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.
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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend All The Occupation Sites And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Protesters Everywhere!
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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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Below I am posting, occasionally, comments on the Occupy movement as I see or hear things of interest, or that cause alarm bells to ring in my head. The first comment directly below from October 1, which represented my first impressions of Occupy Boston, is the lead for all further postings.
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Markin comment October 1, 2011:
There is a lot of naiveté expressed about the nature of capitalism, capitalists, and the way to win in the class struggle by various participants in this occupation. Many also have attempted to make a virtue out of that naiveté, particularly around the issues of effective democratic organization (the General Assembly, its unrepresentative nature and its undemocratic consensus process) and relationships with the police (they are not our friends, no way, when the deal goes down). However, their spirit is refreshing, they are acting out of good subjective anti-capitalist motives and, most importantly, even those of us who call ourselves "reds" (communists), including this writer, started out from liberal premises as naive, if not more so, than those encountered at the occupation site. We can all learn something but in the meantime we must defend the "occupation" and the occupiers. More later as the occupation continues.
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As part of my comment here, dated October 20, 2011, I noted the following:
“… The idea of the General Assembly with each individual attendee acting as a “tribune of the people” is interesting and important. And, of course, it represents, for today anyway, the embryo of what the “new world” we need to create might look like at the governmental level.”
A couple of the people that I have talked to were not quite sure what to make of that idea. The idea that what is going on in Occupy Boston at the governmental level could, should, would be a possible form of governing this society in the “new world a-borning” with the rise of the Occupy movement. Part of the problem is that there was some confusion on the part of the listeners that one of the possible aims of this movement is to create an alternative government, or at least provide a model for such a government. I will argue here now, and in the future, that it should be one the goals. In short, we need to take power away from the Democrats and Republicans and their tired old congressional/executive/judicial doesn’t work checks and balances form of governing and place it at the grassroots level and work upward from there rather than, as now, have power devolve from the top. (And stop well short of the bottom.)
I will leave aside the question (the problem really) of what it would take to create such a possibility. Of course a revolutionary solution would, of necessity, have be on the table since there is no way that the current powerful interests, Democratic, Republican or those having no named politics, is going to give up power without a fight. What I want to pose now is the use of the General Assembly as a deliberative executive, legislative, and judicial body all rolled into one. In that sense previous historical models come to mind; the short-lived but heroic Paris Commune of 1871 that Karl Marx tirelessly defended against the reactionaries of Europe as the prototype of a workers government; the early heroic days of the Russian October Revolution of 1917 when the workers councils (soviets in Russian parlance) acted as a true workers' government; and the period in the Spanish Revolution of 1936-39 where the Central Committee of the Anti-Fascist Militias acted, de facto, as a workers government. All the just mentioned examples had their problems and flaws, no question. However, merely mentioning the General Assembly concept in the same paragraph as these great historic examples should signal that thoughtful leftists and other militants need to investigate and study these examples.
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Recently (see October 22, 2011 comment above) I noted the following while arguing for the General Assembly concept as a form of alternate government using historic examples like the Paris Commune (1871), the early soviets in Russia (1905 and 1917), and the early days of the antifascist militias in the Spanish Civil War (1936-37):
“However, merely mentioning the General Assembly concept in the same paragraph as these great historic examples should signal that thoughtful leftists and other militants need to investigate and study these examples.”
In order to facilitate the investigation and study of those examples I will, occasionally, post works in this space that deal with these forbears from several leftist perspectives (rightist perspectives were clear- crush all the above examples ruthlessly, and with no mercy- so we need not look at them now). I started this Lesson Of History series with Karl Marx’s classic defense and critique of the Paris Commune, The Civil War In France and today’s presentation noted in the headline continues on in that same vein.
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Markin comment January 15, 2012
In several recent comments in this space (in late December) my old radical friend and alternative newspaper commentator, Josh Breslin, noted that the Occupy movement seemed to have lost energy and was , as he vividly described it, a movement of generals without an army. I, initially, argued with him about that characterization saying that this was just a period of growing pains and things would sort themselves out over the next several months. Then a series of disturbing events occurred topped off by what I will here call the “sex registry question” to make me thing that old Josh, once again, was right. Only I would characterize things, unlike Josh, as a succumbing to the circle spirit and as yet another example of the revolution devouring its own. In either case not a healthy situation.
With that said, I have long noted that although I believed that the General Assembly concept was potentially the embryo of an alternate form of government that would drive our vision for a new society there were some structural problems with the concept as practiced. Among those criticisms were the simple notions that majority rule and representative government based on political positions were concepts better suited to the struggle. Well, apparently others have, in the crucible of struggle, learned some of those lessons. Lessons that, perhaps, needed to be painfully worked through in practice before their shortcomings could be exposed. In any case this latest news from OB (consenting to a once a week strategic assembly) about a willingness to think about other governing forms is welcome news. Whether we remain generals without an army can now be hashed out but one thing seems certain this will go a long way toward breaking out of the circle spirit.
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A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around. Organize the unorganized- Organize the South- Organize Wal-Mart- Defend the right for public and private workers to unionize.
* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized and other labor-specific causes (example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio).
*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed.
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
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Gracchus Babeuf 1796
Creation of an Insurrectionary Directory
Source: Pieces relatives a la conspiration trouvées chez Babeuf [Paris? 1796?];
Translated: for marxists.org by Mitchell Abidor;
CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2004.
This partial plan for a conspiratorial organization was found among Babeuf’s papers when he was arrested.
French democrats, painfully affected, profoundly indignant, justly revolted by the sad spectacle offered by the unheard of state of misery and oppression of their country;
Penetrated by the memory that when a democratic constitution was given to the people and accepted by it, it was placed under the guard of all virtues;
Consequently, considering that the initiative for undertaking the avenging of the people when, like today, its rights are usurped, its freedom stolen and even its existence compromised, belongs to those of purest and most courageous virtue;
Recognizing that it is an unfair reproach to accuse the people of cowardice, and that the people have only postponed justice till now because it lacked good leaders to appear at its head;
Recognizing that the overflowing measure of a usurping authority has ripened the disposition of all souls in favor of a revolutionary explosion, and this to such a point that in order to render it fruitful it would perhaps be necessary to temper rather than accelerate the impulse of free men in order to put the regulators in a position to assure its success;
They have resolved the following:
First Article
From this moment an Insurrectional Directory is formed, under the name of Secret Directorate of Public Salvation. In that quality they take the initiative of guiding all the movements that will lead the people to regain its sovereignty.
II. This Directory has four members
III. This Directory shall be secret; the names of its members will not even be known by the principal agents. Between the latter and the members of the Directorate there shall be intermediary members to effectuate communications between the former and the latter.
IV. The Secret Directory of Public Safety commits itself to fulfilling the immense scope of the obligations imposed by this great title.
V. A distinctive mark shall be placed on those written instructions that it will be indispensable to give to principal agents, and this mark shall serve to protect against any surprise through false instructions; it will guarantee, despite the lack of a signature, the authenticity of the acts they will receive from the Secret Directorate.
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Monday, January 16, 2012
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Tunisian Elections: Victory for Islamic Reactionaries-Workers Must Fight for Their Own Class Rule!-Fight For A Workers Government!
Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League website.
Markin comment on this article:
I admit that I was taken aback a little while reading this article concerning the ICL line change proposed for countries, mainly third-world countries, especially those which have just come out of popular movements against dictatorial regimes, around the call for revolutionary constituent assemblies. I have always been somewhat queasy about the simple call for constituent assemblies in these cases because it seemed too similar to the French revolutionary model that has long ago had its day. But as a transitional slogan, and as an affirmation of Leon Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution for more economically backward countries, it made more programmatic sense.
Some of the argumentation for the line change does make sense (the perfidy of the bourgeoisies in secondary, semi-colonial and colonial countries, as noted even in Marx’s time, popular frontism, two-stage revolution, etc.) but I am still left with an odd feeling that calling (as I have in my headline for this post) a workers republic in some of these places (although not Tunisia) like Afghanistan, Nepal and Tibet just seems too far out to be programmatically sound. This one is harder to figure out that the question of a revolutionary attitude to the running for executive offices of the bourgeois state. Another long held position of the common orthodox Trotskyist movement. More, much more later.
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Workers Vanguard No. 993
6 January 2012
Tunisian Elections: Victory for Islamic Reactionaries-Workers Must Fight for Their Own Class Rule!-Fight For A Workers Government!
The following article is translated from Le Bolchévik No. 198 (December 2011), newspaper of our comrades of the Ligue Trotskyste de France.
The popular revolt in Tunisia that ousted hated despot Ben Ali last January resulted in the election of a new constituent assembly on October 23. With the blessing of the imperialists, the “modernist” Islamists of the Ennahda party took 89 of the 217 seats in the new assembly, which is now tasked with the job of running the country for the next year as well as drafting a new constitution. Ennahda, the secular Congress for the Republic (CPR), a bourgeois party, and Ettakatol (Democratic Forum for Labor and Freedom), which is affiliated with the Second International, have formed a coalition to run the country. However, the Islamists have the real power in the coalition. Ennahda’s Number Two, Hamadi Jebali, was named prime minister on December 14, and his party got most of the key ministerial posts, notably that of the police, as well as the ministry of mosques.
The ex-Stalinist Communist Workers Party of Tunisia (PCOT), which won only three seats in the assembly, was apparently also invited to join the new government but declined, asserting that “remaining outside the government is the best choice for the PCOT” (La Presse de Tunisie, 19 November 2011). As we explained in our articles earlier this year, while the organized working class played a quite significant role in the popular uprising that led to the toppling of the hated dictator Ben Ali, it remained politically subordinated to the bourgeoisie. The main trade-union federation, the General Union of Tunisian Workers (UGTT), which is led by longtime Ben Ali toady Abdesselem Jerad, has since last January engaged in various political blocs, subordinating itself to bourgeois forces, including the Islamic reactionaries of Ennahda, in a so-called “National Council to Safeguard the Revolution,” which was formed on February 11. Jerad & Co. thus helped build the credibility of Ennahda, which then won the election. As we wrote back in March, “By thus chaining the workers to their class enemy, the trade-union bureaucrats and reformists are paving the way to a bloody defeat for the workers and the oppressed. It is necessary to break with class collaboration!” (Le Bolchévik No. 195, March 2011).
Indicative of the increasing disillusionment among the Tunisian masses over the perspectives offered by the first “democratic” elections in the history of the country, the rate of abstention was 46 percent on average and was especially high in the rural and less industrialized areas of the country. Tunisia has long been known as the least religious and most secular country in the region. The Ennahda victory thus does not as such indicate a strong turn toward political Islam, given that less than one-quarter of the potential voters cast ballots for its slates. However, this victory is ominous.
Immediately following the election, Ennahda leader Rached Ghannouchi pledged to maintain a secular course, arguing that his party has no interest in establishing sharia (Islamic) law or alienating other parties in the coalition government. Indeed, Ghannouchi chose to govern in alliance with secular parties rather than with the populist Al-Aridah Chaabia (“People’s Petition for Liberty, Justice and Development”), a bourgeois party led by a London businessman who had been an Ennahda activist until 1992 and reportedly forged close ties with the Ben Ali regime.
However, while Rached Ghannouchi may promise, as he did in his first post-election speech, that “Tunisia is for everyone,” attacks on basic rights are sure to be on the rise. On December 3, a band of about 1,000 Islamic reactionaries attacked secular demonstrators with stones in front of the parliament, wounding many people. Even before the elections, Ennahda supporters began to flex their muscles. Two of the larger attacks were against films perceived as being anti-Islam. In June, ultra-conservative Salafist Muslims attacked a showing of the film Neither Allah, Nor Master! as promoting secularism and issued death threats against filmmaker Nadia El Fani. In October, thousands of Islamists demonstrated at the headquarters of a local television station and set it on fire to protest against its showing of Persepolis, an animated film that denounces the reactionary impact of the 1979 “Islamic revolution” in Iran and that the protesters claimed to be insulting to Islam.
While Ennahda professed to denounce the violence of the protests, Rached Ghannouchi announced his support of “the right of the Tunisian people to defend its religion” (l’Humanité, 19 October 2011). Now it is the manager of the TV station that showed Persepolis who is being prosecuted for “violating sacred values and moral standards and disturbing public order,” and he faces up to three years in prison (Le Monde, 17 November 2011). Drop the charges!
In the weeks following the elections, Ennahda has above all sought to reassure the Tunisian bourgeoisie and Western imperialism of its commitment to improving the state of the Tunisian economy. One of its main concerns is to bolster the flagging tourist industry, vowing to continue to allow liquor and bikinis at the country’s beach resorts (while simultaneously hinting that hotels should also offer liquor-free bookings for Muslims). More specifically, just a few short days after the elections, Ennahda met with Tunisian stock market representatives to discuss the implementation of its program of “developing and encouraging private sector initiatives while strengthening the market economy by improving the business environment so that companies can more easily access financial markets, as well encouraging direct and portfolio investment by foreign investors” (La Presse Tunisienne, 27 October 2011). In other words, privatization, austerity and more grinding poverty for the working masses.
For Working-Class Independence
There has indeed been no improvement in the desperate material conditions that led Mohamed Bouazizi, a young street vendor of vegetables, to set himself on fire in Sidi Bouzid in December 2010, sparking the countrywide revolt that overthrew Ben Ali. A general wage increase of 4.7 percent was largely eaten up by consumer inflation, which hit an annual rate of 4.5 percent in October. Unemployment, which hits young people the hardest, has increased by more than a third since the beginning of 2011, and the number of unemployed could reach one million by the end of 2011. Conditions have been made even worse by the return of tens of thousands of Tunisians who had been working in Libya.
