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Trotsky and the struggle for a Revolutionary International (1933-1946) – Part One

Written by Patrick Larsen Tuesday, 22 November 2011

The figure of Leon Trotsky has created a new wave of interest among historians and writers of all types. Recently two new books about the Russian revolutionary have appeared; the first being the work of U.S. Professor Robert Service and the second of Bertrand M. Patenaude, a historian at California University. Both of them belong to that class of commercial literature typical of the bourgeoisie, full of factual errors, which tries to present Trotsky as an authoritarian politician who only lost to Stalin because he lacked tactical skills.

Introduction

Another work, much more sympathetic in its style and its content, is the new novel by Leonardo Padura, “The man who loved dogs”. It tells the stories of Trotsky and his assassin, Ramón Mercader, both stories projected on the life of Iván, a Cuban who represents the post-revolutionary generation on the island.

We have dealt with this important contribution elsewhere. But although it has great value in reclaiming the general legacy of Trotsky, it does indeed contain some mistakes in the appreciation that the author has of aspects of Trotsky's political activity.

The main reason is that the majority of facts about his life which are presented in the book have been taken by Padura from Isaac Deutscher's trilogy – The Prophet Unarmed, The Prophet Armed and The Prophet Outcast. This biography, although it contains some interesting facts, has the major disadvantage of having been written by a person who lacked a firm comprehension of the method of Trotsky. He therefore fell into a whole number of misinterpretations of key elements of his life, especially concerning the last phase of it.

What all these books have in common is the absence of a serious analysis of Trotsky's attempt to found a new revolutionary international, the Fourth International. All of them regard it with a certain suspicion, emphasizing its reduced numbers, its isolation from the working masses and the splits which took place in the movement.

While most of Trotsky's biographers were full of praise for his great literary works such as My life or the History of the Russian Revolution they never understood why the creator of the Red Army spent countless hours of his last years writing letters, critiques, manifestos and programmes which only reached a handful of people and in many cases dealt with practical questions in the day-to-day work.

In our opinion this great flaw was mainly due to the fact that all of these writers were intellectuals on the margins of the workers' movement. They did not have the knowledge or the experience of a participant and consequently their books were not written with the methodology of a revolutionary militant.

However, when one reads the hundreds of letters that Trotsky wrote to create and train a new Marxist leadership, and when one studies the activity of his followers during the Second World War, it is impossible not to be impressed, faced with the magnitude of the lessons that this epoch contains for the future.

The objective of this article is, on the one hand, to serve as an introduction to the reading of Trotsky's last writings, and on the other hand also to extract the principal lessons of the attempt to create a Fourth International. For reasons of space, we cannot go into a detailed analysis of the subsequent history of Trotskyism and we will therefore limit ourselves to give an overview of the main reasons for the decline of the Fourth International after the end of WW2. For a more complete history, we recommend the work of Ted Grant: History of British Trotskyism, The origins of the collapse of the Fourth International by Fred Weston and The theoretical origins of the degeneration of the Fourth - Interview with Ted Grant.

In the work of researching the material for this article, it has been necessary to reclaim the real Trotsky, buried under a mountain of distortions and manipulations. By saying this we are not only referring to the monstrous lies of Stalinism nor only to the caricature presented by the bourgeois historians. We also refer to the “theoreticians” of the small self-styled Trotskyist sects, who have hijacked the name of the great revolutionary.

Always fond of internal rows and personal antagonisms, these gentlemen always had a modus operandi, a style and a life completely separated from the real mass movement. Their hysterical denunciations and their schematic views never allowed them to enter into contact with the living workers' movement and consequently they gave a very bad name to Trotskyism; something which has alienated many workers and made them refuse to collaborate with the 4th International and its subsequent fractions.

Trotsky himself, who had a profound knowledge of the psychology of the masses, did everything to throw out sectarianism and educate the cadres in the Bolshevik method of winning the majority. In this article we will show how he made several attempts to push his followers towards the mass organizations, not only to influence them, but also to constantly renovate his own movement, give it new life blood and break with the vicious circle of the small-group environment.

“The most important work of my life”

It was in the year of 1933 that Trotsky came to the conclusion that a new revolutionary international was necessary. Before this, he had maintained the position of building an opposition within the official Communist Parties in order to fight for a genuine Marxist programme. But it was a huge political event which made Trotsky change his mind: the catastrophe in Germany, where the crazy “theory” of the Third Period and the consequent refusal to form a united front with the Social Democrats, whom they called “social-fascists”, which opened the gates for Hitler to come to power.

From that moment on, Trotsky came to the conclusion that the Party and the International not only had been incapable of taking a correct stance in the decisive moments. They had also been organically incapable of learning from their mistakes and they had proclaimed the big defeat of the German working class as if it was a victory (“After Hitler, our turn!”). He therefore thought that such an organization was doomed and could not be reconquered as an instrument for the proletarian revolution.

Contrary to his biographers, Lev Davidovich considered that the task of forging this new International was the “greatest work of his life”. In 1935, in one of his lesser-known works, Diary in Exile, he wrote the following:


"And still I think that the work in which I am engaged now, despite its extremely insufficient and fragmentary nature, is the most important work of my life—more important than 1917, more important than the period of the Civil War or any other.

“For the sake of clarity I would put it this way. Had I not been present in 1917 in Petersburg, the October Revolution would still have taken place—on the condition that Lenin was present and in command. If neither Lenin nor I had been present in Petersburg, there would have been no October Revolution: the leadership of the Bolshevik Party would have prevented it from occurring—of this I have not the slightest doubt! If Lenin had not been in Petersburg, I doubt whether I could have managed to conquer the resistance of the Bolshevik leaders. The struggle with ‘Trotskyism’ (i.e., with the proletarian revolution) would have commenced in May, 1917, and the outcome of the revolution would have been in question. But I repeat, granted the presence of Lenin the October Revolution would have been victorious anyway. The same could by and large be said of the Civil War, although in its first period, especially at the time of the fall of Simbirsk and Kazan, Lenin wavered and was beset by doubts. But this was undoubtedly a passing mood which he probably never even admitted to anyone but me.”

“Thus I cannot speak of the ‘indispensability’ of my work, even about the period from 1917 to 1921. But now my work is ‘indispensable’ in the full sense of the word. There is no arrogance in this claim at all. The collapse of the two Internationals has posed a problem which none of the leaders of these Internationals is at all equipped to solve. The vicissitudes of my personal fate have confronted me with this problem and armed me with important experience in dealing with it. There is now no one except me to carry out the mission of arming a new generation with the revolutionary method over the heads of the leaders of the Second and Third International. And I am in a complete agreement with Lenin (or rather Turgenev) that the worst vice is to be more than 55 years old! I need at least about five more years of uninterrupted work to ensure the succession."[i]

The first steps: The bloc of the four

According to Trotsky, the new international would of course not fall from the sky from one day to another, but would be the result of a process of formation. It would include different sectors of the workers' movement who had arrived at the same conclusion or were drawing close to it. The degeneration of the Third (Communist) International and the bankruptcy of the Second International, in the context of the rise of fascism and the worst crisis in the history of capitalism created a vacuum on the political scene.

It was in such a situation that Trotsky received with great enthusiasm the news of the formation and the rapid turn to the left of the ILP, the Independent Labour Party of Great Britain. The leaders of the ILP were even for a short time flirting with the idea of setting up a new revolutionary international, although they subsequently abandoned that position. Other organizations, especially left-wing splits from the Socialist parties in Europe, were coming closer to the very same conclusion.

The followers of Trotsky, the Bolshevik-Leninists, participated in that debate and in the conference which was held by fourteen labour organizations and parties in Paris in August of 1933. This meeting had certain similarities with the conference of Zimmerwald in 1915, which, in spite of the enormous theoretical confusion, organized those who opposed the First World War. Just as in Zimmerwald, in the Paris conference a left and a rightwing appeared. The adherents of the left were four organizations who came out signing a declaration for a new International. These included, apart from the International Left Opposition, the SAP of Germany and two Dutch organizations, the RSP and the OSP.

This initiative, in spite of the programmatical limitations and the subsequent disagreements, showed how Trotsky was absolutely willing to collaborate with other groups, even with people who came from other traditions within the workers' movement. He was never afraid of an open and honest discussion with groups or individuals who were moving in the direction of Bolshevism. However, at the same time he insisted on transparency and honesty on the part of his allies and reserved the right to always put forward his own position:


“Revolutionary irreconcilability consists not in demanding our “leadership” be recognized a priori, not in presenting our allies at every occasion with ultimatums and threatening with a break, with the removal of signatures, etc. We leave such methods on one hand, to the Stalinist bureaucrats, on the other to some impatient allies. We realize full well that disagreements between us and our allies will arise more than once. But we hope, more than that, we are convinced, that the march of events will reveal in deeds the impossibility of participating simultaneously in the principled bloc of four and in the unprincipled bloc of the majority. Without resorting to any unbecoming “ultimatums”, we claim however our full right not only to raise our banners but also to state openly to our allies our opinions regarding what we consider to be their mistakes. We expect from them the same frankness. Our alliance will thus be strengthened."

The French Turn

Trotsky was completely conscious of the weakness of his forces, not only from a numerical point of view, but also from the point of view of the lack of political experience of his followers. In one of the discussions he had with a visitor in his house in April of 1939 he explained it in these terms:


“We have comrades who came to us, as Naville and others, 15 or 16 or more years ago when they were young boys. Now they are mature people and their whole conscious life they have had only blows, defeats and terrible defeats on an international scale and they are more or less acquainted with this situation. They appreciate very highly the correctness of their conceptions and they can analyze, but they never had the capacity to penetrate, to work with the masses and they have not acquired it.”[ii]

This was one of the main reasons why he began to recommend a sharp turn towards the Socialist parties, and especially their youth organizations, beginning in France. In his opinion, the Trotskyists should enter these organizations to win the best proletarian elements. This tactic, which was later referred to as “entryism”, was not only about getting a numerical growth in terms of militants, but also about giving new life to the internal regimes of the Trotskyist groups.

This was a vital point for the educating of Marxist cadres in the harsh school of the class struggle. From the Old Man's point of view, it was not sufficient merely to comment on the life of a party from the perspective of an external observer. On the contrary, it was crucial to converge with the masses in revolutionary action, fighting shoulder to shoulder with the left against the right:


“It is not enough for a revolutionist to have correct ideas. Let us not forget that correct ideas have already been set down in Capital and The Communist Manifesto. But that has not prevented false ideas from being broadcast. It is the task of the revolutionary party to weld together the ideas with the mass labour movement. Only in this manner can an idea become a driving force.

“A revolutionary organization does not mean a paper and its readers. One can write and read revolutionary articles day in and day out and still remain in reality outside of the revolutionary movement. One can give the labour organizations good advice from the sidelines. That is something. But that still does not make a revolutionary organization.(...)

“In relation to the Socialist Party, the League has shown not only insufficient initiative but also a hidebound sectarianism. Instead of taking for its task the creation of a faction inside the SFIO just as soon as the crisis in the latter became obvious, the League demanded that every Socialist become convinced of the correctness of our ideas and leave his mass organization to join the group of La Verite readers. In order to create an internal faction, it was necessary to pursue the mass movement, to adapt oneself to the environment, to carry on a menial daily work. Precisely in this very decisive field the League has not been able to make any progress up to the present – with very few exceptions. A great deal of valuable time was allowed to be lost. (...)

“The criticism, the ideas, the slogans of the League are in general correct, but in this present period particularly inadequate. The revolutionary ideas must be transformed into life itself every day through the experiences of the masses themselves. But how can the League explain this to them when it is itself cut off from the experience of the masses? It is necessary to add: several comrades do not even see the need of this experience. It seems to them to be sufficient to form an opinion on the basis of newspaper accounts they read and then give it expression in an article or in a talk. Yet if the most correct ideas do not reflect directly the ideas and actions of the mass, they will escape the attention of the masses altogether” (Trotsky, The League Faced with a Turn, June 1934[iii])

Afterwards, Trotsky made the same recommendations for his followers in England concerning the ILP and in the United States concerning the Socialist Party. In many cases his followers received the advice with a lot of conservatism and opposed entering the organizations in question, or in some cases only a handful entered and did so too late to influence the left-wing tendencies that were developing in the rank and file of the Socialist parties.

Trotsky and the Spanish Revolution

The country where this refusal on the part of Trotsky's comrades to accept his advice generated most controversy was Spain. The study of Trotsky's position in regard to the Spanish Revolution could merit a whole article or a book apart[iv], but in this occasion we will limit ourselves to the most important lessons.

Since the proclamation of the Second Republic in April of 1931, Spain had lived through a revolution of enormous dimensions in all spheres of social and political life. The subsequent incapacity of the republican-socialist government to keep its promises, especially the agrarian reform which would have benefitted the poor and exploited peasants, led to the electoral defeat of the left in the elections of November 1933. What followed afterwards is known as the “bienio negro” (the two black years).


The heroic resistance on the part of the workers, when faced with the entry of the ultra-right-wing CEDA party in 1934, represented the beginning of the armed insurrection and the proletarian commune in Asturias. This experiment was only cut across by the ferocious repression on the part of the army, led by general Franco. This was the very same officer who led a new coup d'etat in July of 1936 with the aim of destroying the revolution once and for all. But the brave workers of Catalonia and in other parts of Spain rose up and prevented a Fascist victory. In effect they made themselves the masters of Barcelona and other parts of Spain. Thus the Spanish civil war commenced in July 1936 and lasted for three years, up until Franco's final victory in April of 1939.

This was the context in which Trotsky tried to build a revolutionary party which could play the same role as the Bolshevik Party had played in Russia in 1917. A victory for the revolution in Spain would have acted as a real earthquake, which in turn would have changed the whole balance of forces internationally. That is why the amount of attention which Trotsky paid in dealing with the Spanish revolution, (something that the majority of his biographers ignore), is completely justified.

From 1930 onwards, one of his old friends, his former secretary, Andreu Nin, had been living in Spain. Nin was a relatively experienced cadre who had been many years in the Soviet Union, working as the President of the Profintern, the Federation of red trade-unions. From his arrival in Spain, he began to correspond with Trotsky about the problems of the revolution and the tasks of the Spanish communists. Nin began to develop more and more differences with the Old Man. While the former wanted a fusion with the right-wing-Communist group of Joaquín Maurin on an eclectic programme, Trotsky insisted on maintaining ideological clarity and discipline.

