THE ORIGIN OF MAY DAY:The 1886 General Strike
We workers in the United States have not always had the eight-hour day. This, like most progress, was won through popular struggle. In the late 1800s, workers, including children, could suffer 16 or more hours a day under dangerous, stifling sweatshop conditions. They earned starvation wages and lived in cramped quarters. Like today, the bosses and the government kept the working class weak by sharpening the divisions of race, gender, immigration status, and other artificial differences. In 1886, however, workers obliterated these divisions and stood together as a class, beginning the fight that won the eight-hour day.
In Chicago, a strong labor movement pressed for, and was rewarded with, 8-hour legislation in 1867. This was supposed to be enacted on May 1st. When that day came, however, the bosses ignored the law and the government wouldn't enforce it. But when Chicago's militant workers went on strike to protest, the government did send the police to brutally crush the peoples' resistance. The despondent workers returned to their jobs. Nothing had changed for Chicago's toilers except their confidence that change could be achieved through legislation.
In 1886 another more radical 8-hour movement gained momentum, led in Chicago by migrant and other workers of the anarchist International Working People's Association (IWPA). A national coalition of unions called for a general strike for May 1st. A general strike is when all workers, regardless of profession, stop working. By crippling the economy workers demonstrate their power - without the workers, society could not continue; the bosses and the rest of the ruling class, on the other hand, are completely useless and even detrimental to the health of human society.
On May 1st, 1886 750,000 workers went on strike across the country— 400,000 in Chicago alone. Eleven-thousand marched in Detroit, 25,000 in New York City, and 80,000 marched through Chicago's streets. Their demonstration of unity terrified the ruling class. Determined not to concede anything and to greedily hoard all of the wealth they had robbed from the poor, the rich set out to crush the movement with violence.
The workers' momentum continued with strikes and demonstrations. On May 3rd, the striking "lumber shovers" union held a public meeting of 6,000 near the McGormick plant. The police attacked the meeting with guns and batons, killing one worker and wounding more. Outraged, anarchists posted a call in their daily German-language paper, the Arbeiter-Zeitung ("Workers'
Newspaper") for a May 4th protest meeting at Haymarket Square.
That night, thousands gathered at Haymarket to denounce police violence. The crowd listened calmly to speeches by migrant anarchist workers, such as August Spies and Samuel Fielden. Even the mayor of Chicago, who attended the beginninghalfoftherally,said,"nothinglookedlikely to happen to require police interference," and he advised police captain Bonfield to send his forces home. Bonfield didn't. Around 10PM, after the mayor and many attendees left, and as Fielden was calling the meeting to a close, Bonfield's force of 200 officers marched on the rally, threatening violence and demanding it break up. A bomb exploded in the police ranks, killing one instantly and injuring many. In the chaos, police fired indiscriminately, killing seven of their own officers and numerous demonstrators, though they never counted how many workers they slaughtered.
A reign of terror followed while the state prosecutor publicly advised the police to target anarchists: "make the raids first and look up the law afterwards." Police arrested all known anarchists and raided meeting halls, printing offices, and homes. Eight prominent anarchist speakers, newspaper editors, and unionists-August Spies, Sam Fielden, Albert Parsons, Adolph Fischer, George Engel, Michael Schwab, Louis Lingg, and Oscar Neebe—were charged with the Haymarket bombing. Of the 8 men, 7 were immigrants, and only 3 were at Haymarket that night. The state prosecutor handpicked a biased jury and presented no evidence connecting them to the bomb.
As the prosecution argued in court, "Anarchy is on trial. These men have been selected, picked out by the Grand Jury, and indicted because they were leaders. They are no more guilty than the thousands who follow them. Gentlemen of the jury; convict these men, make examples of them, Jiang them and you saviour institutions, our society/'l3o they" did." All received death sentences except Neebe, who was given 15 years. A massive international campaign forced the state to commute the sentences of Schwab and Fielden to life imprisonment, but on November llth, 1887, Parsons, Engel, Spies, and Fischer were hanged. The fiery young German carpenter, Louis Lingg, cheated the hangman, committing suicide in his cell the day before his execution. Six-hundred thousand attended their funeral.
While the Haymarket incident was initially seen as a set-back for the 8-hour movement, the event radicalized many more, including influential anarchists Emma Goldman and Voltairine de Gleyre. The American Federation of Labor and the anarchist IWPA took the streets again on May Day, 1890, and the movement for the 8-hour day pressed on. Carrying the legacy of the Haymarket Martyrs, organized labor began to make headway. The United Mine Workers achieved the eight-hour day in 1898, as did the Building Trades Council of San Francisco in 1900, printing trades across the US in 1905, and Ford Motor workers in 1914. In 1916, threatening a nationwide general strike, US railroad workers forced the government to pass the Adamson Act, which won them an eight-hour day, with additional pay for overtime.
Finally in 1938, massive militant movements of workers and unemployed forced the Roosevelt government to pass the Fair Labor Standards Act, establishing for many the 8-hour day with extra overtime pay, as well as a national minimum wage and the abolition of "oppressive child labor."
Saturday, April 21, 2012
Standing In Solidarity With Private Bradley Manning In The Boston Area On Friday April 27th In Davis Square, Somerville And Saturday April 28th At Park Street Station In Boston
Click on the headline to link to the Private Bradley Manning Support Network website for updates on his case and actiosn on his behalf.
We of the anti-war movement were not able to do much to affect the Bush- Obama Iraq War timetable but we can do much to save the one hero of that war, Bradley Manning.
According to the Private Bradley Manning Support Network (see link above) there are a series of actions planned next week in Washington, D.C at the Justice Department on April 24th and at Fort Meade, Maryland on April 25th and 26th in connection with the next round of legal proceedings in his case. I had originally intended to travel down from Boston to take part in those events that week but some other obligations now prevent me from doing so. Nevertheless there are two on-going activities in the Boston area where those of us who support freedom for Bradley Manning can show our solidarity during this week.
Every Friday from 1:00 -2:00 PM there is an on-going solidarity vigil for Brother Manning at the Davis Square Redline MBTA stop in Davis Square, Somerville.
Every Saturday from 1:00-2:00 PM there is an on-going peace vigil/speak-out in our struggle against the war (or wars) of the moment being orchestrated by the American government and its allies at the Redline MBTA Park Street Station in Boston (Boston Common). Bradley Manning’s case is a natural extension of those struggles.
Here is a little comment that I have made previously whenever the call to defend Private Manning in the streets has been issued as motivation for standing in solidarity with him in his time of need:
Of course I will be standing in solidarity with Private Bradley Manning in Davis Square and at Park Street Station on April 27th and 28th respectively because I stand in solidarity with the alleged actions of Private Bradley Manning in bringing to light, just a little light, some of the nefarious war-like doings of this government, Bush-like or Obamian. If he did such acts they are no crime. No crime at all in my eyes or in the eyes of the vast majority of people who know of the case and of its importance as an individual act of resistance to the unjust and barbaric American-led war in Iraq. I sleep just a shade bit easier these days knowing that Private Manning may have exposed what we all knew, or should have known- the Iraq war and the Afghan war justifications rested on a house of cards. American imperialism’s gun-toting house of cards, but cards nevertheless.
I will also be standing in solidarity with Private Bradley Manning because I am outraged by the treatment meted out to Private Manning, presumably an innocent man, by a government who alleges itself to be some “beacon” of the civilized world. Bradley Manning had been held in solidarity at Quantico and other locales for over 500 days, and has been held without trial for much longer, as the government and its military try to glue a case together. The military, and its henchmen in the Justice Department, have gotten more devious although not smarter since I was a soldier in their crosshairs over forty years ago.
These are sufficient reasons to stand in solidarity with Private Manning and will be until the day he is freed by his jailers. And I will continue to stand in proud solidarity with Brother Manning until that great day. Please plan to attend either or both of these events on Friday April 28th (Davis Square) and/or Saturday April 29th (Park Street) to stand in solidarity with Bradley Manning.
We of the anti-war movement were not able to do much to affect the Bush- Obama Iraq War timetable but we can do much to save the one hero of that war, Bradley Manning.
According to the Private Bradley Manning Support Network (see link above) there are a series of actions planned next week in Washington, D.C at the Justice Department on April 24th and at Fort Meade, Maryland on April 25th and 26th in connection with the next round of legal proceedings in his case. I had originally intended to travel down from Boston to take part in those events that week but some other obligations now prevent me from doing so. Nevertheless there are two on-going activities in the Boston area where those of us who support freedom for Bradley Manning can show our solidarity during this week.
Every Friday from 1:00 -2:00 PM there is an on-going solidarity vigil for Brother Manning at the Davis Square Redline MBTA stop in Davis Square, Somerville.
Every Saturday from 1:00-2:00 PM there is an on-going peace vigil/speak-out in our struggle against the war (or wars) of the moment being orchestrated by the American government and its allies at the Redline MBTA Park Street Station in Boston (Boston Common). Bradley Manning’s case is a natural extension of those struggles.
Here is a little comment that I have made previously whenever the call to defend Private Manning in the streets has been issued as motivation for standing in solidarity with him in his time of need:
Of course I will be standing in solidarity with Private Bradley Manning in Davis Square and at Park Street Station on April 27th and 28th respectively because I stand in solidarity with the alleged actions of Private Bradley Manning in bringing to light, just a little light, some of the nefarious war-like doings of this government, Bush-like or Obamian. If he did such acts they are no crime. No crime at all in my eyes or in the eyes of the vast majority of people who know of the case and of its importance as an individual act of resistance to the unjust and barbaric American-led war in Iraq. I sleep just a shade bit easier these days knowing that Private Manning may have exposed what we all knew, or should have known- the Iraq war and the Afghan war justifications rested on a house of cards. American imperialism’s gun-toting house of cards, but cards nevertheless.
I will also be standing in solidarity with Private Bradley Manning because I am outraged by the treatment meted out to Private Manning, presumably an innocent man, by a government who alleges itself to be some “beacon” of the civilized world. Bradley Manning had been held in solidarity at Quantico and other locales for over 500 days, and has been held without trial for much longer, as the government and its military try to glue a case together. The military, and its henchmen in the Justice Department, have gotten more devious although not smarter since I was a soldier in their crosshairs over forty years ago.
These are sufficient reasons to stand in solidarity with Private Manning and will be until the day he is freed by his jailers. And I will continue to stand in proud solidarity with Brother Manning until that great day. Please plan to attend either or both of these events on Friday April 28th (Davis Square) and/or Saturday April 29th (Park Street) to stand in solidarity with Bradley Manning.
All Out On May Day 2012: A Day Of International Working Class Solidarity Actions- An Open Letter To The Working People Of Boston From A Fellow Worker
Click on the headline to link to the Boston May Day Coalition website.
All Out For May 1st-International Workers Day 2012!
Why Working People Need To Show Their Power On May Day 2012
Wage cuts, long work hours, steep consumer price rises, unemployment, small or no pensions, little or no paid vacation time, plenty of poor and inadequate housing, homelessness, and wide-spread sicknesses as a result of a poor medical system or no health insurance. I will stop there although I could go on and on. Sounds familiar though, sounds like your situation or that of someone you know, right?
Words, or words like them, are taken daily from today’s global headlines.
But these were also similar to the conditions our forebears faced in America back in the 1880s when this same vicious ruling class was called, and rightly so, “the robber barons,” and threatened, as one of their kind, Jay Gould, stated in a fit of candor, “to hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” so that they could maintain their luxury in peace. That too has not changed.
What did change then is that our forebears fought back, fought back long and hard, starting with the fight connected with the heroic Haymarket Martyrs in 1886 for the eight-hour day symbolized each year by a May Day celebration of working class power. We need to reassert that claim. This May Day let us revive that tradition as we individually act around our separate grievances and strike, strike like the furies, collectively against the robber barons of the 21st century.
No question over the past several years (really decades but now it is just more public and right in our face) American working people have taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin in every possible way. Start off with massive job losses, heavy job losses in the service and manufacturing sectors (and jobs that are not coming back except as “race to the bottom” low wage, two-tier jobs dividing younger workers from older workers like at General Electric or the auto plants). Move on to paying for the seemingly never-ending bail–out of banks, other financial institutions and corporations “too big to fail,” home foreclosures and those “under water,” effective tax increases (since the rich refuse to pay, in some cases literally paying nothing, we pay). And finish up with mountains of consumer debt for everything from modern necessities to just daily get-bys, and college student loan debt as a life-time deadweight around the neck of the kids there is little to glow about in the harsh light of the “American Dream.”
Add to that the double (and triple) troubles facing immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and many women and the grievances voiced long ago in the Declaration of Independence seem like just so much whining. In short, it is not secret that working people have faced, are facing and, apparently, will continue to face an erosion of their material well-being for the foreseeable future something not seen by most people since the 1930s Great Depression, the time of our grandparents (or, for some of us, great-grandparents).
That is this condition will continue unless we take some lessons from those same 1930s and struggle, struggle like hell, against the ruling class that seems to have all the card decks stacked against us. Struggle like they did in places like Minneapolis, San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and Detroit. Those labor-centered struggles demonstrated the social power of working people to hit the “economic royalists” (the name coined for the ruling class of that day by their front-man Franklin Delano Roosevelt, FDR) to shut the bosses down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property.
The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take (and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their “free-speech” parks (up to a point as we have found out via the Occupy movement), and curse them to eternity as long as we don’t touch their production, “perks,” and profits. Moreover an inspired fight like the actions proposed for this May Day 2012 can help new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed, homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, help themselves to get out from under. All Out On May Day 2012.
I have listed some of the problems we face now to some of our demand that should be raised every day, not just May Day. See if you agree and if you do take to the streets on May Day with us. We demand:
*Hands Off Our Public Worker Unions! No More Wisconsins! Hands Off All Our Unions!
* Give the unemployed work! Billions for public works projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure (bridges, roads, sewer and water systems, etc.)!
*End the endless wars- Troops And Mercenaries Out Of Afghanistan (and Iraq)!-U.S Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
* Full citizenship rights for all those who made it here no matter how they got here!
* A drastic increase in the minimum wage and big wage increases for all workers!
* A moratorium on home foreclosures! No evictions!
* A moratorium on student loan debt! Free, quality higher education for all! Create 100, 200, many publicly-supported Harvards!
*No increases in public transportation fares! No transportation worker lay-offs! For free quality public transportation!
To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1, 2012 we will be organizing a wide-ranging series of mass collective participatory actions:
*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where there is no union - a one-day strike around some, or all, of the above-mentioned demands.
*We will be organizing at workplaces where a strike is not possible for workers to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out”.
*We will be organizing students from kindergarten to graduate school and the off-hand left-wing think tank to walk-out of their schools (or not show up in the first place), set up campus picket lines, and to rally at a central location.
*We will be calling in our communities for a mass consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to make purchases on that day.
All out on May Day 2012.
All Out For May 1st-International Workers Day 2012!
