DEFEATED, BUT UNBOWED-THE WRITINGS OF LEON TROTSKY, 1929-1940

DEFEATED, BUT UNBOWED-THE WRITINGS OF LEON TROTSKY, 1929-1940

BOOK REVIEWS

If you are interested in the history of the International Left in the first half of the 20^th century or are a militant trying to understand some of the past lessons of our history concerning the communist response to various social and labor questions this book is for you. I have reviewed elsewhere Trotsky’s writings published under the title The Left Opposition, 1923-1929 (in three volumes) dealing with Trotsky’s internal political struggles for power inside the Russian Communist Party (and by extension, the political struggles inside  the Communist International) in order to save the Russian Revolution.  This book is part of a continuing series of volumes in English of his writings from his various points of external exile from 1929 up until his death in 1940. These volumes were published by the organization that James P. Cannon, early American Communist Party and later Trotskyist leader founded, the Socialist Workers Party, during the 1970’s and 1980’s. (Cannon’s writings in support of Trotsky’s work are reviewed elsewhere in this space). Look in the archives in this space for other related reviews on and by this important world communist leader.

To set the framework for these reviews I will give a little personal, political and organizational sketch of the period under discussion. After that I will highlight some of the writings from each volume that are of continuing interest. Reviewing such compilations is a little hard to get a handle on as compared to single subject volumes of Trotsky’s writing but, hopefully, they will give the reader a sense of the range of this important revolutionary’s writings.

After the political defeat of the various Trotsky-led Left Oppositions 1923 to 1929 by Stalin and his state and party bureaucracy he nevertheless found it far too dangerous to keep Trotsky in Moscow. He therefore had Trotsky placed in internal exile at Ata Alma in the Soviet Far East in 1928. Even that turned out to be too much for Stalin’s tastes and in 1929 he arranged for the external exile of Trotsky to Turkey. Although Stalin probably rued the day that he did it this exile was the first of a number of places which Trotsky found himself in external exile. Other places included, France, Norway and, finally, Mexico where he was assassinated by a Stalinist agent in 1940. As these volumes, and many others from this period attest to, Trotsky continued to write on behalf of a revolutionary perspective. Damn, did he write. Some, including a few of his biographers, have argued that he should have given up the struggle, retired to who knows where, and acted the role of proper bourgeois writer or professor. Please! These volumes scream out against such a fate, despite the long odds against him and his efforts on behalf of international socialist revolution. Remember this is a revolutionary who had been through more exiles and prisons than one can count easily, held various positions of power and authority in the Soviet state and given the vicissitudes of his life could reasonably expect to return to power with a new revolutionary upsurge. Personally, I think Trotsky liked and was driven harder by the long odds.

The political prospects for socialist revolution in the period under discussion are, to say the least, rather bleak, or ultimately turned out that way. The post-World War I revolutionary upsurge has dissipated leaving Soviet Russia isolated. Various other promising revolutionary situations, most notably the aborted German revolution of 1923 that would have gone a long way to saving the Russian Revolution, had come to nought. In the period under discussion there is a real sense of defensiveness about the prospects for revolutionary change. The specter of fascism loomed heavily and we know at what cost to the international working class. The capitulation to fascism by the German Communist and Social Democratic Parties in 1933, the defeat of the  heroic Austrian working class in 1934, the defeat in Spain in 1939, and the outlines of the impending Second World War colored all political prospects, not the least Trotsky’s.

Organizationally, Trotsky developed two tactical orientations. The first was a continuation of the policy of the Left Opposition during the 1920’s. The International Left Opposition as it cohered in 1930 still acted as an external and unjustly expelled faction of the official Communist parties and of the Communist International and oriented itself to winning militants from those organizations. After the debacle in Germany in 1933 a call for new national parties and a new, fourth, international became the organizational focus. Many of the volumes here contain letters, circulars, and manifestos around these orientations. The daunting struggle to create an international cadre and to gain some sort of mass base animate many of the writings collected in this series. Many of these pieces show Trotsky’s unbending determination to make a breakthrough. That these effort were, ultimately, militarily defeated during the course of World War Two does not take away from the grandeur of the efforts. Hats off to Leon Trotsky.

THE WRITINGS OF LEON TROTSKY, 1932, PATHFINDER PRESS, NEW YORK, 1973

As to the 1932 volume this reviewer recommends a careful reading of the following articles: The Left Opposition and the Right Opposition (a polemic against the tendency of his comrades to try to form a bloc with the defeated remnants of the Bukharinite Right Opposition in the Russian Party and internationally); International and National Questions (an important analysis of the question of the national to self-determination in the age of imperialism); Hands Off Rosa Luxemburg! (a spirited defense of that great revolutionary whom the Stalinists were trying eliminate from the revolutionary pantheon for her various political differences from the Bolsheviks); Peasant War in China and the Proletariat (a analysis of the Chinese Revolution after the defeat in the cities in 1927 and the subsequent drive to awaken the peasant masses to revolution as Japan began its imperialist siege); and, the Declaration to the Antiwar Congress in Amsterdam (a rather nice polemic against the muddle-headedness of depending on pacifists to stop the impending war everyone knew was coming).

DEFEATED, BUT UNBOWED-THE WRITINGS OF LEON TROTSKY, 1929-1940

DEFEATED, BUT UNBOWED-THE WRITINGS OF LEON TROTSKY, 1929-1940


BOOK REVIEWS

If you are interested in the history of the International Left in the first half of the 20^th century or are a militant trying to understand some of the past lessons of our history concerning the communist response to various social and labor questions this book is for you. I have reviewed elsewhere Trotsky’s writings published under the title The Left Opposition, 1923-1929 (in three volumes) dealing with Trotsky’s internal political struggles for power inside the Russian Communist Party (and by extension, the political struggles inside  the Communist International) in order to save the Russian Revolution.  This book is part of a continuing series of volumes in English of his writings from his various points of external exile from 1929 up until his death in 1940. These volumes were published by the organization that James P. Cannon, early American Communist Party and later Trotskyist leader founded, the Socialist Workers Party, during the 1970’s and 1980’s. (Cannon’s writings in support of Trotsky’s work are reviewed elsewhere in this space). Look in the archives in this space for other related reviews on and by this important world communist leader.

To set the framework for these reviews I will give a little personal, political and organizational sketch of the period under discussion. After that I will highlight some of the writings from each volume that are of continuing interest. Reviewing such compilations is a little hard to get a handle on as compared to single subject volumes of Trotsky’s writing but, hopefully, they will give the reader a sense of the range of this important revolutionary’s writings.

After the political defeat of the various Trotsky-led Left Oppositions 1923 to 1929 by Stalin and his state and party bureaucracy he nevertheless found it far too dangerous to keep Trotsky in Moscow. He therefore had Trotsky placed in internal exile at Ata Alma in the Soviet Far East in 1928. Even that turned out to be too much for Stalin’s tastes and in 1929 he arranged for the external exile of Trotsky to Turkey. Although Stalin probably rued the day that he did it this exile was the first of a number of places which Trotsky found himself in external exile. Other places included, France, Norway and, finally, Mexico where he was assassinated by a Stalinist agent in 1940. As these volumes, and many others from this period attest to, Trotsky continued to write on behalf of a revolutionary perspective. Damn, did he write. Some, including a few of his biographers, have argued that he should have given up the struggle, retired to who knows where, and acted the role of proper bourgeois writer or professor. Please! These volumes scream out against such a fate, despite the long odds against him and his efforts on behalf of international socialist revolution. Remember this is a revolutionary who had been through more exiles and prisons than one can count easily, held various positions of power and authority in the Soviet state and given the vicissitudes of his life could reasonably expect to return to power with a new revolutionary upsurge. Personally, I think Trotsky liked and was driven harder by the long odds.

The political prospects for socialist revolution in the period under discussion are, to say the least, rather bleak, or ultimately turned out that way. The post-World War I revolutionary upsurge has dissipated leaving Soviet Russia isolated. Various other promising revolutionary situations, most notably the aborted German revolution of 1923 that would have gone a long way to saving the Russian Revolution, had come to nought. In the period under discussion there is a real sense of defensiveness about the prospects for revolutionary change. The specter of fascism loomed heavily and we know at what cost to the international working class. The capitulation to fascism by the German Communist and Social Democratic Parties in 1933, the defeat of the  heroic Austrian working class in 1934, the defeat in Spain in 1939, and the outlines of the impending Second World War colored all political prospects, not the least Trotsky’s.

Organizationally, Trotsky developed two tactical orientations. The first was a continuation of the policy of the Left Opposition during the 1920’s. The International Left Opposition as it cohered in 1930 still acted as an external and unjustly expelled faction of the official Communist parties and of the Communist International and oriented itself to winning militants from those organizations. After the debacle in Germany in 1933 a call for new national parties and a new, fourth, international became the organizational focus. Many of the volumes here contain letters, circulars, and manifestos around these orientations. The daunting struggle to create an international cadre and to gain some sort of mass base animate many of the writings collected in this series. Many of these pieces show Trotsky’s unbending determination to make a breakthrough. That these effort were, ultimately, militarily defeated during the course of World War Two does not take away from the grandeur of the efforts. Hats off to Leon Trotsky.

THE WRITINGS OF LEON TROTSKY, 1930-31, PATHFINDER PRESS, NEW YORK, 1973

As to the 1930-31 volume this reviewer recommends a careful reading of the following articles: On the Question of Thermidor and Bonapartism, (taken from analogies with the French Revolution which nicely draws the distinctions between the overturn of the revolutionary leadership and the balancing act implied in a military dictatorship); Thermidor and Bonapartism (same); Problems of the German Section (on the ever reoccurring problem of German Left Oppositionists taking serious political action toward the rank and file of the German Communist Party before it is too late);New Zigzags and New Dangers (on the notorious ‘third period’ strategy of the Communist International); and, At the Fresh Grave of Kote Tsintsadze, (probably one of the best and most insightful political obituaries of a fellow revolutionary ever written).   

