burst). The banks did. Their predatory lending practices and slip-shot application processes were out of control. Let them take the “hit” here as well.
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Karl Marx was right way back in the 19th century on his labor theory of value, the workers do produce the social surplus appropriated by the capitalists. Capitalism tends to immiserate the mass of society for the few. Most importantly capitalism, a system that at one time was historically progressive in the fight against feudalism and other ancient forms of production, has turned into its opposite and now is a fetter on production. The current multiple crises spawned by this system show there is no way forward, except that unless we push them out, push them out fast, they will muddle through, again.
Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Socialism is the only serious answer to the human crisis we face economically, socially, culturally and politically. This socialist system is the only one calculated to take one of the great tragedies of life, the struggle for daily survival in a world that we did not create, and replace it with more co-operative human endeavors.
Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. None of the nice things mentioned above can be accomplished without as serious struggle for political power. With the struggle for an independent working-class-centered political party that we can call our own and where our leaders act as “tribunes of the people” not hacks. And the creation of that workers party will get us nowhere unless it fights for a workers government to begin the transition to the next level of human progressive on a world-wide scale.
Emblazon on our banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
An injury to one is an injury to all, PICKET LINES MEAN DON'T CROSS,
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 remarks previously made elsewhere as part of the Boston solidarity rally with the West Coast Port Shutdown this is the way forward as we struggle against the ruling class for a very different, more equitable society. Not everything went as well, or as well-attended, as expected including at our rally in solidarity in Boston but we are still exhibiting growing pains in the post-Occupy encampment era which will get sorted out in the future.
******
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy 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!- As the so-called draw-down of American and Allied troops in Iraq reaches it final stages, the draw down of non-mercenary forces anyway, we must recognize that we anti-warriors failed, and failed rather spectacularly, to affect that withdrawal after a promising start to our opposition in late 2002 and early 2003 (and a little in 2006). As the endless American-led wars (even if behind the scenes, as in Libya) continue we had better straighten out our anti-war, anti-imperialist front quickly if we are to have any effect on the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan!
U.S. Hands Off Iran!- American (and world) imperialists are ratcheting up their propaganda war (right now) and increased economic sanctions that are a prelude to war just this minute well before the dust has settled on the now unsettled situation in Iraq and well before they have even sniffed at an Afghan withdrawal of any import. We will hold our noses, as we did with the Saddam leadership in Iraq and on other occasions, and call for the defense of Iran against the monster. A victory for the Americans (and their junior partner, Israel) in Iran is not in the interests of the international working class. Especially here in the “belly of the beast” we are duty-bound to call not just for non-intervention but for defense of Iran. We will, believe me we will, deal with the mullahs, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Islamic fundamentalist in our own way in our own time.
U.S. Hands Off The World!- With the number of “hot spots” that the American imperialists, or one or another of their junior allies, have their hands on in this wicked old world this generic slogan would seem to fill the bill.
Down With The War Budget! Not One Penny, Not One Person For The Wars! Honor World War I German Social-Democratic Party MP, Karl Liebknecht, who did just that. The litmus test for every political candidate must be first opposition to the war budgets (let’s see, right now winding up Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran preparations, China preparations, etc. you get my drift). Then that big leap. The whole damn imperialist military budget. Again, no one said it would be simple. Revolution may be easier that depriving the imperialists of their military money. Well….okay.
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Free Quality Healthcare For All! This would be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The health and welfare of any society’s citizenry is the simple glue that holds that society together. It is no accident that one of the prime concerns of workers states like Cuba, whatever their other political problems, has been to place health care and education front and center and to provide to the best of their capacity for free, quality healthcare and education for all. Even the hide-bound social-democratic-run capitalist governments of Europe have, until recently anyway, placed the “welfare state” protections central to their programs.
Free, quality higher education for all! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! One Hundred, Two Hundred, Many Harvards!
This would again be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The struggle to increase the educational level of a society’s citizenry is another part of the simple glue that holds that society together. Today higher education is being placed out of reach for many working class and minority families. Hell, it is getting tough for the middle class as well.
Moreover the whole higher educational system is increasing skewed toward those who have better formal preparation and family lives leaving many deserving students in the wilderness. Take the resources of the private institutions and spread them around, throw in hundreds of billions from the government (take from the military budget and the bank bail-out money), get rid of the top heavy and useless college administration apparatuses, mix it up, and let students, teachers, and campus workers run the thing through councils on a democratic basis.
Forgive student debt! The latest reports indicate that college student debt is something like a trillion dollars, give or take a few billion but who is counting. The price of tuition and expenses has gone up dramatically while services have not kept pace. What has happened is that the future highly educated workforce that a modern society, and certainly a socialist society, desperately needs is going to be cast in some form of indentured servitude to the banks or other lending agencies for much of their young working lives. Let the banks take a “hit” for a change!
Stop housing foreclosures now! Hey, everybody, everywhere in the world not just in America should have a safe, clean roof over their heads. Hell, even a single family home that is part of the “American dream,” if that is what they want. We didn’t make the housing crisis in America (or elsewhere, like in Ireland, where the bubble has also burst). The banks did. Their predatory lending practices and slip-shot application processes were out of control. Let them take the “hit” here as well.
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Karl Marx was right way back in the 19th century on his labor theory of value, the workers do produce the social surplus appropriated by the capitalists. Capitalism tends to immiserate the mass of society for the few. Most importantly capitalism, a system that at one time was historically progressive in the fight against feudalism and other ancient forms of production, has turned into its opposite and now is a fetter on production. The current multiple crises spawned by this system show there is no way forward, except that unless we push them out, push them out fast, they will muddle through, again.
Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Socialism is the only serious answer to the human crisis we face economically, socially, culturally and politically. This socialist system is the only one calculated to take one of the great tragedies of life, the struggle for daily survival in a world that we did not create, and replace it with more co-operative human endeavors.
Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. None of the nice things mentioned above can be accomplished without as serious struggle for political power. With the struggle for an independent working-class-centered political party that we can call our own and where our leaders act as “tribunes of the people” not hacks. And the creation of that workers party will get us nowhere unless it fights for a workers government to begin the transition to the next level of human progressive on a world-wide scale.
