New Issue of Black History and the Class Struggle

Workers Vanguard No. 1019	8 March 2013

New Issue of Black History and the Class Struggle

The following article was written by our comrades of Spartacist/South Africa, Section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) as the Introduction to the new issue of Black History and the Class Struggle (No. 23, February 2013). We have not included references to articles contained in the pamphlet.

28 JANUARY—The 16 August 2012 massacre of 34 striking Lonmin platinum miners at Marikana was the worst instance of lethal police violence in response to struggle since the end of white-supremacist apartheid rule in 1994. Carried out under the bourgeois Tripartite Alliance government led by the African National Congress (ANC), this massacre was meant to be a bloody warning to those amongst the oppressed who dare to stand up against their miserable conditions of existence. But the plan backfired as the police slaughter fuelled a wave of wildcat strikes across the industry and beyond, shaking the fragile foundations of neo-apartheid capitalism. The miners, who had been making as little as 4,000 rand per month (US$440), demanded a R12,500 minimum wage. After they won most of that amount for the majority of Lonmin workers, that demand became the battle cry for many other workers who are sick and tired of waiting for the promised better life for all.

The massacre and the strike wave it spurred ripped a huge tear in the fabric of this society. There is wide and deep discontent at the pace of change over the nearly 20 years of rule by the Tripartite Alliance—the ANC, South African Communist Party (SACP) and Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) misleaders, along with the COSATU bureaucracy as a whole, acted as strikebreakers at Lonmin and at other “illegal” strikes, helping spur the growth of the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU). The ferment and political volatility in the mines have not dissipated, as the causes of last year’s strikes centring on starvation wages and terrible conditions of employment remain unresolved. This is likely to be a lightning rod for more struggles ahead.

Like atrocities in the last days of the apartheid era, the Lonmin massacre failed to break the fighting spirit of the striking workers. But militancy on the trade-union level is not capable in and of itself of breaking the overwhelmingly black working class from bourgeois consciousness, which in South Africa is mainly expressed through the politics of nationalism. The rise of powerful trade unions of black workers in the 1980s was a factor in bringing an end to the apartheid regime, but the leadership of the SACP and the emerging COSATU union federation derailed any fight for workers rule by selling the lie that the ANC and its partners are the leaders in the fight for national liberation. A revolutionary leadership is required to break the hold of such deadly illusions among the combative proletariat.

So long as capitalism remains in power, a decent life for the masses can never be won and any gains secured by class struggle remain highly reversible. Nor is there any genuine solution to the masses’ entrenched poverty within the confines of South Africa. Mainly owned by British and U.S. capital, this country’s mining industry—the core of the economy—is subject to the ebbs and flows of the imperialist-dominated world market. Indeed, the economic position of the platinum miners has been undermined by the narrowing of the market for this metal, whose main use is in auto production, due to the ongoing world capitalist contraction. Such facts underscore that the struggle of the working class against capital must be an international struggle reaching into the imperialist centres, which are themselves class-divided and multiracial societies.

Mine capitalists have started this year with a backlash, threatening to lay off tens of thousands of workers. In Carletonville, west of Johannesburg, Harmony Gold locked out its 6,000 mostly migrant workers returning from the holidays, closing hostels and forcing workers to sleep out in the open. Owners are demanding prior assurances that it would be “profitable and safe” to reopen the mine, in other words, workers should commit never to strike again. At Anglo American Platinum (Amplats), miners responded with strike action to the company’s announcement that it would close down four shafts, threatening 14,000 jobs mainly in the Rustenburg area, centre of the platinum industry. The employer was forced to back off from its decision and agree to negotiate with workers’ leaders. This confirms again that class struggle is the only reliable weapon in the hands of the working class. Later it was announced that management decided to delay the implementation of its plan.

The coldblooded murder of workers at Lonmin was the most horrific moment of the 2012 mining wildcat strike movement, which began in late January at Impala Platinum. The massacre showed, in blood, the absurdity of reformist arguments that the ANC/Alliance government is “class contested terrain.” Those like the SACP misleaders and apologists who portray the Alliance as a “people’s government” on the “peaceful road to socialism” are practicing deceit. It is a bourgeois government pledged to maintaining capitalist private property.

This is further shown by the regime’s apartheid-style demolition of houses occupied mainly by black people in predominantly Indian Lenasia, south of Johannesburg, and by the ruthless attacks on recent strikes by farm workers in the Western Cape. Three of those workers have been killed by police and private security guards, and scores of others injured or arrested. Workers have reported police raids in the wee hours of the morning accompanied by beatings and random shootings, injuring women and children in their homes. The “new,” “democratic” South African state is a direct continuity of the old apartheid.

The farm workers ignored authorities’ attempts to play divide-and-rule among coloured [mixed-race, partly Malay-derived], black and immigrant workers. The workers maintained their unity and class integrity in struggle against their common class enemy to ameliorate their slave-like labour conditions. But instead of organising the powerful harbour, transport and other workers in solidarity with the farm workers, COSATU leaders have done everything in their power to stop the strikes. COSATU has historically neglected organising efforts among these isolated and miserably exploited workers, who make as little as R69 per day. To this day, only a small minority belong to unions. The R150-a-day minimum wage the workers have demanded is still far below what they need to survive.

Underlying the farm workers strikes is the burning issue of the land, a question which is at the centre of the dispossession of the non-white majority in this country. The white minority, which forms less than 10 percent of the population, owns more than 70 percent of urban and arable rural land. Most farming is done by large, mechanised and capital-intensive agribusiness employing agricultural proletarians. We are for the expropriation of the large, white-owned farms and for their transformation into collective and state farms under workers rule. Farm workers are going to be central in achieving this goal, which is indissolubly bound up with the socialist revolution to be led by the mainly urban proletariat.

Amid Rising Mass Anger, State Repression Intensifies

The explosive anger at the base of society has triggered an increase in the state’s violent suppression of protest, further helping to peel away the democratic facade of the post-apartheid capitalist state. In January, police minister Nathi Mthethwa announced that 704 people were arrested for “public violence” in December alone. Militants who take part in strikes or township protests demanding electricity, water and other basic services are viciously attacked by police, sometimes with live ammunition, and arrested. We demand the dropping of all charges and the immediate, unconditional freedom of those jailed for protesting against this racist, neo-apartheid capitalist hellhole. An injury to one is an injury to all!

The organised working class must wield its social power on behalf of all the oppressed, particularly the desperate unemployed in the townships. In doing so, it must fight against anti-immigrant attacks, which are often fuelled by petty-bourgeois elements in the townships who see shopkeepers from Somalia, Pakistan or elsewhere as competitors. From the Rustenburg platinum mines to the Western Cape vineyards and orchards, recent strikes have shown a high degree of unity in struggle by South African and immigrant workers. Spartacist/South Africa and the ICL demand: Full citizenship rights for all immigrants!

Recent proposed legislation attacking democratic rights includes the Protection of State Information Bill, which requires prior approval for the publication of material deemed sensitive by the state, and the Traditional Courts Bill. The latter gives traditional leaders, headed by tribal chiefs, unchallenged legal power over 17 million rural black inhabitants, who are balkanised according to tribal background. Chiefs would get enhanced legal authority for making laws, deciding cases and handing down punishment. The burden would be disproportionately felt by women, who are viciously oppressed by backward practices like lobola (bride price) and marriage-by-capture, a form of kidnapping. Under the bill, women would not be allowed to represent themselves but must be represented by their husbands or other male family members. The bill is a rehash of British colonial and later apartheid laws that, in relegating blacks to the bottom of society, designed a separate legal system enshrining the power of traditional leaders.

ANC at Mangaung: The Business of Running Capitalism

At the ANC’s recent Mangaung national elective conference, Jacob Zuma convincingly defeated supporters of his deputy Kgalema Mothlante to retain the ANC presidency. The conference also confirmed the expulsion of the hypocrite populist and former ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema, who is himself a small-time capitalist. Spartacist/South Africa opposes all factions of this party of the class enemy. For the exploited and oppressed masses, whether Zuma or Mothlante won would have changed nothing.

For the first time, prominent COSATU leaders were included in the ANC’s National Executive Committee (NEC), its highest decision-making body between conferences, where they will have to take direct responsibility for the policies of the capitalist government. This is what the COSATU and SACP leaders’ perpetual call to “swell the ranks of the ANC” means. Since becoming president, Zuma has been careful to integrate SACP leaders into his government, in the process succeeding in silencing even their most superficial criticisms. Now he looks set to do the same with COSATU. Zwelinzima Vavi and Irvin Jim, leaders of COSATU and the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) respectively, who both declined nomination to the NEC, use the appearance of distance from the ANC hierarchy to occasionally mouth some criticisms of the government while in practice adhering to the entire programme of class collaboration.

