Click on the headline to link to The Rag Blog website.
Markin comment:
I find this The Rag Blog very useful to monitor for the latest in what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody, with some kind of name, who is still around from the 1960s has found a home here. So the remembrances and recollections are helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least ones that would help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time left politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of the last forty plus years. Still this is a must read blog for today’s left militants.
*******
A compelling but flawed philosophy:Considering Ayn Rand
By Bill Meacham / The Rag Blog / August 3, 2011
Ayn Rand advocates a promising methodology for ethical thinking, but has a deeply flawed vision of human nature, so her enterprise doesn’t quite pan out.(1) That’s too bad, because the methodology -- to base ethical values on what is objectively and verifiably true about the world -- is a good one, better than basing them on moral intuition or uncritically-accepted social norms or someone’s authority.
Moral intuition seems compelling, but different people have different intuitions, so how do you decide among them? Social norms seem as evident as sunlight, but different societies have different norms, so again how do you decide among them? The same goes for authority: how do you decide which authority is worth obeying, particularly if you suspect (often with good reason) that they are really trying to get you to behave for their benefit, not yours?
The answer goes all the way back to the Classical Greeks. We all want a fulfilling life, and we find out what that is by examining who and what we are. Knowing that, we have very good clues to two things: what we are good for or good at, and what is good for us. When we are doing what we are good at and getting what is good for us, then we are functioning well. And the internal experience of functioning well is fulfillment, a fulfilling life, in short: happiness. Aristotle sums it up:
[
A clearer account of happiness] might perhaps be given, if we could first ascertain the function of man. For just as for a flute-player, a sculptor, or an artist, and, in general, for all things that have a function or activity, the good and the "well" is thought to reside in the function, so would it seem to be for man, if he has a function.(2)
What is good for us as human beings is to do well the uniquely human function.
And what is that? Rand follows Aristotle closely here. She says the essential function of the human being is to be rational. Unlike plants, which do not move and only react automatically to stimuli, and animals, which move around and act instinctively, humans think and reason.
Common to all three is the urge to survive and thrive. How humans do that is by the use of reason: “For man, the basic means of survival is reason.”(3) And “that which is proper to the life of a rational being [i.e. the exercise of reason] is the good [for that being]...”(4) So the ethical imperative for human beings is to exercise reason, to be rational.
So far, so good. We can quibble about whether the distinctions between plants, animals and humans are really so hard and fast, but as a first approximation the account is sound. But what shall we reason about? Certainly prudential calculation of risks and benefits in the economic sphere is a big part of it, as is scientific discovery and applied engineering to produce the means of sustenance.
By reasoning we figure out how to acquire what we need in order to survive. In large part that entails being productive, actively working to grow and manufacture the goods we require. For Rand, the ideal person is the one who thinks accurately and acts productively. She rails against thugs and dictators who steal from others without doing the work to produce what is stolen. (No doubt that is a big part of her appeal, because we have all been victims or fear being victims, or both.)
And all of this reasoning is to one end: our own survival and welfare. The goal is to “hold one’s own life as one’s ultimate value, and one’s own happiness as one’s highest purpose...”(5) She combatively calls this “the virtue of selfishness,” although a better characterization would be the virtue of rational self-interest. Thinking rationally about our own welfare is, according to this view, what humans do best and hence what we should do in order to survive, thrive and be fulfilled.
I have no argument with that, and in fact have discussed it before in my blog. What I find problematic is how this plays out in the social sphere. Her ideal is a society of rational actors, each out to satisfy his or her own interests, who trade goods and services with each other to maximize their wealth.
Each of us, in this view, is a homo economicus who seeks to obtain the highest possible well-being for himself or herself given available information about opportunities and constraints. Consequently, for Rand, the ideal human relationship is trade for mutual benefit, entered into freely and without coercion. She says so quite unambiguously:
The principle of trade is the only rational ethical principle for all human relationships, personal and social, private and public, spiritual and material.(6)
Well, that works fine for economic relationships, but does it make sense for personal relationships? I know someone who bases friendship on this principle. He openly looks for how others can be of use to him, and in turn he is willing to be used by them. Many people find this distasteful. Few entrust their deepest feelings and concerns to him.
Imagine a group in which loyalty is a must for survival. This is not implausible, because for hundreds of thousands of years that was exactly the case for all humans. Today as an extreme example we might think of a platoon of soldiers in battle, but to some degree it applies to any in-group.
In order to survive as a member of such a group you need the cooperation and help of others, and in order to secure such cooperation and help you need to be seen as cooperative and helpful yourself. Others need to recognize that you are loyal and reliable. And the best way to be perceived as loyal and reliable is actually to be loyal and reliable.
It is precisely not to act as Rand would have you act, coldly calculating whether to continue to be loyal. Instead you need to act in the interests of the group unhesitatingly, to act swiftly and automatically on your intuition that loyalty is obligatory and disloyalty is so hideous as to be almost unthinkable.
Those whom the group suspects of being purely self-interested are less likely to become trusted members of the group than those whose loyalty is immediate and unquestioned. As group membership is crucial for survival, by her own criteria Rand’s recommendation is anti-life.
What I am talking about here is a moral emotion, an emotion that has been ingrained in us through hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution as beings who are ultra-social, obligatorily gregarious. We need each other, constantly and thoroughly. Rand sneers at morality based on instinct, intuition or feeling, but the instinct for affiliation is what has enabled humans to survive.
Human societies are support systems within which individual weakness does not automatically spell death. Mutual dependence is key to our success. The moral emotion of loyalty is crucial for our survival. And so are others, such as willingness to devote resources to group welfare, cooperation, honesty, and many more.
We have two kinds of rationality, but Rand recognizes only one. We can think carefully and attentively, reasoning step by step from premises to conclusions. And we can react in the blink of an eye, assessing probabilities and choosing what to do without conscious thought. More often than not it is the latter that we employ.
Our minds do most of their work by automatic pattern matching. We do not pay attention, for instance, to how our visual systems translate excitation of receptor cells on the back of the eyes to recognition of objects and people; instead we just recognize things. Similarly, most of our social cognition occurs rapidly and automatically. We very quickly appraise people we meet as attractive or not, friendly or threatening, male or female, higher or lower in status than we are, etc.
Moral intuitions are a form of social cognition. Human beings come equipped with an intuitive ethics, an innate preparedness to feel flashes of approval or disapproval toward certain patterns of events involving other human beings.
But this is what Rand decries, instead praising a rationality that entails “a full mental focus in all issues, in all choices, in all of one’s waking hours,” a process of thought that is “precise,” “scrupulous, ” and “ruthlessly strict.”(7) Someone who actually acted that way would not last very long at all.
Rand overlooks two things: the role of what cognitive scientists call “hot cognition,” which I have been describing, and the essentially social nature of human reality. Nowhere in her essay is the word “compassion” to be found. Nowhere does she speak of empathy. She does mention love. She calls it a “spiritual payment given in exchange for the personal, selfish pleasure which one man derives from the virtues of another man’s character.”(8) Love as payment? If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, Rand appears to be from Jupiter.
Despite the inadequacies of Rand’s theory of human nature, however, there is something to be learned from her theory of ethics. As humans we do have the ability to reflect on ourselves and our situation, to exercise second-order mentation. We have the opportunity to judge whether the moral intuitions provided to us by our evolutionary heritage actually make sense in the present.
The feeling of loyalty to the group, crucial to the survival of small bands of hunters and gatherers, may not make sense when directed to sports teams or, less harmlessly, to governments that oppress portions of their populace and wage wars for the enrichment of the elites. We may not be able to fully divest ourselves of such feelings, but we can intervene when they arise and decide whether and in what manner to act on them.
And, more realistically, we can intervene ahead of time. We can cultivate habits of character that enable us to act in the heat of the moment as we have chosen in times of cool reflection.
Consider someone, perhaps a follower of Ayn Rand, who realizes that his excessively calculating attitude toward others is self-defeating. To overcome this deficiency he could deliberately cultivate habits of emotional openness, generosity and helpfulness. He could look for opportunities to speak the truth about what he is feeling, to be helpful to others, to give freely instead of hoarding.
At first, acting in these ways would feel uncomfortable and alien, but with time they would become second nature. And people would respond to him in kind.
And that is the real power of Ayn Rand’s ethics. Applied to a more accurate view of human nature, it encourages us, not to cogitate excessively over each situation, but to decide what kind of person we want to be. In true Aristotelian fashion it encourages us to cultivate virtues that enable us to live fulfilling lives in the company of others.
Notes
(1) I base this assessment on Rand’s essay “The Objectivist Ethics,” which seems to sum up her essential argument nicely and is certainly a quicker read than her monumental works of fiction.
(2) Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, I.7 1097b 22-29.
(3) Rand, pp. 22-23.
(4) Ibid., p. 25.
(5) Ibid., p. 32.
(6) Ibid., p. 34. Italics in the original.
(7) Ibid., p. 28.
(8) Ibid., p. 35.
References
Aristotle. Nichomachean Ethics, tr. W.D. Ross. In McKeon, Richard, ed., Introduction to Aristotle. New York: Random House Modern Library, 1947. Also available as an on-line publication, URL = http://classics.mit.edu//Aristotle/nicomachaen.html as of 17 April 2011.
Rand, Ayn. “The Objectivist Ethics,” in The Virtue of Selfishness, pp. 13-39. New York: Signet Books, 1964. Also available as an on-line publication, URL = http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=ari_ayn_rand_the_objectivist_ethics as of 3 July 2011.
