| Bradley Manning Seeks Plea Deal | |
| by Stephen Lendman Email: lendmanstephen (nospam) sbcglobal.net (verified) | 10 Nov 2012 |
| police state | |
| Bradley Manning Seeks Plea Deal by Stephen Lendman Plea bargains are sought or accepted for lesser sentences on charges faced. Innocent victims take them if offered. They know potentially what they face against hardball prosecutors wanting blood. If convicted on all or most serious charges, Manning faces potential life in prison. In America, innocence is no defense. Thousands languish unjustifiably in gulag hell. US prisons are some of the worst. Manning's lawyer, David Coombs notified the military court that he'll plead guilty to some charges. It's more a partial plea deal than a traditional one. More on that below. The Bradley Manning Support Network (BMSN) asks, "When did exposing truth become a crime in America?" It's criminalized when government rogues want uncomfortable truths kept secret. Manning is an American hero. He's a courageous Army intelligence analyst turned whistleblower. Harry Truman once said: "When even one American - who has done nothing wrong - is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth, then all Americans are in peril." The National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC) is an alliance of whistleblowers. Sibel Edmonds founded it in August 2004. It's independent and nonpartisan. She serves as president. Its members include "current or former federal employees or civilians working under contract to the United States who, to their detriment or personal risk, bring to light fraud, waste, and abuse in government operations and agencies when such improprieties compromise the national security of the United States." At perhaps the most perilous time in world history, exposing vital truths takes on greater importance than ever. A legion of Bradley Mannings is needed. Exposing government criminality involves great risk. Failure to do so assures unaccountability and greater crimes. America is the world's leading rogue state. Criminals run it. They're waging war on humanity. Human survival is at stake. Stopping them is top priority. Manning exposed snippets of US criminality. Doing so harmed no one. It got him in trouble. In May 2010, he was arrested in Iraq on suspicion of passing on classified material to WikiLeaks. A Pentagon statement said: "The Department of Defense takes the management of classified information very seriously because it affects our national security, the lives of our soldiers, and our operations abroad." Then Defense Secretary Robert Gates lied. He called the leak "potentially dramatic and grievously harmful....The battlefield consequences of the release of these documents are potentially severe and dangerous for our troops, our allies and Afghan partners…." Unmentioned were multiple US imperial wars, lawless occupations, exploitation of people and resources, crimes of war, against humanity, and genocide, as well as millions of noncombatant civilians killed, injured, or otherwise harmed. Whistleblowers like Manning deserve praise, not prosecution. They're heroes. They're America's finest. They risk great personal harm to expose vital truths everyone needs to know. Exposing crimes or intent to commit them deserves highest praise. America equates it with treason, subversion, or terrorism. Manning faces 22 counts under America's Espionage Act. He's also accountable under Articles 92 and 124 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). They include aiding the enemy. It's a potential capital offense. Prosecutors said they won't seek the death penalty. Manning could face life in prison. Possibly it would be without parole. He and Julian Assange received Nobel Peace Prize nominations. On February 1, 2012, the Movement of the Icelandic Parliament (MIP) nominated Manning for the Nobel Peace Prize. They felt compelled to recognize his important contribution to world peace. MIP's letter to the Nobel Peace Prize Committee in part said: "We have the great honor of nominating (Manning) for the 2012 (award)." He stands accused of leaking documents revealing "a long history of corruption, war crimes and imperialism by the United States government in international dealings." The evidence "should never have been kept from public scrutiny." They document crimes of war and against humanity." "Citizens worldwide" are indebted "to the WikiLeaks whistleblower for shedding light on these issues, and so I urge the Committee to award this prestigious prize to accused whistleblower Bradley Manning" for displaying the highest form of courage at great personal risk. On October 2, Manning's lawyer, David Coombs, moved to have all charges dropped without prejudice. He cited constitutional and Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) violations. The Sixth Amendment requires "the right to a speedy and public trial….by an impartial jury….and to be informed of the nature and cause of (all charges); to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have" legal counsel assist in defense proceedings. UCMJ calls for trial within 120 days of restraint and arraignment. When a service member is placed in pre-trial confinement, "immediate steps shall be taken" to inform the accused of all charges, proceed with trial, or dismiss the case entirely. The Rule for Court Martial (RCM) 707 also calls for trial within 120 days from arrest to arraignment to assure speedy trial proceedings. By the time Manning's trial begins on February 4, he'll have been incarcerated for nearly 1,000 days. Willful delay prevented him from being tried earlier. Doing so was unjustified, unconscionable, and illegal. Coombs said: "The Convening Authority, therefore, is just as much at fault for the lack of a speedy trial as is the prosecution." "The Convening Authority abandoned any attempt to make an independent determination of the reasonableness of any Government delay request." "Instead, the Convening Authority operated as a mere rubber stamp by granting all delay requests." The Pentagon ordered Manning's trial delayed. Generals wanted time to punish him ruthlessly. He was isolated in solitary confinement for nine months and imprisoned in pre-trial detention for around 900 days. In confinement he was subjected to brutal, inhumane treatment. Despite being a model prisoner, he was declared a "Maximum Custody Detainee." Doing so subjected him to the harshest possible treatment. BradleyManning.org said "Evidence shows (a) three-star general ordered (his) unlawful, brutal treatment." Brig commanders followed Pentagon orders. Constitutional and US statute laws were violated. So was UCMJ's Article 13. It prohibits pre-trial confinement conditions "any more rigorous" than what's minimally needed to ensure the accused appears for court hearings. Coombs uncovered emails that "reveal everyone at Quantico was complicit in the unlawful pretrial treatment, from senior officers to enlisted soldiers." Military officials lied. They claimed Manning was placed on special "prevention of injury" watch for his own protection. Brig psychiatrists called his treatment unjustified. Bradley Manning Support Network attorney Kevin Zeese said emails made public "now make all previous assertions by Quantico and Pentagon officials that they were simply following procedures to keep Bradley Manning safe patently ridiculous." Retired Army Col. Ann Wright added: "The revelation that a Lieutenant General would order the mistreatment of a fellow soldier in violation of the UCMJ leaves me aghast." "This general, and those who obeyed his orders to mistreat whistle-blower Bradley Manning while he was held in pre-trial confinement, must be held accountable. If not, the entire military justice system fails all members of the military." Manning was subjected to the following harsh treatment: • isolation for 23 hours a day; • one hour alone outside in an isolated room; he was shackled, allowed to walk in circles, and returned to his cell the moment he stopped; • extremely limited activities overall; • prohibited from exercising; • directly and by video surveilled constantly; • barred from accessing any news or other information; • forced to respond to guard inquiries almost every five minutes all day; • awakened at night for being out of full view; he was curled up under very uncomfortable blankets; • denied a pillow and sheets; and • for weeks subjected to forced nudity; he was kept that way at night and outside his cell mornings for inspection; military officials lied; they claiming it was to prevent him from injuring himself. The Pentagon exerted great pressure to break Manning emotionally. He hung on courageously throughout his entire ordeal. Obama threw Manning under the bus. He defended his lawless treatment. He said it met basic standards. He left unexplained gross human rights violations. Coombs said Manning's constitutional and statutory rights were "trampled on with impunity." On November 7, Coombs posted the following information on his web site: "PFC Manning's Offered Plea and Forum Selection" "PFC Manning has offered to plead guilty to various offenses through a process known as 'pleading by exceptions and substitutions.' " "To clarify, PFC Manning is not pleading guilty to the specifications as charged by the Government. Rather, PFC Manning is attempting to accept responsibility for offenses that are encapsulated within, or are a subset of, the charged offenses. The Court will consider whether this is a permissible plea." "PFC Manning is not submitting a plea as part of an agreement or deal with the Government. Further, the Government does not need to agree to PFC Manning's plea; the Court simply has to determine that the plea is legally permissible." "If the Court allows PFC Manning to plead guilty by exceptions and substitutions, the Government may still elect to prove up the charged offenses." "Pleading by exceptions and substitutions, in other words, does not change the offenses with which PFC Manning has been charged and for which he is scheduled to stand trial." "PFC Manning has also provided notice of his forum selection. He has elected to be tried by Military Judge alone." In other words, Coombs made this offer for Manning. In return, he hopes more serious charges will be dropped or lessened. He awaits word from the court. If willingness is expressed, a traditional plea bargain may follow. Spokesman for the Bradley Manning Support Network Nathan Fuller said it's "very premature" to speculate whether prosecutors will show leniency. Given how harshly Manning's been treated, it appears a long shot at best, but can't be ruled out. Manning is world renown. Many distinguished figures and others support him. Pentagon officials may decide to make it appear they're showing some leniency. Trial proceedings are expected to last six weeks. Manning chose to be tried by a military judge alone instead of a jury of military officers. Nothing will be known for sure until the judge rules. He has marching orders and will do what he's told. Coombs said Manning will plead guilty to lesser charges alone. Perhaps by late November, some indication of court sentiment will be known. Law Professor Eugene Fidell represents defendants in court-martial case. He was puzzled by Coombs' move. He said it's unusual to plead guilty without benefit of a pretrial agreement assuring something in return. At the same time, Manning hopes court leniency may follow. Cooperating to save government time and expense may help. It's hard to know after authorities invested enormous effort and expense to make an example of him. At issue is deterring other whistleblowers. Going soft might encourage them. At the same time, playing hardball may encourage fighting back. Manning supporters are enraged about his harsh treatment. If he's imprisoned for decades or life, they won't be silent. Retribution will be on the minds of many. Above all, supporters want justice. Manning's been afforded none so far. It's highly unlikely he'll be treated fairly. Police states rarely show leniency and never say they're sorry. Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen (at) sbcglobal.net. His new book is titled "How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion and Class War" http://www.claritypress.com/Lendman.html Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening. http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour | |
| See also: http://sjlendman.blogspot.com | |
Monday, November 12, 2012
Bradley Manning Seeks Plea Deal by Stephen Lendman
Workers Stand Up to Walmart
| Workers Stand Up to Walmart | |
| by Mark Vorpahl Email: portland (nospam) workerscompass.org (verified) | 18 Oct 2012 |
| When a torrent hits an obstacle that refuses to give, it either flows around or over the obstruction. When workers’ needs for a living wage, fair treatment, and a voice are damned up by an oppressive employer, it is only a matter of time before they find a way of asserting their strength. | |