The Mangaung conference also elected trade unionist-turned-billionaire-capitalist Cyril Ramaphosa as Zuma’s second-in-command. While leading the NUM in the 1980s, Ramaphosa became the protégé of the head of the Oppenheimer family, the dominant owner of Anglo American, the country’s leading mining company. He soon became the chief architect of the sellout deal that set the stage for the replacement of the apartheid government by the ANC-led Alliance. Today, among his many business concerns, Ramaphosa is a prominent shareholder at Lonmin. Just 24 hours before the killing of workers at Marikana, he sent e-mails to Lonmin management and police minister Mthethwa describing strike activities as being “plainly dastardly criminal” and calling for “concomitant action” to be taken.

Spartacist/South Africa and the ICL have been unique among leftists internationally for our consistent, principled political opposition to the ANC/SACP/COSATU nationalist popular front. This is in stark contrast to reformists like the Democratic Socialist Movement (DSM), which not only supported the ANC in the 1994 elections but joined this bourgeois party as a so-called Marxist Tendency.

Such fake-left organisations as the DSM, Keep Left! (supporters of the late Tony Cliff) and the Workers International Vanguard Party (formerly League) support the membership of cops and security guards in trade unions. COSATU includes the Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union (POPCRU) as well as cops organised by the SAMWU municipal workers and other unions, and the SACP recruits police into its own organisation. We oppose the inclusion of cops or security guards—the armed protectors of bourgeois rule and profits—in the unions and the broader working-class movement. After witnessing the wanton butchering of his comrades, and himself suffering torture in police custody, one Marikana striker said of the cops that “they are like dogs to me now.... I do not trust them anymore, they are like enemies” (Marikana: A View from the Mountain and a Case to Answer, 2012). The single experience of these workers has taught them more than the reformists have been capable of learning throughout their whole miserable history.

Talk about “democratic control of the police,” “winning over the police” or “raising the consciousness of the police” has nothing to do with revolutionary Marxism and everything to do with reformism. As Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky argued repeatedly, there is no such thing as a class-neutral “democracy”: the capitalist state is an apparatus of repression based on armed bodies of men—principally the army and the police—that protects the interests and property forms of the ruling class. The working class cannot simply lay hold of this state machinery and wield it for its own purposes. The capitalist state must be smashed through socialist revolution and replaced by a workers state.

The DSM intervened in the Rustenburg strikes to channel working-class militancy into bourgeois parliamentary reformist schemes. In December, the DSM announced the launch of the Workers and Socialist Party (WASP). The projected programme of this party is thoroughly reformist. The press release announcing it consists solely of bread-and-butter economic demands with not even a reference to women’s oppression, much less any call for socialist revolution. Instead, they peddle reformist schemes of cleaning up capitalist municipal governments by leading “a campaign for the recall of all incompetent and corrupt councillors to replace them with WASP representatives” (socialistworld.net, 20 December 2012). This programme is not that of the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky, which led the October Revolution of 1917, the only successful workers revolution in history, but of social-democratic gradualism in the spirit of the classic British Labour Party. Thus the DSM’s British comrades claim that “socialism” will be introduced by nationalising industry through the mechanism of an “enabling bill” passed by the bourgeois Parliament.

A recent survey reporting on the deepening rift between the COSATU leaders and the rank and file states that a significant number of shop stewards want COSATU to leave the ANC and form a workers party, also expressing no confidence in the SACP. We encourage and welcome workers’ desire for independence from the bourgeois ANC as the beginning of wisdom. But the key question is what programme such a workers party would be based on. Reformists push a “workers party” as a con game, seeking merely a vehicle to better pressure the capitalist rulers, or even administer the state on their behalf. We strive to forge a party that stands for proletarian class independence from, and opposition to, the bourgeois state and all its political parties and fights for the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Class and Race in South Africa

Some worker militants who have broken from the NUM are calling for “nonpolitical” unions. While this is understandable given the history of betrayals by the NUM leaders allied to the ANC, it is impossible to divorce union struggle from political struggle. This is especially clear in a country like South Africa, where the superexploitation of mainly black labour is the living legacy of apartheid and centuries of colonial oppression.

In a 17 January press conference widely broadcast on TV, AMCU president Joseph Mathunjwa warned against “illegal, unprotected strikes,” insisted that workers must follow prescribed arbitration procedures and called for government intervention to settle disputes at Amplats. This shows clearly that the AMCU leadership does not oppose the established procedures for class collaboration and views the world through the same lens as the rest of the trade-union bureaucrats.

Meanwhile, the class-collaborationist Democratic Left Front, which is tied to imperialist-funded “social movements,” seeks to channel workers’ anger into the dead-end of pressuring the Farlam Commission of Enquiry, which was established by the government to whitewash its crimes at Marikana and to let the outraged public blow off some steam. We reject the double standards of people who claim to support struggling miners while at the same time preaching illusions in the institutions of the government that mowed them down like wild animals.

Trade-union consciousness is completely inadequate for the tasks necessary for the emancipation of the non-white majority. Parallel to starvation wages, there are problems of vulnerable workers employed by labour brokers, poor black communities in urban areas and especially in the rural reserves, and impoverished coloured townships as well. It is crucial that militant workers and youth assimilate the history of the genuine communist movement. Lenin’s Bolshevik Party was a steadfast champion of all struggles against oppression in the tsarist empire, the “prison house of peoples.” The Bolsheviks fought against Great Russian chauvinism and for the liberation of oppressed peoples using the methods of proletarian class struggle.

This Leninist understanding is all the more critical for South Africa, where class exploitation has always been integrally bound up with the national oppression of the non-white masses. In the mid 1930s, Leon Trotsky wrote to his followers in South Africa that in the event of a proletarian revolution there:

“But it is entirely obvious that the predominant majority of the population, liberated from slavish dependence, will put a certain imprint on the state.

“Insofar as a victorious revolution will radically change not only the relation between classes, but also between races, and will assure to the blacks that place in the state which corresponds to their numbers, insofar will social revolution in South Africa also have a national character.”

Our perspective for a black-centred workers government flows from this understanding of the class content of the struggle for the emancipation of the black majority. History shows that the petty-bourgeois and bourgeois nationalist leaders of struggles for national liberation, once in power, become the agents of the same imperialist overlords, oppressing their “own” people. The “national liberation” rulers killed Marikana workers to protect the profits of Lonmin, which is based in London, capital city of the British former colonial masters of South Africa.

To answer the crisis of unemployment, poverty and inequality plaguing this country, which no capitalist regime can solve, we turn to Trotsky’s 1938 Transitional Programme, founding programme of the Fourth International. The programme puts forward transitional demands that provide a bridge from workers’ current struggles and consciousness to the fight for workers power. These include the demand for a sliding scale of wages, which means that collective agreements should assure an automatic rise in wages in relation to the increase in prices of consumer goods. This is a burning issue in South Africa, where, in addition to skyrocketing food and fuel prices, the masses are faced with the Eskom electrical company’s demand for annual 16 percent tariff hikes until the year 2018, as well as the threatened imposition of “e-tolling” on the highways.

To address unemployment, the trade unions should fight for a sliding scale of working hours, i.e., the division of work amongst available labour without the loss of pay. This would help to bind together the working class and the unemployed masses, who in South Africa are maintained mainly by workers who themselves make only starvation wages. The crying need for a massive public works programme—building affordable houses for the millions who need them, hospitals, schools, roads, etc.—would provide the jobs that apologists for the ANC-led regime say are nowhere to be found.

All these demands point to the need for a black-centred workers government that would expropriate the bourgeoisie as a class. With mining and banking dominated by finance capital based in London and New York, the fight for socialist revolution in South Africa is completely bound up with the struggle for workers power in the imperialist centres. Under a revolutionary leadership, workers who see the failure of capitalism to meet even the most basic human wants will be won to the understanding that the bourgeois order and its system of production for profit must be overthrown and replaced with a collectivised economy, where production is based on social need. This is the perspective of Spartacist/South Africa. Those who want to play a role in the emancipation of the workers and toilers should examine the revolutionary programme of the International Communist League.

In Honor of International Women’s Day

Workers Vanguard No. 1019	8 March 2013

TROTSKY

LENIN

In Honor of International Women’s Day

(Quote of the Week)

In a pioneering Marxist study, August Bebel, a founding leader of the German Social Democratic Party, explained that women’s emancipation required their full integration into economic and social life. This will be possible only in a socialist society based on material abundance and scientific technique, as the household tasks of the family are carried out by social institutions and the role of women will no longer be defined primarily as breeders of the next generation.

One factor is of leading importance in the question of population in the future—the higher, freer position which all women will then occupy. Leaving exceptions aside, intelligent and energetic women are not as a rule inclined to give life to a large number of children as “the gift of God,” and to spend the best years of their own lives in pregnancy, or with a child at their breasts. This disinclination for numerous children, which even now is entertained by most women, may—all the solicitude notwithstanding that a Socialist society will bestow upon pregnant women and mothers—be rather strengthened than weakened. In our opinion, there lies in this the great probability that the increase of population will proceed slower than in bourgeois society....

In Socialist society, where alone mankind will be truly free and planted on its natural basis, it will direct its own development knowingly along the line of natural law. In all epochs hitherto, society handled the questions of production and distribution, as well as of the increase of population without the knowledge of the laws that underlie them,—hence, unconsciously. In the new social order, equipped with the knowledge of the laws of its own development, society will proceed consciously and planfully.