Strikes, sit-ins and workplace blockages have continued unabated since January 2011 in just about every sector of the economy: in telecommunications, transportation, education, the phosphate industry, oil, aviation and tourism, as well involving doctors, judges, postal workers, market vendors, brewery workers—the list goes on. To cite just one example, the Financial Times (15 August 2011) reported that in July there had been a total of 184 protest roadblocks across Tunisia, up from 103 in June, and that 156 protests had blocked access to industrial sites, including oil companies, up from 78 in June. The “post-revolutionary” police have continued to brutally suppress these protests with the help of the army. Thabet Belkacem, a 14-year-old youth, was killed on July 16 by the cops in Sidi Bouzid. Again on November 23 in Kasserine, cops firing their guns in the air attacked several thousand demonstrators with tear gas (tunistribune.com, 24 November 2011).
There was a slight dip in the number of strikes in the month before the elections, as the UGTT obscenely called on the working class to avoid all strikes in the weeks leading up to the elections—a call that was only partially heeded. Having historically engaged in militant class struggle, the UGTT finally succumbed to years of repression under Ben Ali; many of its top leaders even joined the leadership of his Democratic-Constitutional Rally (RCD) party. Today the UGTT claims to represent more than half a million members.
The Tunisian working class remains chained to its own bourgeoisie not only by the trade-union bureaucracy but also by the reformist left groups, many of which were banned or repressed by the Ben Ali regime. These include the ex-Stalinist PCOT and the predecessors of the League of the Workers Left (LGO), which has links with the New Anti-Capitalist Party of Olivier Besancenot in France. Ettajdid (the former Communist Party) ran in the elections as part of the “Modernist Democratic Pole” slate, which won five seats. While its campaign centered on warning against the dangers of the Islamists, and Ennahda in particular, Ettajdid secretary general Ahmed Ibrahim told Reuters (12 October 2011) that differences with Ennahda “should not prevent coexistence with it.... Democracy means coexistence with everyone, without exception, including Ennahda.” Indeed, the fact that the electoral campaign was dominated by the polarization between “secular” and Islamist forces helped mask the utter failure of the workers movement to pose the real question: bourgeois rule (whether secular or not) or workers rule. The Tunisian proletariat must become a class for itself, fighting for power in its own name; and for this they need a revolutionary Leninist party.
As for the LGO, it tried to build its own class-collaborationist alliance (dubbed an “anti-liberal and anti-imperialist front”) with component parts of the “January 14 Front,” a popular front including bourgeois formations such as self-proclaimed Nasserist or Ba’athist groups that was set up following Ben Ali’s ouster. Failing that, and having also failed to obtain its full legalization, the LGO issued a statement on October 9 calling for a boycott of the elections and complaining of “the absence of the necessary conditions for a democratic election” (Tout est à nous! Web site, 22 September and 22 October 2011).
Meanwhile, the PCOT, in its post-election declaration, dedicated itself to fighting “for the installation of a truly democratic, patriotic and popular change” (Tout est à nous!, 3 November 2011). Despite the occasional rhetoric about “revolution,” none of these reformists goes beyond a struggle for “democracy”—that is, they hold to a program explicitly limited to a capitalist framework.
Women’s Rights Under Threat
Compared to the rest of the region, Tunisia boasts relatively broad rights for women, most of them gained under President Bourguiba immediately following independence of Tunisia from France in 1956. These rights were specified in a Code of Personal Status (CPS), which, as we wrote more than two decades ago, represents “an awkward, fragile and reversible compromise between Islamic law and bourgeois ‘modernity’” (Le Bolchévik No. 79, January 1988). That explains why Ennahda considers the code acceptable. It includes formal equality under the law; polygamy is illegal and civil law governs divorce. Abortion rights exist and contraception is available. However, these are not free, which restricts their availability to workers and the poorer layers of society. In addition, single women are still subordinate to their fathers under the law, arranged marriages are frequent and a man must pay a dowry for his future wife. Magic rituals called the tasfih are performed to supposedly protect the virginity of pubescent girls, while hymenoplasty (surgical restoration of the hymen to give the appearance of virginity) is performed among petty-bourgeois layers of society. Sexual harassment is commonplace, and women are very much discriminated against in inheritance laws.
In the recent election, parties were not allowed to run unless half their lists were made up of women. The number of women actually elected was just 49 out of the 217 seats—including 42 for Ennahda, many of whom are veiled women who believe that women should live according to their view of sharia law. The parity clause helped Ennahda present itself as pro-woman. As Marxists, we are opposed to the state dictating whom a political party, including a revolutionary party, is allowed to put forward, whether male or female, “citizen” or “foreigner.”
Women comprise nearly 30 percent of the country’s workforce, including among the working class (one-third of UGTT members are women). In addition, the majority of university students are women, and among the petty bourgeoisie 31 percent of lawyers, 40 percent of college professors and 42 percent of doctors are women. This layer of highly qualified petty-bourgeois professional women has generated numerous women’s rights groups acting largely as watchdogs for the maintenance of the CPS. Many of these women are now understandably worried about what the electoral victory of Ennahda will mean for women’s rights.
Rached Ghannouchi has been careful to insist that Ennahda intends to safeguard the rights of women that currently exist under Tunisian law, and he maintains that women will not be forced to wear the veil. He regularly cites Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) as his model for the future of Tunisia. But as our German comrades wrote following the AKP’s reelection in 2007 (see WV No. 916, 6 June 2008):
“New constitutional amendments were announced scrapping the longstanding ban on the headscarf in colleges and public institutions and replacing a clause in the current constitution that obliges the government to ‘ensure equality for both men and women’ with one that describes women as a ‘vulnerable group in need of special protection.’ Meanwhile, the emboldened forces of Islamic reaction are starting to change the political and social landscape of Turkey, including in cities like Istanbul. Some government offices are organizing work schedules according to prayer times, and boys and girls are being separated in high schools, a wholly reactionary measure.… Today, some form of veiling is worn by more than 60 percent of Turkish women.”
Today, some four years later, conditions are even worse: Turkey has one of the worst records in Europe concerning widespread violence against women (Economist, 12 May 2011).
We are opposed to the veil, no matter what its form, as both a symbol and instrument of women’s oppression. At the same time, we are equally opposed to state bans or restrictions on it. As Marxists, we stand for the separation of religion and state and call for free, secular education for all. But we also recognize that Islamic fundamentalists will use any easing of the ban on the veil to pressure women to cover themselves. This is exactly what is happening now in Tunisia: there are reports that female teachers not wearing the veil have been heckled to prevent them from giving their class, have had their classes boycotted and have even been physically attacked. Women working in stores are approached by men telling them that they should be at home and not working. At Gabès University in the southeast of the country, Salafists succeeded in having the cafeteria divided into separate areas for men and for women. An article in La Presse de Tunisie (7 November 2011) noted that “harassment of women in the street, at the university and in certain workplaces began, in fact, as early as last February, some weeks after the revolution of liberty and dignity. But this harassment has intensified since the October 23 election that gave Ennahda a relative majority in the constituent assembly.”
Ennahda declares that it has nothing to do with these attacks on women’s rights, but its spokesmen have been widely criticized for saying different things to different audiences. One of the most prominent Ennahda representatives during the election campaign was one Souad Abderrahim, a 47-year-old businesswoman and pharmacist who does not wear the veil and who is often described as embodying the “glamour” of the modern Tunisian woman. During a radio debate, Abderrahim announced that unmarried women who have children are “a disgrace” and “should not expect a legal framework that protects their rights.” She disgustingly added that “ethically, they have no right to exist” (Libération, 10 November 2011).
For Abderrahim and her ilk, only married women within the confines of the family have the “right to exist” and to have children. This goes to the very heart of women’s oppression, which is rooted in class society and in the repressive institution of the family. The family is essential to capitalist society. It cannot simply be abolished. Rather, the social functions that it fulfills, such as housework, child rearing, preparation of meals, etc., must be replaced by social institutions. But the perspective of replacing the family requires a tremendous leap in social development, which can be achieved only through sweeping away capitalist rule on a global basis and replacing it with a rational, democratically planned economy. Because the oppression of women is integral to capitalist property relations and is ideologically bolstered by religion, women’s oppression cannot be eradicated in capitalist society. At the same time, without a struggle to end women’s oppression, which reinforces all forms of social backwardness, there will be no proletarian revolution.
For Permanent Revolution in Tunisia
Tunisia is a neocolonial country whose bourgeoisie, including after the fall of Ben Ali, is tied by a million threads to world imperialism. France, the former colonial ruler, continues to benefit from the deep oppression of Tunisia’s masses. Indeed, the subordination of Tunisia to imperialism serves to ensure the brutal exploitation and oppression of its people. In order to win real national and social liberation, the proletariat must be mobilized against both the imperialists and the domestic bourgeoisie, the deadly enemies of Tunisia’s workers and oppressed.
In countries of belated capitalist development like Tunisia, the inherent weakness of the national bourgeoisie ties it so strongly to imperialism that even the most elementary democratic tasks, such as legal equality for women, complete separation of religion and state and agrarian revolution to give land to the peasants, cannot be achieved without the overthrow of the capitalist order. Moreover, the consolidation of proletarian rule requires its international extension to the imperialist centers, particularly France, the former colonial oppressor. This is at bottom what Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution is all about.
In an October 29 statement (La Forge, November 2011), the PCOT whined that the dismal results of the left in the recent elections were due to the role of money in the form of corruption, vote-buying and partiality of the mass media, as well as voting instructions given in the mosques. The truth is that bourgeois elections serve to bolster bourgeois rule; they cannot actually express the will of the masses, particularly in a period of social turmoil and upheaval. This was once again proven in a spectacular fashion in the Tunisian elections.
The call for a constituent assembly was a popular demand following the overthrow of the Ben Ali regime. It was argued that this was the way that democratic demands could be addressed. In fact, only proletarian power can satisfy these demands. We insisted in our propaganda on the need for the working class to establish “factory committees, organs of dual power at the point of production, and from there setting up workers militias, drawing in the urban poor and unemployed, for self-defense against the state’s thugs” (supplement to Le Bolchévik, 4 February 2011 [see “Tunisia: Dictator Flees, Protests Continue,” WV No. 973, 4 February 2011]). However, we also raised the call for a revolutionary constituent assembly in the immediate aftermath of Ben Ali’s removal, as well as in Egypt shortly thereafter. In examining this question more deeply, we in the International Communist League have changed our position. While we have called for a constituent assembly numerous times in the past in other circumstances, as did our forebears in the Trotskyist movement (including Trotsky himself), we felt it necessary to question whether, in light of historical experience, this call is valid or principled from the standpoint of the proletarian revolution. A resolution recently adopted by the International Executive Committee of the ICL pointed out:
“While the Constituent Assembly played a progressive role in the great French bourgeois revolution of 1789, historical experience since has demonstrated that this ceased to be the case thereafter. Beginning with the revolutions of 1848, in every situation where a constituent assembly or similar bourgeois legislative body was convened in the context of a proletarian insurgency its aim was to rally the forces of counterrevolution against the proletariat and to liquidate proletarian power. This was evident in the Paris Commune of 1871, the October Revolution of 1917 and the German Revolution of 1918-19. Though never subsequently codified by the CI [Communist International] as a general statement of principle, the thrust of the Bolsheviks under Lenin and Trotsky’s leadership following the October Revolution was to treat the constituent assembly as a counterrevolutionary agency.”
The ICL has thus rejected on principle the call for a constituent assembly. We have insisted in our propaganda on Tunisia on the need to address the burning democratic demands of the masses after decades of dictatorial rule, as a lever to mobilize the working class and the oppressed behind it for socialist revolution. Such demands include freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, a real separation of church and state, etc. However, the call for a constituent assembly is not a democratic demand but a call for a capitalist government. Our rejection of such a call reflects both the historical experience of the proletariat and the extension of the Marxist program over the years. (This is a different question than that of running candidates in such elections with the aim of using the electoral campaign, as well as parliamentary seats if elected, as a platform to call on the workers to organize as a class for itself—that is, to struggle for their own class rule.)
Marx drew on the experience of the revolutions of 1848, in which the European bourgeoisies made common cause with the forces of aristocratic reaction, to propound the “revolution in permanence.” Pointing to the treachery of the democratic petty bourgeoisie, Marx argued that the task was to “make the revolution permanent, until all more or less possessing classes have been forced out of their position of dominance, the proletariat has conquered state power” and the revolution spread internationally (“Address of the Central Authority to the Communist League,” March 1850). Trotsky extended this understanding to tsarist Russia in his writings of 1904-06 and then, at the time of the Second Chinese Revolution, generalized the program of permanent revolution to countries of combined and uneven development globally. Our understanding of the reactionary character of the bourgeoisie, in the semicolonial countries as well as the advanced capitalist states, means that there can be no revolutionary bourgeois parliament. The call for a constituent assembly consequently runs counter to the permanent revolution.
In the revolt in Tunisia, the anger of the masses, as well as their hopes for real change, were channeled into calls for elections that would simply change the names and faces of the capitalist oppressors. In fact, from its inception, the Tunisian bourgeoisie has always wrapped its rule in the envelope of a (bourgeois) constitution. That has been the case from the demand for a constitution against the colonial-feudalist beylicat [Tunisian monarchy prior to independence] to the constitution later crafted by Habib Bourguiba, the strongman of the early years of the Tunisian republic, and to the recent efforts to prevent a proletarian upheaval. The historic party of the Tunisian bourgeoisie was long called Neo-Destour (“destour” means “constitution” in Arabic). The full name of the party was the “New Tunisian Constitutional Liberal Party”; it was renamed the “Destourian Socialist Party” in 1964. Years later, Ben Ali renamed it…the “Democratic-Constitutional Rally.”
A workers revolution in Tunisia, tearing state power from the capitalist class in an Arab country, would have tremendous impact throughout the region. It would immediately reverberate in the imperialist countries, notably in France, where several million people of North African origin live, concentrated in the proletariat and the most oppressed layers of the population. They constitute a living bridge for socialist revolution on both sides of the Mediterranean. To fight for the overthrow of the capitalist order, the working class needs a proletarian revolutionary party, which can be built only in an intransigent struggle against all bourgeois forces. We fight to reforge the Fourth International founded by Trotsky on the basis of the legacy of the October Revolution.