| Testament to this truth are the strikes at Walmart, the first such actions against the retail behemoth in its 50 year history. The movement began in June when guest workers went on strike to expose forced labor at Walmart’s supplier C.J.’s Seafood in Louisiana. Walmart was fined $250,000 and compelled to suspend its contract with the company. This was followed in September by a strike at a similar warehouse in Inland Empire, California. On this actions’ heels came a three week strike at a warehouse in Elwood, Illinois that receives 70 percent of the chains’ imports. Thirty-eight workers walked out over the retaliatory firing of their co-workers for organizing activity as well as concerns over safety. Standing strong together got results. All workers were reinstated with three weeks back pay and safety concerns finally began to be acted on. Encouraged by this unprecedented victory, the chink in Walmart’s armor began to rapidly expand. At several stores in Pica Rivera, California, workers walked out over management’s attempts to silence them with retaliatory actions against those who spoke up for better conditions. This quickly spread to 28 stores across 12 states. Walmart’s public reaction to these developments has been to dismiss them as “publicity stunts.” However, an October 8th internal memo, intended only for salaried employees, reveals a very different attitude. It advises management on how to discourage workers from taking collective action while also telling them to avoid disciplinary action against employees who engage in walkouts, sit-ins, or sick-outs because of its legal consequences. Since Walmart employees have filed 20 unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) within the last 8 weeks because of retaliatory practices, and that striking against such retaliation is legally protected, it is clear that the company’s tops are attempting to adjust their anti-worker tactics. They are, for the moment, feeling compelled to advocate a more cautious approach to recent developments rather than encourage the arrogant manner of dealing with workers that Walmart management is known for. The strikes against Walmart’s treatment of workers have been a long time coming. Because pay and hours are so bad, employees rely on $2.66 billion in government help every year, or about $240,000 per store. Eighty percent of Walmart store workers are using food stamps. They are subject to unpredictable schedules and having their hours cut in order to avoid being paid benefits. In addition, employees have numerous safety concerns and are frequently treated disrespectfully by management higher ups. So resolute is the company’s hatred of Labor that when a store’s employees in Quebec Canada voted to join a union, Walmart closed it down. The main issue for these workers was not wages and benefits, but only to have regular predictable work schedules. While the majority of Walmart’s employees live in poverty, six members of Sam Walton’s (the founder of Walmart) family are worth more financially than the bottom 30 percent of the U.S. population. Sam Walton alone makes more than all Walmart’s wage employees combined and Walmart is the nation’s biggest employer. It was this kind of inequality and conditions faced by workers that spurred the creation of the union movement. However, the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) and others have so far been unable to organize Walmart’s workforce. Initial attempts went by the letter of the law. Once a majority of the employees signed cards to join a union, the NLRB would take six weeks to set up elections so that the workers would be forced to vote again for joining a union. This six week period allowed management to go on an anti-union offensive, holding captive meetings and finding other ways to intimidate the workforce. Consequently, playing by the rules of this game rigged in favor of the employers has failed repeatedly. In addition, organizing on a one-store-at-a-time basis was a shaky strategy because Walmart has already demonstrated that it would rather shut a store down than have it go union. The company is large enough to afford such a sacrifice. The UFCW went on a campaign with other community groups in an attempt to block the building of Walmart stores in various cities. The hope was that by making such trouble for the corporation, its owners would rather allow unionization than deal with the UFCW as an opponent to its expansion efforts. While there was some limited success, this strategy left Walmart’s workers powerless and did not amount to much more than a nuisance in the face of the corporation’s massive funds. It became clear that a new approach was necessary to take on a giant like Walmart. Consequently, the UFCW helped to found “Organization United for Respect at Walmart” (OUR Walmart) and the United Electrical Workers formed “Warehouse Workers for Justice” (WWJ). The unions provide advice and material support for these loose networks composed both of current Walmart workers and their supporters. However, it is up to the membership to determine their own activity. Unlike unions, they do not have the right to bargain with the employers on the employees’ behalf. On the other hand, they are not subject to the NLRB’s election laws that favor corporations. A minority at a workforce can take concerted collective action as long as this action is over an unfair labor practice such as retaliation by the employer. There are great limits to what this form of organization can accomplish on its own. Taking action over wages and benefits, for instance, is off limits. Even more important, it becomes more difficult to take strike action that shuts off the spigot of profits for an employer since that requires shutting down operations by the involvement of the entire workforce, and organizing community supporters in massive picket lines. Without this option for workers, employers are less likely to give in. But the example of strong wins by organizations such as OUR Walmart and WWJ help to pave the way towards wider unity among the workforce and unionization. They help to chip away at the fear workers have in standing united against an employer like Walmart. For instance, WWJ organizer Leah Fried reported that after receiving back pay for their strike in Elwood, Illinois an envious co-worker who had not gone out said he now wished he had done so. Because OUR Walmart and WWJ are organized on a national basis, they can also open up the road for a union drive on a national scale. Walmart has shown that it is willing to close a store rather than have it go union. However, it cannot afford to do this if a majority of workers from dozens of its stores are signing up. The conditions and wages that Walmart workers currently are subjected to have created a downward pressure for retail employees and the entire working class. The recent actions of these workers in defense of their own interests, on the other hand, can reverse this pressure and lift the living standard up for all. _____________________________________________________ To see how you can contribute to this development visit: OUR Walmart at http://forrespect.org/ and Warehouse Workers for Justice at http://www.warehouseworker.org/ and be prepared to take action on Black Friday, November 23, 2012. | |
| Videos/Photos-Boston Veterans For Peace March On Veterans Day | |
| by Michael Borkson Email: nosanctions (nospam) yahoo.com (unverified!) | 12 Nov 2012 |
| Boston, Mass.-Nov. 11, 2012: About 150 members of Veterans For Peace and their supporters marched behind the official pro-war Boston Veterans Day parade. | |
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| Boston, Mass.-Nov. 11, 2012: About 150 members of Veterans For Peace and their supporters marched behind the official pro-war Boston Veterans Day parade. The organizers of the official pro-war Boston Veterans Day parade, as in years past, will not permit Veterans For Peace to march in the main parade, so VFP members march several blocks behind the official parade--the reason: the pro-war veterans organizations do not believe that the 2 words- "veterans" and "peace" fit together. The march started on Boston Common at 1pm, led by the Leftist Marching Band, and then proceeded down Boylston and Tremont Streets to the applause of the many onlookers. The VFP march ended at Faneuil Hall where a very moving and inspired speakout against war took place. To see 2 videos of the VFP march and rally, click on these 2 Youtube links: Main march and speeches: http://youtu.be/a5WPNflV9uA Susan McLucas speaking on wiki-leaks whistleblower Pvt. Bradley Manning, plus her singing a song about him: http://youtu.be/p805oZrfMTI To view more photos, click on this link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/protestphotos1/sets/72157631984949762/detai/ | |
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From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin-Getting The Bad Guys 1950s Noir Style
Let’s say a clean-cut, some would say righteous, detective, a public employee detective, a cop, working for cheap dough but with some kind of white knight thing about honest work, honest cop work, and getting rid of crumb bum criminals fouling up the city streets, in any case not the usual private dick, like Phillip Marlowe, tilting at windmills for cheap dough too but maybe a roll in the hay with some femme, who is not subject to the vagaries of fearing for his pension or loss of revenue from his cut of the kickbacks, that people most filmnoirs takes on the big city, hell maybe the Naked City, bad guys, the connected guys, the big combo guys, and gets much grief for his efforts.
Let say that this guy, again going against type, the cynical seen it all, done it all, third degree shining lights, knuckle rapper boy with big fists and an off-hand truncheon types down at the precinct nervous about shaking down Aunt Millie for coffee and cakes just in case she is c-o-n-n-e-c-t-e-d that people the real cop houses of this world, was ready to stick his neck out, stick it way out, for not enough dough just, just because, maybe he has been working the case for years, was within an inch, maybe less, of putting the jigsaw puzzle together and making a big name for himself knocking off that big bad combo , and just because maybe the bad guys need taking care of so people in that big city could breathe a little, maybe not have to watch their backs every time they went out that big city door to that big city street and face that big city grift. Let’s say, oh let’s say the guy’s tough fisted do-gooder, knows how to take a punch, a rabbit punch too, still stand up to the dips, and move on. Yah, let’s do that.
Let’s say the bad guys, the big city bad guys were led by a guy named Brown, although everybody knows, everybody who counts knows, that the bad guys, the street bad guys are not some waspy-sounding named guys, some been here since sixteen hundred and something, some uptown swells pinching nickels and dimes down in the gutters, but ethnic types, Kellys, Ricos, Slezaks, and the like, cheap street, maybe down from that just mentioned gutter, growing up types who, well, who scratched and clawed their ways to the top, and who had certain habits, certain, well, unfriendly habits like torture, intimidations, and occasional murder in their resumes to keep the cops, the other low-life, and the average citizen tied- up, tied- up bad. Let say this Brown guy , really Larry La Rosa to give him a real street ethnic name, from big city lower east side, starting out as nothing but a hustler first pool for walking around money, then running numbers for Big Lou (the late Big Lou and you know, or you should know, how he became RIP) to buy his first suits and white shirts, then the girls (taking a little choice piece off the side just to keep them in line, walking daddy in line just to show them who was boss, who they belonged to) and that first big Cadillac, then dope, never touching the stuff himself, alright had the rackets tied-up tight, tight as a man could have a thing tightened up with no loose ends (or just a couple, nothing substantial) because his technique, his beautiful technique, for keeping low-life power, was to break a man (or woman) to his will, one way or another, and if that didn’t work, well, have one of his boys (you know damn well he had his scrambled egged soldiers working cheap looking for their first suits and white shirts) take matters into his own hands. Let say this Brown’s operation was strictly cash, strictly no heavy ledgers, and no traceable bank accounts, and no fingerprints either. Let say this guy is king of the hill and move on.
Let’s say that good cop and that bad guy wind up in a life and death struggle to see who, or what, is going to control the Naked City. Let’s say that a beautiful blonde, an upscale blonde, tired of well-mannered, predictable Mayfair swell guys, looked for some unnamed thrills, some bad guy kicks, although it is not always blondes looking for such thrills, before returning to marry that next door neighbor stockbroker and some adulterous affairs, entered into the picture and that the cop and the bad guy are both staking claims to this beauty. Let’s say this beauty actually likes a little rough stuff from a man, doesn’t mind a few slaps as long as it doesn’t show, and maybe has some other fugitive desires that those Mayfair swells wouldn’t dream of fulfilling but are right up old Brown’s street thug alley. Let’s say fugitive bad guy kicks can only take a girl, a beautiful blonde girl made for symphonies and sonatas, so far and move on
Let’s say that this bad guy is really bad, ready to move might and main to keep his place at the top of the heap, and not afraid to waste half the known world to keep his little secrets secret, including using those previously mentioned little trifecta tricks, torture, intimidation, murder that he has perfected . Let’s suppose that that ethereal blonde, that blonde made for easy castles and downy billows got fed-up with bad guys, with guys who weren’t afraid to slap her around a little once too often just to keep her in line, and cried copper, good copper, or wanted to. Let’s suppose that the source of the bad guy’s secret, an inconvenient ex-wife who got in the way on his way up, turned up after some smooth good cop detective work, not without its own set of false leads. And let’s suppose the bad guy’s world kept getting smaller and smaller, made smaller and smaller by that relentless cop (and some perfume scent he couldn’t get out of his system once that blonde stirred his emotions), small enough for even him to holler uncle.
Then you would have a classic 1950s film noir, grainy black and white in true B-flick glory, like The Big Combo complete with suitable 1950s noir be-bop, slightly beat down, beat around music, by some sainted high white note blower, blowing Gabriel’s horn, suitable gritty feel (wash your hands after watching), and superb framing shots to remember this one. And that blonde, a blonde to disturb your dreams, a blond to disturb a good cop’s and a bad guy’s dreams, walking in some be-fogged night back to Main Street, not alone.
From #Un-Occupied Boston (#Un-Tomemonos Boston)-What Happens When We Do Not Learn The Lessons Of History- The Pre-1848 Socialist Movement-Marxism And The Jacobin Communist Tradition-Part Two -"Blanquism" ("Young Spartacus" March 1976)
Click on the headline to link to the Occupy Boston General Assembly Minutes website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011.