In the course of the year 1934, the same phenomenon of radicalization of the Socialist Youth which had been seen in France was repeated in Spain. The Spanish Socialist Youth even reached a point where they invited the Trotskyists to enter the Socialist Party in order to “bolshevize” it[v]. The main leader of the Socialist Party left, Largo Caballero, who organized his followers around the paper Claridad, spoke in favour of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” and quoted the writings of Lenin on more than one occasion. But instead of grasping this historic opportunity, Nin and his friends opposed Trotsky's call to enter the PSOE and the FSJ. The Stalinists were more intelligent and they managed to make a fusion between their own miniscule youth organization and the Socialist Youth, thus conquering a solid base in the working class youth.

The fusion of Nin's group (Izquierda Comunista) with Maurin's Catalan group (The BOC), led to the formation of the POUM (The Workers' Party for Marxist Unification). Although it was very much accused of being Trotskyist by the Stalinists and although its members showed a lot of courage during the civil war (including Nin himself who was brutally tortured and murdered by the Stalinists), the POUM was never a Trotskyist party. Instead of carrying out the revolution from below, building the power of the workers' and peasant committees, it vacillated between reformism and revolution.

It recognized the legitimacy of the Catalan bourgeois government, the Generalitat, and even entered it with Nin as Minister of Justice. They accepted the dissolution of the militias and the disarmament, something which the government was promoting with the excuse of creating a single professional army. The leaders of the POUM also decided to call upon its militants to abandon the barricades during the famous May Days in Barcelona in 1937, when the Stalinists attempted to destroy workers’ control in the Telephone Exchange.

All these actions were severely condemned by Trotsky who in the last instance explained the defeat of the Spanish Revolution by the lack of a genuine revolutionary party. In his brilliant, unfinished article Class, Party and Leadership, he pointed out that the destruction of the Spanish Revolution was in no way due to a “low level of consciousness” on the part of the working class, but rather due to the betrayal of the leaders:


“The workers’ line of march at all times cut a certain angle to the line of the leadership. And at the most critical moments this angle became 180 degrees. The leadership then helped directly or indirectly to subdue the workers by armed force. In May 1937 the workers of Catalonia rose not only without their own leadership but against it(...)

“The proletariat may “tolerate” for a long time a leadership that has already suffered a complete inner degeneration but has not as yet had the opportunity to express this degeneration amid great events. A great historic shock is necessary to reveal sharply the contradiction between the leadership and the class. The mightiest historical shocks are wars and revolutions. Precisely for this reason the working class is often caught unawares by war and revolution. But even in cases where the old leadership has revealed its internal corruption, the class cannot improvise immediately a new leadership, especially if it has not inherited from the previous period strong revolutionary cadres capable of utilizing the collapse of the old leading party.(...)

“Victory is not at all the ripe fruit of the proletariat’s “maturity.” Victory is a strategical task. It is necessary to utilize the favourable conditions of a revolutionary crisis in order to mobilize the masses; taking as a starting point the given level of their ‘maturity’ it is necessary to propel them forward, teach them to understand that the enemy is by no means omnipotent, that it is torn asunder with contradictions, that behind the imposing facade panic prevails. Had the Bolshevik party failed to carry out this work, there couldn’t even be talk of the victory of the proletarian revolution. The Soviets would have been crushed by the counter-revolution and the little sages of all countries would have written articles and books on the keynote that only uprooted visionaries could dream in Russia of the dictatorship of the proletariat, so small numerically and so immature. [vi]

Incredibly, these very same arguments about a so-called “immaturity” and “low level of consciousness of the masses” are used by reformists in relation to the Venezuelan revolution today. Their aim is to hide their own incapability of completing the revolution by expropriating the capitalists, the bankers and the landlords.

Just as in Spain, in Venezuela the central problem is the lack of a real Marxist leadership which can guide the revolution. And as in Spain, the activity of the Venezuelan masses was also 180 degrees in contradiction with the activities of the reformist ministers during the 11, 12th and 13th of April 2002. While the latter were in hiding or fleeing from the coup d'etát, the masses courageously opposed the coup, taking the control of the streets and fraternizing with the revolutionary elements in the army.

But precisely as with the Spanish revolution, in Venezuela the revolution is running the risk of a defeat, because there is no mass Marxist leadership to drive all the energy of the masses towards the taking of power.

The debates with the leaders of the American SWP:The method of transitional demands

The largest party of Trotsky's movement was without doubt the American Socialist Workers' Party. Its leaders had followed his advice and in a short space of time they had managed to make a successful fusion with the centrist party of A.J. Muste (The American Workers' Party), in reality with the purpose of winning the followers of the AWP over to Trotskyism, without allowing any political concessions. Afterwards they had entered the Socialist Party and effectively won over its youth organization, the Young Peoples' Socialist League. They had also managed to conquer important positions, as the one in Minneapolis, where they led the famous Teamsters Strike in 1934. The SWP had a membership of around 2,000 towards the end of the 30s.

However, Trotsky was completely aware of the theoretical shortcomings of the SWP leaders. He tried to prepare them for the great events that lay ahead by providing them with an insight to the dialectical method of analysis and a militant attitude towards the intervention in the mass movement. During 1938 and 1939 he held various discussions, with Cannon, Shactmann, Vincent Dunne, Joseph Hansen and other leaders of the American party.

The debates lasted for whole days at a time and had a widespread character, not just dealing with the particular problems of the practical work in the United States, but also about general problems of revolutionary tactics and strategy. The notes taken from the discussions were subsequently published and they constitute a real goldmine of lessons for revolutionary work.

The main point which ran through all the discussions was the method with which one could connect with the most active layers of the masses and consequently, the transitional demands to win them over. At that time, there was an increasing mood in favour of united proletarian action, but the class lacked a party on a national level.

Reflecting this mood, the LNPL (Labour's Non-Partisan League) was launched as a political instrument of the workers. However, the LNPL was launched by trade union leaders who merely wanted it to restrict it as being an office under their bureaucratic control which would recommend the vote for the bourgeois candidate Roosevelt. The SWP leaders were doubtful as to whether they should participate in the LNPL but Trotsky insisted on the struggle for “a policy which enables the trade unions to put their weight on the balance”.

He explained that it was necessary to counter-pose revolutionary demands to those of the reformists within the LNPL, in a concrete and audacious manner which could be understood by the workers:


“We are for a party, for an independent party of the toiling masses who will take power in the state. We must concretize it—we are for the creation of factory committees, for workers’ control of industry through the factory committees. All these questions are now pending in the air. They speak of technocracy, and put forward the slogan of ‘production for use.’ We oppose this charlatan formula and advance the workers’ control of production through the factory committees. (...)

“We say, the factory committees should see the books. This program we must develop parallel with the idea of a labour party in the unions, and workers’ militia. Otherwise it is an abstraction and an abstraction is a weapon in the hands of the opposing class. (...)

“Naturally we must make our first step in such a way as to accumulate experience for practical work, not to engage in abstract formulas, but develop a concrete program of action and demands in the sense that this transitional program issues from the conditions of capitalist society today, but immediately leads over the limits of capitalism (...)

“Then we also have the possibility of spreading the slogans of our transitional program and see the reaction of the masses. We will see what slogans should be selected, what slogans abandoned, but if we give up our slogans before the experience, before seeing the reaction of the masses, then we can never advance. .”[vii]

Faced with the scepticism, especially on the part of Shactmann, Trotsky pointed out that the slogan for a workers' militia was a necessity inherent in the concrete situation of the United States, even though this country was very far away and the threat of fascism seemed quite distant. He underlined that on the one hand the events of Europe would have a huge impact on the consciousness of the North American workers and on the other hand that the workers' militia could be proposed in a concrete way to protect shop stewards and picket lines from scabs and the bosses’ armed gangs.

Another controversial point was about the Ludlow amendment, by a bourgeois member of congress proposing a referendum on the participation of the United States in the Second World War. The schematic and abstract way of thinking of the SWP leaders had led the party to reject every attempt of using this slogan in favour of the referendum.

Trotsky opposed himself directly to Cannon and his colleagues and gave them an important lesson on how to tackle the question of democratic demands and connect them with the struggle for socialism. In the first place he explained that, until you can overthrow the bourgeois democracy, you have to take advantage of the means that it gives to you (regardless of how limited these are), in order to mobilize the masses in favour of your programme.

Of course he did not for one instance believe that a referendum could stop the outbreak of the war, nor decide whether the United States would take part in it or not. But Trotsky maintained that “We cannot dissipate the illusions [of the masses] a priori, only in the course of the struggle”. He added that it was crucial to say openly to the masses that the revolutionaries would fight side by side with their class brothers and sisters in favour of this referendum proposed by Ludlow, showing in practice that he wasn't really interested in realizing it, and that the working class could only trust its own forces in order to achieve such a referendum.

The words of Trotsky about the Ludlow amendment could perfectly have been written yesterday about the democratic demands in Tunisia and Egypt, where millions are struggling against the remnants of the dictatorships of Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak. It is a good answer to all those sectarian elements who reject the necessity of giving support to democratic demands, among them for a Constituent Assembly.

In all these discussions we can observe the dialectical method of Trotsky in contrast with the mechanical ideas of sectarianism.

Part 2 ⇒

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[i] Trotsky, Diary In Exile, pp. 53-4

[ii] Writings of Leon Trotsky, : Fighting against the stream. 1939.

[iii] Writings of Leon Trotsky: The league faced with a turn, June 1934

[iv] Among the writings that analyze Trotsky's position on the Spanish Revolution, I would like to highlight the introduction written by Pierre Broué to the Spanish edition of his works on Spain and also the article by Juan Manuel Municio, “Trotsky, La izquierda comunista y el POUM” published in Marxismo Hoy No. 2, 1995.

[v] For a more detailed historical analysis of the development of the Spanish Socialist Youth, I recommend the following work: Pierre Broué: The Spanish Socialist Youth (When Carillo was a leftist), published in Revolutionary History, 2007.

[vi] Writings of Leon Trotsky: The class, the party and the leadership. 1940.

[vii] Writings of Leon Trotsky: On the Labor Party Question in the United States, 1938.




Trotsky and the struggle for a Revolutionary international (1933-1946) - Part three

Written by Patrick Larsen Monday, 19 December 2011

In the third part of our article on the method of Trotsky in his struggle for a Revolutionary international, we will analyze the significance of the Proletarian Military Policy and also the death of Lev Davidovich and its repercussions in the movement. Furthermore, we will make a short and precise balance sheet of the work of the Fourth International during the Second World War and the political mistakes of its leaders which later gave rise to its collapse. [part 1]

Trotsky and the Second World War: The Proletarian Military Policy

Leon Trotsky. Photo: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R15068 / CC-BY-SAIn order to understand the line that Trotsky developed in his last writings, it is necessary to have a general idea of the historical situation that the revolutionaries faced at that time. After Hitler's victory in Germany, the eyes of all workers of Europe were fixed on the rising triumph of fascism in one country after the other. The installation of fascist regimes in Austria, Spain, part of Poland, Czechoslovakia, etc were an alarm signal for the world working class. Subsequently the German army also occupied Holland, France and Denmark.

The imperialist powers of Great Britain and the United States were of course not opposed to Hitler for moral reasons, although they later sold the idea of a “war against fascism”. As a matter of fact, the British Prime Minister Churchill had been a great admirer of fascism in its early phase, applauding racism and the “domination of the white man”.

What really concerned the allied powers was not “democracy”, nor “human rights”. During the war they showed their own cynical brutality with the completely unnecessary massacres in Dresden, Nagasaki and Hiroshima. No, what really mattered were their own imperialist interests, that is to say the markets, raw materials and zones of influence.

Trotsky did not have any illusions whatsoever in the propaganda of the western countries and defined from the very beginning WW2 as an imperialist war, a continuation of the First World War. However, he understood the completely healthy, instinctive rejection of fascism on part of the workers and their natural desire to fight it. In his opinion it was not sufficient to simply oppose the war. The workers had to develop their own policy in this terrain. In his last article he stressed the following:


“The present war, as we have stated on more than one occasion, is a continuation of the last war. But a continuation does not signify a repetition. As a general rule, a continuation signifies a development, a deepening, a sharpening. Our policy, the policy of the revolutionary proletariat toward the second imperialist war is a continuation of the policy elaborated during the last imperialist war, primarily under Lenin’s leadership. But a continuation does not signify a repetition. In this case too, continuation signifies a development, a deepening and a sharpening.

“During the last war not only the proletariat as a whole but also its vanguard and, in a certain sense, the vanguard of this vanguard was caught unaware. The elaboration of the principles of revolutionary policy toward the war began at a time when the war was already in full blaze and the military machine exercised unlimited rule. One year after the outbreak of the war, the small revolutionary minority was still compelled to accommodate itself to a centrist majority at the Zimmerwald Conference. Prior to the February revolution and even afterwards, the revolutionary elements felt themselves to be not contenders for power but the extreme left opposition.

“Even Lenin relegated the socialist revolution to a more or less distant future.... If that is how Lenin viewed the situation, then there is hardly any need of talking about the others.

“This political position of the extreme left wing expressed itself most graphically on the question of the defence of the fatherland.

“In 1915 Lenin referred in his writings to revolutionary wars which the victorious proletariat would have to wage. But it was a question of an indefinite historical perspective and not of tomorrow’s task. The attention of the revolutionary wing was centred on the question of the defence of the capitalist fatherland. The revolutionists naturally replied to this question in the negative. This was entirely correct. But this purely negative answer served as the basis for propaganda and for training the cadres but it could not win the masses who did not want a foreign conqueror. In Russia prior to the war the Bolsheviks constituted four-fifths of the proletarian vanguard, that is, of the workers participating in political life (newspapers, elections, etc.). Following the February revolution the unlimited rule passed into the hands of defencists, the Mensheviks and the SR’s. True enough, the Bolsheviks in the space of eight months conquered the overwhelming majority of the workers. But the decisive role in this conquest was played not by the refusal to defend the bourgeois fatherland but by the slogan: “All Power to the Soviets!” And only by this revolutionary slogan! The criticism of imperialism, its militarism, the renunciation of the defence of bourgeois democracy and so on could have never conquered the overwhelming majority of the people to the side of the Bolsheviks.”[i]

His instructions to the revolutionaries were very clear:


“The militarization of the masses is further intensified every day. We reject the grotesque pretension of doing away with this militarization through empty pacifist protests. All the great questions will be decided in the next epoch arms in hand. The workers should not fear arms; on the contrary they should learn to use them. Revolutionists no more separate themselves from the people during war than in peace. A Bolshevik strives to become not only the best trade unionist but also the best soldier.