Markin comment on this article:
I admit that I was taken aback a little while reading this article concerning the ICL line change proposed for countries, mainly third-world countries, especially those which have just come out of popular movements against dictatorial regimes, around the call for revolutionary constituent assemblies. I have always been somewhat queasy about the simple call for constituent assemblies in these cases because it seemed too similar to the French revolutionary model that has long ago had its day. But as a transitional slogan, and as an affirmation of Leon Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution for more economically backward countries, it made more programmatic sense.
Some of the argumentation for the line change does make sense (the perfidy of the bourgeoisies in secondary, semi-colonial and colonial countries, as noted even in Marx’s time, popular frontism, two-stage revolution, etc.) but I am still left with an odd feeling that calling (as I have in my headline for this post) a workers republic in some of these places (although not Tunisia) like Afghanistan, Nepal and Tibet just seems too far out to be programmatically sound. This one is harder to figure out that the question of a revolutionary attitude to the running for executive offices of the bourgeois state. Another long held position of the common orthodox Trotskyist movement. More, much more later.
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Workers Vanguard No. 993
6 January 2012
Tunisian Elections: Victory for Islamic Reactionaries-Workers Must Fight for Their Own Class Rule!-Fight For A Workers Government!
The following article is translated from Le Bolchévik No. 198 (December 2011), newspaper of our comrades of the Ligue Trotskyste de France.
The popular revolt in Tunisia that ousted hated despot Ben Ali last January resulted in the election of a new constituent assembly on October 23. With the blessing of the imperialists, the “modernist” Islamists of the Ennahda party took 89 of the 217 seats in the new assembly, which is now tasked with the job of running the country for the next year as well as drafting a new constitution. Ennahda, the secular Congress for the Republic (CPR), a bourgeois party, and Ettakatol (Democratic Forum for Labor and Freedom), which is affiliated with the Second International, have formed a coalition to run the country. However, the Islamists have the real power in the coalition. Ennahda’s Number Two, Hamadi Jebali, was named prime minister on December 14, and his party got most of the key ministerial posts, notably that of the police, as well as the ministry of mosques.
The ex-Stalinist Communist Workers Party of Tunisia (PCOT), which won only three seats in the assembly, was apparently also invited to join the new government but declined, asserting that “remaining outside the government is the best choice for the PCOT” (La Presse de Tunisie, 19 November 2011). As we explained in our articles earlier this year, while the organized working class played a quite significant role in the popular uprising that led to the toppling of the hated dictator Ben Ali, it remained politically subordinated to the bourgeoisie. The main trade-union federation, the General Union of Tunisian Workers (UGTT), which is led by longtime Ben Ali toady Abdesselem Jerad, has since last January engaged in various political blocs, subordinating itself to bourgeois forces, including the Islamic reactionaries of Ennahda, in a so-called “National Council to Safeguard the Revolution,” which was formed on February 11. Jerad & Co. thus helped build the credibility of Ennahda, which then won the election. As we wrote back in March, “By thus chaining the workers to their class enemy, the trade-union bureaucrats and reformists are paving the way to a bloody defeat for the workers and the oppressed. It is necessary to break with class collaboration!” (Le Bolchévik No. 195, March 2011).
Indicative of the increasing disillusionment among the Tunisian masses over the perspectives offered by the first “democratic” elections in the history of the country, the rate of abstention was 46 percent on average and was especially high in the rural and less industrialized areas of the country. Tunisia has long been known as the least religious and most secular country in the region. The Ennahda victory thus does not as such indicate a strong turn toward political Islam, given that less than one-quarter of the potential voters cast ballots for its slates. However, this victory is ominous.
Immediately following the election, Ennahda leader Rached Ghannouchi pledged to maintain a secular course, arguing that his party has no interest in establishing sharia (Islamic) law or alienating other parties in the coalition government. Indeed, Ghannouchi chose to govern in alliance with secular parties rather than with the populist Al-Aridah Chaabia (“People’s Petition for Liberty, Justice and Development”), a bourgeois party led by a London businessman who had been an Ennahda activist until 1992 and reportedly forged close ties with the Ben Ali regime.
However, while Rached Ghannouchi may promise, as he did in his first post-election speech, that “Tunisia is for everyone,” attacks on basic rights are sure to be on the rise. On December 3, a band of about 1,000 Islamic reactionaries attacked secular demonstrators with stones in front of the parliament, wounding many people. Even before the elections, Ennahda supporters began to flex their muscles. Two of the larger attacks were against films perceived as being anti-Islam. In June, ultra-conservative Salafist Muslims attacked a showing of the film Neither Allah, Nor Master! as promoting secularism and issued death threats against filmmaker Nadia El Fani. In October, thousands of Islamists demonstrated at the headquarters of a local television station and set it on fire to protest against its showing of Persepolis, an animated film that denounces the reactionary impact of the 1979 “Islamic revolution” in Iran and that the protesters claimed to be insulting to Islam.
While Ennahda professed to denounce the violence of the protests, Rached Ghannouchi announced his support of “the right of the Tunisian people to defend its religion” (l’Humanité, 19 October 2011). Now it is the manager of the TV station that showed Persepolis who is being prosecuted for “violating sacred values and moral standards and disturbing public order,” and he faces up to three years in prison (Le Monde, 17 November 2011). Drop the charges!
In the weeks following the elections, Ennahda has above all sought to reassure the Tunisian bourgeoisie and Western imperialism of its commitment to improving the state of the Tunisian economy. One of its main concerns is to bolster the flagging tourist industry, vowing to continue to allow liquor and bikinis at the country’s beach resorts (while simultaneously hinting that hotels should also offer liquor-free bookings for Muslims). More specifically, just a few short days after the elections, Ennahda met with Tunisian stock market representatives to discuss the implementation of its program of “developing and encouraging private sector initiatives while strengthening the market economy by improving the business environment so that companies can more easily access financial markets, as well encouraging direct and portfolio investment by foreign investors” (La Presse Tunisienne, 27 October 2011). In other words, privatization, austerity and more grinding poverty for the working masses.
For Working-Class Independence
There has indeed been no improvement in the desperate material conditions that led Mohamed Bouazizi, a young street vendor of vegetables, to set himself on fire in Sidi Bouzid in December 2010, sparking the countrywide revolt that overthrew Ben Ali. A general wage increase of 4.7 percent was largely eaten up by consumer inflation, which hit an annual rate of 4.5 percent in October. Unemployment, which hits young people the hardest, has increased by more than a third since the beginning of 2011, and the number of unemployed could reach one million by the end of 2011. Conditions have been made even worse by the return of tens of thousands of Tunisians who had been working in Libya.
Strikes, sit-ins and workplace blockages have continued unabated since January 2011 in just about every sector of the economy: in telecommunications, transportation, education, the phosphate industry, oil, aviation and tourism, as well involving doctors, judges, postal workers, market vendors, brewery workers—the list goes on. To cite just one example, the Financial Times (15 August 2011) reported that in July there had been a total of 184 protest roadblocks across Tunisia, up from 103 in June, and that 156 protests had blocked access to industrial sites, including oil companies, up from 78 in June. The “post-revolutionary” police have continued to brutally suppress these protests with the help of the army. Thabet Belkacem, a 14-year-old youth, was killed on July 16 by the cops in Sidi Bouzid. Again on November 23 in Kasserine, cops firing their guns in the air attacked several thousand demonstrators with tear gas (tunistribune.com, 24 November 2011).
There was a slight dip in the number of strikes in the month before the elections, as the UGTT obscenely called on the working class to avoid all strikes in the weeks leading up to the elections—a call that was only partially heeded. Having historically engaged in militant class struggle, the UGTT finally succumbed to years of repression under Ben Ali; many of its top leaders even joined the leadership of his Democratic-Constitutional Rally (RCD) party. Today the UGTT claims to represent more than half a million members.
The Tunisian working class remains chained to its own bourgeoisie not only by the trade-union bureaucracy but also by the reformist left groups, many of which were banned or repressed by the Ben Ali regime. These include the ex-Stalinist PCOT and the predecessors of the League of the Workers Left (LGO), which has links with the New Anti-Capitalist Party of Olivier Besancenot in France. Ettajdid (the former Communist Party) ran in the elections as part of the “Modernist Democratic Pole” slate, which won five seats. While its campaign centered on warning against the dangers of the Islamists, and Ennahda in particular, Ettajdid secretary general Ahmed Ibrahim told Reuters (12 October 2011) that differences with Ennahda “should not prevent coexistence with it.... Democracy means coexistence with everyone, without exception, including Ennahda.” Indeed, the fact that the electoral campaign was dominated by the polarization between “secular” and Islamist forces helped mask the utter failure of the workers movement to pose the real question: bourgeois rule (whether secular or not) or workers rule. The Tunisian proletariat must become a class for itself, fighting for power in its own name; and for this they need a revolutionary Leninist party.
As for the LGO, it tried to build its own class-collaborationist alliance (dubbed an “anti-liberal and anti-imperialist front”) with component parts of the “January 14 Front,” a popular front including bourgeois formations such as self-proclaimed Nasserist or Ba’athist groups that was set up following Ben Ali’s ouster. Failing that, and having also failed to obtain its full legalization, the LGO issued a statement on October 9 calling for a boycott of the elections and complaining of “the absence of the necessary conditions for a democratic election” (Tout est à nous! Web site, 22 September and 22 October 2011).
Meanwhile, the PCOT, in its post-election declaration, dedicated itself to fighting “for the installation of a truly democratic, patriotic and popular change” (Tout est à nous!, 3 November 2011). Despite the occasional rhetoric about “revolution,” none of these reformists goes beyond a struggle for “democracy”—that is, they hold to a program explicitly limited to a capitalist framework.
Women’s Rights Under Threat
Compared to the rest of the region, Tunisia boasts relatively broad rights for women, most of them gained under President Bourguiba immediately following independence of Tunisia from France in 1956. These rights were specified in a Code of Personal Status (CPS), which, as we wrote more than two decades ago, represents “an awkward, fragile and reversible compromise between Islamic law and bourgeois ‘modernity’” (Le Bolchévik No. 79, January 1988). That explains why Ennahda considers the code acceptable. It includes formal equality under the law; polygamy is illegal and civil law governs divorce. Abortion rights exist and contraception is available. However, these are not free, which restricts their availability to workers and the poorer layers of society. In addition, single women are still subordinate to their fathers under the law, arranged marriages are frequent and a man must pay a dowry for his future wife. Magic rituals called the tasfih are performed to supposedly protect the virginity of pubescent girls, while hymenoplasty (surgical restoration of the hymen to give the appearance of virginity) is performed among petty-bourgeois layers of society. Sexual harassment is commonplace, and women are very much discriminated against in inheritance laws.
In the recent election, parties were not allowed to run unless half their lists were made up of women. The number of women actually elected was just 49 out of the 217 seats—including 42 for Ennahda, many of whom are veiled women who believe that women should live according to their view of sharia law. The parity clause helped Ennahda present itself as pro-woman. As Marxists, we are opposed to the state dictating whom a political party, including a revolutionary party, is allowed to put forward, whether male or female, “citizen” or “foreigner.”
Women comprise nearly 30 percent of the country’s workforce, including among the working class (one-third of UGTT members are women). In addition, the majority of university students are women, and among the petty bourgeoisie 31 percent of lawyers, 40 percent of college professors and 42 percent of doctors are women. This layer of highly qualified petty-bourgeois professional women has generated numerous women’s rights groups acting largely as watchdogs for the maintenance of the CPS. Many of these women are now understandably worried about what the electoral victory of Ennahda will mean for women’s rights.
Rached Ghannouchi has been careful to insist that Ennahda intends to safeguard the rights of women that currently exist under Tunisian law, and he maintains that women will not be forced to wear the veil. He regularly cites Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) as his model for the future of Tunisia. But as our German comrades wrote following the AKP’s reelection in 2007 (see WV No. 916, 6 June 2008):
“New constitutional amendments were announced scrapping the longstanding ban on the headscarf in colleges and public institutions and replacing a clause in the current constitution that obliges the government to ‘ensure equality for both men and women’ with one that describes women as a ‘vulnerable group in need of special protection.’ Meanwhile, the emboldened forces of Islamic reaction are starting to change the political and social landscape of Turkey, including in cities like Istanbul. Some government offices are organizing work schedules according to prayer times, and boys and girls are being separated in high schools, a wholly reactionary measure.… Today, some form of veiling is worn by more than 60 percent of Turkish women.”
Today, some four years later, conditions are even worse: Turkey has one of the worst records in Europe concerning widespread violence against women (Economist, 12 May 2011).
We are opposed to the veil, no matter what its form, as both a symbol and instrument of women’s oppression. At the same time, we are equally opposed to state bans or restrictions on it. As Marxists, we stand for the separation of religion and state and call for free, secular education for all. But we also recognize that Islamic fundamentalists will use any easing of the ban on the veil to pressure women to cover themselves. This is exactly what is happening now in Tunisia: there are reports that female teachers not wearing the veil have been heckled to prevent them from giving their class, have had their classes boycotted and have even been physically attacked. Women working in stores are approached by men telling them that they should be at home and not working. At Gabès University in the southeast of the country, Salafists succeeded in having the cafeteria divided into separate areas for men and for women. An article in La Presse de Tunisie (7 November 2011) noted that “harassment of women in the street, at the university and in certain workplaces began, in fact, as early as last February, some weeks after the revolution of liberty and dignity. But this harassment has intensified since the October 23 election that gave Ennahda a relative majority in the constituent assembly.”
Ennahda declares that it has nothing to do with these attacks on women’s rights, but its spokesmen have been widely criticized for saying different things to different audiences. One of the most prominent Ennahda representatives during the election campaign was one Souad Abderrahim, a 47-year-old businesswoman and pharmacist who does not wear the veil and who is often described as embodying the “glamour” of the modern Tunisian woman. During a radio debate, Abderrahim announced that unmarried women who have children are “a disgrace” and “should not expect a legal framework that protects their rights.” She disgustingly added that “ethically, they have no right to exist” (Libération, 10 November 2011).
