Click on the headline to link to the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee website for the latest news on our class-war political prisoner brother, Leonard Peltier.
Markin comment:
Long live the tradition of the James P. Cannon-founded International Labor Defense (via the American Communist Party and the Communist International's Red Aid). Free Leonard, Free Mumia, Free Lynne, Free Bradley, Free Hugo, Free Ruchell-Free all our class-war prisoners!
*************
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long time supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
Friday, June 01, 2012
The Latest From The Lynne Stewart Defense Committee- Free Lynne Stewart And Her Co-Workers Now!-
Click on the headline to link to the Justice For Lynn Stewart Defense Committee for the latest in her case.
Markin comment:
Free Lynne Stewart and her co-workers! Free Grandma Now!
Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long time supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
Markin comment:
Free Lynne Stewart and her co-workers! Free Grandma Now!
Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long time supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Troy Davis Execution: Racist State Murder-Down With The Barbaric Death Penalty!-Free All Class-War Prisoners
Workers Vanguard No. 987
30 September 2011
Troy Davis Execution: Racist State Murder
Troy Davis is dead. At 11:08 p.m. on September 21, Davis, a 42-year-old black man, was murdered by the legal guardians of the capitalist ruling class. For 22 years, Davis fought to prove his innocence of the 1989 killing of off-duty police officer Mark MacPhail in Savannah, Georgia, only to spend the last moments of his life strapped to an execution gurney. For its part, the U.S. Supreme Court went through the charade of reviewing his petition for a last-minute stay of execution. As protests took place around the world, hundreds of Davis’s supporters rallied outside the Jackson, Georgia, prison—officially known as the Diagnostic and Classification Prison—while millions followed the story on TVs, radios and cell phones, hoping for a semblance of justice for this black man caught in the American “justice” system.
The killing of Troy Davis was racist legal lynching! In place of hooded KKK nightriders were pin-striped prosecutors and black-robed judges, along with the Board of Pardons and Paroles, which turned down Davis’s bid for clemency the day before the execution. In place of the lynch rope were needles dispensing the life-ending chemical cocktail. The substantial evidence of Davis’s innocence meant nothing. A white uniformed enforcer of capitalist law and order had been killed, and this black life had to be taken in return. Here is a stark demonstration of the workings of the capitalist state—an instrument of organized violence to protect the class rule and profits of the tiny handful of capitalists against the workers and the oppressed. The death penalty is the ultimate sanction of a “justice” system that is not only stacked against workers and the poor but also, in this society founded on slavery and maintained on a bedrock of black oppression, racist to its core.
The story of Troy Davis’s frame-up is a familiar one for black people in this country. In 1991, he was sentenced to death after a frame-up conviction based on questionable “eyewitness” identifications, dubious accounts that he confessed and testimony coerced by the cops. Not a shred of physical evidence linked him to the killing. Seven of the prosecution’s nine witnesses have since recanted. The only holdouts were a man who may be the actual killer and another who first denied being able to identify the shooter, only to finger Davis at trial two years later.
What sets Davis’s case apart were the worldwide calls to stop his execution, ultimately including even former FBI director William Sessions and former Georgia Congressman Bob Barr—both staunch proponents of capital punishment—as well as the Pope and ex-president Jimmy Carter. Protests were held in cities internationally following the signing of his death warrant on September 6. In the last days of his life over 600,000 people signed petitions on Davis’s behalf. Just as a federal court judge last year dismissed evidence of Davis’s innocence as “smoke and mirrors,” the state authorities answered these calls for mercy with contempt.
Almost a century ago, Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs powerfully condemned the barbarism of the death penalty, writing in a May 1913 letter: “The taking of human life through criminal impulse or in an hour of passion by an individual is not to be compared to the immeasurably greater crime committed by the State when it deliberately puts to death the individual charged with such crime. Society may not consistently condemn murder as long as it is itself red-handed with that crime.”
As Marxists, we oppose the death penalty on principle and everywhere—from the capitalist U.S., Japan, Iran and Russia to the Chinese deformed workers state. This principle applies for the guilty as well as the innocent. We do not accord the state the right to decide who shall live and who shall die. Abolish the racist death penalty!
Legacy of Slavery
Other than the U.S. and Japan, every advanced capitalist country has eliminated capital punishment as part of its criminal code. The European bourgeoisies are brutally repressive. But the continued use of the death penalty in the U.S. speaks to the particular depravity of this country’s capitalist rulers. More fundamentally, capital punishment in the U.S. is rooted in the origins of its capitalist system, which was built on the backs of black slaves. Under the Slave Codes, blacks were killed with impunity for “crimes” ranging from insolence toward whites to rebellion against the slave masters.
This legacy can be seen today in the dungeons of death row. Of the more than 3,200 men and women there, over 40 percent are black, and another 12 percent are Latino. Among the 36 states that maintain the death penalty, California has the largest death row population. But capital punishment remains a largely Southern institution. Over 70 percent of executions since the Supreme Court reinstituted the death penalty in 1976 have taken place in the states of the former Confederacy—and more than half of those in Texas and Virginia. In Davis’s Georgia, black males make up 15 percent of the population but constitute nearly half of those on death row.
Among those speaking out against the racist death penalty is the family of James Anderson, a black auto worker who was brutally murdered by white-supremacists in Jackson, Mississippi, on June 26 (see “Lynch Mob Murder of Black Worker,” WV No. 985, 2 September). In a letter to the Hinds County district attorney, Anderson’s sister Barbara Anderson Young asked that he “not seek the death penalty for anyone involved in James’ murder,” noting the family’s religious opposition to capital punishment. She added, “We also oppose the death penalty because it historically has been used in Mississippi and the South primarily against people of color for killing whites.”
The cheapness of black life to the American ruling class is evident not just in who is sent to death row, but also in whose loss of life constitutes a capital offense. Although blacks and whites are murder victims in roughly the same numbers, 80 percent of those executed have been convicted of killing a white person. Just hours before Troy Davis was put to death, the state of Texas executed Lawrence Brewer, one of three racist thugs convicted for the gruesome 1998 killing of James Byrd, a black man who was decapitated as he was dragged to death from the back of a pickup truck. While Texas has carried out over 470 executions since 1976, Brewer became only the second white person ever executed in the state for the murder of a black person.
The discriminatory application of the death penalty was sanctified by the U.S. Supreme Court 24 years ago in the case of Warren McCleskey, a black prisoner who was executed in Georgia in 1991. McCleskey’s attorneys presented the Court with an authoritative study detailing that black people in Georgia convicted of killing whites were sentenced to death 22 times more frequently than those convicted of killing blacks. In rejecting McCleskey’s appeal, the Supreme Court explicitly acknowledged that to accept this premise would throw “into serious question the principles that underlie our entire criminal justice system.” In its callous pronouncement, the court expressed a basic truth. McCleskey was a victim of the racism that pervades the criminal justice system—who the cops stop on the street, who the prosecutors choose to indict, what charges and sentences are sought, who sits on juries, who gets paroled and who gets executed.
The buildup to Troy Davis’s execution sparked something of a public discussion on capital punishment in the bourgeois press, especially as it intersected the ascendance of Texas governor Rick Perry as a leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination. Earlier this month, Texas authorities had planned to execute four prisoners in the space of a week. Among those was Duane Buck, whose September 15 execution was stayed by the Supreme Court at the last minute. Convicted of killing his former girlfriend and a friend of hers in 1995, Buck was one of seven black men sentenced to death based on the “expert” testimony of a Texas prison psychologist that because they were black they should be expected to engage in violent behavior in the future!
Death Penalty: Bipartisan Policy
At the September 7 Republican candidates’ debate, Perry received a wild ovation for having overseen 234 executions. He further burnished his credentials by assuring moderator Brian Williams that this body count never cost him a wink of sleep. In an editorial titled “Cheering on the Death Machine,” the New York Times (11 September) declared that Perry’s “attitude about death may make sense in the hard-edged Republican primaries, but other voters should have serious doubts about a man who seems to have none.”
There is no question that the sinister Christian fundamentalist Perry is an outright reactionary, one of several in the Republican contest. But the Democrats—the other party of racist capitalist rule—are themselves no slouches in administering the rulers’ assembly line of death. Barack Obama, a supporter of the death penalty, refused to intervene as time ran out for Davis, with press secretary Jay Carney declaring: “It is not appropriate for the president of the United States to weigh in on specific cases like this one, which is a state prosecution.”
Obama was not so shy about “weighing in” on the case of death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther spokesman and a MOVE supporter who was framed up and sentenced to death on false charges of killing a Philadelphia police officer in 1981. State and federal courts have repeatedly refused to hear the massive evidence of Mumia’s innocence, including another man’s confession to the killing. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Michael Smerconish, a right-wing Philadelphia journalist leading the calls for Mumia’s head, asked Obama about Mumia’s case. According to Smerconish, Obama replied by denying knowing much about the case while assuring him nevertheless that anyone convicted of killing a cop should be executed or imprisoned for life.
What to expect of the Democrats can be seen in the case of Shaka Sankofa, who was executed in June 2000 at the height of the presidential campaign in the face of international opposition similar to that which sought to stop Davis’s execution. As then-governor of Texas George W. Bush and his advisers weighed the political risks of stopping the execution—or not—his Democratic opponent, Al Gore, not only reaffirmed his commitment to the death penalty but gave the go-ahead to execute a likely innocent man, declaring that “mistakes are inevitable.” Eight years earlier, Bill Clinton interrupted his first presidential campaign by flying back to Arkansas, where he was governor, to oversee the execution of Rickey Ray Rector, a brain-damaged black man.
The liberals at the New York Times may be appalled that Rick Perry and the Republican right openly revel in state murder and indifference to the likelihood of killing innocent people. But Perry & Co. are only giving voice to what has been ruling-class policy—implemented by Democrats and Republicans alike—to massively bolster the repressive forces of the capitalist state. It was Clinton’s 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act that cut off the possibilities of presenting new evidence of innocence by eviscerating the right of federal habeas corpus to overturn state death sentences. By 2010, the prison population had reached 2.3 million people, over half of whom were black and Latino, the majority convicted on nonviolent drug charges. In the calculations of the American bourgeoisie, the urban ghettos, which used to provide a reservoir of unskilled labor for the auto plants and steel mills, are simply written off as an expendable population, revealing the racist rulers’ impulse to genocide.
While a widely cited poll shows that nearly two-thirds of the population continues to support the death penalty, there has been a drop in public support over the past several years. The fact that more than 130 people on death row have been proven innocent since 1973, including through DNA testing in recent years, has given sections of the ruling class some pause in the accelerated rush to execution, and juries have become a little more reluctant to issue death sentences. On March 9, Illinois became the fifth state since 2004 to eliminate the death penalty.
In their attempts to fine-tune the system of capitalist repression, liberals often promote the living death of “life without parole” as an alternative to state execution. A New York Times (12 September) editorial upholds life without parole as “a sound option” in capital cases even though it complains that this sentence is otherwise often misused. The Times pointed out that blacks make up 56.4 percent of those serving life without parole in the U.S. but only 37.5 percent of the country’s prison population. This statistic further underscores that there can be no fair or “humane” system of “justice” for minorities or for the working class as a whole in a society based on the exploitation of labor and maintained through the special oppression of black people.
While the face of death row is now primarily black and Latino, fighters for labor’s cause have also been targeted for death by the capitalist state: the Haymarket anarchists, labor organizers who fought for the eight-hour day and were put to death in 1877; IWW organizer Joe Hill, executed in 1915; anarchist workers Sacco and Vanzetti, who died in the electric chair in 1927. This ruling-class venom toward those perceived as challenging their oppressive rule is seen today in the death sentence hanging over the head of Mumia, a prize-winning journalist renowned as a powerful voice for the oppressed.
Following the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, James P. Cannon, founder and secretary of the International Labor Defense, wrote: “It is the vengeful, cruel and murderous class which the workers must fight and conquer before the regime of imprisonment, torture and murder can be ended. This is the message from the chair of death. This is the lesson of the Sacco-Vanzetti case” (“A Living Monument to Sacco and Vanzetti,” Labor Defender, October 1927). This too must be the lesson of the case of Troy Davis, whose murder at the hands of the state will be avenged when a workers party leads all the exploited and oppressed in a socialist revolution that sweeps away the entire barbaric apparatus of capitalist repression.
30 September 2011
Troy Davis Execution: Racist State Murder
Troy Davis is dead. At 11:08 p.m. on September 21, Davis, a 42-year-old black man, was murdered by the legal guardians of the capitalist ruling class. For 22 years, Davis fought to prove his innocence of the 1989 killing of off-duty police officer Mark MacPhail in Savannah, Georgia, only to spend the last moments of his life strapped to an execution gurney. For its part, the U.S. Supreme Court went through the charade of reviewing his petition for a last-minute stay of execution. As protests took place around the world, hundreds of Davis’s supporters rallied outside the Jackson, Georgia, prison—officially known as the Diagnostic and Classification Prison—while millions followed the story on TVs, radios and cell phones, hoping for a semblance of justice for this black man caught in the American “justice” system.
The killing of Troy Davis was racist legal lynching! In place of hooded KKK nightriders were pin-striped prosecutors and black-robed judges, along with the Board of Pardons and Paroles, which turned down Davis’s bid for clemency the day before the execution. In place of the lynch rope were needles dispensing the life-ending chemical cocktail. The substantial evidence of Davis’s innocence meant nothing. A white uniformed enforcer of capitalist law and order had been killed, and this black life had to be taken in return. Here is a stark demonstration of the workings of the capitalist state—an instrument of organized violence to protect the class rule and profits of the tiny handful of capitalists against the workers and the oppressed. The death penalty is the ultimate sanction of a “justice” system that is not only stacked against workers and the poor but also, in this society founded on slavery and maintained on a bedrock of black oppression, racist to its core.
The story of Troy Davis’s frame-up is a familiar one for black people in this country. In 1991, he was sentenced to death after a frame-up conviction based on questionable “eyewitness” identifications, dubious accounts that he confessed and testimony coerced by the cops. Not a shred of physical evidence linked him to the killing. Seven of the prosecution’s nine witnesses have since recanted. The only holdouts were a man who may be the actual killer and another who first denied being able to identify the shooter, only to finger Davis at trial two years later.
What sets Davis’s case apart were the worldwide calls to stop his execution, ultimately including even former FBI director William Sessions and former Georgia Congressman Bob Barr—both staunch proponents of capital punishment—as well as the Pope and ex-president Jimmy Carter. Protests were held in cities internationally following the signing of his death warrant on September 6. In the last days of his life over 600,000 people signed petitions on Davis’s behalf. Just as a federal court judge last year dismissed evidence of Davis’s innocence as “smoke and mirrors,” the state authorities answered these calls for mercy with contempt.
Almost a century ago, Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs powerfully condemned the barbarism of the death penalty, writing in a May 1913 letter: “The taking of human life through criminal impulse or in an hour of passion by an individual is not to be compared to the immeasurably greater crime committed by the State when it deliberately puts to death the individual charged with such crime. Society may not consistently condemn murder as long as it is itself red-handed with that crime.”
As Marxists, we oppose the death penalty on principle and everywhere—from the capitalist U.S., Japan, Iran and Russia to the Chinese deformed workers state. This principle applies for the guilty as well as the innocent. We do not accord the state the right to decide who shall live and who shall die. Abolish the racist death penalty!
Legacy of Slavery
Other than the U.S. and Japan, every advanced capitalist country has eliminated capital punishment as part of its criminal code. The European bourgeoisies are brutally repressive. But the continued use of the death penalty in the U.S. speaks to the particular depravity of this country’s capitalist rulers. More fundamentally, capital punishment in the U.S. is rooted in the origins of its capitalist system, which was built on the backs of black slaves. Under the Slave Codes, blacks were killed with impunity for “crimes” ranging from insolence toward whites to rebellion against the slave masters.
