Click on the headline to link to the Eugene V. Debs Marxist Internet Archive website article listed in the headline..
Markin comment on this From The Pen Of Eugene V. Debs series:
The Political Evolution of Eugene V. Debs
For many reasons, the most important of which for our purposes here are the question of the nature of the revolutionary party and of revolutionary leadership, the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was a turning point in the international labor movement. In its aftermath, there was a definitive and I would argue, necessary split, between those leftists (and here I use that term generically to mean socialists, communists, anarchists, syndicalists and the like) who sought to reform the capitalist state from within and those who saw that it needed to be destroyed “root and branch” and new institutions established to create a more just society. This division today continues, in truncated form to be sure, to define the contours of the question. The heroic American pre- World War II socialist labor leader and icon, Eugene V. Debs, contained within his personal political trajectory all the contradictions of that split. As will be described below in more detail we honor Debs for his generosity of socialist spirit while at the same time underscoring that his profile is, in the final analysis, not that of something who could have led a proletarian revolution in the earlier part of the 20th century.
Debs was above all others except, perhaps, “Big Bill” Haywood in the pre-World War I movement. For details of why that was so and a strong biographic sketch it is still necessary to go Ray Ginger’s “The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene V. Debs”. I will review that effort in this space at a later time. For now though let me give the highlights I found that every serious labor militant or every serious student of socialism needs to think through.
If history has told us anything over the past one hundred and fifty years plus of the organized labor movement it is that mere trade union consciousness under conditions of capitalist domination, while commendable and necessary, is merely the beginning of wisdom. By now several generations of labor militants have passed through the school of trade unionism with varying results; although precious few have gone beyond that to the class consciousness necessary to “turn the world upside down” to use an old expression from the 17th century English Revolution. In the late 19th when American capitalism was consolidating itself and moving onto its industrial phases the landscape was filled with pitched class battles between labor and capital.
One of those key battles in the 1890’s was led by one Eugene V. Debs and his American Railway Union against the mammoth rail giant, The Pullman Company. At that time the rails were the key mode of transportation in the bustling new industrial capitalist commerce. At that time, by his own reckoning, Debs saw the struggle from a merely trade unionist point of view, that is a specific localized economic struggle for better wages and conditions rather than taking on the capitalist system and its state. That strike was defeated and as a result Debs and others became “guests” of that state in a local jail in Illinois for six months or so. The key conclusion drawn from this ‘lesson’, for our purposes, was that Debs personally finally realized that the close connection between the capitalists and THEIR state (troops, media, jails, courts) was organic and needed to be addressed.
Development of working class political class consciousness comes in many ways; I know that from my own personal experiences running up against the capitalist state. For Debs this “up close and personal” confrontation with the capitalist drove him, reluctantly at first and with some reservations, to see the need for socialist solutions to the plight of the workingman (and women). In Debs’ case this involved an early infatuation with the ideas of cooperative commonwealths then popular among radicals as a way to basically provide a parallel alternative society away from capitalism. Well again, having gone thorough that same kind of process of conversion myself (in my case 'autonomous' urban communes, you know, the “hippie” experience of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s); Debs fairly quickly came to realize that an organized political response was necessary and he linked up his efforts with the emerging American Socialist Party.
Before World War I the major political model for politically organizing the working class was provided by the Marxist-dominated German Social Democratic Party. At that time, and in this period of pre-imperialist capitalist development, this was unquestionably the model to be followed. By way of explanation the key organizing principle of that organization, besides providing party discipline for united action, was to create a “big tent” party for the social transformation of society. Under that rubric the notion was to organize anyone and everyone, from socialist-feminists, socialist vegetarians, pacifists, municipal reformers, incipient trade union bureaucrats, hard core reformists, evolutionary socialists and- revolutionaries like Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg who we honor to this day. The American Social Party that Debs joined exhibited all those tendencies (and some even more outlandish) of the German model. And as long as no great events acted to disrupt the “unity” of this amorphous formation the various tensions within the organization concerning reform or revolution were subdued for a time. Not forever though.
Various revolutionary tendencies within the workers’ movement have historically had opposing positions concerning parliamentary politics: what to do politically while waiting for the opportune moment to take political power. The controversy centered (and today centers around) whether to run for elective executive and/or legislative offices. Since World War I a very strong argument has developed that revolutionaries should not run for executive offices of the capitalist state on the principle that we do not want to be responsible for the running of the capitalist state. On the other hand running for legislative office under the principle of acting as “tribunes of the people” continues to have validity. The case of the German revolutionary social democrat Karl Liebknecht using his legislative office to denounce the German war effort DURING the war is a very high-level expression of that position. This question, arguably, was a little less clears in the pre-war period.
If Eugene V. Debs is remembered politically today it is probably for his five famous runs for the American presidency (one, in 1920, run from jail) from 1900 to 1920 (except 1916). Of those the most famous is the 1912 four- way fight (Teddy Roosevelt and his “Bull Moose” Party providing the fourth) in which he got almost a million votes and something like 5 percent of the vote- this is the high water mark of socialist electoral politics then and now. I would only mention that a strong argument could be made here for support of the idea of a revolutionary (and, at least until the early 1920’s Debs considered himself, subjectively, a revolutionary) running for executive office- the presidency- without violating political principle (of course, with the always present proviso that if elected he would refuse to serve). Certainly the issues to be fought around- the emerging American imperial presence in the world, the fierce wage struggles, the capitalist trustification and cartelization of industry, the complicity of the courts, the struggle for women’s right to vote, the struggle against the emerging anti- black Jim Crow regime in the South would make such a platform a useful propaganda tool. Especially since Debs was one of the premier socialist orators of the day, if perhaps too flowery and long-winded for today’s eye or ear.
As the American Socialist Party developed in the early 20th century, and grew by leaps and bounds in this period, a somewhat parallel development was occurring somewhat outside this basically parliamentary movement. In 1905, led by the revolutionary militant “Big Bill” Haywood and with an enthusiastic (then) Debs present probably the most famous mass militant labor organization in American history was formed, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies). As it name denotes this organization stood as, in effect, the nucleus of the industrial unionism that would win the day among the unorganized in the 1930’s with the efforts of the CIO. But it also was, as James P. Cannon an early IWW organizer noted in one of his books, the nucleus of a revolutionary political party. One of the reasons, among others, for its demise was that it never was able to resolve that contradiction between party and union. But that is an analysis for another day.
What is important to note here is that organization form fit in, very nicely indeed, with Debs’ notions of organizing the unorganized, the need for industrial unionization (as opposed to the prevailing narrow craft orientation of the Samuel Gompers-led AFL). Nevertheless Debs, to his credit, was no “dual unionist”, that is, committed to ignoring or going around the AFL and establishing “revolutionary” unions. This question of “boring from within” organized labor or “dual unions” continues to this day, and historically has been a very thorny question among militants faced with the bureaucratic inertia of the trade union bureaucracy. Debs came down on the side of the angels on this one (even if he later took unfavorable positions on IWW actions).
Although Debs is probably best known for his presidential runs (including that one from Atlanta prison in 1920 that I always enjoy seeing pictures of the one where he converses with his campaign staff in his cell) he really should be, if he is remembered for only one thing, remembered for his principled opposition to American war preparedness and eventual entry into World War I in 1917. Although it is unclear in my mind how much of Debs’ position stemmed from personal pacifism, how much from Hoosier isolationism (after all he was the quintessential Midwestern labor politician, having been raised in and lived all his life in Indiana) and how much was an anti-imperialist statement he nevertheless, of all major socialist spokesmen to speak nothing of major politicians in general , was virtually alone in his opposition when Woodrow Wilson pulled the hammer down and entered American forces into the European conflict.
That, my friends, should command respect from almost everyone, political friend or foe alike. Needless to say for his opposition he was eventually tried and convicted of, of all things, the catch-all charge of sedition and conspiracy. Some things never change. Moreover, that prison term is why Debs had to run from prison in 1920.
I started out this exposition of Debs’ political trajectory under the sign of the Russian Revolution and here I come full circle. I have, I believe, highlighted the points that we honor Debs for and now to balance the wheel we need to discuss his shortcomings (which are also a reflection of the shortcomings of the internationalist socialist movement then, and now). The almost universal betrayal of its anti- war positions of the pre-war international social democracy, as organized in the Second International and led by the German Party, by its subordination to the war aims of its respective individual capitalist governments exposed a deep crevice in the theory and practice of the movement.
As the experiences of the Russian revolution pointed out it was no longer possible for reformists and revolutionaries to coexist in the same party. Literally, on more than one occasion, these formally connected tendencies were on opposite sides of the barricades when the social tensions of society exploded. It was not a pretty sight and called for a splitting and realignment of the revolutionary forces internationally. The organizational expression of this was the formation, in the aftermath of the Russian revolution, of the Communist International in 1919. Part of that process, in America, included a left-wing split (or purge depending on the source read) and the creation, at first, of two communist organizations. As the most authoritative left-wing socialist of the day one would have thought that Debs would have inclined to the communists. That was not to be the case as he stayed with the remnant of the American Socialist Party until his death in the late 1920’s.
No one would argue that the early communist movement in America was not filled with more than its share of political mistakes, wild boys and just plain weirdness but that is where the revolutionaries were in the 1920’s. And this brings us really to Debs’ ultimate problem as a socialist leader and why I made that statement above that he could not lead a proletarian revolution in America, assuming that he was his desire. Debs had a life-long aversion to political faction and in-fighting. I would agree, as any rational radical politician would, that faction and in-fighting are not virtuous in and of themselves and are a net drain on the tasks of propaganda, recruitment and united front actions that should drive left-wing political work. However, as critical turning points in the international socialist movement have shown, sometimes the tensions between the political appetites of supposed like-minded individuals cannot be contained in one organization. This question is most dramatically posed, of course, in a revolutionary period when the tensions are whittled down to choices for or against the revolution. One side of the barricade or the other.
That said, Debs’ personality, demeanor and ultimately his political program of trying to keep “big tent” socialist together tarnished his image as a socialist leader. Debs’ positions on convicts, women, and blacks, education, religion and government. Debs was no theorist, socialist or otherwise, and many of his positions would not pass muster among radicals today. I note his economic determinist argument that the black question is subsumed in the class question. I have discussed this question elsewhere and will not address it here. I would only note, for a socialist, his position is just flat out wrong. I also note that, outside his support for women’s suffrage and working women’s rights to equal pay his attitude toward women was strictly Victorian. As was his wishy-washy attitude toward religion. Eugene V. Debs, warts and all, nevertheless deserves a fair nod from history as the premier American socialist of the pre-World War I period.
Wednesday, June 06, 2012
On The 100th Anniversary Of The 1912 Presidential Election- From The Pen Of Early American Socialist Leader Eugene V. Debs- Russell and His War Views:(1916)
Click on the headline to link to the Eugene V. Debs Marxist Internet Archive website article listed in the headline..
Markin comment on this From The Pen Of Eugene V. Debs series:
The Political Evolution of Eugene V. Debs
For many reasons, the most important of which for our purposes here are the question of the nature of the revolutionary party and of revolutionary leadership, the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was a turning point in the international labor movement. In its aftermath, there was a definitive and I would argue, necessary split, between those leftists (and here I use that term generically to mean socialists, communists, anarchists, syndicalists and the like) who sought to reform the capitalist state from within and those who saw that it needed to be destroyed “root and branch” and new institutions established to create a more just society. This division today continues, in truncated form to be sure, to define the contours of the question. The heroic American pre- World War II socialist labor leader and icon, Eugene V. Debs, contained within his personal political trajectory all the contradictions of that split. As will be described below in more detail we honor Debs for his generosity of socialist spirit while at the same time underscoring that his profile is, in the final analysis, not that of something who could have led a proletarian revolution in the earlier part of the 20th century.
Debs was above all others except, perhaps, “Big Bill” Haywood in the pre-World War I movement. For details of why that was so and a strong biographic sketch it is still necessary to go Ray Ginger’s “The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene V. Debs”. I will review that effort in this space at a later time. For now though let me give the highlights I found that every serious labor militant or every serious student of socialism needs to think through.
If history has told us anything over the past one hundred and fifty years plus of the organized labor movement it is that mere trade union consciousness under conditions of capitalist domination, while commendable and necessary, is merely the beginning of wisdom. By now several generations of labor militants have passed through the school of trade unionism with varying results; although precious few have gone beyond that to the class consciousness necessary to “turn the world upside down” to use an old expression from the 17th century English Revolution. In the late 19th when American capitalism was consolidating itself and moving onto its industrial phases the landscape was filled with pitched class battles between labor and capital.
One of those key battles in the 1890’s was led by one Eugene V. Debs and his American Railway Union against the mammoth rail giant, The Pullman Company. At that time the rails were the key mode of transportation in the bustling new industrial capitalist commerce. At that time, by his own reckoning, Debs saw the struggle from a merely trade unionist point of view, that is a specific localized economic struggle for better wages and conditions rather than taking on the capitalist system and its state. That strike was defeated and as a result Debs and others became “guests” of that state in a local jail in Illinois for six months or so. The key conclusion drawn from this ‘lesson’, for our purposes, was that Debs personally finally realized that the close connection between the capitalists and THEIR state (troops, media, jails, courts) was organic and needed to be addressed.
Development of working class political class consciousness comes in many ways; I know that from my own personal experiences running up against the capitalist state. For Debs this “up close and personal” confrontation with the capitalist drove him, reluctantly at first and with some reservations, to see the need for socialist solutions to the plight of the workingman (and women). In Debs’ case this involved an early infatuation with the ideas of cooperative commonwealths then popular among radicals as a way to basically provide a parallel alternative society away from capitalism. Well again, having gone thorough that same kind of process of conversion myself (in my case 'autonomous' urban communes, you know, the “hippie” experience of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s); Debs fairly quickly came to realize that an organized political response was necessary and he linked up his efforts with the emerging American Socialist Party.