For Abderrahim and her ilk, only married women within the confines of the family have the “right to exist” and to have children. This goes to the very heart of women’s oppression, which is rooted in class society and in the repressive institution of the family. The family is essential to capitalist society. It cannot simply be abolished. Rather, the social functions that it fulfills, such as housework, child rearing, preparation of meals, etc., must be replaced by social institutions. But the perspective of replacing the family requires a tremendous leap in social development, which can be achieved only through sweeping away capitalist rule on a global basis and replacing it with a rational, democratically planned economy. Because the oppression of women is integral to capitalist property relations and is ideologically bolstered by religion, women’s oppression cannot be eradicated in capitalist society. At the same time, without a struggle to end women’s oppression, which reinforces all forms of social backwardness, there will be no proletarian revolution.
For Permanent Revolution in Tunisia
Tunisia is a neocolonial country whose bourgeoisie, including after the fall of Ben Ali, is tied by a million threads to world imperialism. France, the former colonial ruler, continues to benefit from the deep oppression of Tunisia’s masses. Indeed, the subordination of Tunisia to imperialism serves to ensure the brutal exploitation and oppression of its people. In order to win real national and social liberation, the proletariat must be mobilized against both the imperialists and the domestic bourgeoisie, the deadly enemies of Tunisia’s workers and oppressed.
In countries of belated capitalist development like Tunisia, the inherent weakness of the national bourgeoisie ties it so strongly to imperialism that even the most elementary democratic tasks, such as legal equality for women, complete separation of religion and state and agrarian revolution to give land to the peasants, cannot be achieved without the overthrow of the capitalist order. Moreover, the consolidation of proletarian rule requires its international extension to the imperialist centers, particularly France, the former colonial oppressor. This is at bottom what Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution is all about.
In an October 29 statement (La Forge, November 2011), the PCOT whined that the dismal results of the left in the recent elections were due to the role of money in the form of corruption, vote-buying and partiality of the mass media, as well as voting instructions given in the mosques. The truth is that bourgeois elections serve to bolster bourgeois rule; they cannot actually express the will of the masses, particularly in a period of social turmoil and upheaval. This was once again proven in a spectacular fashion in the Tunisian elections.
The call for a constituent assembly was a popular demand following the overthrow of the Ben Ali regime. It was argued that this was the way that democratic demands could be addressed. In fact, only proletarian power can satisfy these demands. We insisted in our propaganda on the need for the working class to establish “factory committees, organs of dual power at the point of production, and from there setting up workers militias, drawing in the urban poor and unemployed, for self-defense against the state’s thugs” (supplement to Le Bolchévik, 4 February 2011 [see “Tunisia: Dictator Flees, Protests Continue,” WV No. 973, 4 February 2011]). However, we also raised the call for a revolutionary constituent assembly in the immediate aftermath of Ben Ali’s removal, as well as in Egypt shortly thereafter. In examining this question more deeply, we in the International Communist League have changed our position. While we have called for a constituent assembly numerous times in the past in other circumstances, as did our forebears in the Trotskyist movement (including Trotsky himself), we felt it necessary to question whether, in light of historical experience, this call is valid or principled from the standpoint of the proletarian revolution. A resolution recently adopted by the International Executive Committee of the ICL pointed out:
“While the Constituent Assembly played a progressive role in the great French bourgeois revolution of 1789, historical experience since has demonstrated that this ceased to be the case thereafter. Beginning with the revolutions of 1848, in every situation where a constituent assembly or similar bourgeois legislative body was convened in the context of a proletarian insurgency its aim was to rally the forces of counterrevolution against the proletariat and to liquidate proletarian power. This was evident in the Paris Commune of 1871, the October Revolution of 1917 and the German Revolution of 1918-19. Though never subsequently codified by the CI [Communist International] as a general statement of principle, the thrust of the Bolsheviks under Lenin and Trotsky’s leadership following the October Revolution was to treat the constituent assembly as a counterrevolutionary agency.”
The ICL has thus rejected on principle the call for a constituent assembly. We have insisted in our propaganda on Tunisia on the need to address the burning democratic demands of the masses after decades of dictatorial rule, as a lever to mobilize the working class and the oppressed behind it for socialist revolution. Such demands include freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, a real separation of church and state, etc. However, the call for a constituent assembly is not a democratic demand but a call for a capitalist government. Our rejection of such a call reflects both the historical experience of the proletariat and the extension of the Marxist program over the years. (This is a different question than that of running candidates in such elections with the aim of using the electoral campaign, as well as parliamentary seats if elected, as a platform to call on the workers to organize as a class for itself—that is, to struggle for their own class rule.)
Marx drew on the experience of the revolutions of 1848, in which the European bourgeoisies made common cause with the forces of aristocratic reaction, to propound the “revolution in permanence.” Pointing to the treachery of the democratic petty bourgeoisie, Marx argued that the task was to “make the revolution permanent, until all more or less possessing classes have been forced out of their position of dominance, the proletariat has conquered state power” and the revolution spread internationally (“Address of the Central Authority to the Communist League,” March 1850). Trotsky extended this understanding to tsarist Russia in his writings of 1904-06 and then, at the time of the Second Chinese Revolution, generalized the program of permanent revolution to countries of combined and uneven development globally. Our understanding of the reactionary character of the bourgeoisie, in the semicolonial countries as well as the advanced capitalist states, means that there can be no revolutionary bourgeois parliament. The call for a constituent assembly consequently runs counter to the permanent revolution.
In the revolt in Tunisia, the anger of the masses, as well as their hopes for real change, were channeled into calls for elections that would simply change the names and faces of the capitalist oppressors. In fact, from its inception, the Tunisian bourgeoisie has always wrapped its rule in the envelope of a (bourgeois) constitution. That has been the case from the demand for a constitution against the colonial-feudalist beylicat [Tunisian monarchy prior to independence] to the constitution later crafted by Habib Bourguiba, the strongman of the early years of the Tunisian republic, and to the recent efforts to prevent a proletarian upheaval. The historic party of the Tunisian bourgeoisie was long called Neo-Destour (“destour” means “constitution” in Arabic). The full name of the party was the “New Tunisian Constitutional Liberal Party”; it was renamed the “Destourian Socialist Party” in 1964. Years later, Ben Ali renamed it…the “Democratic-Constitutional Rally.”
A workers revolution in Tunisia, tearing state power from the capitalist class in an Arab country, would have tremendous impact throughout the region. It would immediately reverberate in the imperialist countries, notably in France, where several million people of North African origin live, concentrated in the proletariat and the most oppressed layers of the population. They constitute a living bridge for socialist revolution on both sides of the Mediterranean. To fight for the overthrow of the capitalist order, the working class needs a proletarian revolutionary party, which can be built only in an intransigent struggle against all bourgeois forces. We fight to reforge the Fourth International founded by Trotsky on the basis of the legacy of the October Revolution.
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Mumia Abu-Jamal Is Innocent—Free Him Now!-Drive to Execute Mumia Halted- Mumia Must Not Die In Prison!
Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League website.
Markin comment on this article:
I wish to emphasize the point made in the article (bold-faced below) about “not forgetting” our class-war prisoners a situation highlighted today by Mumia’s case. Once the death penalty is not hanging over the heads of our brothers and sister whole layers of former sympathizers head for the hills (or the next radical or liberal chic cause). That has been transparently the case with Ruchell Macgee, Angela’s Davis’ co-defendant around the George Jackson events back in the early 1970s, who has languished in jail for over thirty years. (The American Communist Party played its usual despicable role purposefully putting his case on the “back–burner” to highlight the more glamorous and palatable Davis case.) The same is true for George Jackson‘s San Quentin Six comrade, Hugo Pinell, who has languished in the California prisons of over forty years. Enough. Free all our class-war prisoners! They must not die in prison!
From James Cannon:
“The workers who had rallied to Mooney and Billings were soothed by the sinister argument that imprisonment for life was, in any event, better than execution. They were told that we would have to be satisfied for the while with one victory, and that the final release of the two fighters would be won later. But after ten years there remain only a few who still keep alive the memory of these buried men and who are pledged to continue the work for their freedom.”
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Workers Vanguard No. 993
6 January 2012
Mumia Abu-Jamal Is Innocent—Free Him Now!-Drive to Execute Mumia Halted
After 29 years and 363 days, Mumia Abu-Jamal no longer lives under the executioner’s shadow. On December 7, Philadelphia district attorney Seth Williams announced that his office was dropping efforts to execute America’s foremost class-war prisoner. While this brings to an end a legal lynching campaign that began with Mumia’s arrest and false conviction for the 1981 killing of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner, Mumia remains condemned to spend the rest of his life in prison with no chance of parole, despite overwhelming evidence of his innocence.
In a recent letter to the Partisan Defense Committee, Mumia aptly characterized his new home at the Mahanoy Correctional Institution in Frackville, PA, as “‘slow’ Death Row.” A Black Panther Party leader in his youth and later an award-winning journalist, Mumia has spent over 40 years fighting for the oppressed. He must not be forgotten and left to rot in prison hell! Trade unionists, radical youth and fighters for black rights must demand: Freedom now for Mumia Abu-Jamal!
The state forces that have tried for decades to silence this powerful voice for the oppressed are certainly not going to forget him. Appearing with Williams when he made his announcement were prosecutors who helped railroad Mumia to death row, officials of the Fraternal Order of Police (F.O.P.), long the spearhead of the drive to execute him, and F.O.P. mouthpiece Maureen Faulkner, the slain policeman’s widow. Spewing the venomous racism that has motivated the persecution of Mumia, Faulkner described him as a “seething animal” and ranted, “I am heartened by the thought that he will finally be taken from the protected cloister he has been living in all these years and begin living among his own kind; the thugs and common criminals that infest our prisons.” This is the voice of the cops who stop and throw black youth against the wall for “walking while black,” who have consigned generations of young blacks and Latinos to prison hell in the “war on drugs,” who carry out street executions with impunity.
For Mumia, being “cloistered” on death row the past 30 years has meant confinement almost 24 hours a day in an eight-by-twelve-foot cell, severe limits on phone calls, separation from visitors by thick Plexiglas and, until recently, being manacled during visits. Mumia has been unable to embrace his wife Wadiya or bounce grandchildren on his knee. In 1985, Mumia learned that the Philly cops and the Feds, on orders from black Democratic mayor Wilson Goode, firebombed the Osage Avenue home of his comrades in the predominantly black MOVE back-to-nature commune, killing eleven people, including five children. A little over a decade later, Mumia saw his son Jamal Hart railroaded to prison for 15 years by the Clinton administration on bogus gun-possession charges—retaliation for Hart’s prominent activism on his father’s behalf. Until Jamal Hart’s release last year, prison regs even prohibited Mumia and his son from corresponding with one another.
As described in the Partisan Defense Committee statement printed below, Mumia is an innocent man who was subjected to a racist and political frame-up. For three decades, police, prosecutors and government officials of both the Democratic and Republican parties have been screaming for Mumia’s head. From the right-wing tabloids to the Philadelphia Inquirer and New York Times, newsrooms across the country have treated the prosecution’s lying account of Faulkner’s killing as gospel.
Court after court has refused to even consider the massive amount of evidence proving Mumia’s innocence. In 2001, Mumia’s attorneys presented in state and federal courts the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that “I was hired, along with another guy, and paid to shoot and kill Faulkner. I had heard that Faulkner was a problem for the mob and corrupt policemen because he interfered with the graft and payoffs made to allow illegal activity including prostitution, gambling, drugs without prosecution in the center city area.” At the time of Faulkner’s killing, the Philadelphia police were under three corruption investigations by the Feds, encompassing virtually the entire chain of command that oversaw the “investigation” of Faulkner’s death.
First taking up Mumia’s defense in 1987, the PDC and the Spartacist League made his case known to a wide range of death penalty abolitionists, student groups, black activists and the labor movement through publicity and protest. From the beginning, we have fought for the understanding that the power of labor must be brought to bear to win Mumia’s freedom. Indeed, it was an outpouring of protest internationally including trade unionists that helped win a stay of execution for Mumia in August 1995.
Mumia had become a central focus of the fight to abolish the racist death penalty. His black skin and meager means are the demographic of most of those selected for death row. At the same time, Mumia’s radical political activism incensed the bourgeoisie. And with Faulkner’s shooting, the cops and prosecutors saw the opportunity to place Mumia in the company of executed labor militants and radicals—from the Haymarket martyrs in 1887 to Joe Hill and Sacco and Vanzetti early last century.
As Marxists, we oppose the barbaric institution of capital punishment on principle—for the guilty as well as the innocent. The death penalty is the ultimate sanction of a “justice” system that is not only stacked against workers and the poor but also, in a society founded on slavery and maintained on a bedrock of black oppression, racist to its core. The manifest unfairness of Mumia’s trial, the racist and political motivation for his conviction and sentence, the outrageously biased court proceedings—all provided a focus for death penalty abolitionists. Most compelling and magnetic, however, was the voice of the man known as the “voice of the voiceless.” Mumia’s incisive, compassionate and compelling commentaries from death row, which appeared in black press across the country, inspired thousands upon thousands to demand that such a man not be executed. Mumia’s writings spoke as well to the humanity of those he encountered behind prison walls and on death row.
While placing no faith in the rigged “justice” of the capitalist courts, we have also advocated pursuing all possible legal proceedings on Mumia’s behalf. The legal issue that removed Mumia from death row was the unconstitutional jury instructions issued at his 1982 trial, which did not allow jurors to freely consider mitigating circumstances weighing against a death sentence. This issue was first raised in a 1990 legal memo by PDC attorney Jonathan Piper to Steven Hawkins of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, then part of the legal team. This was the basis of a 2001 decision by Judge William Yohn, who overturned Mumia’s death sentence while upholding his frame-up conviction. After the Supreme Court in October let stand Yohn’s ruling, which mandated a new sentencing hearing, the D.A.’s office called a halt to the execution drive.