Wal-Mart: Labor Bureaucracy’s Non-Organizing Drive

Workers Vanguard No. 1021	5 April 2013

Wal-Mart: Labor Bureaucracy’s Non-Organizing Drive

In late January, the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) informed the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that it was disavowing any intent to unionize Wal-Mart, declaring that the union-sponsored Organization United for Respect at Walmart (OUR Walmart) merely demands that the retail giant “improve labor rights and standards for its employees.” Wal-Mart had filed a complaint against the UFCW with the NLRB charging that OUR Walmart protests last fall violated federal law limiting picketing at companies where a union has not officially sought recognition. The UFCW leadership has now pledged to cease picketing for 60 days, to erase demands for unionization from union Web sites and to e-mail its disavowal to some 4,000 OUR Walmart members nationwide. In return, the NLRB issued a January 30 memorandum saying that it would hold the company’s charge in abeyance for six months, waiting to see if “the Union complies with its commitments.”

With their non-organizing drive at Wal-Mart, the UFCW tops hope that they can slip by both the company’s anti-union machinery and the capitalist state’s web of anti-labor laws. But the labor bureaucrats are deluding Wal-Mart workers with this supposedly wily strategy. It is nothing but a surrender to a capitalist exploiter known worldwide for its anti-labor chicanery. As Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon wrote about the 1934 Minneapolis strikes that helped pave the way for the Teamsters to become a powerful nationwide union: “Bluffs don’t work in fundamental things, only in incidental ones. In such things as the conflict of class interests one must be prepared to fight” (The History of American Trotskyism, 1944).

The struggle to unionize Wal-Mart is one of those fundamental things. As the country’s largest private employer, Wal-Mart has some 1.4 million workers, employing nearly one of every 100 American workers. It is one of the world’s largest companies, operating more than 10,000 stores and generating $464 billion in revenue last year, roughly equal to Belgium’s gross domestic product. The wealth produced by Wal-Mart’s cutthroat exploitation of workers in the U.S. and abroad is enormous. The offspring of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton, who own roughly half of the company’s shares, are worth about $90 billion. That figure is equal to the combined net worth of the bottom 41.5 percent of the entire U.S. population!

On the other hand, Wal-Mart workers (“associates” in company lingo) on average earn $8.81 an hour, well below the poverty level for a family of four. Even when they manage to get “full time” work (34 hours per week), it is not uncommon for them to rely on local food pantries. New hires must beg managers to get the 30 hours per week they need to qualify for the company’s costly, substandard health coverage. Wal-Mart’s abuse of its workers is legendary: forced and unpaid overtime, workers locked in at night to keep them from stealing, rampant discrimination against the women who make up 70 percent of its hourly workforce.

The astounding inequality between the obscenely rich Walton family and their impoverished employees makes Wal-Mart emblematic of the capitalist system, whose lifeblood is the exploitation of labor. What Karl Marx wrote in Capital (1867) during the rise of industrial capitalism is true with a vengeance today, long after the capitalist system began to decay: “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation at the opposite pole.”

Much of Wal-Mart’s success in accumulating profit comes from keeping unions out of its operations in the U.S. and most everywhere else. As it expanded into the rest of the U.S. from Arkansas, it brought with it the racist, anti-union “open shop” of the Southern bourgeoisie. Dishing out folksy paternalism and phony “profit-sharing” schemes with one hand, Wal-Mart management cracks the whip fast and furiously at pro-union or “uppity” workers with the other. When workers at a store in Jonquière, Quebec, voted to join the UFCW in 2004, the company simply closed the store down—one of many times it has snuffed out union organizing drives.

Organizing Wal-Mart is critical for the welfare of its army of low-wage workers and for revitalizing a labor movement that has taken one body blow after another in the last few decades. Millions of workers want and need real fighting unions. But any serious union organizing drive will mean going up against not only the capitalists whose profit margins depend on remaining union-free but also the courts, cops, labor boards and other forces of the capitalist state. Waging such battles requires a hard fight against the privileged trade-union bureaucracy and its sacred strategy of reliance on the bosses’ government and the Democratic Party. Above all, what labor needs is a leadership that understands that organizing the unorganized, like all struggles against exploitation, is a matter of class against class.

Black Friday and Beyond

Right after the UFCW tops launched OUR Walmart two years ago, the New York Times reported, “Unlike a union, the group will not negotiate contracts on behalf of workers. But its members could benefit from federal labor laws that protect workers from retaliation for engaging in collective discussion and action” (“Wal-Mart Workers Try the Nonunion Route,” 14 June 2011). OUR Walmart grew rapidly over the next year, with workers signing up on the Internet and paying the $5 monthly dues online, reflecting real desire for union organization. While union officials pinned their hopes on paper-thin legal protections, Wal-Mart bosses prepared to go after OUR Walmart as a stalking horse for future unionization. The NLRB’s recent threat to clamp down on the union and OUR Walmart proves that such “protections” are a sham.

Last year’s rallies culminated in the heavily publicized “Black Friday” events held in front of 1,000 Wal-Mart stores the day after Thanksgiving. Some among the 500 Wal-Mart workers who participated braved company reprisals by walking out during their work shifts. The protests were built to shame Wal-Mart for bad corporate behavior, not to shut the stores down, and union organizers explicitly avoided calling for unionization.

A slew of fake-socialist outfits hailed the protests as historic, with the International Socialist Organization going so far as to describe this non-organizing campaign as “class struggle unionism.” The Party for Socialism and Liberation gushed that a work stoppage by a tiny sliver of Wal-Mart’s workforce “set the stage for a dramatic upsurge in the labor movement, and is an important development in the consciousness of workers, both union and non-union” (Liberation, 15 October 2012). The centrist Internationalist Group described protests and small strikes held before Black Friday as having “challenged the hidebound labor movement” (Internationalist, November 2012). More recently, Labor Notes (February 2013), whose editors orbit the reformist Solidarity organization, headlined “In Walmart and Fast Food, Unions Scaling Up a Strike-First Strategy.”

These opportunist outfits not only give cover to the UFCW bureaucrats but also actively sow confusion about the most basic precepts of trade unionism. A strike means “one out, all out.” The aim is to shut down an enterprise and its profit-making activities by mass picketing and other means. It was just such class-struggle methods that built the unions in this country and that need to be revived if labor is to get off its knees.

Before Black Friday, Wal-Mart bosses threatened employees to “show up for work or else” while also advising management hotheads to not crudely go after workers for exercising their “general legal right to engage in a walkout.” There would be casualties in any real organizing drive, and unions need to be prepared to defend victimized workers. But the UFCW and OUR Walmart are not fighting for union protections. Instead they wait for labor law violations so they can file complaints with the NLRB. This only breeds illusions in the purported neutrality of the NLRB, whose purpose is to maintain labor “peace” by enforcing anti-union laws and entangling workers in protracted legal proceedings.

Supply Chain Choke Points

The hard truth is that retail workers, atomized in thousands of separate stores, do not have the social power on their own to put a wrench in Wal-Mart’s profit machine. But Wal-Mart is not the invulnerable behemoth it is portrayed to be. Where it is particularly vulnerable is in its dependence on the steady movement of its wares through the “just-in-time” global cargo chain, with its key choke points. A huge proportion of Wal-Mart’s commodities flows from Asian factories through West Coast ports, where they are off-loaded by longshoremen and then moved by port truckers as well as rail workers to Wal-Mart’s warehouse distribution centers. A fight to organize those warehouses and Wal-Mart’s army of 7,400 truck drivers, as well as the workers in its stores, would crucially depend on solidarity in action by longshoremen and other unionized workers along the cargo chain. It would also need to be linked to efforts to organize the port truckers.

Wal-Mart commonly uses subcontractors to hire and manage workers at its huge modern warehouses. Several of these have been hit by walkouts. In September, workers backed by the Change to Win-sponsored Warehouse Workers United (WWU) walked out of a Jurupa Valley, California, warehouse over unsafe work conditions. That same month, 38 non-union workers at a distribution center in Elwood, Illinois, walked off the job for three weeks to protest the firing of several co-workers as well as wage theft and unsafe work conditions.

The Elwood action was organized by the Warehouse Workers Organizing Committee (WWOC), backed by the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers (UE). While the victimized workers were rehired with back pay, in November the same subcontractor fired four more. Those firings have not been answered with walkouts, and the workers are in limbo until an NLRB hearing in May. Like the UFCW at the stores, neither WWOC nor WWU is calling for unionization of the warehouses. Nevertheless, Wal-Mart has made some concessions to warehouse workers, indicating the disproportionate leverage they hold at the distribution choke points.

By hiring layers of subcontractors, Wal-Mart seeks to insulate itself from labor strife. Militants must find a way to bring the armies of low-wage “perma-temps” into the unions, including by fighting for union control of hiring as part of organizing drives. It is also necessary for labor to fight discrimination against young, old, women, black and immigrant workers, such as the thousands of Latino port truckers and warehouse workers in California.