Why Working People Need To Show Their Power On May Day 2012
Wage cuts, long work hours, steep consumer price rises, unemployment, small or no pensions, little or no paid vacation time, plenty of poor and inadequate housing, homelessness, and wide-spread sicknesses as a result of a poor medical system or no health insurance. I will stop there although I could go on and on. Sounds familiar though, sounds like your situation or that of someone you know, right?
Words, or words like them, are taken daily from today’s global headlines.
But these were also similar to the conditions our forebears faced in America back in the 1880s when this same vicious ruling class was called, and rightly so, “the robber barons,” and threatened, as one of their kind, Jay Gould, stated in a fit of candor, “to hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” so that they could maintain their luxury in peace. That too has not changed.
What did change then is that our forebears fought back, fought back long and hard, starting with the fight connected with the heroic Haymarket Martyrs in 1886 for the eight-hour day symbolized each year by a May Day celebration of working class power. We need to reassert that claim. This May Day let us revive that tradition as we individually act around our separate grievances and strike, strike like the furies, collectively against the robber barons of the 21st century.
No question over the past several years (really decades but now it is just more public and right in our face) American working people have taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin in every possible way. Start off with massive job losses, heavy job losses in the service and manufacturing sectors (and jobs that are not coming back except as “race to the bottom” low wage, two-tier jobs dividing younger workers from older workers like at General Electric or the auto plants). Move on to paying for the seemingly never-ending bail–out of banks, other financial institutions and corporations “too big to fail,” home foreclosures and those “under water,” effective tax increases (since the rich refuse to pay, in some cases literally paying nothing, we pay). And finish up with mountains of consumer debt for everything from modern necessities to just daily get-bys, and college student loan debt as a life-time deadweight around the neck of the kids there is little to glow about in the harsh light of the “American Dream.”
Add to that the double (and triple) troubles facing immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and many women and the grievances voiced long ago in the Declaration of Independence seem like just so much whining. In short, it is not secret that working people have faced, are facing and, apparently, will continue to face an erosion of their material well-being for the foreseeable future something not seen by most people since the 1930s Great Depression, the time of our grandparents (or, for some of us, great-grandparents).
That is this condition will continue unless we take some lessons from those same 1930s and struggle, struggle like hell, against the ruling class that seems to have all the card decks stacked against us. Struggle like they did in places like Minneapolis, San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and Detroit. Those labor-centered struggles demonstrated the social power of working people to hit the “economic royalists” (the name coined for the ruling class of that day by their front-man Franklin Delano Roosevelt, FDR) to shut the bosses down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property.
The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take (and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their “free-speech” parks (up to a point as we have found out via the Occupy movement), and curse them to eternity as long as we don’t touch their production, “perks,” and profits. Moreover an inspired fight like the actions proposed for this May Day 2012 can help new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed, homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, help themselves to get out from under. All Out On May Day 2012.
I have listed some of the problems we face now to some of our demand that should be raised every day, not just May Day. See if you agree and if you do take to the streets on May Day with us. We demand:
*Hands Off Our Public Worker Unions! No More Wisconsins! Hands Off All Our Unions!
* Give the unemployed work! Billions for public works projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure (bridges, roads, sewer and water systems, etc.)!
*End the endless wars- Troops And Mercenaries Out Of Afghanistan (and Iraq)!-U.S Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
* Full citizenship rights for all those who made it here no matter how they got here!
* A drastic increase in the minimum wage and big wage increases for all workers!
* A moratorium on home foreclosures! No evictions!
* A moratorium on student loan debt! Free, quality higher education for all! Create 100, 200, many publicly-supported Harvards!
*No increases in public transportation fares! No transportation worker lay-offs! For free quality public transportation!
To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1, 2012 we will be organizing a wide-ranging series of mass collective participatory actions:
*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where there is no union - a one-day strike around some, or all, of the above-mentioned demands.
*We will be organizing at workplaces where a strike is not possible for workers to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out”.
*We will be organizing students from kindergarten to graduate school and the off-hand left-wing think tank to walk-out of their schools (or not show up in the first place), set up campus picket lines, and to rally at a central location.
*We will be calling in our communities for a mass consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to make purchases on that day.
All out on May Day 2012.
From #Ur-Occupied Boston (#Ur-Tomemonos Boston)-General Assembly-The Embryo Of An Alternate Government-Learn The Lessons Of History-Lessons From The Utopian Socialists- Charles Fourier and The Phalanx Movement-“Administrative Institutions and Practices”
Click on the headline to link to the archives of the Occupy Boston General Assembly minutes from the Occupy Boston website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011. The General Assembly is the core political institution of the Occupy movement. Some of the minutes will reflect the growing pains of that movement and its concepts of political organization. Note that I used the word embryo in the headline and I believe that gives a fair estimate of its status, and its possibilities.
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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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In the recent past as part of my one of my commentaries 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 lately 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 of 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 of the "one percent" 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.
Previous historical models readily 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.
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 Lessons 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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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 of public and private sector workers to unionize.
* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dues 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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Charles Fourier (1772-1837)
“Administrative Institutions and Practices”
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Source: The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier. Selected Texts on Work, Love, and Passionate Attraction. Translated, Edited and with an Introduction by Jonathan Beecher and Richard Bienvenu. Published by Jonathan Cape, 1972;
First Published: in 1822, Théorie de l'unité universelle.
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.
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The internal administration of the Phalanx will be directed at the outset by a regency or council to be composed of those shareholders who have made the greatest contribution in terms of capital and industrial or scientific knowledge. If there are women capable of exercising administrative functions, they should be included on the council along with the men; for in Harmony women are on a par with men in all affairs of interest, provided they have the necessary education.
Harmony cannot tolerate any general community of goods,[33] and there can be no collective recompenses to familial or conjugal groups. Harmony is obliged to deal with everyone individually, even with children who are at least four and a half years old, and dividends must be shared according to each individual’s contribution in terms of labour, capital and talent.
It is allowable for relatives, couples and friends to share what they possess, as is sometimes done in civilisation. But in the dealings of the Phalanx with its members, even with five-year-old children, individual accounts are kept. A child’s earnings are not given to his father; and once he reaches the age of four and a half, a child becomes the owner of the fruits of his own labour, as well as of the legacies, inheritances and interests which he may have acquired. These are kept from him by the Phalanx until he comes of age — that is until he is nineteen or twenty and able to advance from the sixth tribe, the lads and lasses, to the seventh, the adolescents.[34]
After having evaluated the land, machines, materials, furniture, supplies and liquid capital contributed by each member, the regency issues 1728 exchangeable shares. These shares are backed by the property of the Phalanx, its land, buildings, flocks, workshops, etc. The regency issues these shares, or portions thereof, to each member in accordance with his contribution to the Phalanx. It is possible to be a member without being a shareholder; it is also possible to be an outside shareholder without being an active member. In the second case a person has no right to the two portions of the revenue of the Phalanx which are assigned to labour and to talent.
The annual profits are divided into three unequal portions and distributed in the following manner:
5/12 to manual labour,
4/12 to invested capital,
3/12 to theoretical and practical knowledge.
According to his abilities, each member can belong to any or all of these three categories.[35]
In connection with its administrative responsibilities, the regency gives each poor member an advance of one’ year’s clothing, food and lodging.[36] This advance entails no risk, because it is certain that the work which the poor man will perform under the stimulus of attraction and pleasure will produce a yield in excess of the advances made to him. After the annual inventory the Phalanx will find itself in debt to all the poor members to whom it has advanced the minimum. This minimum includes: 1) Board of five meals a day in the third class dining room; 2) Decent clothing including work- and dress-uniforms, as well as all the tools and implements needed for farming and industrial work; 3) Lodging consisting of a private room with toilet, and also access to the public halls and festivities of the third class and to the stalls reserved for the third class at the theatre.
At the outset, before the Phalanx makes its first harvests, the regency is responsible for the purchase of provisions; but their use and management is to be entrusted to the gastronomic series.
If the Phalanx is composed of 1500 members, they will be roughly divided into the following gastronomic categories:
900 members of the third class,
300 members of the second class,
100 members of the first class,
50 members eating food prepared to order.[37]
In all there will be five series devoted to the preparation of food; in addition to the four categories mentioned above, there will also be separate cooking for the animals who will be plentiful and well-treated in Harmony.
Each of the categories noted above will be divided into subdivisions corresponding to the three sexes.[38] There will be separate types of cooking for men, women and children... . Each of the three sexes will have its own tables and dining rooms. They will sometimes eat together in groups of various sizes at lunch or supper. But ordinarily there will be no sexual mixing at dinner, which is a meal during which each of the sexes will engage in its own gastrosophic cabals... .
Children will not dine at the same table with their fathers. This civilised custom would put a crimp on the studies of the fathers and the pleasures of the children. It will be enough for them to eat together at the two small meals, the délité[39] and the afternoon snack. But the two middle-sized meals, breakfast and supper, as well as the pivotal meal or dinner, will be arranged more methodically and according to the wishes of attraction. These arrangements will be perfectly free; they will be in strict conformity with the wishes of the passions. We are unable to recognise these wishes in the present order which distorts the play of the passions. In reading this sketch a father may say: “But I enjoy dining with my wife and my children, and I will continue to do so, come what may.” Such an attitude is quite mistaken. Today, for want of anything better, a father may enjoy eating with his wife and his children. But when he has spent two days in Harmony and taken the bait of the intrigues and cabals of the series, the father will wish to dine with his own cabalistic groups. He will send off his wife and his children who, for their part, will ask nothing better than to be done with the lugubrious family dinner.
Since no coercive measures are tolerated in Harmony, the work to be done is indicated but not ordered by the Areopagus, which is the supreme industrial council. It is composed of the high-ranking officers of each series, and it serves as an advisory body with regard to passional affairs. Its opinions and decisions are subordinated to the wishes of attraction, and each series remains free to make decisions concerning its own industrial interests. Thus the Areopagus cannot order that the mowing or harvesting be done; it can only declare that a certain time is propitious according to the available meteorological or agronomic data; thereupon each series acts according to its wishes. But its wishes can scarcely differ from those of the Areopagus whose opinion is held in high esteem.
****
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend All The Occupation Sites And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Protesters Everywhere!
********
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
********
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.
*******
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.
**********
In the recent past as part of my one of my commentaries 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 lately 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 of 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 of the "one percent" 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.
Previous historical models readily 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.
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 Lessons 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.
********
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 of public and private sector workers to unionize.
* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dues 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!
*******
Charles Fourier (1772-1837)
“Administrative Institutions and Practices”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source: The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier. Selected Texts on Work, Love, and Passionate Attraction. Translated, Edited and with an Introduction by Jonathan Beecher and Richard Bienvenu. Published by Jonathan Cape, 1972;
First Published: in 1822, Théorie de l'unité universelle.
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The internal administration of the Phalanx will be directed at the outset by a regency or council to be composed of those shareholders who have made the greatest contribution in terms of capital and industrial or scientific knowledge. If there are women capable of exercising administrative functions, they should be included on the council along with the men; for in Harmony women are on a par with men in all affairs of interest, provided they have the necessary education.
Harmony cannot tolerate any general community of goods,[33] and there can be no collective recompenses to familial or conjugal groups. Harmony is obliged to deal with everyone individually, even with children who are at least four and a half years old, and dividends must be shared according to each individual’s contribution in terms of labour, capital and talent.
It is allowable for relatives, couples and friends to share what they possess, as is sometimes done in civilisation. But in the dealings of the Phalanx with its members, even with five-year-old children, individual accounts are kept. A child’s earnings are not given to his father; and once he reaches the age of four and a half, a child becomes the owner of the fruits of his own labour, as well as of the legacies, inheritances and interests which he may have acquired. These are kept from him by the Phalanx until he comes of age — that is until he is nineteen or twenty and able to advance from the sixth tribe, the lads and lasses, to the seventh, the adolescents.[34]
After having evaluated the land, machines, materials, furniture, supplies and liquid capital contributed by each member, the regency issues 1728 exchangeable shares. These shares are backed by the property of the Phalanx, its land, buildings, flocks, workshops, etc. The regency issues these shares, or portions thereof, to each member in accordance with his contribution to the Phalanx. It is possible to be a member without being a shareholder; it is also possible to be an outside shareholder without being an active member. In the second case a person has no right to the two portions of the revenue of the Phalanx which are assigned to labour and to talent.
The annual profits are divided into three unequal portions and distributed in the following manner:
5/12 to manual labour,
4/12 to invested capital,
3/12 to theoretical and practical knowledge.
According to his abilities, each member can belong to any or all of these three categories.[35]
In connection with its administrative responsibilities, the regency gives each poor member an advance of one’ year’s clothing, food and lodging.[36] This advance entails no risk, because it is certain that the work which the poor man will perform under the stimulus of attraction and pleasure will produce a yield in excess of the advances made to him. After the annual inventory the Phalanx will find itself in debt to all the poor members to whom it has advanced the minimum. This minimum includes: 1) Board of five meals a day in the third class dining room; 2) Decent clothing including work- and dress-uniforms, as well as all the tools and implements needed for farming and industrial work; 3) Lodging consisting of a private room with toilet, and also access to the public halls and festivities of the third class and to the stalls reserved for the third class at the theatre.
At the outset, before the Phalanx makes its first harvests, the regency is responsible for the purchase of provisions; but their use and management is to be entrusted to the gastronomic series.
If the Phalanx is composed of 1500 members, they will be roughly divided into the following gastronomic categories:
900 members of the third class,
300 members of the second class,
100 members of the first class,
50 members eating food prepared to order.[37]
In all there will be five series devoted to the preparation of food; in addition to the four categories mentioned above, there will also be separate cooking for the animals who will be plentiful and well-treated in Harmony.
Each of the categories noted above will be divided into subdivisions corresponding to the three sexes.[38] There will be separate types of cooking for men, women and children... . Each of the three sexes will have its own tables and dining rooms. They will sometimes eat together in groups of various sizes at lunch or supper. But ordinarily there will be no sexual mixing at dinner, which is a meal during which each of the sexes will engage in its own gastrosophic cabals... .
Children will not dine at the same table with their fathers. This civilised custom would put a crimp on the studies of the fathers and the pleasures of the children. It will be enough for them to eat together at the two small meals, the délité[39] and the afternoon snack. But the two middle-sized meals, breakfast and supper, as well as the pivotal meal or dinner, will be arranged more methodically and according to the wishes of attraction. These arrangements will be perfectly free; they will be in strict conformity with the wishes of the passions. We are unable to recognise these wishes in the present order which distorts the play of the passions. In reading this sketch a father may say: “But I enjoy dining with my wife and my children, and I will continue to do so, come what may.” Such an attitude is quite mistaken. Today, for want of anything better, a father may enjoy eating with his wife and his children. But when he has spent two days in Harmony and taken the bait of the intrigues and cabals of the series, the father will wish to dine with his own cabalistic groups. He will send off his wife and his children who, for their part, will ask nothing better than to be done with the lugubrious family dinner.