This legacy can be seen today in the dungeons of death row. Of the more than 3,200 men and women there, over 40 percent are black, and another 12 percent are Latino. Among the 36 states that maintain the death penalty, California has the largest death row population. But capital punishment remains a largely Southern institution. Over 70 percent of executions since the Supreme Court reinstituted the death penalty in 1976 have taken place in the states of the former Confederacy—and more than half of those in Texas and Virginia. In Davis’s Georgia, black males make up 15 percent of the population but constitute nearly half of those on death row.
Among those speaking out against the racist death penalty is the family of James Anderson, a black auto worker who was brutally murdered by white-supremacists in Jackson, Mississippi, on June 26 (see “Lynch Mob Murder of Black Worker,” WV No. 985, 2 September). In a letter to the Hinds County district attorney, Anderson’s sister Barbara Anderson Young asked that he “not seek the death penalty for anyone involved in James’ murder,” noting the family’s religious opposition to capital punishment. She added, “We also oppose the death penalty because it historically has been used in Mississippi and the South primarily against people of color for killing whites.”
The cheapness of black life to the American ruling class is evident not just in who is sent to death row, but also in whose loss of life constitutes a capital offense. Although blacks and whites are murder victims in roughly the same numbers, 80 percent of those executed have been convicted of killing a white person. Just hours before Troy Davis was put to death, the state of Texas executed Lawrence Brewer, one of three racist thugs convicted for the gruesome 1998 killing of James Byrd, a black man who was decapitated as he was dragged to death from the back of a pickup truck. While Texas has carried out over 470 executions since 1976, Brewer became only the second white person ever executed in the state for the murder of a black person.
The discriminatory application of the death penalty was sanctified by the U.S. Supreme Court 24 years ago in the case of Warren McCleskey, a black prisoner who was executed in Georgia in 1991. McCleskey’s attorneys presented the Court with an authoritative study detailing that black people in Georgia convicted of killing whites were sentenced to death 22 times more frequently than those convicted of killing blacks. In rejecting McCleskey’s appeal, the Supreme Court explicitly acknowledged that to accept this premise would throw “into serious question the principles that underlie our entire criminal justice system.” In its callous pronouncement, the court expressed a basic truth. McCleskey was a victim of the racism that pervades the criminal justice system—who the cops stop on the street, who the prosecutors choose to indict, what charges and sentences are sought, who sits on juries, who gets paroled and who gets executed.
The buildup to Troy Davis’s execution sparked something of a public discussion on capital punishment in the bourgeois press, especially as it intersected the ascendance of Texas governor Rick Perry as a leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination. Earlier this month, Texas authorities had planned to execute four prisoners in the space of a week. Among those was Duane Buck, whose September 15 execution was stayed by the Supreme Court at the last minute. Convicted of killing his former girlfriend and a friend of hers in 1995, Buck was one of seven black men sentenced to death based on the “expert” testimony of a Texas prison psychologist that because they were black they should be expected to engage in violent behavior in the future!
Death Penalty: Bipartisan Policy
At the September 7 Republican candidates’ debate, Perry received a wild ovation for having overseen 234 executions. He further burnished his credentials by assuring moderator Brian Williams that this body count never cost him a wink of sleep. In an editorial titled “Cheering on the Death Machine,” the New York Times (11 September) declared that Perry’s “attitude about death may make sense in the hard-edged Republican primaries, but other voters should have serious doubts about a man who seems to have none.”
There is no question that the sinister Christian fundamentalist Perry is an outright reactionary, one of several in the Republican contest. But the Democrats—the other party of racist capitalist rule—are themselves no slouches in administering the rulers’ assembly line of death. Barack Obama, a supporter of the death penalty, refused to intervene as time ran out for Davis, with press secretary Jay Carney declaring: “It is not appropriate for the president of the United States to weigh in on specific cases like this one, which is a state prosecution.”
Obama was not so shy about “weighing in” on the case of death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther spokesman and a MOVE supporter who was framed up and sentenced to death on false charges of killing a Philadelphia police officer in 1981. State and federal courts have repeatedly refused to hear the massive evidence of Mumia’s innocence, including another man’s confession to the killing. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Michael Smerconish, a right-wing Philadelphia journalist leading the calls for Mumia’s head, asked Obama about Mumia’s case. According to Smerconish, Obama replied by denying knowing much about the case while assuring him nevertheless that anyone convicted of killing a cop should be executed or imprisoned for life.
What to expect of the Democrats can be seen in the case of Shaka Sankofa, who was executed in June 2000 at the height of the presidential campaign in the face of international opposition similar to that which sought to stop Davis’s execution. As then-governor of Texas George W. Bush and his advisers weighed the political risks of stopping the execution—or not—his Democratic opponent, Al Gore, not only reaffirmed his commitment to the death penalty but gave the go-ahead to execute a likely innocent man, declaring that “mistakes are inevitable.” Eight years earlier, Bill Clinton interrupted his first presidential campaign by flying back to Arkansas, where he was governor, to oversee the execution of Rickey Ray Rector, a brain-damaged black man.
The liberals at the New York Times may be appalled that Rick Perry and the Republican right openly revel in state murder and indifference to the likelihood of killing innocent people. But Perry & Co. are only giving voice to what has been ruling-class policy—implemented by Democrats and Republicans alike—to massively bolster the repressive forces of the capitalist state. It was Clinton’s 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act that cut off the possibilities of presenting new evidence of innocence by eviscerating the right of federal habeas corpus to overturn state death sentences. By 2010, the prison population had reached 2.3 million people, over half of whom were black and Latino, the majority convicted on nonviolent drug charges. In the calculations of the American bourgeoisie, the urban ghettos, which used to provide a reservoir of unskilled labor for the auto plants and steel mills, are simply written off as an expendable population, revealing the racist rulers’ impulse to genocide.
While a widely cited poll shows that nearly two-thirds of the population continues to support the death penalty, there has been a drop in public support over the past several years. The fact that more than 130 people on death row have been proven innocent since 1973, including through DNA testing in recent years, has given sections of the ruling class some pause in the accelerated rush to execution, and juries have become a little more reluctant to issue death sentences. On March 9, Illinois became the fifth state since 2004 to eliminate the death penalty.
In their attempts to fine-tune the system of capitalist repression, liberals often promote the living death of “life without parole” as an alternative to state execution. A New York Times (12 September) editorial upholds life without parole as “a sound option” in capital cases even though it complains that this sentence is otherwise often misused. The Times pointed out that blacks make up 56.4 percent of those serving life without parole in the U.S. but only 37.5 percent of the country’s prison population. This statistic further underscores that there can be no fair or “humane” system of “justice” for minorities or for the working class as a whole in a society based on the exploitation of labor and maintained through the special oppression of black people.
While the face of death row is now primarily black and Latino, fighters for labor’s cause have also been targeted for death by the capitalist state: the Haymarket anarchists, labor organizers who fought for the eight-hour day and were put to death in 1877; IWW organizer Joe Hill, executed in 1915; anarchist workers Sacco and Vanzetti, who died in the electric chair in 1927. This ruling-class venom toward those perceived as challenging their oppressive rule is seen today in the death sentence hanging over the head of Mumia, a prize-winning journalist renowned as a powerful voice for the oppressed.
Following the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, James P. Cannon, founder and secretary of the International Labor Defense, wrote: “It is the vengeful, cruel and murderous class which the workers must fight and conquer before the regime of imprisonment, torture and murder can be ended. This is the message from the chair of death. This is the lesson of the Sacco-Vanzetti case” (“A Living Monument to Sacco and Vanzetti,” Labor Defender, October 1927). This too must be the lesson of the case of Troy Davis, whose murder at the hands of the state will be avenged when a workers party leads all the exploited and oppressed in a socialist revolution that sweeps away the entire barbaric apparatus of capitalist repression.
Thursday, May 31, 2012
Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By (Kind Of)-In The Time Of Laura’s Time-Ms. LaVern Baker Is In The House- A CD Review
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of LaVern Baker performing her 1950s classic Tomorrow Night.
LaVern Baker Soul On Fire: The Best Of LaVern Baker, Atlantic Records, 1991
“Tomorrow night, tomorrow night, will you still say the things you said tonight- a line from LaVern Baker’s song Tomorrow Night.
Walking down the narrow stairs leading to the admission window booth at Johnny Fleet’s in good old Harvard Square on this cold Columbus Day 1978 night, jesus 1978 is almost gone already, I was suddenly depressed by this thought-how many times lately had I walked down these very stairs looking, looking for what, looking, as Tom Waits says in his song, for the heart of Saturday night, looking recently every night from Monday to Sunday and not just Saturday. Looking, not hard looking, not right now hard looking anyway after my last nitwit affair, but looking for a man who at least has a job, doesn’t have another girlfriend or ten, and who wants to settle down a little, settle down with me a little. Yes, if you really need to know, want to know, I’ve got those late twenties getting just a touch worried old maid blues.
My parents, my straight-arrow, god-fearing, Methodist god-fearing and that is a fierce fearing, hard-working, lost in some 1950s dreamland parents, my mother really, my father just keeps his own counsel between shots of whiskey and trying to read the latest seed catalogues that keep him and his business alive through the haze, keeps badgering me about finding a nice young man. Yes, easy for you to say you don’t know the nitwits who are out there and they ain’t Rickey Nelson dream jukebox guys, Mother. And then she starts on the coming home, coming home to cranky Mechanicsville (that’s in upstate New York, near Albany, if you don’t believe me) and finding some farmer-grown boy from high school and X, Y, and Z, farmer boys all, still asks about me. No thanks, jesus, that is why I fled to Boston right after college in 1972 (and fled to a far-away, and a no living at home college too but don’t tell them that) and not just because I wanted to get my social worker master’s degree like I told them. And so here I am, a few years later, walking down these skinny stairs again, sigh, yet again.
Johnny’s (nobody calls it Johnny Fleet’s except for one-time people or tourists) isn’t a bad place to hang your hat, as my father always likes to say, when he finds that one or two places in the universe outside of the farm where he feels comfortable enough to stay more than ten minutes before getting the “I’ve got to go water the greenhouse plants” or something itch (read: drink itch). Not a bad place for a woman, a twenty–eight year old woman with college degrees and some aims in life beyond some one-night stand every now and again. Or not a bad place for a pair of women, if my friend and roommate, Priscilla, decides she is man-hungry enough to make the trip to Harvard Square from the wilds of Watertown, and can stand the heavy smoke, mainly cigarette smoke as far as I know, but after a few drinks who knows, that fills the air before the night is half over.
Tonight Priscilla is with me because she has a “crush” on Albie St John, the lead singer for the featured local rock group, The Haystraws. And the last time she was here he was giving her that look like he was game for something although he is known around the Square as strictly a “for fun” guy. And that is okay with Priscilla because she has some guy back home, some guy from upstate New York where she is from near Utica, some fresh from the farm guy who she has known since about third grade, who will marry her if and when she says the word.
Here is the funny thing though alone, or like tonight with Priscilla, this funky old bar is the only place around where a woman can find a guy who is the least bit presentable to the folks back home, wherever back home is. I’ve met a couple of decent guys in here, although like I said before, things didn’t work out for some reason because they were one-night stand guys or already loaded down with girlfriends and I am in no mood to take a ticket, stuff like that. So you can see what desperate straits I am in still trying to meet that right guy, or something close, without a lot of overhead. My standards may be a little high for the times but I’m chipping away at them by the day.
Moreover, this place, this Johnny’s is the only place around that has the kind of music I like, a little country although not Grand Ole Opry country stuff like my parents go for, you know George Jones or Aunt Bee, or someone, a little bit folkie, kind of left-handed folkie, more like local favorite Eric Andersen folk rock, and a little old time let it rip 1950s rock and roll, like the Haystraws cover, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, those guys, that I never knew anything about when I was a kid since I never got past Rickey Nelson and Bobby Darin, darn him, out in the farm field sticks. Upstate New York, like I said, not far out of Albany but it might as well have been a million miles away with me picking my sting beans, tomatoes, and whatever else Pa grew to keep us from hunger’s door.
Not for me this trendy disco stuff, not my style at all, no way, although I love to dance and even took belly dancing lessons although I am not voluptuous, more just left of skinny if I say it but really voluptuous Priscilla calls me just skinny. Also my kind of guy would never, never wear an open shirt and some chainy medallion around his neck. Jesus, no way. Plus, a big plus, Johnny’s has a jukebox for intermissions filled with all kinds of odd-ball songs, real country stuff, late 1950s rock and roll (the Rickey Nelson/Bobby Vee/Bobby Darin stuff) that nobody but me probably ever heard of unless, of course, you were from Mechanicsville, or a place like that.
After going through mandatory license check and admission fee stuff, saying “hi” to the waitresses that I know now by name, and Priscilla does too, and the regular bartenders as we pass by we find our seats, kind of “reserved” seats for us where we can sit and not be hassled by guys, or be hassled if something interesting comes along. I have been in kind of a dry spell, outside the occasional minute affair if one could really call some of the “affairs” even that, for about six months now. Ever since I started to work, work doing social work, my profession, if you need to know. That’s what I am trained to do anyway although when I first came to town a few years ago I was, as one beau back then said, “serving them off the arm” in a spaghetti joint over the other side of Cambridge. Strictly a family fare menu, and plenty of college guys, including a few who I wound up dating, low on funds doing the cheap Saturday night date circuit. All in all a “no tips” situation anyway you cut it, although plenty of guff, a lot of come ons, and extra helpings of “get me this and get me that.”
Before that, out in Rochester in college, and later after a short stop at hometown Mechanicsville it was nothing but wanna-be cowboy losers, an occasionally low-rent dope dealer, some wanna-be musicians, farmer brown farmers, and married guys looking for a little something on a cold night. Ya, I know, I asked for it but a girl gets cold and lonely too. Not just guys, not these days anyway. But I am still pitching, although very low-key. That is my public style (some say, say right to my face, prim but that’s only to fend off the losers).
“Laura, what are you having, tonight honey?’ asked my “regular” waitress, Lannie, and then asked Priscilla the same. “Two Rusty Nails,” we replied together. Tonight, from a quick glance around the room even though it is a Columbus Day holiday night, looks like it is going to be a hard-drinking night from the feel of it. That means on my budget and my capacity about three drinks, max. About the same for Priscilla unless she is real man-hungry. But that is just between us, okay. Lannie, as is her habit, knowing that we are good tippers (the bonds of waitress sisterhood as Priscilla has also “served them off the arm”) brought the drinks right away. And so we settled in get ready to listen to The Haystraws coming up in a while for their first set. Or rather I did the settling in. Priscilla was looking, looking hard at Albie, and he was looking right back. I guess I will be driving home alone tonight.
As I settled in I noticed that some guy was playing the jukebox like crazy. Like crazy for real. He kept playing about three old timey LaVern Baker songs, Jim Dandy of course, and See See Rider but also about six times in a row her Tomorrow Night. I was kind of glad when the band, like I said, these really good rockers, The Haystraws, began their first set. And so the evening was off, good, bad, or indifferent.
About half way through the set I noticed this jukebox guy kept kind of looking at me, kind of “checking” me out without being rude about it. You know those little half-looks and then look away kind of like kid hide-and-seek and back again. Now I have around long enough to know that I am not bad to look at even if I am a little skinny and I take time to get ready when I go out, especially lately, and although times have been tough lately I am easy to get to know but this guy kind of put me on my guard a little. He was about thirty, neatly bearded which I like and okay for looks, I have been with worst. But what I couldn’t figure out, and it bothered me a little even when I tried to avoid his peeks (as he “avoided” mine) is why he was in this place.
Johnny’s, despite its locale in the heart of Harvard Square, is kind of an oasis for country girls like me, or half-country girls like Priscilla (from upstate New York too, Utica, in case you forgot) and guys the same way although once in a while a Harvard guy from the sticks comes around (or a guy who says he goes to Harvard. I have met some who made the claim who I don’t think could spell the name of the college, I swear). This guy looked like Harvard Square was his home turf and if he found himself five feet from a well-lighted street, a library, or a bookstore he would freak out big time. He might have been an old folkie, maybe early Dylan or Dave Von Ronk that nasal hard to understand kind of stuff, he had that feel, or maybe a bluesy kind of guy, Muddy Waters maybe, but he was strictly a city boy and was just cruising this joint.