Before World War I the major political model for politically organizing the working class was provided by the Marxist-dominated German Social Democratic Party. At that time, and in this period of pre-imperialist capitalist development, this was unquestionably the model to be followed. By way of explanation the key organizing principle of that organization, besides providing party discipline for united action, was to create a “big tent” party for the social transformation of society. Under that rubric the notion was to organize anyone and everyone, from socialist-feminists, socialist vegetarians, pacifists, municipal reformers, incipient trade union bureaucrats, hard core reformists, evolutionary socialists and- revolutionaries like Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg who we honor to this day. The American Social Party that Debs joined exhibited all those tendencies (and some even more outlandish) of the German model. And as long as no great events acted to disrupt the “unity” of this amorphous formation the various tensions within the organization concerning reform or revolution were subdued for a time. Not forever though.
Various revolutionary tendencies within the workers’ movement have historically had opposing positions concerning parliamentary politics: what to do politically while waiting for the opportune moment to take political power. The controversy centered (and today centers around) whether to run for elective executive and/or legislative offices. Since World War I a very strong argument has developed that revolutionaries should not run for executive offices of the capitalist state on the principle that we do not want to be responsible for the running of the capitalist state. On the other hand running for legislative office under the principle of acting as “tribunes of the people” continues to have validity. The case of the German revolutionary social democrat Karl Liebknecht using his legislative office to denounce the German war effort DURING the war is a very high-level expression of that position. This question, arguably, was a little less clears in the pre-war period.
If Eugene V. Debs is remembered politically today it is probably for his five famous runs for the American presidency (one, in 1920, run from jail) from 1900 to 1920 (except 1916). Of those the most famous is the 1912 four- way fight (Teddy Roosevelt and his “Bull Moose” Party providing the fourth) in which he got almost a million votes and something like 5 percent of the vote- this is the high water mark of socialist electoral politics then and now. I would only mention that a strong argument could be made here for support of the idea of a revolutionary (and, at least until the early 1920’s Debs considered himself, subjectively, a revolutionary) running for executive office- the presidency- without violating political principle (of course, with the always present proviso that if elected he would refuse to serve). Certainly the issues to be fought around- the emerging American imperial presence in the world, the fierce wage struggles, the capitalist trustification and cartelization of industry, the complicity of the courts, the struggle for women’s right to vote, the struggle against the emerging anti- black Jim Crow regime in the South would make such a platform a useful propaganda tool. Especially since Debs was one of the premier socialist orators of the day, if perhaps too flowery and long-winded for today’s eye or ear.
As the American Socialist Party developed in the early 20th century, and grew by leaps and bounds in this period, a somewhat parallel development was occurring somewhat outside this basically parliamentary movement. In 1905, led by the revolutionary militant “Big Bill” Haywood and with an enthusiastic (then) Debs present probably the most famous mass militant labor organization in American history was formed, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies). As it name denotes this organization stood as, in effect, the nucleus of the industrial unionism that would win the day among the unorganized in the 1930’s with the efforts of the CIO. But it also was, as James P. Cannon an early IWW organizer noted in one of his books, the nucleus of a revolutionary political party. One of the reasons, among others, for its demise was that it never was able to resolve that contradiction between party and union. But that is an analysis for another day.
What is important to note here is that organization form fit in, very nicely indeed, with Debs’ notions of organizing the unorganized, the need for industrial unionization (as opposed to the prevailing narrow craft orientation of the Samuel Gompers-led AFL). Nevertheless Debs, to his credit, was no “dual unionist”, that is, committed to ignoring or going around the AFL and establishing “revolutionary” unions. This question of “boring from within” organized labor or “dual unions” continues to this day, and historically has been a very thorny question among militants faced with the bureaucratic inertia of the trade union bureaucracy. Debs came down on the side of the angels on this one (even if he later took unfavorable positions on IWW actions).
Although Debs is probably best known for his presidential runs (including that one from Atlanta prison in 1920 that I always enjoy seeing pictures of the one where he converses with his campaign staff in his cell) he really should be, if he is remembered for only one thing, remembered for his principled opposition to American war preparedness and eventual entry into World War I in 1917. Although it is unclear in my mind how much of Debs’ position stemmed from personal pacifism, how much from Hoosier isolationism (after all he was the quintessential Midwestern labor politician, having been raised in and lived all his life in Indiana) and how much was an anti-imperialist statement he nevertheless, of all major socialist spokesmen to speak nothing of major politicians in general , was virtually alone in his opposition when Woodrow Wilson pulled the hammer down and entered American forces into the European conflict.
That, my friends, should command respect from almost everyone, political friend or foe alike. Needless to say for his opposition he was eventually tried and convicted of, of all things, the catch-all charge of sedition and conspiracy. Some things never change. Moreover, that prison term is why Debs had to run from prison in 1920.
I started out this exposition of Debs’ political trajectory under the sign of the Russian Revolution and here I come full circle. I have, I believe, highlighted the points that we honor Debs for and now to balance the wheel we need to discuss his shortcomings (which are also a reflection of the shortcomings of the internationalist socialist movement then, and now). The almost universal betrayal of its anti- war positions of the pre-war international social democracy, as organized in the Second International and led by the German Party, by its subordination to the war aims of its respective individual capitalist governments exposed a deep crevice in the theory and practice of the movement.
As the experiences of the Russian revolution pointed out it was no longer possible for reformists and revolutionaries to coexist in the same party. Literally, on more than one occasion, these formally connected tendencies were on opposite sides of the barricades when the social tensions of society exploded. It was not a pretty sight and called for a splitting and realignment of the revolutionary forces internationally. The organizational expression of this was the formation, in the aftermath of the Russian revolution, of the Communist International in 1919. Part of that process, in America, included a left-wing split (or purge depending on the source read) and the creation, at first, of two communist organizations. As the most authoritative left-wing socialist of the day one would have thought that Debs would have inclined to the communists. That was not to be the case as he stayed with the remnant of the American Socialist Party until his death in the late 1920’s.
No one would argue that the early communist movement in America was not filled with more than its share of political mistakes, wild boys and just plain weirdness but that is where the revolutionaries were in the 1920’s. And this brings us really to Debs’ ultimate problem as a socialist leader and why I made that statement above that he could not lead a proletarian revolution in America, assuming that he was his desire. Debs had a life-long aversion to political faction and in-fighting. I would agree, as any rational radical politician would, that faction and in-fighting are not virtuous in and of themselves and are a net drain on the tasks of propaganda, recruitment and united front actions that should drive left-wing political work. However, as critical turning points in the international socialist movement have shown, sometimes the tensions between the political appetites of supposed like-minded individuals cannot be contained in one organization. This question is most dramatically posed, of course, in a revolutionary period when the tensions are whittled down to choices for or against the revolution. One side of the barricade or the other.
That said, Debs’ personality, demeanor and ultimately his political program of trying to keep “big tent” socialist together tarnished his image as a socialist leader. Debs’ positions on convicts, women, and blacks, education, religion and government. Debs was no theorist, socialist or otherwise, and many of his positions would not pass muster among radicals today. I note his economic determinist argument that the black question is subsumed in the class question. I have discussed this question elsewhere and will not address it here. I would only note, for a socialist, his position is just flat out wrong. I also note that, outside his support for women’s suffrage and working women’s rights to equal pay his attitude toward women was strictly Victorian. As was his wishy-washy attitude toward religion. Eugene V. Debs, warts and all, nevertheless deserves a fair nod from history as the premier American socialist of the pre-World War I period.
Markin comment on this From The Pen Of Eugene V. Debs series:
The Political Evolution of Eugene V. Debs
For many reasons, the most important of which for our purposes here are the question of the nature of the revolutionary party and of revolutionary leadership, the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was a turning point in the international labor movement. In its aftermath, there was a definitive and I would argue, necessary split, between those leftists (and here I use that term generically to mean socialists, communists, anarchists, syndicalists and the like) who sought to reform the capitalist state from within and those who saw that it needed to be destroyed “root and branch” and new institutions established to create a more just society. This division today continues, in truncated form to be sure, to define the contours of the question. The heroic American pre- World War II socialist labor leader and icon, Eugene V. Debs, contained within his personal political trajectory all the contradictions of that split. As will be described below in more detail we honor Debs for his generosity of socialist spirit while at the same time underscoring that his profile is, in the final analysis, not that of something who could have led a proletarian revolution in the earlier part of the 20th century.
Debs was above all others except, perhaps, “Big Bill” Haywood in the pre-World War I movement. For details of why that was so and a strong biographic sketch it is still necessary to go Ray Ginger’s “The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene V. Debs”. I will review that effort in this space at a later time. For now though let me give the highlights I found that every serious labor militant or every serious student of socialism needs to think through.
If history has told us anything over the past one hundred and fifty years plus of the organized labor movement it is that mere trade union consciousness under conditions of capitalist domination, while commendable and necessary, is merely the beginning of wisdom. By now several generations of labor militants have passed through the school of trade unionism with varying results; although precious few have gone beyond that to the class consciousness necessary to “turn the world upside down” to use an old expression from the 17th century English Revolution. In the late 19th when American capitalism was consolidating itself and moving onto its industrial phases the landscape was filled with pitched class battles between labor and capital.
One of those key battles in the 1890’s was led by one Eugene V. Debs and his American Railway Union against the mammoth rail giant, The Pullman Company. At that time the rails were the key mode of transportation in the bustling new industrial capitalist commerce. At that time, by his own reckoning, Debs saw the struggle from a merely trade unionist point of view, that is a specific localized economic struggle for better wages and conditions rather than taking on the capitalist system and its state. That strike was defeated and as a result Debs and others became “guests” of that state in a local jail in Illinois for six months or so. The key conclusion drawn from this ‘lesson’, for our purposes, was that Debs personally finally realized that the close connection between the capitalists and THEIR state (troops, media, jails, courts) was organic and needed to be addressed.
Development of working class political class consciousness comes in many ways; I know that from my own personal experiences running up against the capitalist state. For Debs this “up close and personal” confrontation with the capitalist drove him, reluctantly at first and with some reservations, to see the need for socialist solutions to the plight of the workingman (and women). In Debs’ case this involved an early infatuation with the ideas of cooperative commonwealths then popular among radicals as a way to basically provide a parallel alternative society away from capitalism. Well again, having gone thorough that same kind of process of conversion myself (in my case 'autonomous' urban communes, you know, the “hippie” experience of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s); Debs fairly quickly came to realize that an organized political response was necessary and he linked up his efforts with the emerging American Socialist Party.
Before World War I the major political model for politically organizing the working class was provided by the Marxist-dominated German Social Democratic Party. At that time, and in this period of pre-imperialist capitalist development, this was unquestionably the model to be followed. By way of explanation the key organizing principle of that organization, besides providing party discipline for united action, was to create a “big tent” party for the social transformation of society. Under that rubric the notion was to organize anyone and everyone, from socialist-feminists, socialist vegetarians, pacifists, municipal reformers, incipient trade union bureaucrats, hard core reformists, evolutionary socialists and- revolutionaries like Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg who we honor to this day. The American Social Party that Debs joined exhibited all those tendencies (and some even more outlandish) of the German model. And as long as no great events acted to disrupt the “unity” of this amorphous formation the various tensions within the organization concerning reform or revolution were subdued for a time. Not forever though.
Various revolutionary tendencies within the workers’ movement have historically had opposing positions concerning parliamentary politics: what to do politically while waiting for the opportune moment to take political power. The controversy centered (and today centers around) whether to run for elective executive and/or legislative offices. Since World War I a very strong argument has developed that revolutionaries should not run for executive offices of the capitalist state on the principle that we do not want to be responsible for the running of the capitalist state. On the other hand running for legislative office under the principle of acting as “tribunes of the people” continues to have validity. The case of the German revolutionary social democrat Karl Liebknecht using his legislative office to denounce the German war effort DURING the war is a very high-level expression of that position. This question, arguably, was a little less clears in the pre-war period.
If Eugene V. Debs is remembered politically today it is probably for his five famous runs for the American presidency (one, in 1920, run from jail) from 1900 to 1920 (except 1916). Of those the most famous is the 1912 four- way fight (Teddy Roosevelt and his “Bull Moose” Party providing the fourth) in which he got almost a million votes and something like 5 percent of the vote- this is the high water mark of socialist electoral politics then and now. I would only mention that a strong argument could be made here for support of the idea of a revolutionary (and, at least until the early 1920’s Debs considered himself, subjectively, a revolutionary) running for executive office- the presidency- without violating political principle (of course, with the always present proviso that if elected he would refuse to serve). Certainly the issues to be fought around- the emerging American imperial presence in the world, the fierce wage struggles, the capitalist trustification and cartelization of industry, the complicity of the courts, the struggle for women’s right to vote, the struggle against the emerging anti- black Jim Crow regime in the South would make such a platform a useful propaganda tool. Especially since Debs was one of the premier socialist orators of the day, if perhaps too flowery and long-winded for today’s eye or ear.
As the American Socialist Party developed in the early 20th century, and grew by leaps and bounds in this period, a somewhat parallel development was occurring somewhat outside this basically parliamentary movement. In 1905, led by the revolutionary militant “Big Bill” Haywood and with an enthusiastic (then) Debs present probably the most famous mass militant labor organization in American history was formed, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies). As it name denotes this organization stood as, in effect, the nucleus of the industrial unionism that would win the day among the unorganized in the 1930’s with the efforts of the CIO. But it also was, as James P. Cannon an early IWW organizer noted in one of his books, the nucleus of a revolutionary political party. One of the reasons, among others, for its demise was that it never was able to resolve that contradiction between party and union. But that is an analysis for another day.
