Markin comment:
Below this general introduction is another addition to the work of creating a new international working class organization-a revolutionary one fit of the the slogan in the headline.
Markin comment (repost from September 2010):
Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward
The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.
With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
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Felix Morrow-The First Phase of the Coming European Revolution-A Criticism of the International Resolution of the Fifteenth Anniversary Plenum-(December 1943)
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Source: Fourth International Vol.5 No.12, December 1944, pp.369-377. [1*]
Transcribed: by Ted Crawford, 2003.
Public Domain: Marxists’ Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2006. You can freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit the Marxists’ Internet Archive as your source, include the url to this work, and note the transcribers & proofreaders above.
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The document, whose text follows, was rejected by the Eleventh Convention of the American Trotskyist movement by a vote of 51 to 5. See editorial on the Convention in this issue. Ed.
Comrade E.R. Frank, as reporter on the plenum to the New York membership meeting, stated (comrades inform me) that the plenum arrived at unanimous agreement on the international question. He referred once to the “even heated manner” of the plenum discussion, but left unspecified what the political questions were in dispute, and indicated that whatever differences there had been, they were finally resolved in unanimous agreement.
This was not Morrison’s or my understanding of the plenum decision. It becomes necessary to establish precisely what happened in the plenum.
In the course of the discussion it became clear
1.that the plenum did not accept the contention of Comrades Warde, Frank and others that the difference between the subcommittee resolution and the Morrow resolution was no less than programmatic;
2.that some of the points in the Morrow resolution were acceptable to Comrade Cannon;
3.that other Comrades (Thomas, Russell) wished to see various paragraphs of the Morrow resolution incorporated in the final plenum resolution.
To facilitate this, and to arrive at a maximum possible agreement, I withdrew my resolution, joined with Morrison (who had supported my resolution) in rewriting some of its paragraphs to meet various objections, and my rewritten document was offered as a series of amendments to the resolution.
However, after a protracted discussion, the lack of time and other considerations made it impossible to consider the Morrow-Morrison amendments individually.
In my summation speech, I stated that the essential differences between the Morrow-Morrison amendments and the draft resolution could be summed up in two propositions. If these two propositions were accepted by the resolution subcommittee, there could be substantial agreement between us on the international resolution as finally edited. These two propositions were as follows:
1.That the draft resolution erred in excluding the possibility of the use of bourgeois-democratic methods by the European bourgeoisie and its American imperialist masters; they would in all probability attempt to stem the European revolution not only by the use of military and fascist dictatorships but also where necessary by the use of bourgeois democracy.
2.That the draft resolution erred in minimizing the Stalinist danger; we must recognize that the victories of the Red Army have temporarily strengthened the prestige of Stalinism; and we must, therefore, include in the resolution a warning of the very real danger of Stalinism to the European revolution.
Speaking after me in his summary speech, Comrade Cannon indicated that these two propositions would be acceptable to the authors of the draft resolution. This was my impression and that of Morrison and of the other members of the plenum. It is true that Comrade Cannon also added that the amendments which formulated these propositions would be accepted only insofar as they fitted into the framework of the draft resolution. This statement of Comrade Cannon did not, however, appear to modify vitally his statement that the two propositions were acceptable to the authors of the draft resolution.
On the basis of Comrade Cannon’s indication of the extent of our agreement, Comrade Morrison and I accepted the final decision of the plenum as follows: to adopt the subcommittee’s resolution in principle and to submit to the subcommittee the Morrow-Morrison amendments, the subcommittee to incorporate into the resolution those of the amendments which it considered compatible with the resolution, and Morrison and Morrow to be consulted in the writing of the final resolution. If important amendments were not incorporated by the subcommittee, Morrison and I stated, they would be discussed in the party by us in various articles in internal bulletins.
Thus, when the plenum closed, one could not really speak of unanimous or almost unanimous agreement. It was still to be seen which of the Morrow-Morrison amendments would be incorporated by the subcommittee in the final resolution, and which of them would be the subject of an educational discussion.
In preparing the final text of the resolution, the subcommittee was undoubtedly ready to consult me to the fullest extent. Unfortunately, however, I was stricken ill and the final resolution had to be drafted without such consultation. The subcommittee sought my views at the last possible moment before the resolution was sent to press, when I was still in the hospital, but my condition made it impossible for me to read it and offer further suggestions.
Had we been able to collaborate in the final editing, perhaps the area of agreement would be larger than it now is. As I shall indicate below, the subcommittee incorporated into the final resolution several sentences from the Morrow-Morrison amendments while at the same time retaining formulations of the original draft resolution which are in crying contradiction to the incorporated amendments. Perhaps in discussion with the subcommittee I would have been able to demonstrate these contradictions and persuade the subcommittee to remove them.
As the resolution stands, however, were the National Committee given the opportunity to vote on its final text, I would find it impossible to vote for it. Neither of the two propositions which I considered essential to an agreement appear in the final resolution in reasonably satisfactory form, as I shall show in some detail. Though there are no fundamental, programmatic differences, the disputed questions are important and deserve the study of the party as a whole.
After Comrade Frank and others have reported unanimous agreement, it might have come as an unpleasant surprise to the party to learn that differences remain. This could have been in large part avoided if the reporters at the membership meetings had told the membership—which had a right to know—what the plenum discussion consisted of. There was no political or organizational reason why the reporters could not have stated the nature of the political questions which were in dispute, the precise details of the final decision of the plenum, and the stated intention of Morrow and Morrison to discuss in subsequent articles those important amendments not accepted by the resolution subcommittee.
It would aid the education of the party to make a practice of publishing in the internal bulletin the important material rejected or modified by a plenum. The membership would thus be able better to understand how the plenum arrived at its decisions and whether these decisions were the best possible under the circumstances. For this reason alone it was necessary to publish the Morrow-Morrison amendments. It was an error on my part not to have proposed this at the plenum.
In the following pages I have attempted as far as possible, not to repeat the points made in the Morrow-Morrison amendment, or in my plenum speeches. The plenum material is taken for granted, since this is written only for N.C. members, most of whom were present.
The Danger of Ultra-Leftism
The Morrow-Morrison amendments were written from the standpoint that a plenum resolution adopted by us today must primarily occupy itself with the present and immediate future—the first phases of the European revolution. On the other hand the subcommittee resolution obviously proceeded from the point of view that its task was primarily the reiteration of programmatic fundamentals. This difference was especially apparent in the fact that the Morrow-Morrison amendments dealt in some detail with the problem of democratic demands while the subcommittee resolution ignored them entirely in its original draft.
Some of the comrades supporting the subcommittee apparently thought they had a crushing answer to the Morrow-Morrison amendments when they triumphantly quoted from the 1938 Founding Program the idea that democratic slogans are “only incidental and episodic slogans.” And this thought appears in the final resolution, which speaks of “the limitations and subordinate character of democratic slogans as a means of mobilizing the masses for revolutionary action.”
“Episodic,” “incidental,” “subordinate”—with these adjectives Comrades Warde, Frank and Cannon sought to minimise the importance of democratic slogans in the coming revolution.
The absurdity of their position should become clear when we answer the question: what are democratic slogans “incidental” or “subordinate” to? Democratic slogans are subordinate to transitional slogans and to programmatic fundamentals; democratic slogans must be constantly connected, in our agitation, to transitional slogans and programmatic fundamentals. That is all that is meant by “incidental” and “subordinate.” Obviously, then, it follows that at any time this side of the successful revolution democratic slogans still have an important place in our agitation. The fact that tactics (democratic slogans) are subordinated to strategy (dictatorship of the proletariat) does not absolve us from the responsibility of outlining the character of the tactics necessary for the coming period in Europe. The fact that democratic slogans are “incidental” and “episodic” does not do away with the fact that more than one revolutionary party has broken its neck by its failure to understand the crucial role of democratic slogans—that before it could make the revolution it first had to win a majority of the proletariat, and that this majority could be won in part only through a phase, “episodic” but indispensable, of democratic demands. That was the terrible lesson we should have learned for all time from the abortive Spartacist uprising of January 1919.
In a revolutionary situation, a democratic demand may be of enormous importance—the way to win the masses to the revolutionary party. To name but one example—the demand for the immediate convocation of the Constituent Assembly, which played such an enormous role in the Russian Revolution and is certain to play an equally important role in one or more of the European revolutions. Let me remind the Comrades that the Bolshevik withdrawal from and boycott of the Pre-Parliament, which was the curtain-raiser to the insurrection, was carried out under the slogan of immediate convocation of the Constituent Assembly. One has only to cite such a concrete example of a democratic demand to indicate the empty ultra-leftist-radicalism of the resolution’s emphasis on “the limitations and subordinate character of democratic slogans as a means of mobilizing the masses for revolutionary action,”
In the plenum discussion, a number of supporters of the draft resolution justified its passing over the problem, of democratic demands and its preoccupation with reiterating programmatic fundamentals, by referring to the danger within the Fourth International of opportunism and revisionism. The one item of evidence to which these comrades referred was the Three Theses of a small group of European comrades (published in the Dec. 1942 FI).
Comrade Logan answered this argument irrefutably. He agreed, as we all agree, that the Three Theses constitute a revisionist and opportunist tendency. But he insisted that we should make a systematic investigation of and give the correct weight to all the existing tendencies in the international. In actual fact, the authors of the Three Theses represent no one but themselves, are simply an aberration of the emigration. Far more significant than the Three Theses has been the consistently ultra-leftist course of our official British section and its consequent deterioration. And this ultra-left deviation took place in a whole section and one which was operating in its own country under conditions of legality and with many possibilities of a healthy development. Thus the present evidence is that within the International the danger of ultra-leftism is far more likely than the danger of opportunism.
To Logan’s argument one can add the rich lessons of the first years after the last war. The young parties of the Comintern suffered primarily not from opportunism but from ultra-leftism. It was against this tendency that Lenin in 1920 wrote ‘Left Wing’ Communism—An Infantile Disorder. If, despite the tremendous prestige of the victorious Bolsheviks, the Comintern was so pervaded by ultra-leftist deviations, the same phenomenon is far more likely to confront the Fourth International at the end of this war.
If the leadership of the American party feels it necessary in international resolution today to remind our European comrades that democratic slogans are “incidental” and “subordinated” to the grand strategy (dictatorship of the proletariat) of the revolution, then at the very least we should simultaneously and with equal emphasis warn our European comrades that the best strategic line may lead to ruin if it is not coupled with the timely raising of tactical slogans, i.e. those democratic and transitional demands which are appropriate to the consciousness of the masses at the given moment.
Isolation, such as the Fourth International parties have always had to endure, can be weathered only by the utmost programmatic intransigence. But to live in isolation with one’s programmatic banner nailed to the mast tends to breed an inflexibility unfavorable to an intelligent understanding of the use of democratic and transitional demands when the opportunity arises to launch them in a revolutionary situation. Certainly this has been the experience of our European sections. I have already referred to the British experience; the same is true of our Spanish comrades during the revolutionary period of the civil war.
I repeat: the main danger within the Fourth International appears to me to lie in the direction of ultra-leftism. It is necessary, as we approach the first period of the European revolution, to emphasize and underline the role of democratic demands.
Finally, it must be noted that even if Comrade Cannon were correct in assuming that the main danger within the International was in the direction of opportunism, the subcommittee resolution was scarcely the way to combat that danger. The European comrades might well retort to the resolutions:
“Thank you, comrades, for repeating the programmatic fundamentals, but we also have a copy of the 1938 Founding Program and we have copies of our other programmatic documents. And we study the program as well as you do. What we want to know from you is what you think we should do in the next immediate period, what are the first problems we face, what obstacles we must overcome.”
The answer to opportunist tactics is correct tactics, not merely reiterations of the elementary principles of Marxism.
The Tempo of the Coming Revolution
It was perhaps inevitable that, in our attempt to keep the hope of revolution alive during the years of isolation since September 1939, we oversimplified the picture of what is coming. I know that more than one inexperienced comrade drew from our press a picture of the war coming toward its close, the masses rising in all countries of Europe, success crowning their efforts, meaning by success the irrevocable establishment of the Soviet power, and’ that all this would; take place within two or three years after the closing period of the war.
Not that our most authoritative documents were based on such a conception. To mention only one, let us turn to the Manifesto of the Fourth International on The Imperialist War and the Proletarian Revolution. In rejecting a pessimistic outlook for the future, it equally rejected a Pollyanna optimism. It posed the correct outlook in the following manner:
Will not the revolution be betrayed this time too, inasmuch as there are two Internationals in the service of imperialism while the genuine revolutionary elements constitute a tiny minority? In other words: shall we succeed in preparing in time a party capable of leading the proletarian revolution? In order to answer this question correctly it is necessary to pose it correctly. Naturally, this or that uprising may end and surely will end in defeat owing to the immaturity of the revolutionary leadership. But it is not a question of a single uprising. It is a question of an entire revolutionary epoch.
The capitalist world has no way out, unless a prolonged death agony is so considered. It is necessary to prepare for long years, if not decades of war, uprisings, brief interludes of truce, new wars and new uprisings.
A young revolutionary party must base itself on this perspective. History will provide it with enough opportunities and possibilities to test itself, to accumulate experience and to mature. The swifter the ranks of the vanguard are fused the more the epoch of bloody convulsions will be shortened, the less destruction will our planet suffer. But the great historical problem will not be solved in any case until a revolutionary party stands at the head of the proletariat. (Pages 4041, my italics.)
Let us underline the words: “It is necessary to prepare for long years, if not decades...” Trotsky in these words sought to prepare us for the probability that the achievement of the Socialist United States of Europe would take decades rather than the few years immediately following the closing period of the war.