In January, L.A. port truckers working for Toll Group won their first-ever contract after they joined the Teamsters. Their new contract raises their pay from $12.72 to $19.00 per hour and gives them access to more affordable health care, the Teamsters pension fund, paid sick leaves and holidays. This victory ought to be a springboard for renewed organizing of port truckers. Some 12,000 largely Latino port truckers are vital for the flow of goods from L.A.-area ports to the massive Inland Empire warehouse complex to the east. Unlike the Toll Group drivers, almost all of the port truckers are “owner operators.” Organizing this workforce has suffered from the legalistic strategy of the Teamsters bureaucracy, which has banked on pressuring the government to reclassify them as “employees.”

It’s Spelled U-N-I-O-N

Having all but abandoned the strike weapon and even use of the “s-word” in the years following the crushing of the PATCO air traffic controllers union in 1981, the pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy has helped oversee a steady, painful decline of the unions from their peak numbers in the 1950s. After throwing hundreds of millions of dollars into Democratic Party coffers, the AFL-CIO and Change to Win bureaucracies pined for Obama to give the go-ahead to organize through “card checks” and the Employee Free Choice Act. But the Obama White House was not about to ease the way to union organizing, and labor has gone on to suffer yet more defeats. When a wave of “right-to-work” laws swept into former bastions of union power like Wisconsin and Michigan, the union tops could not muster a single protest strike, despite the seething anger of rank-and-file unionists. Selling the notion that strike action is futile and that labor’s only real weapon is electoral politics, the defeatist labor bureaucrats have a new slogan: the polling booth is the new picket line.

Nowadays, in place of union organizing, the labor officialdom conjures up workers “associations,” advocacy groups, community outfits and single-issue campaigns in an attempt to get back some numbers and clout. Many of these groups exist only to help Democratic Party and other “friend of labor” capitalist politicians get elected. Some are lash-ups with clergy, small businesses, environmentalists and consumer groups pushing for good “corporate behavior” from Wal-Mart and other bloodsuckers. Instead of fighting to unionize Wal-Mart outlets, the leaderships of both the UFCW and SEIU service employees union have often campaigned to keep those stores out of key urban areas. In doing so, they go against the interests of the ghetto and barrio poor who would benefit from the jobs (and low prices) and could be won to union organizing drives.

In her book Raising Expectations (And Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement, Jane McAlevey, a former top-level SEIU service employees organizer, goes after the union’s new “grassroots movements,” using quotes from union dispatches:

“In a slight change of tactics, SEIU is now…lavishly funding community groups, or simply setting up their own fully controllable ‘community groups’ that give an illusion of independence.... SEIU is spending tens of millions ‘mobilizing underpaid, underemployed and unemployed workers’ and ‘channeling anger about jobs into action for positive change.’ What’s beyond bizarre is that the program is aimed at mobilizing poor people rather than SEIU’s own base. SEIU looks everywhere except to their own membership to gin up popular revolts.”

A class-struggle union leadership would seek to tap into the anger among the unemployed and the poor, not as a substitute for mobilizing workers but as a way to gather behind labor’s cause those cast aside by the racist rulers. Raising such demands as free, quality health care and jobs for all with good pay and benefits, union organizing drives would find a huge reservoir of support at the base of this society.

In 2003, the trade-union tops threw away an opportunity to spearhead the organizing of Wal-Mart when they sabotaged a bitter, five-month-long strike by 60,000 UFCW grocery workers in Southern California. At the time, Wal-Mart was moving into L.A. and unionized grocers like Vons, Ralphs and Albertsons used its arrival to push the UFCW for deep concessions in health and other benefits. The strikers fought like hell to win. But in the end the strike lost because of the bureaucrats’ refusal to shut down the key grocery distribution centers and to extend the strike when other supermarket contracts in California, Arizona and several other states had expired or were being negotiated.

By the mid 2000s, plenty of bureaucrats like SEIU organizer Wade Rathke had thrown in the towel when it came to Wal-Mart. Rathke’s “A Wal-Mart Workers Association? An Organizing Plan” (reprinted in the 2006 book Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First-Century Capitalism) reads like a blueprint for OUR Walmart. Concluding that unionizing Wal-Mart is impossible and that the strike weapon is “bankrupt,” Rathke argues that a company union would be a step forward and that new workers “associations” could find sufficient legal protection in New Deal-era labor legislation.

Similar arguments for “non-majority,” “minority” and “open source” organizing are now sprouting up throughout the American labor movement, rejecting key lessons from the 1930s fight to forge industrial unions. What low-wage workers at Wal-Mart and everywhere need are strong, fighting unions and the power and benefits only unions can secure: good wages, seniority rights, work rules, safety protections, health care, pensions, vacations, etc. They need solid contracts and the readiness to strike to defend their gains.

To organize Wal-Mart, whose tentacles reach around the world, would require a high level of coordinated labor action, nationally and internationally. U.S. workers must form bonds of mutual assistance with their class brothers and sisters in Mexico, where Wal-Mart outraged the populace when it bribed officials to enable the company to build a “supercenter” next to the ancient pyramids in Teotihuacán. In Bangladesh, after a fire at a Wal-Mart subcontractor killed 112 garment workers in November, labor organizers produced documents showing that the retailer resisted safety improvements at the notoriously fire-prone factories. That kind of industrial murder should ignite internationally backed organizing drives demanding real gains in safety. But any such solidarity is undermined by the chauvinist flag-waving of the U.S. union tops, whose protectionist calls to “save American jobs” come at the expense of workers elsewhere.

Unionizing Wal-Mart would go a long way toward reversing what has been a one-sided class war against the working class. Led by a revolutionary workers party, a revived American proletariat would fight not only to regain what it has lost in recent decades but to expropriate the tiny class of capitalist exploiters, from Sam Walton’s spawn to the owners of the banks and major industries. That will take sweeping away the capitalist state and erecting in its place a workers state as part of the fight for world socialist revolution. 

Canada: Racist Hell for Native Peoples

Workers Vanguard No. 1021	5 April 2013

Canada: Racist Hell for Native Peoples

The following article is reprinted from Spartacist Canada No. 176 (Spring 2013), newspaper of the Trotskyist League/Ligue Trotskyste, Canadian section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist). Recent demonstrations erupting in defense of Native rights have rallied under the banner Idle No More.

The Idle No More protests have put a harsh spotlight on the desperate conditions of Native people. Beginning late last year as a teach-in organized by four Saskatchewan women in opposition to changes to the Indian Act [adopted in the 19th century] and several federal government bills, the protests spread like wildfire. Thousands of people in cities, towns and reserves across the country mobilized on December 10 to demand recognition of Native rights. The next day, Chief Theresa Spence of the Attawapiskat band in Northern Ontario began a hunger strike. In the weeks that followed, rallies, teach-ins and flash mobs popped up in cities from coast to coast, along with road and rail blockades.

The protests have been fueled by the misery and racist brutality that blight the lives of the vast majority of Native people. Whether on the desolate reserves or at the margins of the cities, everywhere the aboriginal population is plagued by unemployment, poverty, illness and homelessness. Supplementing and enforcing this is a remorseless diet of racist police violence. While making up less than 3 percent of the population, Native people comprise a staggering 35 percent of the women and 23 percent of the men in prison. Almost half of Native adults are unemployed and over half have less than a high school education. On the reserves established to formalize their dispossession, median family income is barely $11,000.

The backdrop to the spate of new federal laws further eroding aboriginal rights is the government’s push to accelerate resource extraction in areas where Native people are the predominant population and/or have longstanding land claims. Some $650 billion worth of resource projects are at stake over the next ten years. This notably includes the Northern Gateway pipeline, which is opposed by most Native groups. Some of the new laws that sparked the protests weaken or eliminate environmental protections. Changes to the Indian Act allow for the surrender of reserve land without proper consent of all those affected. Such measures will directly benefit the resource companies, who long to get their hands on the mineral wealth from which they hope to reap fabulous profits. And it’s all being done without any pretense of consultation, much less the consent of the Native population.

The Idle No More banner was also taken up by the annual February marches in remembrance of the aboriginal women who have been murdered or gone missing since the 1990s, particularly in B.C. [British Columbia]. According to the Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC), the number dead or missing now approaches 600. The NDP [social-democratic New Democratic Party] has joined NWAC, Amnesty International and other groups in calling for a “national inquiry.” The ruling class cares nothing for the lives and deaths of Native women. When they accede to calls for public inquiries, their purpose is to channel anger into whitewashes that ultimately strengthen the capitalist state by refurbishing its tarnished image. It is precisely the state—the prisons, courts and cops—that is the main source of the repression of Native people.

A new Human Rights Watch report entitled “Those Who Take Us Away” drives this home in wrenching detail. Dozens of aboriginal women and girls from ten northern B.C. towns have faced violent abuse by police, with at least one report of rape. The brutality includes young girls being pepper-sprayed and shocked with tasers; a 12-year-old girl attacked by a police dog; a 17-year-old girl repeatedly punched by an officer in the back of a police car; women strip-searched by male officers; and women injured by excessive force during their arrests. The researchers were “struck by the level of fear on the part of women we met to talk about sexual abuse inflicted by police officers.”

Capitalism and Native Oppression

The legacy of colonialism, first French and later British, besets Native peoples today. Through a combination of fraud, military conquest and the devastating impact of disease following European contact, the pre-existing aboriginal societies were destroyed and the foundations of Canadian capitalism laid. Over much of the last century, a state policy of forced assimilation led to the abduction of Native children from their parents and their internment in church-run residential schools. The aim was to destroy the aboriginal languages and culture. The architect of the residential school system, Duncan Campbell Scott, Superintendent of Indian Affairs, laid this bare in 1920:

“I want to get rid of the Indian problem. I do not think as a matter of fact, that this country ought to continuously protect a class of people who are able to stand alone.... Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department....”