SOCIALISM IS SCIENCE, APPLIED WITH FULL UNDERSTANDING TO ALL THE FIELDS OF HUMAN ACTIVITY.

—August Bebel, Woman Under Socialism (1879)

U.S. Health Care and the Elderly: Capitalist Cruelty

Workers Vanguard No. 1019	8 March 2013

Working Families Foot the Bill

U.S. Health Care and the Elderly: Capitalist Cruelty

The squabbling by the Obama administration and Congressional Republicans over how to implement spending cuts—including the recent “sequestration” of funds for everything from the Pentagon to national parks—has dominated headlines. While Social Security and Medicaid were exempted from this round of cuts, there can be no doubt that these programs are in the sights of both the Democrats and Republicans. Barack Obama’s health care “reform” of three years ago slashed Medicare payments by over $700 billion, and in the recent deficit negotiations the president reportedly pushed for further cuts of $400 billion to Medicare and other social programs. Both capitalist parties at bottom agree that the budget ax must fall primarily on society’s most vulnerable: the aged, the poor, the disabled and the chronically ill.

Obama has repeatedly proposed cutting $100 billion from Medicaid—the federal assistance program for the poor—which has become the main source of aid for the long-term care of the elderly and disabled. With encouragement from the White House, both Democratic- and Republican-controlled statehouses have been massively rolling back Medicaid benefits, eliminating coverage for many medical conditions and striking tens of thousands of people from the states’ rolls. To cap spending on long-term care, 26 states—among them New York, California and Illinois—have petitioned Washington for approval to turn millions of Medicaid recipients over to private “managed-care organizations.” Those outfits would be paid a fixed sum for providing a lifetime of (grossly inadequate) care.

These and future cuts in social programs will add enormously to the already crushing burden on families as they try to cope with providing care for aging parents or disabled family members. The Elder Care Study (2010) by the non-profit Families and Work Institute found that during the five years preceding the study, fully 40 percent of the country’s workforce had provided elder care to family members. On average, such care represents the equivalent of a part-time job and typically lasts for over four years. Although family caregivers often perform medical tasks such as administering IVs and injections, caring for wounds and operating dialysis or other specialized equipment, they normally receive no help from anyone except other relatives—no home visits by nurses, medical assistants or other health care professionals.

The percentage of adults providing personal care and/or financial assistance to an aged parent has more than tripled over the past 15 years, reflecting the rapid increase in the country’s elderly population. According to the 2010 census, the number of those 85 years and older increased by 30 percent during the previous decade. Many studies have documented the dramatic toll that the stress and anxiety of caring for aging parents takes on adult children’s health, from higher mortality risks and rates of hospitalization to greater incidence of chronic disease.

Overall, two-thirds of caregivers are women. As they marry and give birth at an increasingly later age, more are becoming part of the “sandwich generation”—adults who are responsible for the care of both young children and elderly parents at the same time. Today, nearly 40 percent of women caring for elderly relatives are still raising children of their own, with many of those women also holding down a full-time job. In this capitalist class society, the enormous costs of providing elder care, which should be borne by society as a whole, fall on individual working-class and poor families and, above all, women.

For Free, Quality Health Care for All!

A 2007 study, Family Caregivers: What They Spend, What They Sacrifice, by hospice provider Evercare estimated that caregivers incurred out-of-pocket expenses averaging over $5,500 per year. Low-income families in particular can scarcely hope to recover from such costs. The study noted: “The lowest income family caregivers have the highest burden of care in terms of both the number of hours they spend helping their family member and in their actual proportion of income spent on care.”

In fully one-third of working families faced with the demands of elder care, one or both parents are forced to reduce the number of hours worked—or to quit working entirely—thus deepening their financial distress. The impact on caregivers leaving the workforce is devastating, as it means not only lost wages but also diminished Social Security benefits for their retirement years. Various studies have estimated the average lifetime financial loss to be from $300,000 to over $650,000. A downward spiral is unfolding: As the current generation of caregivers forego opportunities to save for retirement, they increase the financial burden that they likely will impose one day upon their own children.

The total monetary value of unpaid work that family members perform in caring for the elderly far exceeds the amount that the U.S. spends on home health care and nursing home care. In short, the responsibility for caring for the country’s aging population is overwhelmingly borne by working people. If families are unable to provide that care, then the aged have no choice but to just hurry up and die!

That cruel calculus makes perfect sense in terms of the functioning of the capitalist system. For the owners of banks and industry, government spending on caring for the aged is an unnecessary overhead expense that ultimately lowers the overall profit rate. As Karl Marx explained, profits derive from the exploitation of labor: Workers, who have to sell their labor power to survive, add value to what they produce, but they only get paid a sum that allows them to continue to toil and to raise a new generation of workers. The difference between the value added by the workers and what they actually get paid ends up in the capitalists’ pockets in the form of surplus value. However, the aged and infirm do not labor and therefore do not generate surplus value. In the interest of maximizing profits, the engine that powers the capitalist system, public spending on the aged and disabled should logically be cut to the bone.

Those welfare programs that exist have been achieved as a result of mass social struggles. In 1934, the year before the passage of the Social Security Act, there were three victorious citywide organizing strikes: one led by Communists in San Francisco, the Trotskyist-led Minneapolis Teamsters strikes and a general strike led by left-wing socialists in Toledo. In fact, Social Security and other New Deal programs were part of an effort by the bourgeoisie to head off growing leftist political radicalization and the burgeoning labor struggles in the 1930s. Medicare as well as Medicaid and other “war on poverty” programs were enacted to buy social peace during the turbulent 1960s, a period marked by the civil rights upsurge and the Vietnam antiwar movement.

In the U.S., every president since Ronald Reagan has trimmed spending on Medicare, the federal health insurance program for those aged 65 and older as well as younger people with disabilities. The slashing of the social safety net—given added impetus by the capitalist counterrevolution that destroyed the Soviet Union in 1991-92—has been accompanied by a vicious anti-union offensive. The dearth of strikes in recent decades has helped pave the way for the exploiters to butcher health care, pensions and other union gains with impunity. Free, quality medical care is today a burning need for the mass of the population. The labor movement would galvanize broad support if it were to take up this fight as part of a struggle for jobs and decent pensions for all.

To wage such battles poses the need to oust the pro-capitalist trade-union leaders, who peddle the lie that the workers have interests in common with their exploiters. They must be replaced with new leaders based on a program of class struggle in opposition to the capitalist class enemy and its political parties, the Democrats and Republicans. The two parties play a time-honored game of “hard cop, soft cop” in which the Republicans demand draconian cuts in social programs and the Democrats posture as friends of working people while implementing much the same austerity agenda as the Republicans. The working class needs its own party: a workers party that fights for a workers government, which would expropriate the productive wealth of the capitalist class and build and develop a planned economy.

Discarding Those They Cannot Exploit

The responsibility of caring for the older generation in this country has always fallen primarily on younger family members. In the overwhelmingly rural America of the 18th and early 19th centuries, when extended families tended to live in close proximity and women did not work outside the home, kinship networks were in some ways better equipped than today’s families to handle such care. In addition, elder care then was typically less onerous. Before the development of antibiotics in the mid 20th century, the aged often died precipitately of infectious diseases rather than suffering for extended periods with debilitating or chronic illness as is now common.

Urban and industrial growth increasingly undermined the ability of families to care for the elderly, not least because urban families were smaller than rural ones. Yet even as families were finding it more difficult to cope with elder care, the ruling class had not the slightest intention of taking on that role. Throughout the 19th century, state and local governments maintained some bare-bones assistance (termed “outdoor relief”) for the impoverished in the interest of social stability. As one historian explained, “The poor were seen as a threat to civil order, and those in a position of authority sought an effective way of relieving (and calming) them” (Thomas Streissguth, Welfare and Welfare Reform [2009]).

Except for the favored few who received some financial assistance, the policy for those elderly who had no family to provide support was so-called “indoor relief”: They were simply locked up in poorhouses. These dreadful institutions were direct descendants of the English workhouses that had existed since the 16th century essentially to punish the poor for their lamentable state. Far from seeking to ameliorate the condition of the infirm and disabled, the purpose of institutionalizing them was to isolate them and remove them from view. The American bourgeoisie of the 19th and early 20th centuries subjected the most needy of the elderly population to inhuman, prison-like conditions: overcrowded cells swarming with vermin, noxious air that was often barely breathable, rampant disease.

By the mid 19th century, scores of Protestant evangelical and other reform societies had set up charities to enable those who could become productive members of society (and lead virtuous Christian lives) to escape the corrupt influence of the poorhouse. Often, the aged—who, it was assumed, could no longer be productive—were specifically excluded from these uplifting endeavors. The New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor piously resolved “to give no aid to persons who, from infirmity, imbecility, old age, or any other cause, are likely to continue unable to earn their own support” (quoted in Carole Haber, Beyond Sixty-Five: The Dilemma of Old Age in America’s Past [1983]).