Emblazon on our banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
An injury to one is an injury to all, PICKET LINES MEAN DON'T CROSS,
The Latest From The “Occupy Oakland” Website-This Is Class War-We Say No More- Take The Offensive- Defend Our Unions!-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.
****
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!
****
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!
Thursday, December 22, 2011
From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-From The Pages Of The "Socialist Alternative" Press- Part One- Russia -How the (Soviet)Bureaucracy Seized Power -Introduction and The Russian Working Class Takes Power (1917)
From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future
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.
*******
Introduction
A young South Aftican activist, 20-year-old Comrade Bongani of the underground movement in Tumahole township, reflects the attitude of serious fighters the world over towards the need for socialist theory. Asked by a journalist what "people's education" meant, he is reported with answering:
"I mean the type of education whereby all the people are satisfied with it because they are involved in the decision-making for the benefit of all.
"For instance, when dealing with the Russian Revolution of 1917, because Russia is a Communist country, Bantu education [discriminatory system of schooling imposed on blacks by the South African state] will tell you this and that about communism and how bad it is.
"They won't tell you the true facts about what happened in Russia during that time..."
"Would you like to see socialism in this country?"
"Yes, because it's going to do away with capitalism."
"What do you understand by capitalism?"
"It is a system of private ownership by certain individuals who own the means of production. My parents, from Monday to Friday, can make a production of R1,000, but he or she is going to get, say, R50. So our parents are being exploited so that certain individuals can get rich.
"That's why I prefer socialism, because the working class will control production." (Financial Mail, Johannesburg, October 31, 1986)
It is not accidental that this comrade should use the example of the Russian revolution to illustrate this point. The first (and so far the only) conscious socialist revolution in the world, it proved irrefutably the possibility of overthrowing the rule of the reactionary classes and establishing the rule of the working class.
Despite systematic distortion by the capitalist media and education system, workers, youth and peasants (especially in the underdeveloped world) are aware of Russia's amazing transformation, following the October revolution, from a backward peasant country into a superpower.
For these reasons the Russian revolution has continued to inspire millions of oppressed people with confidence in their own victory. For the same reasons, no other event contains more fundamental lessons for the working-class movement today.
What are the "true facts about what happened in Russia during that time?" On what program did the Russian working class conquer power? Are the fundamental aims of that program still applicable in our struggle today?
Comrade Bongani refers to Russia as a "Communist" country. To what extent has the program of the 1917 revolution been carried into practice? To what extent has Russia advanced towards communism?
Politically conscious workers are aware that serious problems exist in the Soviet Union. In 1956, Soviet leader Krushchev denounced the monstrous corruption and repression that had characterized the rule of his predecessor, Stalin, from the 1920s until his death in 1953. Thirty years later, Mikhail Gorbachev is denouncing the continuing bureaucratic abuse.
Comrade Joe Slovo, leader of the South African Communist Party, today expresses his "anger and disgust" at having been a defender of Stalin's regime. (Interview with The Observer, London, March 1 1987)
But denunciations, anger and disgust do not answer the real question: what happened in the Soviet Union after 1917 to give rise to a regime of mass repression? Seventy years later, what remains of the system of workers' democracy established under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky?
For socialists it is essential to answer these questions fully and openly. Our critical examination of the Russian revolution and its subsequent degeneration has nothing in common with the capitalists' class hatred towards the USSR. We need to know "the true facts" in order to learn the lessons, and to respond correctly to the policies of the present-day Soviet leadership.
Comrades should organize discussions where these events, and the ideas that explain them, can be analyzed, where queries can be raised and ideas debated. This pamphlet is intended as a contribution to the discussion, and an introduction to further reading.
Each of its four parts, for example, could form the basis for a group discussion. Individual comrades could prepare contributions on the topics (sections) into which every part is divided. The books and pamphlets listed at the end should be studied by comrades who want to understand the issues in more detail.
Carrying out this study, and taking on board the lessons, is the best way to commemorate the anniversary of the Russian revolution.
George Collins, October 1987
*********
Part One: The Russian Working Class Takes Power
1. The October Revolution
Petrograd, capital of Russia, on the night of October 25, 1917. With the First World War raging on the battlefields of Europe, the Russian revolution has reached its deciding moment. Armed detachments of workers and soldiers, organized by the Bolshevik Party, have taken control in the city. The pro-capitalist Provisional Government, discredited and isolated, has ceased to exist.
In the Smolny Institute, formerly a girls' school, the Congress of Soviets [elected councils] of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies is in session.
Some delegates are professional politicians, left-wing intellectuals or radicalized army officers. But the vast majority are representatives of the ordinary working people: "great masses of shabby soldiers, grimy workmen, peasants - poor men, bent and scarred in the brute struggle for existence" (John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World) - but filled with a revolutionary vision of the future, and a passionate determination to end their oppression once and for all.
Middle-class reformists denounce the Bolsheviks and demand that the congress break up! But delegate after delegate of the workers, peasants and soldiers drown them in the will and inspiration of the masses rising to their feet.
A soldier captures the mood: "I tell you, the Lettish soldiers have many times said: 'No more resolutions! No more talk! We want deeds - the power must be in our hands!'"
The hall, reports John Reed, "rocked with cheering..." (pages 102-103)
Amidst tumultuous applause, the Bolsheviks announce the transfer of state power to the soviets of the working people. A "Proclamation to workers, soldiers and peasants", put forward by the Bolsheviks, is overwhelmingly adopted. It sums up the immediate tasks:
"The Soviet authority will at once propose an immediate democratic peace to all nations, and an immediate truce on all fronts. It will assure the free transfer of landlord, crown and monastery lands to the Land Committees [elected by the peasants as instruments for seizing the landlords' estates], defend the soldiers' rights, enforcing a complete democratization of the Army, establish workers' control over production, ... take means to supply bread to the cities and articles of first necessity to the villages, and secure to all nationalities living in Russia a real right to independent existence.