What is important to note here is that organization form fit in, very nicely indeed, with Debs’ notions of organizing the unorganized, the need for industrial unionization (as opposed to the prevailing narrow craft orientation of the Samuel Gompers-led AFL). Nevertheless Debs, to his credit, was no “dual unionist”, that is, committed to ignoring or going around the AFL and establishing “revolutionary” unions. This question of “boring from within” organized labor or “dual unions” continues to this day, and historically has been a very thorny question among militants faced with the bureaucratic inertia of the trade union bureaucracy. Debs came down on the side of the angels on this one (even if he later took unfavorable positions on IWW actions).
Although Debs is probably best known for his presidential runs (including that one from Atlanta prison in 1920 that I always enjoy seeing pictures of the one where he converses with his campaign staff in his cell) he really should be, if he is remembered for only one thing, remembered for his principled opposition to American war preparedness and eventual entry into World War I in 1917. Although it is unclear in my mind how much of Debs’ position stemmed from personal pacifism, how much from Hoosier isolationism (after all he was the quintessential Midwestern labor politician, having been raised in and lived all his life in Indiana) and how much was an anti-imperialist statement he nevertheless, of all major socialist spokesmen to speak nothing of major politicians in general , was virtually alone in his opposition when Woodrow Wilson pulled the hammer down and entered American forces into the European conflict.
That, my friends, should command respect from almost everyone, political friend or foe alike. Needless to say for his opposition he was eventually tried and convicted of, of all things, the catch-all charge of sedition and conspiracy. Some things never change. Moreover, that prison term is why Debs had to run from prison in 1920.
I started out this exposition of Debs’ political trajectory under the sign of the Russian Revolution and here I come full circle. I have, I believe, highlighted the points that we honor Debs for and now to balance the wheel we need to discuss his shortcomings (which are also a reflection of the shortcomings of the internationalist socialist movement then, and now). The almost universal betrayal of its anti- war positions of the pre-war international social democracy, as organized in the Second International and led by the German Party, by its subordination to the war aims of its respective individual capitalist governments exposed a deep crevice in the theory and practice of the movement.
As the experiences of the Russian revolution pointed out it was no longer possible for reformists and revolutionaries to coexist in the same party. Literally, on more than one occasion, these formally connected tendencies were on opposite sides of the barricades when the social tensions of society exploded. It was not a pretty sight and called for a splitting and realignment of the revolutionary forces internationally. The organizational expression of this was the formation, in the aftermath of the Russian revolution, of the Communist International in 1919. Part of that process, in America, included a left-wing split (or purge depending on the source read) and the creation, at first, of two communist organizations. As the most authoritative left-wing socialist of the day one would have thought that Debs would have inclined to the communists. That was not to be the case as he stayed with the remnant of the American Socialist Party until his death in the late 1920’s.
No one would argue that the early communist movement in America was not filled with more than its share of political mistakes, wild boys and just plain weirdness but that is where the revolutionaries were in the 1920’s. And this brings us really to Debs’ ultimate problem as a socialist leader and why I made that statement above that he could not lead a proletarian revolution in America, assuming that he was his desire. Debs had a life-long aversion to political faction and in-fighting. I would agree, as any rational radical politician would, that faction and in-fighting are not virtuous in and of themselves and are a net drain on the tasks of propaganda, recruitment and united front actions that should drive left-wing political work. However, as critical turning points in the international socialist movement have shown, sometimes the tensions between the political appetites of supposed like-minded individuals cannot be contained in one organization. This question is most dramatically posed, of course, in a revolutionary period when the tensions are whittled down to choices for or against the revolution. One side of the barricade or the other.
That said, Debs’ personality, demeanor and ultimately his political program of trying to keep “big tent” socialist together tarnished his image as a socialist leader. Debs’ positions on convicts, women, and blacks, education, religion and government. Debs was no theorist, socialist or otherwise, and many of his positions would not pass muster among radicals today. I note his economic determinist argument that the black question is subsumed in the class question. I have discussed this question elsewhere and will not address it here. I would only note, for a socialist, his position is just flat out wrong. I also note that, outside his support for women’s suffrage and working women’s rights to equal pay his attitude toward women was strictly Victorian. As was his wishy-washy attitude toward religion. Eugene V. Debs, warts and all, nevertheless deserves a fair nod from history as the premier American socialist of the pre-World War I period.
*In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!- Maumin Khabir,( aka Melvin Mayes)
Click on the headline to link to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.
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 (the now late) 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 longtime supporter of 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 comes 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!
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 (the now late) 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 longtime supporter of 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 comes 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!
In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!-Sekou Kambui, (William Turk)
Click on the headline to link to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.
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 (the now late) 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 longtime supporter of 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 comes 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!
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 (the now late) 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 longtime supporter of 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 comes 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!
*In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!- Abdullah Ka'bah, (aka Jeff Fort)
Click on the headline to link to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.
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 (the now late) 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 longtime supporter of 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 comes 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!
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 (the now late) 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 longtime supporter of 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 comes 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!
In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!-Larry Hoover
Click on the headline to link to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.
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 (the now late) 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 longtime supporter of 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 comes 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!
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 (the now late) 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 longtime supporter of 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 comes 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!
*In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!-Freddie Hilton, (Kamau Sadiki)
Click on the headline to link to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.
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 (the now late) 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 longtime supporter of 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 comes 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!
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 (the now late) 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 longtime supporter of 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 comes 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!
*In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!-Alvaro Luna Hernández
http://www.thejerichomovement.com/prisoners.html
Click on the headline to link to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.
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 (the now late) 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 longtime supporter of 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 comes 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!
Click on the headline to link to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.
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 (the now late) 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 longtime supporter of 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 comes 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!
In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!-Robert Seth Hayes
http://www.thejerichomovement.com/prisoners.html
Click on the headline to link to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.
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 (the now late) 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 longtime supporter of 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 comes 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!
Click on the headline to link to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.
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 (the now late) 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 longtime supporter of 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 comes 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!
*In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!- Antonio Guerrero
Click on the headline to link to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.
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 (the now late) 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 longtime supporter of 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 comes 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!
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 (the now late) 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 longtime supporter of 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 comes 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!
*In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!-Rene González
Click on the headline to link to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.
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 (the now late) 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 longtime supporter of 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 comes 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!
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 (the now late) 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 longtime supporter of 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 comes 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!
The Latest From The Partisan Defense Committee-Free The Class-War Prisoners-Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, Free Leonard Peltier, Free Lynne Stewart And Her Co-Workers-Free The Remaining Ohio 7 Prisoners!-Solidarity with Longview ILWU and Its Supporters
Click on the headline to link to the Partisan Defense Committee website.
Solidarity with Longview ILWU and Its Supporters
Our article “Protest State Vendetta Against Longview ILWU and Its Allies!” (WV No. 998, 16 March) urged unions, both nationally and internationally, to protest the vindictive prosecution of some 100 members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), mainly from Local 21 in Longview, and their supporters. As the article noted, this anti-union vendetta “is a shot at all of labor, aimed at creating a chilling effect on trade unionists who were inspired by the power ILWU members brought to bear during their fight against EGT union-busting in Longview.” Union locals from California, New York and Wisconsin sent letters. International solidarity was expressed by unions in Canada, France and Germany. The Partisan Defense Committee—a class-struggle legal and social defense organization affiliated with the Spartacist League—and its fraternal organizations internationally issued an appeal for unions to send protest letters to Cowlitz County prosecuting attorney Susan Baur.
In its letter, the Northern Region of the German Locomotive Engineers recalled the fines and restrictions on the right to strike that had been imposed upon them in the heat of a contract battle in 2006-07. The Oakland Education Association, one of several unions from the San Francisco Bay Area that sent protest letters, wrote: “The motto of the ILWU is ‘An Injury to One is an Injury to All.’ We concur with this viewpoint and are sending a donation to Local 21 to be used in the legal defense of their members and supporters.” In its letter, the New York chapter of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists demanded “an end to this persecution” and that all charges be dropped.
While Jeff Washburn, who was president of the Cowlitz County Central Labor Council, was convicted, at least six others facing similar charges were acquitted in jury trials. Prosecutor Baur subsequently dropped a number of misdemeanor cases. But she threatened to file trumped-up felony charges against others—including Local 21 president Dan Coffman—in order to pressure them to plead guilty to misdemeanors that juries might have acquitted them of. The ILWU has rightly characterized this now-standard prosecutorial ploy as a “form of extortion.” Those opting to cop a plea have been sentenced to hundreds of dollars of fines and many hours of community service. Felony trials against at least two ILWUers are still pending, and Baur continues to threaten to file additional felony charges.
Two unionists, including ILWU Local 21 secretary-treasurer Byron Jacobs, have been sentenced to jail time. Jacobs was one of two courageous ILWUers who came to the aid of Ladies Auxiliary members under attack by police during a protest against an EGT-bound train on September 21. The two union members were tackled and forced to the ground, where the cops shot pepper spray directly into their eyes. This brutal attack was caught on video and later posted on YouTube. Yet Jacobs was charged with three felony counts! Baur only agreed to drop these frame-up charges if Jacobs pled guilty to three misdemeanors. He was sentenced to 20 days of jail work release, $500 in fines, one year’s probation and an “anger management” assessment. Local 21 member Ronald P. Stavas was sentenced to 22 days in jail after pleading guilty to felony attempted burglary and four misdemeanor charges. Dozens of ILWUers rallied at the Cowlitz County jail in solidarity with Stavas when he began serving his sentence on April 11.
The union-hating climate fueled by Baur and Cowlitz County sheriff Mark Nelson has encouraged additional attacks on Local 21. On April 9, the union hall was broken into, robbed and vandalized. Thousands of dollars of damage was done, and the words “scabs” and “ILWU fags” were scrawled on the wall with red spray paint. A significant amount of cash was stolen from the local’s safe, as well as blank checks, credit cards and other financial records. The union is offering a $2,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible. Local 21 also had to replace a union billboard publicizing the ILWU’s long history in the area after it was defaced by graffiti.
Playing its role as the enforcer of anti-union laws, Barack Obama’s National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has pursued its own vendetta against the ILWU. It went to the federal courts and obtained a restraining order last September against the union for “aggressive picketing,” which resulted in some $300,000 in fines. The Labor Board also issued a complaint against the union based on unfair labor practice charges filed by both EGT and the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) during the Longview battle. In the April issue of the union’s newspaper, the Dispatcher, the ILWU International announced a settlement with the NLRB on this complaint. The PMA is reportedly objecting to the settlement, the details of which are not yet publicly known. The Dispatcher estimates that it will take up to two years to resolve the ILWU International’s appeal of the fines levied by the federal courts. As such, the fines could well be hanging over the union’s head as it faces off with the PMA when the coastwide longshore contract expires in 2014.
In the face of the anti-union offensive against the militant labor struggles waged in Longview last July and September, the ILWU International leadership backed off. It retreated to filing a lawsuit in the capitalist courts that charged the city of Longview, Cowlitz County and their top officials, including Sheriff Nelson, with violating the union’s “respective officers and members’ rights under the Constitution and laws of the United States and Washington.” While it is in the interests of the working class to defend all democratic rights, which have been increasingly curtailed, the battle of Longview was not a question of defending such civil liberties as freedom of speech and assembly. It was one of mobilizing the power of labor against the EGT union-busters, who are backed by the forces of the state. The laws of the United States are designed to uphold the interests of the capitalist owners—and the state, namely the courts, cops and military, enforces them against workers in struggle.
If the working class is to effectively organize to fight in its class interests, it must wield its ability to stop production and shut off the flow of profits. There is a vital need to revive the traditions of effective labor solidarity, not just in words but in deeds.
Solidarity with Longview ILWU and Its Supporters
Our article “Protest State Vendetta Against Longview ILWU and Its Allies!” (WV No. 998, 16 March) urged unions, both nationally and internationally, to protest the vindictive prosecution of some 100 members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), mainly from Local 21 in Longview, and their supporters. As the article noted, this anti-union vendetta “is a shot at all of labor, aimed at creating a chilling effect on trade unionists who were inspired by the power ILWU members brought to bear during their fight against EGT union-busting in Longview.” Union locals from California, New York and Wisconsin sent letters. International solidarity was expressed by unions in Canada, France and Germany. The Partisan Defense Committee—a class-struggle legal and social defense organization affiliated with the Spartacist League—and its fraternal organizations internationally issued an appeal for unions to send protest letters to Cowlitz County prosecuting attorney Susan Baur.
In its letter, the Northern Region of the German Locomotive Engineers recalled the fines and restrictions on the right to strike that had been imposed upon them in the heat of a contract battle in 2006-07. The Oakland Education Association, one of several unions from the San Francisco Bay Area that sent protest letters, wrote: “The motto of the ILWU is ‘An Injury to One is an Injury to All.’ We concur with this viewpoint and are sending a donation to Local 21 to be used in the legal defense of their members and supporters.” In its letter, the New York chapter of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists demanded “an end to this persecution” and that all charges be dropped.
While Jeff Washburn, who was president of the Cowlitz County Central Labor Council, was convicted, at least six others facing similar charges were acquitted in jury trials. Prosecutor Baur subsequently dropped a number of misdemeanor cases. But she threatened to file trumped-up felony charges against others—including Local 21 president Dan Coffman—in order to pressure them to plead guilty to misdemeanors that juries might have acquitted them of. The ILWU has rightly characterized this now-standard prosecutorial ploy as a “form of extortion.” Those opting to cop a plea have been sentenced to hundreds of dollars of fines and many hours of community service. Felony trials against at least two ILWUers are still pending, and Baur continues to threaten to file additional felony charges.