“We do not wish to permit the bourgeoisie to drive untrained or half trained soldiers at the last hour onto the battlefield. We demand that the state immediately provide the workers and the unemployed with the possibility of learning how to handle the rifle, the hand grenade, the machine gun, the cannon, the airplane, the submarine, and the other tools of war. Special military schools are necessary in close connection with the trade unions so that the workers can become skilled specialists of the military art, able to hold posts as commanders.”[ii]

In June 1940, the French bourgeoisie capitulated to Hitler and surrendered Paris without putting up any resistance. Trotsky thought that this event confirmed that the national bourgeoisies of the allied block were not genuinely interested in defending the workers against fascism. For this reason he declared that the revolutionaries ought to agitate amongst the masses for the passing over of the military high command to the hands of the working class, the only class really capable of eradicating fascism:


“The Institute of Public Opinion established that over 70% of the workers are in favour of conscription. It is a fact of tremendous importance! Workers take every question seriously. If the Fatherland should be defended, then the defence cannot be abandoned to the arbitrary will of individuals. It should be a common attitude. This realistic conception shows how right we were in rejecting beforehand purely negative pacifist or semi-pacifist attitudes. We place ourselves on the same ground as the 70% of the workers; against Green and Lewis, and on this premise we begin to develop a campaign in order to oppose the workers to their exploiters in the military field. You, workers, wish to defend and improve democracy. We, of the Fourth International, wish to go further. However, we are ready to defend democracy with you, only on condition that it should be a real defence, and not a betrayal in the Petain manner. ”[iii]

In a discussion on “American problems”[iv], he repeated the same ideas in an even sharper way. In his opinion the revolutionaries ought to say the following:


“We will defend the United States with a workers’ army, with workers’ officers, with a workers’ government, etc. If we are not pacifists, who wait for a better future, and if we are active revolutionists, our job is to penetrate into the whole military machine.

(...)

“We must use the example of France to the very end. We must say, “I warn you, workers, that they (the bourgeoisie) will betray you! Look at Petain, who is a friend of Hitler. Shall we have the same thing happen in this country? We must create our own machine, under workers’ control.” We must be careful not to identify ourselves with the chauvinists, nor with the confused sentiments of self-preservation, but we must understand their feelings and adapt ourselves to these feelings critically, and prepare the masses for a better understanding of the situation, otherwise we will remain a sect, of which the pacifist variety is the most miserable. ”

The key point was to reveal the organic incapacity of the bourgeoisie to really put up a defence against Fascism and in that way adjust the revolutionary agitation to the thought and concerns of the masses. On the other hand, the emphasis on the militarization of the revolutionary organization signified that Trotsky advised his followers to search for all means to come closer to the working class and penetrate it in order to provide the revolutionary programme necessary for victory.

In this situation all the attention of the workers was principally on the war, in some armament factories they worked for 14 to 16 hours a day. Trotsky understood that every abstract slogan of opposition to the war would only reinforce the isolation of the forces of Bolshevik-Leninism from the masses. Without ceasing to explain the real character of the imperialist war, Lev Davidovich instructed the national sections to adapt the transitional slogans to the concrete stage in the development of the consciousness of the masses. It is no coincidence that the Old Man explained how Bolshevism essentially was the history of “sharp and sudden turns” in tactics and slogans in each given moment.

The Fourth International during WW2

Trotsky's death at the hands of the GPU agent Ramón Mercader del Río on the 20th of August of 1940 was a tremendous blow to the forces of the Fourth International. We have seen in the previous parts of this article how even the leaders of the American SWP lacked a sound theoretical capacity and the fundamental dialectical method with which Trotsky was able to understand the changing objective situation. To be honest, we would have to admit that the Fourth International was founded on very unstable organisational bases in most countries.

One of the worst examples was probably France, where the members of the official section, the POI (Workers' International Party), had split at the beginning of 1939 over the question of entry into the PSOP, a centrist split from the Socialist Party. The section was in a state of complete chaos when France was overrun by the Nazis in June 1940. Rapidly the main leaders (Jean Rous, Pierre Naville, Joannès Bardin [Boitel]), adapted to bourgeois nationalism and/or left the Trotskyist movement altogether. New forces, most of them very young people, had to rebuild the organization under very difficult conditions.

Of course, we do not want to discard the heroic work that hundreds of Trotsky's co-thinkers conducted in a Europe under the iron heel of fascism. Nor do we intend to forget the many martyrs of the Bolshevik-Leninist movement. It is appropriate to mention just a couple of the most important examples:

In spite of various waves of repression against its main cadres, the Trotskyist organization of France managed to publish 73 editions of its paper, La Verité, which circulated in 15,000 copies per issue. The Gestapo managed to find and assassinate dozens of Trotskyists, including the section's general secretary, Marcel Hic, who was deported to the concentration camp of Buchenwald and subsequently Dora where he was killed.[v]

The French Trotskyists even managed to publish a paper in German, called Arbeiter und Soldat (Worker and Soldier), which was specifically directed towards winning over the German troops to revolutionary positions. Its editor, Paul Widelin, was arrested in 1944 and murdered by the Gestapo.

In Belgium, one of the countries where the International had had a sizeable force, the repression also put its stamp: Well-known leaders such as León Lesoil and Abraham, among dozens of other Trotskyists, were arrested and executed. In spite of all this, they managed to publish a paper in French (Lenin's Voice) and another in Flemish (The Class Struggle) in 10,000 and 7,000 copies respectively.

In Greece, Pantelis Pouliopoulis, was murdered along with a group of seventeen Trotskyist at the hands of the Italian occupying force in June 1943. But before he died, he had the courage to give a revolutionary speech to the Italian soldiers in their own language, an act which provoked mutiny among the soldiers who afterwards refused to kill him. It was the officers who had to do the bloody work and execute them.

One of the most tragic losses for the movement was probably that of Pietro Tresso [Blasco], one of the first members of the Left Opposition of the Italian CP. Although he managed to escape from the prison in Marseilles in France, he was kidnapped by the Stalinists and murdered.

In this short summary, we cannot go into all the details, but it would be incorrect to forget mentioning the heroic work of the Trotskyists in Sri Lanka and Indochina (Vietnam). During the war, the followers of Trotsky in both countries opposed the bloody oppression of British Imperialism, while the Stalinists sacrificed any pretension of anti-imperialist struggle in the name of their “sacred alliance” with the allied powers.

Later on, this line made the CP of India accept the criminal 1947 division of the country on religious lines, which led to the creation of a Muslim state (Pakistan) and the abortion, through violence, of the revolution. In contrast the Trotskyists build a strong party in Vietnam which even won the local elections of Saigon in 1939. Tragically, the main figure in this group, the legendary Ta Thu Thau, was executed by the Stalinists in September 1945, probably on direct orders of Ho Chi Minh.[vi] In Sri Lanka the first nucleus of the LSSP (Lanka Sama Samaja Party), affiliated to the Fourth International, was formed and led huge general strike movements against the colonial powers. It quickly rose to be the second political party on the island.

The Trotskyists and the Proletarian Military Policy

Although these are all signs of great sacrifice and consistent work, we cannot avoid making a critical balance-sheet of the politics of the Bolshevik-Leninists during the war. Let us remember the central conception of Trotsky's Proletarian Military Policy: Connect with the anti-fascist sentiment of the masses and above all prove the organic inability of the bourgeoisie to organize the fight against fascism, showing that only the proletariat could destroy the roots of Hitler's and Mussolini's regimes.

But, with some important exceptions that we shall investigate later (especially the WIL/RCP of Great Britain), it can be said that the great majority of the Trotskyist groups and parties opposed the Military Policy, or at least did not understand it. Several national sections, including the Greek, the official British one (RSL) and the Spanish group led by Grandizo Munis, rejected the new policy because they regarded it as a concession to social-chauvinism. They therefore maintained the position of “revolutionary defeatism” which Lenin had held during WW1, but which the new situation rendered impractical and which condemned them to total isolation. The Belgian section even went to the extreme of censoring some parts of the May 1940 Emergency Conference Manifesto which Trotsky had written.

The other big problem was the incomprehension of the concept of “militarization”. The Proletarian Military Policy was not simply a propagandistic idea but above all a practical orientation of Trotsky to his followers. As he had explained in his History of the Russian Revolution “The majority is not to be counted, it is to be conquered”: The Trotskyists had to conquer the masses, beginning in the armed forces. We find very few examples of systematic work in this respect. Although the French Trotskyists had a few phrases in their document on the importance of the Partisan movement, there was no organic participation in it.

The French historian Pierre Broué made some valuable reflections on this question. In a critical article, published in his León Trotsky, he said the following:


“All the evidence shows that Trotsky’s appeal for the line of armed struggle and his proposal that revolutionary Socialists should become ‘militarists’ in order to play their rôle in a militarised world, are missing in this conception, or rather reduced to a secondary, ‘partisan’ level, entirely subordinated to ‘the struggle in the factories’. The discovery that ‘the armed struggle’ exerted an attractive force upon the masses must have presented many problems in the absence of the dimension which Trotsky contributed on ‘militarization’.

(...)

“In the same order of ideas, the hesitancy with which Trotskyists looked at armed resistance suggests that it would be interesting to study how the revolution was conceived within the Fourth International during the war. It seems sometimes to have been conceived as something apocalyptic, which would occur independently of what was going on, and not as a result of being worked for. Had their almost exclusively ‘propagandist’ education, involving the use of the weapons of denunciation and ‘explanation’ – which clearly were the essential activities of an organisation the leaders of which felt themselves to be “swimming against the stream” – prepared the cadres for such a belief? ”[vii]

A qualitatively different example: The WIL and the RCP

There were of course exceptions to this. Some groups and individuals tried to apply the Proletarian Military Policy to the day-to-day political work. The American SWP, pressurized by Trotsky until his death, had formally approved the policy and carried it out partially, defending it publicly and also in the court rooms when they were prosecuted by the state for “subversive activity” in the Minneapolis Trials of 1941[viii]. As a result, the SWP did experience a notable growth throughout that period, although it should be said that Cannon and the other American leaders put all the emphasis in the purely propaganda aspect of the work and not in the political work in the armed forces.

A group which did in fact carry out the Proletarian Militant Policy in an energetic fashion was the Workers International League of Great Britain – from 1944 known as the Revolutionary Communist Party. The first nucleus of this group was formed in 1937 with immigrants from South Africa such as Ralph Lee and Ted Grant.

The state of the different Trotskyist groups was particularly discomforting in Britain, where the majority had refused the advice of Trotsky to enter the Independent Labour Party in 1934 and afterwards his proposal to turn towards the Labour Party. The composition of the existing groups was very bad, most of the members came from petit-bourgeois circles and the internal environment was very closed. The militants spent more time on internal quarrels than on the real political work.

After an attempt at reforming the existing grouplets, Ralph Lee, Ted Grant, Jock Haston and a few others decided to leave them and form a new group on a healthy basis, orientated one hundred per cent towards the working class. They founded the WIL with only seven comrades in 1938.

In September of that year they rejected an attempt on the part of Cannon and other SWP representatives to make a unification of all groups on an unprincipled basis. The WIL comrades explained that they were in favour of unity but only on a firm political basis. They stressed the importance of Labour Party and youth work and also on the Proletarian Military Policy. When it was evident that the other groups were not in agreement, the WIL discarded the fusion and foresaw that the unity of three groups on a politically heterogeneous platform would lead to five or six divisions and splits in the near future.

That was exactly what happened. While the “unified” RSL distinguished itself with its constant fragmentations and passivity during almost all of the war, the WIL – which had only seven members in early 1938 – grew rapidly, transforming itself into an important political force with around five hundred members at the end of the war. If we analyze this carefully, we will notice that it was the successful application of Trotsky's policy which made the difference.

By accepting the Proletarian Military Policy, the WIL also adapted it to the concrete situation in Britain, formulating a programme which included demanding a Labour Party government to fight against fascism, the formation of a unified workers' army of trained battalions of the trade unions and with the election of the officers. Cutting across the monstrous lies of the British bourgeoisie, the WIL also agitated for the complete liberation of the Colonies, thus enabling a real fight against fascism on a world scale.

Rejecting every pretension of pacifism, the WIL ordered all its members to enter the armed forces if they were called up. Inside the army, they were instructed to carry out real revolutionary work together with their class brothers and sisters, gaining the respect as the best soldiers in the army. WIL members who were at the North African front of the British Army made use of the legal forums, the assemblies known as the “Army Bureau of Current Affairs – ABCA”, in order to patiently explain the real significance of the war. In several instances, they won the majority of the ABCAs, as in Benghazi in Libya and in Cairo in Egypt.

Even in the British air force, the RAF, the WIL managed to do important political work, through the pilot Frank Ward who gave classes to other pilots in the programme of the Fourth International. The mood among various sectors of the army was explosive, especially in the Eighth Army in the North African desert. Many soldiers confessed that they wanted to take the arms back to Britain, once the war was over, in order to ensure that things would change!

As the initial wave of war euphoria began to dissipate among the working masses, several struggles took place in industry, where the workers were working up to fourteen hours daily to produce the war supplies. At the same time, the Communist Party made a 180-degree summersault, from a position of opposition to the war, to blind support for the Churchill government. The reason was, evidently, Hitler's attack on Russia in 1941 which obliged Stalin to change policy in order to approach his “democratic allies”. This was why the British CP began to play a directly strike-breaking role after 1941, denouncing every labour conflict as a “sabotage against the anti-fascist war”.

This situation gave the WIL huge opportunities for intervening among the working masses and participating in the strikes that took place during the war. The year 1942 saw a big upturn in the number of strikes and WIL members intervened successfully in some of the most important ones, such as the apprentice strikes at Tyneside, Rolls Royce Aircraft Works, and Glasgow, in August of 1941 and again in July 1943, in the Barnbow Royal Ordnance Factory in June 1943, and in the transport strike in Yorkshire in May of 1943.

We have stressed the example of the WIL here because it shows that the Trotskyists were not automatically condemned to isolation because of the objective situation. On the contrary, we have seen how a small group armed with a correct programme, orientation and tactics can conduct very important work, while a larger organization which does not know how to adapt itself to a new situation is doomed to impotence.

If the Fourth International, as a world organization, had followed the policy of Trotsky with the same ability as the WIL, its subsequent development would probably have been very different. In the next part of this article, we shall see what possibilities and challenges the end of the Second World War put in front of the revolutionaries....

Part 4 ⇒

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Notes

[i] LDT: Bonapartism, Fascism and War. Published in October 1940.

[ii] LDT: Manifesto of the Fourth International on Imperialist War.

[iii] LDT: How to really defend democracy. 1940. My emphasis, PL

[iv] LDT: Some Questions on American Problems. August 1940

[v] See Rodolf Prager, “The Fourth International during the Second World War” in Revolutionary History: Vol.1 No.3, Autumn 1988. War and Revolution in Europe: 1939-1945

[vi] See Revolutionary History: Vol.3 No.2, Autumn 1990: Vietnam. Workers’ Revolution and National Independence

[vii] Pierre Broué: How Trotsky and the Trotskyists faced WWII.