It has been many years since thousands took to the streets for Mumia. Now, as the PDC declared in its December 10 statement, “the state authorities hope with the latest decision that Mumia’s cause will be forgotten and that he will rot in prison hell until he dies. This must not be Mumia’s fate.” In 1927, James P. Cannon, the first national secretary of the International Labor Defense, warned of the lessons of the cases of Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, labor leaders falsely accused of murder in 1916. In 1918, Mooney’s death sentence was commuted to life in prison, the same sentence as Billings’. Cannon wrote:
“The workers who had rallied to Mooney and Billings were soothed by the sinister argument that imprisonment for life was, in any event, better than execution. They were told that we would have to be satisfied for the while with one victory, and that the final release of the two fighters would be won later. But after ten years there remain only a few who still keep alive the memory of these buried men and who are pledged to continue the work for their freedom.”
—Labor Defender, July 1927
The frame-up of Mumia Abu-Jamal was not some aberration in American “justice” but the workings of a legal system that defends the rule and profits of the capitalist class through repression of the working class and oppressed minorities. Following the Philly D.A.’s decision, the New York Times (12 December 2011) ran an editorial demanding that the state of Pennsylvania now move to abolish its death penalty. The liberals at the Times have long opposed capital punishment while favoring life without parole as a “humane”—and more frugal—alternative. While the editorial was titled “The Abu-Jamal Case,” it pointedly said nothing about Mumia’s case beyond the issue of improper jury instructions. The hard truth of Mumia’s case—the frame-up of and death sentence for an innocent black man who stood out as an eloquent opponent of racist U.S. imperialism—cuts too close to the bone of what the capitalist state is all about.
For the liberals, removing Mumia from the sanction of death vindicates their belief in the ideal of American justice. But in no way can this be seen as just. In continuing to publicize Mumia’s case and pursue the fight for his freedom, we seek to imbue the multiracial working class with the understanding that it must destroy the monstrous, racist machinery of capitalist repression root and branch and erect in its place a workers state, in which those who labor rule.
Markin comment on this article:
I wish to emphasize the point made in the article (bold-faced below) about “not forgetting” our class-war prisoners a situation highlighted today by Mumia’s case. Once the death penalty is not hanging over the heads of our brothers and sister whole layers of former sympathizers head for the hills (or the next radical or liberal chic cause). That has been transparently the case with Ruchell Macgee, Angela’s Davis’ co-defendant around the George Jackson events back in the early 1970s, who has languished in jail for over thirty years. (The American Communist Party played its usual despicable role purposefully putting his case on the “back–burner” to highlight the more glamorous and palatable Davis case.) The same is true for George Jackson‘s San Quentin Six comrade, Hugo Pinell, who has languished in the California prisons of over forty years. Enough. Free all our class-war prisoners! They must not die in prison!
From James Cannon:
“The workers who had rallied to Mooney and Billings were soothed by the sinister argument that imprisonment for life was, in any event, better than execution. They were told that we would have to be satisfied for the while with one victory, and that the final release of the two fighters would be won later. But after ten years there remain only a few who still keep alive the memory of these buried men and who are pledged to continue the work for their freedom.”
*******
Workers Vanguard No. 993
6 January 2012
Mumia Abu-Jamal Is Innocent—Free Him Now!-Drive to Execute Mumia Halted
After 29 years and 363 days, Mumia Abu-Jamal no longer lives under the executioner’s shadow. On December 7, Philadelphia district attorney Seth Williams announced that his office was dropping efforts to execute America’s foremost class-war prisoner. While this brings to an end a legal lynching campaign that began with Mumia’s arrest and false conviction for the 1981 killing of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner, Mumia remains condemned to spend the rest of his life in prison with no chance of parole, despite overwhelming evidence of his innocence.
In a recent letter to the Partisan Defense Committee, Mumia aptly characterized his new home at the Mahanoy Correctional Institution in Frackville, PA, as “‘slow’ Death Row.” A Black Panther Party leader in his youth and later an award-winning journalist, Mumia has spent over 40 years fighting for the oppressed. He must not be forgotten and left to rot in prison hell! Trade unionists, radical youth and fighters for black rights must demand: Freedom now for Mumia Abu-Jamal!
The state forces that have tried for decades to silence this powerful voice for the oppressed are certainly not going to forget him. Appearing with Williams when he made his announcement were prosecutors who helped railroad Mumia to death row, officials of the Fraternal Order of Police (F.O.P.), long the spearhead of the drive to execute him, and F.O.P. mouthpiece Maureen Faulkner, the slain policeman’s widow. Spewing the venomous racism that has motivated the persecution of Mumia, Faulkner described him as a “seething animal” and ranted, “I am heartened by the thought that he will finally be taken from the protected cloister he has been living in all these years and begin living among his own kind; the thugs and common criminals that infest our prisons.” This is the voice of the cops who stop and throw black youth against the wall for “walking while black,” who have consigned generations of young blacks and Latinos to prison hell in the “war on drugs,” who carry out street executions with impunity.
For Mumia, being “cloistered” on death row the past 30 years has meant confinement almost 24 hours a day in an eight-by-twelve-foot cell, severe limits on phone calls, separation from visitors by thick Plexiglas and, until recently, being manacled during visits. Mumia has been unable to embrace his wife Wadiya or bounce grandchildren on his knee. In 1985, Mumia learned that the Philly cops and the Feds, on orders from black Democratic mayor Wilson Goode, firebombed the Osage Avenue home of his comrades in the predominantly black MOVE back-to-nature commune, killing eleven people, including five children. A little over a decade later, Mumia saw his son Jamal Hart railroaded to prison for 15 years by the Clinton administration on bogus gun-possession charges—retaliation for Hart’s prominent activism on his father’s behalf. Until Jamal Hart’s release last year, prison regs even prohibited Mumia and his son from corresponding with one another.
As described in the Partisan Defense Committee statement printed below, Mumia is an innocent man who was subjected to a racist and political frame-up. For three decades, police, prosecutors and government officials of both the Democratic and Republican parties have been screaming for Mumia’s head. From the right-wing tabloids to the Philadelphia Inquirer and New York Times, newsrooms across the country have treated the prosecution’s lying account of Faulkner’s killing as gospel.
Court after court has refused to even consider the massive amount of evidence proving Mumia’s innocence. In 2001, Mumia’s attorneys presented in state and federal courts the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that “I was hired, along with another guy, and paid to shoot and kill Faulkner. I had heard that Faulkner was a problem for the mob and corrupt policemen because he interfered with the graft and payoffs made to allow illegal activity including prostitution, gambling, drugs without prosecution in the center city area.” At the time of Faulkner’s killing, the Philadelphia police were under three corruption investigations by the Feds, encompassing virtually the entire chain of command that oversaw the “investigation” of Faulkner’s death.
First taking up Mumia’s defense in 1987, the PDC and the Spartacist League made his case known to a wide range of death penalty abolitionists, student groups, black activists and the labor movement through publicity and protest. From the beginning, we have fought for the understanding that the power of labor must be brought to bear to win Mumia’s freedom. Indeed, it was an outpouring of protest internationally including trade unionists that helped win a stay of execution for Mumia in August 1995.
Mumia had become a central focus of the fight to abolish the racist death penalty. His black skin and meager means are the demographic of most of those selected for death row. At the same time, Mumia’s radical political activism incensed the bourgeoisie. And with Faulkner’s shooting, the cops and prosecutors saw the opportunity to place Mumia in the company of executed labor militants and radicals—from the Haymarket martyrs in 1887 to Joe Hill and Sacco and Vanzetti early last century.
As Marxists, we oppose the barbaric institution of capital punishment on principle—for the guilty as well as the innocent. The death penalty is the ultimate sanction of a “justice” system that is not only stacked against workers and the poor but also, in a society founded on slavery and maintained on a bedrock of black oppression, racist to its core. The manifest unfairness of Mumia’s trial, the racist and political motivation for his conviction and sentence, the outrageously biased court proceedings—all provided a focus for death penalty abolitionists. Most compelling and magnetic, however, was the voice of the man known as the “voice of the voiceless.” Mumia’s incisive, compassionate and compelling commentaries from death row, which appeared in black press across the country, inspired thousands upon thousands to demand that such a man not be executed. Mumia’s writings spoke as well to the humanity of those he encountered behind prison walls and on death row.
While placing no faith in the rigged “justice” of the capitalist courts, we have also advocated pursuing all possible legal proceedings on Mumia’s behalf. The legal issue that removed Mumia from death row was the unconstitutional jury instructions issued at his 1982 trial, which did not allow jurors to freely consider mitigating circumstances weighing against a death sentence. This issue was first raised in a 1990 legal memo by PDC attorney Jonathan Piper to Steven Hawkins of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, then part of the legal team. This was the basis of a 2001 decision by Judge William Yohn, who overturned Mumia’s death sentence while upholding his frame-up conviction. After the Supreme Court in October let stand Yohn’s ruling, which mandated a new sentencing hearing, the D.A.’s office called a halt to the execution drive.
It has been many years since thousands took to the streets for Mumia. Now, as the PDC declared in its December 10 statement, “the state authorities hope with the latest decision that Mumia’s cause will be forgotten and that he will rot in prison hell until he dies. This must not be Mumia’s fate.” In 1927, James P. Cannon, the first national secretary of the International Labor Defense, warned of the lessons of the cases of Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, labor leaders falsely accused of murder in 1916. In 1918, Mooney’s death sentence was commuted to life in prison, the same sentence as Billings’. Cannon wrote:
“The workers who had rallied to Mooney and Billings were soothed by the sinister argument that imprisonment for life was, in any event, better than execution. They were told that we would have to be satisfied for the while with one victory, and that the final release of the two fighters would be won later. But after ten years there remain only a few who still keep alive the memory of these buried men and who are pledged to continue the work for their freedom.”
—Labor Defender, July 1927
The frame-up of Mumia Abu-Jamal was not some aberration in American “justice” but the workings of a legal system that defends the rule and profits of the capitalist class through repression of the working class and oppressed minorities. Following the Philly D.A.’s decision, the New York Times (12 December 2011) ran an editorial demanding that the state of Pennsylvania now move to abolish its death penalty. The liberals at the Times have long opposed capital punishment while favoring life without parole as a “humane”—and more frugal—alternative. While the editorial was titled “The Abu-Jamal Case,” it pointedly said nothing about Mumia’s case beyond the issue of improper jury instructions. The hard truth of Mumia’s case—the frame-up of and death sentence for an innocent black man who stood out as an eloquent opponent of racist U.S. imperialism—cuts too close to the bone of what the capitalist state is all about.
For the liberals, removing Mumia from the sanction of death vindicates their belief in the ideal of American justice. But in no way can this be seen as just. In continuing to publicize Mumia’s case and pursue the fight for his freedom, we seek to imbue the multiracial working class with the understanding that it must destroy the monstrous, racist machinery of capitalist repression root and branch and erect in its place a workers state, in which those who labor rule.
5th ANNUAL NEW ENGLAND SOCIALIST CONFERENCE-FEBRUARY I1th AND 12th(SATURDAY AND SUNDAY)
5th ANNUAL NEW ENGLAND SOCIALIST CONFERENCE-FEBRUARY I1th AND 12th(SATURDAY AND SUNDAY)
UMass-Boston
(JFK / UMass on Red Line, Exits 14-15 off 93) McCormack Building, 3rd Floor, Ryan Lounge
*FEATURED EVENTS*
DEBATE - SHOULD THE LEFT SUPPORT DEMOCRATS?
FORUM-INTERNATIONAL CRISIS AND THE FIGHT AGAINST THE 1%
WORKSHOPS INCLUDE:
Occupy and Labor
Dismantling Sexist Culture
Racism, Prisons and Police Brutality
Book Launch: Lessons of Wisconsin
For further details, see
Boston.SocialistAlternative.org as the event approaches.
Call: 774-454-9060
Email: Boston@SocialistAlternative.org
Visit: SocialistWorld.net or SocialistAlternative.org
-Labor Donated-
UMass-Boston
(JFK / UMass on Red Line, Exits 14-15 off 93) McCormack Building, 3rd Floor, Ryan Lounge
*FEATURED EVENTS*
DEBATE - SHOULD THE LEFT SUPPORT DEMOCRATS?
FORUM-INTERNATIONAL CRISIS AND THE FIGHT AGAINST THE 1%
WORKSHOPS INCLUDE:
Occupy and Labor
Dismantling Sexist Culture
Racism, Prisons and Police Brutality
Book Launch: Lessons of Wisconsin
For further details, see
Boston.SocialistAlternative.org as the event approaches.
Call: 774-454-9060
Email: Boston@SocialistAlternative.org
Visit: SocialistWorld.net or SocialistAlternative.org
-Labor Donated-
From #Ur-Occupied Boston (#Ur-Tomemonos Boston)-This Is Class War-We Say No More-Defend Our Unions! - Defend The Boston Commune! Take The Offensive!- A Five Point Program For Discussion
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.
******
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 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.
******
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!
On Martin Luther King Day-HONOR THE MEMORY OF ROBERT F. WILLIAMS-BLACK LIBERATION FIGHTER
Click on title to link to Wikipedia's entry for black liberation fighter Robert F. Williams. This is a classic case of a liberation fighter getting in the cross-hairs of the ruling class and paying the price. We will remember that hard lesson as we struggle for liberation. Thanks, Brother Williams.
******
Originally posted on the American Left History blog on February 23, 2007
COMMENTARY
FOR BLACK LIBERATION THROUGH THE FIGHT FOR SOCIALISM
In this space I have attempted to introduce the new generation of militants and others to some of the historic events and people who have rendered service to the international working class and their allies. Obviously, such figures as John Brown, Leon Trotsky, Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Malcolm X and others need no introduction to most thoughtful militants. However, there are lesser historical figures, many half-forgotten, whose lives and struggles cry out for recognition and study. The late civil rights activist and black liberation militant Robert F. Williams is just such a figure.
