From The Marxist Archives- The Russian Revolution and the Fight for Black Freedom

Workers Vanguard No. 891	27 April 2007

TROTSKY

LENIN

The Russian Revolution and the Fight for Black Freedom

(Quote of the Week)

As Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon explained in a 1959 essay, Lenin and Trotsky’s Communist International won American Communists to the understanding that the fight against the special oppression of black people was of central importance to the proletarian revolutionary struggle.

The earlier socialist movement, out of which the Communist Party was formed, never recognized any need for a special program on the Negro question. It was considered purely and simply as an economic problem, part of the struggle between the workers and the capitalists; nothing could be done about the special problems of discrimination and inequality this side of socialism….

It is customary to attribute the progress of the Negro movement, and the shift of public opinion in favor of its claims, to the changes brought about by the First World War. But the biggest thing that came out of the First World War, the event that changed everything, including the prospects of the American Negro, was the Russian Revolution. The influence of Lenin and the Russian Revolution, even debased and distorted as it later was by Stalin, and then filtered through the activities of the Communist Party in the United States, contributed more than any other influence from any source to the recognition, and more or less general acceptance, of the Negro question as a special problem of American society—a problem which cannot be simply subsumed under the general heading of the conflict between capital and labor, as it was in the pre-communist radical movement….

Everything new on the Negro question came from Moscow—after the Russian Revolution began to thunder its demand throughout the world for freedom and equality for all national minorities, all subject peoples and all races—for all the despised and rejected of the earth.

—James P. Cannon, “The Russian Revolution and the American Negro Movement,” The First Ten Years of American Communism (1962)

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The Russian Revolution and the Black Struggle in the United States

James P. Cannon

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Written: Summer 1959
Source: Fighting for Socialism in the “American Century”; First published in the Summer 1959 issue of International Socialist Review, under the title “The Russian Revolution and the American Negro Movement”. © Resistance Books 2001 Published by Resistance Books 23 Abercrombie St, Chippendale NSW 2008, Permission for on-line publication provided by Resistance Books for use by the James P. Cannon Internet Archive in 2003.
Transcription\HTML Markup:David Walters

