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.
*******
ROTC resurgent- Part I: ROTC and the anti-war movement
They held regular drills on an open field approximately two blocks from the heart of campus. It was viewed as an affront that ROTC paraded so openly while the carnage mounted in Vietnam.
By Jay D. Jurie / The Rag Blog / August 18, 2011
[This is the first of a two-part series on ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps) -- dealing with the militant opposition to ROTC during the Vietnam War era, and with the program's recent resurgence on college campuses. The author was at Boulder and participated in the demonstrations he describes. Similar actions occurred at campuses throughout the country.]
Carrying an upside-down U.S. flag tacked onto a short wooden stake, a student at the head of a column of anti-Vietnam war students marching onto a University of Colorado practice field was tackled by several pro-war student athletes.
As the protest column continued to press onto the field the "jocks" and police struggled to bring it to a halt. They were unsuccessful and the protestors made their way through the ranks of parading cadets, turning the drill into a melee. This April 30, 1970 event was not the first time such a drill had been disrupted on the Boulder campus.
Early in the fall of 1969, members of the Student Peace Union (SPU) approached their counterparts in the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) with a proposal.
SPU had decided the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC, pronounced "rotsee" by friend and foe alike) was the most visible manifestation of the Vietnam War on campus. While SDS elsewhere had devoted some attention to ROTC, this had not particularly filtered down to the Boulder chapter as an "action item." SPU's proposal was that SDS partner in demonstrating against ROTC.
At that time, ROTC held regular drills on an open field approximately two blocks from the heart of campus. SDS readily agreed with the SPU proposal, not only because of the high profile, but because it was viewed as an affront that ROTC paraded so openly while the carnage mounted in Vietnam.
It was agreed that the target of the protest would not be the individual cadets enrolled in ROTC, but the program itself and its relation to the University, the military, and the war. SDS put out a very simple flyer that read only:
1) end ROTC. 2) reimburse students on ROTC scholarships.
When the day of protest came, the two organizations, along with their supporters, met at the student union fountain area and marched to the field where the ROTC drill was already under way. Proceeding onto the field protestors marched to and fro through the ranks of parading cadets and confusion reigned. There was no violence, but the drill was disrupted. ROTC instructors sized up the situation and called off the exercise.
At the next ROTC parade, the protest was repeated. Though they again marched from the fountain area together, relations between SPU and SDS were cool. From the outset it was clear there was a tactical dispute. SPU wanted to be a visible presence and make a statement in opposition to the war and ROTC on campus, while SDS wanted to do everything in its power to "stop the war machine" and end the killing.
Nearing arrival at the field, the column of protestors split into two, with SPU heading to the side of the field, and SDS marching toward the drill. This time, campus police were better prepared. They formed a cordon along the edge of the parade ground to prevent the SDS contingent from reaching the drill. However, SDS moved quickly and did an end run around the police line. As before, protestors managed to run through the ranks of drilling cadets and chaos ensued. There was no violence, but the drill was again disrupted.
Apparently the police realized that if they chased the protestors across the field they would only contribute to the disruption. Again, ROTC instructors called off the drill. SDS was elated, believing the system had been beaten twice and one small corner of the war machine had been shut down, at least temporarily.
There was one more "ROTC smash" that fall, but by this time, in disagreement with SDS tactics, SPU had dropped out of the partnership. SDS figured the police would be too well prepared for a third successful march onto the field. Instead, when the marchers neared the field, they abruptly veered off and headed toward the stadium, where ROTC had its offices. Campus police rapidly redeployed and kept pace with the SDS march.
Outside the ROTC offices, a couple of SDS leaders were making the usual anti-war speeches when the campus police chief noticed smoke billowing from the area where the ROTC parade was underway. He quickly realized they'd been duped. Several police officers stayed with the rally to keep an eye on the demonstrators and ensure the ROTC offices were protected, while the main force ran back to the field.
At that point, the protestors had a good laugh and dispersed. In the planning for the event some SDS members had volunteered to throw smoke bombs onto the field. This was not done in such a way as to cause any harm, but to make a symbolic point about the bombing of Vietnam, and to sow confusion and hopefully yet again cause disruption. In this respect the action was a success, as were all the ROTC "smashes" that fall. No one was injured, and remarkably, no one was kicked out of school and there were no arrests.
By the spring of 1970 both the SPU and SDS chapters were defunct. Filling the void of campus anti-war activism at the University of Colorado was the Student Mobilization Committee (SMC), a front group for the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA), the youth affiliate of the Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Meanwhile, the depredations of the Nixon-Kissinger regime in Southeast Asia had intensified. Campus awareness and activism across the country, and at the University of Colorado, reached its zenith that spring.
Students who were more militant, including many previously affiliated with SDS, became the very uneasy left-wing "junior partner" under the SMC umbrella. The dominant YSA faction, strategically if not ideologically, fulfilled the role played by SPU the previous fall. While a variety of anti-war actions took place early in the year, including an occupation of the first floor of the administration building, ROTC was not forgotten.
It was decided by late April that ROTC would once again be a "smash" target. This time, it was understood well in advance by all in SMC that there would be a divergence over tactics. As before, marchers gathered at the fountain area and set off for the ROTC drill field. This time the protest was larger, with 300-500 participating. When the field was reached, the larger YSA-affliated contingent peeled off and, in keeping with their strategy of mass rallies, like SPU the preceding fall, assumed positions along the sidelines.
Campus police turned out in full force, accompanying the march all the way to the field, where they formed a much larger cordon than before and were more fully equipped for a riot. Determined they were not going to be stopped, the more militant faction of SMC marched directly toward the line of police. Aligned with the police was a contingent of about 30 "jocks."
As the two sides converged, the previously described scuffle broke out. Police chased demonstrators on and off the field. Police parked in cruisers adjacent to the field pursued some who fled across campus. Some students were handcuffed to a nearby chain link fence as the arresting officers returned to the fray. A student who thoughtfully came equipped with a handcuff key surreptitiously set them free.
On this occasion, a number of people were tackled, knocked down, shoved, punched, or grabbed. While there was violence, there were no serious injuries. Most of the violence was initiated by the jocks, a fact which the police ignored, and no jocks were arrested. It was widely believed by protestors that an understanding had been reached between the police and jocks beforehand.
Since some of those arrested had stayed on the sidelines, it was abundantly clear the University strategy was to target and get rid of those they identified as leaders of the campus anti-war movement. Nine of the anti-war students were arrested at the scene and nine more were subsequently charged with violating Colorado's newly-enacted "Campus Disorder Act."
As it turned out, no one was ever tried for the Boulder "ROTC smashes" of 1969-70, though after the 1970 protest several were suspended from school for varying lengths of time. Eventually, the case of the "Boulder 18" wound up in front of the Colorado Supreme Court, which ruled the statute unconstitutionally vague, threw it out, and quashed the charges.
Not knowing this would be the final "smash," the University moved all ROTC drills inside the football stadium, where they could control access. For their part, Boulder's anti-war protestors won at least a minor victory by visibly exposing University complicity with the military and the war. While ROTC was not forced off campus, the protests resulted in some change of "business as usual."
ROTC resurgent Part II: ROTC's history and return to campus
When the military's 'don't ask, don't tell' policy was dropped in 2010, some institutions began to consider reestablishing their relationship with ROTC.
By Jay D. Jurie / The Rag Blog / August 18, 2011
[This is the second of a two-part series on ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps) -- dealing with the militant opposition to ROTC during the Vietnam War era, and with the program's recent resurgence on college campuses. In Part I , Jurie described an escalating series of demonstrations against ROTC in 1969-1970 at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he was a student. Part II covers the history of the ROTC program, the issue of discrimination against gays, and the recent return of ROTC to a number of U.S. campuses.]
While the concerted and militant campaign against ROTC in Boulder may have been unique, it was far from the only protest against ROTC during the anti-Vietnam war era, and, in fact, there had been substantial opposition to the program prior to the War in Vietnam. Since its inception, ROTC has proven controversial.
Part of the original purpose of ROTC was found in the Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862, which gave states federal land that included a stipulation for military coursework. In 1898 the War Department attempted to clarify this by proposing military instruction be provided by officers assigned as faculty, that students in those courses be required to wear uniforms, and that this instruction be made mandatory. Enactment of the National Defense Act of 1916 formally established ROTC and extended it to private as well as public colleges.
Some have argued ROTC played an essential role in keeping the military grounded in civil society. According to Michael S. Neiberg, unlike officers trained in elite military academies,
civilian educated officers would bring to military service a wider and more rounded background. They would also bring to the military a value system more consistent with American society by virtue of having lived in a civilian environment.