[viii] Cannon's speech in the Minneapolis Trials was later published under the title “Socialism on Trial”.

Trotsky and the struggle for a Revolutionary International (1933-1946) - Part four

Written by Patrick Larsen Thursday, 01 March 2012

In this fourth and final part of Patrick Larsen’s account of the struggle of Trotsky and his followers for a genuine revolutionary international, he looks at the revolutionary situations that opened up in Europe between 1943 and 1945. He demonstrates how these were hijacked and diverted by the dominant forces within the labour movement, i.e. the Stalinists and the reformists. This historic betrayal in turn opened up a new situation on a world scale which the majority of Trotsky's followers were unable to understand. [part 1]

The central perspective of Trotsky was that the Second World War, just as the First, would end with a revolutionary wave in the main capitalist countries. Remembering that the Third International had been founded in practice on the basis of the revolutionary post-war movement in countries like Germany, France, Italy and so on, the Old Man anticipated that in the space of a decade, not one stone would be left upon another of the old Internationals (the Second, reformist, International and the Third, Stalinist, International), and that the Fourth International would be transformed into the dominant revolutionary force on the entire planet.

The events in Europe, and also in the colonial world, confirmed in part this perspective, although we also saw contradictory elements, rooted in the very outcome of the war, which rendered the work of the Bolshevik-Leninists extremely difficult.

Greece – the strangled revolution

The Greek Civil War was an event which totally unmasked the misleading propaganda of the imperialists about a so-called “war for democracy”. For years the Greek workers' movement had been severely oppressed by the Metaxas dictatorship. This repression was reinforced by the Italian-German occupation of Greece from 1940. But towards the end of 1941, several strikes and even workers' demonstrations began in the streets.

In the underground, the Greek resistance movement, the EAM, was founded, with ELAS (National Liberation Army) as its armed wing. The Greek Communist Party, the KKE, without regular contact with Moscow, played an enormous role in this movement and correctly raised the slogan of a Constituent Assembly to decide the future of the country without foreign intervention, be it German-Italian or British Imperialism. Nevertheless, the EAM was founded on a Popular-Front basis of “national unity”, rejecting any differentiation between the classes and any firm connection of democratic demands with the emancipation of the Greek working class.

Despite all this, the heroic resistance of the Greek workers and peasants began to make its voice heard throughout the country. The partisans of ELAS took over one city after another and when the British arrived in Greece the country had effectively been taken over by the resistance movement. The working class also played a decisive role in defeating the occupation; on July 25 of 1943 a huge general strike erupted in Athens which prevented the executions of the workers' leaders of the tram-system who had been jailed and condemned to death for organizing a previous strike.

In Moscow, Stalin was extremely worried about the situation. He wanted to avoid revolution in Greece at all costs, as it would not only put into danger his alliance with the British and American imperialists, but also because just one single successful revolution in a European country could trigger a powerful movement in the whole continent, destabilizing the entire situation. That was why he chose to send a special emissary, Popov, who arrived in Greece just before the end of the occupying regime in October 1944. His first act was to demand that the Communists abandon every pretension of class struggle and that they obey the new coalition government of Georgios Papandreou.

But on December 3, 1944, it came to direct confrontation between the British “liberators” and the followers of EAM, when the former attacked an unarmed demonstration of the latter in Athens, killing 28 protesters and wounding another 148. This represented the beginning of the events known as Dekemvriana. The key question in dispute was over the possession of arms. The members of ELAS refused to surrender their guns to the British forces and consequently the EAM ministers abandoned the coalition government.

Curiously, Churchill defined the EAM-ELAS rebels in Greece – who in their majority were members of the Greek CP – as “Trotskyists”. In a speech given to the House of Commons, he said the following:


“I think ‘Trotskyists' is a better definition of the Greek Communists and of certain other sects than the normal word, and it has the advantage of being equally hated in Russia. (Laughter and cheers).”[i]

The same Churchill, with the explicit acceptance of Stalin, travelled to Greece during Christmas of 1944, in order to lead the repression against the Greek revolution. In his memoirs, the British Prime Minister explained how he and Stalin cynically decided the division of Europe on a sheet of paper in the course of a few minutes[ii]. He also tells how the USSR maintained complete silence about the violent smashing of the Greek Revolution:


“Stalin, however, adhered strictly and faithfully to our agreement of October, and during all the long weeks of fighting the Communists in the streets of Athens, not one word of reproach came from Pravda or Izvestia”[iii]

The agreements of reconciliation that were signed in Varkiza on February the 15, 1945, with the support of the KKE, included the disarming of the ELAS. Although some sections refused, the bulk of the forces of ELAS disarmed. The counter-revolution, thus emboldened, went on the offensive, provoking another guerrilla war that ended with the victory of the counter-revolution in 1949.

Italy: The partisan movement and Stalinism

The fall of Fascist dictator Mussolini in 1943, when Marshall Badoglio ousted him in a coup following on from the mass strikes,opened a new phase in the Italian revolution. The partisan movement, in its majority led by the Italian Communist Party, consisted of more than 100,000 armed men and managed to take big parts of the country without the help of the Allied forces. Even CP leaders such as Luigi Longo admitted that a situation of dual power existed with entire cities controlled by the forces of the resistance movement.

Mass strikes took place in Milan, Genoa, Bologna, Turin and other big cities. The train system in the North was paralyzed for days because of the workers' strike action. The masses assaulted the fascist prisons and liberated the political prisoners by their own strength. The old fascist headquarters were looted and the big printing press was taken over by the workers in Milan and elsewhere. Every person who was seen with a fascist uniform or wearing such symbols was attacked in the streets.[iv]

The landing of Allied troops in Sicily was in reality another desperate measure to control the situation. The Allies tried to impose a coalition government, but at first they tried to do it under the Fascist Marshall Badoglio, and with the simultaneous reestablishment of the monarchy. This clearly exposes the lying propaganda about a “war for democracy”! But pressurized by the masses,within a year,they had to take a step back and propose a new government led by Bonomi with the direct participation of the Italian CP.

Although the fascist regime at that moment was clearly collapsing, the Allies began to bomb Milan between August 12 and 15. Why? Milan had been the centre of strikes and mass demonstrations and the working class was clearly striving for power. In this situation, the Allies wanted to weaken the militant mood of the proletariat with the destruction of the Milanese workers' neighbourhoods.

The situation had become serious for the Italian bourgeoisie, and it was only with the arrival of Togliatti, the CP General Secretary, that a more or less stable coalition government could be formed. The “Rome Protocol” was signed and the partisan movement agreed to obey the orders of the Anglo-American troops. In the British Stalinist paper Daily Worker, its North Italian correspondent, James S. Allen, called the armies of British and American Imperialism “friends of the Italian people”[v].

Years later, the same Togliatti explained the line of the Italian CP during the failed Italian Revolution:


“If anyone reproaches us for not having taken power or having let ourselves be excluded from government, I would say to them that we could not transform Italy into a new Greece; not only because of our own interest, but also because of the interest of the Soviets”[vi]

Denmark – The revolutionary general strike and the insurrection in Copenhagen

Largely unknown, but in reality very symptomatic of the situation which prevailed throughout Europe at that time, were the events in Denmark between 1943 and 1945. Located to the north of Germany, and with the effective control of the traffic between the Baltic Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, the occupation of this small country became a necessity for Hitler.

From the beginning of the occupation, on April 9th 1940, the Social-Democrats made a pact with the German army, destroying its own defence and surrendering the country to the Nazis without firing a single shot. It was a repetition of Petain's cowardice in France, a development that Trotsky had brilliantly predicted. Just as in other occupied zones, the exploitation of the working class increased as the country functioned as the German rearguard, forced to provide food, arms and logistics to the army of the Wehrmacht.

In clandestine conditions, hundreds of resistance circles were formed, many of them organized by the Danish Communist Party, which had been illegalized and whose main leaders had been jailed from June 1941, except for a few who had been able to escape and go into hiding. During the four years of German occupation, 2,674 acts of industrial sabotage were committed (bombs against railroads and armament transport, etc). But much more important than that was the marvellous movement of the working class which began with the regional general strikes of July-August 1943 against the presence of a German war boat in the harbour of Odense. The movement was quickly extended to important cities such as Esbjerg, Kolding and Vejle and later on there were also demonstrations in the capital, Copenhagen.

Although the German Army, helped by the Social-Democrats, managed to put an end to this movement through repression, the anger of the working class did not cease. One year later, towards the end of July 1944, the famous “popular strikes” erupted, beginning as a protest of the workers at B&W in the port of Copenhagen, against the curfew imposed by the German invaders. Very rapidly this movement was transformed into a real insurrection in the workers' neighbourhoods, barricades were set up all over the city and bloody clashes took place for days. Only after having given concessions to all the demands of the protests, could a temporary cease-fire be established.

When the end of Hitler's occupation was imminent, towards March of 1945, a power vacuum emerged in Denmark. The resistance committees, most of them led by the Communist Party, were armed; it was only through their collaboration that it was possible for the British to control the situation. The most militant sectors of the Danish working class were breaking with the Social-Democratic Party and passing over en masse to the Communist Party, which before the occupation had been a miniscule group with just one Member of Parliament.

The slogans of the workers were not only of a democratic character, but had above all a social character: they demanded that all the purchasing-power of the workers lost during the occupation should be restored and also called for the expropriation of those capitalists who had collaborated with the invaders (including Mærsk, a huge Danish capital owner). These demands were present in the historic march of 4th of July 1945, with 100,000 workers in Christiansborg Square in front of the National Parliament. It was only after the appearance of the Communist Members of Parliament, who managed to convince the masses, that the workers abandoned the square. Stalinism had betrayed another revolution[vii].

Repercussions in the Colonial World

The same phenomena which we described in the cases of Italy, Greece and Denmark were reflected in countries like Finland, Belgium and also by the defeat of the conservative government of Great Britain in the polls and the huge electoral victory of the Labour Party. But the revolutionary wave that followed the end of the war was not limited to Europe. In the countries under the domination of imperialism a truly unprecedented movement took place.

As we mentioned in the previous part of this article, this was the case in India, where British Imperialism was confronted with the biggest mutiny in the history of its navy. On February 18th of 1946, the sailors of the huge warship HMS Talwaar, located in the harbour of Bombay, went on strike to protest the bad food conditions.

The strike quickly spread to the territorial patrols in Bombay and the soldiers took over various garrisons and raised red flags. Within 48 hours, this episode was repeated in one division after another in 74 warships, 20 fleets and 22 marine units, including the troops at Calcutta, Karachi, Madras, Cochin and Vishakapatam [viii].

However, the political collaboration with imperialism on the part of the Stalinists of the CP of India – and also on the part of Ghandi and the bourgeois nationalists – meant the isolation of the sailors' rebellion. The rebellion was therefore unable to connect with the great strikes that took place in the textile sector. Once the British imperialists began to repress the movement in cold blood, killing 228 sailors and leaving 1,046 wounded, the movement had no other alternative but to surrender.

In spite of all this, there were huge movements of India's workers, among those the strike of 60,000 railroad workers and later on 100,000 postal workers. There was also a big regional strike in Bombay, organized by the CPI.

British Imperialism was very worried and decided to send a special commission to try and exploit religious antagonisms with the purpose of avoiding a socialist revolution at all costs. This was the background to the criminal division of India, with the creation of a Muslim state (Pakistan) in August 1947 and the subsequent massacre which took place. In this way, the revolution was annihilated on the Indian sub-continent with the explicit acceptance of Stalinism.

In other parts of the Colonial World, the same ferment caused revolutionary upheavals. In Argentina, the workers of Buenos Aires defeated an attempted coup d'état against the Nationalist government of Juan Domingo Perón, thus radicalizing the class struggle in that country and seriously weakening British imperialism.

In China we saw the peasant war of the forces of Mao Zedong which put an end to the rule of Chang-Kai-Shek in 1949. The emancipation of China from the chains of imperialism, in spite of the Stalinist regime that Mao implemented, was an absolutely progressive event and must be considered part of the same revolutionary wave.

Africa was also affected by the revolutionary mood with a remarkable growth of the independence movement, among others in Algeria against the French and in Egypt where a nationalist-revolutionary wing within the army was organized around Nasser, preparing his way to power in 1952.

Stalinism and reformism – weakened or strengthened?

To sum up, we can say that the perspective of Trotsky of an enormous revolutionary wave after the war was confirmed by the development of events. But this did not result, except in very special cases, in an explosive growth of Trotskyism. The Fourth International did not become the “dominant force on the planet” and neither Stalinism nor social-democratic reformism collapsed as tendencies within the labour movement. Evidently, this requires some explanation.

It is important to remember that every perspective is conditional and that its prognosis depends on a whole series of factors. If these factors change, then the end result must inevitably also change. To understand this, it is necessary to analyze the military results of the war, which surprised everyone; even the most advanced military strategists and the president of the United States and rulers of Great Britain.

In reality, almost the entire war against Hitler took place on the Eastern front, on Russian soil. The British imperialists were struggling for their own interests in the North of Africa and the Americans for the control of the Pacific in their war against Japan. All the decisive battles took place in Russia and Germany, the most important ones being those of Stalingrad and Kursk in 1942-43. After that, the Red Army advanced and forced the Germans to retreat rapidly.

The imperialists had been waiting for Russia and Germany to mutually destroy each other and thus secure the conditions for a total domination of Europe on the part of the Allies. But the war developed differently, first and foremost because of the two great Soviet advantages: the planned economy and the heroic resistance of the masses. This enabled the Russians to regroup their forces and defeat the German invaders.

The so-called “D-Day” with the landing of Allied troops in Northern France in July 1944, was not an act to “liberate the people of Europe from fascism” but rather a desperate measure by the imperialists to avoid the whole of Europe falling into Soviet hands. Nevertheless, it was the Russians who entered Berlin first and gave the order to raise the red flag above the Reichstag.

Far from weakening Stalinism, the historic advance of the Red Army, liberating the whole of Eastern Europe from German occupation, reinforced it as a political tendency within the workers' movement. Many rank and file workers thought that the Red Army was sowing the seeds of socialism in each liberated country. The situation caused tremendous confusion, even in the ranks of Trotskyism, and gave many activists illusions in Stalinism.

On the other hand, the economic help of American imperialism, the so-called Marshall Plan, played a big role in reinforcing the authority of social-democratic reformism. The leaders of the Social-democracy promised huge reforms in Western Europe and in some countries, like Great Britain, the working masses swung towards them, hoping for a radical change in society.

It was in this way, on the basis of the strengthening of Stalinism and reformism and their capacity to betray the revolutions that Capitalism was able to consolidate itself for the time being. This was the political precondition for the great economic boom which followed the Second World War.

The catastrophist thesis of Cannon and co.