Wikipedia. “Homo economicus.” On-line publication, URL = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_economicus as of 16 July 2011.
[Bill Meacham is an independent scholar in philosophy. A former staffer at Austin's 60's underground paper, The Rag, Bill received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin. Meacham spent many years working as a computer programmer, systems analyst, and project manager. He posts at BillMeacham.com, where this article first appeared.]
The Rag Blog
Saturday, December 31, 2011
The Latest From “The Rag Blog”-Remembering Woody Guthrie in the age of Obama
Click on the headline to link to The Rag Blog website.
Markin comment:
I find this The Rag Blog very useful to monitor for the latest in what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody, with some kind of name, who is still around from the 1960s has found a home here. So the remembrances and recollections are helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least ones that would help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time left politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of the last forty plus years. Still this is a must read blog for today’s left militants.
*******
Remembering Woody Guthrie in the age of Obama
By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / July 19, 2011
Woody Guthrie, the songwriter, musician, social philosopher, and populist extraordinaire, would have turned 99 this past week (July 14) had he lived. He died of Huntington's disease in 1967. He wrote perhaps thousands of songs, some of which continued to be sung after his death by popular performers, including Pete Seeger, Peter, Paul and Mary, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Tom Paxton, his son Arlo Guthrie, and many others.
Guthrie was born in Okemah, Oklahoma, traveled to California with migrant workers during the dust bowl and then all over the country. He hosted a live radio program in California that was very popular for a few years, but Woody did not take kindly to being told what to do or whom to associate with or what he could say, so that job ended.
In 1941, he was hired by the Department of the Interior to write songs about the Columbia River and the dams being built there in connection with a documentary project. Producing electricity from the flowing waters of the Columbia caught his imagination.
When he saw an item in the newspaper that offended his sense of social justice, he was inclined to write a song about it. That's how "Plane Wreck at Los Gatos" came to be written. A group of Mexican migrant workers were killed as they were sent back to Mexico after harvesting crops in the western U.S. He lamented how these people were used to put food on the tables of Americans and their deaths weren't given a second thought. Their names weren't even reported in the news articles. "All they called them were just deportees."
You don't have to agree with everything Woody wrote to appreciate his contribution to American culture. After all, no two people agree on everything, but the strength of his feeling for the American people cannot be denied. That feeling is best found, perhaps, in what has become an anthem of populism -- "This Land is Your Land."
This Land is Your Land
(words and music by Woody Guthrie)
Chorus:
This land is your land, this land is my land
From California, to the New York Island
From the redwood forest, to the gulf stream waters
This land was made for you and me
As I was walking a ribbon of highway
I saw above me an endless skyway
I saw below me a golden valley
This land was made for you and me
(Chorus)
I've roamed and rambled and I've followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts
And all around me a voice was sounding
This land was made for you and me
(Chorus)
The sun comes shining as I was strolling
The wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling
The fog was lifting a voice come chanting
This land was made for you and me
(Chorus)
As I was walkin' - I saw a sign there
And that sign said - no tress-passin'
But on the other side .... it didn't say nothin!
Now that side was made for you and me!
(Chorus)
In the squares of the city - In the shadow of the steeple
Near the relief office - I see my people
And some are grumblin' and some are wonderin'
If this land's still made for you and me.
(Chorus 2x)
In 2008, from everywhere in the country, the spirits of populists and caring people, and those who spent their lives working for social and economic justice for all, were lifted by the election of Barack Obama as president. At a special pre-inaugural gathering, Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, Bruce Springsteen, and others joined in singing all those verses to Woody's anthem. That's how high expectations were for Obama among those who favor a more compassionate world.
Such enthusiasm does not exist today. Obama has thrown in with the wealthy, the corporatists, the bankers, the exploiters, the war profiteers, and he seems to have forgotten the millions of average Americans who are without jobs, without the money to pay their mortgages, without hope for a better future.
I know that Obama faces great opposition, assuming that he cares about Woody's people, but that is no excuse for not using every ounce of his energy and influence for average Americans, rather than the elite. If this land was made for us all, it seems that we should have a government at least as good as its people. I've come to wish that at least we had a president that good as well.
[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]
The Rag Blog
Markin comment:
I find this The Rag Blog very useful to monitor for the latest in what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody, with some kind of name, who is still around from the 1960s has found a home here. So the remembrances and recollections are helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least ones that would help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time left politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of the last forty plus years. Still this is a must read blog for today’s left militants.
*******
Remembering Woody Guthrie in the age of Obama
By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / July 19, 2011
Woody Guthrie, the songwriter, musician, social philosopher, and populist extraordinaire, would have turned 99 this past week (July 14) had he lived. He died of Huntington's disease in 1967. He wrote perhaps thousands of songs, some of which continued to be sung after his death by popular performers, including Pete Seeger, Peter, Paul and Mary, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Tom Paxton, his son Arlo Guthrie, and many others.
Guthrie was born in Okemah, Oklahoma, traveled to California with migrant workers during the dust bowl and then all over the country. He hosted a live radio program in California that was very popular for a few years, but Woody did not take kindly to being told what to do or whom to associate with or what he could say, so that job ended.
In 1941, he was hired by the Department of the Interior to write songs about the Columbia River and the dams being built there in connection with a documentary project. Producing electricity from the flowing waters of the Columbia caught his imagination.
When he saw an item in the newspaper that offended his sense of social justice, he was inclined to write a song about it. That's how "Plane Wreck at Los Gatos" came to be written. A group of Mexican migrant workers were killed as they were sent back to Mexico after harvesting crops in the western U.S. He lamented how these people were used to put food on the tables of Americans and their deaths weren't given a second thought. Their names weren't even reported in the news articles. "All they called them were just deportees."
You don't have to agree with everything Woody wrote to appreciate his contribution to American culture. After all, no two people agree on everything, but the strength of his feeling for the American people cannot be denied. That feeling is best found, perhaps, in what has become an anthem of populism -- "This Land is Your Land."
This Land is Your Land
(words and music by Woody Guthrie)
Chorus:
This land is your land, this land is my land
From California, to the New York Island
From the redwood forest, to the gulf stream waters
This land was made for you and me
As I was walking a ribbon of highway
I saw above me an endless skyway
I saw below me a golden valley
This land was made for you and me
(Chorus)
I've roamed and rambled and I've followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts
And all around me a voice was sounding
This land was made for you and me
(Chorus)
The sun comes shining as I was strolling
The wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling
The fog was lifting a voice come chanting
This land was made for you and me
(Chorus)
As I was walkin' - I saw a sign there
And that sign said - no tress-passin'
But on the other side .... it didn't say nothin!
Now that side was made for you and me!
(Chorus)
In the squares of the city - In the shadow of the steeple
Near the relief office - I see my people
And some are grumblin' and some are wonderin'
If this land's still made for you and me.
(Chorus 2x)
In 2008, from everywhere in the country, the spirits of populists and caring people, and those who spent their lives working for social and economic justice for all, were lifted by the election of Barack Obama as president. At a special pre-inaugural gathering, Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, Bruce Springsteen, and others joined in singing all those verses to Woody's anthem. That's how high expectations were for Obama among those who favor a more compassionate world.
Such enthusiasm does not exist today. Obama has thrown in with the wealthy, the corporatists, the bankers, the exploiters, the war profiteers, and he seems to have forgotten the millions of average Americans who are without jobs, without the money to pay their mortgages, without hope for a better future.
I know that Obama faces great opposition, assuming that he cares about Woody's people, but that is no excuse for not using every ounce of his energy and influence for average Americans, rather than the elite. If this land was made for us all, it seems that we should have a government at least as good as its people. I've come to wish that at least we had a president that good as well.
[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]
The Rag Blog
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.
***********
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.
The Latest From The Private Bradley Manning Support Network-Free Bradley Manning Now!
Click on the headline to link to the Private Bradley Manning Support Network for the latest information in his case.
Click on the headline to link to the Private Bradley Manning Support Network for the lates information in his case.
From the American Left History blog, dated March 17, 2011
Why I Will Be Standing In Solidarity With Private Bradley Manning At Quantico, Virginia On Sunday March 20th At 2:00 PM- A Personal Note From An Ex-Soldier Political Prisoner
Markin comment:
Of course I will be standing at the front gate to the Quantico Marine Base on March 20th because I stand in solidarity with the actions of Private Bradley Manning in bringing to light, just a little light, some of the nefarious doings of this government, Bush-like or Obamian. If he did such acts. I sleep just a shade bit easier these days knowing that Private Manning (or someone) exposed what we all knew, or should have known- the Iraq war and the Afghan war justification rested on a house of card. American imperialism’s house of cards, but cards nevertheless.
Of course I will be standing at the front gate to the Quantico Marine Base on March 20th because I am outraged by the treatment of Private Manning meted to a presumably innocent man by a government who alleges itself to be some “beacon” of the civilized world. The military has gotten more devious although not smarter since I was soldier in their crosshairs over forty years ago. Allegedly Private Manning might become so distraught over his alleged actions that he requires extraordinary protections. He is assumed, in the Catch-22 logic of the military, to be something of a suicide risk on the basis of bringing some fresh air to the nefarious doings of the international imperialist order. Be serious. I, however, noticed no "spike” in suicide rates among the world’s diplomatic community once they were exposed, a place where such activities might have been expected once it was observed in public that most of these persons could barely tie their own shoes.