Two unionists, including ILWU Local 21 secretary-treasurer Byron Jacobs, have been sentenced to jail time. Jacobs was one of two courageous ILWUers who came to the aid of Ladies Auxiliary members under attack by police during a protest against an EGT-bound train on September 21. The two union members were tackled and forced to the ground, where the cops shot pepper spray directly into their eyes. This brutal attack was caught on video and later posted on YouTube. Yet Jacobs was charged with three felony counts! Baur only agreed to drop these frame-up charges if Jacobs pled guilty to three misdemeanors. He was sentenced to 20 days of jail work release, $500 in fines, one year’s probation and an “anger management” assessment. Local 21 member Ronald P. Stavas was sentenced to 22 days in jail after pleading guilty to felony attempted burglary and four misdemeanor charges. Dozens of ILWUers rallied at the Cowlitz County jail in solidarity with Stavas when he began serving his sentence on April 11.
The union-hating climate fueled by Baur and Cowlitz County sheriff Mark Nelson has encouraged additional attacks on Local 21. On April 9, the union hall was broken into, robbed and vandalized. Thousands of dollars of damage was done, and the words “scabs” and “ILWU fags” were scrawled on the wall with red spray paint. A significant amount of cash was stolen from the local’s safe, as well as blank checks, credit cards and other financial records. The union is offering a $2,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible. Local 21 also had to replace a union billboard publicizing the ILWU’s long history in the area after it was defaced by graffiti.
Playing its role as the enforcer of anti-union laws, Barack Obama’s National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has pursued its own vendetta against the ILWU. It went to the federal courts and obtained a restraining order last September against the union for “aggressive picketing,” which resulted in some $300,000 in fines. The Labor Board also issued a complaint against the union based on unfair labor practice charges filed by both EGT and the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) during the Longview battle. In the April issue of the union’s newspaper, the Dispatcher, the ILWU International announced a settlement with the NLRB on this complaint. The PMA is reportedly objecting to the settlement, the details of which are not yet publicly known. The Dispatcher estimates that it will take up to two years to resolve the ILWU International’s appeal of the fines levied by the federal courts. As such, the fines could well be hanging over the union’s head as it faces off with the PMA when the coastwide longshore contract expires in 2014.
In the face of the anti-union offensive against the militant labor struggles waged in Longview last July and September, the ILWU International leadership backed off. It retreated to filing a lawsuit in the capitalist courts that charged the city of Longview, Cowlitz County and their top officials, including Sheriff Nelson, with violating the union’s “respective officers and members’ rights under the Constitution and laws of the United States and Washington.” While it is in the interests of the working class to defend all democratic rights, which have been increasingly curtailed, the battle of Longview was not a question of defending such civil liberties as freedom of speech and assembly. It was one of mobilizing the power of labor against the EGT union-busters, who are backed by the forces of the state. The laws of the United States are designed to uphold the interests of the capitalist owners—and the state, namely the courts, cops and military, enforces them against workers in struggle.
If the working class is to effectively organize to fight in its class interests, it must wield its ability to stop production and shut off the flow of profits. There is a vital need to revive the traditions of effective labor solidarity, not just in words but in deeds.
The Latest From The Partisan Defense Committee-Free The Class-War Prisoners-Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, Free Leonard Peltier, Free Lynne Stewart And Her Co-Workers-Free The Remaining Ohio 7 Prisoners!-U.S. Muslim Imprisoned for Translating-Free Tarek Mehanna!
Click on the headline to link to the Partisan Defense Committee website.
U.S. Muslim Imprisoned for Translating-Free Tarek Mehanna!
Just as the American capitalist rulers have declared the “war against terrorism” to be eternal, the limits to which they will go in eviscerating civil liberties under that pretext know no bounds. In a frontal attack on the rights of speech supposedly protected in the First Amendment, Tarek Mehanna was convicted in December on bogus “material support to terrorism” charges primarily for translating jihadist documents. The 29-year-old U.S. citizen was sentenced on April 12 to 17 1/2 years in prison. It is in the interest of the working class, all minorities, youth and opponents of imperialist war to denounce Mehanna’s conviction and demand his immediate release!
This was a chemically pure thought-crime prosecution. Mehanna committed no crime, carried out no act of “terrorism,” and even according to what has been the government’s expansive definition, did not provide any “material” support to terrorist activities. According to the indictment, evidence that Mehanna furthered a “criminal conspiracy” was that he “created and/or translated, accepted credit for authoring and distributed text, videos, and other media to inspire others to engage in violent jihad,” “watched jihadi videos,” “discussed efforts to create like-minded youth” and spoke of “admiration and love for Usama bin Laden.” As Yale professor Andrew March pointed out in a 21 April New York Times op-ed piece “A Dangerous Mind?”: “Those acts were not used by the government to demonstrate the intent or mental state behind some other crime.... They were the crime.” One prosecutor gave the game away when he declared about the case: “It’s not illegal to watch something on the television. It is illegal, however, to watch something in order to cultivate your desire, your ideology.”
The government’s case rested on two wobbly legs. The first was making a trip abroad. In 2004 at the age of 21, Mehanna and a friend spent one week in Yemen purportedly in an unsuccessful search for a jihadi training camp from which they would continue on to Iraq to wage war against the American occupiers. The other leg—the core of the prosecution—was translating Islamist documents he found online, centrally a 2003 text by a Saudi religious scholar titled “39 Ways to Serve and Participate in Jihad.” Georgetown University law professor David Cole wrote in the New York Review of Books’ NYRblog (19 April):
“Google ‘39 Ways to Serve and Participate in Jihad’ and you’ll get over 590,000 hits. You’ll find full-text English language translations of this Arabic document on the Internet Archive, an Internet library; on 4Shared Desktop, a file-sharing site; and on numerous Islamic sites. You will find it cited and discussed in a US Senate Committee staff report and Congressional testimony. Feel free to read it. Just don’t try to make your own translation from the original.”
The proscription of what constitutes “material support” to terrorism, first promulgated in the Clinton administration’s 1996 “anti-terror” law and then extended in the Bush administration’s USA-Patriot Act, is so broad and vague as to allow the Feds to make it whatever they want it to be. In the 2010 Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project case, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the benign acts of advising the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and Kurdistan Workers Party on their appeals to the UN, engaging in political advocacy on behalf of Tamils and Kurds and training LTTE members in lobbying for tsunami relief would constitute material support to terrorism. (See “Supreme Court Decision Shreds First Amendment Rights,” WV No. 961, 2 July 2010.)
In denying that such prohibitions would violate the First Amendment rights of the Humanitarian Law Project (HLP), the Court ludicrously “explained” that it was not prohibiting “independent advocacy,” i.e., HLP could say whatever it wanted on behalf of a group designated terrorist—just not in consultation with any of its members! Although Mehanna’s prosecution relied on the Holder precedent, he engaged in exactly the “independent advocacy” supposedly approved by that ruling. There were no consultations or communications with Al Qaeda or anyone else the government has deemed terrorists. If upheld on appeal, Mehanna’s conviction will cement a major precedent in the rollback of First Amendment rights, criminalizing just about any speech deemed offensive to this ruling class, the most rapacious in world history.
In his statement to the court before sentencing, Mehanna pointed out how earlier the government had unsuccessfully sought to entrap him into an FBI-initiated terrorist plot (a common ploy in the “war on terror” witchhunt of Muslims), then recruit him as an informant, only to reward his rejections with a terrorism prosecution. Mehanna described how his education as an American schoolchild led him to identify with the cause of the oppressed against their oppressors, citing anti-slavery fighters Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner and John Brown as well as “Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and the civil rights struggle.”
Ultimately, Mehanna embraced a reactionary Islamic worldview. However, as he explained, he did not advocate the indiscriminate killing of Americans as retribution for the crimes of the imperialist rulers but rather the defense of those Muslims across the globe being crushed under the boots of the American marauders. Mehanna passionately recounted the devastation of the 1991 Gulf War, the UN starvation sanctions against Iraq, the “shock and awe” invasion of 2003 and brutal occupation that followed as well as the drone attacks in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen today that routinely kill civilians. As he emphasized, “This trial was not about my position on Muslims killing American civilians. It was about my position on Americans killing Muslim civilians.... The government says that I was obsessed with violence, with ‘killing Americans.’ But, as a Muslim living in these times, I can think of a lie no more ironic.”
The post-September 11 “war against terrorism” may have been hatched by the Bush administration, but it has been Obama and his top cop Eric Holder who have fed it, cleaned its feathers and let it soar. More so than his predecessor, Obama has targeted leftists. Obama’s Justice Department quadrupled the sentence for 72-year-old leftist attorney Lynne Stewart, who was imprisoned for zealously defending her client, a blind Islamic cleric convicted for an alleged plot to blow up NYC landmarks in the early 1990s. The Obama government has also gone after the Freedom Road Socialist Organization on the basis of purported links to the secular-nationalist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Colombia’s FARC guerrillas. Last year, Obama signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act, sanctioning the indefinite military detention of any persons, including U.S. citizens, accused of supporting “terrorism.”
The “anti-terror” laws and well-publicized prosecutions like that of Mehanna serve a dual purpose: purveying the myth of “national unity” and enhancing the repressive machinery of the capitalist state. As the bourgeois rulers ratchet up the grinding exploitation of the proletariat and oversee the brutal oppression of ghettoized black and Latino masses, they portray these measures as necessary to protect the entire population. But there is no unity of interests between the exploited and their exploiters. When the contradictions of American capitalism ultimately propel the working class into struggle, dissolving the “national unity” glue, workers will be confronted with naked state repression bolstered by the “war on terror.” It is incumbent on working people to fight to defend democratic rights, the besieged Muslim population and all those caught up in the “anti-terror” witchhunt. We seek to build a revolutionary workers party, a tribune of all the people, dedicated to leading the working class in sweeping away capitalist class rule and replacing it with a workers government.
U.S. Muslim Imprisoned for Translating-Free Tarek Mehanna!
Just as the American capitalist rulers have declared the “war against terrorism” to be eternal, the limits to which they will go in eviscerating civil liberties under that pretext know no bounds. In a frontal attack on the rights of speech supposedly protected in the First Amendment, Tarek Mehanna was convicted in December on bogus “material support to terrorism” charges primarily for translating jihadist documents. The 29-year-old U.S. citizen was sentenced on April 12 to 17 1/2 years in prison. It is in the interest of the working class, all minorities, youth and opponents of imperialist war to denounce Mehanna’s conviction and demand his immediate release!
This was a chemically pure thought-crime prosecution. Mehanna committed no crime, carried out no act of “terrorism,” and even according to what has been the government’s expansive definition, did not provide any “material” support to terrorist activities. According to the indictment, evidence that Mehanna furthered a “criminal conspiracy” was that he “created and/or translated, accepted credit for authoring and distributed text, videos, and other media to inspire others to engage in violent jihad,” “watched jihadi videos,” “discussed efforts to create like-minded youth” and spoke of “admiration and love for Usama bin Laden.” As Yale professor Andrew March pointed out in a 21 April New York Times op-ed piece “A Dangerous Mind?”: “Those acts were not used by the government to demonstrate the intent or mental state behind some other crime.... They were the crime.” One prosecutor gave the game away when he declared about the case: “It’s not illegal to watch something on the television. It is illegal, however, to watch something in order to cultivate your desire, your ideology.”
The government’s case rested on two wobbly legs. The first was making a trip abroad. In 2004 at the age of 21, Mehanna and a friend spent one week in Yemen purportedly in an unsuccessful search for a jihadi training camp from which they would continue on to Iraq to wage war against the American occupiers. The other leg—the core of the prosecution—was translating Islamist documents he found online, centrally a 2003 text by a Saudi religious scholar titled “39 Ways to Serve and Participate in Jihad.” Georgetown University law professor David Cole wrote in the New York Review of Books’ NYRblog (19 April):
“Google ‘39 Ways to Serve and Participate in Jihad’ and you’ll get over 590,000 hits. You’ll find full-text English language translations of this Arabic document on the Internet Archive, an Internet library; on 4Shared Desktop, a file-sharing site; and on numerous Islamic sites. You will find it cited and discussed in a US Senate Committee staff report and Congressional testimony. Feel free to read it. Just don’t try to make your own translation from the original.”
The proscription of what constitutes “material support” to terrorism, first promulgated in the Clinton administration’s 1996 “anti-terror” law and then extended in the Bush administration’s USA-Patriot Act, is so broad and vague as to allow the Feds to make it whatever they want it to be. In the 2010 Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project case, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the benign acts of advising the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and Kurdistan Workers Party on their appeals to the UN, engaging in political advocacy on behalf of Tamils and Kurds and training LTTE members in lobbying for tsunami relief would constitute material support to terrorism. (See “Supreme Court Decision Shreds First Amendment Rights,” WV No. 961, 2 July 2010.)
In denying that such prohibitions would violate the First Amendment rights of the Humanitarian Law Project (HLP), the Court ludicrously “explained” that it was not prohibiting “independent advocacy,” i.e., HLP could say whatever it wanted on behalf of a group designated terrorist—just not in consultation with any of its members! Although Mehanna’s prosecution relied on the Holder precedent, he engaged in exactly the “independent advocacy” supposedly approved by that ruling. There were no consultations or communications with Al Qaeda or anyone else the government has deemed terrorists. If upheld on appeal, Mehanna’s conviction will cement a major precedent in the rollback of First Amendment rights, criminalizing just about any speech deemed offensive to this ruling class, the most rapacious in world history.
In his statement to the court before sentencing, Mehanna pointed out how earlier the government had unsuccessfully sought to entrap him into an FBI-initiated terrorist plot (a common ploy in the “war on terror” witchhunt of Muslims), then recruit him as an informant, only to reward his rejections with a terrorism prosecution. Mehanna described how his education as an American schoolchild led him to identify with the cause of the oppressed against their oppressors, citing anti-slavery fighters Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner and John Brown as well as “Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and the civil rights struggle.”