On the other hand,others have argued that ROTC desensitizes the civilian population to the militarization of society and the inimical purposes that may be served by the military. According to Neiberg, the University of Washington SDS in 1969 contended that,
If the university's role in cooperating with ROTC is the production of officers, our universities have become, in part, mere extension schools of our government's military establishment... The university continues to produce the tools to make possible policies such as those which led the U.S. into war in Asia.
ROTC had become so well-established by the 1920s that John Dewey and others became sufficiently alarmed to create a Committee on Militarism and Education. Concerns over its growing presence by the 1930s caused a few educational institutions to either drop the program or change its status from mandatory to voluntary.
However, most schools that had the program retained it, usually with the requirement that two years of participation in the program were obligatory for all male students.
ROTC received a boost during World War II, but after the war the controversy returned. Motivated by the Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation in the late 1950s and early 1960s, ROTC sparked protest. In May 1960, protestors at Boston University picketed, leafleted, petitioned, and placed a table with a protest sign in a ROTC parade route.
As the Vietnam war heated up in the mid- and late-1960s, so did protests against ROTC. In addition to demonstrations, ROTC facilities were set on fire at Stanford, Michigan, Kent State, and the University of Colorado. There was a perception held by a number in the anti-war movement that this violence paled in comparison with, and was justified by, the widespread use of napalm and the tonnage of bombs dropped in Vietnam.
Some schools, in response to these protests, removed the mandatory requirement. Others, like the Colorado School of Mines, kept it in place into the 1970s.
Even where ROTC was no longer compulsory, such as the University of Colorado, the program became a focal point of the anti-war movement. During the late 1960s and into the early 1970s over 80 ROTC programs were dropped, mostly from the elite universities where ROTC had drawn the most opposition. While ROTC was dropped from some schools, it was established in less "controversial," mostly public university locations.
It should be pointed out that ROTC programs were never formally banned by host institutions. In most cases, either academic credit was withdrawn, or regular faculty status was not accorded ROTC instructors. In these cases, ROTC decided to withdraw its own program. Responding to the changes that occurred during that decade, women's programs were created in ROTC beginning in 1969.
Nonetheless, a rough status quo was maintained for decades after the Vietnam war ended. During that time frame many colleges and universities enacted policies banning discrimination against gays. Because the military engaged in such discrimination, this effectively kept ROTC off campus at those schools.
Nearly two and half decades later, renewed support for ROTC grew with the passage of the Solomon Amendment. Named after Gerald Solomon (R-NY) who initially introduced the legislation in 1994, this legislation prohibited colleges and universities that received federal funding from prohibiting military recruitment on campus or dropping ROTC programs.
Several law schools combined to file a lawsuit against this prohibition. In the 2006 Rumsfeld v. FAIR decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed an appeals court ruling and upheld the constitutionality of the Solomon Amendment
When the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy was dropped in 2010, some institutions began to consider reestablishing their relationship with ROTC.
For at least two institutions of higher education, reinstatement was not seamless. At Stanford, a women's group objected that while discrimination in the military against gays had been lifted, it continued against transgender individuals. Nonetheless, on April 28, 2011, the Stanford Faculty Senate voted overwhelmingly to invite ROTC back to campus.
At Yale, a representative of a women's group wrote that discrimination and harassment against women in the military was a problem of such significance that it ought to be addressed before welcoming a return of ROTC to that campus.
Another concern has cropped up even more recently. An August 9, 2011 CNN report revealed that Air Force ROTC training has included a slide show that violates the separation of church and state. According to reporter Jennifer Rizzo, "many of the slides in the 43 page production use a Christian justification for war."
Both the ROTC and military launch officer training were developed by the Air Force's Air Education and Training Command (AETC). After 31 Air Force missile launch officers objected to this training, Mikey Weinstein of the Military Religious Foundation is quoted as saying, "they're trying to teach that, under fundamentalist Christian doctrine, war is a good thing."
Harvard, Yale, and Columbia, are among those that have brought ROTC back, and Brown has been considering the matter. ROTC has regained a certain popularity among students. Not only have the draft and the memory of Vietnam faded, but military service is seen as patriotic in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and an employment option in a tough economy.
While the military may no longer be engaged in overt discrimination against gays, there are unresolved issues involving ROTC. Among these, the objections raised during the Vietnam eara largely remain in place. So long as the U.S. maintains an interventionist foreign policy based on resource exploitation and the containment of those at odds with elite interests, it is evident that ROTC will provide officers to serve that policy.
Sources: Allan Brick, "The Campus Protest Against ROTC," Southern Student Organizing Committee, no date; Chuck Colbert, Stanford Faculty OK ROTC Proposal, Bay Area Report, June 5, 2011; Editorial: "Reconsidering ROTC," The Brown Daily Herald; "Larry Gordon, Once a Campus Outcast, ROTC is Booming at Universities," Los Angeles Times, June 1, 2011; Tim Lange & Carol Lease, "ROTC: An Analysis," Boulder, CO: Student Peace Union, 1969; Diane H. Mazur, "The Myth of the ROTC Ban," The New York Times, October 24, 2010; Tara W. Merrigan & Zoe A.Y. Weinberg, "Harvard to Officially Recognize Naval ROTC," Harvard Crimson, March 3, 2011; Michael S. Neiberg, Making Citizen-Soldiers: ROTC and the Ideology of American Military Service, Cambridge: Harvard, 2000; Fahmida Y. Rashid, "The Return of ROTC to Columbia," The Village Voice, April 6, 2011; Emily Rappoport, "Should Yale Allow ROTC to Return to Campus?" Yale: Broad Recognition, May 3, 1011; Otis Reid, "Women's Coalition Rejects ROTC's Return to Campus," Stanford Review, March 14, 2011; Jennifer Rizzo, "Air Force's Use of Christian Messages Extends to ROTC," CNN.com, August 9, 2011.
[Jay D. Jurie was a student at the University of Colorado at Boulder, a member of SDS, and one of the "Boulder 18" arrested as a result of the ROTC demonstrations. Jay now teaches public administration and urban planning and lives near Orlando, Florida. Read more articles by Jay D. Jurie on The Rag Blog.]
Sunday, January 01, 2012
The Latest From “The Rag Blog”-Jane Fonda and the 'home of the brave'
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.
*******
Jane Fonda and the 'home of the brave'
By Nancy Miller Saunders / The Rag Blog / August 11, 2011
"I was infuriated as I learned just how much our soldiers were being lied to about why we were fighting in Vietnam and I was anguished each time I would be with a young man who was traumatized by his experiences." -- Jane Fonda
The same day Obama and the Democrats caved in to Republican Tea Party extremists on the deficit, I learned that the cable channel QVC canceled an appearance by Jane Fonda because of angry calls from extremists objecting to her anti-Vietnam War activities. It has been nearly 40 years since that war ended yet these Swiftboater-types still cling to hatred of her, much of which is based on lies and distortions.
Yes, the picture of her sitting and laughing on a Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun damned her in many people's eyes. But appearances can be misleading, which they are in this case as she explains in a recent piece, “The Truth About My Trip To Hanoi," posted on her blog.
Although one picture may be worth a thousand words, those words can be misleading as easily as they can be revealing. But rather than risk letting go of their hatred by listening to her explanations of what happened and why she went to North Vietnam, these Swiftboaters have clamped their minds shut around their hatred. One mistake in an otherwise exemplary campaign to stop an increasingly unpopular war and Fonda is condemned forever and always.
We claim in our national anthem that ours is “the home of the brave.” Is it, when our president and Congress knuckle under to extremists' threats to bankrupt the country? Is it, when cable channels let bullies frighten them out of letting a movie star peddle her latest book on an entirely different topic?
Where is the bravery in these cave-ins? Where is the bravery in our docile acceptance of such hateful extremism? We recently saw true bravery in Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt, where people fed up with corruption nonviolently withstood fierce attacks and toppled Hosnei Mubarak's regime. We are seeing it again in the streets of Syria where people are being gunned down for their nonviolent protests.
Jane Fonda is a brave woman who looked beyond her instinctive feelings that would not let her imagine the United States could ever fight an unjust war. But then she met and listened to active duty GIs and Vietnam veterans. She began to study that war and discovered what it was doing to the men being sent to fight it. She worked to find them help they needed.
When they asked, she spoke for them, using her celebrity to amplify their voices in an effort to get the American people to listen to what they had to say about what was being done in our name and to our sons, brothers, and neighbors. Only with knowledge -- not emotional assumptions, no matter how treasured -- can we correct our mistakes and maybe, just maybe, avoid making them again in the future. But, sadly, we have repeated them in Iraq.