Now the two reasons above are more than sufficient reasons for my standing at the front gate to the Quantico Marine Base on March 20th although they, in themselves, are only the appropriate reasons that any progressive thinking person would need to show up and shout to the high heavens for Private Manning’s freedom. I have an addition reason though, a very pressing personal reason. As mentioned above I too was in the military’s crosshairs as a soldier during the height of the Vietnam War. I will not go into the details of that episode, this comment after all is about soldier Manning, other than that I spent my own time in an Army stockade for, let’s put it this way, working on the principle of “what if they gave a war and nobody came.” Forty years later I am still working off that principle, and gladly. But here is the real point. During that time I had outside support, outside civilian support, that rallied on several occasions outside the military base where I was confined. Believe me that knowledge helped me through the tough days inside. So on March 20th I am just, as I have been able to on too few other occasions over years, paying my dues for that long ago support. You, brother, are a true winter soldier.
Private Manning I hope that you will hear us, or hear about our rally in your defense. Better yet, everybody who read this join us and make sure that he can hear us loud and clear. And let us shout to those high heavens mentioned above-Free Private Bradley Manning Now!
******
And, of course, I will be standing in support of Private Manning as long as he is not freed from the clutches of his jailers.
Click on the headline to link to the Private Bradley Manning Support Network for the lates information in his case.
From the American Left History blog, dated March 17, 2011
Why I Will Be Standing In Solidarity With Private Bradley Manning At Quantico, Virginia On Sunday March 20th At 2:00 PM- A Personal Note From An Ex-Soldier Political Prisoner
Markin comment:
Of course I will be standing at the front gate to the Quantico Marine Base on March 20th because I stand in solidarity with the actions of Private Bradley Manning in bringing to light, just a little light, some of the nefarious doings of this government, Bush-like or Obamian. If he did such acts. I sleep just a shade bit easier these days knowing that Private Manning (or someone) exposed what we all knew, or should have known- the Iraq war and the Afghan war justification rested on a house of card. American imperialism’s house of cards, but cards nevertheless.
Of course I will be standing at the front gate to the Quantico Marine Base on March 20th because I am outraged by the treatment of Private Manning meted to a presumably innocent man by a government who alleges itself to be some “beacon” of the civilized world. The military has gotten more devious although not smarter since I was soldier in their crosshairs over forty years ago. Allegedly Private Manning might become so distraught over his alleged actions that he requires extraordinary protections. He is assumed, in the Catch-22 logic of the military, to be something of a suicide risk on the basis of bringing some fresh air to the nefarious doings of the international imperialist order. Be serious. I, however, noticed no "spike” in suicide rates among the world’s diplomatic community once they were exposed, a place where such activities might have been expected once it was observed in public that most of these persons could barely tie their own shoes.
Now the two reasons above are more than sufficient reasons for my standing at the front gate to the Quantico Marine Base on March 20th although they, in themselves, are only the appropriate reasons that any progressive thinking person would need to show up and shout to the high heavens for Private Manning’s freedom. I have an addition reason though, a very pressing personal reason. As mentioned above I too was in the military’s crosshairs as a soldier during the height of the Vietnam War. I will not go into the details of that episode, this comment after all is about soldier Manning, other than that I spent my own time in an Army stockade for, let’s put it this way, working on the principle of “what if they gave a war and nobody came.” Forty years later I am still working off that principle, and gladly. But here is the real point. During that time I had outside support, outside civilian support, that rallied on several occasions outside the military base where I was confined. Believe me that knowledge helped me through the tough days inside. So on March 20th I am just, as I have been able to on too few other occasions over years, paying my dues for that long ago support. You, brother, are a true winter soldier.
Private Manning I hope that you will hear us, or hear about our rally in your defense. Better yet, everybody who read this join us and make sure that he can hear us loud and clear. And let us shout to those high heavens mentioned above-Free Private Bradley Manning Now!
******
And, of course, I will be standing in support of Private Manning as long as he is not freed from the clutches of his jailers.
The Latest From The “Occupy Oakland” Website-This Is Class War-We Say No More- Take The Offensive- Defend The Occupy Movement!- 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.
Guest Commentary
From The Transitional Program Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International In 1938Sliding Scale of Wages and Sliding Scale of Hours
Under the conditions of disintegrating capitalism, the masses continue to live the meagerized life of the oppressed, threatened now more than at any other time with the danger of being cast into the pit of pauperism. They must defend their mouthful of bread, if they cannot increase or better it. There is neither the need nor the opportunity to enumerate here those separate, partial demands which time and again arise on the basis of concrete circumstances – national, local, trade union. But two basic economic afflictions, in which is summarized the increasing absurdity of the capitalist system, that is, unemployment and high prices, demand generalized slogans and methods of struggle.
The Fourth International declares uncompromising war on the politics of the capitalists which, to a considerable degree, like the politics of their agents, the reformists, aims to place the whole burden of militarism, the crisis, the disorganization of the monetary system and all other scourges stemming from capitalism’s death agony upon the backs of the toilers. The Fourth International demands employment and decent living conditions for all.
Neither monetary inflation nor stabilization can serve as slogans for the proletariat because these are but two ends of the same stick. Against a bounding rise in prices, which with the approach of war will assume an ever more unbridled character, one can fight only under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages. This means that collective agreements should assure an automatic rise in wages in relation to the increase in price of consumer goods.
Under the menace of its own disintegration, the proletariat cannot permit the transformation of an increasing section of the workers into chronically unemployed paupers, living off the slops of a crumbling society. The right to employment is the only serious right left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is being shorn from him at every step. Against unemployment, “structural” as well as “conjunctural,” the time is ripe to advance along with the slogan of public works, the slogan of a sliding scale of working hours. Trade unions and other mass organizations should bind the workers and the unemployed together in the solidarity of mutual responsibility. On this basis all the work on hand would then be divided among all existing workers in accordance with how the extent of the working week is defined. The average wage of every worker remains the same as it was under the old working week. Wages, under a strictly guaranteed minimum, would follow the movement of prices. It is impossible to accept any other program for the present catastrophic period.
Property owners and their lawyers will prove the “unrealizability” of these demands. Smaller, especially ruined capitalists, in addition will refer to their account ledgers. The workers categorically denounce such conclusions and references. The question is not one of a “normal” collision between opposing material interests. The question is one of guarding the proletariat from decay, demoralization and ruin. The question is one of life or death of the only creative and progressive class, and by that token of the future of mankind. If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. “Realizability” or “unrealizability” is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.
* 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 red banner-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.
Guest Commentary
From The Transitional Program Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International In 1938Sliding Scale of Wages and Sliding Scale of Hours
Under the conditions of disintegrating capitalism, the masses continue to live the meagerized life of the oppressed, threatened now more than at any other time with the danger of being cast into the pit of pauperism. They must defend their mouthful of bread, if they cannot increase or better it. There is neither the need nor the opportunity to enumerate here those separate, partial demands which time and again arise on the basis of concrete circumstances – national, local, trade union. But two basic economic afflictions, in which is summarized the increasing absurdity of the capitalist system, that is, unemployment and high prices, demand generalized slogans and methods of struggle.
The Fourth International declares uncompromising war on the politics of the capitalists which, to a considerable degree, like the politics of their agents, the reformists, aims to place the whole burden of militarism, the crisis, the disorganization of the monetary system and all other scourges stemming from capitalism’s death agony upon the backs of the toilers. The Fourth International demands employment and decent living conditions for all.
Neither monetary inflation nor stabilization can serve as slogans for the proletariat because these are but two ends of the same stick. Against a bounding rise in prices, which with the approach of war will assume an ever more unbridled character, one can fight only under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages. This means that collective agreements should assure an automatic rise in wages in relation to the increase in price of consumer goods.
Under the menace of its own disintegration, the proletariat cannot permit the transformation of an increasing section of the workers into chronically unemployed paupers, living off the slops of a crumbling society. The right to employment is the only serious right left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is being shorn from him at every step. Against unemployment, “structural” as well as “conjunctural,” the time is ripe to advance along with the slogan of public works, the slogan of a sliding scale of working hours. Trade unions and other mass organizations should bind the workers and the unemployed together in the solidarity of mutual responsibility. On this basis all the work on hand would then be divided among all existing workers in accordance with how the extent of the working week is defined. The average wage of every worker remains the same as it was under the old working week. Wages, under a strictly guaranteed minimum, would follow the movement of prices. It is impossible to accept any other program for the present catastrophic period.
Property owners and their lawyers will prove the “unrealizability” of these demands. Smaller, especially ruined capitalists, in addition will refer to their account ledgers. The workers categorically denounce such conclusions and references. The question is not one of a “normal” collision between opposing material interests. The question is one of guarding the proletariat from decay, demoralization and ruin. The question is one of life or death of the only creative and progressive class, and by that token of the future of mankind. If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. “Realizability” or “unrealizability” is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.
* 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 red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
From #Ur-Occupied Boston (#Ur-Tomemonos Boston)-This Is Class War-We Say No More- Defend The Occupy Movement!-Defend Our Unions! - Defend The Boston Commune! Take The Offensive! - General Assembly Blues- A Cautionary Tale.
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.
*******
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!