Since no coercive measures are tolerated in Harmony, the work to be done is indicated but not ordered by the Areopagus, which is the supreme industrial council. It is composed of the high-ranking officers of each series, and it serves as an advisory body with regard to passional affairs. Its opinions and decisions are subordinated to the wishes of attraction, and each series remains free to make decisions concerning its own industrial interests. Thus the Areopagus cannot order that the mowing or harvesting be done; it can only declare that a certain time is propitious according to the available meteorological or agronomic data; thereupon each series acts according to its wishes. But its wishes can scarcely differ from those of the Areopagus whose opinion is held in high esteem.
Friday, April 20, 2012
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!- Why You, Your Union , Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 General Strike In Boston (And Everywhere)-Stand Up!-Fight Back!
Click on the headline to link to the Boston May Day Coalition website to find out about actions planned in the Greater Boston area. Google May Day and your city for actions in other locales.
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 back on December 12, 2011and the subsequent defense of the longshoremen’s union at Longview, Washington and the beating back of the anti-union drives by the bosses there. As I have pointed out in remarks previously made as part of the Boston solidarity rally with the West Coast Port Shutdown on December 12th this is the way forward as we struggle against the ruling class for a very different, more equitable society.
Not everything has gone as well, or as well-attended, as expected including at that rally in solidarity in Boston on the afternoon of December 12th but we are still exhibiting growing pains in the struggle against the bosses, including plenty of illusions or misunderstandings by many newly radicalized militants about whom our friends, and our enemies, are. Some of that will get sorted out in the future as we get a better grip of the importance of the labor movement in winning victories in our overall social struggles. May Day can be the start of that new offensive in order to gain our demands
******
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Labor Movement And Its Allies! Defend All Those Who Defend The Labor Movement! Defend All May Day Protesters Everywhere!
*******
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
OB Endorses Call for General Strike Call-Labor And Its Allies Should As Well
January 8th, 2012 • mhacker •
The following proposal was passed by the General Assembly on Jan 7, 2012:
Occupy Boston supports the call for an international General Strike on May 1, 2012, for immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. We recognize housing, education, health care, LGBT rights and racial equality as human rights; and thus call for the building of a broad coalition that will ensure and promote a democratic standard of living for all peoples.
***********
Why You, Your Union, Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 Actions-Stand Up!-Fight Back!
Wage cuts, long work hours, steep consumer price rises, unemployment, small or no pensions, little or no paid vacation time, plenty of poor and inadequate housing, homelessness, and wide-spread sicknesses as a result of a poor medical system or no health insurance. Sound familiar? Words, perhaps, taken from today’s global headlines? Well, yes. But these were also the similar conditions that faced our forebears in America back in the 1880s when the vicious ruling class was called, and rightly so, “the robber barons,” and threatened, as one of their kind stated in a fit of candor, “to hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” so that they could maintain their luxury in peace. That too has not changed.
What did change then is that our forebears fought back, fought back long and hard, starting with the fight for the eight-hour day symbolized each year by a May Day celebration of working class power. We need to reassert that claim. This May Day let us revive that tradition as we individually act around our separate grievances and strike, strike like the furies, collectively against the robber barons of the 21st century.
No question over the past several years (really decades but it is just more public and in our face now) American working people has taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin in every possible way. Starting with massive job losses, heavy job losses in the service and manufacturing sectors (and jobs that are not coming back except as “race to the bottom” low wage, two-tier jobs dividing younger workers from older workers), paying for the seemingly never-ending bail–out of banks, other financial institutions and corporations “too big to fail,” home foreclosures and those “under water,” effective tax increases (since the rich refuse to pay, we pay), mountains of consumer debt for everything from modern necessities to just daily get-bys, and college student loan debt as a lifetime deadweight around the neck of the kids there is little to glow about in the harsh light of the “American Dream.”
Add to that the double (and triple) troubles facing immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and women and the grievances voiced in the Declaration of Independence seem like just so much whining. In short, it is not secret that working people have faced, are facing and, apparently, will continue to face an erosion of their material well-being for the foreseeable future something not seen by most people since the 1930s Great Depression, the time of our grandparents (or, for some of us, great-grandparents).
That is this condition will continue unless we take some lessons from those same 1930s and struggle, struggle like demons, against the ruling class that seems to have all the card decks stacked against us. Struggle like they did in places like Minneapolis, San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and Detroit. Those labor-centered struggles demonstrated the social power of working people to hit the “economic royalists” (the name coined for the ruling class of that day by their front man Franklin Delano Roosevelt, FDR) to shut the bosses down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property.
The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take (and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their “free-speech” parks (up to a point as we have found out via the Occupy movement), and curse them to eternity as long as we don’t touch their production, “perks,” and profits. Moreover an inspired fight like the actions proposed for this May Day 2012 can help new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed, homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, help themselves to get out from under. All Out On May Day 2012.
Show Power
We demand:
*Hands Off Our Public Worker Unions! Hands Off All Our Unions!
* Give the unemployed work! Billions for public works projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure (bridges, roads, sewer and water systems, etc.)!
*End the endless wars- Troops And Mercenaries Out Of Afghanistan (and Iraq)!-U.S Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
* Full citizenship rights for all those who made it here no matter how they got here!
* A drastic increase in the minimum wage and big wage increases for all workers!
* A moratorium on home foreclosures! No evictions!
* A moratorium on student loan debt! Free, quality higher education for all! Create 100, 200, many publicly-supported Harvards!
*No increases in public transportation fares! No transportation worker lay-offs! Free quality public transportation!
To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1, 2012 we will be organizing a wide-ranging series of mass collective participatory actions:
*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where there is no union - a one-day general strike.
*We will be organizing, where a strike is not possible, to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out”.
*We will be organizing students from kindergarten to graduate school and the off-hand think tank to walk-out of their schools (or not show up in the first place), set up campus picket lines, or to rally at a central location, probably Boston Common.
*We will be calling in our communities for a mass consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to make purchases on that day.
Guest Commentary from the IWW (Industrial Workers Of The World, Wobblies) website http://www.iww.org/en/culture/official/preamble.shtml
Agree or disagree with the Wobblies and their political concepts for class struggle but read their very early statement about the nature of class warfare. “Big Bill” Haywood and his crowd got it right then and have useful words to say now. Read on.
Preamble to the IWW Constitution (1905)
Posted Sun, 05/01/2005 - 8:34am by IWW.org Editor
The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.
Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.
We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class has interests in common with their employers.
These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.
Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."
It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.
Watch this website and other social media sites for further specific details of events and actions.
All out on May Day 2012.
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 back on December 12, 2011and the subsequent defense of the longshoremen’s union at Longview, Washington and the beating back of the anti-union drives by the bosses there. As I have pointed out in remarks previously made as part of the Boston solidarity rally with the West Coast Port Shutdown on December 12th this is the way forward as we struggle against the ruling class for a very different, more equitable society.
Not everything has gone as well, or as well-attended, as expected including at that rally in solidarity in Boston on the afternoon of December 12th but we are still exhibiting growing pains in the struggle against the bosses, including plenty of illusions or misunderstandings by many newly radicalized militants about whom our friends, and our enemies, are. Some of that will get sorted out in the future as we get a better grip of the importance of the labor movement in winning victories in our overall social struggles. May Day can be the start of that new offensive in order to gain our demands
******
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Labor Movement And Its Allies! Defend All Those Who Defend The Labor Movement! Defend All May Day Protesters Everywhere!
*******
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
OB Endorses Call for General Strike Call-Labor And Its Allies Should As Well
January 8th, 2012 • mhacker •
The following proposal was passed by the General Assembly on Jan 7, 2012:
Occupy Boston supports the call for an international General Strike on May 1, 2012, for immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. We recognize housing, education, health care, LGBT rights and racial equality as human rights; and thus call for the building of a broad coalition that will ensure and promote a democratic standard of living for all peoples.
***********
Why You, Your Union, Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 Actions-Stand Up!-Fight Back!
Wage cuts, long work hours, steep consumer price rises, unemployment, small or no pensions, little or no paid vacation time, plenty of poor and inadequate housing, homelessness, and wide-spread sicknesses as a result of a poor medical system or no health insurance. Sound familiar? Words, perhaps, taken from today’s global headlines? Well, yes. But these were also the similar conditions that faced our forebears in America back in the 1880s when the vicious ruling class was called, and rightly so, “the robber barons,” and threatened, as one of their kind stated in a fit of candor, “to hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” so that they could maintain their luxury in peace. That too has not changed.
What did change then is that our forebears fought back, fought back long and hard, starting with the fight for the eight-hour day symbolized each year by a May Day celebration of working class power. We need to reassert that claim. This May Day let us revive that tradition as we individually act around our separate grievances and strike, strike like the furies, collectively against the robber barons of the 21st century.
No question over the past several years (really decades but it is just more public and in our face now) American working people has taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin in every possible way. Starting with massive job losses, heavy job losses in the service and manufacturing sectors (and jobs that are not coming back except as “race to the bottom” low wage, two-tier jobs dividing younger workers from older workers), paying for the seemingly never-ending bail–out of banks, other financial institutions and corporations “too big to fail,” home foreclosures and those “under water,” effective tax increases (since the rich refuse to pay, we pay), mountains of consumer debt for everything from modern necessities to just daily get-bys, and college student loan debt as a lifetime deadweight around the neck of the kids there is little to glow about in the harsh light of the “American Dream.”
Add to that the double (and triple) troubles facing immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and women and the grievances voiced in the Declaration of Independence seem like just so much whining. In short, it is not secret that working people have faced, are facing and, apparently, will continue to face an erosion of their material well-being for the foreseeable future something not seen by most people since the 1930s Great Depression, the time of our grandparents (or, for some of us, great-grandparents).
That is this condition will continue unless we take some lessons from those same 1930s and struggle, struggle like demons, against the ruling class that seems to have all the card decks stacked against us. Struggle like they did in places like Minneapolis, San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and Detroit. Those labor-centered struggles demonstrated the social power of working people to hit the “economic royalists” (the name coined for the ruling class of that day by their front man Franklin Delano Roosevelt, FDR) to shut the bosses down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property.
The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take (and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their “free-speech” parks (up to a point as we have found out via the Occupy movement), and curse them to eternity as long as we don’t touch their production, “perks,” and profits. Moreover an inspired fight like the actions proposed for this May Day 2012 can help new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed, homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, help themselves to get out from under. All Out On May Day 2012.
Show Power
We demand:
*Hands Off Our Public Worker Unions! Hands Off All Our Unions!
* Give the unemployed work! Billions for public works projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure (bridges, roads, sewer and water systems, etc.)!
*End the endless wars- Troops And Mercenaries Out Of Afghanistan (and Iraq)!-U.S Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
* Full citizenship rights for all those who made it here no matter how they got here!
* A drastic increase in the minimum wage and big wage increases for all workers!
* A moratorium on home foreclosures! No evictions!
* A moratorium on student loan debt! Free, quality higher education for all! Create 100, 200, many publicly-supported Harvards!
*No increases in public transportation fares! No transportation worker lay-offs! Free quality public transportation!
To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1, 2012 we will be organizing a wide-ranging series of mass collective participatory actions:
*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where there is no union - a one-day general strike.
*We will be organizing, where a strike is not possible, to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out”.
*We will be organizing students from kindergarten to graduate school and the off-hand think tank to walk-out of their schools (or not show up in the first place), set up campus picket lines, or to rally at a central location, probably Boston Common.
*We will be calling in our communities for a mass consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to make purchases on that day.
Guest Commentary from the IWW (Industrial Workers Of The World, Wobblies) website http://www.iww.org/en/culture/official/preamble.shtml
Agree or disagree with the Wobblies and their political concepts for class struggle but read their very early statement about the nature of class warfare. “Big Bill” Haywood and his crowd got it right then and have useful words to say now. Read on.
Preamble to the IWW Constitution (1905)
Posted Sun, 05/01/2005 - 8:34am by IWW.org Editor
The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.
Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.
We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class has interests in common with their employers.
These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.
Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."
It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.
Watch this website and other social media sites for further specific details of events and actions.
All out on May Day 2012.
Via The "Boston IndyMedia" Website-Boston Branch -Industrial Workers Of The World (IWW, Wobblies) Action Statement On May Day 2012
Click on the headline to link via the Boston IndyMedia Website-Boston Branch -Industrial Workers Of The World (IWW, Wobblies) Action Statement On May Day 2012.
Markin comment:
All out On May Day 2012 our international working class solidarity day!
Markin comment:
All out On May Day 2012 our international working class solidarity day!
Via The "Boston IndyMedia" Website- Tax Day -Boston -April 17th- Photos and Report
Click on the headline to link via the Boston IndyMedia Website- Tax Day -Boston -April 17th- Photos and Report.
The Latest From The “Occupy May Day" Facebook Page- March Separately, Strike Together –International General Strike- Down Tools! Down Work Computers! Down Books!- All Out On May Day 2012- Why You, Your Union , Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 General Strike In Boston-Stand Up!-Fight Back!
Click on the headline to link to updates from the Occupy May Day Facebook Page website. Occupy May Day has called for an international General Strike on May Day 2012. I will post important updates as they appear on that site.
******
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
*******
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
OB Endorses Call for General Strike
January 8th, 2012 • mhacker •
Passed Resolutions No comments The following proposal was passed by the General Assembly on Jan 7, 2012:
Occupy Boston supports the call for an international General Strike on May 1, 2012, for immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. We recognize housing, education, health care, LGBT rights and racial equality as human rights; and thus call for the building of a broad coalition that will ensure and promote a democratic standard of living for all peoples.
*******
Why You, Your Union , Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 General Strike In Boston-Stand Up!-Fight Back!
Wage cuts, long work hours, steep consumer price rises, unemployment, small or no pensions, little or no paid vacation time, plenty of poor and inadequate housing, homelessness, and wide-spread sicknesses as a result of a poor medical system or no health insurance. Sound familiar? Words, perhaps, taken from today’s global headlines? Well, yes. But these were also the similar conditions that faced our forebears in America back in the 1880s when the 1% were called, and rightly so, “the robber barons,” and threatened, as one of their kind stated in a fit of candor, “to hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” so that they could maintain their luxury in peace. That too has not changed.
What did change then is that our forebears fought back, fought back long and hard, starting with the fight for the eight-hour day symbolized each year since 1886 by a May Day celebration of working class power. We need to reassert that claim. This May Day let us revive that tradition as we individually act around our separate grievances and strike, strike like the furies, collectively against the 1%.
No question over the past several years (really decades but it is just more public and in our face now) American working people has taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin in every possible way. Starting with massive job losses, heavy job losses in the service and manufacturing sectors (and jobs that are not coming back), paying for the seemingly never-ending bail–out of banks, other financial institutions and corporations “too big to fail,” home foreclosures and those “under water,” effective tax increases (since the rich refuse to pay, we pay), mountains of consumer debt for everything from modern necessities to just daily get-bys, and college student loan debt as a lifetime deadweight around the neck of the kids there is little to glow about in the harsh light of the “American Dream.”