At intermission Priscilla had to run to the ladies’ room and on the way this guy, Allan Jackman, as I found out later when he introduced himself to me, stopped her and said that her brunette friend looked very nice in her white pants and blouse. He then said to her that he would like to meet me. Priscilla, a veteran of the Laura wars (and I of hers), had the snappy answer ready, “Go introduce yourself, yourself.” And he did start to come over but I kind of turned away to avoid him just in case he had escaped from somewhere (ya, like I said before my luck has been running a little rough lately so I am a little gun-shy). Still he worked his way over.
And this is the very first thing that Allan Jackman ever said to me. “I noticed that you kind of perked up when I played LaVern Baker’s Tomorrow Night. Have you been disappointed when things didn’t work out after that first night of promise too, like in the song?” Not an original line, but close. I answered almost automatically, “Yes.” Then he introduced himself and just kind of stood there not trying to sit down or anything like that waiting for me to make the next move. Then Priscilla came back and said she had run into Albie St. John and he wanted to “talk” to her before the band came back for a second set (she said it with a certain twist like she was doing him this big favor and not like she was practically drooling at the idea. Like I said I am definitely driving home alone today.). She left and Allan was still standing there, a little ill at ease from his look. Befuddled by his soft non-threatening manner, and soft manners, I was not sure if I wanted him to sit down or not but then I said what the hell, he seems nice enough and at least he was not drunk.
So he sat down and gently, very gently shook my hand and said “thank you” for letting me let him sit at the table. In the flush of reaction to that gentle handshake, I swear no man had ever taken my hand in such a manly manner without guile or gimme something before, I relaxed a little and asked him, not an origin question but I was curious, what brought him to Johnny’s. He started to tell me about his country minute, about finding out about the wild boys of country music, about Hank Williams (I winched, that was my father’s music) about this guy Townes Van Zandt and so on.
And then he said he was looking for me. I winched again. Not another crazy. No, not me exactly, but me as a person who he sensed had been kind of beaten down in the love game lately like he had. He said he saw that look in my face, in my eyes, when he kind of half-checked (I made him laugh when I said we were kid-hide-and-seeking earlier) me out at the jukebox. I said I thought he had fully “checked me out” but he would only confess to the half. We both laughed at that one.
And after that opening, strange to say, because being a country girl, and being brought up in a Methodist-etched household to keep my thoughts to myself, or else, or else Pa would have a fit, I started to talk to him about my troubles lately. And he listened and kept asking more questions, not in your face questions, but questions like he was really interested in the answers and not as some fiendish experiment to take advantage of a simple girl. And then I asked him a few things and before we knew it the evening’s entertainment was over and Lannie kept telling us that we had to go. I still had some doubts about this guy, this city boy and his city ways, and his fierce piercing blue eyes that could be true or truly devilish.
As we got up to leave he asked, kind of sheepishly with a little stutter, asked, for my telephone number. No “my place or your place, honey,” or “let’s go down the Charles and have some fun,” or “I brought you six drinks (we had each bought our own) and so I expect something more” or any of that usual end of the night stuff that I have become somewhat inured to. He simply, softly, said he wanted it because he wanted to call me up tomorrow night. We kind of laughed at that seeing the way we met, before we met. I hesitated just a minute and he, sensing my dilemma, started to turn to leave. A guy who knows how to take no for an answer, or the possibility of no, without recrimination or fuss. Wait a minute, Laura. Before he took two steps I blurted out my number. And then put it on a cocktail napkin for him. As I passed the glass wet napkin to him he said he would call about seven if that was okay. I said yes. And then he shook my hand, shook it even more gently than when he introduced himself, if that was possible. I flushed again as he headed to the door. Something in that handshake said you had better not let this one get away. Something that said you had better be near the phone at 7:00 PM tomorrow night waiting for his call. And I will be.
LaVern Baker Soul On Fire: The Best Of LaVern Baker, Atlantic Records, 1991
“Tomorrow night, tomorrow night, will you still say the things you said tonight- a line from LaVern Baker’s song Tomorrow Night.
Walking down the narrow stairs leading to the admission window booth at Johnny Fleet’s in good old Harvard Square on this cold Columbus Day 1978 night, jesus 1978 is almost gone already, I was suddenly depressed by this thought-how many times lately had I walked down these very stairs looking, looking for what, looking, as Tom Waits says in his song, for the heart of Saturday night, looking recently every night from Monday to Sunday and not just Saturday. Looking, not hard looking, not right now hard looking anyway after my last nitwit affair, but looking for a man who at least has a job, doesn’t have another girlfriend or ten, and who wants to settle down a little, settle down with me a little. Yes, if you really need to know, want to know, I’ve got those late twenties getting just a touch worried old maid blues.
My parents, my straight-arrow, god-fearing, Methodist god-fearing and that is a fierce fearing, hard-working, lost in some 1950s dreamland parents, my mother really, my father just keeps his own counsel between shots of whiskey and trying to read the latest seed catalogues that keep him and his business alive through the haze, keeps badgering me about finding a nice young man. Yes, easy for you to say you don’t know the nitwits who are out there and they ain’t Rickey Nelson dream jukebox guys, Mother. And then she starts on the coming home, coming home to cranky Mechanicsville (that’s in upstate New York, near Albany, if you don’t believe me) and finding some farmer-grown boy from high school and X, Y, and Z, farmer boys all, still asks about me. No thanks, jesus, that is why I fled to Boston right after college in 1972 (and fled to a far-away, and a no living at home college too but don’t tell them that) and not just because I wanted to get my social worker master’s degree like I told them. And so here I am, a few years later, walking down these skinny stairs again, sigh, yet again.
Johnny’s (nobody calls it Johnny Fleet’s except for one-time people or tourists) isn’t a bad place to hang your hat, as my father always likes to say, when he finds that one or two places in the universe outside of the farm where he feels comfortable enough to stay more than ten minutes before getting the “I’ve got to go water the greenhouse plants” or something itch (read: drink itch). Not a bad place for a woman, a twenty–eight year old woman with college degrees and some aims in life beyond some one-night stand every now and again. Or not a bad place for a pair of women, if my friend and roommate, Priscilla, decides she is man-hungry enough to make the trip to Harvard Square from the wilds of Watertown, and can stand the heavy smoke, mainly cigarette smoke as far as I know, but after a few drinks who knows, that fills the air before the night is half over.
Tonight Priscilla is with me because she has a “crush” on Albie St John, the lead singer for the featured local rock group, The Haystraws. And the last time she was here he was giving her that look like he was game for something although he is known around the Square as strictly a “for fun” guy. And that is okay with Priscilla because she has some guy back home, some guy from upstate New York where she is from near Utica, some fresh from the farm guy who she has known since about third grade, who will marry her if and when she says the word.
Here is the funny thing though alone, or like tonight with Priscilla, this funky old bar is the only place around where a woman can find a guy who is the least bit presentable to the folks back home, wherever back home is. I’ve met a couple of decent guys in here, although like I said before, things didn’t work out for some reason because they were one-night stand guys or already loaded down with girlfriends and I am in no mood to take a ticket, stuff like that. So you can see what desperate straits I am in still trying to meet that right guy, or something close, without a lot of overhead. My standards may be a little high for the times but I’m chipping away at them by the day.
Moreover, this place, this Johnny’s is the only place around that has the kind of music I like, a little country although not Grand Ole Opry country stuff like my parents go for, you know George Jones or Aunt Bee, or someone, a little bit folkie, kind of left-handed folkie, more like local favorite Eric Andersen folk rock, and a little old time let it rip 1950s rock and roll, like the Haystraws cover, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, those guys, that I never knew anything about when I was a kid since I never got past Rickey Nelson and Bobby Darin, darn him, out in the farm field sticks. Upstate New York, like I said, not far out of Albany but it might as well have been a million miles away with me picking my sting beans, tomatoes, and whatever else Pa grew to keep us from hunger’s door.
Not for me this trendy disco stuff, not my style at all, no way, although I love to dance and even took belly dancing lessons although I am not voluptuous, more just left of skinny if I say it but really voluptuous Priscilla calls me just skinny. Also my kind of guy would never, never wear an open shirt and some chainy medallion around his neck. Jesus, no way. Plus, a big plus, Johnny’s has a jukebox for intermissions filled with all kinds of odd-ball songs, real country stuff, late 1950s rock and roll (the Rickey Nelson/Bobby Vee/Bobby Darin stuff) that nobody but me probably ever heard of unless, of course, you were from Mechanicsville, or a place like that.
After going through mandatory license check and admission fee stuff, saying “hi” to the waitresses that I know now by name, and Priscilla does too, and the regular bartenders as we pass by we find our seats, kind of “reserved” seats for us where we can sit and not be hassled by guys, or be hassled if something interesting comes along. I have been in kind of a dry spell, outside the occasional minute affair if one could really call some of the “affairs” even that, for about six months now. Ever since I started to work, work doing social work, my profession, if you need to know. That’s what I am trained to do anyway although when I first came to town a few years ago I was, as one beau back then said, “serving them off the arm” in a spaghetti joint over the other side of Cambridge. Strictly a family fare menu, and plenty of college guys, including a few who I wound up dating, low on funds doing the cheap Saturday night date circuit. All in all a “no tips” situation anyway you cut it, although plenty of guff, a lot of come ons, and extra helpings of “get me this and get me that.”
Before that, out in Rochester in college, and later after a short stop at hometown Mechanicsville it was nothing but wanna-be cowboy losers, an occasionally low-rent dope dealer, some wanna-be musicians, farmer brown farmers, and married guys looking for a little something on a cold night. Ya, I know, I asked for it but a girl gets cold and lonely too. Not just guys, not these days anyway. But I am still pitching, although very low-key. That is my public style (some say, say right to my face, prim but that’s only to fend off the losers).
“Laura, what are you having, tonight honey?’ asked my “regular” waitress, Lannie, and then asked Priscilla the same. “Two Rusty Nails,” we replied together. Tonight, from a quick glance around the room even though it is a Columbus Day holiday night, looks like it is going to be a hard-drinking night from the feel of it. That means on my budget and my capacity about three drinks, max. About the same for Priscilla unless she is real man-hungry. But that is just between us, okay. Lannie, as is her habit, knowing that we are good tippers (the bonds of waitress sisterhood as Priscilla has also “served them off the arm”) brought the drinks right away. And so we settled in get ready to listen to The Haystraws coming up in a while for their first set. Or rather I did the settling in. Priscilla was looking, looking hard at Albie, and he was looking right back. I guess I will be driving home alone tonight.
As I settled in I noticed that some guy was playing the jukebox like crazy. Like crazy for real. He kept playing about three old timey LaVern Baker songs, Jim Dandy of course, and See See Rider but also about six times in a row her Tomorrow Night. I was kind of glad when the band, like I said, these really good rockers, The Haystraws, began their first set. And so the evening was off, good, bad, or indifferent.
About half way through the set I noticed this jukebox guy kept kind of looking at me, kind of “checking” me out without being rude about it. You know those little half-looks and then look away kind of like kid hide-and-seek and back again. Now I have around long enough to know that I am not bad to look at even if I am a little skinny and I take time to get ready when I go out, especially lately, and although times have been tough lately I am easy to get to know but this guy kind of put me on my guard a little. He was about thirty, neatly bearded which I like and okay for looks, I have been with worst. But what I couldn’t figure out, and it bothered me a little even when I tried to avoid his peeks (as he “avoided” mine) is why he was in this place.
Johnny’s, despite its locale in the heart of Harvard Square, is kind of an oasis for country girls like me, or half-country girls like Priscilla (from upstate New York too, Utica, in case you forgot) and guys the same way although once in a while a Harvard guy from the sticks comes around (or a guy who says he goes to Harvard. I have met some who made the claim who I don’t think could spell the name of the college, I swear). This guy looked like Harvard Square was his home turf and if he found himself five feet from a well-lighted street, a library, or a bookstore he would freak out big time. He might have been an old folkie, maybe early Dylan or Dave Von Ronk that nasal hard to understand kind of stuff, he had that feel, or maybe a bluesy kind of guy, Muddy Waters maybe, but he was strictly a city boy and was just cruising this joint.
At intermission Priscilla had to run to the ladies’ room and on the way this guy, Allan Jackman, as I found out later when he introduced himself to me, stopped her and said that her brunette friend looked very nice in her white pants and blouse. He then said to her that he would like to meet me. Priscilla, a veteran of the Laura wars (and I of hers), had the snappy answer ready, “Go introduce yourself, yourself.” And he did start to come over but I kind of turned away to avoid him just in case he had escaped from somewhere (ya, like I said before my luck has been running a little rough lately so I am a little gun-shy). Still he worked his way over.
And this is the very first thing that Allan Jackman ever said to me. “I noticed that you kind of perked up when I played LaVern Baker’s Tomorrow Night. Have you been disappointed when things didn’t work out after that first night of promise too, like in the song?” Not an original line, but close. I answered almost automatically, “Yes.” Then he introduced himself and just kind of stood there not trying to sit down or anything like that waiting for me to make the next move. Then Priscilla came back and said she had run into Albie St. John and he wanted to “talk” to her before the band came back for a second set (she said it with a certain twist like she was doing him this big favor and not like she was practically drooling at the idea. Like I said I am definitely driving home alone today.). She left and Allan was still standing there, a little ill at ease from his look. Befuddled by his soft non-threatening manner, and soft manners, I was not sure if I wanted him to sit down or not but then I said what the hell, he seems nice enough and at least he was not drunk.
So he sat down and gently, very gently shook my hand and said “thank you” for letting me let him sit at the table. In the flush of reaction to that gentle handshake, I swear no man had ever taken my hand in such a manly manner without guile or gimme something before, I relaxed a little and asked him, not an origin question but I was curious, what brought him to Johnny’s. He started to tell me about his country minute, about finding out about the wild boys of country music, about Hank Williams (I winched, that was my father’s music) about this guy Townes Van Zandt and so on.
And then he said he was looking for me. I winched again. Not another crazy. No, not me exactly, but me as a person who he sensed had been kind of beaten down in the love game lately like he had. He said he saw that look in my face, in my eyes, when he kind of half-checked (I made him laugh when I said we were kid-hide-and-seeking earlier) me out at the jukebox. I said I thought he had fully “checked me out” but he would only confess to the half. We both laughed at that one.
And after that opening, strange to say, because being a country girl, and being brought up in a Methodist-etched household to keep my thoughts to myself, or else, or else Pa would have a fit, I started to talk to him about my troubles lately. And he listened and kept asking more questions, not in your face questions, but questions like he was really interested in the answers and not as some fiendish experiment to take advantage of a simple girl. And then I asked him a few things and before we knew it the evening’s entertainment was over and Lannie kept telling us that we had to go. I still had some doubts about this guy, this city boy and his city ways, and his fierce piercing blue eyes that could be true or truly devilish.
As we got up to leave he asked, kind of sheepishly with a little stutter, asked, for my telephone number. No “my place or your place, honey,” or “let’s go down the Charles and have some fun,” or “I brought you six drinks (we had each bought our own) and so I expect something more” or any of that usual end of the night stuff that I have become somewhat inured to. He simply, softly, said he wanted it because he wanted to call me up tomorrow night. We kind of laughed at that seeing the way we met, before we met. I hesitated just a minute and he, sensing my dilemma, started to turn to leave. A guy who knows how to take no for an answer, or the possibility of no, without recrimination or fuss. Wait a minute, Laura. Before he took two steps I blurted out my number. And then put it on a cocktail napkin for him. As I passed the glass wet napkin to him he said he would call about seven if that was okay. I said yes. And then he shook my hand, shook it even more gently than when he introduced himself, if that was possible. I flushed again as he headed to the door. Something in that handshake said you had better not let this one get away. Something that said you had better be near the phone at 7:00 PM tomorrow night waiting for his call. And I will be.