— quoted in E. Brian Titley, A Narrow Vision: Duncan Campbell Scott and the Administration of Indian Affairs in Canada (1986)

The capitalist rulers failed to wipe out the indigenous peoples, but a wall of racism and systematic deprivation keeps the Native population in a state of wretchedness. Every year, exposés of the life-threatening conditions on one reserve or another spark anger and media attention—to utterly no effect. In late 2011, it was the turn of subarctic Attawapiskat. Theresa Spence and other Native leaders declared a state of emergency to draw attention to the desperate housing crisis there. Dozens of families were living in uninsulated tents and shacks without running water or plumbing, some using buckets as toilets and emptying them into nearby ditches. Another 128 families were living in homes condemned because of black mould and “infrastructure failures,” meaning that they were uninhabitable. The Conservative government responded by blaming the band. Then they appointed a third-party manager against the band’s wishes and ordered an audit.

The Harper Tories [Conservative Party of Prime Minister Stephen Harper] have shown the same disdain for the recent protests. One could not read a daily newspaper without seeing Spence vilified and portrayed as financially corrupt (courtesy of the feds’ audit). Obscenely, she was baited as a terrorist by the National Post (27 December 2012) and denounced a day later by the Globe and Mail for using “coercion,” i.e., a hunger strike. Spence’s hunger strike and the Idle No More protests became lightning rods for racist filth in the gutter press and on the internet, sparking protests at Sun News media offices in Calgary, Toronto and Winnipeg. As Toronto Star columnist Heather Mallick put it, “it turns out that writing a column about Idle No More and the ongoing battle by Indians in Canada for fair treatment attracts racists the way a wet lawn calls out to worms.”

Reflecting an increasingly young Native population with few prospects, the Idle No More protests were striking in their youthful makeup. The protests were also fueled by growing discontent on the part of younger Native people with the ineffectual Assembly of First Nations (AFN) leadership and its cozy relationship with the federal government. This was symbolized by the outcry against AFN national chief Shawn Atleo when he met with Harper in January despite a boycott by many other Native leaders.

AFN leaders have also developed close relations with the RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] and the Ontario and Quebec police. The Toronto Star (15 February) outlined how in 2007 AFN leaders colluded with the cops to undermine one of the largest Native protests in Canadian history, the June 29 national day of action. This included “a joint media relations strategy” and a cop placed in the AFN’s Ottawa office. Julian Fantino—then head of the Ontario police and today a Tory cabinet minister—threatened Mohawk activist Shawn Brant with “grave consequences” if he did not call off a blockade. As the Star noted, the AFN’s collaboration with the police “coincided with the start of a sweeping federal program of surveillance of aboriginal communities and individuals engaged in land rights activism that continues today.”

We Need a Revolutionary Workers Party!

The oppression of the Native population gives the true measure of this racist society. In the course of Spence’s hunger strike, Liberal and NDP politicians made their way to her camp for tear-jerking photo-ops. This should fool no one. The Liberal Party ran Canada for the better part of a century, overseeing untold state brutality and the systematic theft of both lands and peoples. As for the New Democrats, their record is plain. In B.C. in 1995, the NDP government organized what was then the largest RCMP/military operation in Canadian history to evict a handful of Native activists from a ranch at Gustafsen Lake. The RCMP and military created a war zone, and a bloodbath was averted only because the Native occupiers left the area.

Native people need access to jobs at union wages and massive education, health and housing programs, including the provision of clean water and electricity. This is not rocket science, but the bourgeoisie will never provide such necessities. Not far from Attawapiskat, where unemployment is 70 percent, a De Beers diamond mine generates over $400 million a year in revenue. De Beers pays a lousy $2 million a year in royalties to the Attawapiskat Cree, most of which is buried in stocks and bonds under a trust agreement—chump change for this immensely profitable and wealthy corporation. Attawapiskat protesters have blockaded the mine to press their demands for jobs, housing and environmental protections. De Beers responded with an injunction from the Timmins Superior Court accusing them of “extortion.”

There is a fundamental class divide in society between the capitalists—the tiny group of families that own industry and the banks—and the working class, whose labour is the source of the capitalists’ profits. The working class has the potential power and historic interest to sweep away the capitalist system and rebuild society based on a centralized, planned economy that serves human need, not profit. It is this social power to stop the flow of profits that must be mobilized in defense of Native rights.

A majority of the approximately 1.3 million aboriginal people in Canada live in the cities, where the working class is concentrated. Put simply, the future for Native rights lies with the class struggle. Labour’s struggles and those of the Native peoples will either go forward together or fall back separately. Trade unions including the Canadian Labour Congress declared their solidarity with Idle No More. But this is light years from what is necessary. The isolation of the Native protests from the social power of the working class is a direct reflection of the fact that the labour movement itself is quiescent and on the defensive. This sharply undercuts the possibility of any amelioration of the conditions facing aboriginal peoples.

A fighting labour movement would not only use its power to champion Native rights, but would take concrete steps such as aggressive union-run recruitment and training programs. Such programs would be a first step toward breaking the cycle of unemployment and social marginalization. Labour must also be mobilized against acts of racist state terror to make it clear that Native people do not stand alone in their struggles.

The fight against Native oppression provides a litmus test for those aspiring to lead the working class. A party that does not inscribe the defense of the most downtrodden high on its banner will never succeed in leading the proletariat against its class enemy. We seek to build a revolutionary workers party that champions the cause of all the oppressed in the struggle for socialist revolution. To open up a future for the Native peoples will take the establishment of an egalitarian socialist society under workers rule. As we state in our Programmatic Theses:

“Only the destruction of capitalism can hold out the possibility of voluntary integration, on the basis of full equality, for those aboriginal peoples who desire it and the fullest possible regional autonomy for those who do not. The Trotskyist League/Ligue trotskyste demands that whatever residual rights Native peoples have been able to maintain, whether through treaty agreements or otherwise, be respected.”

— “Who We Are, and What We Fight For” (1998)

The stark fact is that in this capitalist society—whether run by the Tory reactionaries or their Liberal and NDP rivals—Native people have no chance at a decent future. Only the destruction of the bourgeoisie’s barbaric profit system and the inauguration of the era of socialist development can redress centuries of crimes against the aboriginal peoples of this country. 

Mumia Abu-Jamal Attorneys Challenge Resentencing Process

Workers Vanguard No. 1021	5 April 2013

Mumia Abu-Jamal Attorneys Challenge Resentencing Process

On February 25, attorneys for class-war prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal filed an appeal challenging the secretive court order that sentenced him to life without parole last August. The sentence was mandated by Pennsylvania statute following Mumia’s removal from death row in December 2011, after the Philadelphia district attorney’s office ended its campaign to legally lynch him (see “Drive to Execute Mumia Halted,” WV No. 993, 6 January 2012). Mumia’s legal papers note that while the outcome of a hearing may have been preordained, the deprivation of his basic due process rights jeopardizes future legal efforts to fight for his freedom.

Seeking a new sentencing hearing, the brief details how the court violated both Pennsylvania law and due process rights by imposing sentence without notice to Mumia or his counsel, preventing Mumia from being present and offering information and argument. The brief further notes, “In fact, there is no record that the sentencing took place in open court at all.”

The secret resentencing of Mumia had more in common with the conclave of the College of Cardinals to anoint the new pope than the due process that purports to be the underpinning of American “justice.” Barring Mumia recalled his eviction from most of the 1982 trial in which he was sentenced to death by a judge who was overheard promising, “I’m going to help them fry the n----r.” Once again the courts have demonstrated that from the day he was falsely charged with the killing of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner, this lifelong fighter for black freedom has no rights the capitalist rulers are bound to respect.

Mumia was targeted by the racist cops from the age of 15, when he donned the beret of the Black Panther Party. The murderous fury of the police was reinforced when he became a renowned journalist known as the “voice of the voiceless” and, in the late 1970s, a supporter of the demonized and brutalized Philadelphia MOVE commune. Mumia’s innocence of Faulkner’s murder is a fact as demonstrable as the earth is round. But court after court has refused to even consider the mass of evidence proving this.

Mumia’s conviction was based on lying testimony extorted by the cops, a “confession” manufactured by the police and prosecutors and phony ballistics “evidence.” In 2001, Mumia’s attorneys presented in state and federal courts the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he and another man were hired for the job because Faulkner “was a problem for the mob and corrupt policemen because he interfered with the graft and payoffs made to allow illegal activity,” such as prostitution, gambling and drugs (see the September 2001 Partisan Defense Committee pamphlet, Mumia Abu-Jamal Is an Innocent Man!). At the time, the Philadelphia police were under three corruption investigations by the Feds, encompassing virtually the entire chain of command that oversaw the “investigation” of Faulkner’s death.

Mumia may no longer live in the shadow of the executioner, instead condemned to what he describes as the “‘slow’ Death Row” of life in prison. From the 1887 execution of four anarchist labor organizers known as the Haymarket martyrs, the gallows and dungeons are the capitalist rulers’ reward for fighters for the exploited and oppressed. Today such prisoners include American Indian Movement leader Leonard Peltier, eight MOVE members and Jaan Laaman and Thomas Manning of the Ohio 7. The PDC, a class-struggle legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League, urges union militants, black activists and radical youth to take up the cause of freedom for Mumia and all the class-war prisoners.

*   *   *

Contributions for Mumia’s legal defense can be made out to the National Lawyers Guild Foundation, earmarked for “Mumia,” and mailed to: Committee to Save Mumia Abu-Jamal, 132 Nassau Street, Room 922, New York, NY 10038. To correspond with Mumia, write to: Mumia Abu-Jamal, AM 8335 SCI Mahanoy, 301 Morea Road, Frackville, PA 17932.