Add to that the double (and triple) troubles facing immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and women and the grievances voiced in the Declaration of Independence seem like just so much whining. In short, it is not secret that working people have faced, are facing and, apparently, will continue to face an erosion of their material well-being for the foreseeable future something not seen by most people since the 1930s Great Depression, the time of our grandparents (or great-grandparents).
That is this condition will continue unless we take some lessons from those same 1930s and struggle, struggle like demons, against the 1% that seem to have all the card decks stacked against us. Struggle like they did in places like Minneapolis, San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and Detroit. Those labor-centered struggles demonstrated the social power of working people to hit the “economic royalists” (the name coined for the 1% of that day) to shut the bosses down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property.
The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take (and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their “free-speech” parks (up to a point as we have found out via the Occupy movement), and curse them to eternity as long as we don’t touch their production, “perks,” and profits. Moreover an inspired fight like the actions proposed for this May Day 2012 can help new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed, homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, help themselves to get out from under.
Show Power
We demand:
*Hands Off Our Public Worker Unions! Hands Off All Our Unions!
* Give the unemployed work! Billions for public works projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure (bridges, roads, sewer and water systems, etc.)!
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.
*End the endless wars! Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops and Mercenaries From Afghanistan (and the residuals from Iraq)! Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
* Full citizenship rights for all those who made it here no matter how they got here!
* A drastic increase in the minimum wage and big wage increases for all workers!
•
* A moratorium on home foreclosures! No evictions!
* A moratorium on student loan debt! Free, quality higher education for all! Create 100, 200, many publicly-supported Harvards!
*No increases in public transportation fares! No transportation worker lay-offs! For free quality public transportation for all!
To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1, 2012 we will be organizing a wide-ranging series of mass collective participatory actions:
*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where there is no union - a one-day general strike.
*We will be organizing where a strike is not possible to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out.”
*We will be organizing students to walk-out of their schools (or not show up in the first place), set up campus picket lines, or to rally at a central location, probably Boston Common.
*We will be calling in our communities for a mass consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to make purchases on that day.
• Guest Commentary from the IWW (Industrial Workers Of The World, Wobblies) website http://www.iww.org/en/culture/official/preamble.shtml
•
•
• Preamble to the IWW Constitution (1905)
•
• Posted Sun, 05/01/2005 - 8:34am by IWW.org Editor
•
• The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.
•
• Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.
•
• We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.
•
• These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.
•
• Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."
•
• It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.
Watch this website and other social media sites for further specific details of events and actions.
All out on May Day 2012.
******
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, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
OB Endorses Call for General Strike
January 8th, 2012 • mhacker •
Passed Resolutions No comments The following proposal was passed by the General Assembly on Jan 7, 2012:
Occupy Boston supports the call for an international General Strike on May 1, 2012, for immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. We recognize housing, education, health care, LGBT rights and racial equality as human rights; and thus call for the building of a broad coalition that will ensure and promote a democratic standard of living for all peoples.
*******
Why You, Your Union , Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 General Strike In Boston-Stand Up!-Fight Back!
Wage cuts, long work hours, steep consumer price rises, unemployment, small or no pensions, little or no paid vacation time, plenty of poor and inadequate housing, homelessness, and wide-spread sicknesses as a result of a poor medical system or no health insurance. Sound familiar? Words, perhaps, taken from today’s global headlines? Well, yes. But these were also the similar conditions that faced our forebears in America back in the 1880s when the 1% were called, and rightly so, “the robber barons,” and threatened, as one of their kind stated in a fit of candor, “to hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” so that they could maintain their luxury in peace. That too has not changed.
What did change then is that our forebears fought back, fought back long and hard, starting with the fight for the eight-hour day symbolized each year since 1886 by a May Day celebration of working class power. We need to reassert that claim. This May Day let us revive that tradition as we individually act around our separate grievances and strike, strike like the furies, collectively against the 1%.
No question over the past several years (really decades but it is just more public and in our face now) American working people has taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin in every possible way. Starting with massive job losses, heavy job losses in the service and manufacturing sectors (and jobs that are not coming back), paying for the seemingly never-ending bail–out of banks, other financial institutions and corporations “too big to fail,” home foreclosures and those “under water,” effective tax increases (since the rich refuse to pay, we pay), mountains of consumer debt for everything from modern necessities to just daily get-bys, and college student loan debt as a lifetime deadweight around the neck of the kids there is little to glow about in the harsh light of the “American Dream.”
Add to that the double (and triple) troubles facing immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and women and the grievances voiced in the Declaration of Independence seem like just so much whining. In short, it is not secret that working people have faced, are facing and, apparently, will continue to face an erosion of their material well-being for the foreseeable future something not seen by most people since the 1930s Great Depression, the time of our grandparents (or great-grandparents).
That is this condition will continue unless we take some lessons from those same 1930s and struggle, struggle like demons, against the 1% that seem to have all the card decks stacked against us. Struggle like they did in places like Minneapolis, San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and Detroit. Those labor-centered struggles demonstrated the social power of working people to hit the “economic royalists” (the name coined for the 1% of that day) to shut the bosses down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property.
The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take (and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their “free-speech” parks (up to a point as we have found out via the Occupy movement), and curse them to eternity as long as we don’t touch their production, “perks,” and profits. Moreover an inspired fight like the actions proposed for this May Day 2012 can help new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed, homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, help themselves to get out from under.
Show Power
We demand:
*Hands Off Our Public Worker Unions! Hands Off All Our Unions!
* Give the unemployed work! Billions for public works projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure (bridges, roads, sewer and water systems, etc.)!
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.
*End the endless wars! Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops and Mercenaries From Afghanistan (and the residuals from Iraq)! Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
* Full citizenship rights for all those who made it here no matter how they got here!
* A drastic increase in the minimum wage and big wage increases for all workers!
•
* A moratorium on home foreclosures! No evictions!
* A moratorium on student loan debt! Free, quality higher education for all! Create 100, 200, many publicly-supported Harvards!
*No increases in public transportation fares! No transportation worker lay-offs! For free quality public transportation for all!
To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1, 2012 we will be organizing a wide-ranging series of mass collective participatory actions:
*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where there is no union - a one-day general strike.
*We will be organizing where a strike is not possible to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out.”
*We will be organizing students to walk-out of their schools (or not show up in the first place), set up campus picket lines, or to rally at a central location, probably Boston Common.
*We will be calling in our communities for a mass consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to make purchases on that day.
• Guest Commentary from the IWW (Industrial Workers Of The World, Wobblies) website http://www.iww.org/en/culture/official/preamble.shtml
•
•
• Preamble to the IWW Constitution (1905)
•
• Posted Sun, 05/01/2005 - 8:34am by IWW.org Editor
•
• The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.
•
• Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.
•
• We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.
•
• These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.
•
• Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."
•
• It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.
Watch this website and other social media sites for further specific details of events and actions.
All out on May Day 2012.
From the General Strike Occupy Boston (GSOB) Working Group- “Official” Flyer For May Day 2012
From the General Strike Occupy Boston (GSOB) Working Group- “Official” Flyer For May Day 2012
Occupy May 1ST-A day without the 99%
We will strike for a better future!
We will strike for OUR HUMAN RIGHTS to:
Healthcare, Education, and Housing
Economic, Social and Environmental Justice
Labor Rights
Freedom from Police Brutality and Profiling
Immigrant Rights
Women & LGBTQ Rights
Racial & Gender Equality
Clean water and healthy food to feed our families!
We call for a democratic standard of living for
all peoples!
Peace in our communities with JUSTICE!
What will you strike for?
Rally at noon, City Hall Plaza, Boston!
for more info: www.bostonmayday.org, www.occupymayist.oro. www.occupyboston org, or find us on facebook https://www.facebookboston-may-day-committee
&&&&&&&&&&&&&
Occupy May 1ST-A day without the 99%
We will strike for a better future!
We will strike for OUR HUMAN RIGHTS to:
Healthcare, Education, and Housing
Economic, Social and Environmental Justice
Labor Rights
Freedom from Police Brutality and Profiling
Immigrant Rights
Women & LGBTQ Rights
Racial & Gender Equality
Clean water and healthy food to feed our families!
We call for a democratic standard of living for
all peoples!
Peace in our communities with JUSTICE!
What will you strike for?
Rally at noon, City Hall Plaza, Boston!
for more info: www.bostonmayday.org, www.occupymayist.oro. www.occupyboston org, or find us on facebook https://www.facebookboston-may-day-committee
&&&&&&&&&&&&&
All Out On May Day 2012: A Day Of International Working Class Solidarity Actions- A Call To Action In Boston
Click on the headline to link to the Boston May Day Coalition website.
All Out For May 1st-International Workers Day 2012!
Markin comment:
In late December 2011 the General Assembly (GA) of Occupy Los Angeles, in the aftermath of the stirring and mostly successful November 2nd Oakland General Strike and December 12th West Coast Port Shutdown, issued a call for a national and international general strike centered on immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. These and other political issues such as supporting union organizing, building rank and file committees in the unions, and defending union rights around hours, wages and working conditions that have long been associated with the labor movement internationally are to be featured in the actions set for May Day 2012.
May Day is the historic international working class holiday that has been celebrated each year in many parts of the world since the time of the heric Haymarket Martyrs in Chicago in 1886 and the struggle for the eight-hour work day. More recently it has been a day when the hard-pressed immigrant communities here in America join together in the fight against deportations and other discriminatory aspects of governmental immigration policy. Given May Day’s origins it is high time that the hard-pressed American working class begin to link up with its historic past and make this day its day.
Political activists here in Boston, some connected with Occupy Boston (OB) and others who are independent or organizationally affiliated radicals, decided just after the new year to support that general strike call and formed the General Strike Occupy Boston working group (GSOB). The working group has met, more or less weekly, since then to plan local May Day actions. The first step in that process was to bring a resolution incorporating the Occupy Los Angeles issues before the GA of Occupy Boston for approval. That resolution was approved by GA OB on January 7, 2012.
********
OB Endorses Call for General Strike
January 8th, 2012 • mhacker •
The following proposal was passed by the General Assembly on Jan 7, 2012:
Occupy Boston supports the call for an international General Strike on May 1, 2012, for immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. We recognize housing, education, health care, LGBT rights and racial equality as human rights; and thus call for the building of a broad coalition that will ensure and promote a democratic standard of living for all peoples.
********
Early discussions within the working group centered on drawing the lessons of the West Coast actions last fall. Above all what is and what isn’t a general strike. Traditionally a general strike, as witness the recent actions in Greece and other countries, is called by workers’ organizations and/or parties for a specified period of time in order to shut down substantial parts of the capitalist economy over some set of immediate demands. A close analysis of the West Coast actions showed a slightly different model: one based on community pickets of specified industrial targets, downtown mass street actions, and scattered individual and collective acts of solidarity like student support strikes and sick-outs. Additionally, small businesses and other allies were asked to close and did close down in solidarity.
That latter model seemed more appropriate to the tasks at hand in Boston given its less than militant recent labor history and that it is a regional financial, technological and educational hub rather than an industrial center. Thus successful actions in Boston on May Day 2012 will not necessarily exactly follow the long established radical and labor traditions of the West Coast. Group discussions have since then reflected that understanding. The focus will be on actions and activities that respond to and reflect the Boston political situation as attempts are made to create, re-create really, an on-going May Day tradition beyond the observance of the day by labor radicals and the immigrant communities.
Over the past several years, starting with the nation-wide actions in 2006, the Latin and other immigrant communities in and around Boston have been celebrating May Day as a day of action on the very pressing problem of immigration status as well as the traditional working-class solidarity holiday. It was no accident that Los Angeles, scene of massive pro-immigration rallies in the past and currently one of the areas facing the brunt of the deportation drives by the Obama administration, would be in the lead to call for national and international actions this year. One of the first necessary steps for the working group therefore was to try to reach out to the already existing Boston May Day Coalition (BMDC), which has spearheaded the annual marches and rallies in the immigrant communities, in order to learn of their experiences and to coordinate actions. This was done as well in order to better coordinate this year’s more extensive over-all May Day actions.
Taking a cue from the developing May Day action movement in this country, especially the broader and more inclusive messages coming out of some of the more vocal Occupy working groups a consensus has formed around the theme of “May 1st- A Day Without The Working Class And Its Allies” in order to highlight the fact that in the capitalist system labor, of one kind or another, has created all the wealth but has not shared in the accumulated profits. Highlighting the increasing economic gap between rich and poor, the endemic massive political voiceless-ness of the vast majority, and social issues related to race, class, sexual inequality, gender and the myriad other oppressions the vast majority face under capitalism is in keeping with the efforts initiated long ago by those who fought for the eight-hour day in the late 1800s and later with the rise of the anarchist, socialist and communist and organized trade union movements.
On May Day working people and their allies are called to strike, skip work, walk out of school, and refrain from shopping, banking and business in order to implement the general slogan. Working people are encouraged to request the day off, or to call in sick. Small businesses are encouraged to close for the day and join the rest of the working class and its allies in the streets.
For students at all levels the call is for a walk-out of classes. Further college students are urged to occupy the universities. With a huge student population of over 250,000 in the Boston area no-one-size-fits- all strategy seems appropriate. Each kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, high school, college, graduate school and wayward left-wing think tank should plan its own strike actions and, at some point in the day all meet at a central location in downtown Boston.
Tentatively planned, as of this writing, for the early hours on May 1st is for working people, students, oppressed minorities and their supporters to converge on the Boston Financial District for a day of direct action to demand an end to corporate rule and a shift of power to the people. The Financial District Block Party is scheduled to start at 7:00 AM on the corner of Federal Street & Franklin Street in downtown Boston. Banks and corporations are strongly encouraged to close down for the day.
At noon there will be a city permit-approved May Day rally to be addressed by a number of speakers from different groups at Boston City Hall Plaza. Following the rally participants are encouraged to head to East Boston for solidarity marches centered on the immigrant communities that will start at approximately 2:00 PM and move from East Boston, Chelsea, and Revere to Everett for a rally at 4:00 PM. Other activities that afternoon for those who chose not to go to East Boston will be scheduled in and around the downtown area.
That evening, for those who cannot for whatever reasons participate in the daytime actions and for any others who wish to do so, there will be a “Funeral March” for the banks forming at 7:00 PM at Copley Square that steps off at 8:00 PM and will march throughout the downtown area.
Pick up the spirit of the general slogans for May 1st now- No work. No school. No chores. No shopping. No banking. Let’s show the rulers that we have the power. Let’s show the world what a day without working people and their allies producing goods and services really means. And let’s return to the old traditions of May Day as a day of international solidarity with our working and oppressed sisters and brothers around the world. All Out For May Day 2012 in Boston!