Trotsky was certain, and so are we, that successful Socialist revolutions would issue out of the war. That is to say, that in one European state or another the workers would, after the maturing of their revolutionary party, successfully overthrow capitalism and establish the Soviet power. But Trotsky also wrote scores, and perhaps hundreds, of articles explaining the crucial importance of democratic demands in a revolutionary situation, i.e., he expected that after the revolutions began in Europe there would be a more or less protracted period in which the masses would follow the reformist parties.
Having at last won the masses, the revolutionary party would lead them to the establishment of the Soviet power. But the young workers’ state—or two or even more—would face world capitalist intervention. Foreign capitalist intervention, in turn, would lead internally in the proletarian states to a revival of civil war, much as it happened in the young Soviet Russian Republic.
As this conflict deepens, we are confident the proletarian power will extend to other European states, and lead in the end to the Socialist United States of Europe. But the whole process will in all likelihood not be telescoped into a few supreme, intense and swift efforts of the European proletariat. No, more likely is a perspective of decades of struggle.
This, then, is the conception of the coming revolution which should now be explained to our party. In essence, of course, this conception of the coming revolution is in no way less optimistic than the oversimplified picture which many of them undoubtedly have in their minds. In any event, it has the decisive merit of being the true picture. Moreover, those who firmly grasp it will not have their hopes dashed to the ground in the coming years. They will remain firm revolutionists no matter what obstacles arise in our path.
Let us not only praise Trotsky, but let us also, try to learn from him how to deal with political problems. One could cite dozens of examples from his writings of how, on the eve of great events or in their first days, Trotsky considered it politically necessary to estimate the probable tempo of what was to come. Almost at random, I cite a typical example—how Trotsky wrote, on May 28, 1931, under the heading The Problems of the Tempos of the Spanish Revolution:
A correct determination of the tempo of development of the revolution is of tremendous significance—if not for the determination of the basic strategic line then for the determination of the tactics. And without correct tactics, the best strategic line may lead to ruin. It is understood that to guess the tempos in advance for a prolonged period is impossible. The tempo has to be examined in the course of the struggle, making use of the most varied indicators. Moreover, in the course of events the tempo may change very abruptly. But we must nevertheless keep before our eyes a definite perspective in order to introduce the necessary connectives into it in the process of experience. (The Spanish Revolution in Danger, page 30, my, italics.)
Having thus enunciated why it was politically necessary to attempt to estimate the tempo of the development of the revolution, Trotsky then went on to indicate the concrete factors which led him to expect a slow development of the revolution in Spain. Such was the method which Trotsky taught us. One seeks in vain for this method in the plenum resolution.
The Morrow-Morrison amendments do attempt to estimate the tempo of the coming revolution. The amendments do not exclude the possibility of the transfer of power to the workers immediately following the fall of Nazism. And from this possibility the amendments draw the conclusion that it is necessary, as soon as the masses begin to move against the Nazi regime, or any regime which may follow as a result of a coup d’état such as occurred in Italy, to put forward the slogans of creation of workers’ councils and All Power to the Workers’ Councils.
But, the amendments then go on to state, “we must also recognize the probability that the bourgeoisie will make a serious attempt to save its rule by means of bourgeois democracy and the temporary success of such an attempt...” Why must we recognize the probability of such a temporary success? Because of a number of crucial factors, which are then outlined in the amendments.
Among these factors which will slow the tempo of the European revolution are the revival of democratic illusions among considerable sections of the masses as a result of the fact that in Germany, Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria, etc., new generations have grown up without any experience of bourgeois democracy and without active participation in political life. After the collapse of fascism, these masses may well have to go through a certain body of experiences before they will understand that their needs cannot be satisfied within the framework of the democratic republic. Another factor making for revival of democratic illusions is the intensification of national feeling in Europe as a result of Nazi occupation; the masses in the “liberated” countries may well feel for a time that such government’s as that of de Gaulle are “our own.”
Central to a proper estimate of the tempo of the revolution is a clear understanding of the fact that the principal parties which emerged in Italy after the fall of Mussolini, were the Communist, Socialist and Action (liberal) parties. This fact shows that the traditional workers’ parties and the party of the petty-bourgeoisie were not held responsible by the masse for the decades of fascist rule. Nor could the masses test the programs of these parties under the conditions of totalitarian oppression, for programs can be tested only in the course of mass activity. We must conclude from the Italian experience that the traditional workers’ parties, as well as centrist and liberal-democratic parties, will emerge throughout Europe as the principal parties of the first period after collapse of the Nazis and their collaborators.
These factors slowing the tempo of the coming revolution can only be overcome by the growth of revolutionary Marxist parties; and such parties do not yet exist in Europe. That is why we must emphasize to our European comrades that the problem of building the party is still before them as their main task.
Amid the gigantic convulsions which will follow the collapse of fascism, we are confident that our European comrades can and may accomplish that main task in a short period. Nevertheless, it is clear that this period will be one of a series of phases of the European revolution in which the bourgeoisie will have a temporary success in saving its rule by resorting by resorting to bourgeois democracy, that is, manipulating the democratic illusions of the masses.
Thus the Morrow-Morrison amendments attempt to estimate the tempo of the revolution. One can disagree with the estimate, but at least the amendments constitute an attempt at such a politically necessary estimate.
One cannot say as much for the plenum resolution. It accepts some of the Morrow-Morrison amendments in truncated form, but evades the problem of tempo posed by the amendments as a whole.
Will the European bourgeoisie and its Anglo-American imperialist masters resort to bourgeois democracy as a means to stem the revolution? A clear answer to this question is basic to an estimate of the tempo of the revolution. For it is obvious that, if the bourgeoisie would not resort to democracy, then the democratic illusions of the masses could be dispelled by the Fourth International far more quickly. It would be relatively easy to mobilize the masses against capitalism if the capitalist class as a whole openly and unyieldingly supported dictatorship, and opposed democracy. Hence, the importance of an unambiguous answer to this question. The Morrow-Morrison amendments give such an unambiguous answer, stating that: “The bourgeoisie is prepared to evolve in the direction of a bourgeois democratic government in order to prevent the socialist revolution.”
On the other hand the plenum resolution evades, the question of the attitude of the bourgeoisie as a class toward bourgeois democracy. Note, for example, the following sentence in the plenum resolution which at first glance appears to have been taken bodily from the Morrow-Morrison amendments: “The fact that the economic preconditions for an extended period of bourgeois democracy in Europe have disappeared does not, however, put an end to the role that bourgeois and petty bourgeois democrats can play to stem the advance of proletarian revolution.” This sentence provides us with nothing more significant than the obvious fact that bourgeois democrats like Sforza and petty-bourgeois democrats like the Socialists will play a role against the proletarian revolution. It evades taking a position on the proposition of the Morrow-Morrison amendments that the bourgeoisie, i.e. not only the Sforzas but also European capitalism as a class, is prepared to evolve in the direction of a democratic government in order to stem the European revolution.
Two or three sentences further on in the plenum resolution, the same crucial question is again evaded by a similar process of incorporating a sentence from the amendments but changing it so that it loses its precise meaning. The amendments state: “When no other shield can protect them, the forces of capitalism may seek to retreat behind the protection of the democratic republic.” In the plenum resolution this is changed to: “When all other defenses crumble, the forces of capitalism will strive to preserve their dictatorship behind the facade of democratic forms, even to the extent of a democratic republic.” What does it mean to say that the bourgeoisie will “preserve their dictatorship behind the facade of democratic forms?” If all that is meant by this is the Marxist theory of the state that a democratic republic is also, in the last analysis a form of the rule (i.e. dictatorship) of the bourgeoisie, then that should be stated and no room left for ambiguity as to what is meant by dictatorship. But as the sentence stands, it implies something more; it implies that the bourgeoisie will strive to preserve not only their class rule, but also to preserve their class rule in the form of a dictatorship, dictatorship meaning what it popularly means, namely not a democratic government in the ordinary sense of the term.
Thus the ambiguities and evasions of the plenum resolution straddle between (1) maintaining the false conception of the original draft resolution of the subcommittee which explicitly denied the possibility that the bourgeoisie would resort to democratic governments and (2) making verbal but not real concessions to the Morrow-Morrison amendments which insist that the bourgeoisie will probably resort to democratic governments.
One final example of how the plenum resolution “accepts” one of the Morrow-Morrison amendments. The following paragraph was not in the original draft resolution but was “accepted” from the amendments:
The revolutionary wave may be so overwhelming as to enable the workers to take power immediately following the collapse of the fascist dictatorship. Hence it is necessary to put forward the slogans of Workers Councils (Soviets) and All Power to the Workers Councils, as soon as the masses begin to move against the fascist regime or any makeshift substitute.
Contrast this with the paragraph in the amendments from which it was “accepted”:
We do not exclude the possibility of the transfer of power to the workers immediately following the fall of fascist dictatorships. It is necessary for our comrades to take this possibility into consideration at all times and hence to put forward the slogans of creation of Workers Councils and All Power to these Councils as soon as the masses begin to move against the fascist regime or any regime which may follow as a result of a coup d’état such as occurred in Italy. But we must also recognize the probability that the bourgeoisie will make a serious attempt to save its rule by means of bourgeois democracy and the temporary success of such an attempt because of the treachery of the social reformists and Stalinists, the lack of a revolutionary party, and the insufficient political development of the working class.
To summarize on the question of the tempo of the coming European revolution. The Morrow-Morrison amendments estimate the tempo as we have outlined above. The plenum resolution, on the other hand, evades taking a position on the question and simultaneously attempts to convey the impression of a speedy success for the Socialist United States of Europe.
One’s estimate of the tempo of development of the revolution, Trotsky pointed out, “is of tremendous significance for the determination of tactics.” Determined to convey the impression of a speedy success for the Socialist United States of Europe, the authors of the draft resolution quite logically minimize the role of democratic demands. But if one recognizes the probability of a slower tempo for the development of the European revolution, and in it a period of bourgeois-democratic regimes—unstable, short-lived, but existing nevertheless for a period—then the importance of the role of democratic and transitional demands becomes obvious. For the revolutionary answer to bourgeois democracy in the first instance is more democracy—the demand for real democracy as against the pseudo-democracy of the bourgeoisie. For bourgeois-democracy can exist only thanks to the democratic illusions of the masses; and those can be dispelled first of all only by mobilizing the masses for the democracy they want and need. In this connection it would be worthwhile for all N.C. members to read again the Program of Action of the Communist League of France (1934), largely written by Trotsky, which we correctly recommended as “the model of its type for young parties approaching a pre-revolutionary situation.” (Fourth International, October 1942.)
Some comrades, reading my criticisms of the resolution’s formulations on the role of bourgeois democracy, may consider that I am refusing to give the resolution the benefit of the doubt: if one only would read the formulations of the resolution with a little sympathetic understanding, one could really find agreement with them. After all, the subsection of the resolution entitled “Bourgeois Democracy” does provide a certain amount of common ground between us on the question of the role of bourgeois democracy in Europe.
Such a criticism of my approach to the resolution would be justified, if the subsection on Bourgeois Democracy, in large part consisting of modified sentences from the Morrow-Morrison amendments, were the only section in the resolution where the question of bourgeois democracy is involved.
The Methods of American Imperialism in Europe
However, if one interprets this first section of the resolution as meaning the same thing as the Morrow-Morrison amendments, then there is a flagrant contradiction between that first section and the second section of the resolution, The Counter-Revolutionary Role of American Capitalism. For then the one predicts that the European bourgeoisie and its American imperialist masters will use bourgeois democracy while the second rules out the use of bourgeois-democracy in Europe by US imperialism.
Perhaps no question is more important today for the European revolution than an analysis of the methods which American imperialism is employing and will employ for its attempted subjugation of Europe. For it is already clear that the European bourgeoisie cannot even hope to survive the coming revolutionary wave without the most direct backing from American imperialism. Already in Italy one can see that the Italian bourgeoisie can rule only as junior partners of American imperialism.
But the Italian experience has also taught us that the US imperialist support of the Italian bourgeoisie is not merely a matter of supporting Italian capitalism on American bayonets. The bayonets are there, of course, but at least equally important are American food and the illusion that the United States will solve Italy’s economic problems. We must give due weight to the undeniable fact that considerable sections of the Italian masses enthusiastically welcomed the American troops. The illusions of the masses will, of course, collide with reality more and more in the coming period, but we must recognize that for a time the covert blackmail of food and the promises of American economic aid will play a major role in shaping the Italian events. And this process will be repeated elsewhere in Europe.
In the long run, of course, US imperialism can solve none of Europe’s economic problems and will inevitably reveal itself as the ruthless exploiter which prevents European recovery. It is not enough, however, to state this long-term perspective. We must also estimate accurately the short-term perspective.
The short-term perspective is that American imperialism will provide food and economic aid to Europe and will thus for a time appear before the European masses in a very different guise than German imperialism. This difference between the two great imperialisms aspiring to subjugate Europe is based on the difference in the economic resources of the two. The Nazis had nothing to offer to Europe; they had to subjugate Europe purely by means of military force, and after conquering each country, they had to plunder it of its food and other materials. The United States, on the other hand, will in the first instance enter the occupied countries of Europe ostensibly not as their conqueror but in the course of driving out the Nazis. Unlike Nazi occupation, American occupation will be followed by improvement in food supplies and in the economic situation generally. Where the Nazis removed factory machinery and transportation equipment, the Americans will bring them in. These economic contrasts, which of course flow entirely from the contrast between the limited resources of German capitalism and the far more ample resources still possessed by American capitalism, cannot fail for a time to have political consequences.