Workers Vanguard No. 1021	5 April 2013

A Death Sentence for Defending Her Client?

Lynne Stewart

By Mumia Abu-Jamal

The following was transcribed from a February 21 prisonradio.org recording.

Lynne Stewart, a brilliant, gung-ho trial attorney, has a stellar history that many attorneys would kill for: a defense attorney who truly fights for her clients and, far more often than not, brings them home. She has battled some of the biggest cases in New York history, beating quite a few and beating the government as well. After her representation of Egyptian cleric Omar Abdel Rahman, for daring to speak out publicly in his defense, and delivering a message of his thoughts to the public, she was charged with conspiracy, providing material support to terrorists, convicted, sentenced to—after an appeal—ten years in federal prison, and disbarred.

Lynne, 73, is a breast cancer survivor, and recently the cancer has returned. Her treatment in federal custody is, to say the least, far from optimal. That ten years, increased by order of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals from 28 months, may prove a death sentence for a courageous, principled, and brilliant defense lawyer, who has been a bane to the state since she first walked into a courtroom.

Andrew Napolitano, former judge and conservative Fox TV contributor, has called the Stewart conviction a perverse victory for the Justice Department and a travesty of justice designed to intimidate all lawyers from vigorously advocating for their clients. To find out how you can help win justice for Lynne Stewart, contact: lynnestewart.org.

From imprisoned nation, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.

©2013 Mumia Abu-Jamal

Sign the petition to free Lynne Stewart at lynnestewart.org. Send donations to: Lynne Stewart Organization, 1070 Dean Street, Brooklyn, New York 11216. Those wishing to correspond can send letters to: Lynne Stewart, #53504-054, Federal Medical Center, Carswell, P.O. Box 27137, Fort Worth, TX 76127.

A Death Sentence for Defending Her Client?-Lynne Stewart

Workers Vanguard No. 1021	5 April 2013

A Death Sentence for Defending Her Client?

Lynne Stewart

By Mumia Abu-Jamal

The following was transcribed from a February 21 prisonradio.org recording.

Lynne Stewart, a brilliant, gung-ho trial attorney, has a stellar history that many attorneys would kill for: a defense attorney who truly fights for her clients and, far more often than not, brings them home. She has battled some of the biggest cases in New York history, beating quite a few and beating the government as well. After her representation of Egyptian cleric Omar Abdel Rahman, for daring to speak out publicly in his defense, and delivering a message of his thoughts to the public, she was charged with conspiracy, providing material support to terrorists, convicted, sentenced to—after an appeal—ten years in federal prison, and disbarred.

Lynne, 73, is a breast cancer survivor, and recently the cancer has returned. Her treatment in federal custody is, to say the least, far from optimal. That ten years, increased by order of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals from 28 months, may prove a death sentence for a courageous, principled, and brilliant defense lawyer, who has been a bane to the state since she first walked into a courtroom.

Andrew Napolitano, former judge and conservative Fox TV contributor, has called the Stewart conviction a perverse victory for the Justice Department and a travesty of justice designed to intimidate all lawyers from vigorously advocating for their clients. To find out how you can help win justice for Lynne Stewart, contact: lynnestewart.org.

From imprisoned nation, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.

©2013 Mumia Abu-Jamal

Sign the petition to free Lynne Stewart at lynnestewart.org. Send donations to: Lynne Stewart Organization, 1070 Dean Street, Brooklyn, New York 11216. Those wishing to correspond can send letters to: Lynne Stewart, #53504-054, Federal Medical Center, Carswell, P.O. Box 27137, Fort Worth, TX 76127.

Defending Labor Against Capitalist Assault

Workers Vanguard No. 1021	5 April 2013

TROTSKY

LENIN

Defending Labor Against Capitalist Assault

(Quote of the Week)

In early 1947, the Political Committee of the then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party passed the resolution excerpted below on its tasks regarding the trade unions. On the heels of the largest strike wave in U.S. history, the government had embarked on an anti-labor offensive that led to the June 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which banned militant union tactics and sought to purge reds from organized labor. Today as then, the fight to defend the unions requires struggling against the class collaborationism of the labor bureaucracy, which subordinates the unions to bourgeois politicians and the capitalist state.

The trade union bureaucracy has always been the most dangerous agency of the capitalist ruling class inside the ranks of labor. In their habits of life, in their social ideas and political outlook these capitalist-minded officials are very little different from the members of the National Association of Manufacturers. Within the unions the bureaucrats willingly undertake the assignment of disciplining the workers for the bosses, curbing their militancy, and restricting the functions of the unions within the narrowest economic limits. This role of the bureaucracy was driven home to many workers during the war when the union officialdom served as policemen for the government inside the trade unions, enforcing their no-strike pledge and shielding the employers against the just grievances of the workers.

Today the bureaucrats are cowering before the monopolist assault upon the rights of labor. In fact, a section of the union bureaucracy secretly welcomes some parts of the legislation before Congress which they themselves could use as weapons against the militancy of the rank and file....

The rest of the trade union leadership proposes to confine its fight against the congressional punitive legislation to the lobbying methods and dependence upon friendly capitalist politicians which have proved so costly to the unions and led them into their present blind alley.

That is why the militants must snap out of their lethargy, prod the unions into action and take the initiative to unite the labor movement for an all-out fight against the anti-labor drive.

—Socialist Workers Party Political Committee, “The Tasks of the Party in the Fight to Defend the Trade Unions” (21 January 1947)

Gun Rights and Shays’ Rebellion

Workers Vanguard No. 1021	5 April 2013

Gun Rights and Shays’ Rebellion

(Letter)

14 February 2013

Dear Workers Vanguard:

Issue No. 1015 of WV reprinted the 1989 Spartacist article on the Second Amendment concerning the right to form militias (usually mislabeled as the right to bear arms). The article states: “American colonial revolutionaries wanted the whole people armed...in order to be able to kill British soldiers and to forestall the threat of any standing army.”

Since the British surrender at Yorktown in 1783 effectively ended the American Revolution, it is not strictly true that the Second Amendment had to do with killing British soldiers. This telescopes historical events and leaves out the single most critical event in prompting the adoption of the Constitution (1787) and the Bill of Rights (1789): what is known as Shays’ Rebellion, in the winter of 1786-87.

Leonard Richards’ excellent 2002 book, Shays’s Rebellion: the American Revolution’s Final Battle, is based on a detailed demographic analysis of some 4,000 members of “Shays’ Rebellion.” Burdened by crippling taxes and lawsuits that put many people into debtor’s prison, much of Western Massachusetts rose up in the fall of 1786 and closed down court sessions whenever they were meeting. They referred to themselves as Regulators whose goal was “the Suppressing of tyrannical government in Massachusetts State” (P. 63).

Daniel Shays was a heavily decorated eight-year veteran officer of the American Revolution and had been presented with a gold-handled sword by Lafayette, under whom he served. The core of the Shays’ officer corps was long-time veterans of the Revolution, not a bunch of poor disgruntled debt-ridden farmers. The insurrection was extremely popular. In fact, when the State sent an army of about 1,000 men to suppress Shays, someone suggested they vote on supporting the insurrection. 800 men moved to the side of the road supporting Shays (12).

Prior to Shays’ Rebellion, efforts to adopt a centralized Constitution had failed. However, the specter of Shays’ Rebellion crystallized antidemocratic sentiment. Proponents of the Constitution justified it as necessary to limit the “excess of democracy” (134). Reports of the rebellion so concerned George Washington that he agreed to attend the constitutional convention in Philadelphia because, as Richards puts it, “the country desperately needed a stronger national government, one that could maintain order, one that could protect property holders like him, one that could suppress malcontents like those in Massachusetts.”

At first it was not at all clear that it would pass. In addition to the notorious “compromise” characterizing slaves as being only 3/5 of a person (which effectively gave control of the government to the South for the next 60 years), the Federalist supporters of the Constitution behind Alexander Hamilton succeeded in sticking a “Shaysites” label on all opponents of the Constitution.

One of the main arguments of those opposing the Constitution was that it had no Bill of Rights, a staple of English law, as the Spartacist article points out. The agreement to add a bill of rights to the constitution was probably the key factor in providing the narrow margin by which the Massachusetts convention approved it.

In short, Shays’ Rebellion was a key factor both in frightening the nascent bourgeoisie into adopting the Constitution and providing the impetus for the Bill of Rights. The Second Amendment is not about the right of an individual to go hunting or target shooting, but the right to organize an armed militia to “suppress tyrannical government.”

Fraternally,
John H.

WV replies:

John H. points out that Shays’ Rebellion in Western Massachusetts helped convince leaders of both the Southern slavocracy and the Northern merchant bourgeoisie that a new centralized federal government was necessary. It is also true that in parts of Massachusetts a significant portion of the population both sympathized with Shays and distrusted the Constitution. As to the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms was widely accepted in the English-speaking world well before Shays’ Rebellion, as were the other rights codified in the Bill of Rights. And in fact, the Second Amendment did have to do with combating British military forces, which would continue to pose a threat to the young republic for some years after Yorktown.

The intent of the amendment was to provide for a people’s militia as against a standing army. At the same time, as the Spartacist article excerpted in WV No. 1015 (11 January) underlined, “The right to ‘keep and bear arms’ was universally recognized as an individual right” by American colonial revolutionaries. This was part of the heritage of the English bourgeois revolution of the mid 17th century. The article noted: “Carrying forward the English tradition, the American revolutionaries expanded on this right, in light of their own experience in struggle against the British king, when they drew up the Constitution.”