Songs To While The Class Struggle By (Kind Of)- Buddha Swings- Benny Goodman On The Air-1937-38- A CD Review
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Benny Goodman his band performing, well, performing swing music, what else.
CD Review
Benny Goodman On The Air-1937-38, Benny Goodman and the 1937-38 version of his band, Columbia Records, Sony Music, 1993
Delores LaBlanc had had just enough of Elizabeth (Betty) LaCroix and her tangled love life with her brother, Jean. Every other week it seemed that she was breaking up with him over one question. Let me give you a hint. Betty and Delores are seniors at Olde Saco High School in this year of our lord 1937. Let me add that they are both dark-haired French-Canadian American beauties dewy like only those from the north up in Quebec can be. So sex is naturally in the equation, especially since in a few months they will be having their senior prom, always a highlight in the Olde Saco calendar year, for those who graduate and those who, for one reason or another don’t. And graduation or not the next step is marriage. That is just ethos of the town, the culture and the times. Right this minute though this Delores fed-up moment the sex question revolves around Betty and Jean.
Seems that Betty had had her fifteenth, no sixteenth, fight and never make-up with dear Jean. And whether the year is 1039, 1539, or like now 1939 the issue, to put it delicately, was sex, or rather “doing it.” Or the real rather why she wanted to wait until marriage, and not before, to give in to one Jean LeBlanc. Needless to say All-American boy, really all All-American French-Canadian boy and former star of the Olde Saco High football team, the one that beat Auburn for the state title a couple of years back, Jean, was all for doing the do right now as a test run for marriage, or so that is how he presented it to Betty last Saturday (and many a previous Saturday night) down in the dunes of Olde Saco Beach as they watch old Neptune do his ocean magic. And Jean almost made the sale, except by the time Betty decided yes, she wasn’t in the mood any longer. Jesus.
And what does all this have to do with Benny Goodman, king of swingness, and the possibilities of seeing said king in person. Well where have you been? How do you think our boy Jean, champion football mover but a little bashful in the sex department when he came right down to it tried to get one Betty LaCroix in the mood. Take one guess. No I will give a hint-think clarinet, a heavenly deep beat-pacing clarinet that sets those drums a rolling, those trumpets blowing to Gabriel’s heaven, and sets those sexy saxes on fire to blow the wall of Jericho down. A Little Body And Soul or Swing Time In The Mountains. Maybe Blue Skies. Get it.
So one can see Delores point, a little. But here is the funny part. Delores is having her own sexual dilemmas with one Jean Jacques LaCroix (yes, Betty’s brother, it’s that kind of town and that kind of clannishness). See, one night she let sweet boy Jean Jacque go a little farther than she should have while they were down the dunes of Olde Saco Beach in his father’s Hudson while the Benny Goodman Hour was on the radio. Get it.
CD Review
Benny Goodman On The Air-1937-38, Benny Goodman and the 1937-38 version of his band, Columbia Records, Sony Music, 1993
Delores LaBlanc had had just enough of Elizabeth (Betty) LaCroix and her tangled love life with her brother, Jean. Every other week it seemed that she was breaking up with him over one question. Let me give you a hint. Betty and Delores are seniors at Olde Saco High School in this year of our lord 1937. Let me add that they are both dark-haired French-Canadian American beauties dewy like only those from the north up in Quebec can be. So sex is naturally in the equation, especially since in a few months they will be having their senior prom, always a highlight in the Olde Saco calendar year, for those who graduate and those who, for one reason or another don’t. And graduation or not the next step is marriage. That is just ethos of the town, the culture and the times. Right this minute though this Delores fed-up moment the sex question revolves around Betty and Jean.
Seems that Betty had had her fifteenth, no sixteenth, fight and never make-up with dear Jean. And whether the year is 1039, 1539, or like now 1939 the issue, to put it delicately, was sex, or rather “doing it.” Or the real rather why she wanted to wait until marriage, and not before, to give in to one Jean LeBlanc. Needless to say All-American boy, really all All-American French-Canadian boy and former star of the Olde Saco High football team, the one that beat Auburn for the state title a couple of years back, Jean, was all for doing the do right now as a test run for marriage, or so that is how he presented it to Betty last Saturday (and many a previous Saturday night) down in the dunes of Olde Saco Beach as they watch old Neptune do his ocean magic. And Jean almost made the sale, except by the time Betty decided yes, she wasn’t in the mood any longer. Jesus.
And what does all this have to do with Benny Goodman, king of swingness, and the possibilities of seeing said king in person. Well where have you been? How do you think our boy Jean, champion football mover but a little bashful in the sex department when he came right down to it tried to get one Betty LaCroix in the mood. Take one guess. No I will give a hint-think clarinet, a heavenly deep beat-pacing clarinet that sets those drums a rolling, those trumpets blowing to Gabriel’s heaven, and sets those sexy saxes on fire to blow the wall of Jericho down. A Little Body And Soul or Swing Time In The Mountains. Maybe Blue Skies. Get it.
So one can see Delores point, a little. But here is the funny part. Delores is having her own sexual dilemmas with one Jean Jacques LaCroix (yes, Betty’s brother, it’s that kind of town and that kind of clannishness). See, one night she let sweet boy Jean Jacque go a little farther than she should have while they were down the dunes of Olde Saco Beach in his father’s Hudson while the Benny Goodman Hour was on the radio. Get it.
Out Of The 1950s Crime Noir Night-French-Style- Jules Dassin’s “Rififi”
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the French crime noir Rififi.
DVD Review
Rififi, starring Jean Servais, directed by Hollywood black-listed director Jules Dassin, 1955.
Recently I went out of my way to honor the French cinematic crime noir tradition in reviewing Jean Gabin’s Touchez Pas au Grisbi, a film right out of the Hollywood gangster shoot-em-up and ask questions later genre. The film under review, Rififi, reflects another French cinematic homage to a different aspect of that tradition, the well-planned (almost) heist saga. In fact, given the approximately one half hour depiction of the heist itself, I would argue that it more than put paid to that homage. Maybe the fact that the film was directed by American red scare black-listed director Jules Dassin was key to those dramatic, skillful and realistic scenes. While reading his Marx in the morning Dassin, maybe, spent a few afternoons at the local two films for the price of one movie theaters of the day watching, intensely watching those heist scenes.
So, as I have already telegraphed,, this one revolves around a heist, a big jewel heist, naturally at an almost impossible to bust, high tech (for the day) protected establishment. Of course to take on such a risky task you either have to be very smart (street smart) or desperate, or both. Enter one Tony, just out of stir, with no prospects, no dough, and no pension (occupational hazard of the profession). And with about seven chips on his shoulder, number one chip being two-timed (who knows maybe more) by his woman. (Ya, I know, two-timing women, and the crazy way they turn smart (street smart) guys goofy in the plot lines of crime noirs, are a dime a dozen.) Tony is ready though to go for the brass ring. And he grabs it, almost.
See, while two-timing women may be a dime a dozen, two-timing women who take up with rival boss gangsters and live to tell about it, are not. So said rival boss gangster, once he cops to the fact that our Tony has “scored” is ready to move heaven and earth to get the jewels, and get them cheap. Cheap? Ya, easy, just kidnap one of the heist guys’ kids and that will have them squealing and handing over jewels ASAP. Well no, not at all. Remember Tony is not going back to stir, no way. And come hell or high water he is not leaving his buddy (and his buddy’s wife) in the lurch. Without giving the whole thing away let’s just put it this way, Hollywood or Paris, film wise anyway, crime does not pay. RIP Tony.
DVD Review
Rififi, starring Jean Servais, directed by Hollywood black-listed director Jules Dassin, 1955.
Recently I went out of my way to honor the French cinematic crime noir tradition in reviewing Jean Gabin’s Touchez Pas au Grisbi, a film right out of the Hollywood gangster shoot-em-up and ask questions later genre. The film under review, Rififi, reflects another French cinematic homage to a different aspect of that tradition, the well-planned (almost) heist saga. In fact, given the approximately one half hour depiction of the heist itself, I would argue that it more than put paid to that homage. Maybe the fact that the film was directed by American red scare black-listed director Jules Dassin was key to those dramatic, skillful and realistic scenes. While reading his Marx in the morning Dassin, maybe, spent a few afternoons at the local two films for the price of one movie theaters of the day watching, intensely watching those heist scenes.
So, as I have already telegraphed,, this one revolves around a heist, a big jewel heist, naturally at an almost impossible to bust, high tech (for the day) protected establishment. Of course to take on such a risky task you either have to be very smart (street smart) or desperate, or both. Enter one Tony, just out of stir, with no prospects, no dough, and no pension (occupational hazard of the profession). And with about seven chips on his shoulder, number one chip being two-timed (who knows maybe more) by his woman. (Ya, I know, two-timing women, and the crazy way they turn smart (street smart) guys goofy in the plot lines of crime noirs, are a dime a dozen.) Tony is ready though to go for the brass ring. And he grabs it, almost.
See, while two-timing women may be a dime a dozen, two-timing women who take up with rival boss gangsters and live to tell about it, are not. So said rival boss gangster, once he cops to the fact that our Tony has “scored” is ready to move heaven and earth to get the jewels, and get them cheap. Cheap? Ya, easy, just kidnap one of the heist guys’ kids and that will have them squealing and handing over jewels ASAP. Well no, not at all. Remember Tony is not going back to stir, no way. And come hell or high water he is not leaving his buddy (and his buddy’s wife) in the lurch. Without giving the whole thing away let’s just put it this way, Hollywood or Paris, film wise anyway, crime does not pay. RIP Tony.
Sometimes There Really Ain’t No Cure For The Summertime Blues-Hats Off To Mr. Eddie Cochran
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Eddie Cochran performing his schools out for the summer 1950s classic, Summertime Blues.
“Hey, school is going to be out for the summer tomorrow Billy (or you fill in the name, the1950s billyjohnniejimmybobby name, or bettyjoannconnielinda name if you prefer), What you gonna do?” yelled girl magnet Frankie Larkin, Francis James Larkin, king of the North Adamsville Junior High School corner boy night and a guy who has his card filled for the summer. And if you are a billyjohnniejimmybobby teenage boy, maybe just made it to teenage boy (or girl but this is strictly a guy thing and the girls, well, the girls can speak for themselves and from what I hear they do every Monday morning at mandatory girl talk what happened over the weekend pre-school “lav” world-historic session) then your answer, my billy answer, is mope. Ya, you heard it right (and you secretly knew it was coming, sledgehammer coming, once I started talking about teen boys, or that Monday morning girls “lav” line-up). Mope.
Mope, maybe mope plus. Reason: one bettyjoannconnielinda, hell, let me just say it and get it over with, connie, did not give me encouragement one at the last dance of the last school dance. And so mope, and maybe leave my sweaty humid room for a drink of water, is what summer has in store for me to while away the summer until school gets back in session come September and back to the connie wars. Until then just dream trance that we, billy and connie we, are one (and more, importantly known as one), down at the seawall of old Adamsville Beach. Ya, you know the spot right between the toney Adamsville Yacht Club and the broken down North Adamsville Boat Club. And where billy mind’s eye can already see Frankie holding court with some bevy of Monday morning talked-out junior high high pecking order chicks (okay, okay girls).
But let me back up and give you the details, the gruesome details of that last dance school dance and mope. I got kooky about this connie (alright Connie) when she sat next to me in art class and we started, as things like that happen in junior high, spatting. Ya, spatting back and forth about this and that, the subject matter is not important but the meaning, the significance, the world- historic significance (did I say that before, oh well, I like the expression) of those exchanges, for those clueless about how 1950s boys and girls relate, is that spatting, you know, if you say this, she says that, and then you say that and she says this, is we are, well, interested in each other. Otherwise why go to all the bother of being contrary. Jesus, do you guys need a diagram? Well all this this-ing (sic) and that-ing (double sic) led to my asking her to the last chance to dance end of school dance to be held on a Friday night. I was happy, and I thought she was too.
I won’t kid you. I was sky high getting ready for this dance, got a new shirt, double- showered, put on some sticky deodorant, and some father’s bay rum concoction on my hair. And I looked okay (and she said I looked okay). And she looked great when I went to her house to walk her to school (come on you know as well as I do these junior high school dances aren’t going to be held at the Ritz or some place like that. And that would be a waste anyway because what matters is who you are with, or not with, not where the damn thing is held. Christ it could be in an airplane hangar for all we cared as long as the certain hes and shes were there and the music was loud (except that last chance dance, then you wanted it dreamy).
But enough of this, Let me get to that last dance and why I am moping, maybe moping plus. Things were set; the last song was The Dubs Could This Be Magic? Home run, right? Well, usually right. But the problem with the slow-mo last dance is that you can hear enough to actually talk. So when Connie asked me “Will you miss me this summer when my parents take the family for a vacation until mid-August?” I answered “No.” Wrong answer, way wrong answer. See I was still playing she says this and I say that. Kid’s spat stuff. When the dance was over she just walked away, and she hasn’t spoken to me since. So when Mister Eddie Cochran says in his song about his mopes that just finished on the radio “There ain’t no cure for the summertime blues,” he’s got it right, damn right. Excuse me; I have to go for a drink of water.
**************
Summertime Blues-Eddie Cochran
Well, I'm gonna raise a fuss
I'm gonna raise a holler
'Bout workin' all summer
Just to try to earn a dollar
Well, I went to the boss man
Tried to get a break
But the boss said 'No dice, son,
You gotta work late'
Sometimes I wonder what am I gonna do
'Cause there ain't no cure for the summertime blues
Well, my Mom and Poppa told me
Son, you gotta earn some money
If you want to use the care
To go riding next Sunday
Well, I wouldn't go to work
I told the boss I was sick
He said 'You can't use the car
'Cause you didn't work a lick'
Sometimes I wonder what am I gonna do
'Cause there ain't no cure for the summertime blues
Gonna take two weeks
Gonna have a fine vacation
Gonna take my problem
To the United Nations
Well' I went to my congressman
He said 'quote'
'I'd like to help you son,
But you're too young to vote'
Sometimes I wonder what am I gonna do
'Cause there ain't no cure for the summertime blues
“Hey, school is going to be out for the summer tomorrow Billy (or you fill in the name, the1950s billyjohnniejimmybobby name, or bettyjoannconnielinda name if you prefer), What you gonna do?” yelled girl magnet Frankie Larkin, Francis James Larkin, king of the North Adamsville Junior High School corner boy night and a guy who has his card filled for the summer. And if you are a billyjohnniejimmybobby teenage boy, maybe just made it to teenage boy (or girl but this is strictly a guy thing and the girls, well, the girls can speak for themselves and from what I hear they do every Monday morning at mandatory girl talk what happened over the weekend pre-school “lav” world-historic session) then your answer, my billy answer, is mope. Ya, you heard it right (and you secretly knew it was coming, sledgehammer coming, once I started talking about teen boys, or that Monday morning girls “lav” line-up). Mope.
Mope, maybe mope plus. Reason: one bettyjoannconnielinda, hell, let me just say it and get it over with, connie, did not give me encouragement one at the last dance of the last school dance. And so mope, and maybe leave my sweaty humid room for a drink of water, is what summer has in store for me to while away the summer until school gets back in session come September and back to the connie wars. Until then just dream trance that we, billy and connie we, are one (and more, importantly known as one), down at the seawall of old Adamsville Beach. Ya, you know the spot right between the toney Adamsville Yacht Club and the broken down North Adamsville Boat Club. And where billy mind’s eye can already see Frankie holding court with some bevy of Monday morning talked-out junior high high pecking order chicks (okay, okay girls).