Markin comment:
I will post any updates from that Occupy Boston site if there are any serious discussions of the way forward for the Occupy movement or, more importantly, any analysis of the now atrophied and dysfunctional General Assembly concept. In the meantime I will continue with the “Lessons From History ’’series started in the fall of 2011 with Karl Marx’s The Civil War In France-1871 (The defense of the Paris Commune). Right now this series is focused on the European socialist movement before the Revolutions of 1848.
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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupy Movement And All Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around. Organize the unorganized- Organize the South- Organize Wal-Mart- Defend the right for public and private workers to unionize.
* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dough instead on organizing the unorganized and on other labor-specific causes (good example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio, bad example the Wisconsin gubernatorial recall race in June 2012).
*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! U.S. Hands Off The World!
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed.
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
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Marxism And The Jacobin Communist Tradition-Part Two -"Blanquism" ("Young Spartacus" March 1976)
EDITOR'S NOTE: With this series Young Spartacus makes available for our readers a contribution presented by Joseph Seymour, a Spartacist League Central Committee member, at the mid-January Spartacus Youth League West Coast educational conference held in Berkeley. "Marxism and the Jacobin Communist Tradition," reproduced from the verbal presentation with a minimum of editorial abridgement, seeks to debunk the academic/New Left view of Marxism as a self-contained derivation from Hegelian philosophy by reaffirming the shaping influence of the experiences, programs and world-views of two generations of revolutionary militants who sought to fuse the bourgeois-democratic revolution with an egalitarian collectivist social order. The first part, featured in our February issue, discussed the Great French Revolution and the legacy of its insurrectionary and most radical wing, upheld by the revolutionaries Babeuf and Buonarroti.
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The history of the French revolutionary movement after the overthrow of Napoleon Bonaparte is the history of the polarization of the left opposition to royal absolutism into its bourgeois conservative, revolutionary democratic and communist component of revolutionary democracy, which simultaneously was transformed through proletarianization.
The two key dividing lines were the successful revolution of 1830 and the Lyons silk weavers’ insurrection of 1834.
Now, at the beginning of this period, 1815, the left opposition to the Bourbon Restoration had three main tendencies. First, the liberal bourgeoisie, whose economic policy was laissez faire, whose power base was the very restricted parliament based on a limited franchise, whose political program advocated not democracy but rather an extended franchise and certain rights, and whose main leadership was the wealthy nobleman Lafayette.
Second, there were the Bonapartists, who were mainly centered in the army and whose program was roughly national populism. Until Bonaparte died in 1821, they stood for the restoration of Bonaparte: "Let's kick these foreigners and their lackeys out of France." Revolutionary nationalism. But they were not committed to economic laissez faire; they could make certain populist appeals to peasant economic protectionism, and in that sense were even demagogically to the left of the liberals.
Then there were the revolutionary democrats, who in this period (1815-1820) were almost exclusively limited to the student population of Paris. And the vanguard was a small group of revolutionary democrats who, being illegal, took over a masonic order and named it the Friends of Truth, whose leader was a rather reputable and important figure named Saint Amand Bazard.
These three forces united in their mass on two occasions: the Carbonari Conspiracy of 1821-23, where they were defeated, and the revolution of 1830, where they were in a military sense victorious. But that victory split those component parts asunder.
Carbonari Conspiracy
I will just say a few words about the Carbonari Conspiracy, which was important. First, it had a genuinely mass character, encompassing at its height probably 80,000 activists. In France every revolutionist who was mature, and even some who were not mature, was a member of the Carbonari. It provided the first revolutionary experience for that generation. The 17-year-old Louis Auguste Blanqui had his first revolutionary experience in the Carbonari and his later secret organizations were modeled on the Carbonari—only cells of three and only one person in the three knew anyone in the cell above, so one had a hierarchy which sealed off the leadership from the base.
In 1821, in response to the gains of the liberals in parliament, the Bourbons moved to the right and rewrote the parliamentary laws. The liberal bourgeois opposition in effect said, "Well, we have no choice but to engage in insurrection." They contacted the radical students and the disgruntled Bonapartists and even democrats in the army, organizing a conspiracy whose main strategy was the subversion of the army. The Carbonari Conspiracy, thus, was a democratic mutiny in the army, financed and organized by the liberal bourgeoisie, utilizing the student radicals, each seeking to manipulate and utilize the other.
But the army, in the absence of a general social crisis, was isolated and sufficiently loyal to the regime that the Conspiracy did not work. When someone would say, "Psst, you want to join?," he would get turned in and would be executed. So there was a whole series of executions and abortive mutinies.
The suppression of the Carbonari had a significant effect but, interestingly enough, the various forces involved maintained a kind of good will toward each other. They drifted apart. The liberal bourgeoisie went back to parliamentary game-playing. The student-based revolutionary democrats, however, did something interesting. They decided to do some fundamental rethinking of political doctrine, and they soon discovered an eccentric nobleman named Saint-Simon, who actually died about the time they began reading his works.
Discovery of Saint-Simon
Saint-Simon was not a socialist, he was not associated with the revolutionary movement, but rather he was a technocrat who believed in state economic planning. He inherited the Enlightenment tradition. He said, "Capitalism is obviously irrational, production is obviously ungoverned, and I can think of fourteen different ways to improve the economy, but there has to be some kind of centralization."
So Saint Amand Hazard and his circle for a couple of years read this material and came out as the first socialist organization with a revolutionary democratic tradition. They were not an odd sect; they actually had experience in revolutionary politics and a real sense for political power.
Saint-Simonism, therefore, was the first politically significant socialist tendency, although Owenism in Britain, by a very different process, was also achieving a semi-mass character. Saint-Simonism also spread through Germany—one of Marx's high-school teachers was a Saint-Simonian socialist—and was the first basic socialist doctrine to penetrate the continent.
While one tends to think of early socialist movements as being very primitive, in fact Saint-Simonism was the most technocratic of any socialist doctrine, not the most primitive. And it reflected the close organic ties between the radical democrats-cum-socialists and the liberal bourgeoisie, which at that time was very alienated from the state apparatus held by the Bourbons, who believed that they were living in the seventeenth century. So, certain elements of bourgeois technocratic socialism tended to penetrate these circles and became quite faddish. Only in a later period, with mass agitation, were the traditions of Jacobin communism rediscovered.
Revolution of 1830
Now, the next time the left opposition to the Bourbon regime unified for insurrectionary action they were successful ... much to their surprise. In the limited parliament, despite the various laws, the liberals were still gaining and finally won a majority. Then the king decided to pull a coup
d’état and declared, "We are dissolving parliament, and we are having total censorship of the press."
Some journalists, among them Louis Auguste Blanqui, although he was not a leader, said, "We refuse.' We protest.'" Some of them were arrested, and the cops knocked on the doors.
It was the spark that was needed to set off the Parisian masses. Among them were all these Bonapartist army officers, who were much better than the French army of the day, which had been purged to make it impossible for France to conquer the other countries anymore. After three days of street fighting, the French army was defeated, decisively driven out of Paris.
Now this should have been, as the radicals and the Saint-Simonians ex-pected the beginning of the second French Revolution. Hazard, the leader of the Saint-Simonians, went to his old friend Lafayette. As the historic leader of the liberal opposition Lafayette was now head of the de facto state power, the so-called National Guard, which was the military arm of the bourgeoisie in Paris. And he said, "Look Lafayette, this is my program, it's a communist program. You be a communist dictator, and we'll support you." And Lafayette stared at him.
Then the liberal pretender—the king's cousin—visited Lafayette along with a banker named Lafitte; Lafayette says, “I am a republican"; the liberal pretender exclaims, "So am I"; and the banker says, "Look, you don't want a lot of trouble." So Lafayette says, "Okay," and they went out—there's a famous kiss of reconciliation in front of the masses of -Paris. When the republicans cried "Betrayal!," they were beaten up and suppressed.
So the French Revolution simply led from an attempted absolutist monarchy to a somewhat more liberal one, although becoming increasingly repressive, in which the Parisian masses and particularly the left—the left wing of the left wing being Saint-Simonian socialists—rightly felt themselves betrayed. It took approximately five years for the new regime to consolidate itself, and the period between the revolution of 1830 and the great repression of 1835 was a continued series of attempts, some of them having a mass character, to carry the revolution of 1830 to a successful conclusion.
The first phase of the struggle, spearheaded by the organization called the Society of the Friends of the People, was simply leftist insurrections in Paris. They felt that the masses would never accept this king, and every couple of months they would rally the students, whatever artisans they could collect, and some disgruntled soldiers and simply attack the state. Blanqui was the vice president of the Society of the Friends of the People and was arrested for student agitation. This is for the SYL: in case anybody puts down agitating on campus, you can point to Blanqui, who never thought that agitating on campus was beneath his dignity.
Buonarroti and the Continuity of Revolutionary Jacobinism
Now, by 1832 the revolutionary democrats had gotten a little bloodied, and they formed another organization with a somewhat longer range and propagandistic purpose, called the Society of the Rights of Man. This was the first mass democratic organization in which revolutionary communists were a serious contender for factional power and the first revolutionary organization which intersected and in a certain sense led the mass organizations of the pre-industrial proletariat.
During 1832-34 in the Society of the Rights of Man there were two factions. The orthodox Jacobin faction republished Robespierre's writings, Robespierre's "Rights of Man," and could be called revolutionary bourgeois democrats anticipating social democracy. And the other faction, the outright Jacobin communist faction organized by Buonarroti, also claimed the same historic tradition. The 1833 program of the agents of Buonarroti within the Society of the Rights of Man declared:
"All property, movable or immovable, contained within the national territory, or anywhere possessed by its citizens, belongs to the people, who alone can regulate its distribution. Labor is a debt which every healthy citizen owes to society, idleness ought to be branded as a robbery and as a perpetual source of immorality."
[—Louis Blanc, History of Ten Years, 1830-1840}
And it was through the Society of the Rights of Man that Buonarroti in the last four or five years of his life was able to intersect a new revolutionary • generation and win them to the traditions of Jacobin communism.
Class Battles at Lyons
Now, after 1832, the scene of the major revolutionary battles in France shifts to the provincial industrial city of Lyons, which was the main concentration of the pre-industrial French working class concentrated in the silk industry, which was producing for the world market. In 1831, as a result of a wage struggle, they had a demonstration, the bourgeois National Guard attacked them, and they attacked back. The army vacillated, because after the revolution of 1830 the army was a little wary of going against the people—they had gone against it and lost. The weavers took over the city, but they had no ulterior political motives. They said, "Here, we don't want the city, you can have it back." So then, of course, the army came in and smashed them.
The silk weavers, however, were organized in a pre-industrial union known as the Mutualists. At the same time there were these burgeoning bourgeois-democratic-cum-communist propaganda groups in Lyons which sought to intersect the Mutualists. The leadership of the first unions were not socialists or revolutionary democrats but rather traditionalists heavily influenced by the clergy. It was only through a long period of struggle that the revolutionary democrats and the communists among them were able to penetrate the organizations of the pre-industrial working class and to win the masses.