Hence, it is quite false when the plenum resolution, without distinguishing between the long-term and short-term perspectives, says (December 1943 FI, p.331): “Europe, today enslaved by the Nazis, will tomorrow be overrun by equally predatory Anglo-American imperialism.” Equally imperialist, yes, but not “equally predatory.” One could perhaps, permit oneself such language loosely in an agitational speech; but it has no place in a plenum resolution, which should provide a coldly precise estimate of the different methods which are being employed by different imperialisms.
Nazi imperialism could give its domination of the occupied countries only the facade of native rule. That is why the term Quislings became so appropriate. American imperialism too has sought to operate through Quislings; Darlan was little more than that; Badoglio similarly. But it should already be clear that US imperialist penetration of the occupied countries is not going to be limited to the use of Quisling regimes, i.e. regimes which rule entirely by means of force and terror and which have no support in the masses. It is true, of course, that a bourgeois-democratic regime in Italy, for example, would also be a Quisling regime in the sense that it would be dominated by American imperialism. But it may very well differ from the Nazi-dominated Quisling regimes in the sense that, through the medium of the Stalinist, Social-Democratic and bourgeois democratic parties, it could muster a majority in an election. As free as Italian elections prior to 1921.
The plenum resolution appears to agree with this conception of the variant methods available to American capitalism when it says, in its subsection on “Bourgeois Democracy” that “when this device (of military force) proves powerless to control the insurgent masses, the native capitalists, allied with they invading imperialists, will push forward their treacherous democratic social reformist and Stalinist agents in an effort to strangle the revolution in a ‘democratic’ noose.” However, the thought of this sentence, incorporated in the resolution from the Morrow-Morrison amendments, appears nowhere in the section of the resolution on the Counter-Revolutionary Role of American Capitalism. On the contrary, in that section, the authors of the resolution visualize only one method to be employed by American imperialism: “military monarchist-clerical dictatorships under the tutelage and hegemony of Anglo-American big business.” And again: “The choice, from the Roosevelt-Churchill point of view, is a Franco-type government or the specter of the Socialist revolution.” The resolution thus rules out, the third “choice,” the use of bourgeois-democratic regimes.
Incidentally, the article on The World Role of US Capitalism, by Comrade William Simmons, published in the same issue of the FI as the plenum resolution, takes the position of the Morrow-Morrison amendments and not that of the plenum resolution. Comrade Simmons writes:
Is a restoration of bourgeois democracy on the European continent—a democratic regime—possible? For a limited time, yes—as an interim regime, because of the absence of an experienced, decisive, proletarian, revolutionary leadership—as an attempt to dam up the floodgates of revolution. Such a restoration may be imposed and supported from abroad; but it can never be invested with any degree of stability. (December 1943 FI, p.336.)
I agree completely with Comrade Simmons concerning the instability of bourgeois democracy, and made this clear with wearisome repetition at the plenum. But this was not the question at issue: the issue was whether or not American imperialism might back bourgeois-democratic regimes in Europe as a way to stem the revolution. Both Comrade Simmons and I answer this question in the affirmative, the resolution answers if, falsely in the negative.
The Function of the Slogan of the Socialist United States Europe
In clarifying our conception of the coming European revolution, it is necessary now to define more precisely the place of the slogan of the Socialist United States of Europe. During the plenum discussion Comrades Warde and Frank stated that there was quite a difference between them and me on this question; they said, indeed, that the difference was no less than programmatic. The final resolution has few references to the slogan, which are mutually satisfactory, but which nevertheless leave unsettled the differences which were adumbrated in the plenum. Perhaps some of the statements of Comrades Warde and Frank in the discussion may reflect merely misunderstandings on this question which deserve clarification.
To such misunderstanding I must admit that I myself have contributed. In a discussion article,[1] I criticized those who define the slogan of the Socialist United States of Europe “as a propaganda slogan, i.e. not at present suitable for immediate agitation.” The essential criticism I sought to make I still think correct: it was aimed against those who do not accept the slogan of a Socialist United States of Europe as the central slogan of the European movement. However, I did not serve to clarify the question when I indicated that the only correct estimate is that it is an agitation slogan and not a propaganda slogan. In making this distinction, I was defining a propaganda slogan as one which has a purely educational role for the present period and that when it becomes actual it will then cease to be a propaganda slogan and become an agitation slogan. I was thinking of the way in which Plekhanov defined propaganda as the dissemination of many ideas to a small group, and agitation as the dissemination of one main idea to great masses.
However, this otherwise useful distinction between propaganda and agitation does not serve to clarify the role of the slogan of the Socialist United States of Europe. This will readily become apparent from the following considerations. We all agree, and correctly, that the Socialist United States of Europe is the central slogan for Europe. What, however, do we mean precisely by a central slogan? Some comrades appear to think it means that it is the slogan by which we shall rally the great masses for the overthrow of European capitalism. That is, that the slogan will play the same role in the coming revolution that the slogan All Power to the Soviets played in the October revolution.
But the central slogan of an epoch is not at all the same thing as the slogan or slogans under which the party leads the masses to make the revolution. The classical example of a central slogan—the slogan which determines the whole course of the revolutionary party in a period—is the slogan raised by Lenin, “Turn the Imperialist War Into Civil War.” This was the central slogan without, however, being a slogan for the masses. This central slogan was a party, a cadre slogan. That is, it served to educate the party but did not show how to win the masses to the proletarian revolution. Trotsky once characterized “Turn the Imperialist War Into Civil War” as an algebraic formula whose concrete content was yet to be found, as it was found, in “All Power to the Soviets” and other slogans. That did not mean that the Bolsheviks did not publicize “Turn the Imperialist War Into Civil War” in their literature. But the place where it is found most often is in the Bolshevik literature written in isolation and directed to party members and small circles of sympathizing workers. Once the Russian Revolution broke out, the slogan receded into the background and seldom appears in the Bolshevik press and speeches of February to October. Thus it was not one of the principal slogans around which the Bolsheviks rallied the masses. Yet anyone who has the slightest understanding of the Bolshevik strategy knows that it remained the central slogan in the sense that it was the basic motivation of Bolshevik agitation and action.
In his last unfinished article, Trotsky refers to the limited role of the central slogan, “Turn the Imperialist War Into Civil War” as follows:
The attention of the revolutionary wing was centered on the question of the defense 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... 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 they Soviets!’ And only by this revolutionary slogan! The criticism of imperialism, its militarism, the renunciation of the defense of bourgeois democracy and so on could have never conquered the overwhelming majority of the people to the side of the Bolsheviks.
There has been much misunderstanding of this distinction between the central slogan which served to train the cadres and the slogan under which the Bolsheviks overthrew capitalism. One could document this with numerous references to the literature produced by the infant communist parties after 1919, in which they used the slogan “Turn the Imperialist War Into Civil War” as if it were a magic key which would bring the masses to them. Nor did this ultra-leftist nonsense cease with the early years of the communist movement. As late as 1935 the ultra-leftists in our party, the Oehlerites, accused us of reducing Lenin’s central slogan of the last war to “merely a party slogan.”
It is my contention that the Socialist United States of Europe is the central slogan of our epoch for Europe but that it is unlikely to be the slogan under which the masses will be rallied for the direct struggle for power. This does not mean that the place of the slogan Socialist United States of Europe is precisely the same as that of “Turn the Imperialist War Into Civil War.” Obviously, the Socialist United States of Europe is capable of moving larger masses than Lenin’s central slogan. Equally obviously, however, the Socialist United States of Europe is not a mass slogan in the sense of the slogan All Power to the Soviets; it is an algebraic formula whose concrete contents will be found by us in appropriate mass slogans during the revolution similar to those the Bolsheviks employed between February-October 1917.
The best and most thoughtful of the European workers—and this means not merely cadres but hundreds of thousands and even millions—will understand that the Socialist unification of Europe is the only way out. But the best and most thoughtful workers will not be enough to make the revolution by themselves. They will succeed only by rallying behind them not merely millions but tens and hundreds of millions. And those will not be rallied by the relatively abstract conception of the Socialist United States of Europe.
The direct struggle for power will in all probability arise out of the question of which institutions shall have the authority to rule the country or the army at a given moment—bourgeois institutions like a provisional government and perhaps a revived parliament, or the representative bodies thrown up by the workers, peasants and soldiers, which will be essentially Soviets, whatever their actual name: city, regional, district or factory committees directly elected by the workers, peasants and soldiers.
These alternatives will be stark enough to compel the masses to choose one or the other. That does not mean, however, that the masses will be choosing consciously between the continuation of capitalism and the Socialist United States of Europe. It will not even mean that in Germany, for example, the masses will be choosing between Socialism or capitalism for that country. Both capitalism and Socialism are abstractions to the great masses even when they are making the proletarian revolution. The masses will be giving their mandate to the revolutionary institutions which are expressing their concrete life-needs—for bread, land and freedom—and the determination to achieve them. But it will not be a conscious mandate for Socialism or the Socialist United States of Europe.
The Stalinist Danger to the European Revolution
Comrade Wright has written more than once in recent months in our press that the Red Army and Soviet industry have revealed fighting power beyond anything we had dreamed they were capable of. That is correct; and of course we all agree that this power expresses the prodigious vitality of the October Revolution despite Stalin’s strangulation of the revolution. But, from a short-term perspective, we must also realize that this Soviet industry and this Red Army are, and are quite likely to remain for a time, in the hand of Stalin. That means that he will throw this power—which is greater that we had dreamed of—on the side of the European counter-revolution.
The Morrow-Morrison amendments attempted to indicate this Stalinist danger but they received short shrift in the final resolution. As in the draft resolution, the section entitled, Significance of the Soviet Victories consists merely of reiteration of programmatic fundamentals and of one reassuring repetition after another that Stalinism will not succeed in its counter-revolutionary plans. Even the absurd sentence in the draft resolution “explaining” the failure of the Spanish revolution was stubbornly retained: “A prewar revolution in the corner of Europe could be isolated, strangled and sold out as part of the Kremlin’s diplomatic maneuvers.” I shall not repeat here the analysis I made in my plenum speech of this sentence and the paragraph it appears in, except to recall again that, far from being isolated in a “corner of Europe,” the Spanish revolution was simultaneous with the revolutionary situation in France which Trotsky had correctly hailed with an article entitled: The French Revolution Has Begun.
At one point or another the Fourth International will be compelled to say frankly to the workers what I said in my plenum report, that the Soviet victories are not a onesided matter of progressive consequences, even though we give the main weight to the progressive consequences.
The Two-Sided Character of the Soviet Victories
The Morrow-Morrison amendments put the second side of the Soviet victories as follows:
At present because of the victories of the Red Army the prestige of the Soviet Union has grown tremendously but unfortunately it has been misappropriated by the parasitic bureaucracy: The power and ideological influence of Stalinism has been strengthened temporarily. As a result, we must recognize a serious danger to the coming European revolution. The Stalinist bureaucracy will either help the capitalist democracies in the attempt to crush the revolution, by force or, if the revolution assumes too great a sweep to be crushed, it will attempt to gain control of it in order to save its own rule. What Stalin has done in Spain he will try to repeat in other countries of Europe. The continental European revolution will surely offer stronger resistance than the Spanish proletariat, but the danger to the revolution from the, Stalinist bureaucracy is very great and we must constantly warn the masses to struggle against this danger.
This amendment was rejected by the resolution subcommittee. In its place the subcommittee only added to the draft resolution the sentence that: “Stalin, exploiting the enhanced prestige of the Soviet Union as a result of the Red Army victories, seeks to gain control of the popular movements in Europe...” And this sentence is larded in between many paragraphs of reassurances that Stalinism will fail, so that the whole effect is precisely the opposite of that sought by the Morrow-Morrison amendments: we wanted to warn and arouse against the danger from Stalinism, and the plenum resolution provides merely reassuring anodynes. By all means let us voice our confidence in the revolutionary future. But that does not suffice. We must also say what is.
I said at the plenum that the prestige of the Soviet victories has resulted in the fact that Stalinism is the principal organized force in the European working class today and that this situation will not disappear before the first stages of the European revolution. The resolution subcommittee agreed with me to the extent that it included, in its subsection on bourgeois democracy, the idea from the Morrow-Morrison amendments that: “It is possible and even probable that the treacherous parties of social reformism and Stalinism can play the leading role in the first stages of the revolution.” Similarly in its section on the “End of the Comintern”, the subcommittee, included from the Morrow-Morrison amendments the idea that “the Italian events have shown the capacity of the Stalinists for perverting the struggle of the workers.” But these two sentences, in the contexts in which they appear, are merely, passing observations and do not convey the conception of the great danger to the revolution from Stalinism. The, place where Stalinism is treated systematically in the resolution Is in the section entitled, “Significance of the Soviet Victories” and there the danger from Stalinism is in effect denied.
The refusal to distinguish between short-term perspective and long-term perspective, which we have noted in other parts of the resolution, is perhaps even more evident in the sections on Stalinism. They “ignore” the short-term perspective; that is, they fail to describe the real situation of the present and the immediate future. As a result they can have but a purely ritualistic character, convincing only those already convinced. (Let us hope that no one will repeat the slander voiced at the plenum, that I called the program of the Fourth International ritualistic; what I said and repeat is that the resolution subcommittee employed the program in a ritualistic manner.)