Fonda also campaigned for an organization that was unprecedented in our history: Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). Never before had U.S. combat veterans massed together to protest the continuation of the war in which they fought, but Vietnam veterans did just that, beginning in 1968.[1]
Two years later Fonda was working with VVAW and I found myself listening to the war's veterans after VVAW asked a group of us filmmakers to film their first two major demonstrations. They pointed out that they had the message and we had the means to broadcast it.
We put together four film crews to accompany VVAW and document the first demonstration, a RAW March over Labor Day weekend, 1970, from Morristown, New Jersey, to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.[2] (RAW stood for Rapid American Withdrawal from Vietnam.) Those of you old enough to remember that day may know that we risked being busted for crossing a state line to foment a riot, even though starting a riot was definitely not our intention.
Whenever possible VVAW used paradigms from the American Revolution to emphasize their patriotism and dedication to our founding principles. The route they chose was one some of George Washington's troops took to Valley Forge that memorable winter. In towns along the way, the veterans performed guerrilla theater in which they used volunteers acting as Vietnamese civilians to demonstrate their sanctioned brutality during the many search and destroy missions they had been sent on.
We filmmakers were with VVAW the entire weekend, even camping on the ground next to the veterans' encampment all three nights. We interviewed them, waded into the middle of their guerrilla theater to film it, and watched with growing admiration as they resisted provocation after provocation. They knew what violence is like and the damage it can do. They did not want to yield to it here at home.
At Valley Forge on Labor Day, VVAW staged a rally that began with more than 200 veterans making a moving entrance. Fonda was one of the speakers, again using her celebrity to amplify what the veterans had to tell their fellow citizens. She then left on a nationwide tour of campuses, introducing veterans to VVAW and recruiting volunteers for the next major action.
That second action was the Winter Soldier Investigation (WSI) in Detroit, Michigan, Jan. 31-Feb. 2, 1971, when more than 100 Vietnam veterans gave “straightforward testimony -- direct testimony -- about acts which are war crimes under international law. Acts which these men have seen and participated in. Acts which are the inexorable result of national policy.”[3]
Contrary to extremists' accusations, VVAW carefully vetted the men it let testify. All had to have their discharge papers and IDs with them. Their testimony was checked against what other veterans knew, against documented evidence and whatever else the organizers could lay their hands on. We filmed the entire three days of testimony as well as related events and interviews with men who testified. Fonda financed us and attended the investigation, though she did not speak at it.[4]
The memories I brought away from the WSI are of haunted eyes of old men who had seen too much grief in already long lives -- as they looked at me from youthful faces. The contrast was proof of their stories. I remember seeing tough, war-hardened men break down and weep. I remember them hugging each other for mutual support. I remember listening to gut-wrenching testimony hour after hour for the full three days.
And I remember a love that spread from the veterans to include all of us who took the time to listen, to really listen, to what they had to say. This was a love far more powerful than any romantic love. It was the love of shared commitment.
Working on those two films with VVAW changed my life, much as I imagine listening to GIs and veterans changed Fonda's. Neither of us had to do what we did, but our hearts and souls had been touched. We knew, as few civilians did, why the war had to be ended. Its destruction had come home in the bodies and minds of those sent to fight it. Sadly there are people still trapped with the hatred necessary for war, necessary to make rational human beings kill other human beings.
I was so moved that I vowed to write the truths I learned about the war, about our national policy, and about the terrible toll it had taken on its veterans, and about the Nixon administration's efforts to silence and discredit VVAW. A number of veterans entrusted their stories to me to tell, much as others had trusted Fonda to speak for them.
In far subtler ways than the blatant lies and hatred used to vilify Fonda, I was hounded, intimidated, pressured, and threatened -- in attempts to make me shut up. The pressure was subtle, and friends to whom I turned for help told me to “stop being so paranoid” -- but some of the veterans stood by me. The first two people not directly involved with VVAW to believe me both had connections in the CIA, which suggests that I was not being paranoid. At times I was so terrified that I did stop... for a while.
The cumulative result of this harassment is that it took me nearly 40 years to finally keep my vow. Unable to find a publisher brave enough to work with me, I had to self-publish Combat by Trial: An Odyssey with 20th Century Winter Soldiers.[5] All that interference would make another good book.
In a second book I would include the lessons I learned from the veterans about overcoming one's fears, about reaching down inside oneself to find the courage needed to continue, about the value of humor and laughter. And I would write about a man I met, Budd Saunders, a combat veteran who believed me -- although he was not a VVAW member or even a veteran of the Vietnam War.
Budd protected me, loved me, married me, and encouraged me to finish Combat by Trial. On our living room wall is a photograph of two of the veterans who most influenced me during those difficult years. One of them, Scott Camil, was hounded far worse than I was. He was framed several times, once for a capital offense (kidnapping), and he was shot in the back (the bullet barely missing his heart) by DEA agents when he refused to let them set him up on a drug deal.
Underneath their photograph I have pasted a quote from Scott: “If you let them demoralize you, then they're effective. If you don't, they aren't. That's up to you, not them.”
If enough of us keep such thoughts in mind, instead of clinging to our fears and wishful beliefs, we can rebuild our “home of the brave.” But it will take all of us finding the strength and courage that dwells within each of us to speak out against lies, distortions, and intimidation; to stand up to the corporate bosses who would squeeze us dry for their profit. And, above all, to stop letting hatred destroy us personally and as a nation.
References:
[1] Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have joined together in Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW).
[2] Different Sons , Bowling Green Films, New York, NY.
[3] Excerpt from the transcript of the opening statement to the Winter Soldier Investigation, January 31, 1971.
[4] Winter Soldier, Winterfilm, New York, NY; reissued by Millarium Zero, Harrington Park, NJ.
[5] Nancy Miller Saunders, Combat by Trial: An Odyssey with 20th Century Winter Soldiers, iUniverse, Bloomington, IN, 2008.
[Nancy Miller Saunders was a member of Winterfilm Collective which documented activities of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. She is the author of Combat by Trial and is a freelance writer living in the Arkansas Ozarks with her husband Budd Saunders.]
Also see:
• BOOKS / Mariann G. Wizard: The Odyssey of Our Winter Soldiers / The Rag Blog / August 25, 2010
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.
*******
Jane Fonda and the 'home of the brave'
By Nancy Miller Saunders / The Rag Blog / August 11, 2011
"I was infuriated as I learned just how much our soldiers were being lied to about why we were fighting in Vietnam and I was anguished each time I would be with a young man who was traumatized by his experiences." -- Jane Fonda
The same day Obama and the Democrats caved in to Republican Tea Party extremists on the deficit, I learned that the cable channel QVC canceled an appearance by Jane Fonda because of angry calls from extremists objecting to her anti-Vietnam War activities. It has been nearly 40 years since that war ended yet these Swiftboater-types still cling to hatred of her, much of which is based on lies and distortions.
Yes, the picture of her sitting and laughing on a Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun damned her in many people's eyes. But appearances can be misleading, which they are in this case as she explains in a recent piece, “The Truth About My Trip To Hanoi," posted on her blog.
Although one picture may be worth a thousand words, those words can be misleading as easily as they can be revealing. But rather than risk letting go of their hatred by listening to her explanations of what happened and why she went to North Vietnam, these Swiftboaters have clamped their minds shut around their hatred. One mistake in an otherwise exemplary campaign to stop an increasingly unpopular war and Fonda is condemned forever and always.
We claim in our national anthem that ours is “the home of the brave.” Is it, when our president and Congress knuckle under to extremists' threats to bankrupt the country? Is it, when cable channels let bullies frighten them out of letting a movie star peddle her latest book on an entirely different topic?
Where is the bravery in these cave-ins? Where is the bravery in our docile acceptance of such hateful extremism? We recently saw true bravery in Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt, where people fed up with corruption nonviolently withstood fierce attacks and toppled Hosnei Mubarak's regime. We are seeing it again in the streets of Syria where people are being gunned down for their nonviolent protests.
Jane Fonda is a brave woman who looked beyond her instinctive feelings that would not let her imagine the United States could ever fight an unjust war. But then she met and listened to active duty GIs and Vietnam veterans. She began to study that war and discovered what it was doing to the men being sent to fight it. She worked to find them help they needed.
When they asked, she spoke for them, using her celebrity to amplify their voices in an effort to get the American people to listen to what they had to say about what was being done in our name and to our sons, brothers, and neighbors. Only with knowledge -- not emotional assumptions, no matter how treasured -- can we correct our mistakes and maybe, just maybe, avoid making them again in the future. But, sadly, we have repeated them in Iraq.