How did Trotsky's supporters, now without the presence of the Old Man, face up this new reality? Far from recognizing the changed situation and changing tactics accordingly, the main leaders of the Fourth International maintained their old perspective and repeated the old phrases.

In the first place, James Cannon, the main SWP leader, even denied that the war was over. In the second place, he insisted, together with Belgian leader Ernest Mandel, on the impossibility of a new boom of capitalism on a world scale. In his document “Perspectives for the American Revolution”, written in 1946, Cannon was predicting an immediate recession in the North American economy:

“US imperialism which proved incapable of recovering from its crisis and stabilising itself in the 10-year period preceding the outbreak of the Second World War is heading for an even more catastrophic explosion in the current postwar era. ”[ix].

The same ideas were repeated in the writings of the main leaders of the Fourth International, with very few exceptions. In the main resolution of the World Conference of the Fourth International, held in Paris in 1946, the same erroneous perspective was present.

Furthermore, that document contained other fundamental mistakes. In the original draft it said that the USSR had emerged weakened by the war and that it could be overthrown"in the near future, even without military intervention, through the sole fact of economic, political and diplomatic pressure of American and British imperialism, and its military threats"[x]

We believe that these lines speak for themselves! In a moment where the armed forces of the USSR had won what could be argued to be the biggest military victory in the history of war, these gentlemen thought that the Stalinist regime could fall by diplomatic pressure and military threats!

As if these errors were not enough, Cannon, Frank, Pablo, Mandel and the other main leaders also declared that the bourgeoisie was only capable of ruling in Europe through Bonapartist military dictatorships![xi] The only base for such an argument was that the Allied powers had tried to reach a deal to install a dictatorship headed by Badoglio in Italy in 1943-44 after the fall of Mussolini.

This conception clashed again with the reality that existed in Europe. Far from being able to install dictatorships, the bourgeoisie was in fact in a position where it had to govern through bourgeois democracy, for the simple reason that it did not have the strength to destroy the powerful organizations of the working class. In this situation it decided to use another tactic, the old method of class collaboration in the form of Popular Front governments.

Counter-revolution in a democratic form

All those questions did not have a mere academic meaning but were of great importance at the time, for elaborating the correct revolutionary slogans and tactics. As Ted Grant explained on numerous occasions, in times of advance the quality of the generals is essential in a war. But in times of difficulty and retreat, the role of the leadership becomes even more decisive. With good generals it is possible to make a successful retreat in order to reorganize the soldiers and prepare the next battle. But with bad soldiers, a temporary retreat is transformed into a defeat.

There were of course some people in the Fourth International who drew a much more sober-minded balance-sheet of the correlation of forces and who opposed the ultra-left tendencies of the majority. In the United States, a minority of the SWP, led by Albert Goldman (Trotsky's lawyer), Felix Morrow (the author of the famous book on the Spanish Revolution) and Jean Van Heijenoort (Trotsky's personal secretary for seven years), began in 1943 to analyze the changes taking place, starting with Italy[xii]. They drew a whole number of correct conclusions, especially on the need to connect the democratic struggles with the social struggle, on the need to participate actively in the armed resistance movements, the impossibility of military dictatorships in Europe in the near future, etc. However, they also made a number of mistakes, including a failed attempt at unity with Max Shactmann's Workers' Party. Subsequently, almost all of the members of the Morrow-Goldman group became disillusioned and abandoned politics.

The most consistent opposition, and politically the most far-sighted, came from the RCP, the British section led by Jock Haston and Ted Grant. In their documents we see a careful defence of Trotsky's method applied to the new reality in post-war Europe. In a March 1945 document, they explained that Europe was passing through a period of counter-revolution in a democratic form[xiii]. They emphasized that historically, the bourgeoisie had not only been able to liquidate revolutions with the installation of dictatorial regimes but also through bourgeois democracy. With crushing clarity they made an analogy with the abortion of the first German revolution of 1918-19 and the regime of Noske-Sheidemann.

Another great sign of political wisdom contained in the document was how the RCP understood the “dual and contradictory nature” of the advance of the USSR. They stressed that, on the one hand the victory of the Red Army made the masses remember the Russian October Revolution, but at the same time, the military triumph allowed the Soviet bureaucracy to strangle the proletarian revolution in Europe. They concluded that it was perfectly possible that Stalinism could survive for a substantial period of time. They even managed to anticipate how Stalin, three years afterwards, in 1948, would implement planned economies in Eastern Europe, controlled from above, Bonapartist-style.[xiv]

Although Ted Grant and the RCP could not foresee the magnitude of the post-war boom (a phenomenon that would influence all of politics in Europe until 1973), they did understand that there would not be an immediate recession but rather an economic upturn of capitalism. In the pre-conference of the Fourth International in April of 1946, they presented a whole number of amendments to the majority document. They speak for themselves:


“In opposition to the reformists and Stalinists, who seek to lull the masses with a perspective of a new renaissance of capitalism and a great future for democracy, the resolution of the International Pre-Conference is one hundred per cent correct in emphasizing the epoch of decline and collapse of world capitalist economy. But in a resolution that seeks to orientate our own cadres on immediate economic perspectives – from which the next stage of the class struggle will largely flow, and thus our immediate propaganda and tactics – the perspective is clearly false.(...)

“The theory of spontaneous collapse of capitalism is entirely alien to the conceptions of Bolshevism. Lenin and Trotsky emphasized again and again that capitalism will always find a way out if it is not destroyed by the conscious intervention of the revolutionary party which, at the head of the masses, takes advantage of the difficulties and crises of capitalism to overthrow it. The experience of World War II emphasizes the profound correctness of these conceptions of Lenin and Trotsky.

“Given the prostration of the proletariat through the betrayal of its mass organisations, the cyclical upswing of the productive forces, the wearing out of machinery, the slashing of wages, leads to an absorption of surplus stocks and the restoration, or partial restoration of the rate of profit. Thus, the way is prepared for a new cyclical upswing which in its turn lays the basis for an even greater slump. (...)

“No matter how devastating the slump, if the workers fail, capitalism will always find a way out of its economic impasse at the cost of the toilers and the preparation of new contradictions. The world crisis of the capitalist system does not end the economic cycle but gives it a different character. The theory of the Stalinists put forward in the last world crisis that this was the last crisis of capitalism from which it would never recover, has been revealed to have been entirely unMarxian. There is a grave danger that this theory will be revived in our own ranks today. .”[xv]

The majority of the leaders of the Fourth International did not listen to the arguments of the RCP. Their lack of understanding caused an incredible amount of confusion in the Trotskyist movement and the whole subsequent history and evolution of the Fourth International was marked by this fact. The destructive line of subordination to petit-bourgeois movements – the adaptation to guerillaism and its tragic consequences in Argentina and Peru, its flirting with Stalinism in Yugoslavia and China, the “invention” of the students as “a new revolutionary factor”, the fatal approving of the POR's adaptation to nationalism during the Bolivian revolution of 1952 – all this was the result of an inability to understand the period that opened up after WW2 and as a consequence, they began the “search” for magic solutions to the real problems in the building of the revolutionary party.

The legacy of Trotsky

The Old Man could not have anticipated in a detailed manner all the events or the way in which the Second World War would end. However, his writings do provide the key, the dialectical method, to understanding, not only the new situation, but also the tasks of the revolutionaries. Despite the historical failure of the leaders of the Fourth International, which effectively destroyed the organization founded by Trotsky, his struggle for a revolutionary International was not in vain.

Although the Marxist movement went through a major setback after the war, especially after the dissolution of the RCP in 1949, the unbroken thread was maintained through the tireless work of Ted Grant. The writings of Ted are the direct continuation of Trotsky and his continued analysis of the world situation helped a new generation understand a complex reality and keep up the struggle against all odds. The unbroken thread between Ted (who died only five years ago, 2006) and Trotsky is what unites the cadres of the International Marxist Tendency with the best traditions of Trotsky.

Seventy-one years after his death, many of Lev Davidovich's perspectives are being vindicated by events. The fall of the USSR, the possibility of which was denied for decades by the Stalinists, revealed the impossibility of building Socialism in one country. Today, many communists, among them Cubans, are reading the writings of Trotsky for the first time, discovering how he anticipated the collapse of “real socialism” almost sixty years ago.

The ideas of Trotsky are also being debated in Venezuela, where president Chávez has quoted him on several occasions and has recommended the reading of the Transitional Programme. The Venezuelan Revolution, which has not been completed, is in itself a brilliant confirmation of his Theory of the Permanent Revolution, i.e. the impossibility of the national bourgeoisie carrying through an agrarian reform and an industrialization of the country. This task falls upon the shoulders of the Venezuelan proletariat, which is currently organizing a big movement for workers' control in the basic industries and the state oil company.

In this article we have tried to show Trotsky's method in the building of the revolutionary party. We think that the struggle for a revolutionary international was neither a waste of time nor a utopian project, but an audacious and courageous attempt to arm a new generation with the theoretical tools that can provide the final victory. The present crisis of capitalism, described even by the bourgeois commentators as the worst recession since the Great Depression of 1929, compels us to re-study the method of Trotsky. If this article has served to assist in this respect, it has been worthwhile.

[End]

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[i] Quoted in “Guerra y revolución. Una interpretación alternativa de la Segunda Guerra Mundial”, CEIP, Buenos Aires, 2004. page 24.

[ii] Winston S. Churchill: “Triumph and Tragedy”, page.228-29

[iii] Ibid. page. 262

[iv] Information taken from: Ted Grant: The Italian revolution and the tasks of the British workers, Workers’ International News, Vol.5 No.12, August 1943:

[v] Quoted in Felix Morrow: The Italian Revolution, Fourth International, New York, September 1943, Vol.4 No.9, pp.263-73.

[vi] Quoted in “Guerra y revolución. Una interpretación alternativa de la Segunda Guerra Mundial”, CEIP, Buenos Aires, 2004. Page 28.

[vii] In spite of the treacherous policy of its leaders, the Danish CP grew from 4,000 to 60,000 members just after the end of the war. On the electoral plane it went from 2.4% to 12.5% of the vote in October 1945. But once the party had revealed its reformist intentions it was abandoned and lost nine MPs in the October 1947 elections.

[viii] For a detailed analysis: Lal Khan: Pakistan's Other Story, Aakar Books, Delhi, 2009. page. 72-83

[ix] James P. Cannon: Theses on the American Revolution

[x] Quoted in Ted Grant: History of British Trotskyism, Wellred, London, 2002, page. 130

[xi] The position of the Majority on the inevitability of a period of Bonapartism in Europe is reflected in many of their, writings, among others the articles of Pierre Frank: Democracy or Bonapartism in Europe? and Bonapartism in Europe

[xii] The documents oft the Morrow-Goldman fraction can be found in the following archives: Félix Morrow, Albert Goldman, Jean Van Heijenoort:

[xiii] “The changed relation of forces in Europe and the role of the Fourth International”, published in: Ted Grant: The Unbroken Thread, Fortress Books, London, 1989, page.83-110.

[xiv] Ibid. page, 92-93

[xv] Proposed line of amendment to International Conference Resolution “New Imperialist Peace and the Building of the Parties of the Fourth International”. Workers’ International News, November-December 1946:





History & Theory » Historical Analysis » The Fourth International


Related articles

Keeping the International alive: a history of the Fourth International – Part Two
Keeping the International alive: a history of the Fourth International – Part One
Introduction to "Ted Grant Selected Works Vol. 2" (Part 2)
Introduction to "Ted Grant Selected Works Vol. 2" (Part 1)
Trotsky and the struggle for a Revolutionary international (1933-1946) - Part three


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From The International Marxist Tendency- Latest Polls Before Elections In Greece- The Pre-Revolutionary Upheaval Continues

As the June 16 elections in Greece are getting closer, the last opinion polls are being published. They reveal a number of interesting things.

First of all, the number of people who would vote for SYRIZA have increased massively in relation to the votes it received in the May 6 election, when it got 16.7% of the votes. Now all opinion polls consistently show the party getting between 25 and 31.5% of the votes (the highest figure being that of the last Public Issue poll for Kathimerini). This is despite the fact that there has been a massive campaign of intimidation, threats, blackmail and fear against the party by all representatives of the Greek and international bourgeoisie. The European Union, the European Central Bank, the IMF and prime ministers and finance ministers from many European countries, all have threatened that a victory for SYRIZA would mean the end of EU funding (which in any case goes to pay German and French banks), Greek exit from the euro-zone, economic chaos, etc.

Just to give you a taste of the tone of this campaign, here's a quote from the outgoing PASOK Minister of the Interior Michalis Chrysohoidis: "If Greece cannot meet its obligations and serve its debt the pain will be great. What will prevail are armed gangs with Kalashnikovs and which one has the greatest number of Kalashnikovs will count. We will end up in civil war." Despite all this SYRIZA's votes according to the opinion polls would still increase by between 60-100%, showing on the one hand the depth of opposition against the austerity policies imposed and on the other, the fact that now SYRIZA looks like a serious proposition with a chance of coming to power.

At the same time, the very parties who signed and voted for the terms of the Memorandum, including ND and PASOK, are now campaigning on the basis of ... their opposition to those austerity measures!

There is a parallel process of concentration of the right wing vote around New Democracy. The Democratic Alliance party which was formed a year ago as split off from ND and which received 2.5% of the votes in May, has now gone back into the fold of New Democracy. The Independent Greeks, a right wing, anti-Memorandum split off from New Democracy, has also lost votes (from 10% in May to 5-7% now) as a result of the fact that its leader was seen to betray the cause of opposition to the Memorandum. Extreme right wing LAOS, which only received 2.8% at the elections (crushed because of its support for the Papademos government) has further collapsed in the polls, down to between 0.4 to 1.7%). Opinion polls, conducted since the June elections were called, give ND between 25 and 29.4% of the votes.

Interestingly the openly neo-Nazi Golden Dawn has also seen half of its votes disappear, from 6.97% in the May elections to 4.4 - 5.4% now. This confirms what the Marxists said at the time that this was mainly a protest vote, which was occupying the ground LAOS had lost. An interesting GPO poll found that of the nearly 7 percent of Greeks who voted for Chrysi Avgi (Golden Dawn) in the May 6 polls, 60 percent did it as a protest vote, 29.3 percent did it "to get rid of illegal immigrants" while only 4.8 percent described themselves as far-right. We should not underestimate the threat which GD represents, as its core is composed of fascist gangs who have not hesitated in using violence against immigrants and left wing organisations. However, the vote it got in May does not represent its real base of support. The 4.8% of its voters which describe themselves as "far-right" would represent about 0.3% of the electorate.