The relationship between the Society of the Rights of Man and the silkweavers1 union has been described by Louis Blanc, the leading socialist historian writing in the 1840's in his History of Ten Years:
"We have said that a considerable number of Mutualists had entered the Society [the Society of the Rights of M an] but they had done so as individuals, for as the Mutualists societies considered collectively and in its tendency, it is certain that in the period in question, it was governed by a narrow corporate spirit. Above all, it was bent on preserving its industrial physiognomy, its originality, and all that constituted for it a situation apart amongst the working classes. No doubt, there were amongst it men exalted above their feelings. But these men did not constitute the majority, all whose interests might be summed up in increased wages for silk weavers. The influence of the clergy, moreover, over the class of silk weavers in Lyons has always been rather considerable. Now the following was the spirit in which was exercised this influence, of which women were the inconspicuous but efficient agents. The clergy, beholding in the manufacturers but liberals and skeptics, had felt no inclination to damp a disposition to revolt which animated the workmen against them. But at the same time it urged the latter to distrust the republican party but taking advantage of its sympathies. Now this was in fact precisely the conduct towards the Society by the leaders of Mutualism; for while they suffered themselves to be charged with republicanism, and availed themselves against the manufacturers in the popular diatribes of the Glaneusse [the republican press] they spared nothing to deaden the republican propaganda in the lodges."
Communist Ideology and Proletarian Struggles
The famous dictum of Lenin [in What Is To Be Done?] that socialist ideology must be brought to the proletariat from without is not a programmatic statement. It is not even a theoretical statement. It is an indisputable historical fact.
The communist movement has a prehistory, and the mass economic organizations of the proletariat have different prehistories. The communist movement arose out of the left wing of the bourgeois-democratic movement and, in its earliest phases, its mass base was essentially the young intellectuals concentrated among students. The mass economic organizations of the working class go back to the earliest mercantilist period, and their earliest natural leaders tended to be the clergy. The communist movement" arising out of the democratic movement and the trade unions emerging out of the artisan guilds intersect, and the workers movement is shaped by that intersection. But at every point there is a deep ideological struggle between the revolutionary democrats or socialists and the Catholic priests in France, or the Russian Orthodox priests in Russia, or the Methodists in England.
As a result of their experiences the leaders of the Mutualists, who were traditionalists and monarchists, appealed to the king and sought reforms, but at every point they were thwarted. Then in 1834 the Orleans monarchy attempted to totally suppress the left opposition, mainly the political opposition, with the so-called Law of Associations, which banned all associations. While these laws were mainly directed at political associations, they also affected the economic organizations of the workers.
So the Lyons silk weavers said, "You attempt to ban our organizations and we will fight." And they fought. There was a mass meeting, jointly called by the Society of the Rights of Man and the silk weavers' union and appealing to
other workers organizations in Lyons; they called a mass demonstration in April, 1834. When the army attempted to suppress the demonstration, the greatest revolutionary violence in France between the revolution of 1830 and those of 1848 occurred in Lyons-six days of fighting, in which hundreds, mainly silk weavers, were killed.
The leaders were repressed in a so-called "Monster Trial," in which both the political left opposition, including virtually all the leaders of the Society of the Rights of Man, and the leaders of the silk weavers were charged with conspiracy and insurrection and were imprisoned. After 1834 Lyons was a Red City for three decades; every communist tendency, Buonarroti, Blanqui, Cabet, had an organic base among the silk weavers in Lyons—until the industry essentially disintegrated in the 1860's. But it didn't begin that way.
Blanqui-Insurrectionary Communism
Blanquism as an identifiable doctrine is a product of the suppression of open insurrectionary activity culminating in the so-called "Monster Trial" of 1835. Blanqui had been a revolutionary activist since the age of 17. He had fought in all the street battles and had been decorated for his role in the revolution of 1830 by the new king. Until 1833-34, however, he was simply one of the boys, in no sense distinguishable, except by his personal courage, from three or four dozen other revolutionary democrats.
In prison between 1832 and 1834 he became a communist, but without particular doctrinal sophistication. He always pooh-poohed attempts to describe the nature of communist society. In prison he developed not the goal of communism, which as I said always had a very general characteristic, but strategic conceptions which were so radically different than those of his contemporaries that they constituted a new and distinct political tendency.
Blanqui asked himself two questions. First, why have all of the insurrections since 1830 failed? And second, why did the revolution of 1830, which succeeded in a military sense, also fail, bringing into power a regime which was at best only quantitatively less reactionary than the regime the masses had replaced?
Blanqui rejected the French revolutionary model which had inspired
Buonarroti: you begin with a bloc with the liberals or even the constitutional monarchists, and then you have the gradual radicalization of the revolution. Historical experience had proven impossible the replication of the experience of the French revolution, that is, the gradual radicalization beginning with a broad unity of all the opponents of the existing regime and then narrowing it down.
Instead, Blanqui insisted that communists must overthrow the government and directly rule. So he created what was in fact a secret army: the army was secret from the authorities, and the leadership of the army was secret from the ranks. He organized secret societies, such as the Society of Families and later, in the late 1830's, the Society of the Seasons.
In order to enter one of these societies, you were asked questions and you had to give the right answers, the revolutionary catechism. This is the catechism of the Society of the Families, 1836:
"What is the people? The people is the mass of citizens who work. What is the fate of the proletariat under the government of the rich? Its fate is the same as that of the serf and the Negro. It is clearly a long tale of hardship, fatigue and suffering. Must one make a political or social revolution? One must make a social revolution."
[—Samuel H. Bernstein, Blanqui and the Art of Insurrection]
You answer those three things correctly, and three years later you'll be fighting it out with the army in the streets of Paris.
The Society of the Seasons was not only a French organization; it had a German appendage, which for the history of Marxism is important. There was a large German population in Paris in the 1830's, heavily artisan. In Paris there was the so-called German Republican Party which contained all of the democrats. A man named Theodore Schuster, who by some curious coincidence was a friend of Buonarroti, formed a faction in the German Republican Party, split the party and from that split arose an organization called the League of the Just. When Buonarroti died in 1837, Blanqui inherited his constituency and formed a military bloc with the League of the Just, at that time a handful of communist intellectuals and a base of German artisans.
So, one nice spring day in 1839, a thousand Frenchmen and Germans, largely artisan, met for their routine military exercise in downtown Paris. But this time Blanqui and his lieutenant Barbes walked up and said, "Gentlemen, we are your leadership, and this is it!" They broke into a gunsmith shop, and for the next couple of days they were fighting a very surprised French army.
How did Blanqui recruit this relatively large number of people willing to just walk into the streets of Paris and start shooting? In a certain sense, he didn't. Blanqui rallied the militant wing of the broader revolutionary democratic opposition, which in general tended to be of the plebeian social background. At his trial Blanqui was the only one who was a bourgeois. Everyone else, there were 30 some odd, were all either artisans or shopkeepers. They had nothing to lose.
This indicates an essential aspect of Blanquism which in a certain sense is the key to this talk. Blanquism was the intersection of two currents. On one hand, Blanquism represented the extreme militarist wing of the bourgeois-democratic revolution whose tactics, concepts and whose method of recruitment were conditioned by the existence of a broader bourgeois-democratic movement. On the other hand it also represented the nascent collectivist instincts and impulse of the plebeian and particularly urban artisan masses. If one liquidates that dialectical tension, one cannot understand Blanquism. And if one fails to understand Blanquism, then one cannot comprehend this entire period.
To be sure, the Blanqui/Barbes uprising of 1839 was a pure putsch. But Blanqui remained tied to the bourgeois-democratic revolution; he proposed a revolutionary provisional government which contained himself and his lieutenants, but also one of the leading democratic oppositionists who knew nothing about the putsch. He said, "This is the government, we take power, you're the president." Blanqui assumed that if he overthrew the state, then the more cautious, conservative bourgeois democrats would go along with him, and, moreover, would also be easily won to communism.
In a certain sense Blanqui was right. The king really wanted to execute Barbes, the Blanquist leader who was captured first; it was only fear of a mass insurrection and mass violence if Barbes and Blanqui were executed that prevented it. So that even though this was a pure putsch, it was profoundly popular, and the execution of these two revolutionaries would have been not only in the mass unpopular but also not in the interest of the liberal bourgeoisie: the Blanquists had the protection of the bourgeois democrats on the grounds that the revolutionary communists can be used, as in 1830. One is not talking about the Weather-
men. - One is talking about an insurrectionary act under conditions of severe repression.
Blanqui spent the 1840's in jail. Blanquism as an organized phenomenon disappeared. If you knew the right Paris cafes in the 1840's, you could walk in and somebody would come up to you, start talking, ask for money to buy guns and say, "Well, do you want to come to a meeting?" Dispersed revolutionary activity.
Marx had great respect for Blanqui. He certainly is the only figure in the 19th century who stands comparable to Marx. He was, however, critical and in some ways contemptuous of Blanqui's conceptions of organization.
In the early 1850's Marx wrote a scathing attack on the typical Parisian revolutionary conspirator in the form of a book review ["Review of A. Chenu's 'Les Conspirateurs'," in Saul K. Pad-over, Marx on Revolution]. And Marx said, "Oh, you're a bunch of Bohemians, declassed intellectuals, declassed proletarians, easily penetrated by the cops, tending to lead a dissolute life-style." Marx was very prudish, a very straight guy.
What distinguished Marx was his insistence that the communists must be tied to the workers—not simply the exceptional workers who were prepared to become professional revolutionaries —the mass of the workers through their established organizations. So that's the negative aspect of Blanquism which quite early on Marx rejected. But in the only two revolutionary situations in which Marx was involved during his lifetime—the Revolution of 1848 and the Paris Commune—Marx and Blanqui were forced together, and Marx on both occasions had to break with right-wing allies.
So, whatever his failing Blanqui insisted, again and again, on certain fundamental truths: namely, that one cannot build communism simply through cooperative bootstrap operations, which were very popular in that period; that you cannot establish communism unless the communists wield state power; and that the bourgeoisie is not going to establish a stable parliamentary democracy in which the communists could establish their constituency and by that means take over the government.
Engels, in a much later critique of the Blanquists, observed that Blanqui was a man of the pre-1848 period. But in some ways he was also a man of the post-1914 period—Blanqui above all grasped the centrality of the revolutionary overthrow of the state.
Markin comment:
I will post any updates from that Occupy Boston site if there are any serious discussions of the way forward for the Occupy movement or, more importantly, any analysis of the now atrophied and dysfunctional General Assembly concept. In the meantime I will continue with the “Lessons From History ’’series started in the fall of 2011 with Karl Marx’s The Civil War In France-1871 (The defense of the Paris Commune). Right now this series is focused on the European socialist movement before the Revolutions of 1848.
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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupy Movement And All Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around. Organize the unorganized- Organize the South- Organize Wal-Mart- Defend the right for public and private workers to unionize.
* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dough instead on organizing the unorganized and on other labor-specific causes (good example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio, bad example the Wisconsin gubernatorial recall race in June 2012).
*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! U.S. Hands Off The World!
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed.
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
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Marxism And The Jacobin Communist Tradition-Part Two -"Blanquism" ("Young Spartacus" March 1976)
EDITOR'S NOTE: With this series Young Spartacus makes available for our readers a contribution presented by Joseph Seymour, a Spartacist League Central Committee member, at the mid-January Spartacus Youth League West Coast educational conference held in Berkeley. "Marxism and the Jacobin Communist Tradition," reproduced from the verbal presentation with a minimum of editorial abridgement, seeks to debunk the academic/New Left view of Marxism as a self-contained derivation from Hegelian philosophy by reaffirming the shaping influence of the experiences, programs and world-views of two generations of revolutionary militants who sought to fuse the bourgeois-democratic revolution with an egalitarian collectivist social order. The first part, featured in our February issue, discussed the Great French Revolution and the legacy of its insurrectionary and most radical wing, upheld by the revolutionaries Babeuf and Buonarroti.