Ultimately, Mehanna embraced a reactionary Islamic worldview. However, as he explained, he did not advocate the indiscriminate killing of Americans as retribution for the crimes of the imperialist rulers but rather the defense of those Muslims across the globe being crushed under the boots of the American marauders. Mehanna passionately recounted the devastation of the 1991 Gulf War, the UN starvation sanctions against Iraq, the “shock and awe” invasion of 2003 and brutal occupation that followed as well as the drone attacks in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen today that routinely kill civilians. As he emphasized, “This trial was not about my position on Muslims killing American civilians. It was about my position on Americans killing Muslim civilians.... The government says that I was obsessed with violence, with ‘killing Americans.’ But, as a Muslim living in these times, I can think of a lie no more ironic.”
The post-September 11 “war against terrorism” may have been hatched by the Bush administration, but it has been Obama and his top cop Eric Holder who have fed it, cleaned its feathers and let it soar. More so than his predecessor, Obama has targeted leftists. Obama’s Justice Department quadrupled the sentence for 72-year-old leftist attorney Lynne Stewart, who was imprisoned for zealously defending her client, a blind Islamic cleric convicted for an alleged plot to blow up NYC landmarks in the early 1990s. The Obama government has also gone after the Freedom Road Socialist Organization on the basis of purported links to the secular-nationalist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Colombia’s FARC guerrillas. Last year, Obama signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act, sanctioning the indefinite military detention of any persons, including U.S. citizens, accused of supporting “terrorism.”
The “anti-terror” laws and well-publicized prosecutions like that of Mehanna serve a dual purpose: purveying the myth of “national unity” and enhancing the repressive machinery of the capitalist state. As the bourgeois rulers ratchet up the grinding exploitation of the proletariat and oversee the brutal oppression of ghettoized black and Latino masses, they portray these measures as necessary to protect the entire population. But there is no unity of interests between the exploited and their exploiters. When the contradictions of American capitalism ultimately propel the working class into struggle, dissolving the “national unity” glue, workers will be confronted with naked state repression bolstered by the “war on terror.” It is incumbent on working people to fight to defend democratic rights, the besieged Muslim population and all those caught up in the “anti-terror” witchhunt. We seek to build a revolutionary workers party, a tribune of all the people, dedicated to leading the working class in sweeping away capitalist class rule and replacing it with a workers government.
The Latest From The Partisan Defense Committee-Free The Class-War Prisoners-Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, Free Leonard Peltier, Free Lynne Stewart And Her Co-Workers-Free The Remaining Ohio 7 Prisoners!-Defend Anti-NATO Protesters!
Click on the headline to link to the Partisan Defense Committee website.
Defend Anti-NATO Protesters!
Chicago
MAY 21—Over 10,000 people marched in Chicago yesterday as part of a week of protests against the annual summit meeting of the U.S.-dominated NATO imperialist military alliance. This gathering of war criminals, hosted by U.S. Commander-in-Chief Obama in his hometown, takes place against a backdrop of the now decade-long U.S./NATO occupation of Afghanistan and last year’s bombing of Libya, not to mention the ongoing austerity forced on working people. Down with NATO!
To shield NATO’s bloody imperialist rulers from justified outrage, Obama’s former henchman and current Democratic mayor Rahm Emanuel imposed a state of siege on Chicago. In the months leading up to the protests, Emanuel rewrote city ordinances to limit the rights of demonstrators, including by placing sweeping restrictions on permits. In one case, National Nurses United, whose members are facing a wage- and benefit-slashing offensive, was forced to cancel a march it had planned to accompany its rally.
Thousands of National Guardsmen, active-duty troops and deputized cops from as far away as North Carolina descended on the city. Police brutally attacked protesters, with arrests now totaling 90. Afterward, Obama praised the Chicago Police Department and the mayor, saying they “did wonderfully.”
As part of their effort to intimidate demonstrators and justify the massive show of police force, on May 16 the Chicago cops raided an apartment that housed out-of-town protesters, arresting the residents and charging three for a supposed “terrorist plot.” The men remain in prison in a clear case of entrapment. Two of those living in the apartment were either police informants or undercover cops. “It really is pretty playbook,” said Sarah Gelsomino of the National Lawyers Guild, which has provided legal counsel to the three men. “The police engage in this kind of conduct—very sensational charges and preemptive raids of activists in what we believe to be really an attempt to intimidate people to stop them from protesting.”
A YouTube video posted by the “NATO 3” prior to their arrest captures how the Chicago cops greeted protesters. With squad cars surrounding their vehicle, one officer invoked the police riot against protesters at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. He asks, “What did they say back in ’68?” Another cop replies: “Billy club to the f---ing skull.”
The NATO 3 are the first ever charged with violating Illinois state’s anti-terror statutes, which were enacted after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Here is another example of how the “war on terror,” which initially victimized Arab and Muslim immigrants, set into motion repressive measures ultimately meant for leftists, trade unionists and black people. It is in the interests of the working class to defend these men and all anti-NATO protesters against state repression.
The military adventures of the imperialist butchers abroad always come packaged with domestic repression at home. The U.S. capitalist ruling class that devastated Iraq and Afghanistan and is now unleashing its thugs in blue on protesters in Chicago is also responsible for grinding down working people nationwide. Struggle against U.S./NATO’s murderous occupations must be linked to a fight against the capitalist system that inevitably breeds war and depredation. Only through workers revolution can that system be swept away.
We reprint below a May 21 letter by the Partisan Defense Committee—a legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League—to the State’s Attorney.
* * *
The Partisan Defense Committee protests the police attacks on the demonstrations against the NATO summit in Chicago and arrest of over 50 protesters. The massive police mobilization and frontal assault on civil liberties accompanying the summit are directed against labor, leftists, antiwar activists and others who simply seek to exercise their First Amendment rights of speech and assembly.
On May 16, with no warrant but guns drawn and battering rams swinging, the Chicago police stormed an apartment in the Bridgeport neighborhood. Nine people were arrested. Three—Brent Betterly, Brian Church and Jared Chase—face charges of “conspiracy to commit terrorism, providing material support for terrorism, and possession of an explosive or incendiary device.” The arrests came less than a week after the accused “NATO 3” had posted on YouTube a video of an officer threatening them: “We’ll come look for you, each and every one of you.” Outrageously, each is being held on a $1.5 million bond and faces up to 40 years in prison if convicted!
The arrests of Betterly, Church and Chase have all the earmarks of a classic case of police entrapment and provocation. According to their attorneys, the allegations were trumped up by informants, who may have been undercover agents, living with them at the time of the police raid. Since then, two other political activists, Mark Neiweem and Sebastian Senakiewicz, have been arrested on terrorism-related charges, reportedly based on accusations by the same police informers. A spokesman for the National Lawyers Guild rightly described these charges as an “effort to frighten people and to diminish the size of the demonstrations.”
We demand that all the charges be dropped! Hands off the anti-NATO protesters!
Defend Anti-NATO Protesters!
Chicago
MAY 21—Over 10,000 people marched in Chicago yesterday as part of a week of protests against the annual summit meeting of the U.S.-dominated NATO imperialist military alliance. This gathering of war criminals, hosted by U.S. Commander-in-Chief Obama in his hometown, takes place against a backdrop of the now decade-long U.S./NATO occupation of Afghanistan and last year’s bombing of Libya, not to mention the ongoing austerity forced on working people. Down with NATO!
To shield NATO’s bloody imperialist rulers from justified outrage, Obama’s former henchman and current Democratic mayor Rahm Emanuel imposed a state of siege on Chicago. In the months leading up to the protests, Emanuel rewrote city ordinances to limit the rights of demonstrators, including by placing sweeping restrictions on permits. In one case, National Nurses United, whose members are facing a wage- and benefit-slashing offensive, was forced to cancel a march it had planned to accompany its rally.
Thousands of National Guardsmen, active-duty troops and deputized cops from as far away as North Carolina descended on the city. Police brutally attacked protesters, with arrests now totaling 90. Afterward, Obama praised the Chicago Police Department and the mayor, saying they “did wonderfully.”
As part of their effort to intimidate demonstrators and justify the massive show of police force, on May 16 the Chicago cops raided an apartment that housed out-of-town protesters, arresting the residents and charging three for a supposed “terrorist plot.” The men remain in prison in a clear case of entrapment. Two of those living in the apartment were either police informants or undercover cops. “It really is pretty playbook,” said Sarah Gelsomino of the National Lawyers Guild, which has provided legal counsel to the three men. “The police engage in this kind of conduct—very sensational charges and preemptive raids of activists in what we believe to be really an attempt to intimidate people to stop them from protesting.”
A YouTube video posted by the “NATO 3” prior to their arrest captures how the Chicago cops greeted protesters. With squad cars surrounding their vehicle, one officer invoked the police riot against protesters at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. He asks, “What did they say back in ’68?” Another cop replies: “Billy club to the f---ing skull.”
The NATO 3 are the first ever charged with violating Illinois state’s anti-terror statutes, which were enacted after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Here is another example of how the “war on terror,” which initially victimized Arab and Muslim immigrants, set into motion repressive measures ultimately meant for leftists, trade unionists and black people. It is in the interests of the working class to defend these men and all anti-NATO protesters against state repression.
The military adventures of the imperialist butchers abroad always come packaged with domestic repression at home. The U.S. capitalist ruling class that devastated Iraq and Afghanistan and is now unleashing its thugs in blue on protesters in Chicago is also responsible for grinding down working people nationwide. Struggle against U.S./NATO’s murderous occupations must be linked to a fight against the capitalist system that inevitably breeds war and depredation. Only through workers revolution can that system be swept away.
We reprint below a May 21 letter by the Partisan Defense Committee—a legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League—to the State’s Attorney.
* * *
The Partisan Defense Committee protests the police attacks on the demonstrations against the NATO summit in Chicago and arrest of over 50 protesters. The massive police mobilization and frontal assault on civil liberties accompanying the summit are directed against labor, leftists, antiwar activists and others who simply seek to exercise their First Amendment rights of speech and assembly.
On May 16, with no warrant but guns drawn and battering rams swinging, the Chicago police stormed an apartment in the Bridgeport neighborhood. Nine people were arrested. Three—Brent Betterly, Brian Church and Jared Chase—face charges of “conspiracy to commit terrorism, providing material support for terrorism, and possession of an explosive or incendiary device.” The arrests came less than a week after the accused “NATO 3” had posted on YouTube a video of an officer threatening them: “We’ll come look for you, each and every one of you.” Outrageously, each is being held on a $1.5 million bond and faces up to 40 years in prison if convicted!
The arrests of Betterly, Church and Chase have all the earmarks of a classic case of police entrapment and provocation. According to their attorneys, the allegations were trumped up by informants, who may have been undercover agents, living with them at the time of the police raid. Since then, two other political activists, Mark Neiweem and Sebastian Senakiewicz, have been arrested on terrorism-related charges, reportedly based on accusations by the same police informers. A spokesman for the National Lawyers Guild rightly described these charges as an “effort to frighten people and to diminish the size of the demonstrations.”
We demand that all the charges be dropped! Hands off the anti-NATO protesters!
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Marxism and the Fight for Women’s Liberation
Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League website.
Workers Vanguard No. 1003
25 May 2012
Presentation by a Veteran Communist
Marxism and the Fight for Women’s Liberation
(Young Spartacus pages)
We are pleased to publish a Spartacus Youth Club class given by comrade Marianne Clemens in San Francisco, California, on 26 October 2011. It has been edited for publication and slightly expanded by Young Spartacus in collaboration with comrade Clemens.
We are the party of the Russian Revolution. October 1917 is unique in human history, and we study it intensively: it shows that the conditions for the true liberation of women only exist when the working class takes and consolidates state power under a proletarian, revolutionary, internationalist leadership. In this huge leap for humanity we also see that because women’s oppression is so thoroughly bound up with the state and private property, there can be no all-sided liberation without the liberation of women.
The Bolsheviks didn’t invent this part of the communist program. For the great utopian socialists of the early 19th century women’s liberation was integral to socialism. Clara Zetkin, a veteran socialist and hugely influential among Russian socialists, saw the heroic role women played in the French Revolution of 1789-94 as the midwife of the socialist women’s movement. This, the greatest of 17th and 18th century bourgeois revolutions, swept away the garbage of ancient, entrenched practices cementing women’s oppression that went along with feudal property relations, bringing significant gains for women. But the utopian socialists also saw that women’s complete liberation was only possible in a collectivized society, not in the capitalist social order based on private property (private ownership of the means of production—not your personal effects) that the bourgeois revolutions secured.
Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
Women’s oppression is rooted in the institution of the family. And as Trotsky wrote, you can’t just abolish the family, you have to replace it. Friedrich Engels, Marx’s lifelong friend and collaborator, was the first to put the woman question on a scientific basis and show how the family, private property and the state arose, linked in early civilization as basic institutions of class society.
Engels was not entirely free of the moralistic assumption that women (chaste things that we are) do not enjoy variety in sexual relations. Also, over 125 years later, we know much more about the prehistory of our species, including beyond Europe. But research has only confirmed Engels’ analysis, including that the first oppression of classes coincides with the oppression of the feminine sex by the masculine, namely in monogamous marriage.
In the earliest human groups in the period termed the Paleolithic (old stone age) in Europe, “primitive communist,” matrilineal societies, there was no separation of rights and duties. There was no prohibition on whom you could play around with or have children with. The children were the children of all; all adult women were their mothers and all adult men were their fathers. This was the earliest form of the family, known as “group marriage.” All that was hunted, gathered or grown belonged to all. Biology determined the division of labor: the women performed tasks that didn’t interfere with bearing, carrying around and nursing the children. That didn’t give them a subordinate social status: women were revered as the bearers of the species. It is generally accepted today that women invented three technologies crucial to the spread and development of human society: spinning fibers and making string, later weaving; pottery making and horticulture.
Gradually tribes settle down on a common territory. The division of labor becomes more complicated—in the beginning scattering seeds and harvesting the food crop, and then plowing up the earth and planting seeds; manufacturing implements; domesticating and caring for animals.