In the camp of the left, the most significant thing is the collapse of the Communist Party (KKE), which is paying for the extremely sectarian policy of its leadership in rejecting the appeal from Syriza to form a government of the Left (graphically shown by Papariga's refusal to even meet Tsipras for discussions). While the KKE received 8.48% of the votes in the May elections, it is currently polling only between 5 and 5.7%. This would mean losing about 200,000 of the 536,000 votes it got in May.

So far, this has only had the effect of increasing the hysterical and sectarian attacks of the KKE leadership against Syriza, precisely the opposite of the tactic of United Front which Lenin advocated towards other workers' parties. In a speech yesterday, KKE general secretary Aleka Papariga concentrated in denouncing SYRIZA as a "new social democratic party" like PASOK, part of a general plot of the ruling class against the KKE. She event went as far as saying that while she did not subscribe to "conspiracy theories" and was not saying that there were any direct "links", she drew attention to the fact that "US media was giving wide coverage to SYRIZA" because it was in the interest of the US to break up the European Union (which is dominated by Germany) thus clearing the way for the US to move against Russia (!!).

As a side note, one of the opinion polls traced changes in voting and produced a very interesting diagram showing what percentage of other party's votes would be going to Syriza:


The graph shows how 24% of those who voted for the KKE in May would now vote for SYRIZA, which would also win votes from a few other parties. As a side note, despite the sectarian policy of ANTARSYA (a coalition of extreme-left sectarian groups) leadership of rejecting an appeal for unity from SYRIZA, 40% of its voters, with a healthy instinct, would vote SYRIZA.

It is still two weeks from the elections and many things can happen. In this situation, violent shifts in public opinion are intrinsic in the situation. The general trends however, are clear.

From The Lynne Stewart Defense Committee- A Poem

Click on headline.

Poem from Prisoner
May 13th, 2012

(From Carole Seligman)

Lynne sent this poem, which was sent by a prisoner at ADX Florence “as a reflection on the ‘exercise’ yard and other things!”

From the Paris Zoo — The Panther

By Rainer Maria Rilke (German)

His vision from the constantly passing bars,

has grown so weary that it cannot hold

anything else. It seems to him there are

a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.

As he paces in cramped circles over and over,

the movement of his powerful strides

is like a ritual dance around a center

in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

Only at Times, the curtain of the pupils

lifts, quietly — , an image enters in,

Rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,

plunges into the heart and is gone.

Songs To While Away The Class By- Bruce Springsteen's "Born In The U. S. A."- From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin-A Story- "Back In The Real World"

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Bruce Springsteen performing “Born In The U.S.A.”

Bruce Springsteen Born In The U. S. A. Lyrics

Born down in a dead man town
The first kick I took was when I hit the ground
You end up like a dog that's been beat too much
Till you spend half your life just covering up

Born in the u.s.a., I was born in the u.s.a.
I was born in the u.s.a., born in the u.s.a.

Got in a little hometown jam
So they put a rifle in my hand
Sent me off to a foreign land
To go and kill the yellow man

Come back home to the refinery
Hiring man said son if it was up to me
Went down to see my v.a. man
He said son, don't you understand

I had a brother at Khe Sahn
Fighting off the Viet Cong
They're still there, he's all gone

He had a woman he loved in Saigon
I got a picture of him in her arms now

Down in the shadow of the penitentiary
Out by the gas fires of the refinery
I'm ten years burning down the road
Nowhere to run aint got nowhere to go

Born in the u.s.a., I was born in the u.s.a.
Born in the u.s.a., I'm a long gone daddy in the u.s.a.
Born in the u.s.a., born in the u.s.a.
Born in the u.s.a., I'm a cool rocking daddy in the u.s.a.
**********
Joshua Lawrence Breslin comment:

As I mentioned in an earlier entry in this space, courtesy of my old yellow brick road magical mystery tour merry prankster fellow traveler Peter Paul Markin, recently, in grabbing an old Bruce Springsteen CD compilation from 1998 to download into my iPod I came across a song that stopped me in my tracks,Brothers Under The Bridge. I had not listened to or thought about that song for a long time but it brought back many memories from the late 1970s when I did a series of articles for the now defunct East Bay Eye (California, naturally) on the fate of some troubled Vietnam veterans who, for one reason or another, could not come to grips with “going back to the real world” and took, like those a great depression generation or two before them, to the “jungle”-the hobo, bum, tramps camps located along the abandoned railroad sidings, the ravines and crevices, and under the bridges of California, mainly down in Los Angeles and created their own “society.” The story that accompanies the song to this little piece from the same compilation, Born In The U. S. A., is written under that same sign.

The genesis of this story follows that of the “Brothers Under The Bridge” previously posted .The editor of the East Bay Eye, Owen Anderson, gave me that long ago assignment after I had done a smaller series for the paper on the treatment, the poor treatment, of Vietnam veterans by the Veterans Administration in San Francisco and in the course of that series had found out about this band of brothers roaming the countryside trying to do the best they could, but mainly trying to keep themselves in one piece. My qualifications for the assignment other than empathy, since I had not been in the military during the Vietnam War period, were based simply on the fact that back East I had been involved, along with several other radicals, in running an anti-war GI coffeehouse near Fort Devens in Massachusetts and down near Fort Dix in New Jersey. During that period I had run into many soldiers of my 1960s generation who had clued me on the psychic cost of the war so I had a running start.

After making connections with some Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) guys down in L.A. who knew where to point me I was on my way. I gathered many stories, published some of them in the Eye, and put the rest in my helter-skelter files. A couple of weeks ago, after having no success in retrieving the old Eye archives, I went up into my attic and rummaged through what was left of those early files. I could find no newsprint articles that I had written but I did find a batch of notes, specifically notes from stories that I didn’t file because the Eye went under before I could round it into shape.

The format of those long ago stories was that I would basically let the guy I was talking to give his spiel, spill what he wanted the world to heard, and I would write it up without too much editing (mainly for language). I have reconstructed that story here as best I can although at this far remove it is hard to get the feel of the voice and how things were said. This is Michael Gross’ short bitter-sweet story, the story of a soldier born in the U. S.A.
**********

I kissed that 1969 West Coast America home tarmac the minute I got off that foul-smelling plane. Foul-smelling after many hours of drinking guys, of dope-smoking and chopped cigarette- smoking guys, of pissing in the sink guys, of food all over the place guys who had just completed that last leg from Hawaii back to the real world from goddam in-country, “Nam, where else. “Back in the real world,” kept pounding through my brain through all the fog of war dope, vile whiskey, and stale potato chips. I swore I would kiss that hot tarmac when I landed and I did. See I came back in one piece, whole see, not like a couple of guys I buddy systemed with. Hell they are still back there for all I know. One day hell came down on us from the north and I made out on an Evac but those guys, Jerry and Sam, just vanished into smoke. I don’t want to talk about that too much because I want to tell you about my life a little after kissing that fucking tarmac. Talk a little about how I wound up here in Santa Monica living on stale bread and stale dreams.

See I had a girl back home. Back home in Steubenville, Ohio, did I tell you that? Lorraine, ah, sweet Lorraine who promised me she would wait for me to get back and then we would get married. Ya, same old, same old, we knew each other from high school, hell, junior high really, and were strictly one on one all the way through. Nobody messed with her, nobody messed with her while I was around anyway, and nobody told me anything otherwise. And her letters, her letters were always sweet perfume and talk of a little cottage and stuff like that. Girl-boy in love young and waiting, just waiting to get a jump start on something. Well I guess Lorraine got lonely, or tired of waiting or just tired of the idea of waiting and headed up to Ann Arbor in Michigan with some girlfriends one weekend (big blue traitor to the Buckeyes, Ohio State you know) and started to smoke dope, and party. And more than party. Guys were all over her (from what she told me latter when I got my own personal dear john letter in person) and she got to like partying around, and guying around. So not two days after I get home, kind of weary, kind of sensing something was wrong but I was unable to my finger on it she spilled everything to me. And then she announced that she was heading west in some Volkswagen bus with her girlfriend and a couple of damn big blue guys to “find herself.” Ya, that story, now that I tell it, has been told a million times by about two millions guys.

Jilted, sliced and diced, heart cut out. It wasn’t until later, later after I hit the road west myself, that I realized that small town girl, small town guy just were glued together by circumstances and once she (and I) had seen the great big world that small town dust couldn’t hold jack together. I took it hard, real hard for a while, real mopey hard until I went back to girl. You know not a girl, girl the name we had for cocaine, sweet dream cocaine, something that would lift you out of the real world funk and into the “real world.”

Hey, before ‘Nam I was like most guys, a few beers, maybe some rotgut store- bought whiskey or maybe jump across the Ohio River to Kentucky for some moonshine. Nothing serious, nothing serious but just passing into manhood like our fathers and theirs before us. Don’t let anyone tell you different, sure a lot of guys drank themselves silly in ‘Nam but almost every guy, every living guy anyway, tried dope, mostly weed. And some of us liked it more than somewhat. And some of us, when the hammer came down, and were sitting out in the boonies, waiting, waiting for your number to be called, had their girl for company. Ya, sweet dream girl. But as I was coming back to the real world, come hell or high water, I tapered off, tapered off big time until Lorraine laid that bummer on me.

Of course in 1970 or so a guy who had girl, or connections to girl, good connections and righteous stuff, had plenty of friends, and plenty of adventurous girlfriends too. So I had my fair share of redheads (my favorite), blondes (so-so) and whatever other color girl’s hair there is and just let the dope run it painless course. Until they stopped coming around some much when the dope dried up, or when they were heading back to whatever they were doing before that early 1970s experiment stuff started to wear thin. Truth though was that I was caught between a rock and a hard place with the dope. I was dealing some to stay alive but I had been busted a couple of times, nothing big but a squaresville Ohio rap was hard going, hard going if and when you wanted go straight. I learned that the hard way when I, after getting a little sober (at the out-patient VA clinic) I went over Mackenzie’s Steel Stamping shop in Mechanicsville, the big local steel mill around that area, and they said “no dice” even though they were hiring vets like crazy. And it was like that a lot of places, a lot. It was like they didn’t care that I had done my duty, had done my American fucking duty. Like it didn’t count, count for anything.

So to make a long story short I stayed just about as long as I could, as long as my parents could take it, as long as Steubenville could take it I guess. A couple of years. Then I heard about guys, a band of brothers, Vietnam Vets, but going wild against the war, and calling out everybody on it, everybody who still supported it but wouldn’t give a vet a break, who were heading west to start fresh, or just to blow off the east. And in that caravan as it headed west sat in one seat one Michael Gross. Free, like some pioneer wild boy I read about in high school in history class. The coast or bust.

Well, as you can see it was bust. I couldn’t get a job because the Arabs had beaten up all the oil or something. I couldn’t keep a girl because they wanted somebody with dough, at least the girls I was running with, or prospects. Ya, and I went back to girl, to pushing girl until I got busted again, did a little time and wound up here, by this fucking ravine just pushing up stale bread and stale dreams trying to keep my head on. Just trying to keep my head on. But when you write this thing up, write up this too, I did what I did for America, and I am not ashamed, not ashamed at all. I just wish somebody had appreciated it. Damn.

Oh ya, if you print this thing could you say that Mike Gross was looking for Lorraine, Lorraine Schmidt, from Steubenville, Ohio. And tell her Mike is back in the real world. Okay.

Make The 1% Pay- Rally In Boston June 16th At Dewey Square

Click on the headline to link to a Facebook event page for the rally and march in Boston against austerity and the 1%.


Markin comment:

Some marches and rallies can be passed up. Others are maybe. But this one is one to attend. Fight for a workers party that fights for a workers government. All out!

Let’s Redouble Our Efforts To Save Private Bradley Manning-Make Every Town Square A Bradley Manning Square From Boston To Berkeley-Join Those In Front Of Fort Meade, Maryland On June 6th To Support Private Manning’s Court Appearance-Notes From The June 8th Hearing

Click on the headline to link to a the Private Bradley Manning website page.

Markin comment:

The Private Bradley Manning case is headed toward a fall trial. Those of us who support his cause should redouble our efforts to secure his freedom. For the past several months there has been a weekly vigil in Greater Boston across from the Davis Square Redline MBTA stop (renamed Bradley Manning Square for the vigil’s duration) in Somerville from 1:00-2:00 PM on Fridays. This vigil has, to say the least, been very sparsely attended. We need to build it up with more supporters present. Please join us when you can. Or better yet if you can’t join us start a Support Bradley Manning weekly vigil in some location in your town whether it is in the Boston area or Berkeley. And please sign the petition for his release. I have placed links to the Manning Network and Manning Square website below.

Bradley Manning Support Network

http://www.bradleymanning.org/

Manning Square website

http://freemanz.com/2012/01/20/somerville_paper_photo-bradmanningsquare/bradleymanningsquare-2011_01_13/

The following are remarks that I have been focusing on of late to build support for Bradley Manning’s cause.

Veterans for Peace proudly stands in solidarity with, and defense of, Private Bradley Manning.

We of the anti-war movement were not able to do much to affect the Bush- Obama Iraq War timetable but we can save the one hero of that war, Bradley Manning.

I stand in solidarity with the alleged actions of Private Bradley Manning in bringing to light, just a little light, some of the nefarious war-related doings of this government, under Bush and Obama. If he did such acts they are no crime. No crime at all in my eyes or in the eyes of the vast majority of people who know of the case and of its importance as an individual act of resistance to the unjust and barbaric American-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I sleep just a shade bit easier these days knowing that Private Manning may have exposed what we all knew, or should have known- the Iraq war and the Afghan war justifications rested on a house of cards. American imperialism’s gun-toting house of cards, but cards nevertheless.

I am standing in solidarity with Private Bradley Manning because I am outraged by the treatment meted out to Private Manning, presumably an innocent man, by a government who alleges itself to be some “beacon” of the civilized world. Bradley Manning had been held in solidarity at Quantico and other locales for over 500 days, and has been held without trial for much longer, as the government and its military try to glue a case together. The military, and its henchmen in the Justice Department, have gotten more devious although not smarter since I was a soldier in their crosshairs over forty years ago.

These are more than sufficient reasons to stand in solidarity with Private Manning and will be until the day he is freed by his jailers. And I will continue to stand in proud solidarity with Private Manning until that great day.

Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal of All U.S./Allied Troops And Mercenaries From Afghanistan! Hands Off Iran! Free Bradley Manning Now!

************
"God knows what happens now. Hopefully worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms...

I want people to see the truth... because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public."

—online chat attributed to Army RFC Bradley Manning

Accused Wikileaks Whistleblower Bradley Manning,

a 23-year-old US Army intelligence analyst, is accused of sharing a video of the killing of civilians— including two Reuters journalists—by a US helicopter in Baghdad, Iraq with the Wikileaks website.

He is also charged with blowing the whistle on the Afghan War Diary, the Iraq War Logs, and revealing US diplomatic cables. In short, he's been charged with telling us the truth.