For those who have either forgotten or are too young to remember Robert F. William was the leader of the Monroe, North Carolina NAACP in the 1950’s and early 1960’s, with this different. Unlike the mainly professional blacks (and their white supporters) who formed the core of NAACP membership the Monroe chapter through Williams’ recruitment drive was composed mainly of working class militants. More importantly, when the Klu Klux Klan rained hell down in Monroe, unlike in other Southern civil rights encounters, they were confronted with blacks armed and prepared to defend themselves.
The fear of a modern day Nat Turner or John Brown has always driven whites, and not only in the South, to wake up screaming in the middle of the night. Yes, that is a very different kind of civil rights story from most of the confrontations in the South, led by preachers and at, least tactically, committed to non-violent resistance. In the end Williams had to pay for his militancy by fleeing first to Cuba and then to China when the inevitable frame-up by the government came. In this case it was trumped up charges of kidnapping a white couple he tried to shelter in his home during a Klan/militant confrontation that he eventually beat.
The life story of Robert F. Williams is however more than that of a militant black ready to defend his home and kin. Military service in both World War II and Korea probably made him less afraid than others to advocate self-defense. I do not believe that it is an accident that many of the most militant blacks in the early civil rights movement and later those around the revolutionary black nationalist Black Panther Party were veterans of military service. A whole separate story could be written about such activists. Williams’ leadership capacities, moreover, extended beyond formal organizational leadership in Monroe. His now classic book Negroes With Guns (well worth reading)is an important contribution to black liberation literature. In exile in Cuba he edited a newspaper and ran a radio station called Radio Free Dixie directed at civil rights militants in the struggle in America.
Robert F. Williams life story also demonstrates the limitations of a blacks-only struggle for liberation. He proclaimed himself, on more than one occasion, a revolutionary black nationalist, and I believe he was sincere in that belief. Williams firmly believed that his natural allies, white workers, had been bought off by the ‘system’. On the face of it, at that time, that was probably not a far-fetched practical way to view the political world of the United States. Unfortunately, it was also a political dead end.
Nevertheless, within those self-imposed political limitations militants today can honor Robert F. Williams as a courageous black liberation fighter. Let me put it another way; Robert F. Williams is the kind of cadre necessary if there is ever to be socialism in this country. I would argue further that no revolution will occur here without such black militants leading the way. I will put it even more bluntly; I will take one fighter like Robert F. Williams for a hundred Jesse Jacksons, Al Sharptons and Obama the “Charma's” who today claim to lead the struggle for black rights. They can step back, way back.
******
Originally posted on the American Left History blog on February 23, 2007
COMMENTARY
FOR BLACK LIBERATION THROUGH THE FIGHT FOR SOCIALISM
In this space I have attempted to introduce the new generation of militants and others to some of the historic events and people who have rendered service to the international working class and their allies. Obviously, such figures as John Brown, Leon Trotsky, Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Malcolm X and others need no introduction to most thoughtful militants. However, there are lesser historical figures, many half-forgotten, whose lives and struggles cry out for recognition and study. The late civil rights activist and black liberation militant Robert F. Williams is just such a figure.
For those who have either forgotten or are too young to remember Robert F. William was the leader of the Monroe, North Carolina NAACP in the 1950’s and early 1960’s, with this different. Unlike the mainly professional blacks (and their white supporters) who formed the core of NAACP membership the Monroe chapter through Williams’ recruitment drive was composed mainly of working class militants. More importantly, when the Klu Klux Klan rained hell down in Monroe, unlike in other Southern civil rights encounters, they were confronted with blacks armed and prepared to defend themselves.
The fear of a modern day Nat Turner or John Brown has always driven whites, and not only in the South, to wake up screaming in the middle of the night. Yes, that is a very different kind of civil rights story from most of the confrontations in the South, led by preachers and at, least tactically, committed to non-violent resistance. In the end Williams had to pay for his militancy by fleeing first to Cuba and then to China when the inevitable frame-up by the government came. In this case it was trumped up charges of kidnapping a white couple he tried to shelter in his home during a Klan/militant confrontation that he eventually beat.
The life story of Robert F. Williams is however more than that of a militant black ready to defend his home and kin. Military service in both World War II and Korea probably made him less afraid than others to advocate self-defense. I do not believe that it is an accident that many of the most militant blacks in the early civil rights movement and later those around the revolutionary black nationalist Black Panther Party were veterans of military service. A whole separate story could be written about such activists. Williams’ leadership capacities, moreover, extended beyond formal organizational leadership in Monroe. His now classic book Negroes With Guns (well worth reading)is an important contribution to black liberation literature. In exile in Cuba he edited a newspaper and ran a radio station called Radio Free Dixie directed at civil rights militants in the struggle in America.
Robert F. Williams life story also demonstrates the limitations of a blacks-only struggle for liberation. He proclaimed himself, on more than one occasion, a revolutionary black nationalist, and I believe he was sincere in that belief. Williams firmly believed that his natural allies, white workers, had been bought off by the ‘system’. On the face of it, at that time, that was probably not a far-fetched practical way to view the political world of the United States. Unfortunately, it was also a political dead end.
Nevertheless, within those self-imposed political limitations militants today can honor Robert F. Williams as a courageous black liberation fighter. Let me put it another way; Robert F. Williams is the kind of cadre necessary if there is ever to be socialism in this country. I would argue further that no revolution will occur here without such black militants leading the way. I will put it even more bluntly; I will take one fighter like Robert F. Williams for a hundred Jesse Jacksons, Al Sharptons and Obama the “Charma's” who today claim to lead the struggle for black rights. They can step back, way back.
On Martin Luther King Day- HONOR THE MEMORY OF CONRAD LYNN- SOCIALIST BLACK LIBERATION FIGHTER WHO JUST HAPPENED TO BE A LAWYER
Click on title to link to a 1956 "American Socialist" article by Conrad Lynn entitled "The Southern Negro Stirs" in order to get a flavor of his politics. I note that there is no entry, at least I could not find it, for Conrad Lynn on Wikipedia. Somebody get to it.
HONOR THE MEMORY OF CONRAD LYNN- A SOCIALIST BLACK LIBERATION FIGHTER WHO JUST HAPPENED TO BE A LAWYER
COMMENTARY
FOR BLACK LIBERATION THROUGH THE FIGHT FOR SOCIALISM
In this space I have attempted to introduce the new generation of militants and others to some of the historic events and people who have rendered service to the international working class and their allies. Obviously, such figures as John Brown, Leon Trotsky, Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Malcolm X and others need no special introduction to most thoughtful militants. However, there are lesser historical figures, many half-forgotten, whose lives and struggles cry out for recognition and study. I have recently done a tribute to Robert F. Williams who falls into that category and now I am honored to do a tribute for the late socialist, civil rights lawyer and black liberation fighter Conrad Lynn. As fate would have it the lives of these two fighters were intertwined, and not by accident, in the early civil rights struggles of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, especially the struggle for militant black self-defense in Monroe, North Carolina while Williams was the head of the NAACP there.
The Monroe, North Carolina fight, the Harlem Six Defense fight, the Bill Epton-led Harlem Defense Council fight, the fight against the ‘red scare’ epitomized by the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, the defense of Puerto Rican nationalists Campos and later Lebron, and an assortment of other important labor and minority struggles highlight the career of Conrad Lynn. The details of these fights can be found in his autobiography THERE IS A FOUNTAIN, Lawrence Hill& Co, 1979. I do not know about you but I see a pattern here. Unlike most lawyers who run away in terror from unpopular fights, especially when it is not a celebrity case and, more importantly, there is no money Lynn spent his active professional and political life ‘running to the danger’. I guess he skipped that class in law school about taking the easy road. To our benefit.
Conrad Lynn, however, was more than a ‘people’s lawyer he was also a very political man. No, not the kind of political lawyer who funds the bourgeois parties or runs for office but one whose politics and professional career reinforced each other in the progressive cause. His early unpleasant experiences in and around the early American Communist Party, like that of many other blacks especially black intellectuals like Richard Wright and Langston Hughes, left him as something of an isolated individual radical gadfly. The American political landscape is full of, or at least it used to be, such types.
Unfortunately, history has shown us no way to create a socialist party that struggles for political power based on the isolated efforts of even such outstanding individual fighters as Lynn. As noted in the Robert F. Williams tribute in his prime, and this is also the case here with Lynn, there was nothing in the American left political landscape forcing him toward a more sustained organizational commitment. That said, Lynn’s individual efforts nevertheless are worthy of honor from today’s militants as a socialist and black liberation fighter. Forward.
HONOR THE MEMORY OF CONRAD LYNN- A SOCIALIST BLACK LIBERATION FIGHTER WHO JUST HAPPENED TO BE A LAWYER
COMMENTARY
FOR BLACK LIBERATION THROUGH THE FIGHT FOR SOCIALISM
In this space I have attempted to introduce the new generation of militants and others to some of the historic events and people who have rendered service to the international working class and their allies. Obviously, such figures as John Brown, Leon Trotsky, Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Malcolm X and others need no special introduction to most thoughtful militants. However, there are lesser historical figures, many half-forgotten, whose lives and struggles cry out for recognition and study. I have recently done a tribute to Robert F. Williams who falls into that category and now I am honored to do a tribute for the late socialist, civil rights lawyer and black liberation fighter Conrad Lynn. As fate would have it the lives of these two fighters were intertwined, and not by accident, in the early civil rights struggles of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, especially the struggle for militant black self-defense in Monroe, North Carolina while Williams was the head of the NAACP there.
The Monroe, North Carolina fight, the Harlem Six Defense fight, the Bill Epton-led Harlem Defense Council fight, the fight against the ‘red scare’ epitomized by the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, the defense of Puerto Rican nationalists Campos and later Lebron, and an assortment of other important labor and minority struggles highlight the career of Conrad Lynn. The details of these fights can be found in his autobiography THERE IS A FOUNTAIN, Lawrence Hill& Co, 1979. I do not know about you but I see a pattern here. Unlike most lawyers who run away in terror from unpopular fights, especially when it is not a celebrity case and, more importantly, there is no money Lynn spent his active professional and political life ‘running to the danger’. I guess he skipped that class in law school about taking the easy road. To our benefit.
Conrad Lynn, however, was more than a ‘people’s lawyer he was also a very political man. No, not the kind of political lawyer who funds the bourgeois parties or runs for office but one whose politics and professional career reinforced each other in the progressive cause. His early unpleasant experiences in and around the early American Communist Party, like that of many other blacks especially black intellectuals like Richard Wright and Langston Hughes, left him as something of an isolated individual radical gadfly. The American political landscape is full of, or at least it used to be, such types.
Unfortunately, history has shown us no way to create a socialist party that struggles for political power based on the isolated efforts of even such outstanding individual fighters as Lynn. As noted in the Robert F. Williams tribute in his prime, and this is also the case here with Lynn, there was nothing in the American left political landscape forcing him toward a more sustained organizational commitment. That said, Lynn’s individual efforts nevertheless are worthy of honor from today’s militants as a socialist and black liberation fighter. Forward.
On Martin Luther King Day-From The Annals Of The Black Liberation Struggle-The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense
The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense
Formed in 1966, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense was the largest Black revolutionary organization that has ever existed.
Famous for taking up guns in defense against police brutality, the Panthers had many other little-known sides to their work. They organized dozens of community programs such as free breakfast for children, health clinics and shoes for children.
Such was their success that they rapidly grew to a size of 5,000 full time party workers, organized in 45 chapters (branches) across America. At their peak, they sold 250,000 papers every week. Opinion polls of the day showed the Panthers to have 90% support amongst Blacks in the major cities. Their impact on Black America can be measured by the response of the state. J. Edgar Hoover, then head of the FBI described them as "the number one threat to the internal security of the United States".
In this chapter, we will be looking at the formation of the Panthers, their program and activities, but more importantly, what marked the Panthers out to be different from all other organizations, what led them to be the inspiration to generations around the world to join the struggle against oppression.
The Civil Rights Movement
The formation of the Panthers was the direct result of the development of the civil rights movement which had already been in full swing for more than a decade before they were created. The movement had largely been based in the south and around demands for desegregation of the busses, schools, waiting rooms and lunch counters. Hundreds of thousands had been mobilized to participate in the demonstrations, sit-ins and freedom rides. Both from the police, local white mobs and the Ku Klux Klan, civil rights protesters faced the constant threat of brutal attack or even death. Despite this, the guiding philosophy of the civil rights leaders - in particular Martin Luther King - remained one of civil disobedience and passive resistance.
The increasing ferocity of the violence put a great strain on the movement. Contrasting views on a strategy for Black liberation began to emerge. Stokely Carmichael was prominent among those who opposed passive resistance and represented the feelings of a new generation of Blacks who felt that the peaceful approach was played out.
Alongside the mainstream civil rights was another current: much smaller than King's movement but still with significant numbers were the Black Muslims. The Nation believed in separation instead of integration and were completely opposed to passive resistance. Their radical ideology was appealing but they refused to participate in the civil rights movement or to become involved in the activities of non-Nation members.
Malcolm X
Malcolm X saw the limitations of both the Muslims and King's strategy of non-violence. He saw the need to embrace the social and economic issues and he attempted to put forward a more coherent strategy than any Black leader up to that point. It was against this background of upheaval that the Black Panther Party was created. The Panthers took the revolutionary philosophy and militant stand of Malcolm X, they were determined that although Malcolm X had been cut down, they would make his ideas come alive.
The Black Panther Party was founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. They met in the early sixties whilst at Meritt Junior College in West Oakland. The civil rights movement had ignited Black America: Seale and Newton were no exception. Both were active in Black politics for several years before they came together to form the Panthers. Bobby Seale was part of RAM (Revolutionary Action Movement) and both Seale and Newton became involved in a college-based group called the Soul Students Advisory Committee. These experiences were critical in the formation of the ideology of the Panthers as it led to them rejecting the philosophy of what they called the cultural nationalists.