By the late 19th century, sectors of the poorhouse population were increasingly transferred to newly created, specialized institutions—orphans to orphanages, the insane to insane asylums and the homeless to flophouses. The poorhouses were essentially transformed into “homes for the aged and infirm,” as many began calling themselves. By the early 1920s, more than 70 percent of the country’s poorhouse inmates were over the age of 55, and most were seriously disabled.

With the passage of the Social Security Act, the bourgeoisie seized the opportunity to do away with the poorhouses, the Dickensian horrors of which had become a national embarrassment. No less important to the Franklin Roosevelt administration was the argument that a system of small pensions would be a cheaper way of providing minimal elder care than maintaining the poorhouses, which were swarming with victims of the Great Depression. Thus, the law prohibited Social Security payments to the elderly inmates of public institutions. Almost overnight, a new industry was born as the direct legacy of the poorhouses: privately owned, for-profit nursing homes.

The Nursing Home Pestilence

Providing professional care for elderly people in this country is big business, and it will become even bigger with the baby-boomer generation entering retirement age. At the center of that business are for-profit nursing homes, often run by giant corporations. As is true of all capitalist enterprises, nursing homes must drive down expenses in the pursuit of profits. Many nursing homes avoid admitting elderly patients who are afflicted with dementia or other chronic diseases—precisely those who need care the most—due to the high cost of looking after them.

Likewise, nursing homes minimize the number of registered nurses employed, almost never hire on-staff doctors and pay the direct-care staff (almost always non-unionized) a wage they could earn at McDonald’s. Often, even in the better nursing homes, there is not enough staff to ensure that residents are properly fed. What they do not stint on are tranquilizers and other drugs that allow them to cut corners in attending to residents. As one academic researcher told the New York Times (23 September 2007), nursing home chains “have made a lot of money by cutting nurses, but it’s at the cost of human lives.”

This also exacts a toll on the remaining nurses and other staff. Nursing homes are stress-filled, physically demanding workplaces where non-fatal injury rates are greater than in the construction, meatpacking and mining industries. Inadequate training and equipment, higher patient loads and mandatory overtime feed the problem. Nursing home workers, who are predominantly women, need to be organized into the trade unions that represent nurses and other health care workers. Backed by the industrial unions, whose role in production gives them far greater potential social power, this fight must be part of a broader campaign to organize all the unorganized, a struggle that is crucial to reversing the decades of attacks on labor.

With employers taking aim at wages, benefits and working conditions, unionized nursing home workers have engaged in several strikes in recent years. One involving 600 workers at five Connecticut nursing homes operated by HealthBridge began last summer after the bosses froze pensions and imposed other takebacks. The company responded to the strike with naked union-busting: Scabs were brought in as permanent replacements and a RICO lawsuit was filed claiming that the activities of the union, which is affiliated with the SEIU 1199 service workers, amounted to “a shake-down by a lawless enterprise.” On March 3, union members returned to the job, three months after a federal judge ordered management to take them back under the terms of their existing contract. Following in the footsteps of many other businesses attempting to void labor contracts, the five HealthBridge nursing homes have filed for bankruptcy.

The struggle for decent wages and working conditions is directly linked to the quality of care. For decades, Congressional committees, journalists and academic researchers have documented the indifference, abuse and outright cruelty of the nursing-home owners toward residents. As a result, the industry is one of the most regulated in the country. Yet nursing homes that provide low-quality care or mistreat their residents face no real consequences because Congress is not about to appropriate the funds for the necessary inspections or to pursue sanctions against those that are non-compliant. Families that try to bring wrongful death lawsuits in egregious cases of neglect are often stymied by a complex web of corporate ownership put in place to shield nursing-home operators from legal responsibility.

Even a generation ago, when defined-benefit pension plans were included in many union contracts, the exorbitant cost of quality nursing homes put them largely out of reach of the working class. Nationally, the average cost of a semi-private (shared) room in a nursing home is today almost $75,000 per year—in New York, it is over $120,000. The elderly will typically soon exhaust their life savings paying for care and, once they are indigent, apply for meager government assistance under Medicaid.

As is true throughout the U.S. health care system, there is a two-class system of nursing homes in which the well-to-do get near-adequate (sometimes even high-quality) care while everyone else receives outrageously dreadful treatment. Many nursing homes will only accept residents who can afford to pay the cost and shun those who are on Medicaid, which typically pays about 30 percent less than what residents would pay out-of-pocket for the same care.

Low-budget nursing homes that cater to impoverished Medicaid recipients, especially those located in poor black and Hispanic communities, are often simply foul-smelling hellholes. According to a 2005 study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, at least one in six nursing homes provides such poor care that residents are at risk of physical harm. Such conditions often persist despite the best efforts of health care workers, who seek to provide quality care in defiance of the rapacious nursing-home bosses. In the case of Hurricane Sandy, it was the staff, often putting in 36-hour shifts, that carried out the emergency evacuations of dozens of stricken New York City nursing homes. There was no good reason why people could not have been evacuated in an orderly fashion before the storm hit. It was penny-pinching by Mayor Michael Bloomberg that left the elderly in harm’s way.

Under capitalism, nursing homes hardly even begin to address the social need for elder care. Only about one person in eight aged 85 or over is placed in a nursing home. Of course, many prefer staying with their families, especially with what is on offer at most old-age facilities. The whole setup is focused on profiteering. By raking in about $160 billion per year while holding down costs, private nursing homes have been quite successful in maximizing their shareholders’ return on investment. This industry provides an object lesson in how the capitalist system is incompatible with satisfying basic human needs.

For Socialized Elder Care!

In the early 19th century, the utopian socialist Charles Fourier observed that the status of women serves as a hallmark of overall emancipation in any society. A not-unrelated hallmark is how society treats its elderly and disabled. The prize-winning 1983 film The Ballad of Narayama depicts a primitive 19th-century Japanese village so impoverished that the elderly were expected to die voluntarily so that a new generation could survive. Amid brutal images of near-starvation, the film contrasts the dignity of the protagonist’s ascent of Mt. Narayama to die there of exposure.

In capitalist America, that contrast is cruelly inverted. Modern industrial society is fully capable of providing quality health care for all, including for the aged, disabled and chronically ill. Yet the bourgeoisie’s treatment of the elderly population denies many—especially working people, minorities and the poor—even basic human dignity. In a study published last October, Home Alone: Family Caregivers Providing Complex Chronic Care, the AARP and the non-profit United Hospital Fund offered “recommendations for action” that are premised on younger family members’ responsibility for long-term care of the elderly. The study simply lists various ways that “family caregivers” could be provided with additional “training and support.” And no politicians in Washington are offering anything remotely resembling an improvement in the conditions of the elderly.

We have written extensively about the Marxist program of replacing the institution of the family—the main source of women’s oppression under capitalism—with socialized childcare and housework. In “The Russian Revolution and the Emancipation of Women” (Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 59, Spring 2006), we described how V.I. Lenin’s Bolshevik Party, after leading the working class to power in Russia in 1917, sought to free women from the drudgery of housework by setting up communal childcare facilities, dining halls and laundries, as well as by introducing paid maternity leave and free health care. Such measures represent the concrete expression of our slogan: For women’s liberation through socialist revolution!

Socialized elder care, like socialized childcare, would represent a significant step toward replacing the institution of the family. Yet elder care is fundamentally different from childcare in that it addresses a process of increasing, not decreasing, dependence. That calls for flexible institutional solutions corresponding to the successive stages of decline in old age. Different levels of group care for the aged, requiring increasing levels of medical supervision, would be necessary, from assisted living and nursing facilities to long-term hospitalization.

The aged in today’s society overwhelmingly wish to remain in their homes as long as possible. A workers state would establish communal facilities attractive to the aged who require care. The needs of the aged who remain attached to their homes could, through state support, be largely met in the same way as for the rich today: by bringing nursing services into their homes on a daily basis. A wide-ranging effort would be undertaken to provide housing, transportation, custodial care and the many other needs of older people that working families today attempt to meet.

We Marxists are for socialized medicine—the expropriation of the pharmaceutical, health care and insurance companies, including the parasitic private nursing home industry—as part of the fight for a workers government. To this end, a workers party is needed to lead the proletariat in the fight to overturn the capitalist order through socialist revolution, ushering in a society based on production for need, not for profit. A rational, internationally planned economy would lay the basis for a qualitative development of the productive forces, opening the road to the elimination of poverty and the creation of an egalitarian socialist society. Based on material abundance, the future communist society would adopt the rule, as Karl Marx declared in his 1875 “Critique of the Gotha Program”: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!” 