The video and documents have illuminated the true number and cause of civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, human rights abuses by U.S.-funded contractors and foreign militaries, and the role that spying and brines play in international diplomacy.

Half of every edition of The New York Times has cited one or more of these documents during the past year. The leaks have caused Amnesty International to hail Wikileaks for catalyzing the democratic middle eastern revolutions and changing journalism forever.

What happens now is up to YOU!

Never before in U.S. history has someone been charged with "Aiding the enemy through indirect means" by making information public.

A massive; popular outpouring of support for Bradley Manning is needed to save his life.

We are at a turning point in our nation's history. Will we as a public demand greater transparency and accountability from pur elected leaders? Will we be governed by fear and secrecy? Will we accept endless war fought with our tax dollars? Or, will we demand the right to know the truth—the real foundation of democracy.

Here are some actions you should take now to support Bradley:

» Visitwww.standwithbrad.org to sign the petition. Then join our photo petition at iam.bradleymanning.org

» Join our facebook page, savebradley,
to receive campaign updates, and follow SaveBradley on twitter

» Visitwww.bradleymanning.org and
download our Organizer Toolkit to learn howyou can educate community members, gain media attention, and donate toward Bradley's defense.

The People Have the Right to Know...

Visit wvwv.braclleymaiiniiig.org to learn howyou can take action!

************
What did WikiLeaks reveal?
.
"In no case shall information be classified... in order to: conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error; prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency... or prevent or delay the release of information that does not require protection in the interest of the national security."

—Executive Order 13526, Sec. 7.7. Classification Prohibitions and Limitations

"Is this embarrassing? Yes. Is this awkward? Yes. Consequences for U.S. foreign policy? I think fairly modest."

—Robert Gates, Unites States Secretary of Defense

PFC Bradley Manning is a US Army intelligence specialist who is accused of releasing classified information to WikiLeaks, an organization that he allegedly understood would release portions of the information to news organizations and ultimately to the public.

Was the information that PFC Manning is accused of leaking classified for our protection and national security, as government officials contend? Or do the revelations provide the American public with information that we should have had access to in the first place? Just

what are these revelations? Below are some key facts that PFC Manning is accused of making public.

There is an official policy to ignore torture in Iraq.

The "Iraq War Logs" published by WikiLeaks revealed that thousands of reports of prisoner abuse and torture had been filed against the Iraqi Security Forces. Medical evidence detailed how prisoners had been whipped with heavy cables across the feet, hung from ceiling hooks, suffered holes being bored into their legs with electric drills, urinated upon, and sexually assaulted. These logs also revealed the existence of "Frago 242,"an order implemented in 2004 not to investigate allegations of abuse against the. Iraqi government This order is a direct violation of the UN Convention Against Torture, which was ratified by the United States in 1994. The Convention prohibits the Armed Forces from transferring a detainee to other countries "where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture." According to the State Department's own reports, the U.S. government was already aware that the Iraqi Security Forces engaged in torture (1).

U.S. officials were told to cover up evidence of child abuse by contractors in Afghanistan.

U.S. defense contractors were brought under much tighter supervision after leaked diplomatic cables revealed that they had been complicit in child trafficking activities. DynCorp — a powerful defense contracting firm that claims almost $2 billion per year in revenue from U.S. tax dollars — threw a party for Afghan security recruits featuring boys purchased from child traffickers for entertainment. DynCorp had already faced human trafficking charges before this incident took place. According to the cables, Afghan Interior minister HanifAtmar urged the assistant US ambassadorto"quash"the story.These revelations have been a driving factor behind recent calls for the removal of all U.S. defense contractors from Afghanistan (2).

Guantanamo prison has held mostly innocent people and low-level operatives.

The Guantanamo Files describe how detainees were arrested based on what the New York Times referred to as highly subjective evidence. For example, some poor farmers were captured after they were found wearing a common watch or a jacket that was the same as those also worn by Al Queda operatives. How quickly innocent prisoners were released was heavily dependent on their country of origin. Because the evidence collected against Guantanamo prisoners is not permissible in U.S. courts, the U.S. State Department has offered millions of dollars to other countries to take and try our prisoners. According to a U.S. diplomatic cable written on April 17, 2009, the Association for the Dignity of Spanish Prisoners requested that the National Court indict six former U.S. officials for creating a legal framework that allegedly permitted torture against five Spanish prisoners. However,"Senator Mel Martinez... met Acting FM [Foreign Minister] AngelLossada... on April 15. Martinez... -underscored that the prosecutions would not be understood or accepted in the U.S. and would have an enormous impact on the bilateral relationship"(3).

There is an official tally of civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Even though the Bush and Obama Administrations maintained publicly that there was no official count of civilian casualties, the Iraq and Afghanistan War Logs showed that this claim was false. Between 2004 and 2009, the U.S. government counted a total of 109,000 deaths in Iraq, with 66,081 classified as non-combatants. This means that for every Iraqi death that is classified as a combatant, two innocent men, women or children are also killed (4),

FOOTNOTES:

(1)Alex Spillius, "Wikileaks: Iraq War Logs show US ignored torture allega-
tions,"Telegraph, October 22,2010. http://www.telegrapti.co.uk/news/
woridnews/middleeast/iraq/8082223/WiMleab-lraq-War-Logs-show-US-
ignored-torture-allegations.html.

(2)foreign contractors hired Afghan 'dancing boys; WikiLeaks cable
reveals'guanJian.co.uk, December 2,2010, http://www.guardian.co.tik/
world/2010/dec/02/foreign-contractors-hired-dancing-boys

(3) Scott Shane and Benjamin Weiser.The Guatanamo Files: Judging De­tainees'Risk, Often With Rawed Evidence'New York Times, April 24,2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/2S/world/guantanamo-files-flawed-evidence-for-assessing-risk.html;'US embassy cables: Don't pursue Guantanamo criminal case, says Spanish attorney general'guardian.co.uk, December 1,2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/202776.

(4) Iraq War Logs Reveal 15,000 Previously Unlisted Civilian Deaths,' guard-ian.co.uk, October 22,2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/won'd/2010/ oct/22/true-civilian-body-count-iraq

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin-“Mitt” on Immigration- A Short Note

Never let it be said that this writer is not an equal opportunity critic. I have spend most of my time over the years hammering the various Democratic presidential candidates for being weak-kneed and perfidious because from my perspective as an advocate of a workers party the kind of people who might be attracted to such a venture are today found, among other places, in the myopic (some say mythical but we will let that pass here) left-wing of the Democratic Party. Can anyone really argue that it is worthwhile to try to argue with Republicans into moving at least into the 18th century? That applies, as well, to this current decade’s crop of Republican candidates because for the most part they are beyond the pale. However this year’s presumptive (nice touch, right) Republican presidential candidate in particular, Mitt Romney has taken the lead on immigrant bashing and therefore are ‘worthy’ of comment.

The odd part (at least to the politically naïve) of the controversy is that when he was Governor of Massachusetts he held, at worst, rather benign positions on the question of illegal immigrants. Now Romney has taken to calling the current regime a virtual sieve for illegal immigration. And Obama has replied in kind about Mitt’s previous efforts in Massachusetts. My question is who are these gentlemen trying to woo by acting as this generation’s version of the yahoos of the anti-immigrant Know Nothing (American) Party. I know for certain that it is not me. Although my father’s forbears came to this country from England one jump ahead of the law in the early 1800’s and my mother’s forbears came over from Ireland on the “famine” ships in the 1840’s I still in many ways feel like an immigrant. And that is exactly the point-virtually everyone here came from somewhere else so we better be damn sure of our own ‘green card’ status before we worry about those who have come after us. I, therefore, at least know who I am not trying to woo. When the deal goes down I am sure we will find that the current Know Nothings probably have only been here a couple of generations themselves. Forget the illegals I want the names and numbers of those people for immediate action (and status report).

As stated above, and as I have mentioned in previous entries, I stand for the proposition that we need a workers party that fights for a workers government. As such I do not have an immigration plan as per Obama and Romney and others. That is this government’s problem and I will provide no advice. Today I would define the immigration question negatively, and urge others to think about it this way as well. That means the central thrust should be to fight for full citizenship rights for all who make it here. A big step in that direction is a real amnesty program. In a nation full of generation after generation of immigrants who came here under all kinds of conditions this is what we should be worrying about. Down with the Know Nothings!

Let’s Redouble Our Efforts To Save Private Bradley Manning-Make Every Town Square A Bradley Manning Square From Boston To Berkeley-Join Those In Front Of Fort Meade, Maryland On June 6th To Support Private Manning’s Court Appearance-Notes From The June 7th Hearing

Click on the headline to link to a the Private Bradley Manning website page.

Markin comment:

The Private Bradley Manning case is headed toward a fall trial. Those of us who support his cause should redouble our efforts to secure his freedom. For the past several months there has been a weekly vigil in Greater Boston across from the Davis Square Redline MBTA stop (renamed Bradley Manning Square for the vigil’s duration) in Somerville from 1:00-2:00 PM on Fridays. This vigil has, to say the least, been very sparsely attended. We need to build it up with more supporters present. Please join us when you can. Or better yet if you can’t join us start a Support Bradley Manning weekly vigil in some location in your town whether it is in the Boston area or Berkeley. And please sign the petition for his release. I have placed links to the Manning Network and Manning Square website below.

Bradley Manning Support Network

http://www.bradleymanning.org/

Manning Square website

http://freemanz.com/2012/01/20/somerville_paper_photo-bradmanningsquare/bradleymanningsquare-2011_01_13/

The following are remarks that I have been focusing on of late to build support for Bradley Manning’s cause.

Veterans for Peace proudly stands in solidarity with, and defense of, Private Bradley Manning.

We of the anti-war movement were not able to do much to affect the Bush- Obama Iraq War timetable but we can save the one hero of that war, Bradley Manning.

I stand in solidarity with the alleged actions of Private Bradley Manning in bringing to light, just a little light, some of the nefarious war-related doings of this government, under Bush and Obama. If he did such acts they are no crime. No crime at all in my eyes or in the eyes of the vast majority of people who know of the case and of its importance as an individual act of resistance to the unjust and barbaric American-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I sleep just a shade bit easier these days knowing that Private Manning may have exposed what we all knew, or should have known- the Iraq war and the Afghan war justifications rested on a house of cards. American imperialism’s gun-toting house of cards, but cards nevertheless.

I am standing in solidarity with Private Bradley Manning because I am outraged by the treatment meted out to Private Manning, presumably an innocent man, by a government who alleges itself to be some “beacon” of the civilized world. Bradley Manning had been held in solidarity at Quantico and other locales for over 500 days, and has been held without trial for much longer, as the government and its military try to glue a case together. The military, and its henchmen in the Justice Department, have gotten more devious although not smarter since I was a soldier in their crosshairs over forty years ago.

These are more than sufficient reasons to stand in solidarity with Private Manning and will be until the day he is freed by his jailers. And I will continue to stand in proud solidarity with Private Manning until that great day.

Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal of All U.S./Allied Troops And Mercenaries From Afghanistan! Hands Off Iran! Free Bradley Manning Now!

************
"God knows what happens now. Hopefully worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms...

I want people to see the truth... because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public."

—online chat attributed to Army RFC Bradley Manning

Accused Wikileaks Whistleblower Bradley Manning,

a 23-year-old US Army intelligence analyst, is accused of sharing a video of the killing of civilians— including two Reuters journalists—by a US helicopter in Baghdad, Iraq with the Wikileaks website.

He is also charged with blowing the whistle on the Afghan War Diary, the Iraq War Logs, and revealing US diplomatic cables. In short, he's been charged with telling us the truth.

The video and documents have illuminated the true number and cause of civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, human rights abuses by U.S.-funded contractors and foreign militaries, and the role that spying and brines play in international diplomacy.

Half of every edition of The New York Times has cited one or more of these documents during the past year. The leaks have caused Amnesty International to hail Wikileaks for catalyzing the democratic middle eastern revolutions and changing journalism forever.

What happens now is up to YOU!

Never before in U.S. history has someone been charged with "Aiding the enemy through indirect means" by making information public.

A massive; popular outpouring of support for Bradley Manning is needed to save his life.

We are at a turning point in our nation's history. Will we as a public demand greater transparency and accountability from pur elected leaders? Will we be governed by fear and secrecy? Will we accept endless war fought with our tax dollars? Or, will we demand the right to know the truth—the real foundation of democracy.

Here are some actions you should take now to support Bradley:

» Visitwww.standwithbrad.org to sign the petition. Then join our photo petition at iam.bradleymanning.org

» Join our facebook page, savebradley,
to receive campaign updates, and follow SaveBradley on twitter

» Visitwww.bradleymanning.org and
download our Organizer Toolkit to learn howyou can educate community members, gain media attention, and donate toward Bradley's defense.

The People Have the Right to Know...

Visit wvwv.braclleymaiiniiig.org to learn howyou can take action!

************
What did WikiLeaks reveal?
.
"In no case shall information be classified... in order to: conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error; prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency... or prevent or delay the release of information that does not require protection in the interest of the national security."

—Executive Order 13526, Sec. 7.7. Classification Prohibitions and Limitations

"Is this embarrassing? Yes. Is this awkward? Yes. Consequences for U.S. foreign policy? I think fairly modest."

—Robert Gates, Unites States Secretary of Defense

PFC Bradley Manning is a US Army intelligence specialist who is accused of releasing classified information to WikiLeaks, an organization that he allegedly understood would release portions of the information to news organizations and ultimately to the public.

Was the information that PFC Manning is accused of leaking classified for our protection and national security, as government officials contend? Or do the revelations provide the American public with information that we should have had access to in the first place? Just

what are these revelations? Below are some key facts that PFC Manning is accused of making public.

There is an official policy to ignore torture in Iraq.

The "Iraq War Logs" published by WikiLeaks revealed that thousands of reports of prisoner abuse and torture had been filed against the Iraqi Security Forces. Medical evidence detailed how prisoners had been whipped with heavy cables across the feet, hung from ceiling hooks, suffered holes being bored into their legs with electric drills, urinated upon, and sexually assaulted. These logs also revealed the existence of "Frago 242,"an order implemented in 2004 not to investigate allegations of abuse against the. Iraqi government This order is a direct violation of the UN Convention Against Torture, which was ratified by the United States in 1994. The Convention prohibits the Armed Forces from transferring a detainee to other countries "where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture." According to the State Department's own reports, the U.S. government was already aware that the Iraqi Security Forces engaged in torture (1).

U.S. officials were told to cover up evidence of child abuse by contractors in Afghanistan.