"The Congress resolves: that all local power shall be transferred to the Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies, which must enforce revolutionary order." (Quoted by John Reed, pages 115-116)
Under a government of the revolutionary workers' party, supported by the mass of the poor peasants, the Russian people were freeing themselves from centuries of enslavement. In doing so they were demolishing the conditions for the existence of the capitalist system.
Lenin addressed the Congress of the following evening. When eventually he could make himself heard above the thunderous applause, his first words were to confirm the task which the democratic revolution had placed on the agenda:
"We shall now proceed to construct the socialist order."
Throughout the long, hard years of struggle leading up to this night, Marxists had explained in theory what this task would involve. Now the Bolshevik leaders needed to explain it in practical terms.
Leon Trotsky, next to Lenin the most authoritative leader of the Russian revolution, spoke later that same night:
"We rest all our hope on the possibility that our revolution will unleash the European revolution. If the insurrectionary peoples of Europe do not crush imperialism, then we will be crushed... Either the Russian revolution will raise the whirlwind of struggle in the west, or the capitalists of all countries will crush our revolution." (Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, volume 3, page 315)
The delegates, wrote an observer, greeted these words "with an immense crusading acclaim". Clearly, Lenin and Trotsky had expressed the thoughts and feelings of the vast majority of revolutionary fighters present in the Smolny that night.
Thus, in its very first hours, the new proletarian regime reasserted two fundamental propositions of Marxism - no longer as theoretical concepts but as the basis for state policy:
(a) democracy and a solution to the land question, in an underdeveloped country like Russia, is possible only under working-class rule, bringing with it the overthrow of capitalism and the transition to socialism.
(b) Socialist revolution cannot be confined within the borders of one country; it can only advance through the struggle to overthrow capitalism on a world scale.
The rest of this pamphlet will deal with the fate of the Russian revolution over the following ten to twenty years, and the displacement of workers' democracy by a monstrous bureaucratic dictatorship. From studying these developments carefully, lessons can be learned that will be of vital importance to the struggle for the overthrow of capitalism today, and the construction of healthy regimes of workers' democracy in the next period.
2. The Counter-Revolution
Marx and Engels had thought it most likely that capitalism would be defeated first in the developed countries, where the working class was most powerful, and the industrial basis existed for the transition to socialism.
Instead, in October 1917, the chain of world capitalism broke at its weakest link.
The Bolshevik government inherited a backward society in a state of disintegration, exhausted by three years of war and a series of crushing defeats by Germany.
The imperialists could not tolerate the challenge to their authority, and the threat to their interests in Russia, which the Bolsheviks presented. As a pro-capitalist historian openly admits: "They [the imperialist leaders such as Churchill and Foch] warned that Bolshevism was a dangerous threat to world society and should be crushed while it was still weak". (J.N. Westwood, Russia 1917 to 1964, page 38)
Within Russia the privileged and reactionary classes, as well as reformists in the labor movement, fought the revolution with every means at their disposal - boycotts, economic sabotage, even the threat of a general strike.
Workers' control over production, through a system of factory, regional and national committees, was proclaimed to provide some check on the capitalists' activities. But there was no way of peacefully regulating the eruption of class struggle unleashed by the revolution.
On the one hand, the capitalists refused to submit to workers' control. On the other hand, where the workers asserted their power, they did not stop at "controlling" the capitalists. They took over factories lock, stock and barrel, even before their government was able to provide them with back-up and resources.
These struggles in industry clearly confirmed the perspective explained by Trotsky in his theory of "permanent revolution" (see Section 11): once the working class takes power, even in a backward country, it becomes impossible to confine their program to the limits of capitalism. The workers will inevitably be driven on to the expropriation of the capitalists and the program of socialist transformation.
A bourgeois historian describes the deepening paralysis of Russian society as the struggle between the classes intensified:
"In the spring of 1918 the Russian economy was approaching the point of complete collapse. Money lost all value, manufactured goods disappeared from the shops, the shops themselves closed down as the normal channels of trade ceased to function; speculation and corruption were rife." (Theodore H. von Laue, Why Lenin? Why Stalin? page 154)
Hunger worsened in the cities as food supplies came almost to a standstill: when manufactured goods could not be obtained even by barter, why should the peasants raise food for the urban market?
Revolutionary counter-measures were taken. The banks, in the face of their persistent sabotage, were occupied and nationalized in December 1917. The workers spontaneously took over more and more factories until the decree of June 1918 bringing every important branch of industry into state ownership.
Committees of the poor peasants, and armed detachments of workers, were organized to seize the grain supplies hoarded by the rich peasants (kulaks).
The irreconcilable struggle between the classes escalated into a full-scale trial of strength. Armed counter-revolution began to emerge, based on an alliance of the imperialist powers with the kulaks, the capitalists, and the remnants of the forces of Tsarism. The Russian civil war raged, with peaks and intervals, from May 1918 until the spring of 1921.
Civil war, like revolution, forces everyone to take sides - for or against the government. Right-wing "socialists", ex-revolutionaries and reformists, their hatred of Marxism (as always) stronger than their fear of reaction, in large numbers joined the onslaught against the workers' state.
In March 1918, British forces occupied the northern port of Murmansk, and in August they seized Archangel, cutting off Russia's outlets to the sea. In April, Japanese troops landed at Vladivostok in Eastern Siberia.
"Emboldened by the prospect of allied intervention," writes the leading bourgeois historian, E.H. Carr, "the right SR's [right wing of the so-called Socialist Revolutionary Party, based on the richer peasants] at their party conference in Moscow in May 1918 openly advocated a policy designed 'to overthrow the Bolshevik dictatorship and to establish a government based on universal suffrage and willing to accept Allied assistance in the war against Germany'" - i.e. a pro-imperialist government! (The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1923, page 170)
The Mensheviks, split in all directions, were "uncompromising only on one point - their hostility to the [Bolshevik] regime". (Carr, page 170)
In Samara, the SR's set up an anti-Bolshevik "government" and started to raise an army. In August they captured Kazan. The Left SR's (based on the poor peasantry) were in coalition with the Bolsheviks until March 1918, when they left the government because they opposed the peace treaty signed with Germany, calling it a "betrayal".