***From The Archives-In The Salad Days Of The Revolution- Leon Trotsky’s History Of The Russian Revolution-Take Two

A Book Review From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Leon Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution in three volumes is partisan history at its best. One does not, at least in this day in age, ask a historian to be ‘objective’. One simply asks that the historian give his or her analysis and get out of the way. Trotsky meets that criterion. Furthermore, in Trotsky’s case there is nothing like having a central actor in the drama, who can also write brilliantly and wittily, give his interpretation of the important events and undercurrents swirling around Russiain 1917. If you are looking for a general history of the revolution or want an analysis of what the revolution meant for the outcome of World War I or world geopolitics look elsewhere. E.H. Carr’s History of the Russian Revolutionoffers an excellent multi-volume set that tells that story through the 1920’s. Or if you want to know what the various parliamentary leaders, both bourgeois and Soviet, were thinking and doing from a moderately leftist viewpoint read Sukhanov’s Notes on the Russian Revolution. Trotsky provides this type of material as well. However, if additionally, you want to get a feel for the molecular process of the Russian Revolution in its ebbs and flows down at the base in the masses where the revolution was made Trotsky’s is the book for you.

The life of Leon Trotsky is intimately intwined with the history of the Russian Revolution. As a young man he entered the revolutionary struggle against the Czar at the turn of the 20^th century. Shortly thereafter he embraced a lifelong devotion to Marxism. Except for the period of the 1905 Revolution when Trotsky was Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet and later in 1912 when he tried to unite all the Social Democratic forces in an ill-fated unity conference which goes down in history as the ‘August Bloc’ he was essentially a free lancer in the international social democracy. While politically close to their positions Trotsky saw the Bolsheviks as sectarians. With the coming of World War I he nevertheless drew even closer to Bolshevik positions, especially on the proper attitude to the imperialist war. He, however, did not actually join the party until the summer of 1917 when he entered the Central Committee after the fusion of his organization, the Inter-District Committee, and the Bolsheviks. This represented an important and decisive switch in his understanding of the necessity of a revolutionary party.

As Trotsky noted, although he was a late comer to the concept of a Bolshevik Party that delay only instilled in him a greater understanding about the need for a non-inclusive revolutionary party. This understanding animated his political positions throughout the rest of his career as a Soviet official and leader of the struggle of the Left Opposition against the Stalinist degeneration of the revolution. Trotsky wrote these three volumes in exile in Turkeyfrom 1930 to 1932. At that time he was not only trying to draw the lessons of the revolution from an historian’s perspective but to teach new cadre the necessary lessons of that struggle as he tried to first reform the Bolshevik Party and the Communist International and later to form a new, revolutionary Fourth International. Trotsky was still fighting for this perspective in defense of the gains of the Russian Revolution when a Stalinist agent cut him down. Thus, without doubt his political insights developed over long experience give his volumes an added worth not found in other sources for militants today.

Throughout most of the 20^th century the Russian Question was the central focus of world politics and the politics of the international labor movement. At the beginning of the 21^st century this question has lost its immediate focus. That central question ended practically with the demise of the Soviet Union in the early 1990’s. However, there are still lessons- some positive, some negative, to be learned from that experience. Today, understanding those lessons is the task for the natural audience for this book, the young alienated radicals of Western society. This is one of the political textbooks you need to read if you want to change the world. However, even if you are merely a history buff getting the inside details of the struggle for power are invaluable. Below I will try to point out what I think are the key points to be learned from the Russian Question that keep that question very much alive today

The central thrust of Trotsky’s volumes and of his later political career was animated by the concept of the crisis of revolutionary leadership. The plain fact is that since the European Revolutions of 1848 and not excepting the heroic Paris Commune until his day (and unfortunately ours) the only successful working class revolution had been in Russiain 1917. Why? Today Anarchist may look back to the Paris Commune of 1871 or forward to the Spanish Civil War in 1936 for solace but the plain fact is that absent a revolutionary party those struggles were defeated. The history of the international labor movement and the resolution of its social policy dictates that a revolutionary party that has assimilulated the lessons of the past and is rooted in the working class leading the plebian masses is the only way to bring the socialist program to fruition. That hard truth shines through the three volumes.

Anarchists and other commentators have hailed the February Revolution in Russiaas a spontaneous overturn of Czarism. However, Trotsky makes an interesting note that despite this notion the February overturn of the monarchy was not as spontaneous as one would be led to believe. He notes that the Russian revolutionary movement had been in existence for many decades before that time, that the Revolution of 1905 had been a dress rehearsal for it and that before World War I temporarily halted its progress another revolutionary period was on the way. All the while ostensibly revolutionary organizations – the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries and others were influencial among the plebian masses. If there had been no such experiences and no such organizations then those who argue for spontenaity would have grounds to stand on. The most telling point in Trotsky’s favor is that the outbreak occurred in Petrograd not exactly an unknown location of revolutionary activities.

It is no longer possible to lead a workers revolution without the capital city of the country being the center of the struggle. That probably has been true in Europe since 1848 and elsewhere for the last one hundred years. It is not only that this is the seat of government but all the vital forces of the government including the arm forces are there as well as civil society. Guerilla warfare and other forms of rebellion may occur but you cannot succeed until you capture the capital city

All revolutions after the first flush of success against the old regime tend to be supported or at least tolerated by the masses. This is a period when divergent class programs are somewhat stifled in the interest of unity. Thus, we see in the English Revolution of the 17^th century and later in the great French Revolution of the 18^th century a struggle mainly led by the lower classes taken over by other forces who try to brake any further revolutionary developments. The common term used in Marxist terminology for this phase is called the Popular Front period. The Russian Revolution also had its Popular Front phase various combinations and guises from February to October. The key to Bolshevik success in October lies in breaking with the Popular Front politically after the arrival of Lenin from exile in April. History has shown us in Spain in the 1930’s and more recently in Chilein the 1970’s how deadly political capitulation to Popular Frontism can be. Parlimentary Popular Fronts in France and elsewhere have shown those limitations in another fashion. In short, Popular Fronts mean the derailment, if not the decimation, of the revolution movement. Learn this hard lesson.

Most history shows that when the popular masses overthrow a tyrant the need to be all-inclusive and therefore passive looms large as we are all good fellows and true spirit starts out. Nevertheless, the class interests of the various parties do not permit such an amorphous gathering in to continue for long. The dual power situation between the demands of the Provisional Government and the tensions form below that the reformist led Soviet’s permitted shows the tension that must be resolved one way or the other. Except for the Bolshevik Revolution that tension has been resolved in the wrong direction.

The Bolsheviks all along had no illusions in the capacity of the other leftist parties to see the February Revolution to the end and furthermore suffered under the persecution of these so-called leftist parties when they were ascendant. Nevertheless the Bolsheviks accepted and I believe desire a revolutionary coalition government. No this got all balled up later with the role of the Left SR’s in the summer of 1918. Nevertheless the principle of a multi-party Soviet system committed to defense of the gains of the October Revolution would seem no to be precluded.

One of Trotsky’s great skills as a historian is to show that within the general revolutionary flow there are ebbs and flows that is that there are events which occur that either speed up the revolutionary process or slow it down. This is the fate of all revolutions and can determine the outcome for good or bad for generations. The first such occurrence in Russiaoccurred during the April Days when it became clear that the then presently constituted Provisional Government intended to continue Russian participation in the war and maintain the aims of Czarism without the Czar. This led the vanguard of the masses to make a premature attempt to bring down the government. However, the vanguard was isolated and did not have the authority needed to bring down the government, especially without the support of the garrison and the peasantry in the country. While this action proved not to be fatal it only resulted in a reshuffling of the Cabinet. The more important result was to sober the advanced workers to the need to better explain and organize its actions.

We saw in the April days that the vanguard was isolated in its efforts to overthrow the government that wanted to continue the war under Czarist principals. The so-called July Days are another example of the ebb and flow of revolution. Here as a result of the demoralizations on the front the workers and others of Petrograd were ready to overthrow the government The Bolsheviks tried to stop then stating that the time was not right. However, when it was going to happen anyway the Bolsheviks went along with the vanguard elements. This seems like the beginning of wisdom if you are going to lead a revolution. The other so-called leftist parties were more than happy to suppress these elements and the Bolsheviks for good measure.

The Bolsheviks were probably the most revolutionary party in the history of revolutions both in terms of their commitment to program and the form of organization and organizational practices that they developed. Nevertheless, before the arrival of Lenin back from exile the forces on the ground were to put it mildly floundering. It was necessary to rearm the party. How to revamp the old theory to the new conditions which placed the socialist program on the immediate agenda much as Trotsky had analyzed in his theory of permanent revolution. This was not done without a struggle in the party. For those who argue that a party is not necessary that is crazy because even with a truly revolutionary party you can have problems as the situation Spain with the POUM and Durrutti point out. This is why Trotsky came with the Bolsheviks and why he drew that lesson very sharply for the rest of his political career.

The peasant based Russian army took a real beating in World War I and was at the point of disintegration when the February Revolution occurred. It was the decisive effort on the part of the peasant soldier along with the worker that overthrew the monarchist system in order that they could end the war and get to the land. From then on the peasant army through coercion or through inertia was no longer a reliable vehicle for any of the combinations of provisional governmental ministries to use. Its final flare-up in defense of placing all power into Soviet hands was as a reserve an important one nevertheless a reserve. Only later when the Whites came to try to take the land did the peasant soldier exhibit a willingness to fight and die.