A large amount of the time of the plenum was taken up with charges hurled at me that I was a pessimist. Had I desired to reply in kind, there was a suitable handle available. During the first weeks after the fall of Mussolini, the comrades who wrote the draft resolution were undoubtedly much more “optimistic” than I concerning the Italian revolution; but in their draft resolution, lo and behold, they were already speaking of the “temporarily defeated Italian revolution”. I, on the other hand, saw no defeated revolution precisely because I had not seen a revolution, but only a revolutionary situation. Who, then, are the optimists: those who say the Italian revolution was defeated or those who do not? This incident alone should indicate that charges of pessimism and boasts of optimism have no place in discussions in our leadership.
December 1943
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1. Our Differences with the Three Theses by Felix Morrow, Fourth International, December 1942.
Note by MIA
1*. Morrow later complained about the juxtaposition of this article, which was a year old at the time of publication and did not take into account more recent developments, with later documents of the SWP Majority, cf. The Political Position of the Minority in the SWP, Fourth International, May 1945.
Monday, September 17, 2012
From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- Johnny Shea’s Femme Fatale Moment
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the classic femme fatale film Out Of The Past to set the scene below.
Jim Sweeney was a great fan of 1940s and 1950s film noir, especially those enticing femme fatales who knew, without lifting a finger sometimes, how to twist a guy in knots and make him like it without working up a hard breathe. He had been crazy for noir since he was kid growing up in 1950s Nashua, New Hampshire when he would go to the old Strand Theater (long since torn down) on Main Street every Saturday afternoon, sometimes with his boys, sometimes alone, although then he didn’t know femme fatale or film noir words from a hole in the ground then. What he did know, and maybe only sub-consciously as he thought about later when he discussed with those same boys, was that dames, those femmes on the screen anyway were poison, but what was a guy going to do when he drew that ticket. Take the ride, see what happened and hope you drew a good femme.
Yes, Jim was a dreamer, a weaver of dreams, and that was why I was surprised when he told me this story about Johnny Shea a few years ago, a guy Jim said put him in the shade in the old days for being crazy about femme fatales, and a guy who did not by any stretch of the imagination draw a good femme. I got to thinking about Jim’s story recently. I was watching a film noir, Impact, a strictly B-noir as far as the story line went, but with a femme worthy of the greats like sultry Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity or coolly calculating Rita Hayworth in The Lady From Shang-hai. This Irene (played by Helen Walker) was nothing but a young gold-digger okay, strictly from cheap street, but she had a plan to murder her rich husband and run off with her boyfriend after he did dear hubby in. Well things didn’t work out as planned, boyfriend (who acted like a hopped up junkie while he was on screen) didn’t finish the job so hubby didn’t die but was just left in some gully to croak, boyfriend carelessly got himself killed in an accident trying to flee the scene, hubby put two and two together finally when he woke up and then tried to start a new anonymous life. Meanwhile sweet poison Irene was being held for his murder. When prodded by the “good” woman who entered his new life to come clean our Helen framed, framed hubby big time, for the murder of her boyfriend. Beautiful right. So you can see that I will listen to a femme tale any time one passes my way. Just make it interesting and not too goofy because goofy is just like a million guys get with any dame and no tied up in knots and liking it like with some dishy femme. Here is how I remember Jim telling me his Johnny Shea story:
He, Johnny Shea from the old neighborhood, was on record, maybe not a swear on the bible take it to court under oath type record but on record, as being very much enthralled by the bad femme fatales of film noir (of course now from a safe cinematic distance ). He would go on and on about how Jane Greer in Out Of The Past off-handedly shot her kept man, Kirk Douglas (or did he keep her, a matter very much in dispute), then put a bullet or six in some snooping sleuth who crowded her just a little and for lunch, just for kicks, turned the tables on a guy, Robert Mitchum, just a stray off-hand guy built to handle rough stuff if necessary who thought maybe he could help her out of a jam after he got a look at her and a whiff of that gardenia perfume or whatever she was wearing that made him crazy. Yes, she was a stone-cold killer, blood simple they call it in some quarters, and Johnny couldn’t get enough of her.
On an off day, or when he got tired of telling, and we got tired of listening, about some newly discovered move Jane put on after watching that film for the fifteenth time, he would go on and on about glamorous, 1940s glamorous (although maybe eternal glamorous when you look at her pin-up pictures even today) Rita Hayworth as she framed, framed big time, one Orson Welles in The Lady From Shang-hai just because his was a little smitten with her after smelling that come hither fragrance. She wanted the dough, all of it, from a rich lawyer hubby and she wanted old Orson to work her magic for her. Yah, but see these guys had it coming because they went in with their eyes open, took their chances and took the fall, took the fall big time. And maybe in some deep recess of their minds, maybe like John Garfield in The Postman Always Rings Twice, they smiled, and would have done it the same way if they that never to be had second chance to do it over.
Johnny, whatever femme film plot line he was thinking of, always came back to that question in the end, the question of questions, the part about a guy taking a beating, taking it hard, and then coming back for more when the femme purrs in his ear, or sways some flash dress into the room or he smells even a whiff, hell, a half whiff of that damn perfume which lets him know she is coming. That part, that doing it again part, always got to him. And this was no academic question, no noir theory, and no clever plotline about the vagaries of human experience, about how low you can go and still breathe. See Johnny had been there, had seen it all, and done it all and so he was haunted forever after about whether if she came in the door again he would also do it exactly like it was done before. Hell, enough of beating around the bush let him tell it and you decide.
“I not saying Rosa, Rosa Lebron, was as hot as Jane Or Rita, no way but she had her moments, her moments with me when she might as well have been one of those dames. I am not going to say exactly how we meet, or under what circumstances, but it all came together down in sunny Mexico, down Sonora way back in the late 1970s when I was doing a little of this and a little of that in the drug trade. This was before it got real crazy although it was always a tight thing when you dealt with the Mexicans, and when you dealt with dope. Period.
See Rosa ‘s older brother, hey, let’s call him Pedro alright just to be on the safe side and just because it doesn’t matter what his name was as long as you remember this is about Rosa and her ways, was a primo “distributor” down Sonora way, mainly marijuana (or herb, ice, ganga, rope, hemp, or whatever you call it in your neighborhood) but as time went on cocaine (ditto on what you call it in your town, snow, little sister, girl), but a guy on his way up in the cartel, no question. I met Pedro through mutual business contacts in New York City one night and that got us started on our business.
One time Rosa came up with him and at first I thought she was his girlfriend because they seemed very close. Now Pedro wasn’t a bad looking guy but I didn’t figure he could have such a fox for a girlfriend, you know all dark skin, nice shape, black as night hair, dancing black eyes AND some scent some mystic Aztec, mestizo, conquistador, ten thousand year sense that distracted me from the minute she clasped my hand. (I found out later from her that it was made from some Mexican cacti flowers, I forget the name but I will never forget that scent, that first time, never). And, so when he introduced me to Rosa as his sister I was relieved. Especially after she threw (there is no other word for it) those laughing Spanish eyes at me. She had me, had me bad from that moment.
I didn’t see her for a while, maybe a couple of months, although Pedro and I were doing a regular series of business transactions. Then, maybe it was late 1979 or so, I got a call from him to come down to Sonora for what he called a big deal. I showed up at the designated cantina, La Noche, on the main strip, a dusty old place then, maybe now to for all I know. And there was Rosa, all Rosa-like, dark, Spanish, those eyes, the fragrance, and dressed very elegantly in a very fashionable dress (so she told me later). She was the bait. And I bite.
Pedro never showed that night, and it didn’t matter as Rosa and I drank high- shelf tequila (my first time, and like scotch and other whiskies there are gradations of tequila too), danced (even with my two left feet it didn’t seem to matter), and wound up at her casa (room) for the night. The rest of the night you can figure out on your own. What matters is the next morning, early; after I took a shower and was lying on her bed she asked me if I couldn’t do Pedro a favor. The favor: go to Columbia and bring back a load (twenty kilos, forty pounds) of little sister. In those days Pedro’s cartel was testing the route and having a friendly Norte Americano do the run, which at the time would have been unusual and would have faked out the cops, was seen as the best way to iron out the wrinkles. And, well, Rosa would go along too. Sold.
The first trip, and several after, was actually uneventful. Back and forth, sometimes with Rosa sometimes with another female “mule.” After a few months, maybe six, Rosa came up to my hotel room in Sonora one night crying, crying like crazy. She told me that she was being harassed and beaten by Pedro because he had started to “use” some of the product and would get all crazy and lash out at whoever was around. She also said he wasn’t all that crazy now about have a goddam gringo around now that things were already set up and that maybe it was time to terminate my contract. The clincher though was when she said right then and there she said she had to get out, get out before she was maybe killed by Pedro, or one of his thugs on his orders.
Maybe it was the tears, maybe it was that scent that always threw me off or maybe now that I knew the score it was flat- out fear that I would be found face down in some Sonora back alley waiting for some consulate officer to ship my remains back home but I listened to what Rosa proposed.
The next shipment was our salvation; the forty of fifty pound of girl would get us a long way from Mexico and far enough away from Pedro that we could start our own lives. It sounded good, real good. The idea was to go to Columbia but instead of heading back to Mexico head to Panama, unload the dope in a new market, then catch a freighter to, to wherever, some island maybe. I was in, in all the way.
And it worked, worked beautifully. For Rosa. See here is how the deal really went down. We got the dope in Columbia okay, no problema as usual. And we did head to Panama and made the transaction there. Again no problema. Something like a half a million in cash in the proverbial suitcase. Easy street. We were to catch a freighter, some Liberian-registered tanker, headed for Africa the next morning. That night Rosa insisted that we celebrate our “liberation” with some high-shelf tequila in honor of our success and remembrance of our first night together. And that was the last I saw of Rosa Lebron.
The last of her but not quite of the story. After being drunk as a skunk and worn to a frazzle by our love-making (maybe drugged too, I don’t know) I was practically unconscious. The next morning when I awoke Rosa was gone. I frantically looked for her, checking every place including the tanker that we were supposed to take through the Canal. They had no reservations (under our aliases) for any gringo or senorita. No reservations for passengers at all. That’s when I started to panic (and to put two and two together). I couldn’t go back to (a) Columbia or (b) Mexico so I headed back to New York City on the sly. After a while I finally put the pieces together (or rather they got put together for me).
First Rosa was not Pedro’s sister but just part of his organization, his brother Pablo’s ex-girlfriend. It was Pedro who had put Rosa up to setting me up on that last transaction because he was feeling constrained by the cartel he was linked to and wanted to go out on his own. The half million (minus Rosa’s cut) would set him up just fine. The problem was that she ran out on Pedro too. It was Pedro (and you can read about it in the Mexican newspaper of the time when such incidents were fairly rare, unlike now) who wound up face down in that Sonora back alley for his lack of cartel spirit, twelve bullet holes in him. And Rosa? Nowhere to be found . Except here is the funny part, although I am not laughing, Pablo, Pedro’s brother and Rosa’s supposed ex-boyfriend was last seen in Sonora the day Rosa and I left for Columbia on that last easy street transaction. If you see her, her and her dancing eyes and that damn cactus flower fragrance tell her I said hello. ”
[Jesus, this is a no-brainer. Of course our boy Johnny would do it over again. Just like that. Take it easy on the tequila though that stuff will kill you Johnny . Christ I might take a run at Rosa and that fragrance myself and I only like to watch femmes from the comfort of my living room or local theater-JLB]
Jim Sweeney was a great fan of 1940s and 1950s film noir, especially those enticing femme fatales who knew, without lifting a finger sometimes, how to twist a guy in knots and make him like it without working up a hard breathe. He had been crazy for noir since he was kid growing up in 1950s Nashua, New Hampshire when he would go to the old Strand Theater (long since torn down) on Main Street every Saturday afternoon, sometimes with his boys, sometimes alone, although then he didn’t know femme fatale or film noir words from a hole in the ground then. What he did know, and maybe only sub-consciously as he thought about later when he discussed with those same boys, was that dames, those femmes on the screen anyway were poison, but what was a guy going to do when he drew that ticket. Take the ride, see what happened and hope you drew a good femme.
Yes, Jim was a dreamer, a weaver of dreams, and that was why I was surprised when he told me this story about Johnny Shea a few years ago, a guy Jim said put him in the shade in the old days for being crazy about femme fatales, and a guy who did not by any stretch of the imagination draw a good femme. I got to thinking about Jim’s story recently. I was watching a film noir, Impact, a strictly B-noir as far as the story line went, but with a femme worthy of the greats like sultry Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity or coolly calculating Rita Hayworth in The Lady From Shang-hai. This Irene (played by Helen Walker) was nothing but a young gold-digger okay, strictly from cheap street, but she had a plan to murder her rich husband and run off with her boyfriend after he did dear hubby in. Well things didn’t work out as planned, boyfriend (who acted like a hopped up junkie while he was on screen) didn’t finish the job so hubby didn’t die but was just left in some gully to croak, boyfriend carelessly got himself killed in an accident trying to flee the scene, hubby put two and two together finally when he woke up and then tried to start a new anonymous life. Meanwhile sweet poison Irene was being held for his murder. When prodded by the “good” woman who entered his new life to come clean our Helen framed, framed hubby big time, for the murder of her boyfriend. Beautiful right. So you can see that I will listen to a femme tale any time one passes my way. Just make it interesting and not too goofy because goofy is just like a million guys get with any dame and no tied up in knots and liking it like with some dishy femme. Here is how I remember Jim telling me his Johnny Shea story:
He, Johnny Shea from the old neighborhood, was on record, maybe not a swear on the bible take it to court under oath type record but on record, as being very much enthralled by the bad femme fatales of film noir (of course now from a safe cinematic distance ). He would go on and on about how Jane Greer in Out Of The Past off-handedly shot her kept man, Kirk Douglas (or did he keep her, a matter very much in dispute), then put a bullet or six in some snooping sleuth who crowded her just a little and for lunch, just for kicks, turned the tables on a guy, Robert Mitchum, just a stray off-hand guy built to handle rough stuff if necessary who thought maybe he could help her out of a jam after he got a look at her and a whiff of that gardenia perfume or whatever she was wearing that made him crazy. Yes, she was a stone-cold killer, blood simple they call it in some quarters, and Johnny couldn’t get enough of her.