*******
Peter Paul Markin comment:
I had never seen my old friend Josh Breslin so irate (Joshua Lawrence Breslin for those who know him under that moniker through his various commentary columns in all kind alternative press operations over the past forty years or so). Or rather more correctly I had never read anything of his that practically steamed off the page, the computer screen page that early Monday morning (December 19, 2011, let’s see the time stamp, oh yes, 5:14 AM, Ya early, definitely early for Josh) when I was casually perusing my daily e-mail delete slaughter-house. It seems that he had attended an Occupy Boston General Assembly (GA) meeting the night before over at the hallowed Community Church on Boylston Street (hallowed in leftist circles, I had first gone there long ago to attend a commemoration program for Sacco and Vanzetti). Since the police raid on the Occupy camp at Dewey Square in the early morning hours of December 11th the GAs have been assembling helter-skelter at various locations from the Parkman Bandstand on the Common to various sympathetic indoor as winter sets in locations, mainly churches, in order to keep some continuity during these unsettled times.
At that meeting the main order of business was a simple proposal submitted by the OB Socialist Caucus, a loose group of organizationally-affiliated and unaffiliated people who identify themselves with the socialist cause. The gist of the proposal was to make a forthright statement that Occupy Boston was to be clearly identified, more clearly identified than in any previous document, as independent of the main bourgeois parties, the Democrats in particular, and by implication was not to be a front or voting cattle bloc for any particular organized political operation ready to move in like hungry wolves looking for an easy meal. This proposal never reached a vote, a yea or nay vote, that night because it was “blocked” well before such a vote could be taken by, as Josh called it in his e-mail, the “Rump” assembly (see said e-mail posted below, well the gist of it anyway). The Rump being a minority of those eighty or so brethren in attendance that evening whose maneuver in the consensus-addled GA world stopped the proposal in its tracks. This series of events triggered in Josh some kind of previously well-hidden verbal explosion about the trends that he had witnessed developing in the movement, and that had disturbed him previously. Naturally he had to send his old compadre Peter Paul his bilious e-mail as the first step in his “campaign” to get things off his chest.
A little explanation is in order to gauge the seriousness of Josh’s maddened impulse and, as well, for why I have taken the time to write this little commentary up and pushed it forward. Josh and I go back a long way, back to the summer of love in San Francisco in 1967 when I was on Captain Crunch’s merry prankster magical mystery tour freedom bus and I met Josh, then going under the moniker “Prince Of Love,” on Russian Hill in that town. Ya, I know, we were just a little too self-important on changing the name changed the person thing but that was the way it was. I was, for a while, known as Be-Bop Benny, among other names. He had, after just graduating from high school up in Olde Saco, Maine hitch-hiked across the country to see “what was happening.” We hit it off right away, probably because my being from North Adamsville here in Massachusetts we were the only New Englanders “on the bus,” even though I was a few years older. In any case our friendship survived through thick and thin, even despite his “stealing” my girl, Butterfly Swirl (okay, okay I will stop with the a. k. a’s), from right under my nose during the first few days we knew each other. Part of that thick and thin has been involvement in a long series of left-wing political struggles where we have not always seen eye to eye but have generally been “on the right of the angels.”
And that, roughly, brings us to the present. Along the way, for a number of reason that shall not detain us here, I increasingly came to socialist conclusions abut the nature of American society and the ways to change it. Josh, while always on the cutting edge of those same conclusions, never crossed over and has maintained a studied non-socialist radical position very similar to many that I have run into as the Occupy movement has gathered steam. Although as a paid political commentator for various publications he has always kept a certain skeptical distance from going overboard every time there is the slightest left breeze coming in over Boston Harbor. Until now.
As I have written elsewhere Josh, now retired, still likes to keep his hand in the mix and so has been working on a project that may turn into a book about the Occupy Boston experience. When he first he crossed the river from the wilds of Cambridge he held himself pretty aloof from the doings but soon became totally enmeshed in what was going on. I was, and still am, a lot more skeptical about where the winds are heading. Josh though spent some nights at Dewey Square and got involved in the camp life. He marched up and down the streets of Boston in every possible cause. Brought food and other goods to the site when he came over. Donated money and other resources to the efforts. He even told me that he washed dishes (once) to help out in the kitchen one day. And believe me in the old prankster days the Prince of Love was, well, too “important” to bow down and get his hands wet doing anything as lowly as dishes. So this new experiment (or rather a chance to make up for those youthful mistakes) really energized him.
So when Joshua Lawrence Breslin, on a darkened Monday morning, signals that something is wrong, something is politically wrong with the direction of the movement I listen up. And, perhaps, you should too.
*******
Below I have placed the substance of the e-mail that Josh Breslin sent to me that fateful Monday December 19th morning. This is my summarization of the document which was written by him in our usual “code” and with his usual excessive use of expletives to normal ears so that it would be not understandable to “outsiders.” In short I have edited it as best I could while retaining the political direction. If Josh doesn’t like it then he can, well, sue me. Ha ha. Or better, write his own damn translation. Peter Paul Markin.
December 19, 2011, 5:14 AM to PeterPaulMarkin@yahoo.com:
Pee Pee, [The reader is hereby warned no to make anything out of this old-time nickname, old time going back to childhood North Adamsville working-class neighborhood days, or else.] You won’t believe what those arrogant airheads did last night at the so-called GA. I call it, and you can quote me on this, the “Rump” like back in Oliver Cromwell’s time when a bunch of cronies controlled everything, or else. They “blocked” the proposal to have a clear statement of independence from the damn Democrats (and Republicans too) but we know who really wants in on this movement.
What they did was get together enough people to block the thing even though with a simple majority it could have gotten through. So much for democracy. For once you are right on this blocking and consensus b.s. Now when Miss Betty [Elizabeth Warren] comes a-courting she will have a field day. You and I have disagreed on many things but keeping the bourgeois parties the hell away from our movement (except maybe to do “Jimmy Higgins” work putting up chairs or licking envelopes, stuff like that) has always been something that has united us ever since Chicago in 1968.
You should have heard the reasons given. Naturally the old chestnut- “we don’t want to alienate anyone” (anyone to the left of Genghis Khan, I guess). “It’s too negative.” Like the bourgeoisie gives a damn about negativity as long as they keep their moola and their power. “The statement we have already posted about transparency and independence is good enough” Like that flimsy one-size-fits-all statement has any political meaning at all. And it degenerated from there. I was so mad I had to walk out and get some fresh air.
I am far from giving up on this Occupy movement but in a lot of ways it really is like that guy, that homeless camper guy, I interviewed over at Dewey Square in early November when the weather got a little cold said. He said the place was a Potemkin Village. I thought he meant about people not staying there overnight. But now I think he meant the whole experiment. They, we, are generals without any army right now and nothing that is being done lately is calculated to break out from that situation. Were we this ruthlessly obtuse back in the days? I hope not- Josh
*******
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!
*******
Peter Paul Markin comment:
I had never seen my old friend Josh Breslin so irate (Joshua Lawrence Breslin for those who know him under that moniker through his various commentary columns in all kind alternative press operations over the past forty years or so). Or rather more correctly I had never read anything of his that practically steamed off the page, the computer screen page that early Monday morning (December 19, 2011, let’s see the time stamp, oh yes, 5:14 AM, Ya early, definitely early for Josh) when I was casually perusing my daily e-mail delete slaughter-house. It seems that he had attended an Occupy Boston General Assembly (GA) meeting the night before over at the hallowed Community Church on Boylston Street (hallowed in leftist circles, I had first gone there long ago to attend a commemoration program for Sacco and Vanzetti). Since the police raid on the Occupy camp at Dewey Square in the early morning hours of December 11th the GAs have been assembling helter-skelter at various locations from the Parkman Bandstand on the Common to various sympathetic indoor as winter sets in locations, mainly churches, in order to keep some continuity during these unsettled times.
At that meeting the main order of business was a simple proposal submitted by the OB Socialist Caucus, a loose group of organizationally-affiliated and unaffiliated people who identify themselves with the socialist cause. The gist of the proposal was to make a forthright statement that Occupy Boston was to be clearly identified, more clearly identified than in any previous document, as independent of the main bourgeois parties, the Democrats in particular, and by implication was not to be a front or voting cattle bloc for any particular organized political operation ready to move in like hungry wolves looking for an easy meal. This proposal never reached a vote, a yea or nay vote, that night because it was “blocked” well before such a vote could be taken by, as Josh called it in his e-mail, the “Rump” assembly (see said e-mail posted below, well the gist of it anyway). The Rump being a minority of those eighty or so brethren in attendance that evening whose maneuver in the consensus-addled GA world stopped the proposal in its tracks. This series of events triggered in Josh some kind of previously well-hidden verbal explosion about the trends that he had witnessed developing in the movement, and that had disturbed him previously. Naturally he had to send his old compadre Peter Paul his bilious e-mail as the first step in his “campaign” to get things off his chest.
A little explanation is in order to gauge the seriousness of Josh’s maddened impulse and, as well, for why I have taken the time to write this little commentary up and pushed it forward. Josh and I go back a long way, back to the summer of love in San Francisco in 1967 when I was on Captain Crunch’s merry prankster magical mystery tour freedom bus and I met Josh, then going under the moniker “Prince Of Love,” on Russian Hill in that town. Ya, I know, we were just a little too self-important on changing the name changed the person thing but that was the way it was. I was, for a while, known as Be-Bop Benny, among other names. He had, after just graduating from high school up in Olde Saco, Maine hitch-hiked across the country to see “what was happening.” We hit it off right away, probably because my being from North Adamsville here in Massachusetts we were the only New Englanders “on the bus,” even though I was a few years older. In any case our friendship survived through thick and thin, even despite his “stealing” my girl, Butterfly Swirl (okay, okay I will stop with the a. k. a’s), from right under my nose during the first few days we knew each other. Part of that thick and thin has been involvement in a long series of left-wing political struggles where we have not always seen eye to eye but have generally been “on the right of the angels.”