Not all revolutions exhibit this massive breakdown in the army- the armed organ which defends any state but it played an exception role here. What does always occur is the existing governmental authority can no longer rely on such troops. If this did no occur revolution generally would no be possible as untrained plebeians are no match for trained soldiers. Moreover, this peasant bastion is exception in that it responded to the general democratic demand for land to the tiller that the Bolsheviks were the only party to endorse at the time. In the normal course of events the peasant as peasant on the land cannot lead a modern revolution in an industrial state. It has been the bulwark for reaction witness the Paris Commune, etc. However, World War I put the peasant youth, and this is decisive in uniform and gave it discipline that it would not other wise have

Trotsky is merciless toward the Menshevik and Social Revolutionary leadership which provided the support for the Provisional governments in their various guises against the real interests of their ranks. Part of this is from the perspective that they saw the current revolution was bourgeois and so therefore they could no go further than the decrepit bourgeoisie of Russiawas willing to go- and given its relationships with foreign capital that was not very far. Let us face it these organizations in the period from February to October betrayed the interest of their ranks on the question of immediate peace and on the question of the redistribution of the land. This is particularly true with the start of the ill-fated summer offensive and the refusal to convene a Constituent Assembly to ratify the redistribution of the land. One can see the slow but then quick rise of the Bolsheviks in places when they did not really exist when the formal parties of those areas moved to the right.

Engels one time suggested that the victory of socialism in Germany would entail a struggle led by the workers and in its tail a peasant war for the land. If that was true in highly industrialized Germanyyou can imagine the necessity of it in Russia. Here it actually happened. The land hunger of the peasants was enormous in the summer of 1917. In a sense the Bolsheviks when they seized power in October were merely ratifying the land grabs. One can no longer postulate that condition today in fact the program of land to the peasant is no a program that would have meaning except in extremely backward areas and even then with the international division of agricultural labor would be more likely to lead to a communal situation.

As the above-mentioned April Days showed revolutions have ebb and flow as we know but more than that if the revolutionary forces lose momentum then other forces will inevitably come to the fore as saviors of the situation in the interests of other classes. This is the meaning of the August Days. The Bolsheviks were just coming out of their isolation and not yet ready to take the power and other forces around Kornilov with the complicity of Kerensky were ready to take over a dictatorship. It was only the mobilization of the Bolsheviks leading all the democratic plebian forces that stooped the counterrevolution in its tracks. We have seen this happen the other way when the revolutionary forces do not put up enough of a resistance to such forces.

Something that is much understood by many leftist groups today and in the past is the question of military support to bourgeois democratic forces in the struggle against right wing forces ready to overthrow democracy. That was clearly the case with the Kornilov uprising. Kerensky asked the Bolsheviks for help with troops to defend the government against the approaching counterrevolutionary forces. Lenin stated that we would give military support to the effort but no political support. This would take the form of not supporting war budgets, etc. It is a very subtle maneuver but miles away from giving blanket support both military and political to forces that you will eventually have to overthrow. The Spanish revolutionaries learned this lesson the hard way.

The tragic deaths of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in the aftermath of the suppression of the Spartacist uprising of January 1919 in Germanyhighlight the necessity of protection of the leading cadre at almost all costs if you are to be successful. After the suppressions of the July Days Lenin and Zinoviev went into hiding that was good so that you can retain the nucleus of leadership if others are caught

The question of the land was a central question for the revolutionary democracy at that time. However, the natural proponents of land redistribution the Social revolutionary Party reneged on its responsibility. Therefore, the second order of business after the Bolshevik seizure of power was to codify the land reform. In its wake it drew in the Left Social Revolutionaries into the government.

As I write this review we are in the third year of the Iraq war (2006). For those who opposed that war from the beginning or have come to oppose it over time actively the Bolshevik Revolution shows the way to end a war. If you really want to end an imperialist war you have to overthrow the imperialist powers History provides no other way.

The Soviets or workers councils which sprang up first in the Revolution of 1905 and then almost automatically were resurrected after the February overturn are merely a convenient and appropriate organization form for the structure of workers power. A Soviet led by Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries does not lead to the seizure of power. That is why Lenin was looking to the factory committees to jump-start the revolution. Soviets are the necessary form of government in the post seizure period but may not be adequate for the task of seizing power. Soviet fetishism is a danger.

The question of the Constituent Assembly, which was a slogan, raised by all parties the Bolsheviks included represents a progressive demand in situations where there has been no previous democratic revolution. Nevertheless in the modern era it has been counterpoised to the Soviets. Any disputes between the authority of the two bodies has to be resolved in favor of the Soviets as the class organization of the workers leading the plebian masses.

A counterrevolutionary attempt is almost inevitable in a revolutionary situation therefore some kind of Committee of Public Safety has to be established to guard against such an eventually. Thus a purely military organization is needed to insure the adequate preparations for such an eventuality. Here the Military Revolutionary Committee was not only an agency of the Soviets but also the nucleus of the insurrectionary forces

The question of whether to seize power is a practical one that no hard and fast rules can be made of except that it important to have the masses ready to go when the decision is made. In fact, it is probably not a bad idea to have the masses a little overeager to insurrect. There is an assumption that power can be taken at any time in a revolutionary period. This is not true because the failure to have a revolutionary party ready to roll means that there is a fairly short window of opportunity for this to occur

As stated before the Bolsheviks were probably and still remain the most revolutionary urban party in world history. Nevertheless the pressures from other classes and parties are intense especially on the leadership level that is usually composed of intellectuals and semi-intellectuals. One must learn from history that the real revolutionary opportunities are rare and that you had better take power when you can

For obvious tactical reasons it is better to take power in the name of a pan-class organization like the Soviets than in the name of a single party. This brings up an interesting point because Lenin was willing to do so in the name of the party if conditions warranted it. Under the circumstances I believe that the Bolsheviks could have taken it in their own name but that it would have been harder for them to keep it. Moreover, they had the majority in the All Russian Soviet and so it would be inexplicable if they took power solely in their own name.

Many historians and political commentators have declared the Bolshevik seizure of power a coup d’etat. If one wants to do harm to the notion of a coup d’etat in the classic sense of a closed military conspiracy this cannot be true. First of all the Bolsheviks were an urban civilian party with at best tenuous ties to military knowledge and resources. Secondly, and decisively their influence over the garrison in Petrogradand eventually elsewhere precluded such a necessity although conspiracy is an element of any insurrection

With almost a century of hindsight and knowing what we know now it is easy to see that the slender social basis for the establishment of Soviet power absent international working class revolution particularly in Germany in Russia meant of necessity that there were going to be deformations even under a healthy workers regime. Nevertheless this begs the question whether at the time the Bolsheviks should have taken power. You do not get that many opportunities to seize power and try to change world history for the better so you better take advantage of the opportunities when they present themselves. History is replead with failed revolutionary opportunities. No, the hell with it.Take the power when you can because the reaction certainly will.

***In The Salad Days Of The Revolution- Leon Trotsky’s History Of The Russian Revolution

A Book Review From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Leon Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution is partisan history at its best. One does not and should not, at least in this day in age, ask historians to be ‘objective’. One simply asks that the historian present his or her narrative and analysis and get out of the way. Trotsky meets that criterion. Furthermore, in Trotsky’s case there is nothing like having a central actor in that drama, who can also write brilliantly and wittily, give his interpretation of the important events and undercurrents swirling around Russia in 1917. If you are looking for a general history of the revolution or want an analysis of what the revolution meant for the fate of various nations after World War I or its affect on world geopolitics look elsewhere. E.H. Carr’s History of the Russian Revolutionoffers an excellent multi-volume set that tells that story through the 1920’s. Or if you want to know what the various parliamentary leaders, both bourgeois and Soviet, were thinking and doing from a moderately leftist viewpoint read Sukhanov’s Notes on the Russian Revolution. For a more journalistic account John Reed’s classic Ten Days That Shook the World is invaluable. Trotsky covers some of this material as well. However, if additionally, you want to get a feel for the molecular process of the Russian Revolution in its ebbs and flows down at the base in the masses where the revolution was made Trotsky’s is the book for you.

The life of Leon Trotsky is intimately intertwined with the rise and decline of the Russian Revolution in the first part of the 20^th century. As a young man, like an extraordinary number of talented Russian youth, he entered the revolutionary struggle against Czarism in the late 1890’s. Shortly thereafter he embraced what became a lifelong devotion to a Marxist political perspective. However, except for the period of the 1905 Revolution when Trotsky was chairman of the Petrograd Soviet and later in 1912 when he tried to unite all the Russian Social Democratic forces in an ill-fated unity conference, which goes down in history as the ‘August Bloc’, he was essentially a free lancer in the international socialist movement. At that time Trotsky saw the Bolsheviks as“sectarians” as it was not clear to him at that time that for socialist revolution to be successful the reformist and revolutionary wings of the movement had to be organizationally split. With the coming of World War I Trotsky drew closer to Bolshevik positions but did not actually join the party until the summer of 1917 when he entered the Central Committee after the fusion of his organization, the Inter-District Organization, and the Bolsheviks. This act represented an important and decisive switch in his understanding of the necessity of a revolutionary workers party to lead the revolution.