Fonda also campaigned for an organization that was unprecedented in our history: Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). Never before had U.S. combat veterans massed together to protest the continuation of the war in which they fought, but Vietnam veterans did just that, beginning in 1968.[1]
Two years later Fonda was working with VVAW and I found myself listening to the war's veterans after VVAW asked a group of us filmmakers to film their first two major demonstrations. They pointed out that they had the message and we had the means to broadcast it.
We put together four film crews to accompany VVAW and document the first demonstration, a RAW March over Labor Day weekend, 1970, from Morristown, New Jersey, to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.[2] (RAW stood for Rapid American Withdrawal from Vietnam.) Those of you old enough to remember that day may know that we risked being busted for crossing a state line to foment a riot, even though starting a riot was definitely not our intention.
Whenever possible VVAW used paradigms from the American Revolution to emphasize their patriotism and dedication to our founding principles. The route they chose was one some of George Washington's troops took to Valley Forge that memorable winter. In towns along the way, the veterans performed guerrilla theater in which they used volunteers acting as Vietnamese civilians to demonstrate their sanctioned brutality during the many search and destroy missions they had been sent on.
We filmmakers were with VVAW the entire weekend, even camping on the ground next to the veterans' encampment all three nights. We interviewed them, waded into the middle of their guerrilla theater to film it, and watched with growing admiration as they resisted provocation after provocation. They knew what violence is like and the damage it can do. They did not want to yield to it here at home.
At Valley Forge on Labor Day, VVAW staged a rally that began with more than 200 veterans making a moving entrance. Fonda was one of the speakers, again using her celebrity to amplify what the veterans had to tell their fellow citizens. She then left on a nationwide tour of campuses, introducing veterans to VVAW and recruiting volunteers for the next major action.
That second action was the Winter Soldier Investigation (WSI) in Detroit, Michigan, Jan. 31-Feb. 2, 1971, when more than 100 Vietnam veterans gave “straightforward testimony -- direct testimony -- about acts which are war crimes under international law. Acts which these men have seen and participated in. Acts which are the inexorable result of national policy.”[3]
Contrary to extremists' accusations, VVAW carefully vetted the men it let testify. All had to have their discharge papers and IDs with them. Their testimony was checked against what other veterans knew, against documented evidence and whatever else the organizers could lay their hands on. We filmed the entire three days of testimony as well as related events and interviews with men who testified. Fonda financed us and attended the investigation, though she did not speak at it.[4]
The memories I brought away from the WSI are of haunted eyes of old men who had seen too much grief in already long lives -- as they looked at me from youthful faces. The contrast was proof of their stories. I remember seeing tough, war-hardened men break down and weep. I remember them hugging each other for mutual support. I remember listening to gut-wrenching testimony hour after hour for the full three days.
And I remember a love that spread from the veterans to include all of us who took the time to listen, to really listen, to what they had to say. This was a love far more powerful than any romantic love. It was the love of shared commitment.
Working on those two films with VVAW changed my life, much as I imagine listening to GIs and veterans changed Fonda's. Neither of us had to do what we did, but our hearts and souls had been touched. We knew, as few civilians did, why the war had to be ended. Its destruction had come home in the bodies and minds of those sent to fight it. Sadly there are people still trapped with the hatred necessary for war, necessary to make rational human beings kill other human beings.
I was so moved that I vowed to write the truths I learned about the war, about our national policy, and about the terrible toll it had taken on its veterans, and about the Nixon administration's efforts to silence and discredit VVAW. A number of veterans entrusted their stories to me to tell, much as others had trusted Fonda to speak for them.
In far subtler ways than the blatant lies and hatred used to vilify Fonda, I was hounded, intimidated, pressured, and threatened -- in attempts to make me shut up. The pressure was subtle, and friends to whom I turned for help told me to “stop being so paranoid” -- but some of the veterans stood by me. The first two people not directly involved with VVAW to believe me both had connections in the CIA, which suggests that I was not being paranoid. At times I was so terrified that I did stop... for a while.
The cumulative result of this harassment is that it took me nearly 40 years to finally keep my vow. Unable to find a publisher brave enough to work with me, I had to self-publish Combat by Trial: An Odyssey with 20th Century Winter Soldiers.[5] All that interference would make another good book.
In a second book I would include the lessons I learned from the veterans about overcoming one's fears, about reaching down inside oneself to find the courage needed to continue, about the value of humor and laughter. And I would write about a man I met, Budd Saunders, a combat veteran who believed me -- although he was not a VVAW member or even a veteran of the Vietnam War.
Budd protected me, loved me, married me, and encouraged me to finish Combat by Trial. On our living room wall is a photograph of two of the veterans who most influenced me during those difficult years. One of them, Scott Camil, was hounded far worse than I was. He was framed several times, once for a capital offense (kidnapping), and he was shot in the back (the bullet barely missing his heart) by DEA agents when he refused to let them set him up on a drug deal.
Underneath their photograph I have pasted a quote from Scott: “If you let them demoralize you, then they're effective. If you don't, they aren't. That's up to you, not them.”
If enough of us keep such thoughts in mind, instead of clinging to our fears and wishful beliefs, we can rebuild our “home of the brave.” But it will take all of us finding the strength and courage that dwells within each of us to speak out against lies, distortions, and intimidation; to stand up to the corporate bosses who would squeeze us dry for their profit. And, above all, to stop letting hatred destroy us personally and as a nation.
References:
[1] Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have joined together in Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW).
[2] Different Sons , Bowling Green Films, New York, NY.
[3] Excerpt from the transcript of the opening statement to the Winter Soldier Investigation, January 31, 1971.
[4] Winter Soldier, Winterfilm, New York, NY; reissued by Millarium Zero, Harrington Park, NJ.
[5] Nancy Miller Saunders, Combat by Trial: An Odyssey with 20th Century Winter Soldiers, iUniverse, Bloomington, IN, 2008.
[Nancy Miller Saunders was a member of Winterfilm Collective which documented activities of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. She is the author of Combat by Trial and is a freelance writer living in the Arkansas Ozarks with her husband Budd Saunders.]
Also see:
• BOOKS / Mariann G. Wizard: The Odyssey of Our Winter Soldiers / The Rag Blog / August 25, 2010
The Rag Blog
The Latest From “The Rag Blog”-Speaking truth to power:The 1962 Port Huron Statement describes the goals, values, and strategies of Students for a Democratic Society -- and continues to inform and inspire.
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.
*******
Markin comment on this article:
A lot of the “feel” of today’s Occupy movement seems very similar to the early days of SDS as this article’s main points bear witness to. With the obvious differences that the Occupy movement, made up in part, at least, of the children of modern computer-touched technology, have a greater and faster capacity to get the message out and that its links to the labor movement are even more attenuated that SDS’s (having come directly out of various Cold War socialist operations with some links to the labor bureaucracy so it has less threads to use labor’s power to win some stuff.
Whether this Occupy movement can “transcend” the SDS experiences, early or late, is problematic. In any case history does not repeat itself exactly, except occasionally as farce, as Marx pointed out, and times are much too serious for that outcome. Moreover each generation’s youth has to fine its own way to fight the social and political struggles of its time. We, of the older generation, can just provide some pointers about, mainly, what not to do. However, on that issue, I sense some of the same mistakes beginning to creep up. Especially on the “no demands” and so-called more inclusive super-democratic organization forms they pride themselves on. Jesus, don’t the kids know how vicious the American monster is? Well, with each police attack they are learning.
*******
Speaking truth to power:The 1962 Port Huron Statement describes the goals, values, and strategies of Students for a Democratic Society -- and continues to inform and inspire.
By Ken Handel / The Rag Blog / July 19, 2011
“My Generation,” released by The Who in 1965, is one of that group’s most popular songs -- and a rallying cry for disaffected youth. Three years earlier, in 1962, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) created “An agenda for a generation,” an action plan for young people seeking broad societal change.
(SDS was the leading organization of the Sixties New Left. At its peak it had more than 100,000 members in 400 chapters around the country.)
The 59 SDS members who assembled in the small Michigan town of Port Huron in June 1962 could not accept a status quo that tolerated the possibility of nuclear annihilation, state-sanctioned racism, and a nation suffering from extensive poverty amidst affluence. Scholar James Miller, in Democracy Is in the Streets, described the Port Huron Statement (PHS) as being “one of the pivotal documents in post-war American history.”
In their own words
In Rebels With A Cause, a film on SDS created in 2000 by Helen Garvy, Port Huron participants reflected upon their experiences. Tom Hayden, the document’s primary author, described “sitting around in small groups talking about your values and how they applied to politics and to economics.” He also spoke of the American tradition of “decentralized democracy, or direct democracy, or town-meeting democracy.”