And that, roughly, brings us to the present. Along the way, for a number of reason that shall not detain us here, I increasingly came to socialist conclusions abut the nature of American society and the ways to change it. Josh, while always on the cutting edge of those same conclusions, never crossed over and has maintained a studied non-socialist radical position very similar to many that I have run into as the Occupy movement has gathered steam. Although as a paid political commentator for various publications he has always kept a certain skeptical distance from going overboard every time there is the slightest left breeze coming in over Boston Harbor. Until now.
As I have written elsewhere Josh, now retired, still likes to keep his hand in the mix and so has been working on a project that may turn into a book about the Occupy Boston experience. When he first he crossed the river from the wilds of Cambridge he held himself pretty aloof from the doings but soon became totally enmeshed in what was going on. I was, and still am, a lot more skeptical about where the winds are heading. Josh though spent some nights at Dewey Square and got involved in the camp life. He marched up and down the streets of Boston in every possible cause. Brought food and other goods to the site when he came over. Donated money and other resources to the efforts. He even told me that he washed dishes (once) to help out in the kitchen one day. And believe me in the old prankster days the Prince of Love was, well, too “important” to bow down and get his hands wet doing anything as lowly as dishes. So this new experiment (or rather a chance to make up for those youthful mistakes) really energized him.
So when Joshua Lawrence Breslin, on a darkened Monday morning, signals that something is wrong, something is politically wrong with the direction of the movement I listen up. And, perhaps, you should too.
*******
Below I have placed the substance of the e-mail that Josh Breslin sent to me that fateful Monday December 19th morning. This is my summarization of the document which was written by him in our usual “code” and with his usual excessive use of expletives to normal ears so that it would be not understandable to “outsiders.” In short I have edited it as best I could while retaining the political direction. If Josh doesn’t like it then he can, well, sue me. Ha ha. Or better, write his own damn translation. Peter Paul Markin.
December 19, 2011, 5:14 AM to PeterPaulMarkin@yahoo.com:
Pee Pee, [The reader is hereby warned no to make anything out of this old-time nickname, old time going back to childhood North Adamsville working-class neighborhood days, or else.] You won’t believe what those arrogant airheads did last night at the so-called GA. I call it, and you can quote me on this, the “Rump” like back in Oliver Cromwell’s time when a bunch of cronies controlled everything, or else. They “blocked” the proposal to have a clear statement of independence from the damn Democrats (and Republicans too) but we know who really wants in on this movement.
What they did was get together enough people to block the thing even though with a simple majority it could have gotten through. So much for democracy. For once you are right on this blocking and consensus b.s. Now when Miss Betty [Elizabeth Warren] comes a-courting she will have a field day. You and I have disagreed on many things but keeping the bourgeois parties the hell away from our movement (except maybe to do “Jimmy Higgins” work putting up chairs or licking envelopes, stuff like that) has always been something that has united us ever since Chicago in 1968.
You should have heard the reasons given. Naturally the old chestnut- “we don’t want to alienate anyone” (anyone to the left of Genghis Khan, I guess). “It’s too negative.” Like the bourgeoisie gives a damn about negativity as long as they keep their moola and their power. “The statement we have already posted about transparency and independence is good enough” Like that flimsy one-size-fits-all statement has any political meaning at all. And it degenerated from there. I was so mad I had to walk out and get some fresh air.
I am far from giving up on this Occupy movement but in a lot of ways it really is like that guy, that homeless camper guy, I interviewed over at Dewey Square in early November when the weather got a little cold said. He said the place was a Potemkin Village. I thought he meant about people not staying there overnight. But now I think he meant the whole experiment. They, we, are generals without any army right now and nothing that is being done lately is calculated to break out from that situation. Were we this ruthlessly obtuse back in the days? I hope not- Josh
Friday, December 30, 2011
The Latest From “The Rag Blog”-"Follow the drinking gourd":Lessons from the Underground Railroad
Click on the headline to link to The Rag Blog website.
Markin comment:
I find this The Rag Blog very useful to monitor for the latest in what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody, with some kind of name, who is still around from the 1960s has found a home here. So the remembrances and recollections are helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least ones that would help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time left politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of the last forty plus years. Still this is a must read blog for today’s left militants.
*******
Follow the drinking gourd:Lessons from the Underground Railroad
By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / July 5, 2011
When the sun comes back,
and the first Quail calls,
Follow the drinking gourd,
For the old man is a-waiting
for to carry you to freedom
If you follow the drinking gourd.
Chorus:
Follow the drinking gourd,
Follow the drinking gourd,
For the old man is a-waiting
for to carry you to freedom
If you follow the drinking gourd.
The riverbank will make a very good road,
The dead trees show you the way.
Left foot, peg foot traveling on,
Following the drinking gourd.
The river ends between two hills,
Follow the drinking gourd,
There's another river on the other side,
Follow the drinking gourd.
When the great big river meets the little river,
Follow the drinking gourd.
For the old man is a-waiting
for to carry you to freedom
If you follow the drinking gourd.
(Old song directing slaves on their escape, in modern times popularized by Pete Seeger and the Weavers)
“Dad, didn’t you ever go to elementary school?”
(My daughter responding to my enthusiastic report on a two-day trip along the Underground Railroad)
I just returned from an inspiring two-day trip to southern Indiana and Ohio, visiting three sites along the Underground Railroad. I was familiar with the history of African Americans’ active resistance to slavery, such as armed revolts, and forms of passive resistance, including purposive manipulations of master/slave relationships.
However, my knowledge of the underground flights to freedom was limited.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, as many school kids know, slaves fled the plantation dictatorships to travel north to so-called “free states.” They continued their journey to Canada where slavery was outlawed. In 1850, the controversial Fugitive Slave Law passed Congress which strengthened the hand of slaveholders in their efforts to stop the Underground Railroad. It declared that although slavery was prohibited outside the South, slaveholders and bounty hunters could travel north to retrieve their human “property.”
Escaping slaves, therefore, could not regard themselves as secure until they reached Canada.
While the flight of slaves was largely unplanned, African American slave society was replete with secret directions for escape transmitted through songs such as “Follow the Drinking Gourd” and “Go Down Moses.” Even the quoting of certain scripture in Black churches was designed to give information on routes to the North and possible safe houses to seek. The courage, creativity, and will to freedom of the slaves were extraordinary.
A trail of safe houses in the “free” state of Ohio was created to give runaway slaves sanctuary, food, and directions for moving further north, ultimately to Canada. Ohio was north of the Ohio River, and Kentucky on the river’s southern banks was still a slave state.
Safe houses existed in Indiana, Michigan, and elsewhere in the Midwest and the East. Those providing sanctuary were both white and Black abolitionists. In Ripley, Ohio, John Rankin, a white Presbyterian Minister and long-time abolitionist, and John Parker, a former slave and local entrepreneur, risked their livelihoods and their physical security to provide safe havens to fleeing slaves.
In the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law it became a crime for northern abolitionists to provide such sanctuary. Northerners were obliged by law to cooperate with slaveholders, blood thirsty bounty hunters, and local law enforcement officials in the brutal kidnapping of those who sought their freedom.
In my travel along the Underground Railroad, a trip that ended at the exciting new museum in Cincinnati, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, I learned about the ingenuity of the runaway slaves and the abolitionists in their construction of this long road to freedom.
Much of the story of the Underground Railroad has only been reconstructed in the last 30 years or so. The paths to freedom embarked upon by the slaves, their level of organization, and the numbers of those who tried to escape and who succeeded remain unclear as do the names and activities of abolitionists.
Information at the time about the Underground Railroad, of necessity, was shrouded in secrecy for reasons of security and for the most part narratives of the trials and tribulations of slaves and abolitionists come from memoirs of abolitionists written after the Civil War.
Historians debate any number of elements of the story of the Underground Railroad. But the historical narrative that I experienced on a simple guided tour left a deep impression on me, particularly on what seems to me to bear relevance to our continuing work today.
Contrary to paternalistic accounts of the slave system that many of us were exposed to as children, the slaves, against all odds, were courageous and possessed an extraordinary ingenuity. Slave society was built on a profound level of human solidarity such that the successful flight to freedom of each and every slave was built on the common struggles of entire communities.
Language, songs, community leaders such as “the old man waiting for to carry you to freedom,” and the sacrifices of men and women to get some of their kin “over Jordan” were the collective responsibility of every family and community.
Abolitionists, white and Black, refused to accept the slave system. They were willing to put their lives on the line to oppose an oppressive and immoral system.
The abolitionists were the first revolutionaries in U.S. history after the formation of the new nation. Some were motivated by a conception of the slave system as a system of super-exploitation of the labor of the slaves by the ruling class of cotton producing slave owners. Others were motivated by religious passion.
Quakers, Presbyterians, and people of other faiths deemed slavery an immoral system that contradicted God’s law. For them, the laws of society, such as the Fugitive Slave Law, were superseded by God’s law. And still others, mostly the Black abolitionists, combated the slave system because they experienced it directly and because it was their brothers and sisters who suffered under its yoke.
Examining the slave system and the laws that gave it sustenance suggests a perverse feature of the U.S. constitutional system. Throughout U.S. history, and particularly during the period of slavery, the Constitution and the political system have, on the one hand, opposed immoral laws such as the Fugitive Slave Law, and, on the other hand, accepted them because of the necessity of political “compromise.”