The roots of the right to bear arms go back to the Middle Ages. As early as the 13th century, England’s yeoman farmers, who served in wars for “king and country,” were encouraged to arm themselves with longbows, the preeminent weapon of the time. During the Hundred Years War, batteries of yeoman archers were decisive in defeating the French at the battles of Crécy (1346) and Agincourt (1415). Of note is that England had a substantial population of free peasants, i.e., not feudal vassals. As early as the 15th century, the peasants were compelled by royal decree to personally own a longbow and to participate in weekly target practice. This obligation was widely resented, particularly since it meant being available to serve in militias. The customary practice of bearing arms was formalized as a “true, ancient, and indubitable” right in the 1689 Bill of Rights that issued from the English bourgeois revolution.

The right to bear arms is bound up with social defense—that is, safeguarding the interests of a class, nation or other social entity. The American Revolution itself began when British soldiers tried to confiscate weapons in Lexington, Massachusetts, in 1775. By 1777, several states had adopted their own declarations of rights guaranteeing the right to bear arms. Massachusetts followed suit in 1780, before Shays’ Rebellion.

But, as the Spartacist article noted: “As in any class society, there were some big, categorical exceptions to these ‘universal’ rights.” Like everything else about the American Revolution, the Second Amendment is particularly complicated by the fact that slavery was the bedrock of much of the country’s economy. The assumption was that white English-speaking Protestants were the ones wielding the guns. The Bill of Rights was adopted to placate much of the hostility toward the Constitution’s prescription of a strong national government, which came not only from supporters of Shays but from representatives of the Southern slavocracy. One of the first to suggest a Bill of Rights was Virginia planter Richard Henry Lee. With its protection of so-called states’ rights, the Tenth Amendment further codified the power of the slavocracy.

While the American War of Independence released a democratic spirit that resonated internationally, it fell to the Civil War to abolish slavery and affirm the basic democratic rights of citizenship and equal protection for the entire population, black and white. Yet in clearing the road for the development of capitalism, this Second American Revolution laid the basis not only for the growth of the working class but also for the consolidation of a central bourgeois state power. With the rise of U.S. imperialism by the end of the century, a standing army was firmly established. Fearful of an armed population and striving to maintain a monopoly of violence for its state, the ruling class has over the years sought to roll back the fundamental democratic right to bear arms. 

Le Deuxième Amendement à la Constitution américaine

Le Bolchévik nº 203	Mars 2013

Le Deuxième Amendement à la Constitution américaine

La révolution et le droit de porter des armes

Les archives de Spartacist

Nous reproduisons ci-dessous des extraits traduits d’un article de Spartacist édition anglaise n° 43-44, été 1989.

* * *

Ce n’est pas une nouveauté : les armes à feu ont été inventées pour tuer des gens. Et dans cette société divisée en classes, les citoyens « respectueux des lois » ont été plus d’une fois obligés de se défendre par la violence, y compris contre un pouvoir censé être légalement constitué. A t’on vraiment la mémoire aussi courte ? Rappelons-nous le massacre de Ludlow en 1914 dans le Colorado : 21 personnes, hommes, femmes et enfants, des familles de mineurs en grève, sont morts sous le feu des mitrailleuses actionnées par la milice d’Etat, qui n’était en réalité que l’armée privée de Rockefeller. Mais les travailleurs avaient été armés par l’United Mine Workers, le syndicat des mineurs, et à la grande horreur des patrons un millier de grévistes rendirent coup pour coup et balle pour balle pendant dix jours.

Rappelons-nous aussi le massacre des sidérurgistes de Republic Steel lors de la « Journée du souvenir » en 1937 dans le sud de Chicago. C’était le 30 mai, en plein milieu d’une grève nationale contre les « petites » entreprises sidérurgiques (c’est-à-dire toutes les entreprises à l’exception du trust géant de l’United States Steel Corporation). 1 500 manifestants, principalement des grévistes et leurs familles, défilaient dans une ambiance festive en direction de l’usine Republic Mill. Ils se retrouvèrent face à 200 flics en rangs serrés, et à un brusque tir de barrage de grenades lacrymogènes. Alors que les manifestants rebroussaient chemin et tentaient de s’enfuir, les flics chargèrent matraque en main et ouvrirent le feu. Dix ouvriers furent tués, quarante blessés – tous abattus d’une balle dans le dos. Les matraques des flics firent 101 blessés de plus, dont un enfant de huit ans. Les manifestants avaient été cette fois politiquement désarmés par leurs dirigeants syndicaux, des traîtres qui leur avaient dit qu’il fallait souhaiter la « bienvenue » aux flics envoyés pour maintenir l’ordre par les politiciens du Parti démocrate « ami des travailleurs ».

Nous nous souvenons aussi du massacre de Greensboro en 1979 : cinq militants des droits civiques et activistes syndicaux ont été abattus de sang-froid par des nazis et le Ku Klux Klan. Un informateur du FBI avait conduit ces fascistes sur le lieu du crime et un agent du Bureau fédéral de l’alcool, du tabac et des armes à feu leur avait montré comment utiliser et transporter des fusils semi-automatiques. Il y a aussi Philadelphie sous le maire noir Wilson Goode en 1985 : les flics ont attaqué l’immeuble de la communauté noire MOVE, tirant 10 000 projectiles en l’espace de 90 minutes avec des fusils d’assaut M-16 et des mitrailleuses M-60. Onze Noirs, dont cinq enfants, sont morts dans l’incendie déclenché par une charge d’explosifs C4 fournie par le FBI. Mais bien sûr personne parmi les « bonnes âmes » du lobby opposé aux armes à feu ne demande qu’on retire leurs armes aux flics.

Les libéraux blancs appartenant à la classe moyenne, qui prêchent un pacifisme absolu, habitent des appartements luxueux et des villas cossues où ils sont relativement en sécurité – ils ne s’attendent pas à voir les flics débarquer chez eux. Mais la classe dirigeante ne croit pas au pacifisme et elle prend soin d’armer son Etat jusqu’aux dents. Toute la problématique du contrôle des armes à feu tourne autour de la question : acceptez-vous que cet Etat ait le monopole des armes ? Et la réponse se reflète dans la polarisation croissante de cette société d’un point de vue social et racial. Le cœur de l’Etat, après tout, ce sont des « détachements spéciaux d’hommes armés », comme l’expliquait Lénine en 1917 dans sa brochure l’Etat et la révolution en s’appuyant sur les écrits de Marx et d’Engels. Et ce n’est pas notre Etat, mais celui des capitalistes ; ceux-ci défendent le monopole de l’Etat sur la force armée afin de perpétuer leur domination de classe.

Désarmer le peuple

Toute l’histoire du contrôle des armes à feu, c’est l’histoire des efforts de la classe dirigeante pour désarmer la population, particulièrement dans les périodes de luttes sociales. Pour justifier l’interdiction des armes automatiques, on évoque habituellement des gangsters comme Al Capone, mais cette interdiction n’a jamais empêché les gangsters de se procurer des mitraillettes Thompson, tout comme la pègre d’aujourd’hui a ses Uzi. Plus au fait, l’interdiction des armes automatiques en 1934 fut décidée pendant la récession des années 1930, quand le spectre de la révolution ouvrière hantait Washington (de fait, il y eut cette année-là dans trois villes des grèves générales dont les dirigeants se réclamaient du communisme). La loi fédérale de 1968 sur le contrôle des armes à feu a coïncidé avec le point culminant des révoltes dans les ghettos noirs. Et les tentatives récurrentes pour interdire les armes de poing bon marché, les « calibres spéciaux du samedi soir », ne visent qu’à rendre les armes à feu plus chères, et donc moins facilement accessibles aux classes défavorisées.

* * *

En Europe et en Amérique, c’est la lutte contre des régimes tyranniques, absolutistes et réactionnaires qui a enfanté le principe révolutionnaire du « droit de détenir et de porter des armes ». L’un des premiers actes de la Révolution française fut de saisir les armes et les munitions dans les arsenaux. Et chacun des soulèvements révolutionnaires qui ont suivi s’est accompagné d’actions similaires. Le droit de porter des armes a été codifié par le Deuxième Amendement de la Constitution américaine. Ce à quoi on assiste aujourd’hui, c’est à une offensive contre-révolutionnaire menée par une classe dirigeante décadente contre ces garanties constitutionnelles.