But let me back up and give you the details, the gruesome details of that last dance school dance and mope. I got kooky about this connie (alright Connie) when she sat next to me in art class and we started, as things like that happen in junior high, spatting. Ya, spatting back and forth about this and that, the subject matter is not important but the meaning, the significance, the world- historic significance (did I say that before, oh well, I like the expression) of those exchanges, for those clueless about how 1950s boys and girls relate, is that spatting, you know, if you say this, she says that, and then you say that and she says this, is we are, well, interested in each other. Otherwise why go to all the bother of being contrary. Jesus, do you guys need a diagram? Well all this this-ing (sic) and that-ing (double sic) led to my asking her to the last chance to dance end of school dance to be held on a Friday night. I was happy, and I thought she was too.
I won’t kid you. I was sky high getting ready for this dance, got a new shirt, double- showered, put on some sticky deodorant, and some father’s bay rum concoction on my hair. And I looked okay (and she said I looked okay). And she looked great when I went to her house to walk her to school (come on you know as well as I do these junior high school dances aren’t going to be held at the Ritz or some place like that. And that would be a waste anyway because what matters is who you are with, or not with, not where the damn thing is held. Christ it could be in an airplane hangar for all we cared as long as the certain hes and shes were there and the music was loud (except that last chance dance, then you wanted it dreamy).
But enough of this, Let me get to that last dance and why I am moping, maybe moping plus. Things were set; the last song was The Dubs Could This Be Magic? Home run, right? Well, usually right. But the problem with the slow-mo last dance is that you can hear enough to actually talk. So when Connie asked me “Will you miss me this summer when my parents take the family for a vacation until mid-August?” I answered “No.” Wrong answer, way wrong answer. See I was still playing she says this and I say that. Kid’s spat stuff. When the dance was over she just walked away, and she hasn’t spoken to me since. So when Mister Eddie Cochran says in his song about his mopes that just finished on the radio “There ain’t no cure for the summertime blues,” he’s got it right, damn right. Excuse me; I have to go for a drink of water.
**************
Summertime Blues-Eddie Cochran
Well, I'm gonna raise a fuss
I'm gonna raise a holler
'Bout workin' all summer
Just to try to earn a dollar
Well, I went to the boss man
Tried to get a break
But the boss said 'No dice, son,
You gotta work late'
Sometimes I wonder what am I gonna do
'Cause there ain't no cure for the summertime blues
Well, my Mom and Poppa told me
Son, you gotta earn some money
If you want to use the care
To go riding next Sunday
Well, I wouldn't go to work
I told the boss I was sick
He said 'You can't use the car
'Cause you didn't work a lick'
Sometimes I wonder what am I gonna do
'Cause there ain't no cure for the summertime blues
Gonna take two weeks
Gonna have a fine vacation
Gonna take my problem
To the United Nations
Well' I went to my congressman
He said 'quote'
'I'd like to help you son,
But you're too young to vote'
Sometimes I wonder what am I gonna do
'Cause there ain't no cure for the summertime blues
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Books To While Away The Class Struggle By-The Life and Death of Leon Trotsky-Victor Serge with Natalia Sedova-A Book Review
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Victor Serge.
Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By” and "Films To While Away The Class Struggle By"-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs and films that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some books that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. Markin
Book Review
The Life and Death of Leon Trotsky-Victor Serge with Natalia Sedova
As far as I know Victor Serge’s biography of Leon Trotsky was the first comprehensive evaluation from a left-wing perspective of the Bolshevik leader’s life and work after his death. From that perspective it is valuable for two reasons. Serge himself was a secondary Communist leader after the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia in 1917 and witnessed many of the events described in the book. Moreover, for a long period of time he was a member of the Trotsky-led Left Opposition to the rise of Stalinism which formed inside the Russian Communist Party and the Communist International in the 1920’s. Additionally, Serge wrote this book in collaboration with Trotsky’s widow, Natalia Sedova who provides many of the personal insights into Trotsky’s life, work and behavior that round out Serge’s historical narrative. This is a task she also performed in Trotsky’s memoir My Life and there is some overlap of the material used. Most importantly this biography fills out the last ten years of Trotsky’s life not covered in his memoir. If a reader wants a rewarding insider’s view of the whirlwind of Trotsky’s life from prophetic rise to leadership to subsequent fall and isolation for his steadfast beliefs I would recommend reading both books.
The main task Serge sets himself here is to place the dramatic and ultimately fateful events of Trotsky’s life in the content of his role in the peaks and valleys of the Russian revolutionary movement from the turn of the 20th century under his assassination in 1940. Those included his leadership of the defeated Revolution of 1905, his internationalist fight against World War I, his organizing the October Revolution, his creation of the Red Army in the Civil War against the Whites, his various positions as a Soviet official, the defeat of the Left Opposition led by him by Stalin and his henchmen and his failure to create a viable left-wing alternate Stalinist rule in exile. Just to summarize the highlights of his career above indicates that we are dealing with a very big task and a very big historical figure. Although Serge had broken politically with Trotsky several years before this biography was written he senses this and mainly lets Trotsky’s accomplishments and mistakes speak for themselves.
As I noted in my review of Trotsky’s My Life many of the events depicted in this biography such as the seemingly arcane disputes within the Russian revolutionary movement, the very real attempts of the Western Powers to overthrow the Bolsheviks by force of arms in the Civil War after their seizure of power and the struggle of the various tendencies inside the Russian Communist Party and in the Communist International in the 1920’s discussed in the book may not be familiar to today's audience. Nevertheless one can take the measure of the man from the strength of Trotsky's commitment to his cause and the fight to preserve his personal and political integrity against overwhelming odds.
As the organizer of the October Revolution, creator of the Red Army in the Civil War, theorist, orator, writer and fighter Trotsky was one of the most feared men of the early 20th century to friend and foe alike. Today, the natural audience for the book, especially those trying to find a way out of the impasse that the international labor movement as the victim of a one-sided class war finds itself in, needs to critically assess Trotsky’s life and times. This book will help.
Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By” and "Films To While Away The Class Struggle By"-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs and films that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some books that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. Markin
Book Review
The Life and Death of Leon Trotsky-Victor Serge with Natalia Sedova
As far as I know Victor Serge’s biography of Leon Trotsky was the first comprehensive evaluation from a left-wing perspective of the Bolshevik leader’s life and work after his death. From that perspective it is valuable for two reasons. Serge himself was a secondary Communist leader after the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia in 1917 and witnessed many of the events described in the book. Moreover, for a long period of time he was a member of the Trotsky-led Left Opposition to the rise of Stalinism which formed inside the Russian Communist Party and the Communist International in the 1920’s. Additionally, Serge wrote this book in collaboration with Trotsky’s widow, Natalia Sedova who provides many of the personal insights into Trotsky’s life, work and behavior that round out Serge’s historical narrative. This is a task she also performed in Trotsky’s memoir My Life and there is some overlap of the material used. Most importantly this biography fills out the last ten years of Trotsky’s life not covered in his memoir. If a reader wants a rewarding insider’s view of the whirlwind of Trotsky’s life from prophetic rise to leadership to subsequent fall and isolation for his steadfast beliefs I would recommend reading both books.
The main task Serge sets himself here is to place the dramatic and ultimately fateful events of Trotsky’s life in the content of his role in the peaks and valleys of the Russian revolutionary movement from the turn of the 20th century under his assassination in 1940. Those included his leadership of the defeated Revolution of 1905, his internationalist fight against World War I, his organizing the October Revolution, his creation of the Red Army in the Civil War against the Whites, his various positions as a Soviet official, the defeat of the Left Opposition led by him by Stalin and his henchmen and his failure to create a viable left-wing alternate Stalinist rule in exile. Just to summarize the highlights of his career above indicates that we are dealing with a very big task and a very big historical figure. Although Serge had broken politically with Trotsky several years before this biography was written he senses this and mainly lets Trotsky’s accomplishments and mistakes speak for themselves.
As I noted in my review of Trotsky’s My Life many of the events depicted in this biography such as the seemingly arcane disputes within the Russian revolutionary movement, the very real attempts of the Western Powers to overthrow the Bolsheviks by force of arms in the Civil War after their seizure of power and the struggle of the various tendencies inside the Russian Communist Party and in the Communist International in the 1920’s discussed in the book may not be familiar to today's audience. Nevertheless one can take the measure of the man from the strength of Trotsky's commitment to his cause and the fight to preserve his personal and political integrity against overwhelming odds.
As the organizer of the October Revolution, creator of the Red Army in the Civil War, theorist, orator, writer and fighter Trotsky was one of the most feared men of the early 20th century to friend and foe alike. Today, the natural audience for the book, especially those trying to find a way out of the impasse that the international labor movement as the victim of a one-sided class war finds itself in, needs to critically assess Trotsky’s life and times. This book will help.
Vamos a redoblar nuestros esfuerzos para salvar privado Bradley Manning-Que todas las Plaza de la Ciudad A Bradley Manning Plaza De Boston a nosotros Berkeley-Ingreso en Davis Square, Somerville Todos los viernes-1 :00-2: 00 PM
Markin comentario:
El caso de Bradley Manning privado se encamina hacia un juicio otoño. Aquellos de nosotros que apoyan su causa, debemos redoblar nuestros esfuerzos para asegurar su libertad. Para los últimos meses ha habido una vigilia semanal en el área metropolitana de Boston frente a la Plaza de Davis Redline MBTA parada (rebautizada Plaza de Bradley Manning para la duración de la vigilia) en Somerville de 1:00-14:00 los viernes. Esta vigilia tiene, por decir lo menos, ha sido muy poca asistencia. Tenemos que construir con más seguidores presentes. Por favor, únase a nosotros cuando pueda. O mejor aún si usted no puede unirse a nosotros iniciar una vigilia de apoyo Bradley Manning la semana en algún lugar en su ciudad ya sea en el área de Boston o Berkeley. Y por favor, firmen la petición para su liberación. He puesto enlaces a la red de Manning y Manning sitio web de la plaza de abajo.
Bradley Manning Support Network
http://www.bradleymanning.org/~~V
Manning Plaza de página web
http://freemanz.com/2012/01/20/somerville_paper_photo-bradmanningsquare/bradleymanningsquare-2011_01_13/
Los siguientes son comentarios que se han centrado en los últimos tiempos para conseguir apoyo para la causa Bradley Manning.
Veteranos por la Paz se yergue en la solidaridad y la defensa de los soldado Bradley Manning.
Nosotros, los del movimiento anti-guerra no pudieron hacer mucho para afectar el gobierno de Bush-Obama Irak calendario guerra, pero podemos salvar uno de los héroes de esa guerra, Bradley Manning.
Estoy en solidaridad con las supuestas acciones de soldado Bradley Manning en sacar a la luz, sólo un poco de luz, algunos de los nefastos hechos relacionados con la guerra de este gobierno, el gobierno de Bush y Obama. Si lo hiciera tales actos no son delito. Ningún crimen en absoluto en mis ojos o en los ojos de la gran mayorÃa de la gente que conoce del caso y de su importancia como un acto individual de resistencia a las injustas y bárbaras encabezadas por Estados Unidos las guerras en Irak y Afganistán. Duermo un poco de sombra más fácil en estos dÃas a sabiendas de que Manning podrÃa haber expuesto lo que todos sabÃan, o debÃan haber sabido, la guerra de Irak y de las justificaciones de la guerra afgana se basaba en un castillo de naipes. El imperialismo estadounidense pistolero castillo de naipes, pero las tarjetas, sin embargo.
Estoy de pie en solidaridad con el soldado Bradley Manning, porque estoy indignado por el trato dado a Manning, presumiblemente un hombre inocente, por un gobierno que afirma a sà misma como un "faro" del mundo civilizado. Bradley Manning se habÃa celebrado en la solidaridad en Quantico y otras localidades de más de 500 dÃas, y ha sido detenido sin juicio durante mucho más tiempo, ya que el gobierno y sus fuerzas armadas tratan de pegar un caso juntos. Los militares y sus secuaces en el Departamento de Justicia, se han vuelto más tortuosa, aunque no más inteligente desde que era un soldado en la mira más de cuarenta años.
Estas son razones más que suficientes para estar en solidaridad con el soldado Manning y lo será hasta el dÃa en que es liberado por sus carceleros. Y voy a seguir para estar en solidaridad con el soldado Manning orgullosos hasta ese gran dÃa.
La retirada inmediata e incondicional de todas las tropas estadounidenses / Allied y mercenarios de Afganistán! Manos Fuera de Irán! GuÃas gratuitas de Bradley Manning ahora!
El caso de Bradley Manning privado se encamina hacia un juicio otoño. Aquellos de nosotros que apoyan su causa, debemos redoblar nuestros esfuerzos para asegurar su libertad. Para los últimos meses ha habido una vigilia semanal en el área metropolitana de Boston frente a la Plaza de Davis Redline MBTA parada (rebautizada Plaza de Bradley Manning para la duración de la vigilia) en Somerville de 1:00-14:00 los viernes. Esta vigilia tiene, por decir lo menos, ha sido muy poca asistencia. Tenemos que construir con más seguidores presentes. Por favor, únase a nosotros cuando pueda. O mejor aún si usted no puede unirse a nosotros iniciar una vigilia de apoyo Bradley Manning la semana en algún lugar en su ciudad ya sea en el área de Boston o Berkeley. Y por favor, firmen la petición para su liberación. He puesto enlaces a la red de Manning y Manning sitio web de la plaza de abajo.
Bradley Manning Support Network
http://www.bradleymanning.org/~~V
Manning Plaza de página web
http://freemanz.com/2012/01/20/somerville_paper_photo-bradmanningsquare/bradleymanningsquare-2011_01_13/
Los siguientes son comentarios que se han centrado en los últimos tiempos para conseguir apoyo para la causa Bradley Manning.
Veteranos por la Paz se yergue en la solidaridad y la defensa de los soldado Bradley Manning.
Nosotros, los del movimiento anti-guerra no pudieron hacer mucho para afectar el gobierno de Bush-Obama Irak calendario guerra, pero podemos salvar uno de los héroes de esa guerra, Bradley Manning.
Estoy en solidaridad con las supuestas acciones de soldado Bradley Manning en sacar a la luz, sólo un poco de luz, algunos de los nefastos hechos relacionados con la guerra de este gobierno, el gobierno de Bush y Obama. Si lo hiciera tales actos no son delito. Ningún crimen en absoluto en mis ojos o en los ojos de la gran mayorÃa de la gente que conoce del caso y de su importancia como un acto individual de resistencia a las injustas y bárbaras encabezadas por Estados Unidos las guerras en Irak y Afganistán. Duermo un poco de sombra más fácil en estos dÃas a sabiendas de que Manning podrÃa haber expuesto lo que todos sabÃan, o debÃan haber sabido, la guerra de Irak y de las justificaciones de la guerra afgana se basaba en un castillo de naipes. El imperialismo estadounidense pistolero castillo de naipes, pero las tarjetas, sin embargo.
Estoy de pie en solidaridad con el soldado Bradley Manning, porque estoy indignado por el trato dado a Manning, presumiblemente un hombre inocente, por un gobierno que afirma a sà misma como un "faro" del mundo civilizado. Bradley Manning se habÃa celebrado en la solidaridad en Quantico y otras localidades de más de 500 dÃas, y ha sido detenido sin juicio durante mucho más tiempo, ya que el gobierno y sus fuerzas armadas tratan de pegar un caso juntos. Los militares y sus secuaces en el Departamento de Justicia, se han vuelto más tortuosa, aunque no más inteligente desde que era un soldado en la mira más de cuarenta años.
Estas son razones más que suficientes para estar en solidaridad con el soldado Manning y lo será hasta el dÃa en que es liberado por sus carceleros. Y voy a seguir para estar en solidaridad con el soldado Manning orgullosos hasta ese gran dÃa.
La retirada inmediata e incondicional de todas las tropas estadounidenses / Allied y mercenarios de Afganistán! Manos Fuera de Irán! GuÃas gratuitas de Bradley Manning ahora!
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-“On Economic Liberalism”
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.
****
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!
*******
ANTI-IMPERIALISM, an injury to one is an injury to all, anti-capitalism, Bolsheviks, class struggle defense, Russian revolution, Defend The Boston Commune, anti-capitalism
http://wiki.occupyboston.org/wiki/GA/Minutes
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.