The Fugitive Slave Law was the result of compromise dictated by demands from pro-slavery advocates in contention with anti-slavery advocates. California would be admitted into the federal union as a free state at the same time that southern bounty hunters would be allowed to enter “free” states and kidnap runaway slaves. Ohio was a free state but slave owners, or their henchmen, could lawfully enter the state to retrieve their “property.”
The United States political system has been based on this system of “compromise.” Abolitionists said “no” to what was seen as compromise. They viewed the Fugitive Slave Law as hypocrisy.
The lessons of the Underground Railroad parallel our politics today. First, the story of the Underground Railroad and the slave question is one instance among many in which what is called “compromise” is in fact hypocrisy. Lofty principles continue to be endorsed which are defied in common practice.
The Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade in 1973 declared that women have the right to control their own bodies, but health care services are denied to them if they make certain choices. Moreover, health care workers risk death if they provide services that are guaranteed by the Constitution as interpreted by the Supreme Court.
In the 19th century slavery was outlawed in Northern states but slave holders and bounty hunters could kidnap former slaves to be brought back to their owners.
Second, there is a continuity in the flight to freedom from slavery to the present. In the 1980s, during the Reagan wars on Central America, refugees came north to avoid death squads or because of desperate economic circumstance. Central American activists in the United States risked arrest providing sanctuary for those fleeing repression.
Today, modern day bounty hunters, federal agents, and local police pursue immigrants, defined as illegal, who were driven from their homes by global economic policies. They are often kidnapped, detained, and deposited in their home countries irrespective of the local circumstances. The anti-immigration movement and draconian state laws such as those in Arizona are contemporary variants of the story of the Fugitive Slave Law.
On the other hand, resistance, in the best of the tradition of the Underground Railroad, continues as those most victimized rise up to seek their freedom. They work in solidarity with political progressives in common struggle to create a better world for economic and social justice, and for freedom.
It is an old story: “Follow the drinking gourd.”
[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical -- and that's also the name of his new book which can be found at Lulu.com. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]
The Rag Blog
Markin comment:
I find this The Rag Blog very useful to monitor for the latest in what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody, with some kind of name, who is still around from the 1960s has found a home here. So the remembrances and recollections are helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least ones that would help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time left politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of the last forty plus years. Still this is a must read blog for today’s left militants.
*******
Follow the drinking gourd:Lessons from the Underground Railroad
By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / July 5, 2011
When the sun comes back,
and the first Quail calls,
Follow the drinking gourd,
For the old man is a-waiting
for to carry you to freedom
If you follow the drinking gourd.
Chorus:
Follow the drinking gourd,
Follow the drinking gourd,
For the old man is a-waiting
for to carry you to freedom
If you follow the drinking gourd.
The riverbank will make a very good road,
The dead trees show you the way.
Left foot, peg foot traveling on,
Following the drinking gourd.
The river ends between two hills,
Follow the drinking gourd,
There's another river on the other side,
Follow the drinking gourd.
When the great big river meets the little river,
Follow the drinking gourd.
For the old man is a-waiting
for to carry you to freedom
If you follow the drinking gourd.
(Old song directing slaves on their escape, in modern times popularized by Pete Seeger and the Weavers)
“Dad, didn’t you ever go to elementary school?”
(My daughter responding to my enthusiastic report on a two-day trip along the Underground Railroad)
I just returned from an inspiring two-day trip to southern Indiana and Ohio, visiting three sites along the Underground Railroad. I was familiar with the history of African Americans’ active resistance to slavery, such as armed revolts, and forms of passive resistance, including purposive manipulations of master/slave relationships.
However, my knowledge of the underground flights to freedom was limited.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, as many school kids know, slaves fled the plantation dictatorships to travel north to so-called “free states.” They continued their journey to Canada where slavery was outlawed. In 1850, the controversial Fugitive Slave Law passed Congress which strengthened the hand of slaveholders in their efforts to stop the Underground Railroad. It declared that although slavery was prohibited outside the South, slaveholders and bounty hunters could travel north to retrieve their human “property.”
Escaping slaves, therefore, could not regard themselves as secure until they reached Canada.
While the flight of slaves was largely unplanned, African American slave society was replete with secret directions for escape transmitted through songs such as “Follow the Drinking Gourd” and “Go Down Moses.” Even the quoting of certain scripture in Black churches was designed to give information on routes to the North and possible safe houses to seek. The courage, creativity, and will to freedom of the slaves were extraordinary.
A trail of safe houses in the “free” state of Ohio was created to give runaway slaves sanctuary, food, and directions for moving further north, ultimately to Canada. Ohio was north of the Ohio River, and Kentucky on the river’s southern banks was still a slave state.
Safe houses existed in Indiana, Michigan, and elsewhere in the Midwest and the East. Those providing sanctuary were both white and Black abolitionists. In Ripley, Ohio, John Rankin, a white Presbyterian Minister and long-time abolitionist, and John Parker, a former slave and local entrepreneur, risked their livelihoods and their physical security to provide safe havens to fleeing slaves.
In the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law it became a crime for northern abolitionists to provide such sanctuary. Northerners were obliged by law to cooperate with slaveholders, blood thirsty bounty hunters, and local law enforcement officials in the brutal kidnapping of those who sought their freedom.
In my travel along the Underground Railroad, a trip that ended at the exciting new museum in Cincinnati, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, I learned about the ingenuity of the runaway slaves and the abolitionists in their construction of this long road to freedom.
Much of the story of the Underground Railroad has only been reconstructed in the last 30 years or so. The paths to freedom embarked upon by the slaves, their level of organization, and the numbers of those who tried to escape and who succeeded remain unclear as do the names and activities of abolitionists.
Information at the time about the Underground Railroad, of necessity, was shrouded in secrecy for reasons of security and for the most part narratives of the trials and tribulations of slaves and abolitionists come from memoirs of abolitionists written after the Civil War.
Historians debate any number of elements of the story of the Underground Railroad. But the historical narrative that I experienced on a simple guided tour left a deep impression on me, particularly on what seems to me to bear relevance to our continuing work today.
Contrary to paternalistic accounts of the slave system that many of us were exposed to as children, the slaves, against all odds, were courageous and possessed an extraordinary ingenuity. Slave society was built on a profound level of human solidarity such that the successful flight to freedom of each and every slave was built on the common struggles of entire communities.
Language, songs, community leaders such as “the old man waiting for to carry you to freedom,” and the sacrifices of men and women to get some of their kin “over Jordan” were the collective responsibility of every family and community.
Abolitionists, white and Black, refused to accept the slave system. They were willing to put their lives on the line to oppose an oppressive and immoral system.
The abolitionists were the first revolutionaries in U.S. history after the formation of the new nation. Some were motivated by a conception of the slave system as a system of super-exploitation of the labor of the slaves by the ruling class of cotton producing slave owners. Others were motivated by religious passion.
Quakers, Presbyterians, and people of other faiths deemed slavery an immoral system that contradicted God’s law. For them, the laws of society, such as the Fugitive Slave Law, were superseded by God’s law. And still others, mostly the Black abolitionists, combated the slave system because they experienced it directly and because it was their brothers and sisters who suffered under its yoke.
Examining the slave system and the laws that gave it sustenance suggests a perverse feature of the U.S. constitutional system. Throughout U.S. history, and particularly during the period of slavery, the Constitution and the political system have, on the one hand, opposed immoral laws such as the Fugitive Slave Law, and, on the other hand, accepted them because of the necessity of political “compromise.”
The Fugitive Slave Law was the result of compromise dictated by demands from pro-slavery advocates in contention with anti-slavery advocates. California would be admitted into the federal union as a free state at the same time that southern bounty hunters would be allowed to enter “free” states and kidnap runaway slaves. Ohio was a free state but slave owners, or their henchmen, could lawfully enter the state to retrieve their “property.”
The United States political system has been based on this system of “compromise.” Abolitionists said “no” to what was seen as compromise. They viewed the Fugitive Slave Law as hypocrisy.
The lessons of the Underground Railroad parallel our politics today. First, the story of the Underground Railroad and the slave question is one instance among many in which what is called “compromise” is in fact hypocrisy. Lofty principles continue to be endorsed which are defied in common practice.
The Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade in 1973 declared that women have the right to control their own bodies, but health care services are denied to them if they make certain choices. Moreover, health care workers risk death if they provide services that are guaranteed by the Constitution as interpreted by the Supreme Court.
In the 19th century slavery was outlawed in Northern states but slave holders and bounty hunters could kidnap former slaves to be brought back to their owners.
Second, there is a continuity in the flight to freedom from slavery to the present. In the 1980s, during the Reagan wars on Central America, refugees came north to avoid death squads or because of desperate economic circumstance. Central American activists in the United States risked arrest providing sanctuary for those fleeing repression.
Today, modern day bounty hunters, federal agents, and local police pursue immigrants, defined as illegal, who were driven from their homes by global economic policies. They are often kidnapped, detained, and deposited in their home countries irrespective of the local circumstances. The anti-immigration movement and draconian state laws such as those in Arizona are contemporary variants of the story of the Fugitive Slave Law.
On the other hand, resistance, in the best of the tradition of the Underground Railroad, continues as those most victimized rise up to seek their freedom. They work in solidarity with political progressives in common struggle to create a better world for economic and social justice, and for freedom.
It is an old story: “Follow the drinking gourd.”
[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical -- and that's also the name of his new book which can be found at Lulu.com. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]
The Rag Blog
The Latest From “The Rag Blog”-Five reasons to remember the Pentagon Papers
Click on the headline to link to The Rag Blog website.