On an off day, or when he got tired of telling, and we got tired of listening, about some newly discovered move Jane put on after watching that film for the fifteenth time, he would go on and on about glamorous, 1940s glamorous (although maybe eternal glamorous when you look at her pin-up pictures even today) Rita Hayworth as she framed, framed big time, one Orson Welles in The Lady From Shang-hai just because his was a little smitten with her after smelling that come hither fragrance. She wanted the dough, all of it, from a rich lawyer hubby and she wanted old Orson to work her magic for her. Yah, but see these guys had it coming because they went in with their eyes open, took their chances and took the fall, took the fall big time. And maybe in some deep recess of their minds, maybe like John Garfield in The Postman Always Rings Twice, they smiled, and would have done it the same way if they that never to be had second chance to do it over.
Johnny, whatever femme film plot line he was thinking of, always came back to that question in the end, the question of questions, the part about a guy taking a beating, taking it hard, and then coming back for more when the femme purrs in his ear, or sways some flash dress into the room or he smells even a whiff, hell, a half whiff of that damn perfume which lets him know she is coming. That part, that doing it again part, always got to him. And this was no academic question, no noir theory, and no clever plotline about the vagaries of human experience, about how low you can go and still breathe. See Johnny had been there, had seen it all, and done it all and so he was haunted forever after about whether if she came in the door again he would also do it exactly like it was done before. Hell, enough of beating around the bush let him tell it and you decide.
“I not saying Rosa, Rosa Lebron, was as hot as Jane Or Rita, no way but she had her moments, her moments with me when she might as well have been one of those dames. I am not going to say exactly how we meet, or under what circumstances, but it all came together down in sunny Mexico, down Sonora way back in the late 1970s when I was doing a little of this and a little of that in the drug trade. This was before it got real crazy although it was always a tight thing when you dealt with the Mexicans, and when you dealt with dope. Period.
See Rosa ‘s older brother, hey, let’s call him Pedro alright just to be on the safe side and just because it doesn’t matter what his name was as long as you remember this is about Rosa and her ways, was a primo “distributor” down Sonora way, mainly marijuana (or herb, ice, ganga, rope, hemp, or whatever you call it in your neighborhood) but as time went on cocaine (ditto on what you call it in your town, snow, little sister, girl), but a guy on his way up in the cartel, no question. I met Pedro through mutual business contacts in New York City one night and that got us started on our business.
One time Rosa came up with him and at first I thought she was his girlfriend because they seemed very close. Now Pedro wasn’t a bad looking guy but I didn’t figure he could have such a fox for a girlfriend, you know all dark skin, nice shape, black as night hair, dancing black eyes AND some scent some mystic Aztec, mestizo, conquistador, ten thousand year sense that distracted me from the minute she clasped my hand. (I found out later from her that it was made from some Mexican cacti flowers, I forget the name but I will never forget that scent, that first time, never). And, so when he introduced me to Rosa as his sister I was relieved. Especially after she threw (there is no other word for it) those laughing Spanish eyes at me. She had me, had me bad from that moment.
I didn’t see her for a while, maybe a couple of months, although Pedro and I were doing a regular series of business transactions. Then, maybe it was late 1979 or so, I got a call from him to come down to Sonora for what he called a big deal. I showed up at the designated cantina, La Noche, on the main strip, a dusty old place then, maybe now to for all I know. And there was Rosa, all Rosa-like, dark, Spanish, those eyes, the fragrance, and dressed very elegantly in a very fashionable dress (so she told me later). She was the bait. And I bite.
Pedro never showed that night, and it didn’t matter as Rosa and I drank high- shelf tequila (my first time, and like scotch and other whiskies there are gradations of tequila too), danced (even with my two left feet it didn’t seem to matter), and wound up at her casa (room) for the night. The rest of the night you can figure out on your own. What matters is the next morning, early; after I took a shower and was lying on her bed she asked me if I couldn’t do Pedro a favor. The favor: go to Columbia and bring back a load (twenty kilos, forty pounds) of little sister. In those days Pedro’s cartel was testing the route and having a friendly Norte Americano do the run, which at the time would have been unusual and would have faked out the cops, was seen as the best way to iron out the wrinkles. And, well, Rosa would go along too. Sold.
The first trip, and several after, was actually uneventful. Back and forth, sometimes with Rosa sometimes with another female “mule.” After a few months, maybe six, Rosa came up to my hotel room in Sonora one night crying, crying like crazy. She told me that she was being harassed and beaten by Pedro because he had started to “use” some of the product and would get all crazy and lash out at whoever was around. She also said he wasn’t all that crazy now about have a goddam gringo around now that things were already set up and that maybe it was time to terminate my contract. The clincher though was when she said right then and there she said she had to get out, get out before she was maybe killed by Pedro, or one of his thugs on his orders.
Maybe it was the tears, maybe it was that scent that always threw me off or maybe now that I knew the score it was flat- out fear that I would be found face down in some Sonora back alley waiting for some consulate officer to ship my remains back home but I listened to what Rosa proposed.
The next shipment was our salvation; the forty of fifty pound of girl would get us a long way from Mexico and far enough away from Pedro that we could start our own lives. It sounded good, real good. The idea was to go to Columbia but instead of heading back to Mexico head to Panama, unload the dope in a new market, then catch a freighter to, to wherever, some island maybe. I was in, in all the way.
And it worked, worked beautifully. For Rosa. See here is how the deal really went down. We got the dope in Columbia okay, no problema as usual. And we did head to Panama and made the transaction there. Again no problema. Something like a half a million in cash in the proverbial suitcase. Easy street. We were to catch a freighter, some Liberian-registered tanker, headed for Africa the next morning. That night Rosa insisted that we celebrate our “liberation” with some high-shelf tequila in honor of our success and remembrance of our first night together. And that was the last I saw of Rosa Lebron.
The last of her but not quite of the story. After being drunk as a skunk and worn to a frazzle by our love-making (maybe drugged too, I don’t know) I was practically unconscious. The next morning when I awoke Rosa was gone. I frantically looked for her, checking every place including the tanker that we were supposed to take through the Canal. They had no reservations (under our aliases) for any gringo or senorita. No reservations for passengers at all. That’s when I started to panic (and to put two and two together). I couldn’t go back to (a) Columbia or (b) Mexico so I headed back to New York City on the sly. After a while I finally put the pieces together (or rather they got put together for me).
First Rosa was not Pedro’s sister but just part of his organization, his brother Pablo’s ex-girlfriend. It was Pedro who had put Rosa up to setting me up on that last transaction because he was feeling constrained by the cartel he was linked to and wanted to go out on his own. The half million (minus Rosa’s cut) would set him up just fine. The problem was that she ran out on Pedro too. It was Pedro (and you can read about it in the Mexican newspaper of the time when such incidents were fairly rare, unlike now) who wound up face down in that Sonora back alley for his lack of cartel spirit, twelve bullet holes in him. And Rosa? Nowhere to be found . Except here is the funny part, although I am not laughing, Pablo, Pedro’s brother and Rosa’s supposed ex-boyfriend was last seen in Sonora the day Rosa and I left for Columbia on that last easy street transaction. If you see her, her and her dancing eyes and that damn cactus flower fragrance tell her I said hello. ”
[Jesus, this is a no-brainer. Of course our boy Johnny would do it over again. Just like that. Take it easy on the tequila though that stuff will kill you Johnny . Christ I might take a run at Rosa and that fragrance myself and I only like to watch femmes from the comfort of my living room or local theater-JLB]
From AP-1 year on, Occupy is in disarray; spirit lives on
1 year on, Occupy is in disarray; spirit lives on
By MEGHAN BARR, AP
6 hours ago
NEW YORK — Occupy Wall Street began to disintegrate in rapid fashion last winter, when the weekly meetings in New York City devolved into a spectacle of fistfights and vicious arguments.
Punches were thrown and objects were hurled at moderators' heads. Protesters accused each other of being patriarchal and racist and domineering. Nobody could agree on anything and nobody was in charge. The moderators went on strike and refused to show up, followed in quick succession by the people who kept meeting minutes. And then the meetings stopped altogether.
In the city where the movement was born, Occupy was falling apart.
"We weren't talking about real things at that point," says Pete Dutro, a tattoo artist who used to manage Occupy's finances but became disillusioned by the infighting and walked away months ago. "We were talking about each other."
The trouble with Occupy Wall Street, a year after it bloomed in a granite park in lower Manhattan and spread across the globe, is that nobody really knows what it is anymore. To say whether Occupy was a success or a failure depends on how you define it.
Occupy is a network. Occupy is a metaphor. Occupy is still alive. Occupy is dead. Occupy is the spirit of revolution, a lost cause, a dream deferred.
"I would say that Occupy today is a brand that represents movements for social and economic justice," says Jason Amadi, a 28-year-old protester who now lives in Philadelphia. "And that many people are using this brand for the quest of bettering this world."
On Monday, protesters will converge near the New York Stock Exchange to celebrate Occupy's anniversary, marking the day they began camping out in Zuccotti Park. Marches and rallies in more than 30 cities around the world will commemorate the day.
About 300 people observing the anniversary marched Saturday. At least a dozen were arrested, mostly on charges of disorderly conduct, police said.
But the movement is now a shadow of its mighty infancy, when a group of young people harnessed the power of a disillusioned nation and took to the streets chanting about corporate greed and inequality.
Back then it was a rallying cry, a force to be reckoned with. But as the encampments were broken up and protesters lost a gathering place, Occupy in turn lost its ability to organize.
The movement had grown too large too quickly. Without leaders or specific demands, what started as a protest against income inequality turned into an amorphous protest against everything wrong with the world.
"We were there to occupy Wall Street," Dutro says. "Not to talk about every social ill that we have."
The community that took shape in Zuccotti Park still exists, albeit in a far less cohesive form. Occupiers mostly keep in touch online through a smattering of websites and social networks. There are occasional conference calls and Occupy-affiliated newsletters. Meetings are generally only convened to organize around specific events, like the much-hyped May Day event that ultimately fizzled last spring.
The movement's remaining $85,000 in assets were frozen, though fundraising continues.
"The meetings kind of collapsed under their own weight," explains Marisa Holmes, a 26-year-old protester among the core organizers who helped Occupy rise up last fall. "They became overly concerned with financial decisions. They became bureaucratic."
In other words, they became a combustible microcosm of the society that Occupiers had decided to abandon — a new, equally flawed society with its own set of miniature hierarchies and toxic relationships. Even before the ouster at Zuccotti Park, the movement had been plagued with noise and sanitary problems, an inability to make decisions and a widening rift between the park's full-time residents and the movement's power players, most of whom no longer lived in the park.
"We've always said that we want a new society," Holmes says. "We're not asking anything of Wall Street. We don't expect anything in return."
Occupy organizers in other U.S. cities have also scattered to the winds in recent months. In Oakland, a metal fence surrounds the City Hall lawn that was the hub of protesters' infamous tear-gassed, riotous clashes with police. The encampment is gone, as are the thousands who ventured west to help repeatedly shut down one of the nation's largest ports.
"I don't think Occupy itself has an enormous future," says Dr. Mark Naison, a professor at Fordham University in New York City. "I think that movements energized by Occupy have an enormous future."
Across the nation, there have been protests organized in the name of ending foreclosure, racial inequality, stop and frisk, debt: You name it, Occupy has claimed it. Occupy the Bronx. Occupy the Department of Education. Occupy the Hood. Occupy the Hamptons.
Protesters opposing everything from liquor sales in Whiteclay, Neb., to illegal immigration in Birmingham, Ala., have used Occupy as a weapon to fight for their own causes. In Russia, opposition activists protesting President Vladimir Putin's re-election to a third term have held a series of Occupy-style protests. Young "indignados" in Spain are joining unions and public servants to rally against higher taxes and cuts to public education and health care.
"All around the world, that youthful spirit of revolt is alive and well," says Kalle Lasn, co-founder of Adbusters, the Canadian magazine that helped ignite the movement.
In New York, groups of friends who call themselves "affinity groups" still gather at each other's apartments for dinner to talk about the future of Occupy. A few weeks ago, about 50 Occupiers gathered in a basement near Union Square to plan the anniversary.
There were the usual flare-ups, with people speaking out of order and heckling the moderators. The group could not agree on whether to allow a journalist to take photographs. An older man hijacked the meeting for nearly 15 minutes with a long-winded rant about the NYPD's stop-and-frisk tactics.
A document called "The Community Agreement of Occupy Wall Street" was distributed that, among other outdated encampment-era rules, exhorted Occupiers not to touch each other's personal belongings and laid out rules about sleeping arrangements.
It is this sort of inward-facing thinking — the focus on Occupiers, not the world they're trying to remake — that saddens ex-protesters like Dutro, who wanted to stay focused on taking down Wall Street.