All Out For May 1st-International Workers Day 2012!
Markin comment:
In late December 2011 the General Assembly (GA) of Occupy Los Angeles, in the aftermath of the stirring and mostly successful November 2nd Oakland General Strike and December 12th West Coast Port Shutdown, issued a call for a national and international general strike centered on immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. These and other political issues such as supporting union organizing, building rank and file committees in the unions, and defending union rights around hours, wages and working conditions that have long been associated with the labor movement internationally are to be featured in the actions set for May Day 2012.
May Day is the historic international working class holiday that has been celebrated each year in many parts of the world since the time of the heric Haymarket Martyrs in Chicago in 1886 and the struggle for the eight-hour work day. More recently it has been a day when the hard-pressed immigrant communities here in America join together in the fight against deportations and other discriminatory aspects of governmental immigration policy. Given May Day’s origins it is high time that the hard-pressed American working class begin to link up with its historic past and make this day its day.
Political activists here in Boston, some connected with Occupy Boston (OB) and others who are independent or organizationally affiliated radicals, decided just after the new year to support that general strike call and formed the General Strike Occupy Boston working group (GSOB). The working group has met, more or less weekly, since then to plan local May Day actions. The first step in that process was to bring a resolution incorporating the Occupy Los Angeles issues before the GA of Occupy Boston for approval. That resolution was approved by GA OB on January 7, 2012.
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OB Endorses Call for General Strike
January 8th, 2012 • mhacker •
The following proposal was passed by the General Assembly on Jan 7, 2012:
Occupy Boston supports the call for an international General Strike on May 1, 2012, for immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. We recognize housing, education, health care, LGBT rights and racial equality as human rights; and thus call for the building of a broad coalition that will ensure and promote a democratic standard of living for all peoples.
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Early discussions within the working group centered on drawing the lessons of the West Coast actions last fall. Above all what is and what isn’t a general strike. Traditionally a general strike, as witness the recent actions in Greece and other countries, is called by workers’ organizations and/or parties for a specified period of time in order to shut down substantial parts of the capitalist economy over some set of immediate demands. A close analysis of the West Coast actions showed a slightly different model: one based on community pickets of specified industrial targets, downtown mass street actions, and scattered individual and collective acts of solidarity like student support strikes and sick-outs. Additionally, small businesses and other allies were asked to close and did close down in solidarity.
That latter model seemed more appropriate to the tasks at hand in Boston given its less than militant recent labor history and that it is a regional financial, technological and educational hub rather than an industrial center. Thus successful actions in Boston on May Day 2012 will not necessarily exactly follow the long established radical and labor traditions of the West Coast. Group discussions have since then reflected that understanding. The focus will be on actions and activities that respond to and reflect the Boston political situation as attempts are made to create, re-create really, an on-going May Day tradition beyond the observance of the day by labor radicals and the immigrant communities.
Over the past several years, starting with the nation-wide actions in 2006, the Latin and other immigrant communities in and around Boston have been celebrating May Day as a day of action on the very pressing problem of immigration status as well as the traditional working-class solidarity holiday. It was no accident that Los Angeles, scene of massive pro-immigration rallies in the past and currently one of the areas facing the brunt of the deportation drives by the Obama administration, would be in the lead to call for national and international actions this year. One of the first necessary steps for the working group therefore was to try to reach out to the already existing Boston May Day Coalition (BMDC), which has spearheaded the annual marches and rallies in the immigrant communities, in order to learn of their experiences and to coordinate actions. This was done as well in order to better coordinate this year’s more extensive over-all May Day actions.
Taking a cue from the developing May Day action movement in this country, especially the broader and more inclusive messages coming out of some of the more vocal Occupy working groups a consensus has formed around the theme of “May 1st- A Day Without The Working Class And Its Allies” in order to highlight the fact that in the capitalist system labor, of one kind or another, has created all the wealth but has not shared in the accumulated profits. Highlighting the increasing economic gap between rich and poor, the endemic massive political voiceless-ness of the vast majority, and social issues related to race, class, sexual inequality, gender and the myriad other oppressions the vast majority face under capitalism is in keeping with the efforts initiated long ago by those who fought for the eight-hour day in the late 1800s and later with the rise of the anarchist, socialist and communist and organized trade union movements.
On May Day working people and their allies are called to strike, skip work, walk out of school, and refrain from shopping, banking and business in order to implement the general slogan. Working people are encouraged to request the day off, or to call in sick. Small businesses are encouraged to close for the day and join the rest of the working class and its allies in the streets.
For students at all levels the call is for a walk-out of classes. Further college students are urged to occupy the universities. With a huge student population of over 250,000 in the Boston area no-one-size-fits- all strategy seems appropriate. Each kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, high school, college, graduate school and wayward left-wing think tank should plan its own strike actions and, at some point in the day all meet at a central location in downtown Boston.
Tentatively planned, as of this writing, for the early hours on May 1st is for working people, students, oppressed minorities and their supporters to converge on the Boston Financial District for a day of direct action to demand an end to corporate rule and a shift of power to the people. The Financial District Block Party is scheduled to start at 7:00 AM on the corner of Federal Street & Franklin Street in downtown Boston. Banks and corporations are strongly encouraged to close down for the day.
At noon there will be a city permit-approved May Day rally to be addressed by a number of speakers from different groups at Boston City Hall Plaza. Following the rally participants are encouraged to head to East Boston for solidarity marches centered on the immigrant communities that will start at approximately 2:00 PM and move from East Boston, Chelsea, and Revere to Everett for a rally at 4:00 PM. Other activities that afternoon for those who chose not to go to East Boston will be scheduled in and around the downtown area.
That evening, for those who cannot for whatever reasons participate in the daytime actions and for any others who wish to do so, there will be a “Funeral March” for the banks forming at 7:00 PM at Copley Square that steps off at 8:00 PM and will march throughout the downtown area.
Pick up the spirit of the general slogans for May 1st now- No work. No school. No chores. No shopping. No banking. Let’s show the rulers that we have the power. Let’s show the world what a day without working people and their allies producing goods and services really means. And let’s return to the old traditions of May Day as a day of international solidarity with our working and oppressed sisters and brothers around the world. All Out For May Day 2012 in Boston!
Thursday, April 19, 2012
From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-From The Pen Of American Communist Leader (CP And SWP) James P. Cannon At The End (1974)-"Questions of American Radical History"
Markin comment on this series:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
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Markin comment on this article:
Anytime you have person who has been through the key left-wing movements of his century (IWW, Socialist Party, Communist Party, Socialist Workers Party) as a militant and leader you had best listen up-listen up closely
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Questions of American Radical History
The following interview was conducted at James P. Cannon's home in Los Angeles July 16.
Sidney Lens is a labor historian who was active hi the anti-Vietnam war movement He is also an editor of Liberation magazine.
Lens: I interviewed Earl Browder before he died. What was your reaction to him personally?
Cannon: Well, that's quite a story, because I knew him for many years.
Lens: Yes, I know, but did you like him personally?
Cannon: For a long time we worked together.
Lens: He never joined the Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World — IWW), did he?
Cannon: I don't think so. He became a disciple of Foster. 2 Foster came through Kansas City, I think it was in 1913. He had been a Wobbly who had gone to France and had become converted to syndicalism. He came back and made a tour of the IWW locals, trying to convince them of his ideas of 'boring from within' the AFL (American Federation of Labor). Browder was one of his converts from Kansas City.
Lens: Did he try to convert you?
1.Earl Browder was general secretary
of the American Communist Party from
1930 to 1945.
2. William Z. Foster was the most im
portant trade-union figure to join the early
Communist Party.
Cannon: No.
Lens: Why not?
Cannon: I didn't run into him personally. I don't know whether Browder had been a Wobbly or not. I had been traveling around the country shortly before that and had been out of Kansas City. I knew he was a radical.
Lens: What made Browder become a Stalinist?
Cannon: That's a long story. What made all the others become Stalinists?
Lens: Was it a matter of just belonging to something big?
Cannon: Yes.
Lens: He told me that he disliked Trotsky personally. He was quite senile when I saw him, and he spoke very cryptically. He gave the impres-
sion that the biggest basis for not joining with Trotsky was that he considered Trotsky a show-off and very egotistical.
Cannon: When the first world war broke out for this country in 1917, Browder had been working in the (food and farm) cooperative movement. He was an accountant by profession. I think he was impressed by the cooperative movement, which at that tune there was quite a sentiment for.
He had been to New York. He may have been influenced by Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman's demonstrations of opposition to the war. He came back to Kansas City. He and his two brothers and his brother-in-law, Bob Sullivan, made an open demonstration against the entry into the war with leaflets. They were promptly arrested. He got a year in the Missouri State Penitentiary. They got out about 1918.
Recruited Browder
By that time I had become a communist. I saw them immediately after they came out. They had no inclination toward the communist movement because it was harebrained. There was some truth in that. There was a large element of harebrains in the new communist movement. But I think it's safe to say that I convinced him there was fundamental merit in it. And he became a communist.
In the fall of 1918 we decided to start a paper in Kansas City. It had no political allegiance at its start, but it was an exponent of the Russian revolution and defense of class-war prisoners and so on. Browder was the first editor and I worked very closely with him, promoting the idea of the paper and then getting started on it.
Along about early summer of 1919 he and his brothers had to go back to serve a federal sentence in Leaven-worth, Kans., and I had to take over the paper as editor.
We remained close associates while he was in prison. I became rather prominent in the new communist movement. I was elected to the central committee at the first Bridgeman, Mich., convention in the spring of 1920 and became organizer of the St. Louis-Southern Illinois coal district for the party. A few months after that I was moved to Cleveland to become editor of a paper called the Toiler, which was a continuation of the Ohio Socialist
(Alfred) Wagenknecht and his group had control of the state (Socialist Party) organization and they took the paper along with them when the split came (the split of the left wing from the SP). A few months later they decided to move the paper to New York and change the name to the Worker and I went along with that. That would be in the late fall of 1920. Eventually it became the Daily Worker. So if you want to have a record of my sins, you can say I was the original editor of the Daily Worker.
Lens: Yes, I know that record.
Cannon: Browder was in prison till the spring of 1921. He wasn't known to the leadership of the party. It was on my recommendation that he was brought to New York. He became right away the assistant of Foster, who had also at that time decided to join the party clandestinely.
They decided to start a monthly magazine, the Labor Monthly, in Chicago, with Foster as editor and Browder as managing editor. We were close together all that time up until Foster and I had a falling out —in 1925, I think it was.
Lens: What was that all about?
Cannon: I tell the story in my book The First Ten Years of American Communism in reply to some of (Theodore) Draper's questions. The split took place rather dramatically at a plenary meeting, right down the middle of the Foster-Cannon group. People like Bill Dunne, Arne Swabeck, and others came with me. Browder and (Jack) Johnstone and others went with Foster in this split, which* was never fully healed, although we had relations later. That amounted to a personal falling out to 1925. That would be about 12 years after I first met him.
Lens: Would you consider Browder a creative person to that period, independent?
Cannon: No.
Lens: Did he always have to attach himself to somebody, like to Foster or you?
Cannon: He wasn't by nature a leader or a politician. There was never such a thing as a Browder group in the party. There was a Foster group, and a Cannon group, and a Ruthenberg group. But he was a very energetic and intelligent, capable worker.
Lens: Was there anything in the twenties similar to the present counter-culture amongst the youth?
Cannon: Not to my knowledge.
Lens: What were the main reasons for the failure of the Communist Party (CP) to take off? I know that's a big story, but do you think they were mainly subjective reasons?
Cannon: Well, of course, first there were the persecutions, quite severe in the first few years. The party was driven underground. Next there was a sharp economic depression and then an ascending boom that continued throughout the twenties. That wasn't a very fertile field for communism to expand. And it was a new movement with a lot to learn.
Lens: Did you anticipate the depression of 1929?
Cannon: Well, we kept forecasting it.
Lens: Yes, you kept forecasting it from about 1922 on.
Cannon: So we were eventually vindicated in 1929.
Lens: But did you anticipate that particular depression and that it would come through the stock market crash?
Cannon: I wouldn't say specifically so, but the Lovestoneites3 wrote a document on American exception-alism. The Comintern (Communist International) was just beginning its left turn. They wrote a document on American exceptionalism. That's what they called it. Sort of exempting America from the world trend for the time being.
And we wrote a counter-document in collaboration with the Fosterites that we presented at the Sixth Congress of the Comintern in 1928. It was called "The Right Danger in the American Party." There you'll see that we took a rather radical approach to the whole question, including the economy.
Lens: When the depression came, what were your personal reactions? Did you feel that America was moving close to an actual revolution?
Cannon: I can't say that I did. Lens: Then what was your reaction?
Cannon: Like most everybody else, stunned.
Lens: Stunned?
Workers atomized
Cannon: Yes, it was so severe. It was hard to see an immediate revolution. The workers were atomized. The organized labor movement had lost ground in the twenties. The unions had fewer than three million members at the time of the crash and they began losing more after that.
Lens: Did the CP really believe that a revolution impended?
Cannon: At that time they were in the midst of the "third period."4 So they were running hog-wild for a while, but they weren't getting much response to that appeal.
3. Jay Lovestone was secretary of the CP in the 1920s. He headed a rightist faction in the party that was aligned internationally with Bukharin. In 1928, Love-stone carried out the expulsion of the American Trotskyists from the CP. When Stalin turned on his rightist allies in 1929, Lovestone was demoted from his post and expelled.
The Lovestone group maintained itself until the outbreak of World War II and then dissolved. Lovestone subsequently became an anticommunist expert for the AFL-CIO bureaucracy.
Lens: Was your organization called the Communist League of America at first, or was it called Communist Party Majority or Left Opposition?
Cannon: Communist League of America (Opposition). The Lovestoneites called themselves Communist Party (Majority Group).5
Lens: Then you dropped the word "opposition" eventually.
Cannon: Eventually, yes. But for four years we continued to direct our agitation mainly to the Communist Party.
Lens: Were you disappointed in the results?
Cannon: Well, we were trying to recruit our primary cadre and we recruited more than a hundred people to begin with. I guess we had a couple of hundred or a little more by 1934 and then we got into the Minneapolis strike and that gave us a big boost. It identified us as workers in the mass movement.
Then came the fusion with the Muste-ites6 in the same year. So it was sort of a period of expansion in the later thirties.
4The "third period" was a schema pro
claimed by the Stalinists in 1928 accord
ing to which capitalism was in its final
period of collapse. Following from this
schema, the Comintern's tactics during
the next six years were marked by ultra-
leftism, adventurism, sectarian "red"
unions, and opposition to forming united
fronts with other working-class organiza
tions.
5The Communist League of America
(Opposition) was the organization formed
by Cannon and others who were expelled
from the Communist Party in 1928 for
supporting the program of the Left Op
position in the Soviet CP, led by Leon
Trotsky.
6In December 1934 the Communist
League of America fused with the Ameri
can Workers Party, led by A. J. Muste,
to form the Workers Party of the United
States.