U.S. defense contractors were brought under much tighter supervision after leaked diplomatic cables revealed that they had been complicit in child trafficking activities. DynCorp — a powerful defense contracting firm that claims almost $2 billion per year in revenue from U.S. tax dollars — threw a party for Afghan security recruits featuring boys purchased from child traffickers for entertainment. DynCorp had already faced human trafficking charges before this incident took place. According to the cables, Afghan Interior minister HanifAtmar urged the assistant US ambassadorto"quash"the story.These revelations have been a driving factor behind recent calls for the removal of all U.S. defense contractors from Afghanistan (2).

Guantanamo prison has held mostly innocent people and low-level operatives.

The Guantanamo Files describe how detainees were arrested based on what the New York Times referred to as highly subjective evidence. For example, some poor farmers were captured after they were found wearing a common watch or a jacket that was the same as those also worn by Al Queda operatives. How quickly innocent prisoners were released was heavily dependent on their country of origin. Because the evidence collected against Guantanamo prisoners is not permissible in U.S. courts, the U.S. State Department has offered millions of dollars to other countries to take and try our prisoners. According to a U.S. diplomatic cable written on April 17, 2009, the Association for the Dignity of Spanish Prisoners requested that the National Court indict six former U.S. officials for creating a legal framework that allegedly permitted torture against five Spanish prisoners. However,"Senator Mel Martinez... met Acting FM [Foreign Minister] AngelLossada... on April 15. Martinez... -underscored that the prosecutions would not be understood or accepted in the U.S. and would have an enormous impact on the bilateral relationship"(3).

There is an official tally of civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Even though the Bush and Obama Administrations maintained publicly that there was no official count of civilian casualties, the Iraq and Afghanistan War Logs showed that this claim was false. Between 2004 and 2009, the U.S. government counted a total of 109,000 deaths in Iraq, with 66,081 classified as non-combatants. This means that for every Iraqi death that is classified as a combatant, two innocent men, women or children are also killed (4),

FOOTNOTES:

(1)Alex Spillius, "Wikileaks: Iraq War Logs show US ignored torture allega-
tions,"Telegraph, October 22,2010. http://www.telegrapti.co.uk/news/
woridnews/middleeast/iraq/8082223/WiMleab-lraq-War-Logs-show-US-
ignored-torture-allegations.html.

(2)foreign contractors hired Afghan 'dancing boys; WikiLeaks cable
reveals'guanJian.co.uk, December 2,2010, http://www.guardian.co.tik/
world/2010/dec/02/foreign-contractors-hired-dancing-boys

(3) Scott Shane and Benjamin Weiser.The Guatanamo Files: Judging De­tainees'Risk, Often With Rawed Evidence'New York Times, April 24,2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/2S/world/guantanamo-files-flawed-evidence-for-assessing-risk.html;'US embassy cables: Don't pursue Guantanamo criminal case, says Spanish attorney general'guardian.co.uk, December 1,2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/202776.

(4) Iraq War Logs Reveal 15,000 Previously Unlisted Civilian Deaths,' guard-ian.co.uk, October 22,2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/won'd/2010/ oct/22/true-civilian-body-count-iraq

Out in the 1950s Be-Bop Night- Bo Diddley- Who Put The Rock In Rock 'n’ Roll?

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Bo Diddley performing his rock classic Bo Diddley.

DVD Review

Rock ‘n’ Rock All-Star Jam: Bo Diddley, Bob Diddley, Ron Woods, and other artists,1985

Well, there is no need to pussy foot around on this one. The question before the house is who put the rock in rock ‘n’ roll. And here in this one hour all-star concert documentary, complete with background backstage footage, Bo Diddley unabashedly stakes his claim to the title that was featured in a song of his by the same name, except, except it starts out with the answer. Yes, Bo Diddley put the rock in rock ‘n’ roll. And off his performance here as part of the 30th anniversary celebration of the tidal wave of rock that swept through the post-World War II teenage population in 1955 he has some “street cred” for that proposition.

Certainly there is no question that black music, in the early 1950s at least, previously confined to mainly black audiences down on the southern farms and small segregated towns and in the northern urban ghettos, centrally New York City, Chicago and Detroit, along with a ragtag coterie of “hip” whites (located in such urban oases as Greenwich Village, Harvard Square and North Beach out on the western blue-pink sky great American rim) is central to the mix that became classic 1950s rock ‘n’ roll. That is not to deny the other important thread commonly called rockabilly (although if you had scratched a rockabilly artist and asked him or her for a list of influences black gospel and rhythm and blues would be right at the top of their list, including Elvis’). But here let’s just go with the black influences. No question Ike Turner’s Rocket 88, Joe Turner’s Shake , Rattle and Roll and, I would add, Elmore James’ Look Yonder Wall are nothing but examples of R&B starting to break to a faster, more nuanced rock beat.

Enter one Bo Diddley. Not only does he have the old country blues songbook down, and the post- World War II urbanization and electrification of those blues down, but he reaches back to the oldest traditions of black music, back before the American slavery plantations days, back to the Carib influences and even further back to earth mother African shores. In short, that “jungle music”, that “devil’s music” that every white mother and father (and not a few black ones as well), north and south, was worried, no, frantically worried would carry away their kids. Well, it did and we are none the worst for it.

Here is a little story from back in the 1950s days though that places old Bo’s claim in perspective and addresses the impact (and parental horror) that Bo and rock had on teenage (and late pre-teenage) kids, even all white “projects” kids like me and my beat down corner boys. In rock birth years, like 1955, ’56, ’57 every self-respecting teenage boy (or almost teenage boy), under the influence of omnipresent black and white television, tried, one way or another, to imitate Elvis. From his off-hand casual dress, to his sideburns, to swiveling hips, to sneer. Hell, I even bought a be-bop doo-wop comb to wear my hair like his. I should qualify this statement a little and say every self-respecting boy who was aware of girls tried the Elvis trick. And, additionally, became acutely aware that if you wanted to get any place with them, any place at all, you had better be something like the second coming of Elvis.

Enter now, one eleven year old William James Bradley, “Billie,” my bosom buddy in those old Adamsville South elementary school days. Billie was wild for girls way before I acknowledged their existence, or at least their charms. Billie decided, and rightly so I think, to try a different tack. Instead of forming up at the end of the line in the Elvis imitation department he decided to imitate Bo Diddley. At that time we were playing the song Bo Diddley and, I think, Who Do You Love? like crazy. Elvis bopped, no question. But Bo’s beat spoke to something more primordial, something connected, unconsciously to our way back ancestry. Even a clumsy white boy like me could sway to the beat.

Of course that last sentence is nothing but a now time explanation for what drove us to the music. Then we didn’t know the roots of rock, or probably care, except our parents didn’t like it, and were sometimes willing to put the stop to our listening. Praise be for transistor radios (younger readers look that up on Wikipedia) to get around their madness, their cold war night parental madness that enveloped us all.

But see, Billie also, just at that beginning break-out time, did not know what Bo looked like. Nor did I. So his idea of imitating Bo was to set himself up as a sort of a Buddy Holly look alike, complete with glasses and that single curled hair strand.

Billie, naturally, like I say, was nothing but a top-dog dancer, and wired into girl-dom like crazy. And they were starting to like him too. One night he showed up at a local church catholic, chaste, virginal priest-chaperoned dance with this faux-Buddy Holly look. Some older guy meaning maybe sixteen or seventeen, wise to the rock scene well beyond our experiences, asked Billy what he was trying to do. Billie said, innocently, that he was something like the seventh son of the seventh son of Bo Diddley. This older guy laughed, laughed a big laugh and drew everyone’s attention to himself and Billie. Then he yelled out, yelled out for all the girls to hear “Billie boy here wants to be Bo Diddley, he wants to be nothing but a jungle bunny music N----r boy”. All went quiet. Billie ran out of the hall, and I ran after him, out the back door. I couldn’t find him that night.

See, Billie and I were clueless about Bo’s race. We just thought it was all rock (read: white music) then and didn’t know much about the black part of it, or the south part, or the segregated part either. We did know though what the n----r part meant in our all white housing project. And here was the kicker. Next day Billie strutted into school looking like the seventh son of the seventh son of Elvis. But as he got to the end of the line I could see, and can see very clearly even now, that the steam had gone out of him. So when somebody asks you who put the rock in rock ‘n’ roll know that old Bo’s claim was right on track, and he had to clear some very high racial and social hurdles to make that claim. Just ask Billie.

Reflections In The Dorchester Day Wind- From The Pen Of Peter Paul Markin

Click on the headline to link to the Dorchester Day website

As I stepped up the steps from the Morrissey Boulevard entrance to the Columbia MTA station in the “high Dorchester” section of old home town Boston that noontime June 3rd morning I was suddenly overcome with thoughts of how much this old transit/transfer section of town from my neighboring North Adamsville grow up home to downtown and points north had been part of my growing up life. Oops on that Columbia station reference, except maybe for old-time townies. I ‘forgot’ that the station had long ago been renamed from old housing project ghetto hellhole dump for Boston’s poor, black and white, but increasing black as time wore on and the whites fled to neighboring North Adamsville and points south, Columbia Point. Of course the stop is now named the JFK (no need to identify those Boston-etched initials, even to newcomers, although for how much longer I don’t know) UMass MBTA station reflecting its new designation as the site of the JFK Presidential Library and the ever-sprawling although still commuter-bound Boston branch of the state university system.

The reason that I am taking these steps, these now suddenly fraught with memories steps, is in order to take the old Redline subway down the line a few stops to the still same old name Ashmont station. From there to then walk a few blocks (actually about twenty but memory failed) further down Dorchester Avenue (hereafter “Dot” Avenue, we don’t have to be formal here, not in Dorchester, christ, not in Dorchester) to meet up with some ex-military veteran activists united in Veterans for Peace who are marching this day in the annual Dorchester Day parade and have invited me to march with them. I can hardly believe though that this is actually my first Dorchester Day parade under any pretext (held annually on the first Sunday in June for about a billion years now in order to celebrate the landing party that founded the place. It was not always part of Boston but had its own separate history back about half a billion years ago). So this will be a story about memory, yes, always memory these days, about how the peace message that these gutsy veterans bring with them in hard-hit working class and immigrant- heavy Dot, and about the twelve millionth reworking of the “what goes around comes around.” But let’s get started.

Okay, so I “safely” entered the JFK/UMass station and after successfully passing my new “Charlie” card through the scanner (there is a story here but I will let that pass) I head downstairs almost automatically to the waiting platform. Except, as a fairly infrequent user of the “T” of late, and of this stop almost beyond memory, I almost went to the wrong platform. Reason: this Redline station separates one branch going to old traditional Ashmont the other winding its way to North Adamsville and points south as the public transportation system has grown tentacles to all reaches of the Greater Boston area. But I right myself in time, walk right, and wait a few minutes for the old redeye to come into the station with much fanfare.

The trip was uneventful as a ride, no screaming kids, no drunks riding the rails to shake the shakes on the cheap, no petty larceny eyes waiting to pounce, but was filled with memory tips as we joggle alone parallel to the ever present triple-deckers adjacent to line. House after house stuck almost together like one with their three back porches showing laundry and storage, In the old days these triple-deckers represented that first trek (including by some of my more distant relatives, the close ones hail from hard Irish South Boston, “Southie”) out toward the southern old suburbs and more space. Now they represent, increasingly, the lasting abode of blacks, browns, and immigrants who did not survive the seemingly never-ending 2008 home-ownership bubble, or who never got that far. Next stop Savin Hill, same comment, and same stuck together three-deckers along the line (although farther from the din of the tracks, closer to the bay, better housing stock can be found).

Ah, then the curve turn to Fields Corner and I see a couple of hats doffed from old- time passengers, one seemingly ancient beyond description and time, while we pass the ancient Roman Catholic Church (Saint Anne’s, maybe?) seen from the curve. (In the old days, jesus, the whole train load would be men doffing hats or women crossing themselves, including hatless kid me, I think).

Of course Fields Corner memory was more than just train doffs and crosses but was filled with treks from North Adamsville. Why? Well, kid why. See the train sprawl to the suburbs mentioned earlier started after I left this part of town. Back in the day (nice, huh) no Redline went to North Adamsville and so to get to town (or beyond to mecca Harvard Square) you waited, waited endlessly for the clickety-clack privately-run Eastern Massachusetts bus or just walked. Me, I walked, kid walked, hey it was only a couple of miles, just a lark most days except meltdown dog days August. Just go over the North Adamsville Bridge walk up Neponset Avenue, cut up Adams Street and then presto, taken a token and take freedom (the why of freedom has been told before and need not detain us here) and hang-out Boston Common or Friday night/ early Saturday morning Harvard Square. Next.

Shawmut, seldom stopped at and known mainly for the white invasion into the area by young 1970s radicals (SDS remnants, Progressive Labor, all kinds of Maoists and Trotskyists beyond mention looking to immerse themselves in the tiny real Boston working class. Good luck, brothers and sisters). They mainly hovered around the Melville Street Victorians and big houses (simple math- divide up seven rooms among seven roommates and you could swing the rent, or in some cases afford the cheap mortgage). Somebody told me a while back , and I was amazed since most of those ancient minute warriors have long since gone to academia ghettos or at least the quiet, very quiet so as not to disturb their sleep, suburbs, that a few refugees still hold forth there and even make some noise on local issues. Hats off, if that is true. But time to move on.

Okay end of the line beautified Ashmont and walk. Ashmont of a thousand (maybe not that many, not as many as Southie anyway) Irish (Irish by bulk clientele and thus Irish) bars, ladies by invitation only, thus not invited, for manly bouts of whiskey straight up (and maybe, depending on dough and days, a beer chaser), furtive arguments about baseball or some misty sport or name, and a few busted ribs or noses. I knew the inside of a fair share of them, walking home, Dorchester home, not youth North Adamsville home, and was not welcome like the ladies in a couple of the rougher ones (“slumming” so it seemed ), no dough for carfare used for one last shot instead. And Ashmont of youth alternative to Field Corner home, sometimes when I had a pressing problem, a pressing kid problem, meaning, naturally, girls, or something like that, and the extra walk time down Gallivan Boulevard gave resolve to the question (hey, minute resolve on the girl thing, hell, even I knew, or suspected, eternity angst on that one)

Walk, human walk machine walk, since wee kid eternity down at the old Adamsville projects, and carless father, mostly carless father (or clunkers that meant carless in short order) , and too impatient to wait for another branch of that privately run Eastern Massachusetts bus, and so walk. And today I walk because in my planning I had assumed more time that I needed for random Sunday service trains and so I could old time walk to eat up time before the one o’clock step-off. And so walk, walk right in into that cluster of hard-bitten veterans (mainly now ancient times Vietnam era or older, jesus) getting ready to “show the colors” to do unequal “battle” once again against the American monster war machine. And we, they, do.