Sharon Jeffrey identified two key themes the document addressed: “…participatory democracy: this was something that somehow it had a resonance to it… This was really significant because it touched very deeply… sort of like the soul of who we were”; and the importance of values.
On this point, Steve Max commented, “The idea that you make your own values as a group was a new thing. That values weren’t just inherited and weren’t just transmitted from the older generation but that people could actually sit down and work out an ethical framework, as an organization…”
Political and cultural influences
In the first paragraph of the Port Huron Statement, SDS members acknowledged their privileged status: they were “bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities…” But in what Hayden has termed “a manifesto of hope,” the 41-page document envisioned an end to racism, a transformation of democracy, a reconception of the economy, and a conclusion to the cold war.
In his book, The Long Sixties: From 1960 to Barack Obama, Hayden noted the influences that contributed to the document’s explicit idealism.
Port Huron participants had witnessed the independence of many African nations, and Cuba’s successful revolution. They abhorred South Africa’s policy of apartheid and its violent repression of the African National Congress. They allied themselves with other students fighting racism in the U.S. -- and in particular, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). They had read inspiring books, seen influential films, and rocked around the clock. Port Huron, Hayden says, “was a spontaneous beginning, but one informed by legacy.”
Does Port Huron still resonate?
June 2012 represents the Port Huron Statement’s golden anniversary. And the alienation and apathy SDS sought to counter nearly 50 years ago is even more prevalent today: only six percent of a Harris Poll expressed confidence in Congress. In the 2010 mid-term election, 59.1 percent of registered voters chose to withhold their ballots.
To counteract hopelessness, the document offered a new definition of individual rights and of the role a person plays in the political system:
Participatory Democracy: “…we seek the establishment of a democracy of individual participation, governed by two central aims: that the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life; that society be organized to encourage independence in men and provide the media for their common participation.”
Values: “Men have unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity. It is this potential that we regard as crucial and to which we appeal, not to the human potentiality for violence, unreason, and submission to authority. The goal of man and society should be human independence: a concern not with image of popularity but with finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic...”
SDS succumbed to factionalism and dissolved in 1969. But the Port Huron Statement is the group’s living legacy. Just as “My Generation” continues to win new fans, so too can the Port Huron Statement assist today’s citizens in fulfilling their aspirations and in making government more responsive.
Monte Wasch offers a unique perspective on the PHS. As a 20 year-old City College student he attended the Port Huron gathering. When he returned to New York, Tom and Casey Hayden temporarily moved into his apartment. There, Hayden worked on final PHS edits, which Wasch typed up.
“I remember,” he comments, “a summer of optimism and challenge. Optimism because we all felt we were on the cusp of something exceptional and unique in the history of American progressivism. The challenge was -- as a new generation with a progressive, reform set of values -- to leave behind the narrow sectarian battles that had long characterized the Left. The PHS prescribed a new model for social change and non-sectarian progressive action by developing a new model for social change: participatory democracy.
[Ken Handel is a freelance writer and editor. This article was also posted to Suite101.]
Sources
Students for a Democratic Society
Port Huron Statement, SDS Documents
Democracy Is In the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago by James Miller (Simon and Schuster, 1987.) “Pivotal Document”: Page 13; “manifesto of hope”: Page 77
Rebels With A Cause, a documentary film written, produced, and directed by Helen Garvy, 2000.
The Long Sixties: From 1960 to Barack Obama by Tom Hayden. (Paradigm Publishers. 2009). SDS influences: Page 21-23
Poll Citations:
• Confidence in Congress -- The Harris Poll. "Confidence in Congress and Supreme Court Drops to Lowest Level in Many Years,” May 18, 2011.
• Election Data––United States Election Project. 2010 General Election Turnout Rates
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.
*******
Markin comment on this article:
A lot of the “feel” of today’s Occupy movement seems very similar to the early days of SDS as this article’s main points bear witness to. With the obvious differences that the Occupy movement, made up in part, at least, of the children of modern computer-touched technology, have a greater and faster capacity to get the message out and that its links to the labor movement are even more attenuated that SDS’s (having come directly out of various Cold War socialist operations with some links to the labor bureaucracy so it has less threads to use labor’s power to win some stuff.
Whether this Occupy movement can “transcend” the SDS experiences, early or late, is problematic. In any case history does not repeat itself exactly, except occasionally as farce, as Marx pointed out, and times are much too serious for that outcome. Moreover each generation’s youth has to fine its own way to fight the social and political struggles of its time. We, of the older generation, can just provide some pointers about, mainly, what not to do. However, on that issue, I sense some of the same mistakes beginning to creep up. Especially on the “no demands” and so-called more inclusive super-democratic organization forms they pride themselves on. Jesus, don’t the kids know how vicious the American monster is? Well, with each police attack they are learning.
*******
Speaking truth to power:The 1962 Port Huron Statement describes the goals, values, and strategies of Students for a Democratic Society -- and continues to inform and inspire.
By Ken Handel / The Rag Blog / July 19, 2011
“My Generation,” released by The Who in 1965, is one of that group’s most popular songs -- and a rallying cry for disaffected youth. Three years earlier, in 1962, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) created “An agenda for a generation,” an action plan for young people seeking broad societal change.
(SDS was the leading organization of the Sixties New Left. At its peak it had more than 100,000 members in 400 chapters around the country.)
The 59 SDS members who assembled in the small Michigan town of Port Huron in June 1962 could not accept a status quo that tolerated the possibility of nuclear annihilation, state-sanctioned racism, and a nation suffering from extensive poverty amidst affluence. Scholar James Miller, in Democracy Is in the Streets, described the Port Huron Statement (PHS) as being “one of the pivotal documents in post-war American history.”
In their own words
In Rebels With A Cause, a film on SDS created in 2000 by Helen Garvy, Port Huron participants reflected upon their experiences. Tom Hayden, the document’s primary author, described “sitting around in small groups talking about your values and how they applied to politics and to economics.” He also spoke of the American tradition of “decentralized democracy, or direct democracy, or town-meeting democracy.”
Sharon Jeffrey identified two key themes the document addressed: “…participatory democracy: this was something that somehow it had a resonance to it… This was really significant because it touched very deeply… sort of like the soul of who we were”; and the importance of values.
On this point, Steve Max commented, “The idea that you make your own values as a group was a new thing. That values weren’t just inherited and weren’t just transmitted from the older generation but that people could actually sit down and work out an ethical framework, as an organization…”
Political and cultural influences
In the first paragraph of the Port Huron Statement, SDS members acknowledged their privileged status: they were “bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities…” But in what Hayden has termed “a manifesto of hope,” the 41-page document envisioned an end to racism, a transformation of democracy, a reconception of the economy, and a conclusion to the cold war.
In his book, The Long Sixties: From 1960 to Barack Obama, Hayden noted the influences that contributed to the document’s explicit idealism.
Port Huron participants had witnessed the independence of many African nations, and Cuba’s successful revolution. They abhorred South Africa’s policy of apartheid and its violent repression of the African National Congress. They allied themselves with other students fighting racism in the U.S. -- and in particular, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). They had read inspiring books, seen influential films, and rocked around the clock. Port Huron, Hayden says, “was a spontaneous beginning, but one informed by legacy.”
Does Port Huron still resonate?
June 2012 represents the Port Huron Statement’s golden anniversary. And the alienation and apathy SDS sought to counter nearly 50 years ago is even more prevalent today: only six percent of a Harris Poll expressed confidence in Congress. In the 2010 mid-term election, 59.1 percent of registered voters chose to withhold their ballots.
To counteract hopelessness, the document offered a new definition of individual rights and of the role a person plays in the political system:
Participatory Democracy: “…we seek the establishment of a democracy of individual participation, governed by two central aims: that the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life; that society be organized to encourage independence in men and provide the media for their common participation.”
Values: “Men have unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity. It is this potential that we regard as crucial and to which we appeal, not to the human potentiality for violence, unreason, and submission to authority. The goal of man and society should be human independence: a concern not with image of popularity but with finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic...”
SDS succumbed to factionalism and dissolved in 1969. But the Port Huron Statement is the group’s living legacy. Just as “My Generation” continues to win new fans, so too can the Port Huron Statement assist today’s citizens in fulfilling their aspirations and in making government more responsive.
Monte Wasch offers a unique perspective on the PHS. As a 20 year-old City College student he attended the Port Huron gathering. When he returned to New York, Tom and Casey Hayden temporarily moved into his apartment. There, Hayden worked on final PHS edits, which Wasch typed up.
“I remember,” he comments, “a summer of optimism and challenge. Optimism because we all felt we were on the cusp of something exceptional and unique in the history of American progressivism. The challenge was -- as a new generation with a progressive, reform set of values -- to leave behind the narrow sectarian battles that had long characterized the Left. The PHS prescribed a new model for social change and non-sectarian progressive action by developing a new model for social change: participatory democracy.