When the plow is developed, e.g., in Sumer, productivity eventually rises massively over simple horticulture, creating a surplus. As surplus production rises, wealth and consequently social power accrue to the landowners—who strive to bequeath their wealth and power to their biological children. Women, biologically tied to childbearing and nursing, aren’t available to work long hours plowing, and do not have the physical strength needed for the task. Thus, in this phase of social development, women come to be excluded from productive work (i.e., the production of the surplus). A ruling class was consolidated early on in Egypt and Mesopotamia. The Sumerian ruling class was the tribally based priesthood.
Mother right and the large matrilineal and matrilocal “gens” are supplanted. The patriarchal “monogamian family” becomes society’s basic unit. Women lose the equal rights they had in primitive communistic society. The man as master of the house subjugates woman and charges her with a host of duties, above all monogamy, in order to ensure the inheritance of wealth and power, and a lower social status is attached to women’s biological role. This is the “world-historic defeat of the female sex” Engels talks about, and the subject of the classical Greek myths: the clash of the customs and freedoms of the older society with the new—as human tragedy.
So that’s the family and private property. This is also the point the state is born. Now, who was to become the ruling class and run the state wasn’t decided by cunning or wickedness or brute force or male chauvinism, but by economics. Protecting and expanding a territory and the accumulated surplus takes military might—an armed body of men that defends the interests of the propertied. That is the core of the state. In the endless wars over territory that humanity is then subjected to, there is a reason to enslave the soldiers of the vanquished army instead of killing them: they can be pressed into producing the surplus. Labor is branded as base and worthy only of slaves.
Today all school kids get it pounded into their heads that ancient Greece is the fount of “pure” democracy. But that democracy was based on slavery and the subjugation of women. And it was only for the owners of slaves—the “paterfamilias.” In The Republic Plato justifies deep social inequality: “souls” were made of gold (the slave owners, being closest to the gods), silver (the soldiers) or bronze and iron—who are forbidden to own property.
In the intervening thousands of years of class societies, the family has had many forms. But in a nutshell, that’s why the family, private property and the state are organically linked—and are crucial to understand. And that’s why the capitalist ruling class has always hysterically defended all three. If they perceive the family to be under attack, they and their “leftist” water boys fly into a fearful rage.
October Revolution of 1917
Karl Marx’s most important original contribution to socialist theory was to show that the victorious workers revolution must smash the bourgeois state and create its own, a state of a new kind—the dictatorship of the proletariat. The October Revolution led by the Bolsheviks established a workers state power that laid the basis for socialist construction: they nationalized the means of production and distribution, established a monopoly of foreign trade and banking, and began organizing a collectivized planned economy. Some of their first measures decreed equal rights for women and men. They made marriage and divorce simple matters of civil registration. They abolished all laws criminalizing consensual sexual relations, including homosexuality. We fight for equal rights for gay women and men and against all forms of bigotry—which will disappear for good only with the family and its straitjacket values. The hard work came after the 1917 Revolution—the “material act” or process of women’s liberation—beginning to collectivize family housework and childcare.
A corps of impressive women in the Bolshevik Party was doing work among women well before World War I. Most already had many years of experience in the underground, in nihilist or social-revolutionary groups when they became Bolsheviks. Not a few had done some hard time. Most were highly educated, from privileged layers of society. Through years of political struggle against the opponents of the Communists, they became highly trained, steeled Marxists. An index of their high political level is that most either sympathized politically with Leon Trotsky and opposed the ham-fisted, nationalist bureaucracy that was consolidated around Stalin in 1923-24, or openly joined Trotsky’s Left Opposition in the next few years. The best, if they lived that long, shared the fate of the entire leadership of the October Revolution whom Stalin destroyed by 1940.
In 1917 the Russian working class was a tiny minority in a few urban centers, in a sea of peasant backwardness—less urbanized than India today. Women in the priest-ridden countryside were illiterate, superstitious, and were treated like beasts of burden. So winning over and mobilizing the masses of toiling women for the revolution was daunting. In 1919, the year the Communist International (Comintern) was founded, the Bolshevik Party created the Department of the Central Committee for Work Among Women, known as Zhenotdel. In 1920 the Comintern Executive formed the International Women’s Secretariat to coordinate the work and publish a journal in German and one in Russian. Zhenotdel party organizers were in charge of work in Soviet Russia and made great contributions to the work internationally.
Inessa Armand was one of the most talented among the layer of high-level women cadre who led the Bolsheviks’ early work among women. She was Zhenotdel’s first head until tragically she died of cholera in 1920. Armand introduced two extremely effective methods that became the Bolsheviks’ primary tools to win over to the side of the revolution and mobilize the doubly and triply oppressed female masses in the actual work of constructing and administering the new society on a socialist basis.
In delegate assemblies and non-party women’s conferences, Zhenotdel speakers asked the women to explain what they wanted and needed most. Then with party assistance, they went out and began building their own childcare centers, communal kitchens, laundries, literacy centers and schools. A couple of million women workers and poor peasants were mobilized in this work. They were the vanguard in these tasks, but they knew that if Soviet Russia could survive, the entire working population would be drawn into this work more and more: it was the future infrastructure of society as a whole.
But 1920-21 was the high point of this work. Replacing the family requires truly massive resources. With famine and even cannibalism in the countryside, the cities decimated and in rubble after almost four years of civil war and the savage incursions of 14 capitalist armies, in mid 1921 scarce resources had to be diverted to get the factories running and feed the urban workforce. By late 1923 it had become clear that there would be no revolution in Germany, and thus, no aid from Europe. The Soviet Union had to retrench.
Making a virtue out of necessity, in 1924 Stalin put forward the anti-revolutionary dogma of “socialism in one country” (see Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed). Under Stalin the revolution degenerated bureaucratically, although the economic basis of the workers state remained. As Trotsky wrote, Stalin glued the broken shell of the family back together. Many gains for women were reversed—abortion was banned in 1936. The bureaucracy simply declared socialism, instead of telling the truth—that socialism requires huge resources and an international division of labor and thus is impossible under conditions of generalized want.
Despite the bureaucratic degeneration, the vision of future society that issued out of the Russian Revolution was so inspiring that the lively debate on collective forms of living continued into the 1930s. We defended the Soviet Union unconditionally from internal counterrevolution and imperialist attack, until the last. For 70 years the imperialists had sought a way to destroy the Soviet Union. Finally, Stalinist bureaucrat Boris Yeltsin, supported by his patrons in the U.S. government, presided over the counterrevolution that opened up one-sixth of the earth’s land surface to capitalist exploitation.
As we wrote in 1993: “Capitalist counterrevolution tramples on women.” A comrade who worked there described capitalist Russia as “the valley of the shadow of death”—promising a nightmare future. Public health care died with the Soviet Union. Life expectancy and the birth rate plummeted; alcoholism, drug addiction, malnutrition, debilitating diseases (including AIDS and Multidrug-Resistant Tuberculosis), homelessness, prostitution and mental retardation in children soared. Armies of hungry children live on the streets, as in the ruins of WWI and the Civil War.
DDR: East German Deformed Workers State
The Soviet degenerated workers state and the East and Central European workers states that were bureaucratically deformed from birth were “transitional” societies, stuck halfway between capitalism and socialism. For 24 years I was a member of our German section, including during the 1989 budding proletarian political revolution in East Germany (DDR), where our international intervened with all forces we could muster. We called for workers and soldiers councils (soviets) that would defend the proletarian gains and return to the road of Lenin and Trotsky, for unconditional defense of the DDR against counterrevolution, and for a Red Republic of Workers Councils in all of Germany through proletarian political revolution in the East and socialist revolution in the West.
The DDR was founded in 1949 on the model of the degenerated USSR, “on the bayonets of the Red Army” after it had smashed the Hitler regime. It was a pretty drab place, but everybody was guaranteed a job and a place to live. Women there probably had the highest social status in the world. Over 95 percent worked. They were crane operators, engineers, economists, judges, lawyers, doctors. Mothers got a full year off work with pay after the birth of each child, and their jobs were safe during that time. You got prenatal visits at home from medical personnel, and the ambulance was on call when it was time to go to the hospital. At the plant and factories, there were day-care centers, nurseries, canteens, laundries and libraries.
But there was still the “second shift” in the family—millions of mommies shopped, cleaned, fed and took care of everybody. Like Stalin, the Honecker regime in the DDR glorified the “socialist family” as the germ cell of the state in society. Discrimination against women outside the workplace was especially obvious in political life. There were almost no women in the upper echelons of the East German Stalinist party (Socialist Unity Party)—except Margot Honecker, the feared Minister of Education, and a few more.
It was a society of enormous contradictions. The workers told this joke: “What would happen if the Sahara went socialist?”—“For 10 years, nothing. Then sand would become scarce.” The economy was secretly bankrupt. To get hard currency they exported high-quality heavy equipment and machine tools, but they couldn’t make women’s underwear that fit, or condoms that didn’t leak or were more sensitive than safety gloves. But AIDS cases were practically unknown: Travel restrictions isolated the population. There was no drug scene—the currency wasn’t convertible. A DDR scientist we knew had invented their own ELISA test, and they tested every last liter of blood that was used.
The bureaucracy constantly lied to the population and spied on them for 40 years. Many workers were terribly cynical in the end, but many young workers and soldiers wanted real socialism—not what the bureaucrats told them it was.
When we had an internal class on the woman question and passed around graphics showing early Soviet plans for collective living centers (see “Architecture as a Tool of Social Transformation,” Women and Revolution No. 11, Spring 1976) our East German comrades were thunderstruck. One woman comrade said “Now I see how far we were from socialism!” She had always wondered why there were the huge long avenues of gigantic high-rise apartment projects for miles like the famous Stalin Boulevard, devoid of any social infrastructure, that atomized the working class. The DDR couldn’t afford to replace the family, so they lied. The population had never heard that real socialism by definition means redesigning society, with collectivized housework and child rearing!
Recently I was excited to find a 1975 Russian edition of Inessa Armand’s selected works. But at the beginning of one wonderful article the editors had actually deleted two sentences that read: “Private, separate domestic economies have become harmful anachronisms which only hold up and make more difficult the carrying out of new forms of distribution. They must be abolished” (emphasis added). Obviously, no self-respecting Stalinist would admit that the tiny domestic economic unit was an anachronism.
Assault on Women’s Rights
Let’s talk about the U.S. today, where abortion rights have been whittled away for almost 40 years, hitting working and poor women hardest. The defense of women’s right to abortion is absolutely crucial. It’s about women’s equality, women’s independence. If working women do not have that right, they have no say in their own future and that of their families. But, crucially, it is very hard to participate in social struggle—as the rulers know.
The state and their attack dogs are viciously sworn to keeping women bound up in the family, because the family is vitally necessary to maintain the capitalist order. Ensuring inheritance, as in the past, only matters to the propertied class. The ruling class needs the working-class family to reproduce the next generation of wage slaves and cannon fodder. But also, the family is hugely useful because it inculcates and reinforces bourgeois ideology and morals and, above all, obedience to authority.
We support every possible defense of the right to abortion, just as we defend every gain for working people, however partial. Leninists struggle to be the tribune of the people, able to react to every instance of tyranny and oppression, no matter what layer or class of the people it affects. That is the way we set forth our socialist convictions and our democratic demands publicly and make clear for everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat. Because it is in the historic interests of the proletariat as a whole, we call for free abortion on demand as part of free, quality health care for all, and free, quality 24-hour childcare.
In the early 19th century Charles Fourier wrote, “Social progress is brought about by the progress of women towards liberty.” Yes! In regions of the Third World where women are excluded from the political economy, the economy is characteristically stagnant. Society is correspondingly backward. In the “advanced” U.S. anti-woman bigotry is especially handy in recurring periods of economic decline, when the capitalists throw women and minorities out of the workforce first and then blame them for being poor. To go after their hot and cold wars abroad, the imperialists always need to whip up fervor at home for “free enterprise,” God and country, and “family values,” the code word for trashing women’s rights, as we have seen since the late 1970s.
From Feminism to Marxism
Now, since the “Occupy” movement has caught everybody’s attention as the way to right society’s wrongs, let me tell you a story about my student days. After growing up in Jim Crow East Texas, I got into left politics at Cornell University during the Vietnam War over two things: black liberation and women’s liberation. The New Left pushed all this wretched literature that the most oppressed were the most revolutionary. Lenin and Marx? Oh, that’s old hat! In the women’s movement, it was “self-determination”—like your body or uterus is a little country that can declare its independence. We were spinning our wheels going nowhere.
The women’s movement splintered between the straights and the gays; between those who took their nice Ivy League degrees and formed their own women’s health or dental or legal clinics and the ones that were for forming a women’s army. To fight whom, you ask? Well, we witnessed a gang of frat rats with baseball bats marching into a women’s concert intending to clean it out. Luckily the concert was already over, but after that the women decided a women’s army wasn’t such a good idea. You need men and women to fight shoulder to shoulder against the bigots.
Meanwhile everything polarized along racial lines. In April 1969 the black students at Cornell occupied the student union building to protest the administration’s racist policies and to demand a black studies center. After right-wing frat rats attacked (these guys were real activists), amid rumors of a second attack with guns, the black students armed themselves. SDS set up a protective cordon around the building; thousands of black and white students mobilized. It was tense, but ultimately everything stayed quiet. On the second day, the administration met the black students’ demands. Still armed, they marched with great dignity out of the building and across the arts quad. The following year the new black studies center was torched by racist vigilantes.
The Black Panthers were really the best of that generation, as black militants were increasingly sinking into the dead end of black nationalism. Their strategy was to “pick up the gun” and “electrify” the ghetto masses into revolutionary action. The Feds reacted with COINTELPRO, blowing away 38 Panthers. The Panthers taught me that a revolution is necessary to achieve liberation. If you are dead or in prison you’re not going to electrify anybody. What was left—blacks, Latinos, Native people, whites, female and male, gays and straights—all went off by themselves to “liberate” their own “sector.”