Hanging in the entryway to his Brooklyn apartment, like a relic of the past, is the first poster he ever brought down to Zuccotti Park. In black and gold lettering, painted on a piece of cardboard, the sign says: "Nobody got rich on their own. Wall St. thinks U-R-A-SUCKER."
He keeps it there as a reminder of what Occupy is really fighting for. Because despite his many frustrations, Dutro hasn't been able to stamp the Occupy anger out of his soul. Not yet.
On Sept. 17, he'll be down at Liberty Square again. And he'll be waiting, like the rest of the world, to see what happens next.
"We came into the park and had this really magical experience," he says. "It was a big conversation. It was where we all got to realize: `I'm not alone.'"
By MEGHAN BARR, AP
6 hours ago
NEW YORK — Occupy Wall Street began to disintegrate in rapid fashion last winter, when the weekly meetings in New York City devolved into a spectacle of fistfights and vicious arguments.
Punches were thrown and objects were hurled at moderators' heads. Protesters accused each other of being patriarchal and racist and domineering. Nobody could agree on anything and nobody was in charge. The moderators went on strike and refused to show up, followed in quick succession by the people who kept meeting minutes. And then the meetings stopped altogether.
In the city where the movement was born, Occupy was falling apart.
"We weren't talking about real things at that point," says Pete Dutro, a tattoo artist who used to manage Occupy's finances but became disillusioned by the infighting and walked away months ago. "We were talking about each other."
The trouble with Occupy Wall Street, a year after it bloomed in a granite park in lower Manhattan and spread across the globe, is that nobody really knows what it is anymore. To say whether Occupy was a success or a failure depends on how you define it.
Occupy is a network. Occupy is a metaphor. Occupy is still alive. Occupy is dead. Occupy is the spirit of revolution, a lost cause, a dream deferred.
"I would say that Occupy today is a brand that represents movements for social and economic justice," says Jason Amadi, a 28-year-old protester who now lives in Philadelphia. "And that many people are using this brand for the quest of bettering this world."
On Monday, protesters will converge near the New York Stock Exchange to celebrate Occupy's anniversary, marking the day they began camping out in Zuccotti Park. Marches and rallies in more than 30 cities around the world will commemorate the day.
About 300 people observing the anniversary marched Saturday. At least a dozen were arrested, mostly on charges of disorderly conduct, police said.
But the movement is now a shadow of its mighty infancy, when a group of young people harnessed the power of a disillusioned nation and took to the streets chanting about corporate greed and inequality.
Back then it was a rallying cry, a force to be reckoned with. But as the encampments were broken up and protesters lost a gathering place, Occupy in turn lost its ability to organize.
The movement had grown too large too quickly. Without leaders or specific demands, what started as a protest against income inequality turned into an amorphous protest against everything wrong with the world.
"We were there to occupy Wall Street," Dutro says. "Not to talk about every social ill that we have."
The community that took shape in Zuccotti Park still exists, albeit in a far less cohesive form. Occupiers mostly keep in touch online through a smattering of websites and social networks. There are occasional conference calls and Occupy-affiliated newsletters. Meetings are generally only convened to organize around specific events, like the much-hyped May Day event that ultimately fizzled last spring.
The movement's remaining $85,000 in assets were frozen, though fundraising continues.
"The meetings kind of collapsed under their own weight," explains Marisa Holmes, a 26-year-old protester among the core organizers who helped Occupy rise up last fall. "They became overly concerned with financial decisions. They became bureaucratic."
In other words, they became a combustible microcosm of the society that Occupiers had decided to abandon — a new, equally flawed society with its own set of miniature hierarchies and toxic relationships. Even before the ouster at Zuccotti Park, the movement had been plagued with noise and sanitary problems, an inability to make decisions and a widening rift between the park's full-time residents and the movement's power players, most of whom no longer lived in the park.
"We've always said that we want a new society," Holmes says. "We're not asking anything of Wall Street. We don't expect anything in return."
Occupy organizers in other U.S. cities have also scattered to the winds in recent months. In Oakland, a metal fence surrounds the City Hall lawn that was the hub of protesters' infamous tear-gassed, riotous clashes with police. The encampment is gone, as are the thousands who ventured west to help repeatedly shut down one of the nation's largest ports.
"I don't think Occupy itself has an enormous future," says Dr. Mark Naison, a professor at Fordham University in New York City. "I think that movements energized by Occupy have an enormous future."
Across the nation, there have been protests organized in the name of ending foreclosure, racial inequality, stop and frisk, debt: You name it, Occupy has claimed it. Occupy the Bronx. Occupy the Department of Education. Occupy the Hood. Occupy the Hamptons.
Protesters opposing everything from liquor sales in Whiteclay, Neb., to illegal immigration in Birmingham, Ala., have used Occupy as a weapon to fight for their own causes. In Russia, opposition activists protesting President Vladimir Putin's re-election to a third term have held a series of Occupy-style protests. Young "indignados" in Spain are joining unions and public servants to rally against higher taxes and cuts to public education and health care.
"All around the world, that youthful spirit of revolt is alive and well," says Kalle Lasn, co-founder of Adbusters, the Canadian magazine that helped ignite the movement.
In New York, groups of friends who call themselves "affinity groups" still gather at each other's apartments for dinner to talk about the future of Occupy. A few weeks ago, about 50 Occupiers gathered in a basement near Union Square to plan the anniversary.
There were the usual flare-ups, with people speaking out of order and heckling the moderators. The group could not agree on whether to allow a journalist to take photographs. An older man hijacked the meeting for nearly 15 minutes with a long-winded rant about the NYPD's stop-and-frisk tactics.
A document called "The Community Agreement of Occupy Wall Street" was distributed that, among other outdated encampment-era rules, exhorted Occupiers not to touch each other's personal belongings and laid out rules about sleeping arrangements.
It is this sort of inward-facing thinking — the focus on Occupiers, not the world they're trying to remake — that saddens ex-protesters like Dutro, who wanted to stay focused on taking down Wall Street.
Hanging in the entryway to his Brooklyn apartment, like a relic of the past, is the first poster he ever brought down to Zuccotti Park. In black and gold lettering, painted on a piece of cardboard, the sign says: "Nobody got rich on their own. Wall St. thinks U-R-A-SUCKER."
He keeps it there as a reminder of what Occupy is really fighting for. Because despite his many frustrations, Dutro hasn't been able to stamp the Occupy anger out of his soul. Not yet.
On Sept. 17, he'll be down at Liberty Square again. And he'll be waiting, like the rest of the world, to see what happens next.
"We came into the park and had this really magical experience," he says. "It was a big conversation. It was where we all got to realize: `I'm not alone.'"
Let Us Solemnly Commemorate OWS On September 17th Each Year- And Move On- Radical Writer Joshua Lawrence Breslin Pulls The Hammer Down On The Occupy Movement
Markin comment:
“…The Occupy movement has now declared unequivocally that it is a movement of generals without an army. And likes it that way ”- from an article, Whither Occupy?”- by Joshua Lawrence Breslin in the East Bay Other, December 22, 2011.
Note that Brother Breslin ( I will explain that bond in a minute) did not say that the Occupy movement was an army without generals. Josh’s finely-tuned sense of which way a movement is heading and why picked that nugget out long before this writer in early spring had to concede the point, a sense he has developed, by the way, over forty years of writing for half the unread ( just kidding , Josh), and in some cases unlamented , radical and progressive journals and newspapers in this country. Brother Breslin always had shape antennae for the ebb and flow of social movements going back to the 1960s when he saw the ebb of those high heaven movements fall apart around the 1969 “Days Of Rage” at a time when I did not see the ebb until the 1971 May Day Tribe attempts in Washington, D.C. to shut the government down over the ever-continuing Vietnam War. So Josh Breslin is somebody I listen to.
Back in December I, as usual, dismissed his remarks as so much bad air as a result of having been burned by some of his experiences on the West Coast (his base for many years, although he resides now mostly near his old home town of Olde Saco up in Maine) and at the Occupy Boston site at Dewey Square. I, in what now seems like a fit of hubris, defended the movement as just about the best thing since sliced bread. Oh sure I had my fair share of criticisms, criticisms from a socialist perspective about the “no demands” demands and the like. However I saw most of the stuff that I disliked as “growing pains” and particularly held out hope for the General Assembly idea as the embryo of an alternative form of government in our new world a-borning .
Josh, if he is honest, will admit that he too shared some of my “generation of ‘68” hopes that this new movement would be the place where we passed on the torch the next generation (really the next next generation, there is a “missing generation (roughly the Occupy kids’ parents). Now those hopes have dissolved in the spring air and that son of a bitch proved right again.
Why have I spilled so much cyberspace “ink” on the august opinions of an old-time radical writer? Simply put because I recently was approached by a “true believer,” a self-described socialist ‘true believer” in the Occupy mission to answer some questions about my take on what socialists contributed (or didn’t ) to the movement and other questions along those lines. Naturally when such questions are raised I turn to my old comrade Josh for his opinions, suggestions, etc. Josh and I have shared many a picket line duty, many a lonely vigil, many a forlorn march for some underpublicized cause, and many a rally for some aspect of the world’s ills so our bonds of brotherhood run deep, even if we seldom agree on political perspectives. I have placed his answers to that true believer’s questions below. To finish up though let me quote his closing remark which has been telegraphed in the headline to this piece. “Let’s solemnly commemorate September 17th each year-and move on.” Pure Josh Breslin. But, damn him, he’s right-again.
***********
[Markin: I have deleted questions that Josh, for his own reasons, did not answer. My answers will form part of that true believer’s essay so I have not included them here. ]
Socialists in the Occupy Movement (Massachusetts)
I'm trying to keep this Massachusetts specific, but feel free to refer to national events when applicable.
Feel free to send this to other socialists who may be interested in answering questions.
Feel free to skip any questions that are not applicable by writing N/A.
Share links to relevant articles where appropriate.
1. Your name? Or if you prefer to use a pen-name for this interview, please write it down.
Joshua Lawrence Breslin (my by-line name but just Josh in mixed company, mixed being political and non-political)
2. What socialist organization are you a part of? Or if you are an independent socialist, do you have some other affiliation (journal, union, etc.)?
Independent Socialist-East Bay Other , Real Paper, The Barb, Boston Phoenix, Rolling Stone, Green Weekly, and too many other papers and journals to mention
3. How would you describe yourself ideologically?
Traced from youth- Catholic Worker etched-liberalism (same as Markin except that his was Irish mine Gallic-derived) , Cold War social democracy, communist fellow traveler radical –League Of California Radicals, now for many years, an independent radical
4. When did either you or your organization get involved in the Occupy Movement (specifically in Massachusetts)?
I attended the pre-encampment meetings before September 30th, had a writing assignment at Occupy Oakland for most of October and early November, came back and worked at Dewey Square from then on.
5. Did you or anyone from organization camp out in an Occupy encampment?
Are you serious? No. Old men do not “camp out” on the highway. And young people shouldn’t either.
8. How would you characterize Occupy's relation/reception to socialists ideas? Good? Bad? Indifferent? –
Indifferent but a studied indifference to any ideas beyond the mush of “ideas” that held the camp together. I once commented that for a political movement that then held the public center of attention there was less political discussion at Occupy than I had run into off-handedly in various pre-Occupy rallies and marches in which I had participated. That observation has only gotten stronger as the movement has fallen apart.
11. Were you a part of any Occupy working groups? Which ones and your assessment?
Socialist Caucus-short-lived, not well-attended and mainly a “mail-drop” and endorsement vehicle for other actions, including those which I supported and sought endorsements for. The caucus I believe pretty accurately reflected the weaknesses of the non-academic socialist movement in Boston (and probably more generally the radical milieu) as far as numbers go, desire for an all-inclusive socialist organization where groups and individuals could fight out their politics while doing the necessary united front work that has to drive the movement in this period, and general post-Soviet demise indifferent and/or hostility to socialism beyond the endlessly prattled passive poll figure that the younger generations now have a more positive attitude toward socialist ideas and do not want to shoot every socialist on sight.
Action for Peace-mainly the same observations as for the Socialist Caucus except that it really was kind of redundant to Veterans for Peace and UNAC organizational efforts reflecting the composition of the members of the group. Most successful action was as part of the February Hands Off Iran rally but that event, a real united front rather than Occupy event, demonstrates the redundant nature of the group. As a general observation about the working groups I would note that pre-Occupy organizations, for a time, found it worthwhile, and rightly so, I think, to work under the Occupy umbrella. Of late I note that most groups now work under their previous individual organizational forms and not under the Occupy umbrella.
General Strike OB- planning for May Day 2012. The best group I worked with, again too small for the task, the general strike task that originally animated its formation. Made up of a core of anarchists who were very hard-working but who also (as I did) kept some distance from OB GA (except for dough). To the extent that it might help you I have placed my May 2012 reflections here.
**********
I have noted on several previous occasions that due to the recent absence of serious left-wing political struggle (prior to the events at Occupy Boston in Dewey Square from October to December 2011anyway) that our tasks for May Day 2012 in Boston centered on reviving the international working class tradition beyond the limited observance by revolutionaries, radicals and, in recent years, immigrants. This effort would thus not be a one event, one year but require a number of years and that this year’s efforts was just a start. We have made that start.
The important thing this year was to bring Boston in line with the international movement, to have leftist militants and others see our struggles here as part of an international struggle even if our actions were, for now, more symbolic and educational than powerful blows at the imperial system. I believe, despite the bad weather and consequently smaller than anticipated numbers on May Day 2012, we achieved that aim. Through months of hard outreach, especially over the past several weeks as the day approached, we put out much propaganda and information about the events through the various media with which we have access. The message of this May Day, a day without the 99%, got a full hearing by people from the unions, immigrant communities, student milieu and other sectors like the women’s movement and GLBQT community. The connections and contacts made are valuable for our further efforts.