Lens: What happened then in the relalively large mass movement before World War II and during World War II? Did you feel that there was something impeding your development or your progress, or were you going too slow, or what?
Cannon: Do you mean our organization?
Lens: Yes.
Cannon: Our big obstacle was the Communist Party. It had complete domination of what there was of the radical movement. The SP was an empty shell. And we were isolated. The membership of the Communist Party largely identified Stalin with the Comintern. And whatever the Comintern said was the law. But we kept recruiting one here and one there until we'd built up quite a cadre of capable people.
Lens: Why didn't you take over the Communist Party? Why didn't the majority come over to your point of view? Must a radical party have the support of a government in some foreign country to survive or prosper?
Cannon: The Comintern represented the Russian revolution in the minds of the American communists. The Comintern said we were counterrevolutionaries and that Trotsky was a fascist, a traitor, and everything else; and they accepted that.
Lens: From a theoretical point of view, though, Marxism is supposed to be the science of revolution, and your estimate of events was more lucid than Browder's, say and yet here were ten or twenty thousand communists to whom you couldn't get through. Their emotions were much stronger than their intellectual probing.
Cannon: That's true; it took a long time for us to break through.
Lens: Is that a handicap that the left can always expect, that emotion plays a bigger role than science of revolution?
Cannon: The pull of a radical organization that is dominant in the field is almost gravitational. The average worker and activist doesn't want to be connected with some little sect on the sidelines. He wants to be where the action is.
Muste group
Lens: Did the Muste group make any sensational spurt in its early days, or was it growing about like your group?
Cannon: It was growing about like ours. Muste was a remarkable personal character. He was a preacher, you know, to start with.
In 1917, as a minister in Boston, he went to Lawrence, Mass., and got into the textile strike there and became the head of it Next, if I'm correct, he became the head of the textile workers union, or what was left of it.
Then he started the Brookwood Labor College in New York State, which quite a number of people attended, and he recruited some of them. Out of that he developed the Conference for Progressive Labor Action and recruited people here and there. Then this organization developed an unemployed movement of its own.
The Communist Party dominated the main unemployment movement in the big cities, the Unemployed Councils. The Musteites organized around the fringes rather effectively, in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and other places. The Unemployed Leagues, they called them. Through all these operations Muste accumulated a cadre.
We were greatly impressed with their actions in the Toledo Auto-Lite strike in 1934, at the same time that we were occupied with the Teamsters' fight in Minneapolis. They had done an unprecedented thing. Their leaders there
— Sam Pollock, Ted Selander, and Art Preis — were in the unemployment movement, the Unemployed League of the Musteites. And they organized to support the strike.
Contrary to the custom of the unemployed being recruited as strikebreakers, they became the most militant supporters of the strike. They practically led the strike. We were tremendously impressed by that, and it led to our negotiations with them for fusion. Meanwhile Muste was turning to the left politically, so there wasn't much trouble in bringing about a unification.
Some of the people that Muste had attracted —such as (J. B. S.) Hardman and (Louis) Budenz and a few others wouldn't go along with it, but Muste
decided to do it and he brought along a majority of his people and it gave
the movement quite a boost.
Lens: Did you expect a revolution in the 1930s —that capitalism would collapse?
Cannon: I can't say that I expected it, but looking back on it now, as I have said many times, anything was possible in the thirties. After the workers recovered from their paralysis. In the first four or five years they were simply stunned, they didn't know what to do. But beginning with Minneapolis in 1934, three strikes —Minneapolis, the San Francisco general strike, and the Auto-Lite strike in Toledo — seemed to give the impetus needed for a new movement. And it began to develop by leaps and bounds.
Lens: What stopped it?
Tremendous upheaval
Cannon: The American Communist Party.
The industrial union movement developed millions of members and John L. Lewis, recognizing the tide, turned toward it and gave quite effective leadership for a time. The sit-down strikes in Flint, Mich., and the organization of General Motors and Ford represented a tremendous upheaval. That was accomplished in a few years.
Lens: When you say the Communist Party stopped it, in what way?
Cannon: The Communist Party was the dominant force in the radical movement. They dominated the unemployed movement and by that time there developed a radical movement on the campuses, which they also dominated. And they trained some cadres in the unemployment and student movements who took part in various actions.
You know, the average worker is afraid to stand up and make a motion in a meeting. They aren't accustomed to that. The CP trained a whole cadre of people who could stand up and make motions and parliamentary moves, and run meetings, and things of this sort.
In the mid-thirties there was a certain upsurge out of the depression. Not a real economic recovery, but a revival. They began to open factories and take some people back to work. And the Communist Party colonized a lot of their people in the strategic industries and their radical talk appealed widely. They were competitors for control of the auto workers union for a while.
Right in the middle of this came the turn of the Comintern toward the right. The "third period" had passed and the Kremlin began turning over toward conservatism and naturally the Communist Party just carried it out here in the United States to the letter.
I believe that if the Communist Party had remained a revolutionary party, it could have made great things out of that mass movement of the thirties.
Lens: If you go back to the Russian revolution, you also had a Menshevik group, and the Bolsheviks were a minority in relation to the Mensheviks, and yet they were able to pull people away from them. Why weren't the Trotskyists able to pull people from the Stalinists here? You also had capable people, you also knew how to make motions in meetings and all the rest of that, and probably were more dedicated.
Excluded
Cannon: Unquestionably. But we didn't have the numbers. The Communist Party excluded us from every movement they controlled, like the unemployed movement. A hungry unemployed member of the Trotskyist organization couldn't get into the Unemployed Councils because the Stalinists branded him a "counterrevolutionary."
The CP formed alliances with other radicals and socialists in the League Against War and Fascism, but we were not admitted to it. So although we expanded somewhat with the success of the Minneapolis strikes, the fusion with the Musteites, and the entry into the Socialist Party, ? which gained us quite a group of new members, we were still a small minority in comparison to the Communist Party.
Lens: You expected quite a bit more from the entry in the Socialist Party, didn't you, than you eventually got?
Cannon: We won over the majority of the Young People's Socialist League.
Lens: I know, but you really expected to become an important mass party.
Cannon: We expected the Socialist Party itself to grow and that we would grow with it.
Lens: Why didn't it?
Cannon: The competition of the Communist Party, and partly the inadequacy of its leadership, I guess.
Lens: Of the Communist or Socialist leadership?
Cannon: Of the Socialist Party leadership.
Lens: But you were playing an important role in it by then. Weren't you in the Socialist leadership?
Cannon: I came out to California during that period. We soon got a majority in the state executive committee of the Socialist Party and published a weekly paper in San Francisco. The right-wingers remaining in the Socialist Party got alarmed about that and began expelling our people. And we had nothing to do but fight it out and come to a break.
Lens: Had you expected a break? Cannon: No, we tried to prevent it.
Lens: You had hoped to remain in the Socialist Party?
Cannon: Yes, we were not ready to bring things to a head yet. But we had no choice.
Lens: Why do you think the Comintern got rid of Browder?8 Or, to put it a different way, why didn't he adjust to the Comintern? He had been adjusting to it all his life.
7 In 1936 the Trotskyists joined the So
cialist Party in order to win over the
growing left wing to revolutionary poli
tics. •
8 Browder was deposed as secretary of
the CP in 1945 and expelled from the
party in 1946. Except for his first few
years in office (the end of the ultraleft
"third period") and the brief interlude of
the Stalin-Hitler pact, his regime coincided
with those years in which the CP engaged
in blatant class collaboration of the peo
ple's front variety.
During the World War II alliance of the U. S. and the Soviet Union, Browder ardently supported U. S. imperialism and publicly urged that the wartime no-strike pledge be continued after the war ended.
Cannon: It began with his appointment as secretary. Foster was a far more publicly prominent and able man than Browder. That was his trouble. You might say he was the logical man to succeed Lovestone when they got rid of Lovestone. But by that time Stalin didn't want any able people heading national parties.
I think Browder's defects were his merits. His lack of leadership capacity was just what they wanted from him — somebody to do what they told him to do. I don't say Foster wouldn't have done it, but Foster had ideas and initiative of his own.
Lens: Did you like Foster personally?
Cannon: At first I did. I was associated with him in the political fights. But I didn't like his character.
Lens: Why?
Cannon: Why don't you like somebody? He was terribly self-centered and dishonest, when it served his purpose, and disloyal in personal relations. All the kinds of things that I especially don't like.
Lens: Getting back to Browder. He had shifted gears with the Comintern all along, and then 1946 comes along and he refuses to shift gears. How do you account for that?
Cannon: I think he was taken by surprise. He carried the conciliationism of the Kremlin bureaucracy to an extreme that they were not prepared to go to after the war ended. They were getting ready for the outbreak of the cold war, while Browder was going ahead as before.
You remember his famous statement, when he said something like, "I'm ready
to shake hands with J. Pierpont Morgan on this —to have peace, no strikes during thewar, speedup, incentive pay, and all the rest."
Out of favor
It's remarkable how easily the Stalinists disposed of him. They didn't even have to send any message directly from Moscow. All they had to do was to have somebody in France, Duclos (Jacques Duclos, longtime leader of the French Communist Party), write a piece in the French CP magazine criticizing Browder. And all the hacks in the party took that as a sign that this fellow was out of favor with the big power.
Lens: Why do you feel the Lovestone-ites fell apart?
Cannon: What stages do you mean?
Lens: When they dissolved, about 1937 or 1938 (actually, 1939).
Cannon: In 1929 they took a hundred or more with them out of the Communist Party. That in itself was an indication of the tremendous power of Stalin over the party. The CP had just had a convention where the Love-stoneites had a big majority, or so they thought, because the party wasn't aware that Stalin was getting ready to dump him.
The Lovestoneites claimed to be the champions of the Comintern above all others. But the Comintern had two representatives here at the CP's 1929 convention early in the year, and the campaign against Bukharin was beginning already in Moscow. Bukharin had been their mentor and their protector, and Lovestone didn't get the signal quickly enough.
Lens: Then they survived for about 10 years. And they did have some influence in the auto workers and the ladies garment workers unions.
Cannon: As late as 1934 one of the big events in the radical movement in New York was a debate between me and Lovestone at Irving Plaza on the question of whether we should build a new international or support the Communist International. At that time he strongly supported the Comintern of Stalin. He was still, I think, hoping to convince them that he was their boy. And probably still had some idea that the Communist movement had a future here.
Some people don't have to believe things out of conviction; if they believe something is going to be a success, that's enough for them. I think that was the case with Lovestone. I think he was a careerist from the very beginning.
Lens: Let me sidetrack to another issue. The emergence of the New Left after World War II, or quite a long time after World War II, was accompanied by a tremendous counterculture movement. Why wasn't there one in the 1930s?
Cannon: This counter-culture movement of the recent past was an intellectual student movement, wasn't it?
Lens: Yes, but you had a growing student movement hi the thirties too.
Cannon: Yes, but the real power that asserted itself was a workers uprising in the 1930s. We don't have anything like that today. Nothing comparable.
Lens: In other words you feel that the students were pretty much secondary to the workers.
Cannon: In the thirties, yes.
Lens: And therefore they didn't take on characteristics of their own?
Cannon: I just don't recall them making any special mark for themselves in the thirties.
Lens: How do you account for that?
Cannon: There was a student movement, but it was mainly composed of groups affiliated to the two radical parties, the Communist Party and the Socialist Party.
I don't know whether you've heard this story, I've told it a hundred tunes: Among the big events on the campuses of New York in the thirties were the debates between the Draper brothers. Have you heard of that?
Lens: No. Theodore and Hal?
Cannon: Theodore Draper was an ardent Stalinist. Hal Draper was a left-wing Socialist. And they had a number of debates. I didn't attend any of them, but I heard about them.
The left wing of the Socialist Party didn't develop as a counter-cultural nut movement, but as a radical, Leninist movement. I heard Gus Tyler debate with Gil Green —who later became head of the Young Communist League —on the question of policy toward war. Green took the peaceful coexistence position of the Comintern and Tyler defended the Leninist policy.
Tyler, who's now an ILGWU (International Ladies Garment Workers Union) leader, simply cut him to pieces, in my judgment.
This whole counter-culture business expressed in this New Left phenomenon seems to me like it sprang out of nowhere. And it disappeared almost as rapidly.
New Left
Lens: How do you account for the emergence of the New Left? Why didn't all those young people come into the Socialist Workers Party?
Cannon: It started with the League for Industrial Democracy, didn't it?
Lens: But that was pretty much of a dead organization.
Cannon: But they had a "Port Huron Statement" that seemed to just catch fire. It took most everybody by surprise. I certainly didn't anticipate it.
Lens: Why? Here was the SWP. Eighteen of your comrades had gone to jail for opposing World War II. You had an unsullied personal record. You had worked throughout the war rather consistently against the Stalin-Hitler pact, and then against Mc-Carthyism. And yet, when the youth began to choose sides, they bypassed the CP and they bypassed you.
Cannon: You mustn't forget that the 1950s were a period of terrible reaction in the labor movement. In the cold war period the union bureaucrats were able with the help of the government to clean out all the Stalinists and all the other radicals from the CIO. And everything was dead on the campus. They called it the "silent generation."
We had counted greatly in the postwar period on young veterans being a natural recruiting ground for a big expansion. Instead, the soldiers came back and got the GI Bill of Rights. They went to school and they were studying to get degrees and get jobs. There was no response to radical ideas.
Lens: Did you expect a depression after the war like the depression of 1929?
Cannon: No, we were taken by surprise.
Lens: But you didn't expect an economic slump in 1946-47 like Eugene Dennis did.9
Cannon: We expected it, but we didn't put a time limit on it. We suffered terrible reverses. We lost a lot of members in the fifties.
Lens: To what, the persecutions?
Cold war period
Cannon: The persecution, the lack of response, the inactivity of the workers. People began falling away. Our biggest struggle in the whole cold war period of the fifties was to hold our nucleus together.
Lens: How big was the SWP?
Cannon: I would say we came out of the fifties with about 500 members.
Lens: And how many members did you have in 1945?
Cannon: In 1945 we had about 3,000, I guess, because at the 1946 convention I recall we made a ceremony of initiating 1,000 new members who had been recruited since the 1944 convention. During the latter years of the war there was considerable radicaliza-tion in anticipation of the war's end and labor struggles.
But there was no sign of radicaliza-tion in the fifties, and no sign of action in the labor unions to speak of. The campuses were dead. It was the civil rights movement that sparked the rebirth of a radical movement. We oriented ourselves as much as we could to that, and we recruited some people from the campuses, and we started a youth organization again, the Young Socialist Alliance. It began to attract a cadre. In general we've been advancing ever since, not spectacularly, but rather steadily.
Lens: But my question is why did all the energy go into the organizations of the New Left? And although you've made some gains, you never made a
9. Eugene Dennis was general secretary of the CPin the 1950s.
Lens: Why? Was it something you did that was wrong?