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The history of the French revolutionary movement after the overthrow of Napoleon Bonaparte is the history of the polarization of the left opposition to royal absolutism into its bourgeois conservative, revolutionary democratic and communist component of revolutionary democracy, which simultaneously was transformed through proletarianization.
The two key dividing lines were the successful revolution of 1830 and the Lyons silk weavers’ insurrection of 1834.
Now, at the beginning of this period, 1815, the left opposition to the Bourbon Restoration had three main tendencies. First, the liberal bourgeoisie, whose economic policy was laissez faire, whose power base was the very restricted parliament based on a limited franchise, whose political program advocated not democracy but rather an extended franchise and certain rights, and whose main leadership was the wealthy nobleman Lafayette.
Second, there were the Bonapartists, who were mainly centered in the army and whose program was roughly national populism. Until Bonaparte died in 1821, they stood for the restoration of Bonaparte: "Let's kick these foreigners and their lackeys out of France." Revolutionary nationalism. But they were not committed to economic laissez faire; they could make certain populist appeals to peasant economic protectionism, and in that sense were even demagogically to the left of the liberals.
Then there were the revolutionary democrats, who in this period (1815-1820) were almost exclusively limited to the student population of Paris. And the vanguard was a small group of revolutionary democrats who, being illegal, took over a masonic order and named it the Friends of Truth, whose leader was a rather reputable and important figure named Saint Amand Bazard.
These three forces united in their mass on two occasions: the Carbonari Conspiracy of 1821-23, where they were defeated, and the revolution of 1830, where they were in a military sense victorious. But that victory split those component parts asunder.
Carbonari Conspiracy
I will just say a few words about the Carbonari Conspiracy, which was important. First, it had a genuinely mass character, encompassing at its height probably 80,000 activists. In France every revolutionist who was mature, and even some who were not mature, was a member of the Carbonari. It provided the first revolutionary experience for that generation. The 17-year-old Louis Auguste Blanqui had his first revolutionary experience in the Carbonari and his later secret organizations were modeled on the Carbonari—only cells of three and only one person in the three knew anyone in the cell above, so one had a hierarchy which sealed off the leadership from the base.
In 1821, in response to the gains of the liberals in parliament, the Bourbons moved to the right and rewrote the parliamentary laws. The liberal bourgeois opposition in effect said, "Well, we have no choice but to engage in insurrection." They contacted the radical students and the disgruntled Bonapartists and even democrats in the army, organizing a conspiracy whose main strategy was the subversion of the army. The Carbonari Conspiracy, thus, was a democratic mutiny in the army, financed and organized by the liberal bourgeoisie, utilizing the student radicals, each seeking to manipulate and utilize the other.
But the army, in the absence of a general social crisis, was isolated and sufficiently loyal to the regime that the Conspiracy did not work. When someone would say, "Psst, you want to join?," he would get turned in and would be executed. So there was a whole series of executions and abortive mutinies.
The suppression of the Carbonari had a significant effect but, interestingly enough, the various forces involved maintained a kind of good will toward each other. They drifted apart. The liberal bourgeoisie went back to parliamentary game-playing. The student-based revolutionary democrats, however, did something interesting. They decided to do some fundamental rethinking of political doctrine, and they soon discovered an eccentric nobleman named Saint-Simon, who actually died about the time they began reading his works.
Discovery of Saint-Simon
Saint-Simon was not a socialist, he was not associated with the revolutionary movement, but rather he was a technocrat who believed in state economic planning. He inherited the Enlightenment tradition. He said, "Capitalism is obviously irrational, production is obviously ungoverned, and I can think of fourteen different ways to improve the economy, but there has to be some kind of centralization."
So Saint Amand Hazard and his circle for a couple of years read this material and came out as the first socialist organization with a revolutionary democratic tradition. They were not an odd sect; they actually had experience in revolutionary politics and a real sense for political power.
Saint-Simonism, therefore, was the first politically significant socialist tendency, although Owenism in Britain, by a very different process, was also achieving a semi-mass character. Saint-Simonism also spread through Germany—one of Marx's high-school teachers was a Saint-Simonian socialist—and was the first basic socialist doctrine to penetrate the continent.
While one tends to think of early socialist movements as being very primitive, in fact Saint-Simonism was the most technocratic of any socialist doctrine, not the most primitive. And it reflected the close organic ties between the radical democrats-cum-socialists and the liberal bourgeoisie, which at that time was very alienated from the state apparatus held by the Bourbons, who believed that they were living in the seventeenth century. So, certain elements of bourgeois technocratic socialism tended to penetrate these circles and became quite faddish. Only in a later period, with mass agitation, were the traditions of Jacobin communism rediscovered.
Revolution of 1830
Now, the next time the left opposition to the Bourbon regime unified for insurrectionary action they were successful ... much to their surprise. In the limited parliament, despite the various laws, the liberals were still gaining and finally won a majority. Then the king decided to pull a coup
d’état and declared, "We are dissolving parliament, and we are having total censorship of the press."
Some journalists, among them Louis Auguste Blanqui, although he was not a leader, said, "We refuse.' We protest.'" Some of them were arrested, and the cops knocked on the doors.
It was the spark that was needed to set off the Parisian masses. Among them were all these Bonapartist army officers, who were much better than the French army of the day, which had been purged to make it impossible for France to conquer the other countries anymore. After three days of street fighting, the French army was defeated, decisively driven out of Paris.
Now this should have been, as the radicals and the Saint-Simonians ex-pected the beginning of the second French Revolution. Hazard, the leader of the Saint-Simonians, went to his old friend Lafayette. As the historic leader of the liberal opposition Lafayette was now head of the de facto state power, the so-called National Guard, which was the military arm of the bourgeoisie in Paris. And he said, "Look Lafayette, this is my program, it's a communist program. You be a communist dictator, and we'll support you." And Lafayette stared at him.
Then the liberal pretender—the king's cousin—visited Lafayette along with a banker named Lafitte; Lafayette says, “I am a republican"; the liberal pretender exclaims, "So am I"; and the banker says, "Look, you don't want a lot of trouble." So Lafayette says, "Okay," and they went out—there's a famous kiss of reconciliation in front of the masses of -Paris. When the republicans cried "Betrayal!," they were beaten up and suppressed.
So the French Revolution simply led from an attempted absolutist monarchy to a somewhat more liberal one, although becoming increasingly repressive, in which the Parisian masses and particularly the left—the left wing of the left wing being Saint-Simonian socialists—rightly felt themselves betrayed. It took approximately five years for the new regime to consolidate itself, and the period between the revolution of 1830 and the great repression of 1835 was a continued series of attempts, some of them having a mass character, to carry the revolution of 1830 to a successful conclusion.
The first phase of the struggle, spearheaded by the organization called the Society of the Friends of the People, was simply leftist insurrections in Paris. They felt that the masses would never accept this king, and every couple of months they would rally the students, whatever artisans they could collect, and some disgruntled soldiers and simply attack the state. Blanqui was the vice president of the Society of the Friends of the People and was arrested for student agitation. This is for the SYL: in case anybody puts down agitating on campus, you can point to Blanqui, who never thought that agitating on campus was beneath his dignity.
Buonarroti and the Continuity of Revolutionary Jacobinism
Now, by 1832 the revolutionary democrats had gotten a little bloodied, and they formed another organization with a somewhat longer range and propagandistic purpose, called the Society of the Rights of Man. This was the first mass democratic organization in which revolutionary communists were a serious contender for factional power and the first revolutionary organization which intersected and in a certain sense led the mass organizations of the pre-industrial proletariat.
During 1832-34 in the Society of the Rights of Man there were two factions. The orthodox Jacobin faction republished Robespierre's writings, Robespierre's "Rights of Man," and could be called revolutionary bourgeois democrats anticipating social democracy. And the other faction, the outright Jacobin communist faction organized by Buonarroti, also claimed the same historic tradition. The 1833 program of the agents of Buonarroti within the Society of the Rights of Man declared:
"All property, movable or immovable, contained within the national territory, or anywhere possessed by its citizens, belongs to the people, who alone can regulate its distribution. Labor is a debt which every healthy citizen owes to society, idleness ought to be branded as a robbery and as a perpetual source of immorality."
[—Louis Blanc, History of Ten Years, 1830-1840}
And it was through the Society of the Rights of Man that Buonarroti in the last four or five years of his life was able to intersect a new revolutionary • generation and win them to the traditions of Jacobin communism.
Class Battles at Lyons
Now, after 1832, the scene of the major revolutionary battles in France shifts to the provincial industrial city of Lyons, which was the main concentration of the pre-industrial French working class concentrated in the silk industry, which was producing for the world market. In 1831, as a result of a wage struggle, they had a demonstration, the bourgeois National Guard attacked them, and they attacked back. The army vacillated, because after the revolution of 1830 the army was a little wary of going against the people—they had gone against it and lost. The weavers took over the city, but they had no ulterior political motives. They said, "Here, we don't want the city, you can have it back." So then, of course, the army came in and smashed them.
The silk weavers, however, were organized in a pre-industrial union known as the Mutualists. At the same time there were these burgeoning bourgeois-democratic-cum-communist propaganda groups in Lyons which sought to intersect the Mutualists. The leadership of the first unions were not socialists or revolutionary democrats but rather traditionalists heavily influenced by the clergy. It was only through a long period of struggle that the revolutionary democrats and the communists among them were able to penetrate the organizations of the pre-industrial working class and to win the masses.
The relationship between the Society of the Rights of Man and the silkweavers1 union has been described by Louis Blanc, the leading socialist historian writing in the 1840's in his History of Ten Years:
"We have said that a considerable number of Mutualists had entered the Society [the Society of the Rights of M an] but they had done so as individuals, for as the Mutualists societies considered collectively and in its tendency, it is certain that in the period in question, it was governed by a narrow corporate spirit. Above all, it was bent on preserving its industrial physiognomy, its originality, and all that constituted for it a situation apart amongst the working classes. No doubt, there were amongst it men exalted above their feelings. But these men did not constitute the majority, all whose interests might be summed up in increased wages for silk weavers. The influence of the clergy, moreover, over the class of silk weavers in Lyons has always been rather considerable. Now the following was the spirit in which was exercised this influence, of which women were the inconspicuous but efficient agents. The clergy, beholding in the manufacturers but liberals and skeptics, had felt no inclination to damp a disposition to revolt which animated the workmen against them. But at the same time it urged the latter to distrust the republican party but taking advantage of its sympathies. Now this was in fact precisely the conduct towards the Society by the leaders of Mutualism; for while they suffered themselves to be charged with republicanism, and availed themselves against the manufacturers in the popular diatribes of the Glaneusse [the republican press] they spared nothing to deaden the republican propaganda in the lodges."
Communist Ideology and Proletarian Struggles
The famous dictum of Lenin [in What Is To Be Done?] that socialist ideology must be brought to the proletariat from without is not a programmatic statement. It is not even a theoretical statement. It is an indisputable historical fact.