Now they plotted against the government and tried to provoke a German attack which, they believed, would be met with "revolutionary war". Totally misreading the situation, they staged an insurrection in July, which rapidly collapsed.
The Western powers, as their war against Germany neared its end, concentrated their attention on Russia. More British, French and US troops were landed in Murmansk and Archangel. American, Japanese, British, French and Italian troops occupied Vladivostok and advanced westward as far as the Ural mountains. Sizeable French forces were deployed in the Black Sea.
At the same time, the imperialists financed and armed the counter-revolutionary ("White") armies organized out of the most backward peasantry by ex-Tsarist officers.
Victor Serge, a Bolshevik at the time, vividly describes the desperate situation in October 1919:
"The Whites under Admiral Kolchak are masters of Siberia; they constitute the 'supreme government' of Ukraine under General Denikin who is preparing for a march on Moscow. In the North, thanks to the British battalions, they dominate a vaguely socialist government presided over by old Tchaikovsky, a veteran of the first struggles against Tsarism; and General Yudenich is preparing to take Petrograd, where the people are dying of hunger in the streets and dead horses are piled up in fromt of the Grand Opera." (From Lenin to Stalin, page 31)
Yet, a year later, Wrangel (Denikin's successor) had been crushed in the Crimea, and the military threat was effectively ended.
The Bolsheviks' victory over the combined forces of internal and external reaction, from a position of terrible weakness, most surely rank as one of the most brilliant military achievements of all time.
How was this victory won?
3. How the Bolsheviks Defeated the Counter-Revolution
The survival of the Russian workers' state was made possible, in the first place, by the support of the working class internationally in the enormous movements following the October revolution.
Brilliantly confirming the Bolsheviks' perspective, Europe was plunged into a period of revolution. The road to victory opened up before the working class in one country after another.
The imperialists, tied down by life-and-death struggles in their own countries, could not continue their attacks on Russia without provoking the workers even further, and driving their soldiers to mutiny.
A strike by Hungarian munitions workers in January 1918 spread like wildfire to Vienna, Berlin and throughout Germany, involving over two million workers. Their central demand, echoing the Russian workers' demand, was peace. In Finland an Independent Workers' Republic was proclaimed. After months of fighting it was crushed with the help of German troops.
Then, on 4 November 1918, mutiny broke out at the German naval base of Kiel, and ignited the German revolution. Within days every major city was in the hands of the workers' councils.
The effect on the Russian working class was electrifying. The Bolshevik Ilyin-Shenevsky, taking an evening off in a Petrograd theatre, gives a glimpse of its impact throughout the country:
"Before one of the acts was about to begin, a man in jacket and high boots came on to the stage and said: 'Comrades! We have just had news from Germany. There has been a revolution in Germany. Wilhelm [the emperor] has been overthrown. A Soviet of workers' deputies has been formed in Berlin and has sent us a telegram of greeting.'
"It is hard to convey what followed... The announcement was met with a kind of roar, and frenzied applause shook the theatre for several minutes..." (The Bolsheviks in Power, pages 127-128)
In Austria, mass strikes and army mutinies finally smashed the imperial Hasburg regime. The empire disintegrated, and in Hungary a revolutionary soviet government took power in March 1919.
France was swept by mass strikes and naval mutiny. British soldiers mutinied, and the Red Flag was hoisted over the Clyde in the Scottish industrial heartland. Ireland was in armed revolt against British rule. Strikes involving four million workers convulsed in the USA in 1919.
These events, hardly mentioned in official history books, demonstrated a law which every socialist needs to understand: a successful workers' revolution has an incalculable impact internationally, provoking capitalist reaction but, at the same time, inspiring the workers in other countries to come to its defense and follow its example.
The spirit of international solidarity was the Russian workers' most potent weapon. Not by moral appeals to "democracy" ir the "conscience" of the capitalist class, but by linking themselves to the working-class struggle for power internationally, the Bolsheviks won immeasurable support from every corner of the globe, and opened a "second front" in the imperialists' rear.
Addressed in a comradely way, British and American troops in Russia began to mutiny. On the Black Sea, French sailors hoisted the Red Flag. The imperialists were compelled to withdraw their forces and abandon the Whites to their fate.
The early congresses of the Communist International (see Section 4 below) called on the workers' movement internationally to take action against any kind of support for the Whites in Russia. In July 1920, following the invasion of Russia by reactionary Polish forces, the Second Congress appealed:
"Stop all work, atop all transport, if you see that despite your protests the capitalist cliques of your countries are preparing a new intervention against Russia. Do not allow a single train, a single ship through to Poland." (Quoted in J. Degras, The Communist International 1919-1943 - Documents, Volume 1, page 113)
In Britain, the London dockers rallied magnificently to their comrades in Russia when they refused to load the vessel Jolly George with arms for the Whites in Poland.
In July, with the Red Army driving back the invaders, the British government threatened to send troops to Poland. Council of action were set up by trade unionists throughout Britain, threatening a general strike if the intervention went ahead.
The British government - 48 hours after rejecting the Soviet reply to its ultimatum - backed down.
On the battlefields of Russia, as in the international arena, the workers' victory was only made possible by the Bolsheviks' uncompromising revolutionary policy.
A soldier, speaking at a mass meeting in Petrograd, makes clear the class program that the Red Army was built on:
"The soldier says: 'Show me what I am fighting for... Is it the democracy, or is it the capitalist plunderers? If you can prove to me that I am defending the Revolution, then I will go out and fight without capital punishment to force me'.
"When the land belongs to the peasants and the factories to the workers and the power to the Soviets, then we'll know we have something to fight for, and we'll fight for it!" (John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World, pages 45-46)
A key factor in the struggle is leadership - in the first place, ideas and program; but following from this, the role of individuals in grasping those ideas, embodying the forward drive of their class, and showing others the way.
It would be impossible, for example, to deny the historic contribution of Marx and Engels in the development of the program of socialism, or of Lenin in preparing the way for the October revolution.