Cannon: No, I don't know of anything we did that was wrong. In the late fifties the Khrushchev revelations opened up the Communist Party periphery.
We plunged into that very determinedly. We recruited some members out of the CP itself after the Khrushchev revelations especially in Los Angeles. And since then we have confronted the Communist Party in mass movements of various kinds virtually as equals. They can't brush us aside any more.
Lens: But you never were able to become the dominant force on the left.
Cannon: No.
Lens: When I asked Rennie Davis and Tom Hayden why they joined the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) rather than the CP or the SWP, they said they felt that there was no magnetism there.
Recruited women
Cannon: We did recruit fairly substantially, and some excellent cadres. And we have recruited women comrades on a scale never before in the radical movement. Forty percent of our members are women. And I think about 40 percent of our staff members are women. This takes place not as a quota policy but just naturally. So many talented women have come forward to fill this and that position.
Lens: But even with all the work you've done in the antiwar movement, you're not back to your 1945 strength yet.
Cannon: We're much stronger in the cadre sense.
Lens: Having influence.
Cannon: But I don't think we're much stronger numerically. A large number of the people we recruited during that period at the end of the war were Blacks as well as industrial workers. There was a big turnover as soon as the climate in the country turned conservative with the cold war. Then they dropped out because they expected more immediate advantages than we could offer. But this membership we have today is a pretty solid membership both in the YSA and in the SWP.
Lens: Do you anticipate a revolution in America in the near future?
Cannon: -It depends on what you mean by near.
Lens: Next 10 or 15 years.
Anything possible
Cannon: I say anything is possible in this century in the years that are left of it. That's 26 years.
Lens: But you don't sound very optimistic.
Cannon: I don't want to make any categorical statements, but I say we're living in a time when capitalism is plunging toward its climactic end.
Lens: Didn't you say that in the thirties?
Cannon: I did, yes.
Lens: And in the forties? Cannon: And in the forties.
Lens: I mean, that must sound like something peculiar when you say it every decade.
Cannon: But when you stop to think, the history of humanity is a very long one, isn't it? And a quarter of a century is only an instant in the history of the human race.
Lens: What do you see in the near future for the capitalist system?
Cannon: I see one crisis piling upon another. I don't think the capitalists have ever been in such a jam in this country as they are right now, both poltically and economically. _,
Lens: Yet the average man is living well compared to 40 years ago.
Cannon: Materially, you mean?
Lens: Yes.
Cannon: Yes, but they got used to the new standard and now they see
the beginning of the decline and they don't like that.
One phenomenon that interests me greatly is the extraordinary development of union action among public workers. It's an entirely new phenomenon. And very widespread, very militant, and continuing.
Lens: You have two separate groups outside the CP and SWP that are radical, the New American Movement and the People's Party, which believe in the idea of a mass party. And then you have the Maoist parties, like the Revolutionary Union and the October League. Can you see the Trotskyists uniting with either of those forces?
Cannon: No.
Lens: You don't think that either one of them has a future?
Cannon: They have a future. I think this New American Movement or something like it can easily develop and have a temporary existence. But I don't think we can ever be isolated again. We will be in the midst of any kind of public mass movement that begins, and we will recruit out of it.
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
********
Markin comment on this article:
Anytime you have person who has been through the key left-wing movements of his century (IWW, Socialist Party, Communist Party, Socialist Workers Party) as a militant and leader you had best listen up-listen up closely
****
Questions of American Radical History
The following interview was conducted at James P. Cannon's home in Los Angeles July 16.
Sidney Lens is a labor historian who was active hi the anti-Vietnam war movement He is also an editor of Liberation magazine.
Lens: I interviewed Earl Browder before he died. What was your reaction to him personally?
Cannon: Well, that's quite a story, because I knew him for many years.
Lens: Yes, I know, but did you like him personally?
Cannon: For a long time we worked together.
Lens: He never joined the Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World — IWW), did he?
Cannon: I don't think so. He became a disciple of Foster. 2 Foster came through Kansas City, I think it was in 1913. He had been a Wobbly who had gone to France and had become converted to syndicalism. He came back and made a tour of the IWW locals, trying to convince them of his ideas of 'boring from within' the AFL (American Federation of Labor). Browder was one of his converts from Kansas City.
Lens: Did he try to convert you?
1.Earl Browder was general secretary
of the American Communist Party from
1930 to 1945.
2. William Z. Foster was the most im
portant trade-union figure to join the early
Communist Party.
Cannon: No.
Lens: Why not?
Cannon: I didn't run into him personally. I don't know whether Browder had been a Wobbly or not. I had been traveling around the country shortly before that and had been out of Kansas City. I knew he was a radical.
Lens: What made Browder become a Stalinist?
Cannon: That's a long story. What made all the others become Stalinists?
Lens: Was it a matter of just belonging to something big?
Cannon: Yes.
Lens: He told me that he disliked Trotsky personally. He was quite senile when I saw him, and he spoke very cryptically. He gave the impres-
sion that the biggest basis for not joining with Trotsky was that he considered Trotsky a show-off and very egotistical.
Cannon: When the first world war broke out for this country in 1917, Browder had been working in the (food and farm) cooperative movement. He was an accountant by profession. I think he was impressed by the cooperative movement, which at that tune there was quite a sentiment for.
He had been to New York. He may have been influenced by Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman's demonstrations of opposition to the war. He came back to Kansas City. He and his two brothers and his brother-in-law, Bob Sullivan, made an open demonstration against the entry into the war with leaflets. They were promptly arrested. He got a year in the Missouri State Penitentiary. They got out about 1918.
Recruited Browder
By that time I had become a communist. I saw them immediately after they came out. They had no inclination toward the communist movement because it was harebrained. There was some truth in that. There was a large element of harebrains in the new communist movement. But I think it's safe to say that I convinced him there was fundamental merit in it. And he became a communist.
In the fall of 1918 we decided to start a paper in Kansas City. It had no political allegiance at its start, but it was an exponent of the Russian revolution and defense of class-war prisoners and so on. Browder was the first editor and I worked very closely with him, promoting the idea of the paper and then getting started on it.
Along about early summer of 1919 he and his brothers had to go back to serve a federal sentence in Leaven-worth, Kans., and I had to take over the paper as editor.
We remained close associates while he was in prison. I became rather prominent in the new communist movement. I was elected to the central committee at the first Bridgeman, Mich., convention in the spring of 1920 and became organizer of the St. Louis-Southern Illinois coal district for the party. A few months after that I was moved to Cleveland to become editor of a paper called the Toiler, which was a continuation of the Ohio Socialist
(Alfred) Wagenknecht and his group had control of the state (Socialist Party) organization and they took the paper along with them when the split came (the split of the left wing from the SP). A few months later they decided to move the paper to New York and change the name to the Worker and I went along with that. That would be in the late fall of 1920. Eventually it became the Daily Worker. So if you want to have a record of my sins, you can say I was the original editor of the Daily Worker.
Lens: Yes, I know that record.
Cannon: Browder was in prison till the spring of 1921. He wasn't known to the leadership of the party. It was on my recommendation that he was brought to New York. He became right away the assistant of Foster, who had also at that time decided to join the party clandestinely.
They decided to start a monthly magazine, the Labor Monthly, in Chicago, with Foster as editor and Browder as managing editor. We were close together all that time up until Foster and I had a falling out —in 1925, I think it was.
Lens: What was that all about?
Cannon: I tell the story in my book The First Ten Years of American Communism in reply to some of (Theodore) Draper's questions. The split took place rather dramatically at a plenary meeting, right down the middle of the Foster-Cannon group. People like Bill Dunne, Arne Swabeck, and others came with me. Browder and (Jack) Johnstone and others went with Foster in this split, which* was never fully healed, although we had relations later. That amounted to a personal falling out to 1925. That would be about 12 years after I first met him.
Lens: Would you consider Browder a creative person to that period, independent?
Cannon: No.
Lens: Did he always have to attach himself to somebody, like to Foster or you?
Cannon: He wasn't by nature a leader or a politician. There was never such a thing as a Browder group in the party. There was a Foster group, and a Cannon group, and a Ruthenberg group. But he was a very energetic and intelligent, capable worker.
Lens: Was there anything in the twenties similar to the present counter-culture amongst the youth?
Cannon: Not to my knowledge.
Lens: What were the main reasons for the failure of the Communist Party (CP) to take off? I know that's a big story, but do you think they were mainly subjective reasons?
Cannon: Well, of course, first there were the persecutions, quite severe in the first few years. The party was driven underground. Next there was a sharp economic depression and then an ascending boom that continued throughout the twenties. That wasn't a very fertile field for communism to expand. And it was a new movement with a lot to learn.
Lens: Did you anticipate the depression of 1929?
Cannon: Well, we kept forecasting it.
Lens: Yes, you kept forecasting it from about 1922 on.
Cannon: So we were eventually vindicated in 1929.
Lens: But did you anticipate that particular depression and that it would come through the stock market crash?
Cannon: I wouldn't say specifically so, but the Lovestoneites3 wrote a document on American exception-alism. The Comintern (Communist International) was just beginning its left turn. They wrote a document on American exceptionalism. That's what they called it. Sort of exempting America from the world trend for the time being.
And we wrote a counter-document in collaboration with the Fosterites that we presented at the Sixth Congress of the Comintern in 1928. It was called "The Right Danger in the American Party." There you'll see that we took a rather radical approach to the whole question, including the economy.
Lens: When the depression came, what were your personal reactions? Did you feel that America was moving close to an actual revolution?
Cannon: I can't say that I did. Lens: Then what was your reaction?
Cannon: Like most everybody else, stunned.
Lens: Stunned?
Workers atomized
Cannon: Yes, it was so severe. It was hard to see an immediate revolution. The workers were atomized. The organized labor movement had lost ground in the twenties. The unions had fewer than three million members at the time of the crash and they began losing more after that.
Lens: Did the CP really believe that a revolution impended?
Cannon: At that time they were in the midst of the "third period."4 So they were running hog-wild for a while, but they weren't getting much response to that appeal.
3. Jay Lovestone was secretary of the CP in the 1920s. He headed a rightist faction in the party that was aligned internationally with Bukharin. In 1928, Love-stone carried out the expulsion of the American Trotskyists from the CP. When Stalin turned on his rightist allies in 1929, Lovestone was demoted from his post and expelled.
The Lovestone group maintained itself until the outbreak of World War II and then dissolved. Lovestone subsequently became an anticommunist expert for the AFL-CIO bureaucracy.
Lens: Was your organization called the Communist League of America at first, or was it called Communist Party Majority or Left Opposition?
Cannon: Communist League of America (Opposition). The Lovestoneites called themselves Communist Party (Majority Group).5
Lens: Then you dropped the word "opposition" eventually.
Cannon: Eventually, yes. But for four years we continued to direct our agitation mainly to the Communist Party.
Lens: Were you disappointed in the results?
Cannon: Well, we were trying to recruit our primary cadre and we recruited more than a hundred people to begin with. I guess we had a couple of hundred or a little more by 1934 and then we got into the Minneapolis strike and that gave us a big boost. It identified us as workers in the mass movement.
Then came the fusion with the Muste-ites6 in the same year. So it was sort of a period of expansion in the later thirties.
4The "third period" was a schema pro
claimed by the Stalinists in 1928 accord
ing to which capitalism was in its final
period of collapse. Following from this
schema, the Comintern's tactics during
the next six years were marked by ultra-
leftism, adventurism, sectarian "red"
unions, and opposition to forming united
fronts with other working-class organiza
tions.
5The Communist League of America
(Opposition) was the organization formed
by Cannon and others who were expelled
from the Communist Party in 1928 for
supporting the program of the Left Op
position in the Soviet CP, led by Leon
Trotsky.
6In December 1934 the Communist
League of America fused with the Ameri
can Workers Party, led by A. J. Muste,
to form the Workers Party of the United
States.
Lens: What happened then in the relalively large mass movement before World War II and during World War II? Did you feel that there was something impeding your development or your progress, or were you going too slow, or what?
Cannon: Do you mean our organization?
Lens: Yes.
Cannon: Our big obstacle was the Communist Party. It had complete domination of what there was of the radical movement. The SP was an empty shell. And we were isolated. The membership of the Communist Party largely identified Stalin with the Comintern. And whatever the Comintern said was the law. But we kept recruiting one here and one there until we'd built up quite a cadre of capable people.
Lens: Why didn't you take over the Communist Party? Why didn't the majority come over to your point of view? Must a radical party have the support of a government in some foreign country to survive or prosper?
Cannon: The Comintern represented the Russian revolution in the minds of the American communists. The Comintern said we were counterrevolutionaries and that Trotsky was a fascist, a traitor, and everything else; and they accepted that.
Lens: From a theoretical point of view, though, Marxism is supposed to be the science of revolution, and your estimate of events was more lucid than Browder's, say and yet here were ten or twenty thousand communists to whom you couldn't get through. Their emotions were much stronger than their intellectual probing.
Cannon: That's true; it took a long time for us to break through.
Lens: Is that a handicap that the left can always expect, that emotion plays a bigger role than science of revolution?
Cannon: The pull of a radical organization that is dominant in the field is almost gravitational. The average worker and activist doesn't want to be connected with some little sect on the sidelines. He wants to be where the action is.
Muste group
Lens: Did the Muste group make any sensational spurt in its early days, or was it growing about like your group?
Cannon: It was growing about like ours. Muste was a remarkable personal character. He was a preacher, you know, to start with.
In 1917, as a minister in Boston, he went to Lawrence, Mass., and got into the textile strike there and became the head of it Next, if I'm correct, he became the head of the textile workers union, or what was left of it.
Then he started the Brookwood Labor College in New York State, which quite a number of people attended, and he recruited some of them. Out of that he developed the Conference for Progressive Labor Action and recruited people here and there. Then this organization developed an unemployed movement of its own.
The Communist Party dominated the main unemployment movement in the big cities, the Unemployed Councils. The Musteites organized around the fringes rather effectively, in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and other places. The Unemployed Leagues, they called them. Through all these operations Muste accumulated a cadre.
We were greatly impressed with their actions in the Toledo Auto-Lite strike in 1934, at the same time that we were occupied with the Teamsters' fight in Minneapolis. They had done an unprecedented thing. Their leaders there
— Sam Pollock, Ted Selander, and Art Preis — were in the unemployment movement, the Unemployed League of the Musteites. And they organized to support the strike.
Contrary to the custom of the unemployed being recruited as strikebreakers, they became the most militant supporters of the strike. They practically led the strike. We were tremendously impressed by that, and it led to our negotiations with them for fusion. Meanwhile Muste was turning to the left politically, so there wasn't much trouble in bringing about a unification.
Some of the people that Muste had attracted —such as (J. B. S.) Hardman and (Louis) Budenz and a few others wouldn't go along with it, but Muste
decided to do it and he brought along a majority of his people and it gave
the movement quite a boost.