The communist movement has a prehistory, and the mass economic organizations of the proletariat have different prehistories. The communist movement arose out of the left wing of the bourgeois-democratic movement and, in its earliest phases, its mass base was essentially the young intellectuals concentrated among students. The mass economic organizations of the working class go back to the earliest mercantilist period, and their earliest natural leaders tended to be the clergy. The communist movement" arising out of the democratic movement and the trade unions emerging out of the artisan guilds intersect, and the workers movement is shaped by that intersection. But at every point there is a deep ideological struggle between the revolutionary democrats or socialists and the Catholic priests in France, or the Russian Orthodox priests in Russia, or the Methodists in England.
As a result of their experiences the leaders of the Mutualists, who were traditionalists and monarchists, appealed to the king and sought reforms, but at every point they were thwarted. Then in 1834 the Orleans monarchy attempted to totally suppress the left opposition, mainly the political opposition, with the so-called Law of Associations, which banned all associations. While these laws were mainly directed at political associations, they also affected the economic organizations of the workers.
So the Lyons silk weavers said, "You attempt to ban our organizations and we will fight." And they fought. There was a mass meeting, jointly called by the Society of the Rights of Man and the silk weavers' union and appealing to
other workers organizations in Lyons; they called a mass demonstration in April, 1834. When the army attempted to suppress the demonstration, the greatest revolutionary violence in France between the revolution of 1830 and those of 1848 occurred in Lyons-six days of fighting, in which hundreds, mainly silk weavers, were killed.
The leaders were repressed in a so-called "Monster Trial," in which both the political left opposition, including virtually all the leaders of the Society of the Rights of Man, and the leaders of the silk weavers were charged with conspiracy and insurrection and were imprisoned. After 1834 Lyons was a Red City for three decades; every communist tendency, Buonarroti, Blanqui, Cabet, had an organic base among the silk weavers in Lyons—until the industry essentially disintegrated in the 1860's. But it didn't begin that way.
Blanqui-Insurrectionary Communism
Blanquism as an identifiable doctrine is a product of the suppression of open insurrectionary activity culminating in the so-called "Monster Trial" of 1835. Blanqui had been a revolutionary activist since the age of 17. He had fought in all the street battles and had been decorated for his role in the revolution of 1830 by the new king. Until 1833-34, however, he was simply one of the boys, in no sense distinguishable, except by his personal courage, from three or four dozen other revolutionary democrats.
In prison between 1832 and 1834 he became a communist, but without particular doctrinal sophistication. He always pooh-poohed attempts to describe the nature of communist society. In prison he developed not the goal of communism, which as I said always had a very general characteristic, but strategic conceptions which were so radically different than those of his contemporaries that they constituted a new and distinct political tendency.
Blanqui asked himself two questions. First, why have all of the insurrections since 1830 failed? And second, why did the revolution of 1830, which succeeded in a military sense, also fail, bringing into power a regime which was at best only quantitatively less reactionary than the regime the masses had replaced?
Blanqui rejected the French revolutionary model which had inspired
Buonarroti: you begin with a bloc with the liberals or even the constitutional monarchists, and then you have the gradual radicalization of the revolution. Historical experience had proven impossible the replication of the experience of the French revolution, that is, the gradual radicalization beginning with a broad unity of all the opponents of the existing regime and then narrowing it down.
Instead, Blanqui insisted that communists must overthrow the government and directly rule. So he created what was in fact a secret army: the army was secret from the authorities, and the leadership of the army was secret from the ranks. He organized secret societies, such as the Society of Families and later, in the late 1830's, the Society of the Seasons.
In order to enter one of these societies, you were asked questions and you had to give the right answers, the revolutionary catechism. This is the catechism of the Society of the Families, 1836:
"What is the people? The people is the mass of citizens who work. What is the fate of the proletariat under the government of the rich? Its fate is the same as that of the serf and the Negro. It is clearly a long tale of hardship, fatigue and suffering. Must one make a political or social revolution? One must make a social revolution."
[—Samuel H. Bernstein, Blanqui and the Art of Insurrection]
You answer those three things correctly, and three years later you'll be fighting it out with the army in the streets of Paris.
The Society of the Seasons was not only a French organization; it had a German appendage, which for the history of Marxism is important. There was a large German population in Paris in the 1830's, heavily artisan. In Paris there was the so-called German Republican Party which contained all of the democrats. A man named Theodore Schuster, who by some curious coincidence was a friend of Buonarroti, formed a faction in the German Republican Party, split the party and from that split arose an organization called the League of the Just. When Buonarroti died in 1837, Blanqui inherited his constituency and formed a military bloc with the League of the Just, at that time a handful of communist intellectuals and a base of German artisans.
So, one nice spring day in 1839, a thousand Frenchmen and Germans, largely artisan, met for their routine military exercise in downtown Paris. But this time Blanqui and his lieutenant Barbes walked up and said, "Gentlemen, we are your leadership, and this is it!" They broke into a gunsmith shop, and for the next couple of days they were fighting a very surprised French army.
How did Blanqui recruit this relatively large number of people willing to just walk into the streets of Paris and start shooting? In a certain sense, he didn't. Blanqui rallied the militant wing of the broader revolutionary democratic opposition, which in general tended to be of the plebeian social background. At his trial Blanqui was the only one who was a bourgeois. Everyone else, there were 30 some odd, were all either artisans or shopkeepers. They had nothing to lose.
This indicates an essential aspect of Blanquism which in a certain sense is the key to this talk. Blanquism was the intersection of two currents. On one hand, Blanquism represented the extreme militarist wing of the bourgeois-democratic revolution whose tactics, concepts and whose method of recruitment were conditioned by the existence of a broader bourgeois-democratic movement. On the other hand it also represented the nascent collectivist instincts and impulse of the plebeian and particularly urban artisan masses. If one liquidates that dialectical tension, one cannot understand Blanquism. And if one fails to understand Blanquism, then one cannot comprehend this entire period.
To be sure, the Blanqui/Barbes uprising of 1839 was a pure putsch. But Blanqui remained tied to the bourgeois-democratic revolution; he proposed a revolutionary provisional government which contained himself and his lieutenants, but also one of the leading democratic oppositionists who knew nothing about the putsch. He said, "This is the government, we take power, you're the president." Blanqui assumed that if he overthrew the state, then the more cautious, conservative bourgeois democrats would go along with him, and, moreover, would also be easily won to communism.
In a certain sense Blanqui was right. The king really wanted to execute Barbes, the Blanquist leader who was captured first; it was only fear of a mass insurrection and mass violence if Barbes and Blanqui were executed that prevented it. So that even though this was a pure putsch, it was profoundly popular, and the execution of these two revolutionaries would have been not only in the mass unpopular but also not in the interest of the liberal bourgeoisie: the Blanquists had the protection of the bourgeois democrats on the grounds that the revolutionary communists can be used, as in 1830. One is not talking about the Weather-
men. - One is talking about an insurrectionary act under conditions of severe repression.
Blanqui spent the 1840's in jail. Blanquism as an organized phenomenon disappeared. If you knew the right Paris cafes in the 1840's, you could walk in and somebody would come up to you, start talking, ask for money to buy guns and say, "Well, do you want to come to a meeting?" Dispersed revolutionary activity.
Marx had great respect for Blanqui. He certainly is the only figure in the 19th century who stands comparable to Marx. He was, however, critical and in some ways contemptuous of Blanqui's conceptions of organization.
In the early 1850's Marx wrote a scathing attack on the typical Parisian revolutionary conspirator in the form of a book review ["Review of A. Chenu's 'Les Conspirateurs'," in Saul K. Pad-over, Marx on Revolution]. And Marx said, "Oh, you're a bunch of Bohemians, declassed intellectuals, declassed proletarians, easily penetrated by the cops, tending to lead a dissolute life-style." Marx was very prudish, a very straight guy.
What distinguished Marx was his insistence that the communists must be tied to the workers—not simply the exceptional workers who were prepared to become professional revolutionaries —the mass of the workers through their established organizations. So that's the negative aspect of Blanquism which quite early on Marx rejected. But in the only two revolutionary situations in which Marx was involved during his lifetime—the Revolution of 1848 and the Paris Commune—Marx and Blanqui were forced together, and Marx on both occasions had to break with right-wing allies.
So, whatever his failing Blanqui insisted, again and again, on certain fundamental truths: namely, that one cannot build communism simply through cooperative bootstrap operations, which were very popular in that period; that you cannot establish communism unless the communists wield state power; and that the bourgeoisie is not going to establish a stable parliamentary democracy in which the communists could establish their constituency and by that means take over the government.
Engels, in a much later critique of the Blanquists, observed that Blanqui was a man of the pre-1848 period. But in some ways he was also a man of the post-1914 period—Blanqui above all grasped the centrality of the revolutionary overthrow of the state.
Sunday, November 11, 2012
12 October 2012
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Free Bradley Manning!
U.S. Army private Bradley Manning, currently detained at Fort
Leavenworth, Kansas, awaits a February court martial on nearly two dozen charges
that include “aiding the enemy,” identified as Al Qaeda. The 24-year-old
Manning, who was stationed in Baghdad as an intelligence analyst in 2009-10, was
detained in May 2010 under allegations that he gave WikiLeaks the
much-publicized video of an Apache helicopter gunning down two Reuters
journalists and the Iraqis who tried to rescue them, with the pilots gloating
over the carnage. Manning is also accused of distributing more than 250,000
State Department cables as well as military reports detailing the torture of
Iraqis and documenting the killing of some 120,000 civilians in
imperialist-occupied Iraq and Afghanistan. He faces penalties of up to life in
military custody or even execution.
On July 27, Manning’s attorney David Coombs filed a motion to
dismiss all charges on the grounds of unlawful pretrial punishment. During his
prior nine-month detention at the Quantico Marine brig in Virginia, Manning was
placed in solitary confinement under “prevention of injury” (suicide watch)
status despite repeated protests by brig psychiatrists. He was forced to sleep
with a “tear-proof security blanket” that caused rashes and rug burns while not
protecting him from the cold. Forbidden from exercising in his cell, he was
granted only 20 minutes of sunshine daily, during which he was shackled.
When Manning pointed out the absurdity of the suicide watch
restrictions, he was vindictively forced to repeatedly stand naked at parade
rest in view of multiple guards and suffered other penalties. Finally, in April
2011, he was transferred to Fort Leavenworth, where he is allowed to socialize
with prisoners, walk around unshackled and keep personal and hygiene items in
his cell.
By the time Manning reaches his February trial, he will have spent
983 days in pretrial confinement, awaiting “his day” in a court that has
essentially declared him guilty while banning evidence that may prove his
innocence. In July, the court refused to admit government “damage assessment”
reports that would help him to refute the inflammatory charge that the WikiLeaks
postings aided Al Qaeda. At the same hearing, the court refused to admit United
Nations torture investigator Juan Méndez as a witness, the latest move by
Manning’s persecutors to cover up the fact that his confinement has amounted to
torture.
In a September 26 speech streamed into a UN panel discussion from
the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange described
Manning’s time in captivity, emphasizing that this is part of the U.S.
government’s attempt “to break him, to force him to testify against WikiLeaks
and me.” Assange denounced the White House for “trying to erect a national
regime of secrecy” by targeting whistle-blowers as well as the journalists to
whom they pass information.