Markin comment:
I find this The Rag Blog very useful to monitor for the latest in what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody, with some kind of name, who is still around from the 1960s has found a home here. So the remembrances and recollections are helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least ones that would help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time left politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of the last forty plus years. Still this is a must read blog for today’s left militants.
*******
Five reasons to remember the Pentagon Papers
By Margarita Alarcón / The Rag Blog / June 14, 2011
Call it the granddaddy of WikiLeaks. Four decades ago, a young defense analyst leaked a top-secret study packed with damaging revelations about America's conduct of the Vietnam War.
[….]
The National Archives released the Pentagon Papers in full Monday and put them online, long after most of the secrets spilled. The release was timed 40 years to the day after The New York Times published the first in its series of stories about the findings, on June 13, 1971, prompting President Richard Nixon to try to suppress publication and crush anyone in government who dared to spill confidences.
Prepared near the end of Johnson's term by Defense Department and private analysts, the report was leaked primarily by one of them, Daniel Ellsberg, in a brash act of defiance that stands as one of the most dramatic episodes of whistleblowing in U.S. history.
-- Associated Press / June 13, 2011
HAVANA -- Daniel Ellsberg served in the Pentagon under then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Ellsberg had been on duty on the evening of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, reporting the incident to McNamara.
For those of you who are rusty on U.S./world history, the Gulf of Tonkin incident served as President Johnson's legal justification for deploying U.S. conventional forces and for the commencement of open warfare against North Vietnam.
When Daniel Ellsberg, back in 1969, photocopied classified documents from the Pentagon to which he had access, he did so because he was disenchanted with the war his government was pulling his country deeper into; he felt he had to do something to stop the lying and protect the lives of so many that would be lost in the end.
The government of course wanted Ellsberg tried and convicted, but due to gross governmental misconduct and illegal evidence-gathering, and the defense work of Leonard Boudin and Harvard Law School professor Charles Nesson, charges against Ellsberg were dropped.
After his trail ended Ellsberg learned that there had been a plan by the CIA to drug him with LSD and have him appear completely incoherent in front of a mass audience. This “Ellsberg neutralization proposal” originated with Howard Hunt and was recounted in G. Gordon Liddy’s autobiography.
Now here comes the punch line of my rant: who did the CIA have on board to carry out this fiendish act? Well, turns out it was 12 Cuban-Americans no less! Ha! We’re everywhere! The good ones and the bad ones! I leave it to readers to decide which are which.
But as fate or karma would have it, it turns out that the lawyers who defended Ellsberg in one of the most important and decisive trials in U.S. history included a young fresh-out-of-law school attorney who also had the first name of Leonard.
Leonard Weinglass had already garnered a name for himself during the trial of the Chicago 8. But little did Lenny know during the trials of Tom Hayden and Daniel Ellsberg that Cubans would be following him till his dying day.
Weinglass’ last case, his last battle against the same windmills of gross governmental misconduct, involved five Cubans unjustly imprisoned in the U.S. for divulging information to Cuba and the United States on terrorist activities against their Cuban homeland -- and against all those in the U.S., Cuba, and everywhere else, who wanted to see normal relations between our two countries.
So now, 40 years after The New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers -- which helped lead to the end of the war in Vietnam -- wouldn’t it be great if another truth came to light and President Obama, with or without the help of The New York Times, freed the Cuban 5 and, in doing so, took the next step towards ending the U.S.-Cuba conflict?
[Margarita Alarcón Perea was born in Havana, Cuba, and raised in New York City. She studied at Karl Marx Stadt in East Germany and Havana, and is a graduate of Havana University in linguistics. She has taught English translation and North American twentieth century literature, and worked in the Cuban music industry. She is currently a news analyst for Cubadebate in Havana and contributes to The Rag Blog and The Huffington Post. Maggie's father is Ricardo Alarcón, president of the Cuban National Assembly. Read more articles by Margarita Alarcón on The Rag Blog.]
Markin comment:
I find this The Rag Blog very useful to monitor for the latest in what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody, with some kind of name, who is still around from the 1960s has found a home here. So the remembrances and recollections are helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least ones that would help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time left politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of the last forty plus years. Still this is a must read blog for today’s left militants.
*******
Five reasons to remember the Pentagon Papers
By Margarita Alarcón / The Rag Blog / June 14, 2011
Call it the granddaddy of WikiLeaks. Four decades ago, a young defense analyst leaked a top-secret study packed with damaging revelations about America's conduct of the Vietnam War.
[….]
The National Archives released the Pentagon Papers in full Monday and put them online, long after most of the secrets spilled. The release was timed 40 years to the day after The New York Times published the first in its series of stories about the findings, on June 13, 1971, prompting President Richard Nixon to try to suppress publication and crush anyone in government who dared to spill confidences.
Prepared near the end of Johnson's term by Defense Department and private analysts, the report was leaked primarily by one of them, Daniel Ellsberg, in a brash act of defiance that stands as one of the most dramatic episodes of whistleblowing in U.S. history.
-- Associated Press / June 13, 2011
HAVANA -- Daniel Ellsberg served in the Pentagon under then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Ellsberg had been on duty on the evening of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, reporting the incident to McNamara.
For those of you who are rusty on U.S./world history, the Gulf of Tonkin incident served as President Johnson's legal justification for deploying U.S. conventional forces and for the commencement of open warfare against North Vietnam.
When Daniel Ellsberg, back in 1969, photocopied classified documents from the Pentagon to which he had access, he did so because he was disenchanted with the war his government was pulling his country deeper into; he felt he had to do something to stop the lying and protect the lives of so many that would be lost in the end.
The government of course wanted Ellsberg tried and convicted, but due to gross governmental misconduct and illegal evidence-gathering, and the defense work of Leonard Boudin and Harvard Law School professor Charles Nesson, charges against Ellsberg were dropped.
After his trail ended Ellsberg learned that there had been a plan by the CIA to drug him with LSD and have him appear completely incoherent in front of a mass audience. This “Ellsberg neutralization proposal” originated with Howard Hunt and was recounted in G. Gordon Liddy’s autobiography.
Now here comes the punch line of my rant: who did the CIA have on board to carry out this fiendish act? Well, turns out it was 12 Cuban-Americans no less! Ha! We’re everywhere! The good ones and the bad ones! I leave it to readers to decide which are which.
But as fate or karma would have it, it turns out that the lawyers who defended Ellsberg in one of the most important and decisive trials in U.S. history included a young fresh-out-of-law school attorney who also had the first name of Leonard.
Leonard Weinglass had already garnered a name for himself during the trial of the Chicago 8. But little did Lenny know during the trials of Tom Hayden and Daniel Ellsberg that Cubans would be following him till his dying day.
Weinglass’ last case, his last battle against the same windmills of gross governmental misconduct, involved five Cubans unjustly imprisoned in the U.S. for divulging information to Cuba and the United States on terrorist activities against their Cuban homeland -- and against all those in the U.S., Cuba, and everywhere else, who wanted to see normal relations between our two countries.
So now, 40 years after The New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers -- which helped lead to the end of the war in Vietnam -- wouldn’t it be great if another truth came to light and President Obama, with or without the help of The New York Times, freed the Cuban 5 and, in doing so, took the next step towards ending the U.S.-Cuba conflict?
[Margarita Alarcón Perea was born in Havana, Cuba, and raised in New York City. She studied at Karl Marx Stadt in East Germany and Havana, and is a graduate of Havana University in linguistics. She has taught English translation and North American twentieth century literature, and worked in the Cuban music industry. She is currently a news analyst for Cubadebate in Havana and contributes to The Rag Blog and The Huffington Post. Maggie's father is Ricardo Alarcón, president of the Cuban National Assembly. Read more articles by Margarita Alarcón on The Rag Blog.]
The Latest From The Private Bradley Manning Support Network-Free Bradley Manning Now! -No harm in transparency: Wrap-up from the Bradley Manning pretrial hearing
Click on the headline to link to the Private Bradley Manning Support Network for the latest information in his case.
Click on the headline to link to the Private Bradley Manning Support Network for the lates information in his case.
From the American Left History blog, dated March 17, 2011
Why I Will Be Standing In Solidarity With Private Bradley Manning At Quantico, Virginia On Sunday March 20th At 2:00 PM- A Personal Note From An Ex-Soldier Political Prisoner
Markin comment:
Of course I will be standing at the front gate to the Quantico Marine Base on March 20th because I stand in solidarity with the actions of Private Bradley Manning in bringing to light, just a little light, some of the nefarious doings of this government, Bush-like or Obamian. If he did such acts. I sleep just a shade bit easier these days knowing that Private Manning (or someone) exposed what we all knew, or should have known- the Iraq war and the Afghan war justification rested on a house of card. American imperialism’s house of cards, but cards nevertheless.
Of course I will be standing at the front gate to the Quantico Marine Base on March 20th because I am outraged by the treatment of Private Manning meted to a presumably innocent man by a government who alleges itself to be some “beacon” of the civilized world. The military has gotten more devious although not smarter since I was soldier in their crosshairs over forty years ago. Allegedly Private Manning might become so distraught over his alleged actions that he requires extraordinary protections. He is assumed, in the Catch-22 logic of the military, to be something of a suicide risk on the basis of bringing some fresh air to the nefarious doings of the international imperialist order. Be serious. I, however, noticed no "spike” in suicide rates among the world’s diplomatic community once they were exposed, a place where such activities might have been expected once it was observed in public that most of these persons could barely tie their own shoes.