Some participants that spoke to me on May Day (and others who had expressed the same concerns on earlier occasions) believed that we had “bitten off more than we could chew,” by having an all-day series of events. While I am certainly open to hear criticism on the start time of the day’s events (7:00AM does stretch the imagination for night-owlish militants) the idea of several events starting with that early Financial District Block Party and continuing on with the 11:00 AM Anti-Capitalist March which fed into the noontime rally at Boston City Hall Plaza and then switching over to the immigrant community marches and rally capped off that evening by the sober, solemn and visually impression “Death Of Capitalism” funeral procession still seems right to me. Given our task –introducing (really re-introducing) May Day to a wider Boston audience we needed to provide a number of times and events where people could, consciously, contribute to the day’s celebration. Maybe some year our side will be able to call for a one event May Day mass rally (or better a general strike) but that is music for the future.
Needless to say, as occurs almost any time you have many events and a certain need to have them coordinated, there were some problems from technical stuff like mic set-ups to someone forgetting something important, or not showing at the right time, etc. Growing pains. Nevertheless all the scheduled events happened, we had minimum hassles from the police, and a couple of events really stick out as exemplars for future May Days. The Anti-Capitalist March from Copley Square, mainly in a downpour, led by many young militants and which fed into the noontime City Hall rally was spirited and gave me hope that someday (someday soon, I hope) we are going to bring this imperial monster down. The already mentioned funeral procession was an extremely creative (and oft-forgotten by us) alternative way to get our message across outside the “normal” ham-handed, jack-booted political screed.
Finally, a word or two on organization. The Occupy-May Day Coalition personnel base was too small, way too small even for our limited goals. We need outreach early (early next year) to get enough organizer-type people on board to push forward. More broadly on outreach I believe, and partially this was a function of being too small an organizing center, we spent too much time “preaching to the choir”-going to events, talking to people already politically convinced , talking among ourselves rather than get out into the broader political milieu. For next year (which will not be an election year) we really need union and community people (especially people of color) to “smooth” the way for us. We never got that one (although we want more than one ultimately) respected middle-level still militant union official or community organizer that people, working people, listen to and who would listen to us with his or her nod. Radical or bourgeois politics, down at the base, you still need the people that the people listen to. Forward to May Day 2013.
12. Did you or your organization bring any proposals to a General Assembly? How were those proposals received?
As noted the General Strike proposals, in line with the national and international thrust for May Day were well-received, including for money. I would note that during the post-encampment period GA served as more of a “mail drop” and endorsement vehicle similar to the working groups I was involved with. If couched in the right language and sufficiently genetic (read; noncontroversial) most proposals that I was associated with passed with a minimum of friction. The main point though is to trace the political demise of GA from an October “people’s voice” operation to a “rump” in the post encampment period. Its writ did not run very far (and maybe never did except in the political winds). That was highlighted by May Day where the central Occupy struggle event (the Financial District Block Party) fizzled, fizzled badly. As I said back in December “we are generals without an army.” People, including political genius Markin, thought I was crazy when I first said that, but as usual, my political antennae were very sharp.
13. What do you or your organization perceive as the weaknesses of Occupy? Please elaborate.
See most of above. I will just outline here as a summary. Too attached to the camp idea beyond its usefulness. Too caught up in camp details once it became a “homeless shelter” toward the end of October. A studied lack of serious political discussion beyond platitudes. No demands which ordinary people could organize around and fight for. And desperately need to fight for too. Too wedded to the almost politically infantile ideas that formed the movement (mic check, endless GA prattle, absolute consensus, non-representative assemblies, moral blocks). Too many marches and rallies without purpose other than to proclaim 99%-dom. Too wedded to a purely social media concept of revolution in the U.S. and not taking into consideration the differences between here and let’s say, in Egypt. No links, other than formal and those tenuous, to organized labor, blacks, Latinos, working women, non-radicalized students, ordinary working people, hard-pressed suburban home-owners, etc. Unwillingness, incapacity, or even awareness of political timing of the need to shift perspective as the movement fell apart in winter and spring. Too wedded to the “leaderless” leader concept. In short all the problems that one should have expected of a movement that “had” it for a political minute last fall and essentially squandered it. That is a hard thing to swallow for me. Harder still it is not something that can really be addressed (at least for Boston) at this late date.
14. Any campaigns that you/organization have been involved in? (ex. Occupy the T). In what way?
See above.
15. Where do you see the Occupy movement going from here?
As I said above -… “we are generals without an army.” From all appearances of late that looks like the situation for the future as well. I would note that from the declining number of active working groups, smaller size of those groups, and the rather cult-like actions of the remnant of OB GA it is not good. We should have a solemn commemoration for the OWS movement every September 17th- and move on.
“…The Occupy movement has now declared unequivocally that it is a movement of generals without an army. And likes it that way ”- from an article, Whither Occupy?”- by Joshua Lawrence Breslin in the East Bay Other, December 22, 2011.
Note that Brother Breslin ( I will explain that bond in a minute) did not say that the Occupy movement was an army without generals. Josh’s finely-tuned sense of which way a movement is heading and why picked that nugget out long before this writer in early spring had to concede the point, a sense he has developed, by the way, over forty years of writing for half the unread ( just kidding , Josh), and in some cases unlamented , radical and progressive journals and newspapers in this country. Brother Breslin always had shape antennae for the ebb and flow of social movements going back to the 1960s when he saw the ebb of those high heaven movements fall apart around the 1969 “Days Of Rage” at a time when I did not see the ebb until the 1971 May Day Tribe attempts in Washington, D.C. to shut the government down over the ever-continuing Vietnam War. So Josh Breslin is somebody I listen to.
Back in December I, as usual, dismissed his remarks as so much bad air as a result of having been burned by some of his experiences on the West Coast (his base for many years, although he resides now mostly near his old home town of Olde Saco up in Maine) and at the Occupy Boston site at Dewey Square. I, in what now seems like a fit of hubris, defended the movement as just about the best thing since sliced bread. Oh sure I had my fair share of criticisms, criticisms from a socialist perspective about the “no demands” demands and the like. However I saw most of the stuff that I disliked as “growing pains” and particularly held out hope for the General Assembly idea as the embryo of an alternative form of government in our new world a-borning .
Josh, if he is honest, will admit that he too shared some of my “generation of ‘68” hopes that this new movement would be the place where we passed on the torch the next generation (really the next next generation, there is a “missing generation (roughly the Occupy kids’ parents). Now those hopes have dissolved in the spring air and that son of a bitch proved right again.
Why have I spilled so much cyberspace “ink” on the august opinions of an old-time radical writer? Simply put because I recently was approached by a “true believer,” a self-described socialist ‘true believer” in the Occupy mission to answer some questions about my take on what socialists contributed (or didn’t ) to the movement and other questions along those lines. Naturally when such questions are raised I turn to my old comrade Josh for his opinions, suggestions, etc. Josh and I have shared many a picket line duty, many a lonely vigil, many a forlorn march for some underpublicized cause, and many a rally for some aspect of the world’s ills so our bonds of brotherhood run deep, even if we seldom agree on political perspectives. I have placed his answers to that true believer’s questions below. To finish up though let me quote his closing remark which has been telegraphed in the headline to this piece. “Let’s solemnly commemorate September 17th each year-and move on.” Pure Josh Breslin. But, damn him, he’s right-again.
***********
[Markin: I have deleted questions that Josh, for his own reasons, did not answer. My answers will form part of that true believer’s essay so I have not included them here. ]
Socialists in the Occupy Movement (Massachusetts)
I'm trying to keep this Massachusetts specific, but feel free to refer to national events when applicable.
Feel free to send this to other socialists who may be interested in answering questions.
Feel free to skip any questions that are not applicable by writing N/A.
Share links to relevant articles where appropriate.
1. Your name? Or if you prefer to use a pen-name for this interview, please write it down.
Joshua Lawrence Breslin (my by-line name but just Josh in mixed company, mixed being political and non-political)
2. What socialist organization are you a part of? Or if you are an independent socialist, do you have some other affiliation (journal, union, etc.)?
Independent Socialist-East Bay Other , Real Paper, The Barb, Boston Phoenix, Rolling Stone, Green Weekly, and too many other papers and journals to mention
3. How would you describe yourself ideologically?
Traced from youth- Catholic Worker etched-liberalism (same as Markin except that his was Irish mine Gallic-derived) , Cold War social democracy, communist fellow traveler radical –League Of California Radicals, now for many years, an independent radical
4. When did either you or your organization get involved in the Occupy Movement (specifically in Massachusetts)?
I attended the pre-encampment meetings before September 30th, had a writing assignment at Occupy Oakland for most of October and early November, came back and worked at Dewey Square from then on.
5. Did you or anyone from organization camp out in an Occupy encampment?
Are you serious? No. Old men do not “camp out” on the highway. And young people shouldn’t either.
8. How would you characterize Occupy's relation/reception to socialists ideas? Good? Bad? Indifferent? –
Indifferent but a studied indifference to any ideas beyond the mush of “ideas” that held the camp together. I once commented that for a political movement that then held the public center of attention there was less political discussion at Occupy than I had run into off-handedly in various pre-Occupy rallies and marches in which I had participated. That observation has only gotten stronger as the movement has fallen apart.
11. Were you a part of any Occupy working groups? Which ones and your assessment?
Socialist Caucus-short-lived, not well-attended and mainly a “mail-drop” and endorsement vehicle for other actions, including those which I supported and sought endorsements for. The caucus I believe pretty accurately reflected the weaknesses of the non-academic socialist movement in Boston (and probably more generally the radical milieu) as far as numbers go, desire for an all-inclusive socialist organization where groups and individuals could fight out their politics while doing the necessary united front work that has to drive the movement in this period, and general post-Soviet demise indifferent and/or hostility to socialism beyond the endlessly prattled passive poll figure that the younger generations now have a more positive attitude toward socialist ideas and do not want to shoot every socialist on sight.
Action for Peace-mainly the same observations as for the Socialist Caucus except that it really was kind of redundant to Veterans for Peace and UNAC organizational efforts reflecting the composition of the members of the group. Most successful action was as part of the February Hands Off Iran rally but that event, a real united front rather than Occupy event, demonstrates the redundant nature of the group. As a general observation about the working groups I would note that pre-Occupy organizations, for a time, found it worthwhile, and rightly so, I think, to work under the Occupy umbrella. Of late I note that most groups now work under their previous individual organizational forms and not under the Occupy umbrella.
General Strike OB- planning for May Day 2012. The best group I worked with, again too small for the task, the general strike task that originally animated its formation. Made up of a core of anarchists who were very hard-working but who also (as I did) kept some distance from OB GA (except for dough). To the extent that it might help you I have placed my May 2012 reflections here.
**********
I have noted on several previous occasions that due to the recent absence of serious left-wing political struggle (prior to the events at Occupy Boston in Dewey Square from October to December 2011anyway) that our tasks for May Day 2012 in Boston centered on reviving the international working class tradition beyond the limited observance by revolutionaries, radicals and, in recent years, immigrants. This effort would thus not be a one event, one year but require a number of years and that this year’s efforts was just a start. We have made that start.
The important thing this year was to bring Boston in line with the international movement, to have leftist militants and others see our struggles here as part of an international struggle even if our actions were, for now, more symbolic and educational than powerful blows at the imperial system. I believe, despite the bad weather and consequently smaller than anticipated numbers on May Day 2012, we achieved that aim. Through months of hard outreach, especially over the past several weeks as the day approached, we put out much propaganda and information about the events through the various media with which we have access. The message of this May Day, a day without the 99%, got a full hearing by people from the unions, immigrant communities, student milieu and other sectors like the women’s movement and GLBQT community. The connections and contacts made are valuable for our further efforts.
Some participants that spoke to me on May Day (and others who had expressed the same concerns on earlier occasions) believed that we had “bitten off more than we could chew,” by having an all-day series of events. While I am certainly open to hear criticism on the start time of the day’s events (7:00AM does stretch the imagination for night-owlish militants) the idea of several events starting with that early Financial District Block Party and continuing on with the 11:00 AM Anti-Capitalist March which fed into the noontime rally at Boston City Hall Plaza and then switching over to the immigrant community marches and rally capped off that evening by the sober, solemn and visually impression “Death Of Capitalism” funeral procession still seems right to me. Given our task –introducing (really re-introducing) May Day to a wider Boston audience we needed to provide a number of times and events where people could, consciously, contribute to the day’s celebration. Maybe some year our side will be able to call for a one event May Day mass rally (or better a general strike) but that is music for the future.
Needless to say, as occurs almost any time you have many events and a certain need to have them coordinated, there were some problems from technical stuff like mic set-ups to someone forgetting something important, or not showing at the right time, etc. Growing pains. Nevertheless all the scheduled events happened, we had minimum hassles from the police, and a couple of events really stick out as exemplars for future May Days. The Anti-Capitalist March from Copley Square, mainly in a downpour, led by many young militants and which fed into the noontime City Hall rally was spirited and gave me hope that someday (someday soon, I hope) we are going to bring this imperial monster down. The already mentioned funeral procession was an extremely creative (and oft-forgotten by us) alternative way to get our message across outside the “normal” ham-handed, jack-booted political screed.