Indeed, the Sydney Morning Herald (27 September) reported
that declassified U.S. Air Force documents confirm that the military has
designated Assange and WikiLeaks as “enemies” of the state—the same legal
category as Al Qaeda. The documents reveal that any military personnel who
contact WikiLeaks or its supporters may be charged with “communicating with the
enemy,” which carries a maximum penalty of death. Assange’s U.S. attorney,
Michael Ratner, stressed the danger his client faces: “An enemy is dealt with
under the laws of war, which could include killing, capturing, detaining without
trial, etc.” The Obama administration has brought criminal charges against six
government and military whistle-blowers, more than all the previous presidents
in U.S. history combined.
If Bradley Manning was indeed the source of the leaks, he performed
a valuable service to the working class and the oppressed worldwide by helping
lift the veil of secrecy and lies with which the capitalist rulers try to cover
their depredations. By persecuting Manning and WikiLeaks, the White House is
sending the message that any such exposure will bring the most severe
punishment. This only underscores that it is in the vital interests of the
working class, in the U.S. and internationally, to take up the fight for Bradley
Manning’s freedom.
Let’s Redouble Our Efforts To Free Private Bradley Manning-President Obama Pardon Bradley Manning -Make Every Town Square In America (And The World) A Bradley Manning Square From Boston To Berkeley to Berlin-Join Us In Davis Square, Somerville –The Stand-Out Is Every Wednesday From 4:00-5:00 PM
Click on the headline
to link to the "Private Bradley Manning Petition" website page.
Bradley Manning Support Network-http://www.bradleymanning.org/
Markin comment:
The Private Bradley Manning
case is headed toward a mid- winter trial now scheduled for February 2013. The
recent news on his case has centered on the many (since last April) pre-trial
motions hearings including defense motions to dismiss for lack of speedy trial
(Private Manning’s pre-trial confinement is now entering 900 plus days),
dismissal as a matter of freedom of speech and alleged national security issues
(issues for us to know what the hell the government is doing either in front of
us, or behind our backs) and dismissal based on serious allegations of
torturous behavior by the military authorities extending far up the chain of
command while Private Manning was detained at the Quantico Marine brig for
about a year ending in April 2011. The latest news from the November 2012
pre-trail sessions is the offer by the defense to plead guilty to lesser
charges (wrongful, unauthorized use of the Internet, etc.) in orderto clear the
deck and have the major (with a possibility of a life sentence) espionage
/aiding the enemy issue solely before the court-martial judge (a single military
judge, the one who has been hearing the pre-trial motions, not a lifer-stacked panel).
Those of us who support his
cause should thus redouble our efforts to secure Private Manning’s freedom. The
status of the legal case may change a little over the next period if some form
of negotiated plea on the lesser charges is worked out (although that is right
now only in the preliminary stages and is far from etched in stone and we
believe that he has committed no crime in need of punishment but rather has
done humankind a great service by his alleged actions) however donations to the
legal fund should still be sent and solicited. The petitioning to the Secretary
of the Army for Private Manning release (see link above) should still be
gathering signatures and the telephone/e-mail/letter campaign to the White
House urging recently re-elected President Obama, who has the constitutional
authority to do so, to pardon Private Manning now should continue.
Additionally, for the past
several months there has been a weekly stand-out in Greater Boston across from
the Davis Square Redline MBTA stop (renamed Bradley Manning Square for the
stand-out’s duration) in Somerville on Friday afternoons but we have since July
4, 2012 changed the time and day to 4:00-5:00 PM on Wednesdays. This stand-out
has, to say the least, been very sparsely attended. We need to build it up with
more supporters present. Please join us when you can. Or better yet if you
can’t join us start a Support Bradley Manning weekly stand-out in some location
in your town whether it is in the Boston area, Berkeley or Berlin. And please
sign the petition for his release either in person or through the "Bradley
Manning Support Network". We have placed links to the "Manning Network”
and "Pardon Private Manning Square" website below.
********Bradley Manning Support Network-http://www.bradleymanning.org/
Manning Square website-http://freemanz.com/2012/01/20/somerville_paper_photo-bradmanningsquare/bradleymanningsquare-2011_01_13/
Private Manning
Support Remarks Made By A Speaker At Smedley Butler Brigade Armistice Day
(Veterans Day) Observance In Boston –November 11, 2012
Welcome one and all and I am
glad you could be here for this important struggle. The Smedley Butler Brigade
of Veterans for Peace proudly stands in solidarity with, and defense of,
Private Bradley Manning and his fight for freedom from his jailers, the
American military.
Now usually when I get before
a mic or am on a march I am shouting to high heaven about some injustice.
Recently I was called strident by someone and when it comes to the struggle
against this country’s wars, the struggle for social and economic equality, and
for freedom for our political prisoners I am indeed strident. But I am looking
for something today something personally important to me, and so I will try to
lower my temperature a bit- I want, like you, for recently re-elected President
Obama to pardon Bradley Manning so I will be nice, or try to be.
Bradley Manning is in a sense
the poster person for all of us who have struggled against the wars of the last
decade. He stands charged with allegedly leaking information about American war
crimes and other matters of public concern to Wikileaks. We, and we are not alone on this, do not see
whistleblowing on such activities as a crime but as an elemental humanitarian
act and public service. Private Manning has paid the price for his alleged acts
with over 900 days of pre-trial confinement and is now facing life imprisonment
for simple acts of humanity. For letting the American people know what they
perhaps did not want to know but must know- when soldiers, American soldiers,
go to war some awful things can happen and do. He has also suffered torture at
the hands of the American government for his brave stand. We have become
somewhat inured to foreign national being tortured by the American government
at places like Guantanamo and other black hole locales. We have even become
somewhat inured to American citizens being tortured and killed by the American
government by drones and other methods. But we know, or should know, that when
the American government stands accused of torturing an American soldier for not
toeing the war line then we private citizens are in serious trouble.
Why does Private Manning need
a pardon? Did he give away the order of battle or the table of organization for
American military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan? No. Did he give away the
design for drones and such weapons? No. He allegedly simply blew the whistle on
something that is a hard fact of war- war crimes by American soldiers through
release of the Collateral Murder tape
and what have become known as the Iraq and Afghan War logs. This is what the
American government had tried with might and main to cover up. And what needed
to be exposed. All talk of bringing democracy, or nation- building, or having a
war to end all wars, and the million other lame excuses for war pale before the
hard fact that in the heat of war the real strategy is to kill and burn and let
god sort out the innocent from the guilty.
That is what Private Manning
exposed. I, and I am sure many other veterans from previous wars who saw or
knew of such things and did nothing about it, are glad that such things were
exposed. If for no other reason Private First Class Bradley Manning deserves
presidential pardon for his service. To insure that event we urge everybody to
ramp up their efforts in behalf of Bradley by signing here or online at the
Bradley Manning Support Network site the petition to the Secretary of the Army
for his release and to call/e-mail or write a letter to the White House and
demand that President Obama pardon Private Manning.
We have been holding weekly
stand-outs in Davis Square in Somerville outside the MBTA Red Line stop
Wednesdays from 4:00to 5:00 PM and urge you to join us. Or better yet start a
Free Bradley Manning stand-out in your own town square. Thank you.
From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin-Getting The Bad Guys 1950s Noir Style- Cornel Wilde’s “The Big Combo”
DVD Review
The Big Combo, starring Cornel Wilde, Richard Conte, Jean Wallace, Allied Artists, 1955
Let’s say a clean cut, some would say righteous, detective (played by Cornel Wilde), a public employee detective working for cheap dough but with some kind of white knight thing about honest work, honest cop work, and getting rid of crumb bum criminals fouling up the city streets, not the usual private dick tilting at windmills for cheap dough and maybe a roll with some femme like Phillip Marlowe, who is not subject the vagaries of fearing for his pension or loss of revenue from his cut of the kickbacks that people most film noirs takes on the big city, hell maybe the Naked City, bad guys, the connected guys, the big combo guys, and gets much grief for his efforts. Let’s say the bad guys, the big city bad guys are now led by a guy name Brown (played by Richard Conte), although everybody knows, everybody who counts knows, that the bad guys, the street bad guys are not some waspy sounding named guys, but ethnic types, Kellys, Ricos, Slezaks, and the like, cheap street growing up types who, well, who scratched and clawed their ways to the top, who have certain habits, certain, well, unfriendly habits like torture, intimidations, and occasional murder in their resumes to keep the cops, the other low life, and the average citizen tied- up tied up bad. Let’s say that good cop and that bad guy wind up in a life and death struggle to see who, or what, is going to control the Naked City. Let’s say that a beautiful blonde (played by Jean Wallace), an upscale blonde, tired of well-mannered, predictable Mayfair swell guys, looked for some unnamed thrills, some bad guy kicks, although it is not always blondes looking for such thrills before returning to marry that next door neighbor stockbroker, entered into the picture and that the cop and the bad guy are both staking claims to this beauty. Let’s say that this bad guy is really bad, ready to move might and main to keep his place at the top of the heap, and not afraid to waste half the known world to keep his little secrets, including those previously mentioned little tricks that he has perfected. Let’s suppose that that ethereal blonde got fed-up with bad guys, with guys who aren’t afraid to slap her around a little just to keep her in line, and cried copper, or wanted to. Let’s suppose that the source of the bad guy’s secret turned up after some smooth good cop detective work. And let’s suppose the bad guy’s world kept getting smaller and smaller, small enough for even him to holler uncle. Then you would have a classic 1950s film noir like The Big Combo complete with suitable noir music, suitable gritty feel, and superb black and white still shots to remember this one. And that blonde, a blonde to disturb your dreams, walking back to Main Street, not alone.
Poet's Corner- On Armistice Day Weekend- From World War I- Wilfred Owen's Dulce Est Decorum Est
Poet's Corner- On Armistice Day Weekend- From World War I- Wilfred Owen's Dulce Est Decorum Est
WILFRED OWEN
Dulce et Decorum Est
best known poem of the First World War
(with notes)
DULCE ET DECORUM EST(1)
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares(2) we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest(3) began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots(4)
Of tired, outstripped(5) Five-Nines(6) that dropped behind.
Gas!(7) Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets(8) just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime(9) . . .
Dim, through the misty panes(10) and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering,(11) choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud(12)
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest(13)
To children ardent(14) for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.(15)
Wilfred Owen
8 October 1917 - March, 1918
Notes on Dulce et Decorum Est
1. DULCE ET DECORUM EST - the first words of a Latin saying (taken from an ode by Horace). The words were widely understood and often quoted at the start of the First World War. They mean "It is sweet and right." The full saying ends the poem: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori - it is sweet and right to die for your country. In other words, it is a wonderful and great honour to fight and die for your country.
2. Flares - rockets which were sent up to burn with a brilliant glare to light up men and other targets in the area between the front lines (See illustration, page 118 of Out in the Dark.)
3. Distant rest - a camp away from the front line where exhausted soldiers might rest for a few days, or longer
4. Hoots - the noise made by the shells rushing through the air
5. Outstripped - outpaced, the soldiers have struggled beyond the reach of these shells which are now falling behind them as they struggle away from the scene of battle
6. Five-Nines - 5.9 calibre explosive shells
7. Gas! - poison gas. From the symptoms it would appear to be chlorine or phosgene gas. The filling of the lungs with fluid had the same effects as when a person drowned
8. Helmets - the early name for gas masks
9. Lime - a white chalky substance which can burn live tissue
10. Panes - the glass in the eyepieces of the gas masks
11. Guttering - Owen probably meant flickering out like a candle or gurgling like water draining down a gutter, referring to the sounds in the throat of the choking man, or it might be a sound partly like stuttering and partly like gurgling
12. Cud - normally the regurgitated grass that cows chew usually green and bubbling. Here a similar looking material was issuing from the soldier's mouth
13. High zest - idealistic enthusiasm, keenly believing in the rightness of the idea
14. ardent - keen
15. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori - see note 1 above.