It would be equally impossible to underestimate Trotsky's role as Commissar for War from 1918 to 1925 in building the Red Army and leading it to victory.
Trotsky organized the Red Army as a revolutionary army, motivated by political understanding, not by blind obedience. His unshakeable confidence in the workers, youth and peasants who made up its ranks is best expressed in his own words:
"What was needed for [saving the revolution]? Very little. The front ranks of the masses had to realize the mortal danger in the situation. The first requisite for success was to hide nothing, our weaknesses least of all; not to trifle with the masses but to call everything by its right name." (My Life, page 43)
Dedicated young workers were attracted to the army, and became its vanguard. Trotsky continues:
"The Soviets, the party, the trades unions, all devoted themselves to raising new detachments, and sent thousands of communists to the [front]. Most of the youth of the party did not know how to handle arms, but they had the will to win, and that was the most important thing. They put backbone into the soft body of the army."
The "will to win" was "the most important thing". Howe to use arms can be learned in a short time. But the will to win can only be born out of a sense of purpose, a clear goal to fight for, and the understanding of how it can be achieved.
The Bolsheviks had the morale to win; and precisely this vital force was missing from the ranks of the Whites. Even the pro-capitalist Westwood is forced to admit:
"Until Wrangel took over the remnants of the White Army [i.e., nearly at the end of the war], its officers set an example of drunkenness, looting and violence which their soldiers willingly followed. Outrageous treatment of the local population, the outspoken intention to restore the landlords, and the greater social cleavage between the Whites and the peasantry made the latter finally prefer the Reds." (Russia 1917 to 1964)
Thus the initial onslaught of the counter-revolution was defeated. The Bolsheviks, however, understood that their victory could bring no more than a respite in the struggle. As Lenin commented in 1920:
"We have now passed from war to peace. But we have not forgotten that war will come again. So long as both capitalism and socialism remain, we cannot live in peace. Either the one or the other in the long run will conquer." (Quoted by Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, Volume 3, page 365)
Questions for Discussion
1. Why did the revolution occur in backward Russia, and not in Britain or Germany where the working class was stronger?
2. What would have happened if Lenin and Trotsky hadn't been in Russia in 1917?
3. The revolution took place in Russia because of the unique conditions of war weariness, starvation and landless peasants. Surely it won't happen like that here?
4. Didn't the development of a three-year civil war show that the Bolsheviks only had the support of a tiny minority?
5. How did the Bolsheviks with the civil war against militarily superior forces?
Further Reading: Introductory
Articles in Militant in 1987, (834 overview of 1917; 835 February 1917; 842 April 1917; 859 Kornilov's revolt; 869 The October Revolution; also November 1987 on rise of Stalinism.)
Russian Revolution study guide, especially articles on February 1917 and the Russian Revolution
Ideals of October by LPYS (pp. 1-6)
Further Study
In Defense of October by Trotsky
Bureaucratism or Workers Power? by Silverman and Grant (pp. 26-40)
Lenin and Trotsky: What They Really Stood For by Woods and Grant (pp. 22-39)
Lessons of October By Trotsky
History of the Russian Revolution by Trotsky
A marvelous book outlining the process and development of the revolution up to the end of 1917
Ten Days That Shook the World by Reed
A vivid eyewitness account of the events of 1917
The Bolsheviks in Power by Ilyin-Shenevsky
From Lenin to Stalin by Serge
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.
*******
Introduction
A young South Aftican activist, 20-year-old Comrade Bongani of the underground movement in Tumahole township, reflects the attitude of serious fighters the world over towards the need for socialist theory. Asked by a journalist what "people's education" meant, he is reported with answering:
"I mean the type of education whereby all the people are satisfied with it because they are involved in the decision-making for the benefit of all.
"For instance, when dealing with the Russian Revolution of 1917, because Russia is a Communist country, Bantu education [discriminatory system of schooling imposed on blacks by the South African state] will tell you this and that about communism and how bad it is.
"They won't tell you the true facts about what happened in Russia during that time..."
"Would you like to see socialism in this country?"
"Yes, because it's going to do away with capitalism."
"What do you understand by capitalism?"
"It is a system of private ownership by certain individuals who own the means of production. My parents, from Monday to Friday, can make a production of R1,000, but he or she is going to get, say, R50. So our parents are being exploited so that certain individuals can get rich.
"That's why I prefer socialism, because the working class will control production." (Financial Mail, Johannesburg, October 31, 1986)
It is not accidental that this comrade should use the example of the Russian revolution to illustrate this point. The first (and so far the only) conscious socialist revolution in the world, it proved irrefutably the possibility of overthrowing the rule of the reactionary classes and establishing the rule of the working class.
Despite systematic distortion by the capitalist media and education system, workers, youth and peasants (especially in the underdeveloped world) are aware of Russia's amazing transformation, following the October revolution, from a backward peasant country into a superpower.
For these reasons the Russian revolution has continued to inspire millions of oppressed people with confidence in their own victory. For the same reasons, no other event contains more fundamental lessons for the working-class movement today.
What are the "true facts about what happened in Russia during that time?" On what program did the Russian working class conquer power? Are the fundamental aims of that program still applicable in our struggle today?
Comrade Bongani refers to Russia as a "Communist" country. To what extent has the program of the 1917 revolution been carried into practice? To what extent has Russia advanced towards communism?
Politically conscious workers are aware that serious problems exist in the Soviet Union. In 1956, Soviet leader Krushchev denounced the monstrous corruption and repression that had characterized the rule of his predecessor, Stalin, from the 1920s until his death in 1953. Thirty years later, Mikhail Gorbachev is denouncing the continuing bureaucratic abuse.
Comrade Joe Slovo, leader of the South African Communist Party, today expresses his "anger and disgust" at having been a defender of Stalin's regime. (Interview with The Observer, London, March 1 1987)
But denunciations, anger and disgust do not answer the real question: what happened in the Soviet Union after 1917 to give rise to a regime of mass repression? Seventy years later, what remains of the system of workers' democracy established under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky?