Finally, a word or two on organization. The Occupy-May Day Coalition personnel base was too small, way too small even for our limited goals. We need outreach early (early next year) to get enough organizer-type people on board to push forward. More broadly on outreach I believe, and partially this was a function of being too small an organizing center, we spent too much time “preaching to the choir”-going to events, talking to people already politically convinced , talking among ourselves rather than get out into the broader political milieu. For next year (which will not be an election year) we really need union and community people (especially people of color) to “smooth” the way for us. We never got that one (although we want more than one ultimately) respected middle-level still militant union official or community organizer that people, working people, listen to and who would listen to us with his or her nod. Radical or bourgeois politics, down at the base, you still need the people that the people listen to. Forward to May Day 2013.
12. Did you or your organization bring any proposals to a General Assembly? How were those proposals received?
As noted the General Strike proposals, in line with the national and international thrust for May Day were well-received, including for money. I would note that during the post-encampment period GA served as more of a “mail drop” and endorsement vehicle similar to the working groups I was involved with. If couched in the right language and sufficiently genetic (read; noncontroversial) most proposals that I was associated with passed with a minimum of friction. The main point though is to trace the political demise of GA from an October “people’s voice” operation to a “rump” in the post encampment period. Its writ did not run very far (and maybe never did except in the political winds). That was highlighted by May Day where the central Occupy struggle event (the Financial District Block Party) fizzled, fizzled badly. As I said back in December “we are generals without an army.” People, including political genius Markin, thought I was crazy when I first said that, but as usual, my political antennae were very sharp.
13. What do you or your organization perceive as the weaknesses of Occupy? Please elaborate.
See most of above. I will just outline here as a summary. Too attached to the camp idea beyond its usefulness. Too caught up in camp details once it became a “homeless shelter” toward the end of October. A studied lack of serious political discussion beyond platitudes. No demands which ordinary people could organize around and fight for. And desperately need to fight for too. Too wedded to the almost politically infantile ideas that formed the movement (mic check, endless GA prattle, absolute consensus, non-representative assemblies, moral blocks). Too many marches and rallies without purpose other than to proclaim 99%-dom. Too wedded to a purely social media concept of revolution in the U.S. and not taking into consideration the differences between here and let’s say, in Egypt. No links, other than formal and those tenuous, to organized labor, blacks, Latinos, working women, non-radicalized students, ordinary working people, hard-pressed suburban home-owners, etc. Unwillingness, incapacity, or even awareness of political timing of the need to shift perspective as the movement fell apart in winter and spring. Too wedded to the “leaderless” leader concept. In short all the problems that one should have expected of a movement that “had” it for a political minute last fall and essentially squandered it. That is a hard thing to swallow for me. Harder still it is not something that can really be addressed (at least for Boston) at this late date.
14. Any campaigns that you/organization have been involved in? (ex. Occupy the T). In what way?
See above.
15. Where do you see the Occupy movement going from here?
As I said above -… “we are generals without an army.” From all appearances of late that looks like the situation for the future as well. I would note that from the declining number of active working groups, smaller size of those groups, and the rather cult-like actions of the remnant of OB GA it is not good. We should have a solemn commemoration for the OWS movement every September 17th- and move on.
Show Solidarity With The Chicago Teachers- This Is Our Fight!-Victory To The Chicago Teachers!-Send Donations
Click on the headline to link to the Chicago Teachers Union to show solidarity by messages or donations.
Contribute to the CTU Solidarity Fund
The Chicago Teachers Union is currently on the front lines of a fight to defend public education. On one side the 30,000 members of the CTU have called for a contract that includes fair compensation, meaningful job security for qualified teachers, smaller class sizes and a better school day with Art, Music, World Language and appropriate staffing levels to help our neediest students.
On the other side, the Chicago Board of Education—which is managed by out of town reformers and Broad Foundation hires with little or no Chicago public school experience—has pushed to add two weeks to the school year and 85 minutes to the school day, eliminate pay increases for seniority, evaluate teachers based on student test scores, and slash many other rights.
Teachers, parents and community supporters in Chicago have fought valiantly—marching, filling auditoriums at hearings and parent meetings, even occupying a school and taking over a school board meeting. Most recently, 98 percent of our members voted to authorize a strike. But now we find ourselves facing new opponents—national education privatizers, backed by some of the nation’s wealthiest people. They are running radio ads, increasing press attacks, and mounting a PR campaign to discredit the CTU and the benefits of public education.
We are asking you to support our struggle for educational justice. You and your organization can show your support by making contribution to our Solidarity Fund. All donations will be used to conduct broad outreach throughout Chicago and nation-wide. Specifically, we plan to print educational materials, to distribute information about our positive agenda, such as the CTU report The Schools Chicago Students Deserve, and to mobilize massive support for educators in rallies and gatherings throughout the city. Any amount you can give will be a great help. You can donate using your credit card below or write a check to the “Chicago Teachers Union Solidarity Fund” and mail it directly to the Chicago Teachers Union Solidarity Fund, 222 Merchandise Mart Plaza, Suite 400, Chicago, Illinois 60654. If your organization or union would like to write a letter or resolution of solidarity, we would very much appreciate it.
Thank you for your support.
In Solidarity,
Karen GJ Lewis, NBCT
CTU President
Contribute to the CTU Solidarity Fund
The Chicago Teachers Union is currently on the front lines of a fight to defend public education. On one side the 30,000 members of the CTU have called for a contract that includes fair compensation, meaningful job security for qualified teachers, smaller class sizes and a better school day with Art, Music, World Language and appropriate staffing levels to help our neediest students.
On the other side, the Chicago Board of Education—which is managed by out of town reformers and Broad Foundation hires with little or no Chicago public school experience—has pushed to add two weeks to the school year and 85 minutes to the school day, eliminate pay increases for seniority, evaluate teachers based on student test scores, and slash many other rights.
Teachers, parents and community supporters in Chicago have fought valiantly—marching, filling auditoriums at hearings and parent meetings, even occupying a school and taking over a school board meeting. Most recently, 98 percent of our members voted to authorize a strike. But now we find ourselves facing new opponents—national education privatizers, backed by some of the nation’s wealthiest people. They are running radio ads, increasing press attacks, and mounting a PR campaign to discredit the CTU and the benefits of public education.
We are asking you to support our struggle for educational justice. You and your organization can show your support by making contribution to our Solidarity Fund. All donations will be used to conduct broad outreach throughout Chicago and nation-wide. Specifically, we plan to print educational materials, to distribute information about our positive agenda, such as the CTU report The Schools Chicago Students Deserve, and to mobilize massive support for educators in rallies and gatherings throughout the city. Any amount you can give will be a great help. You can donate using your credit card below or write a check to the “Chicago Teachers Union Solidarity Fund” and mail it directly to the Chicago Teachers Union Solidarity Fund, 222 Merchandise Mart Plaza, Suite 400, Chicago, Illinois 60654. If your organization or union would like to write a letter or resolution of solidarity, we would very much appreciate it.
Thank you for your support.
In Solidarity,
Karen GJ Lewis, NBCT
CTU President
Chicago teachers strike enters 2nd week-Victory To The Chicago Teachers Union !
Chicago teachers strike enters 2nd week
By SOPHIA TAREEN and TAMMY WEBBER, AP
2 hours ago
Philomena Johnson, a delegate from Little Village Academy, decorates her veh...
CHICAGO — Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is turning to the courts to try to put an end to a teachers strike that's entering its second week and has left parents scrambling to make alternative child care arrangements for at least two more days.
The union and school leaders seemed headed toward a resolution at the end of last week, saying they were optimistic students in the nation's third-largest school district would be back in class by Monday. But teachers uncomfortable with a tentative contract offer decided Sunday to remain on strike, saying they needed more time to review a complicated proposal.
Emanuel fired back, saying he told city attorneys to seek a court order forcing Chicago Teachers Union members back into the classroom.
The strike is the first for the city's teachers in 25 years and has kept 350,000 students out of class, leaving parents to make other plans.
Working mom Dequita Wade said that when the strike started, she sent her son 15 miles away to a cousin's house so he wouldn't be left unsupervised in a neighborhood known for violent crime and gangs. She was hoping the union and district would work things out quickly.
"You had a whole week. This is beginning to be ridiculous," Wade said. "Are they going to keep prolonging things?"
Months of contract negotiations have come down to two main issues central to the debate over the future of education across the United States: teacher evaluations and job security.
Union delegates said they felt uncomfortable approving the contract because they had seen it only in bits. The union will meet again Tuesday, after the end of the Rosh Hashana, the Jewish new year.
"There's no trust for our members of the board," Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis told reporters Sunday night. "They're not happy with the agreement. They'd like it to actually be a lot better."
Emanuel said the strike was illegal because it endangers the health and safety of students and concerned issues — evaluations, layoffs and recall rights — that state law says cannot be grounds for a work stoppage.
"This was a strike of choice and is now a delay of choice that is wrong for our children," Emanuel said in a written statement.
The strike has shined a spotlight on Emanuel's leadership more than ever, and some experts have suggested the new contract — which features annual pay raises and other benefits — is a win for union.
"I'm hard-pressed to imagine how they could have done much better," said Robert Bruno, a professor of labor and employment relations at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "This is a very impressive outcome for the teachers."
With an average salary of $76,000, Chicago teachers are among the highest-paid in the nation, and the contract outline calls for annual raises. But some teachers are upset it did not restore a 4 percent raise Emanuel rescinded last year.
Emanuel pushed for a contract that includes ratcheting up the percentage of evaluations based on student performance, to 35 percent within four years. The union contends that does not take into account outside factors that affect student performance such as poverty and violence.
The union pushed for a policy to give laid-off teachers first dibs on open jobs anywhere in the district, but the city said that would keep principals from hiring the teachers they think are most qualified.
The union has engaged in something of a publicity campaign, telling parents about problems that include a lack of important books and basic supplies.
Some parents said they remain sympathetic to teachers.
"I don't think they're wrong. The things they're asking for are within reason," said Pamela Edwards, who has sent her 16-year-old daughter to one of about 140 schools the district has kept open during the strike to provide meals and supervision.
Others said they understand why teachers are taking their time.
"As much as we want our kids back in school, teachers need to make sure they have dotted all their i's and crossed their t's," said Becky Malone, mother of a second grader and fourth grader, who've been studying at home and going to museums over the last week. "What's the point of going on strike if you don't get everything you need out of it? For parents, it'll be no more of a challenge than it's been in the past week."
By SOPHIA TAREEN and TAMMY WEBBER, AP
2 hours ago
Philomena Johnson, a delegate from Little Village Academy, decorates her veh...
CHICAGO — Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is turning to the courts to try to put an end to a teachers strike that's entering its second week and has left parents scrambling to make alternative child care arrangements for at least two more days.
The union and school leaders seemed headed toward a resolution at the end of last week, saying they were optimistic students in the nation's third-largest school district would be back in class by Monday. But teachers uncomfortable with a tentative contract offer decided Sunday to remain on strike, saying they needed more time to review a complicated proposal.
Emanuel fired back, saying he told city attorneys to seek a court order forcing Chicago Teachers Union members back into the classroom.
The strike is the first for the city's teachers in 25 years and has kept 350,000 students out of class, leaving parents to make other plans.
Working mom Dequita Wade said that when the strike started, she sent her son 15 miles away to a cousin's house so he wouldn't be left unsupervised in a neighborhood known for violent crime and gangs. She was hoping the union and district would work things out quickly.
"You had a whole week. This is beginning to be ridiculous," Wade said. "Are they going to keep prolonging things?"
Months of contract negotiations have come down to two main issues central to the debate over the future of education across the United States: teacher evaluations and job security.
Union delegates said they felt uncomfortable approving the contract because they had seen it only in bits. The union will meet again Tuesday, after the end of the Rosh Hashana, the Jewish new year.
"There's no trust for our members of the board," Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis told reporters Sunday night. "They're not happy with the agreement. They'd like it to actually be a lot better."
Emanuel said the strike was illegal because it endangers the health and safety of students and concerned issues — evaluations, layoffs and recall rights — that state law says cannot be grounds for a work stoppage.
"This was a strike of choice and is now a delay of choice that is wrong for our children," Emanuel said in a written statement.
The strike has shined a spotlight on Emanuel's leadership more than ever, and some experts have suggested the new contract — which features annual pay raises and other benefits — is a win for union.
"I'm hard-pressed to imagine how they could have done much better," said Robert Bruno, a professor of labor and employment relations at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "This is a very impressive outcome for the teachers."
With an average salary of $76,000, Chicago teachers are among the highest-paid in the nation, and the contract outline calls for annual raises. But some teachers are upset it did not restore a 4 percent raise Emanuel rescinded last year.
Emanuel pushed for a contract that includes ratcheting up the percentage of evaluations based on student performance, to 35 percent within four years. The union contends that does not take into account outside factors that affect student performance such as poverty and violence.
The union pushed for a policy to give laid-off teachers first dibs on open jobs anywhere in the district, but the city said that would keep principals from hiring the teachers they think are most qualified.
The union has engaged in something of a publicity campaign, telling parents about problems that include a lack of important books and basic supplies.
Some parents said they remain sympathetic to teachers.
"I don't think they're wrong. The things they're asking for are within reason," said Pamela Edwards, who has sent her 16-year-old daughter to one of about 140 schools the district has kept open during the strike to provide meals and supervision.
Others said they understand why teachers are taking their time.
"As much as we want our kids back in school, teachers need to make sure they have dotted all their i's and crossed their t's," said Becky Malone, mother of a second grader and fourth grader, who've been studying at home and going to museums over the last week. "What's the point of going on strike if you don't get everything you need out of it? For parents, it'll be no more of a challenge than it's been in the past week."
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