In Seize the Time, Bobby Seale explains,
"Cultural nationalists and Black Panthers are in conflict in many areas. Basically, cultural nationalism sees the white man as the oppressor and makes no distinction between racist whites and non-racist whites, as the Panthers do. The cultural nationalists say that a Black man cannot be the enemy of the Black people, while the Panthers believe that Black capitalists are exploiters and oppressors. Although the Black Panther Party believes in Black nationalism and Black culture, it does not believe that either will lead to Black liberation or the overthrow of the capitalist system, and are therefore ineffective."
Cultural nationalism was a powerful current in the Black movement and one which influenced Malcolm X in his early years as a Black Muslim. The nationalists rejected the integrationist approach and believed in separation from whites.
In forming the Panthers, Seale and Newton made a clean break with both the integrationist and the separatist approach. They argued instead that the economic and political roots of racism were in the exploitative capitalist system and that the Black struggle must be a revolutionary movement to overthrow the entire power structure in order to achieve liberation for all Black people.
Under pressure from the mass civil rights struggle, the government had made certain concessions: promoting Black officials, mayors, Congressmen etc., but no lasting improvement to the daily lives of most Black people had taken place. In fact, whilst segregation laws had been broken down, the level of poverty had actually increased. Black unemployment was higher in 1966 (after more than a decade of struggle) than in 1954.
32% of Black people were living below the poverty line in 1966.
71% of the poor living in metropolitan areas were Black.
By 1968, two-thirds of the Black population lived in ghettos.
The Panthers realized that the movement needed to progress beyond the battles for desegregation and to address the fundamental economic problems that people faced in their daily lives. They were the first independent Black organization to have a clear analysis of the type of society we live in: one in which a small class hold all the economic and political power and use it to exploit the majority.
Bobby Seale said,
"We do not fight racism with racism. We fight racism with solidarity. We do not fight exploitative capitalism with Black capitalism. We fight capitalism with basic socialism. And we do not fight imperialism with more imperialism. We fight imperialism with proletarian internationalism."
This was the guiding philosophy of the Black Panthers. But critical to their development was the knowledge that it was not enough to have the right theories, that this must be translated into a concrete set of demands that people can relate to and a clear course of action to achieve those demands. And so the first task of Seale and Newton was to sit down and write a program for the Panthers.
October 1966 Black Panther Party-Platform and Program-What We Want
What We Believe
1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black community. We believe that Black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.
2. We want full employment for our people.
We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the white American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.
3. We wand an end to the robbery by the white man of our Black community.
We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules was promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of Black people. We will accept the payment in currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over fifty million Black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.
4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.
We believe that if the white landlords will not give decent housing to our Black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.
5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in present-day society.
We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.
6. We want all Black men to be exempt from military service.
We believe that Black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like Black people, are being victimized by the white racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.
7. We want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of Black people.
We believe we can end police brutality in our Black community by organizing Black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our Black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The second amendment to the constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all Black people should arm themselves for self-defense.
8. We want freedom for all Black men held in federal state, county and city prisons and jails.
We believe that all Black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.
9. We want all Black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their Black communities, as defined by the constitution of the United States.
We believe that the courts should follow the United States constitution so that black people will receive fair trials. The Fourteenth Amendment of the US constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a jury from the Black community from which the Black defendant came. We have been and are being tried by all-white juries that have no understanding of the "average reasoning man" of the Black community.
10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. And as our major political objective, a United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the Black colony in which only Black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate, for the purpose of determining the will of Black people as to their national destiny.
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitle, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter such principles, and organizing its powers in such a form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and, accordingly, all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.
As soon as the program was written, they printed 1,000 copies and went out onto the streets to distribute them. Seale, Newton and their first member, Bobby Hutton put their months paychecks together to rent an old shop front as a base for operations. They painted up a sign saying Black Panther Party for Self Defense and on January 1, 1967 the office was opened. Weekly meetings and political education classes were held to spread the word, and so the first chapter of the Panthers was formed.
The party began to grow not only because an organization of that character with a clearly worked out program was needed at that time but because they based themselves in the community, working with the people, for the people. They had an office, they had the ten point platform and program - now was time to put that program into action.
Self Defense
The Panthers decided to take up their constitutional right to carry arms and to implement Malcolm X's philosophy of self-defense, by patrolling the police. They did this at a time when severe police brutality was common - the police would beat down and kill Blacks at random. They would even recruit police from the racist south to come and work in the northern ghettos.
On one occasion, whilst on patrol, they witnessed an officer stop and search a young guy. The Panthers got out of their car and went over to the scene and stood watching their guns on full display. Angrily, the policeman began to question them and tried to intimidate them with threats of arrest. But Huey P. Newton had studied the law intimately and could quote every law and court ruling relevant to their situation.
Huey stood there with a law book in one hand and a gun in the other and told the "pigs" about his constitutional right to carry a weapon as long as it was not concealed. He told them about the law and said that every citizen had the right to observe a police officer carry out his duty as long as they stood a reasonable distance away. And he told them about the Supreme Court ruling which defined that distance.
A crowd gathered and watched this whole scene in amazement. The Panthers made it clear that they were not looking for a shoot-out and that they would only use their guns in self-defense. They took the opportunity to distribute copies of their ten point program, inform people of the Panthers ideology and invite them to their political meetings. Meanwhile, the flustered and nervous cop took the opportunity to get the hell out of there.
The gun had a huge psychological effect, both on the Black community and the police. For the police, it reversed the fear that they so enjoyed creating in others. But for the Black community, it fired their imagination, people felt empowered by seeing Black brothers and sisters protecting their interests.
There were two sides to the carrying of guns though, most people saw it as a positive move but others were put off by the militaristic image. On the other side, many brothers in particular, came to the Panther office purely for the gun, the Black uniform - the whole image. When this happened, the Panthers would simply explain that the Black struggle was about a whole lot more than just picking up the gun: it was about educating yourself and then others, about organizing the community programs, selling the newspaper and serving the people. At the same time, they would get the brother to work in the nursery for a while, looking after the children while other members went out on party business. In this way, they tried to make sure that people understood the Panther ideology and that they got a balanced view of what it was all about.
Community Programs
The programs were of key importance in the Panthers strategy. Firstly, they demonstrated that politics was relevant to peoples lives - to feed a hungry child, give out food, clothing and medical care showed that the Panthers related to people's needs. Secondly, it showed what could be achieved if you were organized. The programs achieved a great deal with very limited resources but it also raised in peoples minds how much more could be achieved if they had the resources available to the government and the business corporations. Some people have criticized the community programs saying it was not a revolutionary thing to do but Bobby Seale answers this clearly.
"A lot of people misunderstand the politics of these programs; some people have a tendency to call them reform programs. They're not reform programs; they're actually revolutionary community programs. A revolutionary program is onset forth by revolutionaries, by those who want to change the existing system for a better system. A reform program is set up by the existing exploitative system as an appeasing handout, to fool the people and to keep them quiet. Examples of these programs are poverty programs, youth work programs and things like that."
The first program the Panthers organized was the Free Breakfast for Children Program. Lesley Johnson explains how this led her to get involved in the Panthers.
"Well, one of the things that I could immediately respect and admire the party for, was its Breakfast for School Children Program. You know my parents were both workers, my father was a shipper and my mother, she worked cleaning clothes, rubbing the spots out, what was known as a spotter. And there were times when I was growing up, the week's oatmeal or whatever would run out and I went to school hungry. So that I could really appreciate what the party was doing."
The Panthers would go out and get donations of food from businessmen. Any chain of stores that refused even a small donation would be boycotted. Leaflets would be produced and distributed in the community exposing that business.
The programs usually took place in a church hall. Party members would have to work very hard, starting work at 6am every day. They would prepare breakfast, serve children, they would usually sing some songs with them and then, when the children left, they would have to clear the place up and go out to collect provisions for the next day.
The FBI
The success of the Panther's political activities and community programs and their huge growth and influence and membership soon brought them under fire from the American state. The FBI intensified the COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) against them. Nearly every office in the country was raided at some point. In Chicago, all the food provisions for the breakfast program were burnt out. During one raid in the spring of 1968, Bobby Hutton, the party's first member, came out with his hands up. The police shot him in the head and killed him. The attacks became even more vicious in 1969. On December 4, at 1am, the police burst into Fred Hampton's apartment and opened fire in the bedroom where he lay sleeping with his pregnant girlfriend. Another Panther called out that a pregnant sister was in the room and the police paused their firing. Deborah Johnson recalls:
"One of the policemen grabbed my robe and threw it down and said 'what do you know, we have a broad here.' Another man grabbed me by the head and shoved me into the kitchen. I heard a voice from another part of the apartment saying 'he's barely alive', or 'he'll barely make it'. Then I heard more shots. A sister screamed from the front. Then the shooting stopped. I heard someone say 'he's as good as dead now.'"
In 1969 alone, 25 Panther members were killed. But the FBI's operations went further. Aside from the constant arrests of Panther members which disrupted the work of the organization and drained them financially, the FBI infiltrated the party and manufactured rivalries and disputes between different members.
Today, some would explain the demise of the Panthers as due to the successful operations of the FBI. Undoubtedly, this placed an enormous strain on the organization but there are many countries in the world where political opposition faces even greater repression from the state. Without underestimating the difficulties, they cannot entirely account for the fall of the Panthers. There are a number of factors which contributed.
Women in the Panthers
The role of women within the Panthers was an area with many problems. At one point, women comprised 70% of the membership of the organization. Yet, all the leading positions were occupied by men. This is not a petty point because it illustrated the different roles that men and women took on. It seems that many women were confined to secretarial, administrative, childcare or other traditional roles whilst men were encouraged to develop the political ideas, speaking and leadership abilities. Also, some of the brothers complained that they were not taking directions from a woman! At other times it was found that accusations of being a counter-revolutionary were spread about a woman just because she did not want to sleep with someone.
These problems would have cut the Panthers off from a whole layer of Black women who were not prepared to put up with this nonsense. However, we have to see that sexist attitudes were not unique to the Panthers - it is something that occurs in all organizations because it is related to the oppressive nature of this society and the way in which it exploits women. The Panthers did take action against these attitudes but they did not fully succeed - equality in the party was never achieved. And you cannot be a true community organization, fighting the oppression of society if women are being oppressed within your organization.
The membership of the Panthers was 5,000. This seems pretty low when you consider all they achieved but the reason is that those 5,000 members were all full-time! You could not be a member of the organization unless you were unemployed or prepared to give up your job. It is a sign of the tremendous commitment that the Panthers inspired, that they had 5,000 full-time workers but they would definitely have had a much, much larger membership if they had allowed students and people who were working to join. In effect they cut themselves off from hundreds of thousands of people who would have supported them. This also set themselves apart from the rest of the community.
Revolutionary Black Workers Groups
At that point in time, there were several radical Black workers groups such as DRUM (Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement), DODGE - named after the car plant in Detroit and ELARUM (Eldron Avenue Revolutionary Union Movement). They organized large numbers of revolutionary Black workers. Although they had some Black caucuses within the trade unions, the Panthers did not sufficiently develop this aspect of the work. It was of particular importance because the Black working class are critical in the struggle for Black liberation.
The Panthers were one of the few groups who understood the whole basis of American society had to be transformed. It was this understanding that gave them a revolutionary outlook. But this alone, guarantees nothing. The clarity of ideas which enables the development of a coherent and effective strategy is essential in accomplishing the task of the overthrow of capitalism. We would argue that there were many confused ideas in the Black Panther Party. Some believed they could develop on the basis of a struggle conducted by a small armed minority and didn't have a strategy for building a mass organization which could be sustained over a longer period.
Huey Newton says in Revolutionary Suicide
"But we soon discovered that weapons and uniforms set us apart from the community. We were looked upon as an ad hoc military group, acting outside the community fabric and too radical to be a part of it. Perhaps some of our tactics at the time were extreme; perhaps we placed too much emphasis on military action."
This was particularly important as they had reached their high point at the time of the ebbing of the huge civil rights movement. Had the organization been developed with a more long term perspective then the Black Panthers would have been in a position to put themselves at the head of a mass resurgence of radicalism amongst the Black population or even in wider American society. This, above all demonstrates the need for a clear forward view of how events will unfold in society. That is why a careful and disciplined study of events is an important aspect of shaping the outlook of any revolutionary organization.
The Panthers have left us with an invaluable experience. Their dedication, will and bravery in the face of what might have appeared as insurmountable odds is an example which any serious Black activist or revolutionary should be proud to follow. They were the highpoint of the civil rights movement.
Adrian Wood & Nutan Rajguru
Formed in 1966, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense was the largest Black revolutionary organization that has ever existed.
Famous for taking up guns in defense against police brutality, the Panthers had many other little-known sides to their work. They organized dozens of community programs such as free breakfast for children, health clinics and shoes for children.
Such was their success that they rapidly grew to a size of 5,000 full time party workers, organized in 45 chapters (branches) across America. At their peak, they sold 250,000 papers every week. Opinion polls of the day showed the Panthers to have 90% support amongst Blacks in the major cities. Their impact on Black America can be measured by the response of the state. J. Edgar Hoover, then head of the FBI described them as "the number one threat to the internal security of the United States".
In this chapter, we will be looking at the formation of the Panthers, their program and activities, but more importantly, what marked the Panthers out to be different from all other organizations, what led them to be the inspiration to generations around the world to join the struggle against oppression.
The Civil Rights Movement
The formation of the Panthers was the direct result of the development of the civil rights movement which had already been in full swing for more than a decade before they were created. The movement had largely been based in the south and around demands for desegregation of the busses, schools, waiting rooms and lunch counters. Hundreds of thousands had been mobilized to participate in the demonstrations, sit-ins and freedom rides. Both from the police, local white mobs and the Ku Klux Klan, civil rights protesters faced the constant threat of brutal attack or even death. Despite this, the guiding philosophy of the civil rights leaders - in particular Martin Luther King - remained one of civil disobedience and passive resistance.