Lens: Did you expect a revolution in the 1930s —that capitalism would collapse?
Cannon: I can't say that I expected it, but looking back on it now, as I have said many times, anything was possible in the thirties. After the workers recovered from their paralysis. In the first four or five years they were simply stunned, they didn't know what to do. But beginning with Minneapolis in 1934, three strikes —Minneapolis, the San Francisco general strike, and the Auto-Lite strike in Toledo — seemed to give the impetus needed for a new movement. And it began to develop by leaps and bounds.
Lens: What stopped it?
Tremendous upheaval
Cannon: The American Communist Party.
The industrial union movement developed millions of members and John L. Lewis, recognizing the tide, turned toward it and gave quite effective leadership for a time. The sit-down strikes in Flint, Mich., and the organization of General Motors and Ford represented a tremendous upheaval. That was accomplished in a few years.
Lens: When you say the Communist Party stopped it, in what way?
Cannon: The Communist Party was the dominant force in the radical movement. They dominated the unemployed movement and by that time there developed a radical movement on the campuses, which they also dominated. And they trained some cadres in the unemployment and student movements who took part in various actions.
You know, the average worker is afraid to stand up and make a motion in a meeting. They aren't accustomed to that. The CP trained a whole cadre of people who could stand up and make motions and parliamentary moves, and run meetings, and things of this sort.
In the mid-thirties there was a certain upsurge out of the depression. Not a real economic recovery, but a revival. They began to open factories and take some people back to work. And the Communist Party colonized a lot of their people in the strategic industries and their radical talk appealed widely. They were competitors for control of the auto workers union for a while.
Right in the middle of this came the turn of the Comintern toward the right. The "third period" had passed and the Kremlin began turning over toward conservatism and naturally the Communist Party just carried it out here in the United States to the letter.
I believe that if the Communist Party had remained a revolutionary party, it could have made great things out of that mass movement of the thirties.
Lens: If you go back to the Russian revolution, you also had a Menshevik group, and the Bolsheviks were a minority in relation to the Mensheviks, and yet they were able to pull people away from them. Why weren't the Trotskyists able to pull people from the Stalinists here? You also had capable people, you also knew how to make motions in meetings and all the rest of that, and probably were more dedicated.
Excluded
Cannon: Unquestionably. But we didn't have the numbers. The Communist Party excluded us from every movement they controlled, like the unemployed movement. A hungry unemployed member of the Trotskyist organization couldn't get into the Unemployed Councils because the Stalinists branded him a "counterrevolutionary."
The CP formed alliances with other radicals and socialists in the League Against War and Fascism, but we were not admitted to it. So although we expanded somewhat with the success of the Minneapolis strikes, the fusion with the Musteites, and the entry into the Socialist Party, ? which gained us quite a group of new members, we were still a small minority in comparison to the Communist Party.
Lens: You expected quite a bit more from the entry in the Socialist Party, didn't you, than you eventually got?
Cannon: We won over the majority of the Young People's Socialist League.
Lens: I know, but you really expected to become an important mass party.
Cannon: We expected the Socialist Party itself to grow and that we would grow with it.
Lens: Why didn't it?
Cannon: The competition of the Communist Party, and partly the inadequacy of its leadership, I guess.
Lens: Of the Communist or Socialist leadership?
Cannon: Of the Socialist Party leadership.
Lens: But you were playing an important role in it by then. Weren't you in the Socialist leadership?
Cannon: I came out to California during that period. We soon got a majority in the state executive committee of the Socialist Party and published a weekly paper in San Francisco. The right-wingers remaining in the Socialist Party got alarmed about that and began expelling our people. And we had nothing to do but fight it out and come to a break.
Lens: Had you expected a break? Cannon: No, we tried to prevent it.
Lens: You had hoped to remain in the Socialist Party?
Cannon: Yes, we were not ready to bring things to a head yet. But we had no choice.
Lens: Why do you think the Comintern got rid of Browder?8 Or, to put it a different way, why didn't he adjust to the Comintern? He had been adjusting to it all his life.
7 In 1936 the Trotskyists joined the So
cialist Party in order to win over the
growing left wing to revolutionary poli
tics. •
8 Browder was deposed as secretary of
the CP in 1945 and expelled from the
party in 1946. Except for his first few
years in office (the end of the ultraleft
"third period") and the brief interlude of
the Stalin-Hitler pact, his regime coincided
with those years in which the CP engaged
in blatant class collaboration of the peo
ple's front variety.
During the World War II alliance of the U. S. and the Soviet Union, Browder ardently supported U. S. imperialism and publicly urged that the wartime no-strike pledge be continued after the war ended.
Cannon: It began with his appointment as secretary. Foster was a far more publicly prominent and able man than Browder. That was his trouble. You might say he was the logical man to succeed Lovestone when they got rid of Lovestone. But by that time Stalin didn't want any able people heading national parties.
I think Browder's defects were his merits. His lack of leadership capacity was just what they wanted from him — somebody to do what they told him to do. I don't say Foster wouldn't have done it, but Foster had ideas and initiative of his own.
Lens: Did you like Foster personally?
Cannon: At first I did. I was associated with him in the political fights. But I didn't like his character.
Lens: Why?
Cannon: Why don't you like somebody? He was terribly self-centered and dishonest, when it served his purpose, and disloyal in personal relations. All the kinds of things that I especially don't like.
Lens: Getting back to Browder. He had shifted gears with the Comintern all along, and then 1946 comes along and he refuses to shift gears. How do you account for that?
Cannon: I think he was taken by surprise. He carried the conciliationism of the Kremlin bureaucracy to an extreme that they were not prepared to go to after the war ended. They were getting ready for the outbreak of the cold war, while Browder was going ahead as before.
You remember his famous statement, when he said something like, "I'm ready
to shake hands with J. Pierpont Morgan on this —to have peace, no strikes during thewar, speedup, incentive pay, and all the rest."
Out of favor
It's remarkable how easily the Stalinists disposed of him. They didn't even have to send any message directly from Moscow. All they had to do was to have somebody in France, Duclos (Jacques Duclos, longtime leader of the French Communist Party), write a piece in the French CP magazine criticizing Browder. And all the hacks in the party took that as a sign that this fellow was out of favor with the big power.
Lens: Why do you feel the Lovestone-ites fell apart?
Cannon: What stages do you mean?
Lens: When they dissolved, about 1937 or 1938 (actually, 1939).
Cannon: In 1929 they took a hundred or more with them out of the Communist Party. That in itself was an indication of the tremendous power of Stalin over the party. The CP had just had a convention where the Love-stoneites had a big majority, or so they thought, because the party wasn't aware that Stalin was getting ready to dump him.
The Lovestoneites claimed to be the champions of the Comintern above all others. But the Comintern had two representatives here at the CP's 1929 convention early in the year, and the campaign against Bukharin was beginning already in Moscow. Bukharin had been their mentor and their protector, and Lovestone didn't get the signal quickly enough.
Lens: Then they survived for about 10 years. And they did have some influence in the auto workers and the ladies garment workers unions.
Cannon: As late as 1934 one of the big events in the radical movement in New York was a debate between me and Lovestone at Irving Plaza on the question of whether we should build a new international or support the Communist International. At that time he strongly supported the Comintern of Stalin. He was still, I think, hoping to convince them that he was their boy. And probably still had some idea that the Communist movement had a future here.
Some people don't have to believe things out of conviction; if they believe something is going to be a success, that's enough for them. I think that was the case with Lovestone. I think he was a careerist from the very beginning.
Lens: Let me sidetrack to another issue. The emergence of the New Left after World War II, or quite a long time after World War II, was accompanied by a tremendous counterculture movement. Why wasn't there one in the 1930s?
Cannon: This counter-culture movement of the recent past was an intellectual student movement, wasn't it?
Lens: Yes, but you had a growing student movement hi the thirties too.
Cannon: Yes, but the real power that asserted itself was a workers uprising in the 1930s. We don't have anything like that today. Nothing comparable.
Lens: In other words you feel that the students were pretty much secondary to the workers.
Cannon: In the thirties, yes.
Lens: And therefore they didn't take on characteristics of their own?
Cannon: I just don't recall them making any special mark for themselves in the thirties.
Lens: How do you account for that?
Cannon: There was a student movement, but it was mainly composed of groups affiliated to the two radical parties, the Communist Party and the Socialist Party.
I don't know whether you've heard this story, I've told it a hundred tunes: Among the big events on the campuses of New York in the thirties were the debates between the Draper brothers. Have you heard of that?
Lens: No. Theodore and Hal?
Cannon: Theodore Draper was an ardent Stalinist. Hal Draper was a left-wing Socialist. And they had a number of debates. I didn't attend any of them, but I heard about them.
The left wing of the Socialist Party didn't develop as a counter-cultural nut movement, but as a radical, Leninist movement. I heard Gus Tyler debate with Gil Green —who later became head of the Young Communist League —on the question of policy toward war. Green took the peaceful coexistence position of the Comintern and Tyler defended the Leninist policy.
Tyler, who's now an ILGWU (International Ladies Garment Workers Union) leader, simply cut him to pieces, in my judgment.
This whole counter-culture business expressed in this New Left phenomenon seems to me like it sprang out of nowhere. And it disappeared almost as rapidly.
New Left
Lens: How do you account for the emergence of the New Left? Why didn't all those young people come into the Socialist Workers Party?
Cannon: It started with the League for Industrial Democracy, didn't it?
Lens: But that was pretty much of a dead organization.
Cannon: But they had a "Port Huron Statement" that seemed to just catch fire. It took most everybody by surprise. I certainly didn't anticipate it.
Lens: Why? Here was the SWP. Eighteen of your comrades had gone to jail for opposing World War II. You had an unsullied personal record. You had worked throughout the war rather consistently against the Stalin-Hitler pact, and then against Mc-Carthyism. And yet, when the youth began to choose sides, they bypassed the CP and they bypassed you.
Cannon: You mustn't forget that the 1950s were a period of terrible reaction in the labor movement. In the cold war period the union bureaucrats were able with the help of the government to clean out all the Stalinists and all the other radicals from the CIO. And everything was dead on the campus. They called it the "silent generation."
We had counted greatly in the postwar period on young veterans being a natural recruiting ground for a big expansion. Instead, the soldiers came back and got the GI Bill of Rights. They went to school and they were studying to get degrees and get jobs. There was no response to radical ideas.
Lens: Did you expect a depression after the war like the depression of 1929?
Cannon: No, we were taken by surprise.
Lens: But you didn't expect an economic slump in 1946-47 like Eugene Dennis did.9
Cannon: We expected it, but we didn't put a time limit on it. We suffered terrible reverses. We lost a lot of members in the fifties.
Lens: To what, the persecutions?
Cold war period
Cannon: The persecution, the lack of response, the inactivity of the workers. People began falling away. Our biggest struggle in the whole cold war period of the fifties was to hold our nucleus together.
Lens: How big was the SWP?
Cannon: I would say we came out of the fifties with about 500 members.
Lens: And how many members did you have in 1945?
Cannon: In 1945 we had about 3,000, I guess, because at the 1946 convention I recall we made a ceremony of initiating 1,000 new members who had been recruited since the 1944 convention. During the latter years of the war there was considerable radicaliza-tion in anticipation of the war's end and labor struggles.
But there was no sign of radicaliza-tion in the fifties, and no sign of action in the labor unions to speak of. The campuses were dead. It was the civil rights movement that sparked the rebirth of a radical movement. We oriented ourselves as much as we could to that, and we recruited some people from the campuses, and we started a youth organization again, the Young Socialist Alliance. It began to attract a cadre. In general we've been advancing ever since, not spectacularly, but rather steadily.
Lens: But my question is why did all the energy go into the organizations of the New Left? And although you've made some gains, you never made a
9. Eugene Dennis was general secretary of the CPin the 1950s.
Lens: Why? Was it something you did that was wrong?
Cannon: No, I don't know of anything we did that was wrong. In the late fifties the Khrushchev revelations opened up the Communist Party periphery.
We plunged into that very determinedly. We recruited some members out of the CP itself after the Khrushchev revelations especially in Los Angeles. And since then we have confronted the Communist Party in mass movements of various kinds virtually as equals. They can't brush us aside any more.
Lens: But you never were able to become the dominant force on the left.
Cannon: No.
Lens: When I asked Rennie Davis and Tom Hayden why they joined the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) rather than the CP or the SWP, they said they felt that there was no magnetism there.
Recruited women
Cannon: We did recruit fairly substantially, and some excellent cadres. And we have recruited women comrades on a scale never before in the radical movement. Forty percent of our members are women. And I think about 40 percent of our staff members are women. This takes place not as a quota policy but just naturally. So many talented women have come forward to fill this and that position.
Lens: But even with all the work you've done in the antiwar movement, you're not back to your 1945 strength yet.
Cannon: We're much stronger in the cadre sense.
Lens: Having influence.
Cannon: But I don't think we're much stronger numerically. A large number of the people we recruited during that period at the end of the war were Blacks as well as industrial workers. There was a big turnover as soon as the climate in the country turned conservative with the cold war. Then they dropped out because they expected more immediate advantages than we could offer. But this membership we have today is a pretty solid membership both in the YSA and in the SWP.
Lens: Do you anticipate a revolution in America in the near future?
Cannon: -It depends on what you mean by near.
Lens: Next 10 or 15 years.
Anything possible
Cannon: I say anything is possible in this century in the years that are left of it. That's 26 years.
Lens: But you don't sound very optimistic.
Cannon: I don't want to make any categorical statements, but I say we're living in a time when capitalism is plunging toward its climactic end.
Lens: Didn't you say that in the thirties?
Cannon: I did, yes.
Lens: And in the forties? Cannon: And in the forties.
Lens: I mean, that must sound like something peculiar when you say it every decade.
Cannon: But when you stop to think, the history of humanity is a very long one, isn't it? And a quarter of a century is only an instant in the history of the human race.
Lens: What do you see in the near future for the capitalist system?
Cannon: I see one crisis piling upon another. I don't think the capitalists have ever been in such a jam in this country as they are right now, both poltically and economically. _,
Lens: Yet the average man is living well compared to 40 years ago.
Cannon: Materially, you mean?
Lens: Yes.
Cannon: Yes, but they got used to the new standard and now they see
the beginning of the decline and they don't like that.
One phenomenon that interests me greatly is the extraordinary development of union action among public workers. It's an entirely new phenomenon. And very widespread, very militant, and continuing.
Lens: You have two separate groups outside the CP and SWP that are radical, the New American Movement and the People's Party, which believe in the idea of a mass party. And then you have the Maoist parties, like the Revolutionary Union and the October League. Can you see the Trotskyists uniting with either of those forces?
Cannon: No.
Lens: You don't think that either one of them has a future?
Cannon: They have a future. I think this New American Movement or something like it can easily develop and have a temporary existence. But I don't think we can ever be isolated again. We will be in the midst of any kind of public mass movement that begins, and we will recruit out of it.
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