For socialists it is essential to answer these questions fully and openly. Our critical examination of the Russian revolution and its subsequent degeneration has nothing in common with the capitalists' class hatred towards the USSR. We need to know "the true facts" in order to learn the lessons, and to respond correctly to the policies of the present-day Soviet leadership.
Comrades should organize discussions where these events, and the ideas that explain them, can be analyzed, where queries can be raised and ideas debated. This pamphlet is intended as a contribution to the discussion, and an introduction to further reading.
Each of its four parts, for example, could form the basis for a group discussion. Individual comrades could prepare contributions on the topics (sections) into which every part is divided. The books and pamphlets listed at the end should be studied by comrades who want to understand the issues in more detail.
Carrying out this study, and taking on board the lessons, is the best way to commemorate the anniversary of the Russian revolution.
George Collins, October 1987
*********
Part One: The Russian Working Class Takes Power
1. The October Revolution
Petrograd, capital of Russia, on the night of October 25, 1917. With the First World War raging on the battlefields of Europe, the Russian revolution has reached its deciding moment. Armed detachments of workers and soldiers, organized by the Bolshevik Party, have taken control in the city. The pro-capitalist Provisional Government, discredited and isolated, has ceased to exist.
In the Smolny Institute, formerly a girls' school, the Congress of Soviets [elected councils] of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies is in session.
Some delegates are professional politicians, left-wing intellectuals or radicalized army officers. But the vast majority are representatives of the ordinary working people: "great masses of shabby soldiers, grimy workmen, peasants - poor men, bent and scarred in the brute struggle for existence" (John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World) - but filled with a revolutionary vision of the future, and a passionate determination to end their oppression once and for all.
Middle-class reformists denounce the Bolsheviks and demand that the congress break up! But delegate after delegate of the workers, peasants and soldiers drown them in the will and inspiration of the masses rising to their feet.
A soldier captures the mood: "I tell you, the Lettish soldiers have many times said: 'No more resolutions! No more talk! We want deeds - the power must be in our hands!'"
The hall, reports John Reed, "rocked with cheering..." (pages 102-103)
Amidst tumultuous applause, the Bolsheviks announce the transfer of state power to the soviets of the working people. A "Proclamation to workers, soldiers and peasants", put forward by the Bolsheviks, is overwhelmingly adopted. It sums up the immediate tasks:
"The Soviet authority will at once propose an immediate democratic peace to all nations, and an immediate truce on all fronts. It will assure the free transfer of landlord, crown and monastery lands to the Land Committees [elected by the peasants as instruments for seizing the landlords' estates], defend the soldiers' rights, enforcing a complete democratization of the Army, establish workers' control over production, ... take means to supply bread to the cities and articles of first necessity to the villages, and secure to all nationalities living in Russia a real right to independent existence.
"The Congress resolves: that all local power shall be transferred to the Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies, which must enforce revolutionary order." (Quoted by John Reed, pages 115-116)
Under a government of the revolutionary workers' party, supported by the mass of the poor peasants, the Russian people were freeing themselves from centuries of enslavement. In doing so they were demolishing the conditions for the existence of the capitalist system.
Lenin addressed the Congress of the following evening. When eventually he could make himself heard above the thunderous applause, his first words were to confirm the task which the democratic revolution had placed on the agenda:
"We shall now proceed to construct the socialist order."
Throughout the long, hard years of struggle leading up to this night, Marxists had explained in theory what this task would involve. Now the Bolshevik leaders needed to explain it in practical terms.
Leon Trotsky, next to Lenin the most authoritative leader of the Russian revolution, spoke later that same night:
"We rest all our hope on the possibility that our revolution will unleash the European revolution. If the insurrectionary peoples of Europe do not crush imperialism, then we will be crushed... Either the Russian revolution will raise the whirlwind of struggle in the west, or the capitalists of all countries will crush our revolution." (Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, volume 3, page 315)
The delegates, wrote an observer, greeted these words "with an immense crusading acclaim". Clearly, Lenin and Trotsky had expressed the thoughts and feelings of the vast majority of revolutionary fighters present in the Smolny that night.
Thus, in its very first hours, the new proletarian regime reasserted two fundamental propositions of Marxism - no longer as theoretical concepts but as the basis for state policy:
(a) democracy and a solution to the land question, in an underdeveloped country like Russia, is possible only under working-class rule, bringing with it the overthrow of capitalism and the transition to socialism.
(b) Socialist revolution cannot be confined within the borders of one country; it can only advance through the struggle to overthrow capitalism on a world scale.
The rest of this pamphlet will deal with the fate of the Russian revolution over the following ten to twenty years, and the displacement of workers' democracy by a monstrous bureaucratic dictatorship. From studying these developments carefully, lessons can be learned that will be of vital importance to the struggle for the overthrow of capitalism today, and the construction of healthy regimes of workers' democracy in the next period.
2. The Counter-Revolution
Marx and Engels had thought it most likely that capitalism would be defeated first in the developed countries, where the working class was most powerful, and the industrial basis existed for the transition to socialism.
Instead, in October 1917, the chain of world capitalism broke at its weakest link.
The Bolshevik government inherited a backward society in a state of disintegration, exhausted by three years of war and a series of crushing defeats by Germany.
The imperialists could not tolerate the challenge to their authority, and the threat to their interests in Russia, which the Bolsheviks presented. As a pro-capitalist historian openly admits: "They [the imperialist leaders such as Churchill and Foch] warned that Bolshevism was a dangerous threat to world society and should be crushed while it was still weak". (J.N. Westwood, Russia 1917 to 1964, page 38)
Within Russia the privileged and reactionary classes, as well as reformists in the labor movement, fought the revolution with every means at their disposal - boycotts, economic sabotage, even the threat of a general strike.
Workers' control over production, through a system of factory, regional and national committees, was proclaimed to provide some check on the capitalists' activities. But there was no way of peacefully regulating the eruption of class struggle unleashed by the revolution.
On the one hand, the capitalists refused to submit to workers' control. On the other hand, where the workers asserted their power, they did not stop at "controlling" the capitalists. They took over factories lock, stock and barrel, even before their government was able to provide them with back-up and resources.