To see the source of Wilfred Owen's ideas about muddy conditions see his letter in Wilfred Owen's First Encounter with the Reality of War.
WILFRED OWEN
Dulce et Decorum Est
best known poem of the First World War
(with notes)
DULCE ET DECORUM EST(1)
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares(2) we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest(3) began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots(4)
Of tired, outstripped(5) Five-Nines(6) that dropped behind.
Gas!(7) Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets(8) just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime(9) . . .
Dim, through the misty panes(10) and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering,(11) choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud(12)
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest(13)
To children ardent(14) for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.(15)
Wilfred Owen
8 October 1917 - March, 1918
Notes on Dulce et Decorum Est
1. DULCE ET DECORUM EST - the first words of a Latin saying (taken from an ode by Horace). The words were widely understood and often quoted at the start of the First World War. They mean "It is sweet and right." The full saying ends the poem: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori - it is sweet and right to die for your country. In other words, it is a wonderful and great honour to fight and die for your country.
2. Flares - rockets which were sent up to burn with a brilliant glare to light up men and other targets in the area between the front lines (See illustration, page 118 of Out in the Dark.)
3. Distant rest - a camp away from the front line where exhausted soldiers might rest for a few days, or longer
4. Hoots - the noise made by the shells rushing through the air
5. Outstripped - outpaced, the soldiers have struggled beyond the reach of these shells which are now falling behind them as they struggle away from the scene of battle
6. Five-Nines - 5.9 calibre explosive shells
7. Gas! - poison gas. From the symptoms it would appear to be chlorine or phosgene gas. The filling of the lungs with fluid had the same effects as when a person drowned
8. Helmets - the early name for gas masks
9. Lime - a white chalky substance which can burn live tissue
10. Panes - the glass in the eyepieces of the gas masks
11. Guttering - Owen probably meant flickering out like a candle or gurgling like water draining down a gutter, referring to the sounds in the throat of the choking man, or it might be a sound partly like stuttering and partly like gurgling
12. Cud - normally the regurgitated grass that cows chew usually green and bubbling. Here a similar looking material was issuing from the soldier's mouth
13. High zest - idealistic enthusiasm, keenly believing in the rightness of the idea
14. ardent - keen
15. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori - see note 1 above.
To see the source of Wilfred Owen's ideas about muddy conditions see his letter in Wilfred Owen's First Encounter with the Reality of War.
Saturday, November 10, 2012
Private Manning Support Remarks Made By A Speaker At Smedley Butler Brigade Armistice Day (Veterans Day) Observance In Boston –November 11, 2012
Welcome one and all and I am
glad you could be here for this important struggle. The Smedley Butler Brigade
of Veterans for Peace proudly stands in solidarity with, and defense of,
Private Bradley Manning and his fight for freedom from his jailers, the
American military.
Now usually when I get before
a mic or am on a march I am shouting to high heaven about some injustice.
Recently I was called strident by someone and when it comes to the struggle
against this country’s wars, the struggle for social and economic equality, and
for freedom for our political prisoners I am indeed strident. But I am looking
for something today something personally important to me, and so I will try to
lower my temperature a bit- I want, like you, for recently re-elected President
Obama to pardon Bradley Manning so I will be nice, or try to be.
Bradley Manning is in a sense
the poster person for all of us who have struggled against the wars of the last
decade. He stands charged with allegedly leaking information about American war
crimes and other matters of public concern to Wikileaks. We, and we are not alone on this, do not see whistleblowing
on such activities as a crime but as an elemental humanitarian act and public
service. Private Manning has paid the price for his alleged acts with over 900
days of pre-trial confinement and is now facing life imprisonment for simple
acts of humanity. For letting the American people know what they perhaps did
not want to know but must know- when soldiers, American soldiers, go to war
some awful things can happen and do. He has also suffered torture at the hands
of the American government for his brave stand. We have become somewhat inured
to foreign national being tortured by the American government at places like
Guantanamo and other black hole locales. We have even become somewhat inured to
American citizens being tortured and killed by the American government by
drones and other methods. But we know, or should know, that when the American
government stands accused of torturing an American soldier for not toeing the
war line then we private citizens are in serious trouble.
Why does Private Manning need
a pardon? Did he give away the order of battle or the table of organization for
American military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan? No. Did he give away the
design for drones and such weapons? No. He allegedly simply blew the whistle on
something that is a hard fact of war- war crimes by American soldiers through
release of the Collateral Murder tape
and what have become known as the Iraq and Afghan War logs. This is what the
American government had tried with might and main to cover up. And what needed
to be exposed. All talk of bringing democracy, or nation- building, or having a
war to end all wars, and the million other lame excuses for war pale before the
hard fact that in the heat of war the real strategy is to kill and burn and let
god sort out the innocent from the guilty.
That is what Private Manning
exposed. I, and I am sure many other veterans from previous wars who saw or
knew of such things and did nothing about it, are glad that such things were
exposed. If for no other reason Private First Class Bradley Manning deserves
presidential pardon for his service. To insure that event we urge everybody to
ramp up their efforts in behalf of Bradley by signing here or online at the
Bradley Manning Support Network site the petition to the Secretary of the Army
for his release and to call/e-mail or write a letter to the White House and
demand that President Obama pardon Private Manning.
We have been holding weekly
stand-outs in Davis Square in Somerville outside the MBTA Red Line stop
Wednesdays from 4:00to 5:00 PM and urge you to join us. Or better yet start a
Free Bradley Manning stand-out in your own town square. Thank you.
Flyer For The Smedley Butler Brigade- Veterans For Peace 2012 Veterans Day/Armistice Day Commemoration –Sunday November 12 in Boston At Noon
President Obama Pardon Private Bradley Manning Now!
Free The Alleged Wikileak Whistleblower Now!
Bradley Manning in his own
words:
"God knows what happens
now. Hopefully worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms...
I want people to see the
truth... because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a
public."
*************
The Smedley Butler Brigade of
Veterans for Peace proudly stands in solidarity with, and defense of, Private
Bradley Manning and his fight for freedom from his jailers, the American
military.
Private Manning is facing a
February 2013 court-martial for allegedly simply blowing the whistle on
something that is a hard fact of war- war crimes by American soldiers through
release of the “Collateral Murder” tape and what have become known as the Iraq
and Afghan War logs.
Private Manning has paid the
price for his alleged acts with almost 900 days of pre-trial confinement,
including allegations of torture during this period, and is now facing life
imprisonment for simple acts of humanity. For letting the American people know
what they perhaps did not want to know but must know- when soldiers, American
soldiers, go to war some awful things can and do happen.
For more information about
the Private Manning case and what you can do to help or to sign the online
petition to the Secretary of the Army for his release contact:
Bradley Manning Support
Network: http://www.bradleymanning.org/ or the Courage To Resist Website:http://www.couragetoresist.org/
Smedley Butler Brigade-
Veterans for Peace Website: http://smedleyvfp.org/ - on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/smedleyvfp -on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/SmedleyVFP#
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Bienvenidos todos y cada uno y estoy contento de poder estar aquà para esta importante lucha. La
Ahora por lo general cuando llegue ante un micrófono o estoy en una marcha que estoy gritando al cielo sobre alguna injusticia. Recientemente fui llamado estridente por alguien y cuando se trata de la lucha contra las guerras de este paÃs, la lucha por la igualdad social y económica, y por la libertad de nuestros presos polÃticos de hecho estoy estridente. Pero estoy buscando algo hoy algo importante para mà personalmente, por lo que voy a tratar de bajar la temperatura un poco-lo que quiero, como tú, para recién reelegido presidente Obama a perdonar a Bradley Manning, asà que será bueno, o tratar ser.
Bradley Manning es en cierto sentido la persona del cartel para todos los que han luchado en contra de las guerras de la última década. Él está acusado de presuntamente haber filtrado información sobre los crÃmenes de guerra estadounidenses y otros asuntos de interés público a Wikileaks. Nosotros, y no estamos solos en esto, no veo la denuncia de irregularidades en actividades tales como un delito, sino como un acto humanitario elemental y servicio público. Soldado Manning ha pagado el precio por sus presuntos actos con más de 900 dÃas de prisión preventiva y se enfrenta ahora a cadena perpetua por simples actos de la humanidad. Para permitir que el pueblo estadounidense sabe lo que tal vez no querÃa saber, pero debe saber que los soldados, los soldados estadounidenses, ir a la guerra algunas cosas terribles pueden suceder y hacer. Él también ha sufrido tortura a manos del gobierno estadounidense por su posición valiente. Nos hemos vuelto un poco habituado a los extranjeros ser torturado por el gobierno estadounidense en lugares como Guantánamo y otros lugares de agujeros negros. Incluso hemos llegado a ser algo habituado a los ciudadanos estadounidenses torturados y asesinados por el gobierno de Estados Unidos por aviones no tripulados y otros métodos. Pero sabemos, o deberÃamos saber, que cuando el gobierno estadounidense es acusado de torturar a un soldado estadounidense por no sigue la lÃnea de guerra luego nosotros, los ciudadanos privados están en serios problemas.
¿Por qué el soldado Manning necesita un indulto? ¿Se regala el orden de batalla o en la tabla de organización de las operaciones militares estadounidenses en Irak y Afganistán? No. ¿Le regalan el diseño de aviones y armas de este tipo? No. Al parecer simplemente sopló el silbato en algo que es un hecho difÃcil de crÃmenes de guerra por la guerra por parte de soldados estadounidenses a través de la liberación de la cinta Asesinato colateral y lo que se conoce como el Iraq y los registros de la guerra afgana. Esto es lo que el gobierno estadounidense habÃa intentado con todas sus fuerzas para cubrir. Y lo que tenÃa que haber estado expuestos. Todos hablan de llevar la democracia, o construcción de la nación, o que tengan una guerra para acabar con todas las guerras, y el millón de excusas poco convincentes para la guerra palidecen ante la dura realidad de que en el fragor de la guerra la verdadera estrategia es matar y quemar y dejar que Dios clasificar a los inocentes de los culpables.
Eso es lo que soldado Manning expuesto. I, y estoy seguro de que muchos veteranos de otras guerras anteriores que veÃan o sabÃan de estas cosas y no hicieron nada al respecto, se alegra de que estas cosas estaban expuestos. Si no por otra razón soldado de primera clase Bradley Manning merece perdón presidencial por su servicio. Para asegurar que el evento instamos a todos a la rampa encima de sus esfuerzos en favor de Bradley firmando aquà o en lÃnea en el sitio de la Red de Apoyo a Bradley Manning la petición al Secretario del Ejército para su puesta en libertad y llamar a / e-mail o escribir una carta a la Casa Blanca y la demanda de que el presidente Obama Manning perdón Privado.
Hemos estado llevando a cabo semanalmente stand-outs en Davis Square en Somerville fuera de los miércoles MBTA rojo de parada de la lÃnea 4:00-17:00 y les insto a unirse a nosotros. O mejor aún iniciar Gratis Bradley Manning stand-out en su propio plaza de la ciudad. Gracias.