L’histoire révolutionnaire du Deuxième Amendement

Les termes même du Deuxième Amendement (ratifié en 1791), montrent clairement qu’il ne s’agissait pas d’autoriser un sport ou un hobby, mais une milice populaire :

« Une milice bien organisée étant nécessaire à la sécurité d’un Etat libre, il ne pourra être porté atteinte au droit du peuple de détenir et de porter des armes. »

Ce droit constitutionnel ne vise pas la chasse ou le tir sportif ; les révolutionnaires des colonies américaines voulaient que le peuple tout entier soit armé, et ils avaient en tête les armes de guerre – l’équivalent contemporain serait quelque chose comme les AK-47 ; il s’agissait de pouvoir tuer des soldats britanniques et d’écarter la menace, sous quelque forme que ce soit, d’une armée permanente, que les révolutionnaires considéraient à juste titre comme un fléau contre la liberté et la base de la tyrannie. De fait, la Révolution américaine fut déclenchée par les tentatives de l’armée britannique, et en particulier du général Thomas Gage, de forcer les colons à rendre leurs armes. Comme l’explique un article récent de Stephen P. Halbrook :

« La Guerre révolutionnaire fut déclenchée quand des miliciens à l’exercice à Lexington refusèrent de rendre leurs armes. Le récit de la journée du 19 avril 1775, largement diffusé dans le camp américain, commence par cet ordre aboyé par un officier britannique :
« “Dispersez-vous, maudits rebelles – déposez vos armes et dispersez-vous.” »

– American Rifleman, mars 1989

Il y a une continuité entre la guerre civile anglaise, la Révolution américaine et la guerre civile américaine [guerre de Sécession]. La question de l’armée permanente et les tentatives du roi pour lever des impôts destinés à la financer malgré l’opposition du parlement et de la bourgeoisie montante furent des facteurs décisifs dans le déclenchement de la révolution bourgeoise anglaise. Oliver Cromwell décapita le roi en 1649, et la révolution donna naissance à des principes démocratiques qui furent codifiés plusieurs dizaines d’années plus tard dans le Bill of Rights [Déclaration des droits] anglais de 1689, à un moment où la révolution était déjà en phase de reflux, et après une nouvelle tentative de réaction absolutiste sous Jacques II. Comme garantie contre la menace catholique et royaliste, la Déclaration des droits anglaise affirmait « le bien-fondé de leurs anciens droits et libertés », parmi lesquels :

« 6. Que la levée ou le maintien sur pied d’une armée dans le royaume en temps de paix sans le consentement du parlement viole la loi ;
« 7. Que les sujets protestants peuvent posséder des armes appropriées à leur condition pour se défendre, comme la loi les y autorise. »

Ce principe fut réitéré dans les Commentaires sur les lois anglaises rédigés au XVIII^e siècle par Blackstone, et qui sont aujourd’hui encore considérés comme le point de vue bourgeois faisant autorité sur la « Common Law » anglaise [corpus de textes et de jurisprudence qui fondent le droit anglais]. Le Claim of Rights [Proclamation des droits] écossais de 1689 réaffirmait un point identique concernant le droit de porter des armes. Cette déclaration s’appuyait en Ecosse sur l’usage communément accepté de porter des armes. Elle reflétait entre autres le fait que l’on comprenait que ce qui avait souvent fait la différence entre l’indépendance ou l’invasion et la conquête par les Britanniques, c’était la capacité ou non de mobiliser rapidement une force composée de combattants équipés et expérimentés. De plus, la Réforme écossaise avait été confrontée à des tentatives d’imposer l’absolutisme catholique avec le soutien de la France.

Les révolutionnaires américains partirent de la tradition anglaise pour étendre ce droit, à la lumière de leur propre expérience dans la lutte contre la monarchie britannique, quand ils rédigèrent la Constitution en 1787. Lors des congrès organisés dans les différents Etats pour la ratifier, le mot « milice » était compris comme signifiant le peuple en armes, et non une milice « triée sur le volet » comme la Garde nationale actuelle (qui peut être placée sous contrôle du gouvernement fédéral et dont les armes sont entreposées dans des arsenaux contrôlés par le gouvernement). Le droit « de détenir et de porter des armes » était unanimement compris comme un droit individuel. Comme le résumait Patrick Henry, « toute l’affaire est que chaque homme soit armé ».

Comme dans toute société de classes, il y avait des exceptions importantes et catégoriques à ces droits « universels ». Le Deuxième Amendement présumait qu’il s’agissait du droit des protestants blancs anglophones à détenir des armes pour s’en servir contre les Indiens, les esclaves noirs, les envahisseurs espagnols, hollandais et français et, cela va sans dire, contre l’ex-puissance coloniale britannique qui continuait à menacer la jeune république. Aujourd’hui en Afrique du Sud, la population blanche est individuellement lourdement armée afin de préserver son statut privilégié face à la majorité noire. De même, pendant la Révolution anglaise, le droit de porter des armes était dirigé contre les catholiques, qui étaient considérés (souvent à juste titre) comme les représentants de la réaction. Mais ce droit, appliqué en Irlande, fut un instrument d’exploitation accompagnée d’une oppression terrible. Il y avait en Irlande après 1688 une série de mesures anticatholiques, parmi lesquelles l’interdiction pour les catholiques de servir dans l’armée ou de détenir des armes. A la fin du XVIII^e siècle, des milices armées furent levées en Irlande et en Grande-Bretagne. En Irlande, il s’agissait majoritairement de « volontaires » protestants favorables à la lutte pour des réformes. On vota alors une « Arms and Gunpowder Bill » [Loi sur les armes et la poudre] qui obligeait les volontaires à rendre leurs armes. L’aile radicale, inspirée par les révolutions américaine et française, et dirigée par Wolfe Tone, réclamait le suffrage universel et l’abrogation de toutes les lois anticatholiques. La Rébellion irlandaise de 1798 fut la révolution bourgeoise avortée de l’Irlande.

Malgré ces limites au concept de « droits universels », il émanait de la guerre d’Indépendance américaine un esprit démocratique qui eut un impact international ; dans le domaine militaire, cela se voyait dans l’armement en masse de civils qu’on jugeait capables, du fait de leurs convictions idéologiques, de combattre pour leur gouvernement dans le cadre d’unités de guérilla dotés d’une large autonomie. Comme le faisait remarquer Friedrich Engels, lui-même grand soldat (en tant qu’officier héroïque et compétent dans le camp révolutionnaire en 1848) :

« Les soldats des armées européennes, soudées par la contrainte et une discipline sévère, n’étaient pas fiables pour combattre en ordre dispersé, mais en Amérique ces soldats étaient confrontés à une population qui, ignorante de l’ordre serré des soldats de ligne, tirait juste et savait très bien se servir d’un fusil. La nature du terrain les favorisait ; au lieu d’essayer d’exécuter des manœuvres dont ils étaient au début incapables, ils se rabattaient inconsciemment sur une guerre d’escarmouches. C’est pourquoi l’engagement de Lexington et Concord a inauguré une nouvelle époque dans l’histoire de l’infanterie. »

– « Infanterie », article écrit pour The New American Cyclopaedia

L’abolition de l’esclavage par l’armement des esclaves

Mais ce qu’on appelait la démocratie américaine acceptait l’esclavage, inscrit dans la Constitution elle-même. On estimait en général que si les esclaves avaient des fusils, ce serait la fin de l’esclavage. On leur refusait donc ce droit par un artifice juridique, approuvé par la Cour suprême dans son tristement célèbre arrêt Dred Scott de 1857 : « le peuple » voulait seulement dire « les citoyens », et les esclaves noirs ne faisaient pas partie des « citoyens ». Le juge Taney, président de la Cour suprême, faisait remarquer avec horreur que si les Noirs étaient des citoyens, il leur serait reconnu une longue liste de droits, dont le droit « de détenir et de porter des armes partout où ils iraient ».

John Brown faisait partie dans les années 1850 de la petite avant-garde de ceux qui avaient compris que seule la force des armes mettrait fin à l’esclavage, et il devint un martyr prophétique en menant son célèbre coup de main contre l’arsenal fédéral de Harpers Ferry en 1859. Au même moment, Frederick Douglass, ex-esclave, militant abolitionniste et ami intime de Brown, défendait ouvertement le « droit à l’autodéfense » individuelle quand des esclaves en fuite étaient traqués par des hommes de main des esclavagistes, même si cela signifiait « abattre ses poursuivants », comme cela pouvait arriver. « L’esclavage est un système de force brutale », expliquait-il. « Il faut lui opposer ses propres armes. »

La guerre civile éclata et la bourgeoisie du Nord commença en 1862-1863 à désespérer de la possibilité d’écraser militairement la rébellion des esclavagistes contre l’Union. Cela conduisit Lincoln à publier la Proclamation d’émancipation et à accepter de créer des régiments noirs. Douglass se saisit alors de cette occasion historique. « Hommes de couleur, aux armes ! » fut le mot d’ordre avec lequel il fit campagne pour l’engagement de volontaires noirs dans des unités comme le célèbre 54^e régiment du Massachusetts. Et les Noirs ne combattirent pas seulement dans l’armée. Pendant les émeutes racistes contre la conscription qui éclatèrent à New York en 1863, un journal noir de l’époque raconte :

« Les hommes de couleur qui étaient dignes de ce nom s’armèrent et mirent en place des piquets, jour et nuit, déterminés à mourir en défendant leur foyer […]. La plupart des hommes de couleur de Brooklyn qui habitaient encore dans cette ville étaient armés quotidiennement pour leur autodéfense. »

– cité par James McPherson dans The Negro’s Civil War (1965)

Dans la période de la Reconstruction après la guerre civile, le conflit principal dans le Sud opposait les Noirs récemment émancipés qui voulaient exercer le pouvoir politique aux héritiers des gouvernements esclavagistes qui cherchaient à remettre les anciens esclaves « à leur place ». Ce conflit portait sur la possibilité ou non pour les Noirs de posséder des armes. Ceci explique les « codes noirs » réactionnaires qui furent adoptés dans différents Etats sudistes pour essayer d’interdire aux Noirs de posséder des armes à feu. Une loi de l’Etat de Floride de 1865, par exemple, interdisait à « tout Noir » de posséder « des armes à feu ou des munitions d’aucune sorte », sous peine de mise au pilori et de flagellation. Le « Bureau des affranchis » du gouvernement fédéral réagit en diffusant partout des proclamations affirmant notamment que « tous les hommes, sans distinction de couleur, ont le droit de détenir et de porter des armes pour défendre leur foyer, leur famille ou eux-mêmes ». Mais la question allait être décidée par la force militaire : dans les Etats, les milices blanches racistes avaient déjà entrepris, avec l’aide privée du Ku Klux Klan, de désarmer les Noirs, qui avaient pour seule défense leurs propres armes et/ou l’Armée d’occupation de l’Union. Ce qui se passait dans le Sud est bien décrit dans cette lettre citée pendant une séance du Congrès en 1871 :

« Le Ku Klux Klan ouvrit alors le feu sur eux à travers la fenêtre ; une des balles frappa une femme de couleur […] et la blessa gravement au genou. Les hommes de couleur ouvrirent alors le feu sur le Ku Klux Klan et tuèrent leur chef ou capitaine sur place, sur les marches de la maison des hommes de couleur […]. »

Comme dans de nombreux cas similaires, le meneur du Klan s’avéra être « un policier et shérif adjoint ».