****
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!
*******
ANTI-IMPERIALISM, an injury to one is an injury to all, anti-capitalism, Bolsheviks, class struggle defense, Russian revolution, Defend The Boston Commune, anti-capitalism
*******
Charles Fourier (1772-1837)
“On Economic Liberalism”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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: 1808 in Théorie des quatre mouvements et des destinées génerales.
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The fundamental principle of the commercial systems is: “Let the merchants have complete freedom.” This principle concedes to them absolute ownership of the commodities in which they deal. They have the right to take their goods out of circulation, to hide them, and even to burn them as was done more than once by the Dutch East India Company which publicly burned supplies of cinnamon in order to raise its price. What it did with cinnamon it would have done with wheat, had it not feared the anger of the common people. it would have burned a part of its wheat, or allowed it to rot, in order to sell the rest at four times its value. Well! Every day on the docks can you not see people throwing into the sea supplies of grain that a merchant has allowed to rot while waiting for a rise in prices. I have myself presided as a clerk over these foul operations, and one day I jettisoned twenty thousand quintals of rice which could have been sold before it rotted for a fair profit, had the owner been less greedy for gain. It is society as a whole which suffers by such waste, which you can see taking place every day under the cover of the philosophical principle: Laissez faire les marchands.[19]
Let us suppose that in a famine year like 1709 a rich company of merchants observes this principle by cornering all the grain in a small state such as Ireland. Let us further suppose that the general scarcity and the restrictions on exports in neighbouring states have made it impossible to find grain abroad. Having cornered all the available grain, the company refuses to sell it until the price has tripled or quadrupled, saying: “This grain is our property; it pleases us to sell it at four times its cost. If these terms don’t suit you, find your grain somewhere else. While we are waiting for the price to rise a quarter of the population may die of starvation, but that doesn’t bother us. We are sticking to our speculation, in keeping with the principles of commercial liberty, as consecrated by modern philosophy.”
I ask in what respect the actions of this company differ from those of a band of thieves, for its monopoly compels the whole nation to pay a ransom equal to three times the value of the grain — or else die of starvation.
According to the rules of commercial liberty the company has the right to refuse to sell at any price, to allow the wheat to rot in its granaries while the people are starving. Can you believe that the starving nation is in conscience bound to die of hunger for the honour of the fine philosophical principle: Laissez faire les marchands? Of course not. Then admit that the right of commercial liberty should be subject to restrictions consistent with the needs of society as a whole. Admit that a person who possesses a superabundance of a commodity which he has not produced and which he will not consume, ought to be regarded as a conditional trustee of that commodity and not as its absolute owner. Admit that the dealings of merchants and middlemen should be subordinated to the welfare of the mass of society, and that these individuals should not be free to impede economic relations by all those disastrous manoeuvres which your economists admire.
Are merchants alone exempt from the social obligations imposed on all the other classes of society? When a general, a judge or a doctor is given a free hand, he is not authorised to betray the army, despoil the innocent or assassinate his patient. Such people are punished when they betray their trust; the perfidious general is beheaded; the judge must answer to the Minister of justice. The merchants alone are inviolable and sure of impunity! Political economy wishes no one to have the right of controlling their machinations. If they starve a whole region, if they disturb its industry with their speculation, hoarding and bankruptcies, everything is justified by the simple title of merchant. This is like the quack doctor in the play who, having killed everyone with his pills, is justified because he can say in Latin: medicus sum. In our century of regeneration people are trying to convince us that the plots hatched by one of the least enlightened classes of society can never do harm to the welfare of the state. Once upon a time people talked about the infallibility of the pope; today it is that of the merchant which they wish to establish.
****
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!
*******
ANTI-IMPERIALISM, an injury to one is an injury to all, anti-capitalism, Bolsheviks, class struggle defense, Russian revolution, Defend The Boston Commune, anti-capitalism
http://wiki.occupyboston.org/wiki/GA/Minutes
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.
****
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!
*******
ANTI-IMPERIALISM, an injury to one is an injury to all, anti-capitalism, Bolsheviks, class struggle defense, Russian revolution, Defend The Boston Commune, anti-capitalism
*******
Charles Fourier (1772-1837)
“On Economic Liberalism”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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: 1808 in Théorie des quatre mouvements et des destinées génerales.
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The fundamental principle of the commercial systems is: “Let the merchants have complete freedom.” This principle concedes to them absolute ownership of the commodities in which they deal. They have the right to take their goods out of circulation, to hide them, and even to burn them as was done more than once by the Dutch East India Company which publicly burned supplies of cinnamon in order to raise its price. What it did with cinnamon it would have done with wheat, had it not feared the anger of the common people. it would have burned a part of its wheat, or allowed it to rot, in order to sell the rest at four times its value. Well! Every day on the docks can you not see people throwing into the sea supplies of grain that a merchant has allowed to rot while waiting for a rise in prices. I have myself presided as a clerk over these foul operations, and one day I jettisoned twenty thousand quintals of rice which could have been sold before it rotted for a fair profit, had the owner been less greedy for gain. It is society as a whole which suffers by such waste, which you can see taking place every day under the cover of the philosophical principle: Laissez faire les marchands.[19]
Let us suppose that in a famine year like 1709 a rich company of merchants observes this principle by cornering all the grain in a small state such as Ireland. Let us further suppose that the general scarcity and the restrictions on exports in neighbouring states have made it impossible to find grain abroad. Having cornered all the available grain, the company refuses to sell it until the price has tripled or quadrupled, saying: “This grain is our property; it pleases us to sell it at four times its cost. If these terms don’t suit you, find your grain somewhere else. While we are waiting for the price to rise a quarter of the population may die of starvation, but that doesn’t bother us. We are sticking to our speculation, in keeping with the principles of commercial liberty, as consecrated by modern philosophy.”
I ask in what respect the actions of this company differ from those of a band of thieves, for its monopoly compels the whole nation to pay a ransom equal to three times the value of the grain — or else die of starvation.
According to the rules of commercial liberty the company has the right to refuse to sell at any price, to allow the wheat to rot in its granaries while the people are starving. Can you believe that the starving nation is in conscience bound to die of hunger for the honour of the fine philosophical principle: Laissez faire les marchands? Of course not. Then admit that the right of commercial liberty should be subject to restrictions consistent with the needs of society as a whole. Admit that a person who possesses a superabundance of a commodity which he has not produced and which he will not consume, ought to be regarded as a conditional trustee of that commodity and not as its absolute owner. Admit that the dealings of merchants and middlemen should be subordinated to the welfare of the mass of society, and that these individuals should not be free to impede economic relations by all those disastrous manoeuvres which your economists admire.
Are merchants alone exempt from the social obligations imposed on all the other classes of society? When a general, a judge or a doctor is given a free hand, he is not authorised to betray the army, despoil the innocent or assassinate his patient. Such people are punished when they betray their trust; the perfidious general is beheaded; the judge must answer to the Minister of justice. The merchants alone are inviolable and sure of impunity! Political economy wishes no one to have the right of controlling their machinations. If they starve a whole region, if they disturb its industry with their speculation, hoarding and bankruptcies, everything is justified by the simple title of merchant. This is like the quack doctor in the play who, having killed everyone with his pills, is justified because he can say in Latin: medicus sum. In our century of regeneration people are trying to convince us that the plots hatched by one of the least enlightened classes of society can never do harm to the welfare of the state. Once upon a time people talked about the infallibility of the pope; today it is that of the merchant which they wish to establish.
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
From The Pages Of The Communist International-In Honor Of The 90th Anniversary Of The Fourth Congress (1922)On The 93rd Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International (1919)- Theses On The United Front(1921)
Click on the headline to link to the Communist International Internet Archives.
Markin comment:
This article goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist future mentioned in this day's other posts.
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Fourth Congress of the Communist International
Appendix to the Theses on Comintern Tactics;
Theses On The United Front
Adopted by the EC, December 1921
1 The international workers’ movement is currently going through a particular transitional stage, which presents both the Communist International as a whole and its separate sections with new and important tactical problems.
Basically, this stage can be characterised as follows: the world economic crisis is worsening; unemployment is growing; in almost every country international capital has gone over to a systematic offensive against the workers, the main evidence of which is the capitalists’ cynical and open attempts to reduce wages and lower the workers’ general standard of living; and the bankruptcy of the Versailles peace is steadily becoming more apparent to the vast majority of workers. It is obvious that unless the international proletariat overthrows the bourgeois system a new imperialist war, or even several such wars, is inevitable. Th e Washington conference is eloquent confirmation of this.
2 A certain revival of reformist illusions which, due to a whole series of circumstances, had begun among fairly wide sections of workers is now, under the pressure of reality, beginning to give way to a different mood. The democratic and reformist illusions that re-emerged, after the imperialist carnage had ended, among some workers (on the one hand the more privileged workers and on the other the more backward, less politically experienced workers) are fading, having failed to flower. The future course and outcome of the ‘work’ of the Washington conference will upset these illusions even more. If six months ago it was possible to speak with some justification of a general move to the right among the working masses of Europe and America, then today it is possible to state with certainty that an opposite move to the left has begun.
3 On the other hand, under the influence of the mounting capitalist attack, there is anew mood among the workers – a spontaneous striving towards unity, which literally cannot be restrained, and which is a development paralleled by the gradual growth in the confidence felt by the broad mass of workers in the Communists.
A steadily growing number of workers are only now beginning to appreciate the courage shown by the Communist vanguard in throwing itself into the fight for the interests of the working class, even when the vast majority of workers were still indifferent or even hostile to Communism. A steadily growing number of workers are now becoming convinced that it was only the Communists who defended their economic and political interests, and that they did so in the most difficult circumstances, at times making the greatest sacrifices. This is why there is once more growing respect for and confidence in the uncompromising Communist vanguard of the working class, now that even the more backward layers of the workers have seen through the empty reformist hopes and have understood that without struggle there will be no escape from the onslaught of the capitalist gangsters.
4 The Communist Parties can and should now gather the fruits of the struggle they waged earlier on, in the wholly unfavourable circumstances of mass apathy. But as confidence steadily grows in those who are most uncompromising and militant, in the Communist elements of the working class, the working masses as a whole are experiencing an unprecedented longing for unity. The new layers of politically inexperienced workers just coming into activity long to achieve the unification of all the workers’ parties and even of all the workers’ organisations in general, hoping in this way to strengthen opposition to the capitalist offensive. These new layers of workers, who have often not previously taken an active part in political struggle, are now finding a new way to test the practical plans of reformism in the light of their own experience. Like these new layers, considerable sections of workers belonging to the old social-democratic parties are even now unwilling to accept the attacks of the social democrats and the centrists on the Communist vanguard. They are even beginning to demand an agreement with the Communists, but at the same time they have not outgrown their belief in the reformists and large numbers of them still support the parties of the Second and the Amsterdam Internationals. They do not formulate their plans and aspirations all that clearly, but in general the new mood of these masses comes down to a wish to set up a united front and make the parties and unions of the Second and the Amsterdam Internationals fight alongside the Communists against the capitalist attack. To that extent, this mood is progressive. The most important point is that their faith in reformism has been broken. Given the general situation of the workers’ movement today, any serious mass action, even if it starts with only partial slogans, will inevitably bring to the forefront the more general and fundamental questions of revolution. The Communist vanguard can only gain if new layers of workers are convinced by their own experience that reformism is an illusion and that compromise is fatal.
5 When the birth of a conscious and organised protest against the treachery of the leaders of the Second International was still in its early stages, these leaders kept control of the entire apparatus of the workers’ organisations. They ruthlessly manipulated the principle of unity and proletarian discipline in order to stifle revolutionary proletarian protest and, without opposition, to place the entire power of the workers’ organisations at the service of national imperialism. Faced with these circumstances, the revolutionary wing had at any cost to win freedom of agitation and propaganda, i.e., the freedom to explain to the working masses that this is an unprecedented historical betrayal, and that it has been committed – is still being committed – by the parties and unions they themselves created.
6 The Communist Parties of the world, having secured complete organisational freedom to extend their ideological influence among the working masses, are now trying at every opportunity to achieve the broadest and fullest possible unity of these masses in practical activity. The heroes of the Second and the Amsterdam Internationals preach unity in words, but deny it in action. Now that the reformist compromisers of Amsterdam have failed in their organisational attempt to suppress the voice of protest, criticism, and revolutionary aspirations, they are looking for a way out of their own impasse and are bringing splits, confusion and organised sabotage to the struggle of the working masses. One of the most important tasks facing Communists is to expose publicly these new forms of the old treachery.
7 However, the diplomats and leaders of the Second and Two-and-a-Half Internationals have lately been forced in their turn, by profound internal processes that stem from the general economic position of the working class in Europe and America, to push the question of unity into the foreground. Though, for the inexperienced sections of workers just becoming politically aware, the slogan of the united front is a genuine expression of their very real desire to rally the forces of the oppressed class against the capitalist attack, for the leaders and diplomats of the Second, Two-and-a-Half and Amsterdam Internationals the adoption of the slogan of unity represents a new attempt to deceive the workers and a new way of drawing them onto the old path of class collaboration. The approaching danger of a new imperialist war (Washington), the growth of armaments, the new imperialist treaties agreed on behind the scenes – all this not only fails to make the leaders of the Second, Two-and-a-Half and Amsterdam Internationals sound the alarm and uphold in deeds rather than words the international unification of the working class, but, on the contrary, is bound to provoke inside the Second and Amsterdam Internationals the same kind of friction and division that can be observed in the camp of the international bourgeoisie itself. This process is inevitable in as much as the cornerstone of reformism is the solidarity of the ‘reformist-socialists’ with the bourgeoisies of their ‘own’ countries.
These are the general conditions which the Communist International as a whole and its separate sections must consider in formulating their attitude to the slogan of the united socialist front.
8 Weighing up the situation, the Executive Committee of the Communist International finds that the slogan of the Third World Congress of the Communist International, -"To the masses!”, and the overall interests of the Communist movement require that the Communist Parties and the Communist International as a whole support the slogan of a united workers’ front and take the initiative on this question into their own hands. In this, the tactics of each Communist Party must of course be concretised with regard to the conditions and circumstances of each particular country.
9 In Germany the Communist Party at its last national conference supported the slogan of a united workers’ front and recognised the possibility of supporting a “united workers’ government”, provided it was willing to mount a serious challenge to capitalist power. The Executive Committee of the Communist International considers this decision entirely correct and is sure that the German Communist Party will be able, while fully maintaining its independent political position, to reach all sections of workers and strengthen Communist influence among the masses. In Germany, more than anywhere else, the broad masses will daily grow more convinced that the Communist vanguard was absolutely right in not wanting to lay down its arms at the most difficult time and in persistently exposing the hollowness of the reformist stratagems put forward to overcome a crisis that can be resolved only by proletarian revolution. By following this tactic, the Party can group around itself all the anarchist and syndicalist elements standing aside from the mass struggle.
10 In France the majority of politically organised workers support the Communist Party. This means that the question of the united front is posed rather differently in France than in other countries. However, it is essential that here, too, the entire responsibility for any split in the united workers’ camp should lie with our opponents. The revolutionary section of the French syndicalists is entirely correct to wage its fight against a split in the trade unions, i.e., for the unity of the working class in its economic struggle against the bourgeoisie. But the workers’ struggle does not end in the industrial sphere. Unity is also essential in view of the growing wave of reaction, of imperialist policies, etc. The policies of the reformists and centrists have led to a split in the Party and now threaten even the unity of the trade-union movement, which is objective proof that both Jouhaux and Longuet are playing into the hands of the bourgeoisie. The slogan of proletarian unity in the economic and political struggle against the bourgeoisie is the best means of defeating these plans for a split.