As Trotsky himself noted, although he was a late comer to the concept of a Bolshevik Party that delay only instilled in him a greater understanding of the need for a vanguard revolutionary workers party to lead the revolutionary struggles. This understanding underscored his political analysis throughout the rest of his career as a Soviet official and as the leader of the struggle of the Left Opposition against the Stalinist degeneration of the Russian Revolution. After his defeat at the hands of Stalin and his henchmen Trotsky wrote these three volumes in exile in Turkey from 1930 to 1932. At that time Trotsky was not only trying to draw the lessons of the Revolution from an historian’s perspective but to teach new cadre the necessary lessons of that struggle as he tried first reform the Bolshevik Party and the Communist International and then later, after that position became politically untenable , to form a new, revolutionary Fourth International. Trotsky was still fighting from this perspective in defense of the gains of the Russian Revolution when a Stalinist agent cut him down. Thus, without doubt, beyond a keen historian’s eye for detail and antidote, Trotsky’s political insights developed over long experience give his volumes an invaluable added dimension not found in other sources on the Russian Revolution.

As a result of the Bolshevik seizure of power the so-called Russian Question was the central question for world politics throughout most of the 20^th century. That central question ended practically with the demise of the Soviet Union in the early 1990’s. However, there are still lessons, not all negative, to be learned from the experience of the Russian Revolution. Today, an understanding of this experience is the task for the natural audience for this book, the young alienated radicals of Western society. For the remainder of this review I will try to point out some issues raised by Trotsky which remain relevant today.

The central preoccupation of Trotsky’s volumes reviewed here and of his later political career concerns the problem of the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the international labor movement and its national components. That problem can be stated as the gap between the already existing objective conditions necessary for beginning socialist construction based on the current level of capitalist development and the immaturity or lack of revolutionary leadership to overthrow the old order. From the European Revolutions of 1848 on, not excepting the heroic Paris Commune, until his time the only successful working class revolution had been in led by the Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917. Why? Anarchists may look back to the Paris Commune or forward to the Spanish Civil War in 1936 for solace but the plain fact is that absent a revolutionary party those struggles were defeated without establishing the prerequisites for socialism. History has indicated that a revolutionary party that has assimilated the lessons of the past and is rooted in the working class allied with and leading the plebian masses in its wake is the only way to bring the socialist program to fruition. That hard truth shines through Trotsky’s three volumes. Unfortunately, this is still the central problem confronting the international labor movement today.

***In The Time Of The Time Of An Outlaw Country Music Moment- The Belfast Cowboy Rides Again Van Morrison’s “Pay The Devil”

CD Review

Pay The Devil, Van Morrison, Exile Productions, 2006

Apparently just now, although this time rather accidentally, I am on something of an outlaw country moment tear, again. I have mentioned on previously occasions when I have discussed county music, or rather more correctly outlaw country music, that I had a very short, but worthwhile period when I was immersed in this genre in the late 1970s. After tiring somewhat of Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and other more well know country outlaws I gravitated toward the music, eerily beautiful and haunting music, of Townes Van Zandt whose Steve Earle tribute album Townes I have recently reviewed in this space. As I noted there, as well, while this outlaw country thing was short-lived and I scrambled back to my first loves, blues, rock and folk music I always had time to listen to Townes and is funny mix of blues, folk rock, rock folk, and just downright outlaw country.

And that brings us to the album under review, Pay The Devil, and another “outlaw” country music man, the Belfast cowboy Van Morrison. Wait a minute, Van Morrison? Belfast cowboy? Okay, let me take a few steps back. I first heard Van Morrison in his 1960s rock period when I flipped out over his Into The Mystic on his Moondance album. And when I later saw him doing some blues stuff highlighted by his appearance in Martin Scorsese PBS History of Blues series several years ago I also flipped out, and said yes, brother blues. But somewhere along the way he turned again on us and has “reinvented”himself as the “son”, the legitimate son, of Hank Williams. And hencethe Belfast cowboy.

If you do not believe me then just listen to him ante up on There Stands The Glass, a classic honky-tonk midnight sorrows tune; the Williams’classic Your Cheatin’ Heart; the pathos of Back Street Affair; the title song Pay The Devil; and, something out of about 1952, and the number one example of his cowboyishness (whee!), Till I Gain Control Again. The Belfast cowboy, indeed, although I always thought that was in the North.

***Out In The 1940s Crime Noir Night- Otto Preminger’s “Fallen Angel”- A Film Review

DVD Review

Fallen Angel, starring Dana Andrews, Alice Faye, Linda Darnell, directed by Otto Preminger, 1945

As I have mentioned at the start of other reviews in this genre I am an aficionado of film noir, especially those 1940s detective epics like the film adaptations of Dashiell Hammet’s Sam Spade in The Maltese Falconand Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe in The Big Sleep. There is nothing like that gritty black and white film, ominous musical background (one can tell without watching the beginning of the film, the credits, that a noir is on hand, or noir-influenced and those shadowy fugitive moments to stir the imagination. Others in the genre like Gilda, The Lady From Shang-hai, and Out Of The Past rate a nod because in addition to those attributes mentioned above they have classic femme fatales to add a little off-hand spice to the plot line, and, oh yah, they look nice too. Beyond those classics this period (say, roughly from the mid-1940s to mid-1950s) produced many black and white film noir set pieces, some good, some not so good. For plot line, and plot interest, the film under review, Fallen Angel, is under that former category. This film is an example of what 1940s film noirwas all about, maybe not the best but still more than passable.

Once you have started to get fixated on crime noir films a key question that inevitably comes up is the femme fatale, good or bad, although not every crime noir film had them. Fallen Angel does, although rather unusually this femme fatale (played by sultry big-lipped Linda Darnell) is working in a one-arm joint (come on now you know what that is right? A hash house, a diner, a road house, a dew-drop in and the person serving them off the arm, one arm see, is none other than Darnell as the magnet waitress, Stella). Now all femme fatales, at least the ones I have seen in film (and a few, okay more than a few, that I have been run over by in life), have some kind of shady past and/or have gone wrong by hooking up with a wrong gee. Some of them have put on high class- airs (like Gilda in the movie of the same name and The Lady From Shang-hai both played by sultry, very sultry, let me get my handkerchief out Rita Hayworth) and others, like the Stella role Ms. Darnell plays here, are just hard-boiled gold-diggers from the wrong side of the tracks.

And that little fact is what has all the boys crazy here, and also drives the plot line.

The Great Depression and World War II unhinged a lot of the certainties that earlier American society took for granted. Those mega-events left a lot of loose-end people struggling, struggling hard to find their place in the sun, or at least some dough to help find that place. And that notion goes a long way in explaining why down-at-the-heels Eric (played by Dana Andrews) find himself on the left coast (California before the post- World War II land’s end explosion westward, westward from any east) with no dough and no prospects. But that doesn’t stop him from drawing a bee-line to femme fatale Darnell when he was unceremoniously dropped off in some backwater California ocean town. But brother Eric, take a ticket, get in line, because every other guy on the left coast, including the very unglamorous hash house owner, has big ideas, or wants to have big ideas about setting up house with this two-timing brunette waitress. (Personally I don’t see it but I run to perky blondes and fire-haired red heads although, truth to tell, a few of those femmesI have been run over by, mentioned above, have been brunettes too.) But when a man, as men will do, is smitten well there it is. There are no hoops big enough that he will not roll through and that is where the plot thickens. See Stella, she from the wrong side of the tracks born, wants a home with a picket fence like all the other girls and if you don't have the cash, the cash in hand, then get lost, brother. Or an extra wife. Be a long gone daddy.

Needless to say old Eric is ready to move heaven and earth to get the dough for that white picket-fenced house. And here is his scam. A scam that played right has worked since time immemorial. Go where the money is. In that one-horse town, ocean-fronted or not, the dough resides with two prominent sisters who have some dough left from their father’s estate. So Eric plays up to one sister, June, (the pretty one, of course, played by Alice Faye) and through a convoluted series of events they wind up married. Ms. Darnell was not pleased by this turn of event, as you can imagine.

Although Stella not being pleased was cut short by a little problem, she was murdered on the night of Eric’s honeymoon with June. And all signs lead to him as the stone-cold killer- the frame is on, no question. But also “no question”is that he is not that kind of guy. But just step back a minute and remember that point about having to take a ticket to line up for Stella's affections. Plenty of guys (and at least one woman) had motive. See the film and figure who that was. Like I say this not the best of the 1940s crime noirs for plot line but is interesting enough. And the film was directed by Otto Preminger so you know the black and white cinematography shadows and contrasts will be just fine.