The increasing ferocity of the violence put a great strain on the movement. Contrasting views on a strategy for Black liberation began to emerge. Stokely Carmichael was prominent among those who opposed passive resistance and represented the feelings of a new generation of Blacks who felt that the peaceful approach was played out.
Alongside the mainstream civil rights was another current: much smaller than King's movement but still with significant numbers were the Black Muslims. The Nation believed in separation instead of integration and were completely opposed to passive resistance. Their radical ideology was appealing but they refused to participate in the civil rights movement or to become involved in the activities of non-Nation members.
Malcolm X
Malcolm X saw the limitations of both the Muslims and King's strategy of non-violence. He saw the need to embrace the social and economic issues and he attempted to put forward a more coherent strategy than any Black leader up to that point. It was against this background of upheaval that the Black Panther Party was created. The Panthers took the revolutionary philosophy and militant stand of Malcolm X, they were determined that although Malcolm X had been cut down, they would make his ideas come alive.
The Black Panther Party was founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. They met in the early sixties whilst at Meritt Junior College in West Oakland. The civil rights movement had ignited Black America: Seale and Newton were no exception. Both were active in Black politics for several years before they came together to form the Panthers. Bobby Seale was part of RAM (Revolutionary Action Movement) and both Seale and Newton became involved in a college-based group called the Soul Students Advisory Committee. These experiences were critical in the formation of the ideology of the Panthers as it led to them rejecting the philosophy of what they called the cultural nationalists.
In Seize the Time, Bobby Seale explains,
"Cultural nationalists and Black Panthers are in conflict in many areas. Basically, cultural nationalism sees the white man as the oppressor and makes no distinction between racist whites and non-racist whites, as the Panthers do. The cultural nationalists say that a Black man cannot be the enemy of the Black people, while the Panthers believe that Black capitalists are exploiters and oppressors. Although the Black Panther Party believes in Black nationalism and Black culture, it does not believe that either will lead to Black liberation or the overthrow of the capitalist system, and are therefore ineffective."
Cultural nationalism was a powerful current in the Black movement and one which influenced Malcolm X in his early years as a Black Muslim. The nationalists rejected the integrationist approach and believed in separation from whites.
In forming the Panthers, Seale and Newton made a clean break with both the integrationist and the separatist approach. They argued instead that the economic and political roots of racism were in the exploitative capitalist system and that the Black struggle must be a revolutionary movement to overthrow the entire power structure in order to achieve liberation for all Black people.
Under pressure from the mass civil rights struggle, the government had made certain concessions: promoting Black officials, mayors, Congressmen etc., but no lasting improvement to the daily lives of most Black people had taken place. In fact, whilst segregation laws had been broken down, the level of poverty had actually increased. Black unemployment was higher in 1966 (after more than a decade of struggle) than in 1954.
32% of Black people were living below the poverty line in 1966.
71% of the poor living in metropolitan areas were Black.
By 1968, two-thirds of the Black population lived in ghettos.
The Panthers realized that the movement needed to progress beyond the battles for desegregation and to address the fundamental economic problems that people faced in their daily lives. They were the first independent Black organization to have a clear analysis of the type of society we live in: one in which a small class hold all the economic and political power and use it to exploit the majority.
Bobby Seale said,
"We do not fight racism with racism. We fight racism with solidarity. We do not fight exploitative capitalism with Black capitalism. We fight capitalism with basic socialism. And we do not fight imperialism with more imperialism. We fight imperialism with proletarian internationalism."
This was the guiding philosophy of the Black Panthers. But critical to their development was the knowledge that it was not enough to have the right theories, that this must be translated into a concrete set of demands that people can relate to and a clear course of action to achieve those demands. And so the first task of Seale and Newton was to sit down and write a program for the Panthers.
October 1966 Black Panther Party-Platform and Program-What We Want
What We Believe
1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black community. We believe that Black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.
2. We want full employment for our people.
We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the white American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.
3. We wand an end to the robbery by the white man of our Black community.
We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules was promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of Black people. We will accept the payment in currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over fifty million Black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.
4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.
We believe that if the white landlords will not give decent housing to our Black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.
5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in present-day society.
We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.
6. We want all Black men to be exempt from military service.
We believe that Black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like Black people, are being victimized by the white racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.
7. We want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of Black people.
We believe we can end police brutality in our Black community by organizing Black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our Black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The second amendment to the constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all Black people should arm themselves for self-defense.
8. We want freedom for all Black men held in federal state, county and city prisons and jails.
We believe that all Black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.
9. We want all Black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their Black communities, as defined by the constitution of the United States.
We believe that the courts should follow the United States constitution so that black people will receive fair trials. The Fourteenth Amendment of the US constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a jury from the Black community from which the Black defendant came. We have been and are being tried by all-white juries that have no understanding of the "average reasoning man" of the Black community.
10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. And as our major political objective, a United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the Black colony in which only Black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate, for the purpose of determining the will of Black people as to their national destiny.
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitle, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter such principles, and organizing its powers in such a form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and, accordingly, all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.
As soon as the program was written, they printed 1,000 copies and went out onto the streets to distribute them. Seale, Newton and their first member, Bobby Hutton put their months paychecks together to rent an old shop front as a base for operations. They painted up a sign saying Black Panther Party for Self Defense and on January 1, 1967 the office was opened. Weekly meetings and political education classes were held to spread the word, and so the first chapter of the Panthers was formed.
The party began to grow not only because an organization of that character with a clearly worked out program was needed at that time but because they based themselves in the community, working with the people, for the people. They had an office, they had the ten point platform and program - now was time to put that program into action.
Self Defense
The Panthers decided to take up their constitutional right to carry arms and to implement Malcolm X's philosophy of self-defense, by patrolling the police. They did this at a time when severe police brutality was common - the police would beat down and kill Blacks at random. They would even recruit police from the racist south to come and work in the northern ghettos.
On one occasion, whilst on patrol, they witnessed an officer stop and search a young guy. The Panthers got out of their car and went over to the scene and stood watching their guns on full display. Angrily, the policeman began to question them and tried to intimidate them with threats of arrest. But Huey P. Newton had studied the law intimately and could quote every law and court ruling relevant to their situation.
Huey stood there with a law book in one hand and a gun in the other and told the "pigs" about his constitutional right to carry a weapon as long as it was not concealed. He told them about the law and said that every citizen had the right to observe a police officer carry out his duty as long as they stood a reasonable distance away. And he told them about the Supreme Court ruling which defined that distance.
A crowd gathered and watched this whole scene in amazement. The Panthers made it clear that they were not looking for a shoot-out and that they would only use their guns in self-defense. They took the opportunity to distribute copies of their ten point program, inform people of the Panthers ideology and invite them to their political meetings. Meanwhile, the flustered and nervous cop took the opportunity to get the hell out of there.
The gun had a huge psychological effect, both on the Black community and the police. For the police, it reversed the fear that they so enjoyed creating in others. But for the Black community, it fired their imagination, people felt empowered by seeing Black brothers and sisters protecting their interests.
There were two sides to the carrying of guns though, most people saw it as a positive move but others were put off by the militaristic image. On the other side, many brothers in particular, came to the Panther office purely for the gun, the Black uniform - the whole image. When this happened, the Panthers would simply explain that the Black struggle was about a whole lot more than just picking up the gun: it was about educating yourself and then others, about organizing the community programs, selling the newspaper and serving the people. At the same time, they would get the brother to work in the nursery for a while, looking after the children while other members went out on party business. In this way, they tried to make sure that people understood the Panther ideology and that they got a balanced view of what it was all about.
Community Programs
The programs were of key importance in the Panthers strategy. Firstly, they demonstrated that politics was relevant to peoples lives - to feed a hungry child, give out food, clothing and medical care showed that the Panthers related to people's needs. Secondly, it showed what could be achieved if you were organized. The programs achieved a great deal with very limited resources but it also raised in peoples minds how much more could be achieved if they had the resources available to the government and the business corporations. Some people have criticized the community programs saying it was not a revolutionary thing to do but Bobby Seale answers this clearly.
"A lot of people misunderstand the politics of these programs; some people have a tendency to call them reform programs. They're not reform programs; they're actually revolutionary community programs. A revolutionary program is onset forth by revolutionaries, by those who want to change the existing system for a better system. A reform program is set up by the existing exploitative system as an appeasing handout, to fool the people and to keep them quiet. Examples of these programs are poverty programs, youth work programs and things like that."
The first program the Panthers organized was the Free Breakfast for Children Program. Lesley Johnson explains how this led her to get involved in the Panthers.
"Well, one of the things that I could immediately respect and admire the party for, was its Breakfast for School Children Program. You know my parents were both workers, my father was a shipper and my mother, she worked cleaning clothes, rubbing the spots out, what was known as a spotter. And there were times when I was growing up, the week's oatmeal or whatever would run out and I went to school hungry. So that I could really appreciate what the party was doing."
The Panthers would go out and get donations of food from businessmen. Any chain of stores that refused even a small donation would be boycotted. Leaflets would be produced and distributed in the community exposing that business.
The programs usually took place in a church hall. Party members would have to work very hard, starting work at 6am every day. They would prepare breakfast, serve children, they would usually sing some songs with them and then, when the children left, they would have to clear the place up and go out to collect provisions for the next day.
The FBI
The success of the Panther's political activities and community programs and their huge growth and influence and membership soon brought them under fire from the American state. The FBI intensified the COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) against them. Nearly every office in the country was raided at some point. In Chicago, all the food provisions for the breakfast program were burnt out. During one raid in the spring of 1968, Bobby Hutton, the party's first member, came out with his hands up. The police shot him in the head and killed him. The attacks became even more vicious in 1969. On December 4, at 1am, the police burst into Fred Hampton's apartment and opened fire in the bedroom where he lay sleeping with his pregnant girlfriend. Another Panther called out that a pregnant sister was in the room and the police paused their firing. Deborah Johnson recalls:
"One of the policemen grabbed my robe and threw it down and said 'what do you know, we have a broad here.' Another man grabbed me by the head and shoved me into the kitchen. I heard a voice from another part of the apartment saying 'he's barely alive', or 'he'll barely make it'. Then I heard more shots. A sister screamed from the front. Then the shooting stopped. I heard someone say 'he's as good as dead now.'"
In 1969 alone, 25 Panther members were killed. But the FBI's operations went further. Aside from the constant arrests of Panther members which disrupted the work of the organization and drained them financially, the FBI infiltrated the party and manufactured rivalries and disputes between different members.
Today, some would explain the demise of the Panthers as due to the successful operations of the FBI. Undoubtedly, this placed an enormous strain on the organization but there are many countries in the world where political opposition faces even greater repression from the state. Without underestimating the difficulties, they cannot entirely account for the fall of the Panthers. There are a number of factors which contributed.
Women in the Panthers
The role of women within the Panthers was an area with many problems. At one point, women comprised 70% of the membership of the organization. Yet, all the leading positions were occupied by men. This is not a petty point because it illustrated the different roles that men and women took on. It seems that many women were confined to secretarial, administrative, childcare or other traditional roles whilst men were encouraged to develop the political ideas, speaking and leadership abilities. Also, some of the brothers complained that they were not taking directions from a woman! At other times it was found that accusations of being a counter-revolutionary were spread about a woman just because she did not want to sleep with someone.
These problems would have cut the Panthers off from a whole layer of Black women who were not prepared to put up with this nonsense. However, we have to see that sexist attitudes were not unique to the Panthers - it is something that occurs in all organizations because it is related to the oppressive nature of this society and the way in which it exploits women. The Panthers did take action against these attitudes but they did not fully succeed - equality in the party was never achieved. And you cannot be a true community organization, fighting the oppression of society if women are being oppressed within your organization.
The membership of the Panthers was 5,000. This seems pretty low when you consider all they achieved but the reason is that those 5,000 members were all full-time! You could not be a member of the organization unless you were unemployed or prepared to give up your job. It is a sign of the tremendous commitment that the Panthers inspired, that they had 5,000 full-time workers but they would definitely have had a much, much larger membership if they had allowed students and people who were working to join. In effect they cut themselves off from hundreds of thousands of people who would have supported them. This also set themselves apart from the rest of the community.
Revolutionary Black Workers Groups
At that point in time, there were several radical Black workers groups such as DRUM (Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement), DODGE - named after the car plant in Detroit and ELARUM (Eldron Avenue Revolutionary Union Movement). They organized large numbers of revolutionary Black workers. Although they had some Black caucuses within the trade unions, the Panthers did not sufficiently develop this aspect of the work. It was of particular importance because the Black working class are critical in the struggle for Black liberation.
The Panthers were one of the few groups who understood the whole basis of American society had to be transformed. It was this understanding that gave them a revolutionary outlook. But this alone, guarantees nothing. The clarity of ideas which enables the development of a coherent and effective strategy is essential in accomplishing the task of the overthrow of capitalism. We would argue that there were many confused ideas in the Black Panther Party. Some believed they could develop on the basis of a struggle conducted by a small armed minority and didn't have a strategy for building a mass organization which could be sustained over a longer period.
Huey Newton says in Revolutionary Suicide
"But we soon discovered that weapons and uniforms set us apart from the community. We were looked upon as an ad hoc military group, acting outside the community fabric and too radical to be a part of it. Perhaps some of our tactics at the time were extreme; perhaps we placed too much emphasis on military action."
This was particularly important as they had reached their high point at the time of the ebbing of the huge civil rights movement. Had the organization been developed with a more long term perspective then the Black Panthers would have been in a position to put themselves at the head of a mass resurgence of radicalism amongst the Black population or even in wider American society. This, above all demonstrates the need for a clear forward view of how events will unfold in society. That is why a careful and disciplined study of events is an important aspect of shaping the outlook of any revolutionary organization.
The Panthers have left us with an invaluable experience. Their dedication, will and bravery in the face of what might have appeared as insurmountable odds is an example which any serious Black activist or revolutionary should be proud to follow. They were the highpoint of the civil rights movement.
Adrian Wood & Nutan Rajguru
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