Even though the reformist Confederation of Labour led by Jouhaux, Merrheim and Co. will not fail to sell out the interest of the French working class, the French Communists and the revolutionary elements of the French working class must still approach the reformists before the start of every mass strike, revolutionary demonstration or any other spontaneous mass action, asking them to support the workers'
initiative, and must systematically expose the reformists when they refuse to support the revolutionary struggle of the workers. This will prove the easiest way to win the masses of workers who are outside the Party. Of course, it must in no circumstances induce the French Communist Party to give up any of its independence, by, for example, giving even a modicum of support to a “left-bloc” during election campaigns, or taking a lenient attitude to those shaky ‘Communists’ who still regret the split with the social-patriots.
11 In Britain the reformist Labour Party has refused to allow the Communist Party to affiliate on the same basis as other workers’ organisations. Influenced by the growing mood among the workers in favour of unity, the London workers’ organisations recently passed a resolution supporting the affiliation of the British Communist Party to the Labour Party.
Britain, of course, is an exception in this respect, since unusual conditions have made the Labour Party in Britain a kind of general workers’ association for the whole country. The British Communists must launch a vigorous campaign for their admittance to the Labour Party. The recent sell-outs by the trade-union leaders during the miners’ strike etc., the steady capitalist pressure on the workers’ wages etc., all this has roused a deep discontent among the masses of the British proletariat, which is becoming more revolutionary. The British Communists must do their utmost, whatever the cost, to extend their influence to the rank-and-file of the working masses, using the slogan of a united revolutionary front against the capitalists.
12 In Italy the young Communist Party is bitterly opposed to the reformist Italian Socialist Party and the social-traitors of the Confederation of Labour who have just sold the cause of proletarian revolution down the river; nevertheless it is beginning to conduct its agitational work around the slogan of a militant united proletarian front against the capitalist offensive. The Executive Committee of the Communist International considers that this agitational work is entirely correct and insists only that it be intensified in the same direction. The Executive Committee of the Communist International is sure that the Italian Communist Party, with sufficient far-sightedness, will be able to give the whole International an example of combative Marxism, by ruthlessly exposing at every step the half-hearted treachery of the reformists and the centrists (who have adopted the guise of Communists) and simultaneously by conducting a tireless campaign for the unity of the workers’ front against the bourgeoisie – a campaign that must steadily grow and involve larger and larger sections of the masses.
In this context the Party must naturally do its utmost to ensure the participation of revolutionary syndicalist elements in the common struggle.
13 In Czechoslovakia, where the Communist Party has the support of a significant section of the politically organised workers, the tasks of the Communists are in some respects analogous to those of the Communists in France. While strengthening its independence and weeding out the last traces of centrism, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia must also be able to popularise within the country the slogan of the united workers’ front against the bourgeoisie and must use it once and for all to expose the leaders of social democracy and the centrists as agents of capital in the eyes of the most backward workers. At the same time the Czechoslovak Communists must strengthen their efforts to win the trade unions, which are still to a significant extent in the hands of the scab leaders.
14 In Sweden the recent parliamentary elections have created a situation which will allow the small Communist fraction of deputies to play a major role. Mr. Branting, one of the most prominent leaders of the Second International and simultaneously prime minister for the Swedish bourgeoisie, is at present in such a position that, if he wishes to secure a parliamentary majority, he cannot remain indifferent to the actions of the Communist fraction in the Swedish parliament. The Executive Committee of the Communist International believes that the Communist fraction in the Swedish parliament may, in certain circumstances, agree to support the Menshevik ministry of Branting, as was correctly done by the German Communists in some of the provincial governments of Germany (for example, Thuringia). However, this certainly does not imply that the Swedish Communists should limit their independence in the slightest, or avoid exposing the character of the Menshevik government. On the contrary, the more power the Mensheviks have, the more they will betray the working class and all the greater must be the Communists’ efforts to expose these Mensheviks in the eyes of the broadest sections of workers. The Communist Party must also set about involving syndicalist workers in the common struggle.
15 In America the unification of all the Left elements in the trade-union and political movement is underway, and if the Communists occupy a central place in this Left unification, it will give them the opportunity to implant themselves in the broad masses of the American proletariat. The American Communists must form Communist groups wherever there are even a few Communists, must be able to stand at the head of this movement for the unification of all revolutionary forces and should particularly now raise the slogan of a united workers’ front, for example to defend the unemployed etc. The chief accusation levelled against the Gompers trade unions should be their unwillingness to participate in the setting up of a united workers’ front against the capitalists and in defence of the unemployed, etc. However, attracting the best elements from the IWW still remains the main task of the Communist Party.
16 In Switzerland our Party has been able to score a few successes by following the path we indicated. As a result of the Communists’ agitation for a united revolutionary front, the trade-union bureaucracy has been forced to call a special trade-union congress. At the congress, which is due to take place soon, our friends will be able to expose to all the Swiss workers the lie of reformism and so help boost the revolutionary solidarity of the proletariat.
17 In a number of other countries the question presents itself differently, in accordance with a whole series of different local conditions. Having made the general line clear, the Executive Committee of the Communist International is confident that individual Communist Parties will know how to apply it in accordance with the conditions prevailing in each country.
18 The Executive Committee of the Communist International considers that the chief and categorical condition, the same for all Communist Parties, is: the absolute autonomy and complete independence of every Communist Party entering into any agreement with the parties of the Second and Two-and-a-Half Internationals, and its freedom to present its own views and its criticisms of those who oppose the Communists. While accepting the need for discipline in action, Communists must at the same time retain both the right and the opportunity to voice, not only before and after but if necessary during actions, their opinion on the politics of all the organisations of the working class without exception. The waiving of this condition is not permissible in any circumstances. Whilst supporting the slogan of maximum unity of all workers’ organisations in every practical action against the capitalist front, Communists cannot in any circumstances refrain from putting forward their views, which are the only consistent expression of the interests of the working class as a whole.
19 The Executive Committee of the Communist International considers it useful to remind all fraternal parties of the experience of the Russian Bolsheviks – the only party so far to succeed in defeating the bourgeoisie and taking power into its own hands. During the fifteen years that elapsed from the birth of Bolshevism to its victory over the bourgeoisie (1903-1917), Bolshevism never ceased to wage a tireless fight against reformism or, to use another name, Menshevism. Nevertheless, during these fifteen years the Russian Bolsheviks often made agreements with the Mensheviks. The formal split with the Mensheviks took place in the spring of 1905, but at the end of that year, influenced by the stormy development of the workers’ movement, the Bolsheviks temporarily formed a common front with the Mensheviks. The second formal split with the Mensheviks finally took place in January 1912, but between 1905 and 1912 separation gave way to unifications and semi-unifications in 1906-7 and also in 1910. These unifications and semi-unifications were caused not just by fluctuations in the factional struggle, but by the direct pressure of broad sections of workers who were beginning to be politically active and were in fact demanding the opportunity to test by their own experience whether the Menshevik path really did fundamentally diverge from the path of revolution. Before the new revolutionary upsurge that followed the Lena strikes, [the Lena is a Siberian river. The strikes which occurred in the Lena area in early 1912 gave rise to a vast movement of solidarity on 1 May of that year, which marked the beginning of the revival of the revolutionary movement.] not long before the start of the imperialist war, the working masses of Russia were particularly eager for unity and the diplomat – leaders of Russian Menshevism tried at the time to use this for their own ends, in much the same way as the leaders of the Second, Two-and-a-Half and Amsterdam Internationals are trying at present. The Russian Bolsheviks did not respond to the workers’ eagerness for unity by rejecting any and every united front. On the contrary, to counter the diplomatic game of the Menshevik leaders, the Russian Bolsheviks put forward the slogan “unity from below – , i.e., unity of the working masses themselves in the practical struggle for the revolutionary demands of the workers against the capitalists. Events showed that this was the only correct response. As a result of this tactic, which was modified to suit the circumstances of time and place, a large number of the best Menshevik workers were gradually won over to the side of Communism.
20 Since the Communist International is putting forward the slogan of the united workers’ front and permitting agreements between individual sections of the Communist International and the parties and unions of the Second and Two-and-a-Half Internationals, it obviously cannot reject similar agreements at an international level. The Executive Committee of the Communist International made a proposal to the Amsterdam International in connection with famine relief to Russia. It repeated this proposal in connection with the White Terror and persecution of workers in Spain and Yugoslavia. The Executive Committee of the Communist International is currently making new proposals to the Amsterdam and Second Internationals, and also the Two-and-a-Half International, in connection with the initial work of the Washington conference, which has shown that a new imperialist slaughter threatens the international working class. The leaders of the Second, Two-and-a-Half and Amsterdam Internationals have shown by their behaviour so far that when it comes to practical activity they in practice ignore their slogan of unity. In all such situations the task of the Communist International as a whole and of each of its sections separately will be to explain to the broadest circles of workers the hypocrisy of the leaders of the Second, Two-and-a-Half and Amsterdam Internationals, who put unity with the bourgeoisie before unity with the revolutionary workers, by staying, for example, in the International Labour Organisation of the League of Nations and by being party to the Washington imperialist conference instead of organising the struggle against imperialist Washington etc. However, the rejection by the leaders of the Second, Two-and-a-Half and Amsterdam Internationals of this or that practical proposal from the Communist international will not make us give up this tactic, which has deep roots in the masses and which we systematically and steadily must develop. Whenever our opponents reject proposals for joint struggle, the masses must be informed so that they can learn who the real destroyers of the united workers’ front are. Whenever our opponents accept a proposal, we must aim gradually to intensify the struggle and raise it to a higher level. In either case it is essential to draw the attention of the broad masses to the talks between the Communists and the other organisations and to interest them in all the fluctuations of the struggle for the united revolutionary workers’ front.
21 In putting forward this plan, the Executive Committee of the Communist International directs the attention of all fraternal parties to the dangers that in certain circumstances could be involved. Not all Communist Parties are sufficiently developed and consolidated; not all have finally broken with centrist and semi-centrist ideology. There may be cases of bending the stick too far the other way; there may be tendencies which amount to the dissolution of the Communist Parties and groups into a formless united bloc. If the use of this tactic is to advance the cause of Communism, the actual Communist Parties carrying it out must be strong, united and under an ideologically clear leadership.
22 The groupings within the Communist International itself which, with greater or lesser justification, are considered Right or even semi-centrist, are clearly made up of two different tendencies. Some elements have not really broken with the ideology and methods of the Second International, have not freed themselves from reverence for its former organisational strength and, half-consciously or unconsciously, are still seeking ideological agreement with the Second International and, accordingly, with bourgeois society. Other elements, opposed to formal radicalism and the mistakes of so-called Leftism, etc., are anxious that the newly-formed Communist Parties should be more subtle and flexible in their tactics, so that they can more rapidly strengthen their influence among the rank-and-file of the working masses. The rapid pace of development of the Communist Parties has always appeared to push both these tendencies into the same camp, even into the same grouping. The use of the methods suggested by us, which are designed to give Communist agitation a base in the unified mass activity of the proletariat, is the most effective way of uncovering the truly reformist tendencies within the Communist Parties and, if applied correctly, these methods will greatly help the internal revolutionary consolidation of the Communist Parties, both by re-educating through experience impatient or sectarian Left elements and by ridding the Parties of reformist ballast.
23 The united workers’ front must mean the unity of all workers willing to fight against capitalism – including those workers who still follow the anarchists, syndicalists, etc. In the Latin countries there are still many such workers, and in other countries, too, they can contribute to the revolutionary struggle. From the start of its existence the Communist International has adopted a friendly line in its relations with those elements among the workers who have gradually overcome their prejudices and are moving towards Communism. Communists must be all the more attentive towards them now that the united workers’ front against the capitalists is becoming a reality.
24 In order finally to concretize this work along the lines indicated, the Executive Committee of the Communist International resolves to call in the near future an extended session of the Executive Committee of the Communist International with twice the usual number of delegates representing each Party.
25 The Executive Committee of the Communist International will closely follow every practical step taken in this sector of work and asks all the Parties to inform it of every attempt made and every gain won in this direction, giving full factual details.
Markin comment:
This article goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist future mentioned in this day's other posts.
***********
Fourth Congress of the Communist International
Appendix to the Theses on Comintern Tactics;
Theses On The United Front
Adopted by the EC, December 1921
1 The international workers’ movement is currently going through a particular transitional stage, which presents both the Communist International as a whole and its separate sections with new and important tactical problems.
Basically, this stage can be characterised as follows: the world economic crisis is worsening; unemployment is growing; in almost every country international capital has gone over to a systematic offensive against the workers, the main evidence of which is the capitalists’ cynical and open attempts to reduce wages and lower the workers’ general standard of living; and the bankruptcy of the Versailles peace is steadily becoming more apparent to the vast majority of workers. It is obvious that unless the international proletariat overthrows the bourgeois system a new imperialist war, or even several such wars, is inevitable. Th e Washington conference is eloquent confirmation of this.
2 A certain revival of reformist illusions which, due to a whole series of circumstances, had begun among fairly wide sections of workers is now, under the pressure of reality, beginning to give way to a different mood. The democratic and reformist illusions that re-emerged, after the imperialist carnage had ended, among some workers (on the one hand the more privileged workers and on the other the more backward, less politically experienced workers) are fading, having failed to flower. The future course and outcome of the ‘work’ of the Washington conference will upset these illusions even more. If six months ago it was possible to speak with some justification of a general move to the right among the working masses of Europe and America, then today it is possible to state with certainty that an opposite move to the left has begun.
3 On the other hand, under the influence of the mounting capitalist attack, there is anew mood among the workers – a spontaneous striving towards unity, which literally cannot be restrained, and which is a development paralleled by the gradual growth in the confidence felt by the broad mass of workers in the Communists.
A steadily growing number of workers are only now beginning to appreciate the courage shown by the Communist vanguard in throwing itself into the fight for the interests of the working class, even when the vast majority of workers were still indifferent or even hostile to Communism. A steadily growing number of workers are now becoming convinced that it was only the Communists who defended their economic and political interests, and that they did so in the most difficult circumstances, at times making the greatest sacrifices. This is why there is once more growing respect for and confidence in the uncompromising Communist vanguard of the working class, now that even the more backward layers of the workers have seen through the empty reformist hopes and have understood that without struggle there will be no escape from the onslaught of the capitalist gangsters.
4 The Communist Parties can and should now gather the fruits of the struggle they waged earlier on, in the wholly unfavourable circumstances of mass apathy. But as confidence steadily grows in those who are most uncompromising and militant, in the Communist elements of the working class, the working masses as a whole are experiencing an unprecedented longing for unity. The new layers of politically inexperienced workers just coming into activity long to achieve the unification of all the workers’ parties and even of all the workers’ organisations in general, hoping in this way to strengthen opposition to the capitalist offensive. These new layers of workers, who have often not previously taken an active part in political struggle, are now finding a new way to test the practical plans of reformism in the light of their own experience. Like these new layers, considerable sections of workers belonging to the old social-democratic parties are even now unwilling to accept the attacks of the social democrats and the centrists on the Communist vanguard. They are even beginning to demand an agreement with the Communists, but at the same time they have not outgrown their belief in the reformists and large numbers of them still support the parties of the Second and the Amsterdam Internationals. They do not formulate their plans and aspirations all that clearly, but in general the new mood of these masses comes down to a wish to set up a united front and make the parties and unions of the Second and the Amsterdam Internationals fight alongside the Communists against the capitalist attack. To that extent, this mood is progressive. The most important point is that their faith in reformism has been broken. Given the general situation of the workers’ movement today, any serious mass action, even if it starts with only partial slogans, will inevitably bring to the forefront the more general and fundamental questions of revolution. The Communist vanguard can only gain if new layers of workers are convinced by their own experience that reformism is an illusion and that compromise is fatal.
5 When the birth of a conscious and organised protest against the treachery of the leaders of the Second International was still in its early stages, these leaders kept control of the entire apparatus of the workers’ organisations. They ruthlessly manipulated the principle of unity and proletarian discipline in order to stifle revolutionary proletarian protest and, without opposition, to place the entire power of the workers’ organisations at the service of national imperialism. Faced with these circumstances, the revolutionary wing had at any cost to win freedom of agitation and propaganda, i.e., the freedom to explain to the working masses that this is an unprecedented historical betrayal, and that it has been committed – is still being committed – by the parties and unions they themselves created.