These struggles in industry clearly confirmed the perspective explained by Trotsky in his theory of "permanent revolution" (see Section 11): once the working class takes power, even in a backward country, it becomes impossible to confine their program to the limits of capitalism. The workers will inevitably be driven on to the expropriation of the capitalists and the program of socialist transformation.
A bourgeois historian describes the deepening paralysis of Russian society as the struggle between the classes intensified:
"In the spring of 1918 the Russian economy was approaching the point of complete collapse. Money lost all value, manufactured goods disappeared from the shops, the shops themselves closed down as the normal channels of trade ceased to function; speculation and corruption were rife." (Theodore H. von Laue, Why Lenin? Why Stalin? page 154)
Hunger worsened in the cities as food supplies came almost to a standstill: when manufactured goods could not be obtained even by barter, why should the peasants raise food for the urban market?
Revolutionary counter-measures were taken. The banks, in the face of their persistent sabotage, were occupied and nationalized in December 1917. The workers spontaneously took over more and more factories until the decree of June 1918 bringing every important branch of industry into state ownership.
Committees of the poor peasants, and armed detachments of workers, were organized to seize the grain supplies hoarded by the rich peasants (kulaks).
The irreconcilable struggle between the classes escalated into a full-scale trial of strength. Armed counter-revolution began to emerge, based on an alliance of the imperialist powers with the kulaks, the capitalists, and the remnants of the forces of Tsarism. The Russian civil war raged, with peaks and intervals, from May 1918 until the spring of 1921.
Civil war, like revolution, forces everyone to take sides - for or against the government. Right-wing "socialists", ex-revolutionaries and reformists, their hatred of Marxism (as always) stronger than their fear of reaction, in large numbers joined the onslaught against the workers' state.
In March 1918, British forces occupied the northern port of Murmansk, and in August they seized Archangel, cutting off Russia's outlets to the sea. In April, Japanese troops landed at Vladivostok in Eastern Siberia.
"Emboldened by the prospect of allied intervention," writes the leading bourgeois historian, E.H. Carr, "the right SR's [right wing of the so-called Socialist Revolutionary Party, based on the richer peasants] at their party conference in Moscow in May 1918 openly advocated a policy designed 'to overthrow the Bolshevik dictatorship and to establish a government based on universal suffrage and willing to accept Allied assistance in the war against Germany'" - i.e. a pro-imperialist government! (The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1923, page 170)
The Mensheviks, split in all directions, were "uncompromising only on one point - their hostility to the [Bolshevik] regime". (Carr, page 170)
In Samara, the SR's set up an anti-Bolshevik "government" and started to raise an army. In August they captured Kazan. The Left SR's (based on the poor peasantry) were in coalition with the Bolsheviks until March 1918, when they left the government because they opposed the peace treaty signed with Germany, calling it a "betrayal".
Now they plotted against the government and tried to provoke a German attack which, they believed, would be met with "revolutionary war". Totally misreading the situation, they staged an insurrection in July, which rapidly collapsed.
The Western powers, as their war against Germany neared its end, concentrated their attention on Russia. More British, French and US troops were landed in Murmansk and Archangel. American, Japanese, British, French and Italian troops occupied Vladivostok and advanced westward as far as the Ural mountains. Sizeable French forces were deployed in the Black Sea.
At the same time, the imperialists financed and armed the counter-revolutionary ("White") armies organized out of the most backward peasantry by ex-Tsarist officers.
Victor Serge, a Bolshevik at the time, vividly describes the desperate situation in October 1919:
"The Whites under Admiral Kolchak are masters of Siberia; they constitute the 'supreme government' of Ukraine under General Denikin who is preparing for a march on Moscow. In the North, thanks to the British battalions, they dominate a vaguely socialist government presided over by old Tchaikovsky, a veteran of the first struggles against Tsarism; and General Yudenich is preparing to take Petrograd, where the people are dying of hunger in the streets and dead horses are piled up in fromt of the Grand Opera." (From Lenin to Stalin, page 31)
Yet, a year later, Wrangel (Denikin's successor) had been crushed in the Crimea, and the military threat was effectively ended.
The Bolsheviks' victory over the combined forces of internal and external reaction, from a position of terrible weakness, most surely rank as one of the most brilliant military achievements of all time.
How was this victory won?
3. How the Bolsheviks Defeated the Counter-Revolution
The survival of the Russian workers' state was made possible, in the first place, by the support of the working class internationally in the enormous movements following the October revolution.
Brilliantly confirming the Bolsheviks' perspective, Europe was plunged into a period of revolution. The road to victory opened up before the working class in one country after another.
The imperialists, tied down by life-and-death struggles in their own countries, could not continue their attacks on Russia without provoking the workers even further, and driving their soldiers to mutiny.
A strike by Hungarian munitions workers in January 1918 spread like wildfire to Vienna, Berlin and throughout Germany, involving over two million workers. Their central demand, echoing the Russian workers' demand, was peace. In Finland an Independent Workers' Republic was proclaimed. After months of fighting it was crushed with the help of German troops.
Then, on 4 November 1918, mutiny broke out at the German naval base of Kiel, and ignited the German revolution. Within days every major city was in the hands of the workers' councils.
The effect on the Russian working class was electrifying. The Bolshevik Ilyin-Shenevsky, taking an evening off in a Petrograd theatre, gives a glimpse of its impact throughout the country:
"Before one of the acts was about to begin, a man in jacket and high boots came on to the stage and said: 'Comrades! We have just had news from Germany. There has been a revolution in Germany. Wilhelm [the emperor] has been overthrown. A Soviet of workers' deputies has been formed in Berlin and has sent us a telegram of greeting.'
"It is hard to convey what followed... The announcement was met with a kind of roar, and frenzied applause shook the theatre for several minutes..." (The Bolsheviks in Power, pages 127-128)
In Austria, mass strikes and army mutinies finally smashed the imperial Hasburg regime. The empire disintegrated, and in Hungary a revolutionary soviet government took power in March 1919.