Now the two reasons above are more than sufficient reasons for my standing at the front gate to the Quantico Marine Base on March 20th although they, in themselves, are only the appropriate reasons that any progressive thinking person would need to show up and shout to the high heavens for Private Manning’s freedom. I have an addition reason though, a very pressing personal reason. As mentioned above I too was in the military’s crosshairs as a soldier during the height of the Vietnam War. I will not go into the details of that episode, this comment after all is about soldier Manning, other than that I spent my own time in an Army stockade for, let’s put it this way, working on the principle of “what if they gave a war and nobody came.” Forty years later I am still working off that principle, and gladly. But here is the real point. During that time I had outside support, outside civilian support, that rallied on several occasions outside the military base where I was confined. Believe me that knowledge helped me through the tough days inside. So on March 20th I am just, as I have been able to on too few other occasions over years, paying my dues for that long ago support. You, brother, are a true winter soldier.
Private Manning I hope that you will hear us, or hear about our rally in your defense. Better yet, everybody who read this join us and make sure that he can hear us loud and clear. And let us shout to those high heavens mentioned above-Free Private Bradley Manning Now!
******
And, of course, I will be standing in support of Private Manning as long as he is not freed from the clutches of his jailers.
Click on the headline to link to the Private Bradley Manning Support Network for the lates information in his case.
From the American Left History blog, dated March 17, 2011
Why I Will Be Standing In Solidarity With Private Bradley Manning At Quantico, Virginia On Sunday March 20th At 2:00 PM- A Personal Note From An Ex-Soldier Political Prisoner
Markin comment:
Of course I will be standing at the front gate to the Quantico Marine Base on March 20th because I stand in solidarity with the actions of Private Bradley Manning in bringing to light, just a little light, some of the nefarious doings of this government, Bush-like or Obamian. If he did such acts. I sleep just a shade bit easier these days knowing that Private Manning (or someone) exposed what we all knew, or should have known- the Iraq war and the Afghan war justification rested on a house of card. American imperialism’s house of cards, but cards nevertheless.
Of course I will be standing at the front gate to the Quantico Marine Base on March 20th because I am outraged by the treatment of Private Manning meted to a presumably innocent man by a government who alleges itself to be some “beacon” of the civilized world. The military has gotten more devious although not smarter since I was soldier in their crosshairs over forty years ago. Allegedly Private Manning might become so distraught over his alleged actions that he requires extraordinary protections. He is assumed, in the Catch-22 logic of the military, to be something of a suicide risk on the basis of bringing some fresh air to the nefarious doings of the international imperialist order. Be serious. I, however, noticed no "spike” in suicide rates among the world’s diplomatic community once they were exposed, a place where such activities might have been expected once it was observed in public that most of these persons could barely tie their own shoes.
Now the two reasons above are more than sufficient reasons for my standing at the front gate to the Quantico Marine Base on March 20th although they, in themselves, are only the appropriate reasons that any progressive thinking person would need to show up and shout to the high heavens for Private Manning’s freedom. I have an addition reason though, a very pressing personal reason. As mentioned above I too was in the military’s crosshairs as a soldier during the height of the Vietnam War. I will not go into the details of that episode, this comment after all is about soldier Manning, other than that I spent my own time in an Army stockade for, let’s put it this way, working on the principle of “what if they gave a war and nobody came.” Forty years later I am still working off that principle, and gladly. But here is the real point. During that time I had outside support, outside civilian support, that rallied on several occasions outside the military base where I was confined. Believe me that knowledge helped me through the tough days inside. So on March 20th I am just, as I have been able to on too few other occasions over years, paying my dues for that long ago support. You, brother, are a true winter soldier.
Private Manning I hope that you will hear us, or hear about our rally in your defense. Better yet, everybody who read this join us and make sure that he can hear us loud and clear. And let us shout to those high heavens mentioned above-Free Private Bradley Manning Now!
******
And, of course, I will be standing in support of Private Manning as long as he is not freed from the clutches of his jailers.
The Latest From The Private Bradley Manning Support Network-Free Bradley Manning Now!
Click on the headline to link to the Private Bradley Manning Support Network for the lates information in his case.
From the American Left History blog, dated March 17, 2011
Why I Will Be Standing In Solidarity With Private Bradley Manning At Quantico, Virginia On Sunday March 20th At 2:00 PM- A Personal Note From An Ex-Soldier Political Prisoner
Markin comment:
Of course I will be standing at the front gate to the Quantico Marine Base on March 20th because I stand in solidarity with the actions of Private Bradley Manning in bringing to light, just a little light, some of the nefarious doings of this government, Bush-like or Obamian. If he did such acts. I sleep just a shade bit easier these days knowing that Private Manning (or someone) exposed what we all knew, or should have known- the Iraq war and the Afghan war justification rested on a house of card. American imperialism’s house of cards, but cards nevertheless.
Of course I will be standing at the front gate to the Quantico Marine Base on March 20th because I am outraged by the treatment of Private Manning meted to a presumably innocent man by a government who alleges itself to be some “beacon” of the civilized world. The military has gotten more devious although not smarter since I was soldier in their crosshairs over forty years ago. Allegedly Private Manning might become so distraught over his alleged actions that he requires extraordinary protections. He is assumed, in the Catch-22 logic of the military, to be something of a suicide risk on the basis of bringing some fresh air to the nefarious doings of the international imperialist order. Be serious. I, however, noticed no "spike” in suicide rates among the world’s diplomatic community once they were exposed, a place where such activities might have been expected once it was observed in public that most of these persons could barely tie their own shoes.
Now the two reasons above are more than sufficient reasons for my standing at the front gate to the Quantico Marine Base on March 20th although they, in themselves, are only the appropriate reasons that any progressive thinking person would need to show up and shout to the high heavens for Private Manning’s freedom. I have an addition reason though, a very pressing personal reason. As mentioned above I too was in the military’s crosshairs as a soldier during the height of the Vietnam War. I will not go into the details of that episode, this comment after all is about soldier Manning, other than that I spent my own time in an Army stockade for, let’s put it this way, working on the principle of “what if they gave a war and nobody came.” Forty years later I am still working off that principle, and gladly. But here is the real point. During that time I had outside support, outside civilian support, that rallied on several occasions outside the military base where I was confined. Believe me that knowledge helped me through the tough days inside. So on March 20th I am just, as I have been able to on too few other occasions over years, paying my dues for that long ago support. You, brother, are a true winter soldier.
Private Manning I hope that you will hear us, or hear about our rally in your defense. Better yet, everybody who read this join us and make sure that he can hear us loud and clear. And let us shout to those high heavens mentioned above-Free Private Bradley Manning Now!
******
And, of course, I will be standing in support of Private Manning as long as he is not freed from the clutches of his jailers.
From the American Left History blog, dated March 17, 2011
Why I Will Be Standing In Solidarity With Private Bradley Manning At Quantico, Virginia On Sunday March 20th At 2:00 PM- A Personal Note From An Ex-Soldier Political Prisoner
Markin comment:
Of course I will be standing at the front gate to the Quantico Marine Base on March 20th because I stand in solidarity with the actions of Private Bradley Manning in bringing to light, just a little light, some of the nefarious doings of this government, Bush-like or Obamian. If he did such acts. I sleep just a shade bit easier these days knowing that Private Manning (or someone) exposed what we all knew, or should have known- the Iraq war and the Afghan war justification rested on a house of card. American imperialism’s house of cards, but cards nevertheless.
Of course I will be standing at the front gate to the Quantico Marine Base on March 20th because I am outraged by the treatment of Private Manning meted to a presumably innocent man by a government who alleges itself to be some “beacon” of the civilized world. The military has gotten more devious although not smarter since I was soldier in their crosshairs over forty years ago. Allegedly Private Manning might become so distraught over his alleged actions that he requires extraordinary protections. He is assumed, in the Catch-22 logic of the military, to be something of a suicide risk on the basis of bringing some fresh air to the nefarious doings of the international imperialist order. Be serious. I, however, noticed no "spike” in suicide rates among the world’s diplomatic community once they were exposed, a place where such activities might have been expected once it was observed in public that most of these persons could barely tie their own shoes.
Now the two reasons above are more than sufficient reasons for my standing at the front gate to the Quantico Marine Base on March 20th although they, in themselves, are only the appropriate reasons that any progressive thinking person would need to show up and shout to the high heavens for Private Manning’s freedom. I have an addition reason though, a very pressing personal reason. As mentioned above I too was in the military’s crosshairs as a soldier during the height of the Vietnam War. I will not go into the details of that episode, this comment after all is about soldier Manning, other than that I spent my own time in an Army stockade for, let’s put it this way, working on the principle of “what if they gave a war and nobody came.” Forty years later I am still working off that principle, and gladly. But here is the real point. During that time I had outside support, outside civilian support, that rallied on several occasions outside the military base where I was confined. Believe me that knowledge helped me through the tough days inside. So on March 20th I am just, as I have been able to on too few other occasions over years, paying my dues for that long ago support. You, brother, are a true winter soldier.
Private Manning I hope that you will hear us, or hear about our rally in your defense. Better yet, everybody who read this join us and make sure that he can hear us loud and clear. And let us shout to those high heavens mentioned above-Free Private Bradley Manning Now!
******
And, of course, I will be standing in support of Private Manning as long as he is not freed from the clutches of his jailers.
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.
***********
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)