6 The Communist Parties of the world, having secured complete organisational freedom to extend their ideological influence among the working masses, are now trying at every opportunity to achieve the broadest and fullest possible unity of these masses in practical activity. The heroes of the Second and the Amsterdam Internationals preach unity in words, but deny it in action. Now that the reformist compromisers of Amsterdam have failed in their organisational attempt to suppress the voice of protest, criticism, and revolutionary aspirations, they are looking for a way out of their own impasse and are bringing splits, confusion and organised sabotage to the struggle of the working masses. One of the most important tasks facing Communists is to expose publicly these new forms of the old treachery.
7 However, the diplomats and leaders of the Second and Two-and-a-Half Internationals have lately been forced in their turn, by profound internal processes that stem from the general economic position of the working class in Europe and America, to push the question of unity into the foreground. Though, for the inexperienced sections of workers just becoming politically aware, the slogan of the united front is a genuine expression of their very real desire to rally the forces of the oppressed class against the capitalist attack, for the leaders and diplomats of the Second, Two-and-a-Half and Amsterdam Internationals the adoption of the slogan of unity represents a new attempt to deceive the workers and a new way of drawing them onto the old path of class collaboration. The approaching danger of a new imperialist war (Washington), the growth of armaments, the new imperialist treaties agreed on behind the scenes – all this not only fails to make the leaders of the Second, Two-and-a-Half and Amsterdam Internationals sound the alarm and uphold in deeds rather than words the international unification of the working class, but, on the contrary, is bound to provoke inside the Second and Amsterdam Internationals the same kind of friction and division that can be observed in the camp of the international bourgeoisie itself. This process is inevitable in as much as the cornerstone of reformism is the solidarity of the ‘reformist-socialists’ with the bourgeoisies of their ‘own’ countries.
These are the general conditions which the Communist International as a whole and its separate sections must consider in formulating their attitude to the slogan of the united socialist front.
8 Weighing up the situation, the Executive Committee of the Communist International finds that the slogan of the Third World Congress of the Communist International, -"To the masses!”, and the overall interests of the Communist movement require that the Communist Parties and the Communist International as a whole support the slogan of a united workers’ front and take the initiative on this question into their own hands. In this, the tactics of each Communist Party must of course be concretised with regard to the conditions and circumstances of each particular country.
9 In Germany the Communist Party at its last national conference supported the slogan of a united workers’ front and recognised the possibility of supporting a “united workers’ government”, provided it was willing to mount a serious challenge to capitalist power. The Executive Committee of the Communist International considers this decision entirely correct and is sure that the German Communist Party will be able, while fully maintaining its independent political position, to reach all sections of workers and strengthen Communist influence among the masses. In Germany, more than anywhere else, the broad masses will daily grow more convinced that the Communist vanguard was absolutely right in not wanting to lay down its arms at the most difficult time and in persistently exposing the hollowness of the reformist stratagems put forward to overcome a crisis that can be resolved only by proletarian revolution. By following this tactic, the Party can group around itself all the anarchist and syndicalist elements standing aside from the mass struggle.
10 In France the majority of politically organised workers support the Communist Party. This means that the question of the united front is posed rather differently in France than in other countries. However, it is essential that here, too, the entire responsibility for any split in the united workers’ camp should lie with our opponents. The revolutionary section of the French syndicalists is entirely correct to wage its fight against a split in the trade unions, i.e., for the unity of the working class in its economic struggle against the bourgeoisie. But the workers’ struggle does not end in the industrial sphere. Unity is also essential in view of the growing wave of reaction, of imperialist policies, etc. The policies of the reformists and centrists have led to a split in the Party and now threaten even the unity of the trade-union movement, which is objective proof that both Jouhaux and Longuet are playing into the hands of the bourgeoisie. The slogan of proletarian unity in the economic and political struggle against the bourgeoisie is the best means of defeating these plans for a split.
Even though the reformist Confederation of Labour led by Jouhaux, Merrheim and Co. will not fail to sell out the interest of the French working class, the French Communists and the revolutionary elements of the French working class must still approach the reformists before the start of every mass strike, revolutionary demonstration or any other spontaneous mass action, asking them to support the workers'
initiative, and must systematically expose the reformists when they refuse to support the revolutionary struggle of the workers. This will prove the easiest way to win the masses of workers who are outside the Party. Of course, it must in no circumstances induce the French Communist Party to give up any of its independence, by, for example, giving even a modicum of support to a “left-bloc” during election campaigns, or taking a lenient attitude to those shaky ‘Communists’ who still regret the split with the social-patriots.
11 In Britain the reformist Labour Party has refused to allow the Communist Party to affiliate on the same basis as other workers’ organisations. Influenced by the growing mood among the workers in favour of unity, the London workers’ organisations recently passed a resolution supporting the affiliation of the British Communist Party to the Labour Party.
Britain, of course, is an exception in this respect, since unusual conditions have made the Labour Party in Britain a kind of general workers’ association for the whole country. The British Communists must launch a vigorous campaign for their admittance to the Labour Party. The recent sell-outs by the trade-union leaders during the miners’ strike etc., the steady capitalist pressure on the workers’ wages etc., all this has roused a deep discontent among the masses of the British proletariat, which is becoming more revolutionary. The British Communists must do their utmost, whatever the cost, to extend their influence to the rank-and-file of the working masses, using the slogan of a united revolutionary front against the capitalists.
12 In Italy the young Communist Party is bitterly opposed to the reformist Italian Socialist Party and the social-traitors of the Confederation of Labour who have just sold the cause of proletarian revolution down the river; nevertheless it is beginning to conduct its agitational work around the slogan of a militant united proletarian front against the capitalist offensive. The Executive Committee of the Communist International considers that this agitational work is entirely correct and insists only that it be intensified in the same direction. The Executive Committee of the Communist International is sure that the Italian Communist Party, with sufficient far-sightedness, will be able to give the whole International an example of combative Marxism, by ruthlessly exposing at every step the half-hearted treachery of the reformists and the centrists (who have adopted the guise of Communists) and simultaneously by conducting a tireless campaign for the unity of the workers’ front against the bourgeoisie – a campaign that must steadily grow and involve larger and larger sections of the masses.
In this context the Party must naturally do its utmost to ensure the participation of revolutionary syndicalist elements in the common struggle.
13 In Czechoslovakia, where the Communist Party has the support of a significant section of the politically organised workers, the tasks of the Communists are in some respects analogous to those of the Communists in France. While strengthening its independence and weeding out the last traces of centrism, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia must also be able to popularise within the country the slogan of the united workers’ front against the bourgeoisie and must use it once and for all to expose the leaders of social democracy and the centrists as agents of capital in the eyes of the most backward workers. At the same time the Czechoslovak Communists must strengthen their efforts to win the trade unions, which are still to a significant extent in the hands of the scab leaders.
14 In Sweden the recent parliamentary elections have created a situation which will allow the small Communist fraction of deputies to play a major role. Mr. Branting, one of the most prominent leaders of the Second International and simultaneously prime minister for the Swedish bourgeoisie, is at present in such a position that, if he wishes to secure a parliamentary majority, he cannot remain indifferent to the actions of the Communist fraction in the Swedish parliament. The Executive Committee of the Communist International believes that the Communist fraction in the Swedish parliament may, in certain circumstances, agree to support the Menshevik ministry of Branting, as was correctly done by the German Communists in some of the provincial governments of Germany (for example, Thuringia). However, this certainly does not imply that the Swedish Communists should limit their independence in the slightest, or avoid exposing the character of the Menshevik government. On the contrary, the more power the Mensheviks have, the more they will betray the working class and all the greater must be the Communists’ efforts to expose these Mensheviks in the eyes of the broadest sections of workers. The Communist Party must also set about involving syndicalist workers in the common struggle.
15 In America the unification of all the Left elements in the trade-union and political movement is underway, and if the Communists occupy a central place in this Left unification, it will give them the opportunity to implant themselves in the broad masses of the American proletariat. The American Communists must form Communist groups wherever there are even a few Communists, must be able to stand at the head of this movement for the unification of all revolutionary forces and should particularly now raise the slogan of a united workers’ front, for example to defend the unemployed etc. The chief accusation levelled against the Gompers trade unions should be their unwillingness to participate in the setting up of a united workers’ front against the capitalists and in defence of the unemployed, etc. However, attracting the best elements from the IWW still remains the main task of the Communist Party.
16 In Switzerland our Party has been able to score a few successes by following the path we indicated. As a result of the Communists’ agitation for a united revolutionary front, the trade-union bureaucracy has been forced to call a special trade-union congress. At the congress, which is due to take place soon, our friends will be able to expose to all the Swiss workers the lie of reformism and so help boost the revolutionary solidarity of the proletariat.
17 In a number of other countries the question presents itself differently, in accordance with a whole series of different local conditions. Having made the general line clear, the Executive Committee of the Communist International is confident that individual Communist Parties will know how to apply it in accordance with the conditions prevailing in each country.
18 The Executive Committee of the Communist International considers that the chief and categorical condition, the same for all Communist Parties, is: the absolute autonomy and complete independence of every Communist Party entering into any agreement with the parties of the Second and Two-and-a-Half Internationals, and its freedom to present its own views and its criticisms of those who oppose the Communists. While accepting the need for discipline in action, Communists must at the same time retain both the right and the opportunity to voice, not only before and after but if necessary during actions, their opinion on the politics of all the organisations of the working class without exception. The waiving of this condition is not permissible in any circumstances. Whilst supporting the slogan of maximum unity of all workers’ organisations in every practical action against the capitalist front, Communists cannot in any circumstances refrain from putting forward their views, which are the only consistent expression of the interests of the working class as a whole.
19 The Executive Committee of the Communist International considers it useful to remind all fraternal parties of the experience of the Russian Bolsheviks – the only party so far to succeed in defeating the bourgeoisie and taking power into its own hands. During the fifteen years that elapsed from the birth of Bolshevism to its victory over the bourgeoisie (1903-1917), Bolshevism never ceased to wage a tireless fight against reformism or, to use another name, Menshevism. Nevertheless, during these fifteen years the Russian Bolsheviks often made agreements with the Mensheviks. The formal split with the Mensheviks took place in the spring of 1905, but at the end of that year, influenced by the stormy development of the workers’ movement, the Bolsheviks temporarily formed a common front with the Mensheviks. The second formal split with the Mensheviks finally took place in January 1912, but between 1905 and 1912 separation gave way to unifications and semi-unifications in 1906-7 and also in 1910. These unifications and semi-unifications were caused not just by fluctuations in the factional struggle, but by the direct pressure of broad sections of workers who were beginning to be politically active and were in fact demanding the opportunity to test by their own experience whether the Menshevik path really did fundamentally diverge from the path of revolution. Before the new revolutionary upsurge that followed the Lena strikes, [the Lena is a Siberian river. The strikes which occurred in the Lena area in early 1912 gave rise to a vast movement of solidarity on 1 May of that year, which marked the beginning of the revival of the revolutionary movement.] not long before the start of the imperialist war, the working masses of Russia were particularly eager for unity and the diplomat – leaders of Russian Menshevism tried at the time to use this for their own ends, in much the same way as the leaders of the Second, Two-and-a-Half and Amsterdam Internationals are trying at present. The Russian Bolsheviks did not respond to the workers’ eagerness for unity by rejecting any and every united front. On the contrary, to counter the diplomatic game of the Menshevik leaders, the Russian Bolsheviks put forward the slogan “unity from below – , i.e., unity of the working masses themselves in the practical struggle for the revolutionary demands of the workers against the capitalists. Events showed that this was the only correct response. As a result of this tactic, which was modified to suit the circumstances of time and place, a large number of the best Menshevik workers were gradually won over to the side of Communism.
20 Since the Communist International is putting forward the slogan of the united workers’ front and permitting agreements between individual sections of the Communist International and the parties and unions of the Second and Two-and-a-Half Internationals, it obviously cannot reject similar agreements at an international level. The Executive Committee of the Communist International made a proposal to the Amsterdam International in connection with famine relief to Russia. It repeated this proposal in connection with the White Terror and persecution of workers in Spain and Yugoslavia. The Executive Committee of the Communist International is currently making new proposals to the Amsterdam and Second Internationals, and also the Two-and-a-Half International, in connection with the initial work of the Washington conference, which has shown that a new imperialist slaughter threatens the international working class. The leaders of the Second, Two-and-a-Half and Amsterdam Internationals have shown by their behaviour so far that when it comes to practical activity they in practice ignore their slogan of unity. In all such situations the task of the Communist International as a whole and of each of its sections separately will be to explain to the broadest circles of workers the hypocrisy of the leaders of the Second, Two-and-a-Half and Amsterdam Internationals, who put unity with the bourgeoisie before unity with the revolutionary workers, by staying, for example, in the International Labour Organisation of the League of Nations and by being party to the Washington imperialist conference instead of organising the struggle against imperialist Washington etc. However, the rejection by the leaders of the Second, Two-and-a-Half and Amsterdam Internationals of this or that practical proposal from the Communist international will not make us give up this tactic, which has deep roots in the masses and which we systematically and steadily must develop. Whenever our opponents reject proposals for joint struggle, the masses must be informed so that they can learn who the real destroyers of the united workers’ front are. Whenever our opponents accept a proposal, we must aim gradually to intensify the struggle and raise it to a higher level. In either case it is essential to draw the attention of the broad masses to the talks between the Communists and the other organisations and to interest them in all the fluctuations of the struggle for the united revolutionary workers’ front.
21 In putting forward this plan, the Executive Committee of the Communist International directs the attention of all fraternal parties to the dangers that in certain circumstances could be involved. Not all Communist Parties are sufficiently developed and consolidated; not all have finally broken with centrist and semi-centrist ideology. There may be cases of bending the stick too far the other way; there may be tendencies which amount to the dissolution of the Communist Parties and groups into a formless united bloc. If the use of this tactic is to advance the cause of Communism, the actual Communist Parties carrying it out must be strong, united and under an ideologically clear leadership.
22 The groupings within the Communist International itself which, with greater or lesser justification, are considered Right or even semi-centrist, are clearly made up of two different tendencies. Some elements have not really broken with the ideology and methods of the Second International, have not freed themselves from reverence for its former organisational strength and, half-consciously or unconsciously, are still seeking ideological agreement with the Second International and, accordingly, with bourgeois society. Other elements, opposed to formal radicalism and the mistakes of so-called Leftism, etc., are anxious that the newly-formed Communist Parties should be more subtle and flexible in their tactics, so that they can more rapidly strengthen their influence among the rank-and-file of the working masses. The rapid pace of development of the Communist Parties has always appeared to push both these tendencies into the same camp, even into the same grouping. The use of the methods suggested by us, which are designed to give Communist agitation a base in the unified mass activity of the proletariat, is the most effective way of uncovering the truly reformist tendencies within the Communist Parties and, if applied correctly, these methods will greatly help the internal revolutionary consolidation of the Communist Parties, both by re-educating through experience impatient or sectarian Left elements and by ridding the Parties of reformist ballast.
23 The united workers’ front must mean the unity of all workers willing to fight against capitalism – including those workers who still follow the anarchists, syndicalists, etc. In the Latin countries there are still many such workers, and in other countries, too, they can contribute to the revolutionary struggle. From the start of its existence the Communist International has adopted a friendly line in its relations with those elements among the workers who have gradually overcome their prejudices and are moving towards Communism. Communists must be all the more attentive towards them now that the united workers’ front against the capitalists is becoming a reality.
24 In order finally to concretize this work along the lines indicated, the Executive Committee of the Communist International resolves to call in the near future an extended session of the Executive Committee of the Communist International with twice the usual number of delegates representing each Party.
25 The Executive Committee of the Communist International will closely follow every practical step taken in this sector of work and asks all the Parties to inform it of every attempt made and every gain won in this direction, giving full factual details.
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