France was swept by mass strikes and naval mutiny. British soldiers mutinied, and the Red Flag was hoisted over the Clyde in the Scottish industrial heartland. Ireland was in armed revolt against British rule. Strikes involving four million workers convulsed in the USA in 1919.
These events, hardly mentioned in official history books, demonstrated a law which every socialist needs to understand: a successful workers' revolution has an incalculable impact internationally, provoking capitalist reaction but, at the same time, inspiring the workers in other countries to come to its defense and follow its example.
The spirit of international solidarity was the Russian workers' most potent weapon. Not by moral appeals to "democracy" ir the "conscience" of the capitalist class, but by linking themselves to the working-class struggle for power internationally, the Bolsheviks won immeasurable support from every corner of the globe, and opened a "second front" in the imperialists' rear.
Addressed in a comradely way, British and American troops in Russia began to mutiny. On the Black Sea, French sailors hoisted the Red Flag. The imperialists were compelled to withdraw their forces and abandon the Whites to their fate.
The early congresses of the Communist International (see Section 4 below) called on the workers' movement internationally to take action against any kind of support for the Whites in Russia. In July 1920, following the invasion of Russia by reactionary Polish forces, the Second Congress appealed:
"Stop all work, atop all transport, if you see that despite your protests the capitalist cliques of your countries are preparing a new intervention against Russia. Do not allow a single train, a single ship through to Poland." (Quoted in J. Degras, The Communist International 1919-1943 - Documents, Volume 1, page 113)
In Britain, the London dockers rallied magnificently to their comrades in Russia when they refused to load the vessel Jolly George with arms for the Whites in Poland.
In July, with the Red Army driving back the invaders, the British government threatened to send troops to Poland. Council of action were set up by trade unionists throughout Britain, threatening a general strike if the intervention went ahead.
The British government - 48 hours after rejecting the Soviet reply to its ultimatum - backed down.
On the battlefields of Russia, as in the international arena, the workers' victory was only made possible by the Bolsheviks' uncompromising revolutionary policy.
A soldier, speaking at a mass meeting in Petrograd, makes clear the class program that the Red Army was built on:
"The soldier says: 'Show me what I am fighting for... Is it the democracy, or is it the capitalist plunderers? If you can prove to me that I am defending the Revolution, then I will go out and fight without capital punishment to force me'.
"When the land belongs to the peasants and the factories to the workers and the power to the Soviets, then we'll know we have something to fight for, and we'll fight for it!" (John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World, pages 45-46)
A key factor in the struggle is leadership - in the first place, ideas and program; but following from this, the role of individuals in grasping those ideas, embodying the forward drive of their class, and showing others the way.
It would be impossible, for example, to deny the historic contribution of Marx and Engels in the development of the program of socialism, or of Lenin in preparing the way for the October revolution.
It would be equally impossible to underestimate Trotsky's role as Commissar for War from 1918 to 1925 in building the Red Army and leading it to victory.
Trotsky organized the Red Army as a revolutionary army, motivated by political understanding, not by blind obedience. His unshakeable confidence in the workers, youth and peasants who made up its ranks is best expressed in his own words:
"What was needed for [saving the revolution]? Very little. The front ranks of the masses had to realize the mortal danger in the situation. The first requisite for success was to hide nothing, our weaknesses least of all; not to trifle with the masses but to call everything by its right name." (My Life, page 43)
Dedicated young workers were attracted to the army, and became its vanguard. Trotsky continues:
"The Soviets, the party, the trades unions, all devoted themselves to raising new detachments, and sent thousands of communists to the [front]. Most of the youth of the party did not know how to handle arms, but they had the will to win, and that was the most important thing. They put backbone into the soft body of the army."
The "will to win" was "the most important thing". Howe to use arms can be learned in a short time. But the will to win can only be born out of a sense of purpose, a clear goal to fight for, and the understanding of how it can be achieved.
The Bolsheviks had the morale to win; and precisely this vital force was missing from the ranks of the Whites. Even the pro-capitalist Westwood is forced to admit:
"Until Wrangel took over the remnants of the White Army [i.e., nearly at the end of the war], its officers set an example of drunkenness, looting and violence which their soldiers willingly followed. Outrageous treatment of the local population, the outspoken intention to restore the landlords, and the greater social cleavage between the Whites and the peasantry made the latter finally prefer the Reds." (Russia 1917 to 1964)
Thus the initial onslaught of the counter-revolution was defeated. The Bolsheviks, however, understood that their victory could bring no more than a respite in the struggle. As Lenin commented in 1920:
"We have now passed from war to peace. But we have not forgotten that war will come again. So long as both capitalism and socialism remain, we cannot live in peace. Either the one or the other in the long run will conquer." (Quoted by Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, Volume 3, page 365)
Questions for Discussion
1. Why did the revolution occur in backward Russia, and not in Britain or Germany where the working class was stronger?
2. What would have happened if Lenin and Trotsky hadn't been in Russia in 1917?
3. The revolution took place in Russia because of the unique conditions of war weariness, starvation and landless peasants. Surely it won't happen like that here?
4. Didn't the development of a three-year civil war show that the Bolsheviks only had the support of a tiny minority?
5. How did the Bolsheviks with the civil war against militarily superior forces?
Further Reading: Introductory
Articles in Militant in 1987, (834 overview of 1917; 835 February 1917; 842 April 1917; 859 Kornilov's revolt; 869 The October Revolution; also November 1987 on rise of Stalinism.)
Russian Revolution study guide, especially articles on February 1917 and the Russian Revolution
Ideals of October by LPYS (pp. 1-6)
Further Study
In Defense of October by Trotsky
Bureaucratism or Workers Power? by Silverman and Grant (pp. 26-40)
Lenin and Trotsky: What They Really Stood For by Woods and Grant (pp. 22-39)
Lessons of October By Trotsky
History of the Russian Revolution by Trotsky
A marvelous book outlining the process and development of the revolution up to the end of 1917
Ten Days That Shook the World by Reed
A vivid eyewitness account of the events of 1917
The Bolsheviks in Power by Ilyin-Shenevsky
From Lenin to Stalin by Serge
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