[Ken Handel is a freelance writer and editor. This article was also posted to Suite101.]
Sources
Students for a Democratic Society
Port Huron Statement, SDS Documents
Democracy Is In the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago by James Miller (Simon and Schuster, 1987.) “Pivotal Document”: Page 13; “manifesto of hope”: Page 77
Rebels With A Cause, a documentary film written, produced, and directed by Helen Garvy, 2000.
The Long Sixties: From 1960 to Barack Obama by Tom Hayden. (Paradigm Publishers. 2009). SDS influences: Page 21-23
Poll Citations:
• Confidence in Congress -- The Harris Poll. "Confidence in Congress and Supreme Court Drops to Lowest Level in Many Years,” May 18, 2011.
• Election Data––United States Election Project. 2010 General Election Turnout Rates
The Rag Blog
Out In The 1930s Jazzy Be-Bop Night-A Girl Has Got To Do What a Girl Has To Do-“Baby Face”- A Film Review
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the 1930s forbidden film classic, Baby Face.
Baby Face, starring Barbara Stanwyck, written bt Darryl Zanuck, 1933
A girl has got to do what a girl has to do, circa 1933. That is the overarching theme of the film under review, Baby Face. And what a down in the dregs speakeasy life, pimped off on by a money-grubbing Prohibition father girl does then, and now for that matter, is the best she can. And the best she can is to use her sexual attractiveness, her feminine wiles, and her gold-digger’s heart to move up the social ladder. The film traces Baby Face’s (played by a young and fetching, fetching more before she gets her hair all marcelled, Barbara Stanwyck) hard grind up the social scale using those talents. Starting from an “easy rider” on a tramp train up to the high and rarified airs of the CEO of a bank she single-mindedly get what she wants, or what she thinks she wants.
Now this story of a girl doing the best she can is hardly a new one but what makes this film stand out is its rather explicit and upfront look at social reality and sexual themes. No question Baby Face is a kept woman, no question she will exchange her sexual favors for money, jewels, and maybe power, power over upscale men. These themes usually in the past have been kept under veil and this film, or rather films if you watch the two versions provided, is a no holds barred affair in the scramble to get out from under. The other version is a more sanitized offering, more up to Hollywood 1930s code.
The companion films would make for a good cinema student’s class project. Moreover, the underlining “philosophy” presented is rather startling for a “fluff” movie as Baby Face is early on exposed to a nutty professor-type (really a shoemaker and maybe no so nutty), a foreign nutty guy, who is touting the virtues of Nietzsche’ Will To Power and his various war of all against all notions. That in 1933 (as Hitler starts kicking some Nietzsche doors down in troubled Germany). So all this socially significant material in an hour and one half film. Whee!
Out In The 1930s Jazzy Be-Bop Night-A Girl Has Got To Do What a Girl Has To Do-“Baby Face”- A Film Review
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_Face_(film)
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the 1930s forbidden film classic, Baby Face.
Baby Face, starring Barbara Stanwyck, written by Darryl Zanuck, 1933
A girl has got to do what a girl has to do, circa 1933. That is the overarching theme of the film under review, Baby Face. And what a down in the dregs speakeasy life, pimped off on by a money-grubbing Prohibition father girl does then, and now for that matter, is the best she can. And the best she can is to use her sexual attractiveness, her feminine wiles, and her gold-digger’s heart to move up the social ladder. The film traces Baby Face’s (played by a young and fetching, fetching more before she gets her hair all marcelled, Barbara Stanwyck) hard grind up the social scale using those talents. Starting from an “easy rider” on a tramp train up to the high and rarified airs of the CEO of a bank she single-mindedly get what she wants, or what she thinks she wants.
Now this story of a girl doing the best she can is hardly a new one but what makes this film stand out is its rather explicit and upfront look at social reality and sexual themes. No question Baby Face is a kept woman, no question she will exchange her sexual favors for money, jewels, and maybe power, power over upscale men. These themes usually in the past have been kept under veil and this film, or rather films if you watch the two versions provided, is a no holds barred affair in the scramble to get out from under. The other version is a more sanitized offering, more up to Hollywood 1930s code.
The companion films would make for a good cinema student’s class project. Moreover, the underlining “philosophy” presented is rather startling for a “fluff” movie as Baby Face is early on exposed to a nutty professor-type (really a shoemaker and maybe no so nutty), a foreign nutty guy, who is touting the virtues of Nietzsche’ Will To Power and his various war of all against all notions. That in 1933 (as Hitler starts kicking some Nietzsche doors down in troubled Germany). So all this socially significant material in an hour and one half film. Whee!
Baby Face, starring Barbara Stanwyck, written bt Darryl Zanuck, 1933
A girl has got to do what a girl has to do, circa 1933. That is the overarching theme of the film under review, Baby Face. And what a down in the dregs speakeasy life, pimped off on by a money-grubbing Prohibition father girl does then, and now for that matter, is the best she can. And the best she can is to use her sexual attractiveness, her feminine wiles, and her gold-digger’s heart to move up the social ladder. The film traces Baby Face’s (played by a young and fetching, fetching more before she gets her hair all marcelled, Barbara Stanwyck) hard grind up the social scale using those talents. Starting from an “easy rider” on a tramp train up to the high and rarified airs of the CEO of a bank she single-mindedly get what she wants, or what she thinks she wants.
Now this story of a girl doing the best she can is hardly a new one but what makes this film stand out is its rather explicit and upfront look at social reality and sexual themes. No question Baby Face is a kept woman, no question she will exchange her sexual favors for money, jewels, and maybe power, power over upscale men. These themes usually in the past have been kept under veil and this film, or rather films if you watch the two versions provided, is a no holds barred affair in the scramble to get out from under. The other version is a more sanitized offering, more up to Hollywood 1930s code.
The companion films would make for a good cinema student’s class project. Moreover, the underlining “philosophy” presented is rather startling for a “fluff” movie as Baby Face is early on exposed to a nutty professor-type (really a shoemaker and maybe no so nutty), a foreign nutty guy, who is touting the virtues of Nietzsche’ Will To Power and his various war of all against all notions. That in 1933 (as Hitler starts kicking some Nietzsche doors down in troubled Germany). So all this socially significant material in an hour and one half film. Whee!
Out In The 1930s Jazzy Be-Bop Night-A Girl Has Got To Do What a Girl Has To Do-“Baby Face”- A Film Review
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_Face_(film)
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the 1930s forbidden film classic, Baby Face.
Baby Face, starring Barbara Stanwyck, written by Darryl Zanuck, 1933
A girl has got to do what a girl has to do, circa 1933. That is the overarching theme of the film under review, Baby Face. And what a down in the dregs speakeasy life, pimped off on by a money-grubbing Prohibition father girl does then, and now for that matter, is the best she can. And the best she can is to use her sexual attractiveness, her feminine wiles, and her gold-digger’s heart to move up the social ladder. The film traces Baby Face’s (played by a young and fetching, fetching more before she gets her hair all marcelled, Barbara Stanwyck) hard grind up the social scale using those talents. Starting from an “easy rider” on a tramp train up to the high and rarified airs of the CEO of a bank she single-mindedly get what she wants, or what she thinks she wants.
Now this story of a girl doing the best she can is hardly a new one but what makes this film stand out is its rather explicit and upfront look at social reality and sexual themes. No question Baby Face is a kept woman, no question she will exchange her sexual favors for money, jewels, and maybe power, power over upscale men. These themes usually in the past have been kept under veil and this film, or rather films if you watch the two versions provided, is a no holds barred affair in the scramble to get out from under. The other version is a more sanitized offering, more up to Hollywood 1930s code.
The companion films would make for a good cinema student’s class project. Moreover, the underlining “philosophy” presented is rather startling for a “fluff” movie as Baby Face is early on exposed to a nutty professor-type (really a shoemaker and maybe no so nutty), a foreign nutty guy, who is touting the virtues of Nietzsche’ Will To Power and his various war of all against all notions. That in 1933 (as Hitler starts kicking some Nietzsche doors down in troubled Germany). So all this socially significant material in an hour and one half film. Whee!
As The 2012 Anti-War Season Gets Under Way- A Vietnam War Flashback Moment-Private First Class Jimmy Jacks, 1944-1965 R.I.P.-All U.S.Troops Out!