En même temps qu’il votait toutes sortes de mesures qui protégeaient les Noirs sur le papier, dont le Quatorzième Amendement à la Constitution qui garantit à tous « l’égale protection des lois », le Congrès trahit la promesse de l’émancipation des Noirs avec le « Compromis de 1877 » qui prévoyait que les troupes de l’Union devaient se retirer du Sud. Parce qu’ils ne pouvaient pas défendre leurs droits par la force des armes, les Noirs se virent dénier tous leurs droits. Il fallut le long et sanglant combat du mouvement des droits civiques, 80 ans plus tard, pour rétablir certains des droits que les Noirs avaient conquis pendant la « Deuxième Révolution américaine » que fut la guerre civile.

Désarmer la population

Karl Marx avait exprimé au XIX^e siècle l’espoir que l’Amérique serait un des rares pays où les travailleurs pourraient prendre le pouvoir de manière plus ou moins pacifique, parce que la classe dirigeante n’avait pratiquement pas d’armée permanente mais se reposait sur les milices. Mais avant la fin du siècle, les Etats-Unis étaient entrés dans le club impérialiste et ils développaient rapidement une armée permanente. Et au fil des ans, les droits énoncés par le Deuxième Amendement, supposé inviolable, ont été de plus en plus limités par des couches successives de lois qui ont transformé la possession d’armes à feu et l’autodéfense armée en privilèges de classe.

L’exemple le plus flagrant est la loi Sullivan de l’Etat de New York, qui rend illégale la possession d’un pistolet pour se défendre si vous ne faites pas partie de la poignée de gens bien introduits qui peuvent obtenir de la police une autorisation de « port d’arme » – des gens comme le magnat de l’immobilier Donald Trump et le propriétaire du New York Times Arthur O. Sulzberger (« Les hommes d’affaires choisissent de porter une arme à feu », New York City Business, 11 mars 1985). Cette loi a été adoptée en 1911, après qu’un ex-veilleur de nuit municipal qui s’estimait victime d’un licenciement abusif eut tiré au revolver sur le maire Hizzoner. Celui-ci survécut, mais cet incident servit de prétexte à des citoyens « éminents » comme John D. Rockefeller junior (celui qui était responsable du massacre de Ludlow) pour lancer une campagne pour le contrôle des armes à feu. Avec le New York Times en première ligne.

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Le tournant : 1848

L’appel à une milice populaire fut adopté par le mouvement prolétarien naissant tandis que la bourgeoisie abandonnait son propre mot d’ordre que « chaque homme soit armé ». Comme l’expliquait Friedrich Engels, les revendications des ouvriers pour l’égalité sociale constituaient « un danger pour l’ordre social établi » :

« Les ouvriers, qui la posaient, étaient encore armés ; pour les bourgeois qui se trouvaient au pouvoir, le désarmement des ouvriers était donc le premier devoir. Aussi après chaque révolution, acquise au prix du sang des ouvriers, éclate une nouvelle lutte, qui se termine par la défaite de ceux-ci. C’est en 1848 que cela arriva pour la première fois. »

– Introduction de 1891 à la Guerre civile en France de Marx

Avec l’entrée en scène du prolétariat en tant qu’acteur indépendant, « le peuple en armes » est devenu une idée archaïque car la population se polarisait selon la classe sociale. 1848 marqua le début du monde moderne qui est encore le nôtre, et la lutte de classe entre la bourgeoisie et le prolétariat est aujourd’hui encore une question non résolue historiquement.

La défaite des révolutions de 1848 en Europe fut suivie d’un bain de sang qui, écrivait Engels, montrait la « folle cruauté » dont la bourgeoisie était capable. « Et pourtant 1848 ne fut encore qu’un jeu d’enfant comparé à la rage de la bourgeoisie de 1871 », quand les ouvriers parisiens se soulevèrent et formèrent la Commune. La Commune prit une décision cruciale le 30 mars 1871 : elle « supprima la conscription et l’armée permanente et proclama la garde nationale, dont tous les citoyens valides devaient faire partie, comme la seule force armée ». A la chute de la Commune, en mai 1871, les troupes du gouvernement français, derrière lesquelles se tenaient les forces encore plus considérables de l’armée prussienne, procédèrent au désarmement de la classe ouvrière, suivi du massacre de 30 000 hommes, femmes et enfants sans défense.

La législation contre la possession des armes et pour le contrôle des armes à feu est étroitement corrélée à la situation sociale. Outre les événements majeurs que furent 1848 et 1871, toute l’histoire de la France depuis 1789 montre comment la classe dirigeante a utilisé le contrôle des armes à feu en fonction des menaces qui pesaient selon elle sur sa domination. Après la restauration de la monarchie en 1816, Louis XVIII chercha à désarmer la population en ordonnant que toutes les armes fussent remises aux autorités. Louis-Philippe en 1834 et Napoléon III en 1858 promulguèrent des lois restreignant l’accès aux armes. Un décret-loi du gouvernement Daladier de 1939 constitue aujourd’hui encore la base de toutes les lois françaises sur le contrôle des armes à feu, et des restrictions supplémentaires furent imposées en 1958, 1960 et 1961, pendant la crise qu’avait provoquée la guerre pour l’indépendance de l’Algérie. Cependant, le souvenir de l’insurrection armée des communards reste vivant dans la classe ouvrière française. Et la Résistance pendant la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, malgré le nationalisme et la collaboration de classes du Parti communiste, n’a pas exactement laissé un héritage pacifiste et anti-armes à feu.

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La Révolution bolchévique

La Révolution bolchévique a été faite par une classe ouvrière armée, conformément à ce que réclamait Lénine :

« En suivant la voie indiquée par l’expérience de la Commune de Paris de 1871 et de la révolution russe de 1905, le prolétariat doit organiser et armer tous les éléments pauvres et exploités de la population, afin qu’eux-mêmes prennent directement en main les organes du pouvoir d’Etat et forment eux-mêmes les institutions de ce pouvoir. »

– « Lettres de loin, Lettre 3, De la milice prolétarienne » (mars 1917)

Les milices ouvrières des Gardes rouges soviétiques combattirent dans les premières batailles de la guerre civile qui s’ensuivit. Comme toutes les milices, les Gardes rouges ne furent pas très efficaces au début, mais dans une guerre la force se mesure toujours relativement à celle de l’ennemi, et chez les blancs le moral était bas. Des miliciens peuvent devenir des combattants professionnels s’ils survivent assez longtemps pour acquérir de l’expérience. Comme l’expliquait en décembre 1921 Léon Trotsky, fondateur de l’Armée rouge, « dans les premiers temps ce sont eux [les blancs] qui nous ont appris à manœuvrer ». Et les soviets eurent finalement le dessus face aux forces combinées de 14 corps expéditionnaires impérialistes et alliés et des Gardes blancs tsaristes.

Les bolchéviks étaient favorables à une milice socialiste « en liaison avec l’abolition des classes », mais ils furent contraints par la lutte contre la contre-révolution de construire une armée permanente. Dans sa préface au cinquième tome de ses écrits militaires (Comment s’arma la révolution, 1921-1923), Trotsky expliquait que le problème était à la source la pauvreté et l’arriération de la Russie, qui faisait que « les casernes rouges constituent un environnement culturel incomparablement plus élevé que celui auquel le soldat de l’Armée rouge est habitué chez lui ». Mais quand Staline, à la tête d’une bureaucratie conservatrice, usurpa le pouvoir politique, il plaça l’armée permanente sur un piédestal, allant jusqu’à singer les grades et les privilèges des armées capitalistes, ce que dénonça Trotsky :

« Mais aucune armée ne peut être plus démocratique que le régime qui la nourrit. Le bureaucratisme, avec sa routine et sa suffisance, ne dérive pas des besoins spéciaux de l’organisation militaire, mais des besoins politiques des dirigeants. »

– la Révolution trahie (1936)

Après avoir restauré la caste des officiers 18 ans après son abolition par la révolution, Staline décapita ensuite l’Armée rouge à la veille de l’invasion hitlérienne.

Alors que planait le spectre d’une nouvelle guerre mondiale, la Quatrième Internationale de Trotsky insistait dans son Programme de transition de 1938 que « le seul désarmement qui puisse prévenir ou arrêter la guerre, c’est le désarmement de la bourgeoisie par les ouvriers. Mais, pour désarmer la bourgeoisie, il faut que les ouvriers eux-mêmes soient armés. » Dans son programme de lutte révolutionnaire contre l’impérialisme et contre la guerre figurait la « substitution à l’armée permanente, c’est-à-dire de caserne, d’une milice populaire en liaison indissoluble avec les usines, les mines, les fermes, etc. » Sa revendication d’une instruction militaire et de l’armement des ouvriers et des paysans sous le contrôle immédiat des comités ouvriers et paysans était accompagnée de l’exigence d’une « indépendance complète des organisations ouvrières à l’égard du contrôle militaire et policier ».

Avoir des fusils n’est pas un talisman magique, mais une population désarmée sera impitoyablement massacrée par cette classe dirigeante cruelle dont l’Etat est armé jusqu’aux dents. Car comme le résumait Karl Marx dans le Capital (1867), « la force est l’accoucheuse de toute vieille société en travail ».