Except there was one serious group on campus. Through a friend, an anarchist of sorts, I had gotten to know a very nice couple who were around the Spartacist League. But we thought: anybody but the Sparts! The Spartacist guy and I used to have dreadful fights over the degeneration of the Soviet Union. He was Carl Lichtenstein, our very dear comrade who recently died unexpectedly. I thought I really had the number of those Russians, those patriarchal, male chauvinist pigs—why else could the revolution have degenerated? So I wasn’t listening.
Another friend who had been in the Canadian section of Ernest Mandel’s United Secretariat recommended I read Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution on the party. Oh, yes, and J.P. Nettl’s biography of Rosa Luxemburg. Both excellent suggestions, but the trouble was, I couldn’t understand a word. First I was depressed, but I got angry when I realized that all this “Marx and Lenin are old hat” was crap. It had kept me ignorant of some 150 years of working-class struggle!
In a somewhat chastened frame of mind, I moved to Boston, where I again met Carl and Alice, who by then were members of the SL. My first discussion with Carl was again about the Russian Revolution. To his surprise, I was ready to listen. What galled me most about my years at Cornell was that in that time a whole generation of young militants on the campuses and in the ghettos and barrios were wasted in the dead-end activism of all kinds I had seen over the past five years. I began to read, and to discuss what I read, and I began to understand that the key, missing from all those dead ends, was a party: The working class is the only force in society that has the social power to change history, but to win it needs the leadership of a revolutionary party.
The first youth class I was invited to was on the woman question, like this one. The first thing on the reading list was Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, chapters 2 and 9. I couldn’t put it down and read it cover to cover. The second thing was the Comintern’s “Theses on Work among Women.” When the comrades asked, I couldn’t say I disagreed with anything in the Theses, because the down-to-earth realistic approach to liberation answered questions that I had never gotten answers to.
All the talk about “liberation” and “self-determination” and “empowerment” in capitalism—we heard it then and you hear it today from “leftist” organizations—is just hot air. It’s not hard for them to defend the right to abortion, or rather, “the right to choose,” which doesn’t offend the Democrats. Their real perspective is to remain unobjectionable to petty-bourgeois public opinion. But one thing you are not likely to hear from such fake socialists is that the road to women’s emancipation leads through a real workers revolution. Such outfits are obstacles on that path.
So becoming a Marxist means learning to study history and how to analyze every new situation that arises from the point of view of the historic interests of the working class. So you study. You follow events around the world. When we can, we build actions that show by example what is needed on a large scale. For years, it seems like nothing happens, and then class battles break over our heads. Then, as in the DDR, everything happens in the space of hours and days. In 1989 we were all keenly aware that everything we had read and studied was for that moment. When the working class begins to move in the U.S., and it will, we will be there fighting for the program of communist revolution. We are fighting to build a multiracial vanguard party of the type that led the October Revolution to victory. And true to their vision, in a socialist future, women will be fully and equally integrated into society. Everyone will be able to develop to their full capacity. Society will be free of the barbaric garbage of the past—violence and bigotry against women, free of the reactionary straitjacket of the family and religion and capitalist state repression. If you want to fight for that future, join us.
Workers Vanguard No. 1003
25 May 2012
Presentation by a Veteran Communist
Marxism and the Fight for Women’s Liberation
(Young Spartacus pages)
We are pleased to publish a Spartacus Youth Club class given by comrade Marianne Clemens in San Francisco, California, on 26 October 2011. It has been edited for publication and slightly expanded by Young Spartacus in collaboration with comrade Clemens.
We are the party of the Russian Revolution. October 1917 is unique in human history, and we study it intensively: it shows that the conditions for the true liberation of women only exist when the working class takes and consolidates state power under a proletarian, revolutionary, internationalist leadership. In this huge leap for humanity we also see that because women’s oppression is so thoroughly bound up with the state and private property, there can be no all-sided liberation without the liberation of women.
The Bolsheviks didn’t invent this part of the communist program. For the great utopian socialists of the early 19th century women’s liberation was integral to socialism. Clara Zetkin, a veteran socialist and hugely influential among Russian socialists, saw the heroic role women played in the French Revolution of 1789-94 as the midwife of the socialist women’s movement. This, the greatest of 17th and 18th century bourgeois revolutions, swept away the garbage of ancient, entrenched practices cementing women’s oppression that went along with feudal property relations, bringing significant gains for women. But the utopian socialists also saw that women’s complete liberation was only possible in a collectivized society, not in the capitalist social order based on private property (private ownership of the means of production—not your personal effects) that the bourgeois revolutions secured.
Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
Women’s oppression is rooted in the institution of the family. And as Trotsky wrote, you can’t just abolish the family, you have to replace it. Friedrich Engels, Marx’s lifelong friend and collaborator, was the first to put the woman question on a scientific basis and show how the family, private property and the state arose, linked in early civilization as basic institutions of class society.
Engels was not entirely free of the moralistic assumption that women (chaste things that we are) do not enjoy variety in sexual relations. Also, over 125 years later, we know much more about the prehistory of our species, including beyond Europe. But research has only confirmed Engels’ analysis, including that the first oppression of classes coincides with the oppression of the feminine sex by the masculine, namely in monogamous marriage.
In the earliest human groups in the period termed the Paleolithic (old stone age) in Europe, “primitive communist,” matrilineal societies, there was no separation of rights and duties. There was no prohibition on whom you could play around with or have children with. The children were the children of all; all adult women were their mothers and all adult men were their fathers. This was the earliest form of the family, known as “group marriage.” All that was hunted, gathered or grown belonged to all. Biology determined the division of labor: the women performed tasks that didn’t interfere with bearing, carrying around and nursing the children. That didn’t give them a subordinate social status: women were revered as the bearers of the species. It is generally accepted today that women invented three technologies crucial to the spread and development of human society: spinning fibers and making string, later weaving; pottery making and horticulture.
Gradually tribes settle down on a common territory. The division of labor becomes more complicated—in the beginning scattering seeds and harvesting the food crop, and then plowing up the earth and planting seeds; manufacturing implements; domesticating and caring for animals.
When the plow is developed, e.g., in Sumer, productivity eventually rises massively over simple horticulture, creating a surplus. As surplus production rises, wealth and consequently social power accrue to the landowners—who strive to bequeath their wealth and power to their biological children. Women, biologically tied to childbearing and nursing, aren’t available to work long hours plowing, and do not have the physical strength needed for the task. Thus, in this phase of social development, women come to be excluded from productive work (i.e., the production of the surplus). A ruling class was consolidated early on in Egypt and Mesopotamia. The Sumerian ruling class was the tribally based priesthood.
Mother right and the large matrilineal and matrilocal “gens” are supplanted. The patriarchal “monogamian family” becomes society’s basic unit. Women lose the equal rights they had in primitive communistic society. The man as master of the house subjugates woman and charges her with a host of duties, above all monogamy, in order to ensure the inheritance of wealth and power, and a lower social status is attached to women’s biological role. This is the “world-historic defeat of the female sex” Engels talks about, and the subject of the classical Greek myths: the clash of the customs and freedoms of the older society with the new—as human tragedy.
So that’s the family and private property. This is also the point the state is born. Now, who was to become the ruling class and run the state wasn’t decided by cunning or wickedness or brute force or male chauvinism, but by economics. Protecting and expanding a territory and the accumulated surplus takes military might—an armed body of men that defends the interests of the propertied. That is the core of the state. In the endless wars over territory that humanity is then subjected to, there is a reason to enslave the soldiers of the vanquished army instead of killing them: they can be pressed into producing the surplus. Labor is branded as base and worthy only of slaves.
Today all school kids get it pounded into their heads that ancient Greece is the fount of “pure” democracy. But that democracy was based on slavery and the subjugation of women. And it was only for the owners of slaves—the “paterfamilias.” In The Republic Plato justifies deep social inequality: “souls” were made of gold (the slave owners, being closest to the gods), silver (the soldiers) or bronze and iron—who are forbidden to own property.
In the intervening thousands of years of class societies, the family has had many forms. But in a nutshell, that’s why the family, private property and the state are organically linked—and are crucial to understand. And that’s why the capitalist ruling class has always hysterically defended all three. If they perceive the family to be under attack, they and their “leftist” water boys fly into a fearful rage.
October Revolution of 1917
Karl Marx’s most important original contribution to socialist theory was to show that the victorious workers revolution must smash the bourgeois state and create its own, a state of a new kind—the dictatorship of the proletariat. The October Revolution led by the Bolsheviks established a workers state power that laid the basis for socialist construction: they nationalized the means of production and distribution, established a monopoly of foreign trade and banking, and began organizing a collectivized planned economy. Some of their first measures decreed equal rights for women and men. They made marriage and divorce simple matters of civil registration. They abolished all laws criminalizing consensual sexual relations, including homosexuality. We fight for equal rights for gay women and men and against all forms of bigotry—which will disappear for good only with the family and its straitjacket values. The hard work came after the 1917 Revolution—the “material act” or process of women’s liberation—beginning to collectivize family housework and childcare.
A corps of impressive women in the Bolshevik Party was doing work among women well before World War I. Most already had many years of experience in the underground, in nihilist or social-revolutionary groups when they became Bolsheviks. Not a few had done some hard time. Most were highly educated, from privileged layers of society. Through years of political struggle against the opponents of the Communists, they became highly trained, steeled Marxists. An index of their high political level is that most either sympathized politically with Leon Trotsky and opposed the ham-fisted, nationalist bureaucracy that was consolidated around Stalin in 1923-24, or openly joined Trotsky’s Left Opposition in the next few years. The best, if they lived that long, shared the fate of the entire leadership of the October Revolution whom Stalin destroyed by 1940.
In 1917 the Russian working class was a tiny minority in a few urban centers, in a sea of peasant backwardness—less urbanized than India today. Women in the priest-ridden countryside were illiterate, superstitious, and were treated like beasts of burden. So winning over and mobilizing the masses of toiling women for the revolution was daunting. In 1919, the year the Communist International (Comintern) was founded, the Bolshevik Party created the Department of the Central Committee for Work Among Women, known as Zhenotdel. In 1920 the Comintern Executive formed the International Women’s Secretariat to coordinate the work and publish a journal in German and one in Russian. Zhenotdel party organizers were in charge of work in Soviet Russia and made great contributions to the work internationally.
Inessa Armand was one of the most talented among the layer of high-level women cadre who led the Bolsheviks’ early work among women. She was Zhenotdel’s first head until tragically she died of cholera in 1920. Armand introduced two extremely effective methods that became the Bolsheviks’ primary tools to win over to the side of the revolution and mobilize the doubly and triply oppressed female masses in the actual work of constructing and administering the new society on a socialist basis.
In delegate assemblies and non-party women’s conferences, Zhenotdel speakers asked the women to explain what they wanted and needed most. Then with party assistance, they went out and began building their own childcare centers, communal kitchens, laundries, literacy centers and schools. A couple of million women workers and poor peasants were mobilized in this work. They were the vanguard in these tasks, but they knew that if Soviet Russia could survive, the entire working population would be drawn into this work more and more: it was the future infrastructure of society as a whole.
But 1920-21 was the high point of this work. Replacing the family requires truly massive resources. With famine and even cannibalism in the countryside, the cities decimated and in rubble after almost four years of civil war and the savage incursions of 14 capitalist armies, in mid 1921 scarce resources had to be diverted to get the factories running and feed the urban workforce. By late 1923 it had become clear that there would be no revolution in Germany, and thus, no aid from Europe. The Soviet Union had to retrench.
Making a virtue out of necessity, in 1924 Stalin put forward the anti-revolutionary dogma of “socialism in one country” (see Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed). Under Stalin the revolution degenerated bureaucratically, although the economic basis of the workers state remained. As Trotsky wrote, Stalin glued the broken shell of the family back together. Many gains for women were reversed—abortion was banned in 1936. The bureaucracy simply declared socialism, instead of telling the truth—that socialism requires huge resources and an international division of labor and thus is impossible under conditions of generalized want.
Despite the bureaucratic degeneration, the vision of future society that issued out of the Russian Revolution was so inspiring that the lively debate on collective forms of living continued into the 1930s. We defended the Soviet Union unconditionally from internal counterrevolution and imperialist attack, until the last. For 70 years the imperialists had sought a way to destroy the Soviet Union. Finally, Stalinist bureaucrat Boris Yeltsin, supported by his patrons in the U.S. government, presided over the counterrevolution that opened up one-sixth of the earth’s land surface to capitalist exploitation.
As we wrote in 1993: “Capitalist counterrevolution tramples on women.” A comrade who worked there described capitalist Russia as “the valley of the shadow of death”—promising a nightmare future. Public health care died with the Soviet Union. Life expectancy and the birth rate plummeted; alcoholism, drug addiction, malnutrition, debilitating diseases (including AIDS and Multidrug-Resistant Tuberculosis), homelessness, prostitution and mental retardation in children soared. Armies of hungry children live on the streets, as in the ruins of WWI and the Civil War.
DDR: East German Deformed Workers State
The Soviet degenerated workers state and the East and Central European workers states that were bureaucratically deformed from birth were “transitional” societies, stuck halfway between capitalism and socialism. For 24 years I was a member of our German section, including during the 1989 budding proletarian political revolution in East Germany (DDR), where our international intervened with all forces we could muster. We called for workers and soldiers councils (soviets) that would defend the proletarian gains and return to the road of Lenin and Trotsky, for unconditional defense of the DDR against counterrevolution, and for a Red Republic of Workers Councils in all of Germany through proletarian political revolution in the East and socialist revolution in the West.