Markin comment:
Private First Class, United States Army (RA), Jimmy Jacks would have been sixty-seven, or perhaps, sixty-eight years old this fall. You do not see the point of bringing up this unknown stranger’s name? Well, here is another clue Jimmy J. (his local moniker), a few years older than I am, was the first kid from my growing-up working class neighborhood to see service in Vietnam. Still not enough? Then take a little trip down to Washington, D.C. and you will find his “fame” listed on that surreally and serenely beautiful black stone work dedicated to the fallen of that war. Yes, I thought that might get your attention. This is Jimmy J’s story, but is also my story around the edges, and come to think of it, yours too, if you want end these damn imperial military adventures that the American state insists on dragging its youth, and in disproportionate numbers its working-class and minority youth, into.
My first dozen years or so of life were spend in a public housing project (“the projects” that every self-respecting mother warned their sons and daughters drifting down into if they didn’t shape up like a previous generation spoke of “the county farm,” the place of dreamless dreams), a place where the desperately poor of the day, or the otherwise displaced and forgotten of the go-go American economy of the 1950s were shunted off to. So you can say I knew Jimmy Jacks all my life, really, although I did not physically meet him until we moved across town to my coming-of-age working class neighborhood, a neighborhood whose ethos was in no way superior to “the projects” except that, unlike the four to a box project, the tiny houses were, for the most part, single dwellings. And I really only knew Jimmy through my older brother, Prescott (street name, The Gat Kid, ya real original I know) which is to say not very well at all as I was, okay, just a wet-behind-the-ears kid. And Jimmy was the king hellion of the neighborhood and dragged my brother, and the brothers of others, in tow. So this ain’t going to be a story of moral uplift, which is for sure.
See Jimmy, when he was around the old neighborhood, was the very large target, that is to say the number one target, of the “shawlies.” Shawlies? In our mainly Irish working-class neighborhood, although I confess I only heard it used by more recent immigrants just off the boat (or plane) from the old country or older ones who refused to become vanilla Americans, it signified that circle, council if you will, unofficial of course, of mothers, young and old, who set the moral tone, at least the public moral tone, of the place. In short, the gossips, old hags, and rumor-mongers (I am being polite here) who had their own devious grapevine, and more importantly, were a constant source of information about you to your own mother. Usually nothing good either.
And what conduct of Jimmy’s would bring him to the notice of that august body, other than the obvious one of corrupting the morals of the youth? Hey, as you will see this guy was no Socrates. Jimmy, it seems, or it seems to me now, was spoon-fed on old time gangster movies (and The Gat Kid too). No, not the George Raft-Jimmy Cagney-Edward G. Robinson vehicles of the 1930s in which the bad guy pepper-sprayed every one with his trusty machine-gun, everyone except dear old Ma (whom he would not touch a hair of the head of, and you better not either if you know what’s good for you). No, Jimmy was into being a proto-typical "wild one" a la Marlon Brando or the bad guys in Rebel Without A Cause. The ones who tried to cut James Dean up, cut him up bad. Without putting too fine a spin on it, he played out some kind of existential anti-hero. Something Jean Genet might have worked out character sketch on for one of his sullen plays.
So who was this Jimmy? No a bad looking guy with slicked-back black hair, long sideburns (even after they were early 1960s fashion-faded), sh-t kicking engineer boots, dungarees (before they were fashionista), tied together by a thick leather belt (which did service for other purposes, other better left unsaid purposes), tee-shirt in season (and out). Always smoking a cigarette (or getting ready too, and always unfiltered, natch, maybe Camels or Luckies, I really don’t remember), always carrying himself with a little swagger and lot of attitude. Oh ya, he was a tenth-grade high school drop-out (not really that unusual in those days in that neighborhood, drop-outs were a dime a dozen, including my own brother). And here is the draw, the final draw that drew slightly younger guys to him (and older girls, as well) he always had wheels, great wheels, wheels to die for, and kept them up to the nth degree. Employment (in order to get and keep those wheels, jesus, don't you guys know nothing): unknown
That last point is really the start of this story about how the ethos of the working poor and the demands of the American military linked up. Jimmy (and his associates, including my drop-out brother, and for a minute my younger brother, called “Stup” by Jimmy and The Gat Kid too, as look-out) was constantly the subject of local police attention. Every known offense, real or made-up, wound up at his door. Some of it rightly so, as it turned out. I might add that the irate shawlies had plenty to do with this police activity. And also plenty to do with setting up Jimmy as the prime example of what not to emulate. Well, as anyone, including me, in own my very small-bore, short-lived criminal career can testify to when you tempt the fates long enough those damn sisters will come out and get you. Get you bad. The long and short of it is was that eventually Jimmy’s luck ran out. The year that his luck ran out was 1963, not a good year to be nineteen and have your luck run out if there ever is one.
Nowadays we talk, and rightly so, about an “economic draft” that forces many working class and minority youth to sign up for military service even in ill-fated war time because they are up against the wall in their personal lives and the military offers some security. I want to talk about this “economic draft” in a different sense although I know that the same thing probably still goes on today. I just don’t have the data or anecdotal evidence to present on the issue. Jimmy, however, was a prima facie case of what I am talking about. When Jimmy’s luck ran out (and my brother’s as well) he faced several counts of armed robbery, and other assorted minor crimes. When he went to court he thus faced many years (I don’t remember his total, my brother’s was nine, I think). The judge, in his infinite mercy offered this deal- Cedar Junction (not the name then, but the state prison nevertheless) or the Army. Jimmy, fatefully, opted for the Army (as did my brother).
Here is the part that is important to understand though. Jimmy (and to a lesser extent, my brother), the minute that he opted for military service went from being “bum-of-the-month” in shawlie circles to a fine, if misunderstood and slightly errant, boy. Even the oldest hags had twinkles in their eyes for old Jimmy. Of course, his mother also came into high regard for raising such a fine boy committed to serve his country (and his god, and just so you understand that was a very Catholic god, don’t forget that part). Once in uniform, an airborne ranger’s uniform, and more importantly, once he had orders for Vietnam, then an exotic if dangerous place and a name little understood other than the United States was committed to its defense against the atheistic communists, his stock rose even further. I was not around the old neighborhood when the news of his death was announced in 1965 but my parents told me later than his funeral was treated something like a state function. The shawlies, weeping and moaning like their own sons were lost, in any case were out in force. Jimmy J, a belated R.I.P.
Private First Class, United States Army (RA), Jimmy Jacks would have been sixty-seven, or perhaps, sixty-eight years old this fall. You do not see the point of bringing up this unknown stranger’s name? Well, here is another clue Jimmy J. (his local moniker), a few years older than I am, was the first kid from my growing-up working class neighborhood to see service in Vietnam. Still not enough? Then take a little trip down to Washington, D.C. and you will find his “fame” listed on that surreally and serenely beautiful black stone work dedicated to the fallen of that war. Yes, I thought that might get your attention. This is Jimmy J’s story, but is also my story around the edges, and come to think of it, yours too, if you want end these damn imperial military adventures that the American state insists on dragging its youth, and in disproportionate numbers its working-class and minority youth, into.
My first dozen years or so of life were spend in a public housing project (“the projects” that every self-respecting mother warned their sons and daughters drifting down into if they didn’t shape up like a previous generation spoke of “the county farm,” the place of dreamless dreams), a place where the desperately poor of the day, or the otherwise displaced and forgotten of the go-go American economy of the 1950s were shunted off to. So you can say I knew Jimmy Jacks all my life, really, although I did not physically meet him until we moved across town to my coming-of-age working class neighborhood, a neighborhood whose ethos was in no way superior to “the projects” except that, unlike the four to a box project, the tiny houses were, for the most part, single dwellings. And I really only knew Jimmy through my older brother, Prescott (street name, The Gat Kid, ya real original I know) which is to say not very well at all as I was, okay, just a wet-behind-the-ears kid. And Jimmy was the king hellion of the neighborhood and dragged my brother, and the brothers of others, in tow. So this ain’t going to be a story of moral uplift, which is for sure.
See Jimmy, when he was around the old neighborhood, was the very large target, that is to say the number one target, of the “shawlies.” Shawlies? In our mainly Irish working-class neighborhood, although I confess I only heard it used by more recent immigrants just off the boat (or plane) from the old country or older ones who refused to become vanilla Americans, it signified that circle, council if you will, unofficial of course, of mothers, young and old, who set the moral tone, at least the public moral tone, of the place. In short, the gossips, old hags, and rumor-mongers (I am being polite here) who had their own devious grapevine, and more importantly, were a constant source of information about you to your own mother. Usually nothing good either.