Out Of The 1940s Film Noir Night-With Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake’s This Gun For Hire In Mind –Take Two

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

The Raven was a piece of work a piece of work alright tough and mean, damn mean, if he had to be and gentle as a lamb when he wanted to be. Tough and mean on those guys who needed wasting, or who somebody thought needed to be wasted and had the dough to back that thought up. Big dough, now that the Raven was at the top of his class, a top “hit man” who guys sent airplane fare for just to talk to him about some proposition, and air fare back too whether he took the job or not, which he usually took since guys who had loose change for air fare had enough dough for what they wanted done. See too Raven had developed what he called a “code” and that code entailed the hard fact that in this wicked old world some guys, some guys with maybe more brains than smarts, or more hunger that what was good for them, deserved to be wasted for gumming up the works, the right order of things and if the guy in charge had the dough he was all ears. So he took a certain professional pride in his work, that and working as a loner, except when he needed a little frail company but that was just short stuff, a night pillow thing and move on, and that sense of style had seen him through some rough patches since he started out several years back as nothing but a back alley jack-roller. That possible fate got him thinking about the old days.

Yah, it was a tough break, a big bad tough break that Raven’s father had died in the Great War (World War I, the war to end all wars if anybody was asking, although he usually forgot to mention that his father’s death was by hanging by his own side since he had deserted his unit under fire) and his mother had died when he was young so he was nothing but an orphan. It was tough too that the aunt who took him in was nothing but a bitch, a devilish bitch that beat him mercilessly for the slightest infraction. Like once grabbing an off-hand piece of candy without permission from the candy dish on her dining room table. Of course she got hers, got hers good after he graduated from jack-roller school to the “bigs.”That was the only job he ever did for free, gratis, for nothing. He found that he liked that setting up the kill and then executing the plan, that he liked to waste people that needed wasting.

After that one though he got wise to the fact that if he was to survive and go to the head of the class, make the big hits and not wind up in stir for some crummy two-bit back alley jack-roll, it had to become impersonal and that was how he developed and honed his code. So it was easy to see where the Raven (he refused all the way, under all conditions, to give any other name and nobody, nobody who wanted to stay alive, bothered with the formalities of name once he settled that issue in his mind) was kind of destined to fall off the tracks from early on, to turn himself, his lonely self into nothing but a stone- cold killer, a professional hit man, a hired gun if you don’t want to put it so delicately. He wasn’t saying, in those very few reflective moments that he endured, that the dice were fixed but close enough and so he was what he was, and good at it too, very good for a long while without a hitch as such things go.

Very good that is until he hitched up with Willie James, a high-roller (self-advertised as such anyway). Raven thought he had a little too much woman in him all soft and fleshy, hiring guys, and maybe girls too, to get his kicks, including an off-hand hit or two. Always looking for the main chance, and the main chance just then was selling high- grade chemical formulas to the highest bidder regardless of nationality. He had a source, a two-bit chemist who worked for Associated Industries, the big chemical firm over in Long Beach, who wanted to live the high life with some honey and needed dough. Not an uncommon story. That Willie James predilection for high bidder might have meant nothing to anybody most times except for a funny little event, Pearl Harbor, where the slant-eyes, the Nips, the crazy yellow men bombed the hell out of the United States and thought nothing of it. See though Willie James thought nothing of it either and they, the Japanese, were willing to pay a very high price for a nice little formula, a poison gas formula if you want to know, to get it and use it during the current war, World War II for those who forgot.

Not everybody was happy to know that selling to the highest bidder was what Willie was about once they found out, and that chemist with the high life tastes was willing to sell him out to the feds no question without a big bonus to keep his trap shut. Willie however had other ideas, Raven ideas, and so he was gainfully employed by Willie to waste that errant associate and he did, did it very professionally if somewhat messily. Actually for a moment it was a classic job of the profession- the target fell easily but he happened to have his honey secretary with him although that was not part of the deal. She wasn’t supposed to be there. Bang. Sorry honey. Sweet. Willie however playing for high stakes and wary of an off-hand witness to his nefarious deeds paid the Raven off in counterfeit money to set him up for the frame, the big frame. Touché. Needless to say when Raven scoped to that hard fact, hard jail fact, he was ready to move heaven and earth once again to avenge his hurt, his long ago embedded hurt. His code be damned on this one, this was personal, maybe too personal, but the guy needed wasting, serious wasting.

Of course a woman goes with it, murder or not, a dame out of some old-time Hollywood film, Elena, a dame who looked like some angel if angels had their blonde hair pushed just a little over that right eye that year, could sing, do magic tricks, and be, well fetching. The Raven took to her right away right from the first moment he eyed her at the Neptune Club, Willie’s hangout where he was waiting to have a word or two with him as part of his plan. So he took a little time out from Willie to dig into her, to find out whether her tastes ran to hard guys, hard guys with chips on their shoulders, but just then looking for some pillow talk. He never had trouble with women, girls, all the way back to elementary school and he expected none now. Funny all the talk he had heard about women wanting a little home and hubby there by five and all civilized. Raven found out early that some women, and not all plain janes either, wanted to walk on the wild side as much as men, as much as him. This Elena had adventure and pillows written all over her. So he didn’t get any resistance, or any turn down, when he sent a drink over to her table at intermission. She thereafter waved him over.

After a few words, some in the air banter really, a couple of sly double- ententes and some dreamy pillow talk by her once she sized him up as a hard guy but maybe good for a fling they agreed to meet after the show. They did so, grabbed a cab, and went to her place. The next morning Raven shook off the night’s sweats and slumbers and after a shave and shower headed out before she awoke. He headed over to Willie’s place out on Sunset Boulevard and placed two beauties, two 38s, right between poor Willie Boy’s eyes. And had done his work very impersonally after the night’s exertions had settled him down, done it by the book just like he should have. He knew he would now have to be on the lam for a while so he called that last night beautiful and told her to meet him in Frisco town, yes, Frisco town. He hung up and had just the slightest smile on his face, a smile for such a good day’s work. Yes, he was a pro, a pro no question…

On The 10^th Anniversary Of The Iraq War-U.S./Allied Troops Out Of Afghanistan Now!

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

[No this writer is not lost in a time warp, nor is he suffering from a senior moment in noting the 10^th Anniversary of the ill-fated, ill-advised, ill, well, let’s just keep it as the previous two, start of the now seemingly completed fiasco in Iraq. However although American troops have mainly been withdrawn many thousand American bought and paid for “contract” soldiers are still operating in that theater. Moreover the wreckage from the huge American footprint (boot print, really) is still wreaking havoc on that benighted land from lack of electrical power to unexploded bombs to speak nothing of the current constant political turmoil between the myriad factions struggling for power. Then there is the question of those tens of thousands of soldiers switched over within a heartbeat from benighted Iraq to benighted Afghanistan. The call for immediate troop withdrawal from Afghanistan if not drawing much support in these back- burner concern days is still a necessary call. Finally, if there is a modern example of the follies of war, of a needless imperial adventure, of flat-out American imperial hubris to do something explosive (in more ways than one) then the ill-famed Iraq invasion started on March 19, 2003 should be etched in every leftist militant, hell, every thoughtful citizen’s brain.]

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After listening to the evening news that May1st 2003 Tim Reid was deeply satisfied that he had stuck to his guns and defended President Bush’s decision in March to go into Iraq and get rid of that mad man and vicious killer Saddam Hussein before he unleashed holy hell on the United States and the world with those dreaded weapons of mass destruction that Tim was sure would be discovered very soon. That evil bastard had had plenty of time to hide them in some out of the way place not easily accessible especially with military operations proceeding apace. That evening President Bush had announced that major operations had been suspended against the porous melting Iraqi army and that the road to democratic nation-building in Iraq could now go forward, full-steam ahead. Some lives, sadly some American lives, had been lost, but not many not as against what might have happened had Saddam not been toppled. The military operation had been in the words of one correspondent who quoted an anonymous military source “a slam dunk.”

Tim thought back to his younger days, days when he had opposed the President’s father, George H.W., in the first Iraq war back in 1991 and was able to draw a very big distinction between that opposition which to his mind was basically being drawn into a squabble between dictators and sheiks and not really any of our business and this. Times had changed (and he would take into the mix that he had changed too now being the father of two young ones and, as any father would do, trying to protect them from a dangerous world any way he could), 9/11 happened, happened right here in New York City , and happened to people he knew and cared about, and no further reference was needed that there were bad guys in the world, bad guys aiming their arrows in our direction, and they needed to be stamped out like cockroaches. And Saddam was the numero uno state actor on that list especially with atomic bombs and biological bombs and other stuff the CIA and other national security agencies knew he had hidden somewhere. Now that the dust of battle had settled they would be able to go in and destroy all those damn things and while it might still be a dangerous world at least it was a smidgeon less so.

Later that night, that May Day night, after the kids had gone to bed, and Sheila was doing something in the study, some homey thing like she did after the kid wars of the day were done he sat on the sofa, television now off, a book in hand to finish the night off, a snooze off probably, Tim flashed back for just a minute to those 1991 days. Days when he was ready to raise infinite amounts of hell to stop that first Iraq war, had even joined an ad hoc anti-imperialist committee here in the city made of old time progressives, pacifists, and socialists in order to combine with others in his fury against the big bad American military machine wreaking havoc on the world . He had that year, ironically, even marched in the small May Day parade down at Union Square, the place where today’s anti-war activists had launch their latter-day marches. How times had changed, how he had changed. And just for one second he wished he could still be that old Tim Reid. But just for a second…