The DDR was founded in 1949 on the model of the degenerated USSR, “on the bayonets of the Red Army” after it had smashed the Hitler regime. It was a pretty drab place, but everybody was guaranteed a job and a place to live. Women there probably had the highest social status in the world. Over 95 percent worked. They were crane operators, engineers, economists, judges, lawyers, doctors. Mothers got a full year off work with pay after the birth of each child, and their jobs were safe during that time. You got prenatal visits at home from medical personnel, and the ambulance was on call when it was time to go to the hospital. At the plant and factories, there were day-care centers, nurseries, canteens, laundries and libraries.
But there was still the “second shift” in the family—millions of mommies shopped, cleaned, fed and took care of everybody. Like Stalin, the Honecker regime in the DDR glorified the “socialist family” as the germ cell of the state in society. Discrimination against women outside the workplace was especially obvious in political life. There were almost no women in the upper echelons of the East German Stalinist party (Socialist Unity Party)—except Margot Honecker, the feared Minister of Education, and a few more.
It was a society of enormous contradictions. The workers told this joke: “What would happen if the Sahara went socialist?”—“For 10 years, nothing. Then sand would become scarce.” The economy was secretly bankrupt. To get hard currency they exported high-quality heavy equipment and machine tools, but they couldn’t make women’s underwear that fit, or condoms that didn’t leak or were more sensitive than safety gloves. But AIDS cases were practically unknown: Travel restrictions isolated the population. There was no drug scene—the currency wasn’t convertible. A DDR scientist we knew had invented their own ELISA test, and they tested every last liter of blood that was used.
The bureaucracy constantly lied to the population and spied on them for 40 years. Many workers were terribly cynical in the end, but many young workers and soldiers wanted real socialism—not what the bureaucrats told them it was.
When we had an internal class on the woman question and passed around graphics showing early Soviet plans for collective living centers (see “Architecture as a Tool of Social Transformation,” Women and Revolution No. 11, Spring 1976) our East German comrades were thunderstruck. One woman comrade said “Now I see how far we were from socialism!” She had always wondered why there were the huge long avenues of gigantic high-rise apartment projects for miles like the famous Stalin Boulevard, devoid of any social infrastructure, that atomized the working class. The DDR couldn’t afford to replace the family, so they lied. The population had never heard that real socialism by definition means redesigning society, with collectivized housework and child rearing!
Recently I was excited to find a 1975 Russian edition of Inessa Armand’s selected works. But at the beginning of one wonderful article the editors had actually deleted two sentences that read: “Private, separate domestic economies have become harmful anachronisms which only hold up and make more difficult the carrying out of new forms of distribution. They must be abolished” (emphasis added). Obviously, no self-respecting Stalinist would admit that the tiny domestic economic unit was an anachronism.
Assault on Women’s Rights
Let’s talk about the U.S. today, where abortion rights have been whittled away for almost 40 years, hitting working and poor women hardest. The defense of women’s right to abortion is absolutely crucial. It’s about women’s equality, women’s independence. If working women do not have that right, they have no say in their own future and that of their families. But, crucially, it is very hard to participate in social struggle—as the rulers know.
The state and their attack dogs are viciously sworn to keeping women bound up in the family, because the family is vitally necessary to maintain the capitalist order. Ensuring inheritance, as in the past, only matters to the propertied class. The ruling class needs the working-class family to reproduce the next generation of wage slaves and cannon fodder. But also, the family is hugely useful because it inculcates and reinforces bourgeois ideology and morals and, above all, obedience to authority.
We support every possible defense of the right to abortion, just as we defend every gain for working people, however partial. Leninists struggle to be the tribune of the people, able to react to every instance of tyranny and oppression, no matter what layer or class of the people it affects. That is the way we set forth our socialist convictions and our democratic demands publicly and make clear for everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat. Because it is in the historic interests of the proletariat as a whole, we call for free abortion on demand as part of free, quality health care for all, and free, quality 24-hour childcare.
In the early 19th century Charles Fourier wrote, “Social progress is brought about by the progress of women towards liberty.” Yes! In regions of the Third World where women are excluded from the political economy, the economy is characteristically stagnant. Society is correspondingly backward. In the “advanced” U.S. anti-woman bigotry is especially handy in recurring periods of economic decline, when the capitalists throw women and minorities out of the workforce first and then blame them for being poor. To go after their hot and cold wars abroad, the imperialists always need to whip up fervor at home for “free enterprise,” God and country, and “family values,” the code word for trashing women’s rights, as we have seen since the late 1970s.
From Feminism to Marxism
Now, since the “Occupy” movement has caught everybody’s attention as the way to right society’s wrongs, let me tell you a story about my student days. After growing up in Jim Crow East Texas, I got into left politics at Cornell University during the Vietnam War over two things: black liberation and women’s liberation. The New Left pushed all this wretched literature that the most oppressed were the most revolutionary. Lenin and Marx? Oh, that’s old hat! In the women’s movement, it was “self-determination”—like your body or uterus is a little country that can declare its independence. We were spinning our wheels going nowhere.
The women’s movement splintered between the straights and the gays; between those who took their nice Ivy League degrees and formed their own women’s health or dental or legal clinics and the ones that were for forming a women’s army. To fight whom, you ask? Well, we witnessed a gang of frat rats with baseball bats marching into a women’s concert intending to clean it out. Luckily the concert was already over, but after that the women decided a women’s army wasn’t such a good idea. You need men and women to fight shoulder to shoulder against the bigots.
Meanwhile everything polarized along racial lines. In April 1969 the black students at Cornell occupied the student union building to protest the administration’s racist policies and to demand a black studies center. After right-wing frat rats attacked (these guys were real activists), amid rumors of a second attack with guns, the black students armed themselves. SDS set up a protective cordon around the building; thousands of black and white students mobilized. It was tense, but ultimately everything stayed quiet. On the second day, the administration met the black students’ demands. Still armed, they marched with great dignity out of the building and across the arts quad. The following year the new black studies center was torched by racist vigilantes.
The Black Panthers were really the best of that generation, as black militants were increasingly sinking into the dead end of black nationalism. Their strategy was to “pick up the gun” and “electrify” the ghetto masses into revolutionary action. The Feds reacted with COINTELPRO, blowing away 38 Panthers. The Panthers taught me that a revolution is necessary to achieve liberation. If you are dead or in prison you’re not going to electrify anybody. What was left—blacks, Latinos, Native people, whites, female and male, gays and straights—all went off by themselves to “liberate” their own “sector.”
Except there was one serious group on campus. Through a friend, an anarchist of sorts, I had gotten to know a very nice couple who were around the Spartacist League. But we thought: anybody but the Sparts! The Spartacist guy and I used to have dreadful fights over the degeneration of the Soviet Union. He was Carl Lichtenstein, our very dear comrade who recently died unexpectedly. I thought I really had the number of those Russians, those patriarchal, male chauvinist pigs—why else could the revolution have degenerated? So I wasn’t listening.
Another friend who had been in the Canadian section of Ernest Mandel’s United Secretariat recommended I read Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution on the party. Oh, yes, and J.P. Nettl’s biography of Rosa Luxemburg. Both excellent suggestions, but the trouble was, I couldn’t understand a word. First I was depressed, but I got angry when I realized that all this “Marx and Lenin are old hat” was crap. It had kept me ignorant of some 150 years of working-class struggle!
In a somewhat chastened frame of mind, I moved to Boston, where I again met Carl and Alice, who by then were members of the SL. My first discussion with Carl was again about the Russian Revolution. To his surprise, I was ready to listen. What galled me most about my years at Cornell was that in that time a whole generation of young militants on the campuses and in the ghettos and barrios were wasted in the dead-end activism of all kinds I had seen over the past five years. I began to read, and to discuss what I read, and I began to understand that the key, missing from all those dead ends, was a party: The working class is the only force in society that has the social power to change history, but to win it needs the leadership of a revolutionary party.
The first youth class I was invited to was on the woman question, like this one. The first thing on the reading list was Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, chapters 2 and 9. I couldn’t put it down and read it cover to cover. The second thing was the Comintern’s “Theses on Work among Women.” When the comrades asked, I couldn’t say I disagreed with anything in the Theses, because the down-to-earth realistic approach to liberation answered questions that I had never gotten answers to.
All the talk about “liberation” and “self-determination” and “empowerment” in capitalism—we heard it then and you hear it today from “leftist” organizations—is just hot air. It’s not hard for them to defend the right to abortion, or rather, “the right to choose,” which doesn’t offend the Democrats. Their real perspective is to remain unobjectionable to petty-bourgeois public opinion. But one thing you are not likely to hear from such fake socialists is that the road to women’s emancipation leads through a real workers revolution. Such outfits are obstacles on that path.
So becoming a Marxist means learning to study history and how to analyze every new situation that arises from the point of view of the historic interests of the working class. So you study. You follow events around the world. When we can, we build actions that show by example what is needed on a large scale. For years, it seems like nothing happens, and then class battles break over our heads. Then, as in the DDR, everything happens in the space of hours and days. In 1989 we were all keenly aware that everything we had read and studied was for that moment. When the working class begins to move in the U.S., and it will, we will be there fighting for the program of communist revolution. We are fighting to build a multiracial vanguard party of the type that led the October Revolution to victory. And true to their vision, in a socialist future, women will be fully and equally integrated into society. Everyone will be able to develop to their full capacity. Society will be free of the barbaric garbage of the past—violence and bigotry against women, free of the reactionary straitjacket of the family and religion and capitalist state repression. If you want to fight for that future, join us.
From The Pen Of Vladimir Lenin- Winning the Vast Majority Through Proletarian State Power
Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League website.
Workers Vanguard No. 1003
25 May 2012
Winning the Vast Majority Through Proletarian State Power
(Quote of the Week)
Polemicizing against the Social Democrats of the Second International, who preached that socialism could be introduced through winning a majority in bourgeois parliaments, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin stressed that the proletariat would win the support of the vast majority of working people through smashing the bourgeois state and replacing it with a workers state that expropriates capitalist property. This teaching is of special relevance today in the U.S., Europe and throughout the capitalist world, where masses of the population are being ground down by the ongoing economic crisis.
How can state power in the hands of the proletariat become the instrument of its class struggle for influence over the non-proletarian working people, of the struggle to draw them to its side, to win them over, to wrest them from the bourgeoisie?
First, the proletariat achieves this not by putting into operation the old apparatus of state power, but by smashing it to pieces, levelling it with the ground (in spite of the howls of frightened philistines and the threats of saboteurs), and building a new state apparatus....
Secondly, the proletariat can, and must, at once, or at all events very quickly, win from the bourgeoisie and from petty-bourgeois democrats “their” masses, i.e., the masses which follow them—win them by satisfying their most urgent economic needs in a revolutionary way by expropriating the landowners and the bourgeoisie.
The bourgeoisie cannot do that, no matter how “mighty” its state power may be.
The proletariat can do that on the very next day after it has won state power, because for this it has both an apparatus (the Soviets) and economic means (the expropriation of the landowners and the bourgeoisie)....
The traitors, blockheads and pedants of the Second International could never understand such dialectics; the proletariat cannot achieve victory if it does not win the majority of the population to its side. But to limit that winning to polling a majority of votes in an election under the rule of the bourgeoisie, or to make it the condition for it, is crass stupidity, or else sheer deception of the workers. In order to win the majority of the population to its side the proletariat must, in the first place, overthrow the bourgeoisie and seize state power; secondly, it must introduce Soviet power and completely smash the old state apparatus, whereby it immediately undermines the rule, prestige and influence of the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeois compromisers over the non-proletarian working people. Thirdly, it must entirely destroy the influence of the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeois compromisers over the majority of the non-proletarian masses by satisfying their economic needs in a revolutionary way at the expense of the exploiters.
—V.I. Lenin, “The Constituent Assembly Elections and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” December 1919, Collected Works, Vol. 30
Workers Vanguard No. 1003
25 May 2012
Winning the Vast Majority Through Proletarian State Power
(Quote of the Week)
Polemicizing against the Social Democrats of the Second International, who preached that socialism could be introduced through winning a majority in bourgeois parliaments, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin stressed that the proletariat would win the support of the vast majority of working people through smashing the bourgeois state and replacing it with a workers state that expropriates capitalist property. This teaching is of special relevance today in the U.S., Europe and throughout the capitalist world, where masses of the population are being ground down by the ongoing economic crisis.
How can state power in the hands of the proletariat become the instrument of its class struggle for influence over the non-proletarian working people, of the struggle to draw them to its side, to win them over, to wrest them from the bourgeoisie?
First, the proletariat achieves this not by putting into operation the old apparatus of state power, but by smashing it to pieces, levelling it with the ground (in spite of the howls of frightened philistines and the threats of saboteurs), and building a new state apparatus....
Secondly, the proletariat can, and must, at once, or at all events very quickly, win from the bourgeoisie and from petty-bourgeois democrats “their” masses, i.e., the masses which follow them—win them by satisfying their most urgent economic needs in a revolutionary way by expropriating the landowners and the bourgeoisie.
The bourgeoisie cannot do that, no matter how “mighty” its state power may be.
The proletariat can do that on the very next day after it has won state power, because for this it has both an apparatus (the Soviets) and economic means (the expropriation of the landowners and the bourgeoisie)....
The traitors, blockheads and pedants of the Second International could never understand such dialectics; the proletariat cannot achieve victory if it does not win the majority of the population to its side. But to limit that winning to polling a majority of votes in an election under the rule of the bourgeoisie, or to make it the condition for it, is crass stupidity, or else sheer deception of the workers. In order to win the majority of the population to its side the proletariat must, in the first place, overthrow the bourgeoisie and seize state power; secondly, it must introduce Soviet power and completely smash the old state apparatus, whereby it immediately undermines the rule, prestige and influence of the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeois compromisers over the non-proletarian working people. Thirdly, it must entirely destroy the influence of the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeois compromisers over the majority of the non-proletarian masses by satisfying their economic needs in a revolutionary way at the expense of the exploiters.
—V.I. Lenin, “The Constituent Assembly Elections and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” December 1919, Collected Works, Vol. 30
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