And what conduct of Jimmy’s would bring him to the notice of that august body, other than the obvious one of corrupting the morals of the youth? Hey, as you will see this guy was no Socrates. Jimmy, it seems, or it seems to me now, was spoon-fed on old time gangster movies (and The Gat Kid too). No, not the George Raft-Jimmy Cagney-Edward G. Robinson vehicles of the 1930s in which the bad guy pepper-sprayed every one with his trusty machine-gun, everyone except dear old Ma (whom he would not touch a hair of the head of, and you better not either if you know what’s good for you). No, Jimmy was into being a proto-typical "wild one" a la Marlon Brando or the bad guys in Rebel Without A Cause. The ones who tried to cut James Dean up, cut him up bad. Without putting too fine a spin on it, he played out some kind of existential anti-hero. Something Jean Genet might have worked out character sketch on for one of his sullen plays.
So who was this Jimmy? No a bad looking guy with slicked-back black hair, long sideburns (even after they were early 1960s fashion-faded), sh-t kicking engineer boots, dungarees (before they were fashionista), tied together by a thick leather belt (which did service for other purposes, other better left unsaid purposes), tee-shirt in season (and out). Always smoking a cigarette (or getting ready too, and always unfiltered, natch, maybe Camels or Luckies, I really don’t remember), always carrying himself with a little swagger and lot of attitude. Oh ya, he was a tenth-grade high school drop-out (not really that unusual in those days in that neighborhood, drop-outs were a dime a dozen, including my own brother). And here is the draw, the final draw that drew slightly younger guys to him (and older girls, as well) he always had wheels, great wheels, wheels to die for, and kept them up to the nth degree. Employment (in order to get and keep those wheels, jesus, don't you guys know nothing): unknown
That last point is really the start of this story about how the ethos of the working poor and the demands of the American military linked up. Jimmy (and his associates, including my drop-out brother, and for a minute my younger brother, called “Stup” by Jimmy and The Gat Kid too, as look-out) was constantly the subject of local police attention. Every known offense, real or made-up, wound up at his door. Some of it rightly so, as it turned out. I might add that the irate shawlies had plenty to do with this police activity. And also plenty to do with setting up Jimmy as the prime example of what not to emulate. Well, as anyone, including me, in own my very small-bore, short-lived criminal career can testify to when you tempt the fates long enough those damn sisters will come out and get you. Get you bad. The long and short of it is was that eventually Jimmy’s luck ran out. The year that his luck ran out was 1963, not a good year to be nineteen and have your luck run out if there ever is one.
Nowadays we talk, and rightly so, about an “economic draft” that forces many working class and minority youth to sign up for military service even in ill-fated war time because they are up against the wall in their personal lives and the military offers some security. I want to talk about this “economic draft” in a different sense although I know that the same thing probably still goes on today. I just don’t have the data or anecdotal evidence to present on the issue. Jimmy, however, was a prima facie case of what I am talking about. When Jimmy’s luck ran out (and my brother’s as well) he faced several counts of armed robbery, and other assorted minor crimes. When he went to court he thus faced many years (I don’t remember his total, my brother’s was nine, I think). The judge, in his infinite mercy offered this deal- Cedar Junction (not the name then, but the state prison nevertheless) or the Army. Jimmy, fatefully, opted for the Army (as did my brother).
Here is the part that is important to understand though. Jimmy (and to a lesser extent, my brother), the minute that he opted for military service went from being “bum-of-the-month” in shawlie circles to a fine, if misunderstood and slightly errant, boy. Even the oldest hags had twinkles in their eyes for old Jimmy. Of course, his mother also came into high regard for raising such a fine boy committed to serve his country (and his god, and just so you understand that was a very Catholic god, don’t forget that part). Once in uniform, an airborne ranger’s uniform, and more importantly, once he had orders for Vietnam, then an exotic if dangerous place and a name little understood other than the United States was committed to its defense against the atheistic communists, his stock rose even further. I was not around the old neighborhood when the news of his death was announced in 1965 but my parents told me later than his funeral was treated something like a state function. The shawlies, weeping and moaning like their own sons were lost, in any case were out in force. Jimmy J, a belated R.I.P.
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 The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
*******
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was this high in the American labor force. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work. Work that would be divided through local representative workers’ councils which would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work. Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing as implement “30 for 40” 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 sector that desperately need to be organized 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 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 American imperial 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. We need to 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. The creation of that workers party, however, will get us nowhere unless it fights for a workers government to begin the transition to the next level of human progress 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 The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
*******
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was this high in the American labor force. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work. Work that would be divided through local representative workers’ councils which would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work. Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing as implement “30 for 40” 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 sector that desperately need to be organized 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 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 American imperial 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. We need to 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. The creation of that workers party, however, will get us nowhere unless it fights for a workers government to begin the transition to the next level of human progress on a world-wide scale.
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
From The “West Coast Port Shutdown” Website-This Is Class War, We Say No More!- Support The Mid-January Ship Blockade Action In Defense Of The Longview, Washington Longshoremen!
Click on the headline to link to the West Coast Port Shutdown website.
Markin comment:
We know that we are only at the very start of an upsurge in the labor movement as witness the stellar exemplary actions by the West Coast activists on December 12, 2011. As I have pointed out in remarks previously made elsewhere as part of the Boston solidarity rally with the West Coast Port Shutdown this is the way forward as we struggle against the ruling class for a very different, more equitable society. Not everything went as well, or as well-attended, as expected including at our rally in solidarity in Boston but we are still exhibiting growing pains in the post-Occupy encampment era which will get sorted out in the future.
******
******
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
*******
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was this high in the American labor force. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work. Work that would be divided through local representative workers’ councils which would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work. Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing as implement “30 for 40” 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 sector that desperately need to be organized 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 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 American imperial 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. We need to 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. The creation of that workers party, however, will get us nowhere unless it fights for a workers government to begin the transition to the next level of human progress on a world-wide scale.
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
Markin comment:
We know that we are only at the very start of an upsurge in the labor movement as witness the stellar exemplary actions by the West Coast activists on December 12, 2011. As I have pointed out in remarks previously made elsewhere as part of the Boston solidarity rally with the West Coast Port Shutdown this is the way forward as we struggle against the ruling class for a very different, more equitable society. Not everything went as well, or as well-attended, as expected including at our rally in solidarity in Boston but we are still exhibiting growing pains in the post-Occupy encampment era which will get sorted out in the future.
******
******
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
*******
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was this high in the American labor force. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work. Work that would be divided through local representative workers’ councils which would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work. Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing as implement “30 for 40” 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 sector that desperately need to be organized 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 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 American imperial 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. We need to 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. The creation of that workers party, however, will get us nowhere unless it fights for a workers government to begin the transition to the next level of human progress on a world-wide scale.
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
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!
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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 Partisan Defense Committee-Free The 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.
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.
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!
Click on the headline to link to updates from the Occupy Boston website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011. I will post important updates as they appear on that site.
Markin comment:
We know that we are only at the very start of an upsurge in the labor movement as witness the stellar exemplary actions by the West Coast activists on December 12, 2011. As I have pointed out in remarks previously made elsewhere as part of the Boston solidarity rally with the West Coast Port Shutdown on that date this is the way forward as we struggle against the ruling class for a very different, more equitable society. Not everything went as well, or as well-attended, as expected including at our rally in solidarity in Boston on the afternoon of December 12th but we are still exhibiting growing pains in the post-Occupy encampment era. Some of that will get sorted out in the future as well get a better grip of the important of the labor movement to winning victories in our struggles.
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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!
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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was this high in the American labor force. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work. Work that would be divided through local representative workers’ councils which would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work. Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing as implement “30 for 40” 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 sector that desperately need to be organized 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 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 American imperial 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. We need to 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. The creation of that workers party, however, will get us nowhere unless it fights for a workers government to begin the transition to the next level of human progress 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, PICKET LINES MEAN DON'T CROSS,
Markin comment:
We know that we are only at the very start of an upsurge in the labor movement as witness the stellar exemplary actions by the West Coast activists on December 12, 2011. As I have pointed out in remarks previously made elsewhere as part of the Boston solidarity rally with the West Coast Port Shutdown on that date this is the way forward as we struggle against the ruling class for a very different, more equitable society. Not everything went as well, or as well-attended, as expected including at our rally in solidarity in Boston on the afternoon of December 12th but we are still exhibiting growing pains in the post-Occupy encampment era. Some of that will get sorted out in the future as well get a better grip of the important of the labor movement to winning victories in our struggles.
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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!
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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was this high in the American labor force. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work. Work that would be divided through local representative workers’ councils which would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work. Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing as implement “30 for 40” 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 sector that desperately need to be organized 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 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 American imperial 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. We need to 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. The creation of that workers party, however, will get us nowhere unless it fights for a workers government to begin the transition to the next level of human progress 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, PICKET LINES MEAN DON'T CROSS,
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