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All through the first 10 years of American communism, the party was preoccupied with the Negro question, and gradually arrived at a policy different and superior to that of traditional American radicalism. Yet in my published recollections of this period, the Negro question does not appear anywhere as the subject of internal controversy between the major factions. The reason for this was that none of the American leaders came up with any new ideas on this explosive problem on their own account; and none of the factions, as such, sponsored any of the changes in approach, attitude and policy which were gradually effected by the time the party finished its first decade.
The main discussions on the Negro question took place in Moscow, and the new approach to the problem was elaborated there. As early as the Second Congress of the Comintern in 1920, “The Negroes in America” was a point on the agenda, and a preliminary discussion of the question took place. Historical research will prove conclusively that CP policy on the Negro question got its initial impulse from Moscow, and also that all further elaborations of this policy, up to and including the adoption of the “self-determination” slogan in 1928 came from Moscow.
Under constant prodding and pressure from the Russians in the Comintern, the party made a beginning with Negro work in its first 10 years; but it recruited very few Negroes and its influence in the Negro community didn’t amount to much. From this it is easy to draw the pragmatic conclusion that all the talk and bother about policy in that decade, from New York to Moscow, was much ado about nothing, and that the results of Russian intervention were completely negative.
That is, perhaps, the conventional assessment in these days of the Cold War when aversion to all things Russian is the conventional substitute for considered opinion. But it is not true history—not by a long shot. The first 10 years of American communism are too short a period for definitive judgment of the results of the new approach to the Negro question imposed on the American party by the Comintern.
Historical treatment of Communist Party policy and action on the Negro question, and of Russian influence in shaping it in the first 10 years of the party’s existence, however exhaustive and detailed, cannot be adequate unless the inquiry is projected into the next decade. It took the first 10 years for the young party to get fairly started in this previously unexplored field. The spectacular achievements in the ’30s cannot he understood without reference to this earlier decade of change and reorientation. That’s where the later actions and results came from.
I I I
A serious analysis of the whole complex process has to begin with recognition that the American communists in the early ’20s, like all other radical organisations of that and earlier times, had nothing to start with on the Negro question but an inadequate theory, a false or indifferent attitude and the adherence of a few individual Negroes of radical or revolutionary bent.
The earlier socialist movement, out of which the Communist Party was formed, never recognised any need for a special program on the Negro question. It was considered purely and simply as an economic problem, part of the struggle between the workers and the capitalists; nothing could be done about the special problems of discrimination and inequality this side of socialism.
The best of the earlier socialists were represented by Debs, who was friendly to all races and purely free from prejudice. But the limitedness of the great agitator’s view on this far from simple problem was expressed in his statement: “We have nothing special to offer the Negro, and we cannot make separate appeals to all the races. The Socialist Party is the party of the whole working class, regardless of colour—the whole working class of the whole world.” (Ray Ginger: The Bending Cross) That was considered a very advanced position at the time, but it made no provision for active support of the Negro’s special claim for a little equality here and now, or in the foreseeable future, on the road to socialism.
And even Debs, with his general formula that missed the main point—the burning issue of ever-present discrimination against the Negroes every way they turned—was far superior in this regard, as in all others, to Victor Berger, who was an outspoken white supremacist. Here is a summary pronouncement from a Berger editorial in his Milwaukee paper, the Social Democratic Herald: “There can be no doubt that the Negroes and mulattoes constitute a lower race.” That was “Milwaukee socialism” on the Negro question, as expounded by its ignorant and impudent leader-boss. A harried and hounded Negro couldn’t mix that very well with his Milwaukee beer, even if he had a nickel and could find a white man’s saloon where he could drink a glass of beer—at the back end of the bar.
Berger’s undisguised chauvinism was never the official position of the party. There were other socialists, like William English Walling who was an advocate of equal rights for the Negroes, and one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People in 1909. But such individuals were a small minority among the socialists and radicals before the First World War and the Russian Revolution.
The inadequacy of traditional socialist policy on the Negro question is amply documented by the historians of the movement, Ira Kipnis and David Shannon. The general and prevailing attitude of the Socialist Party toward the Negroes is summed up by Shannon as follows:
“They were not important in the party, the party made no special effort to attract Negro members, and the party was generally disinterested in, if not actually hostile to, the effort of Negroes to improve their position in American capitalist society.” And further: “The party held that the sole salvation of the Negro was the same as the sole salvation of the white: 'Socialism’.”
In the meantime, nothing could be done about the Negro question as such, and the less said about it the better. Sweep it under the rug.
Such was the traditional position inherited by the early Communist Party from the preceding socialist movement out of which it had come. The policy and practice of the trade union movement was even worse. The IWW barred nobody from membership because of “race, colour or creed”. But the predominant AFL unions, with only a few exceptions, were lily-white job trusts. They also had nothing special to offer the Negroes; nothing at all, in fact.
I I I
The difference—and it was a profound difference—between the Communist Party of the ’20s and its socialist and radical ancestors, was signified by its break with this tradition. The American communists in the early days, under the influence and pressure of the Russians in the Comintern, were slowly and painfully learning to change their attitude; to assimilate the new theory of the Negro question as a special question of doubly-exploited second-class citizens, requiring a program of special demands as part of the overall program—and to start doing something about it.
The true importance of this profound change, in all its dimensions, cannot be adequately measured by the results in the ’20s. The first 10 years have to be considered chiefly as the preliminary period of reconsideration and discussion and change of attitude and policy on the Negro question—in preparation for future activity in this field.
The effects of this change and preparation in the ’20s, brought about by the Russian intervention, were to manifest themselves explosively in the next decade. The ripely favourable conditions for radical agitation and organisation among the Negroes, produced by the Great Depression, found the Communist Party ready to move in this field as no other radical organisation in this country had ever done before.
I I I
Everything new and progressive on the Negro question came from Moscow, after the revolution of 1917, and as a result of the revolution—not only for the American communists who responded directly, but for all others concerned with the question.
By themselves, the American communists never thought of anything new or different from the traditional position of American radicalism on the Negro question. That, as the above quotations from Kipnis’ and Shannon’s histories show, was pretty weak in theory and still weaker in practice. The simplistic formula that the Negro problem was merely economic, a part of the capital-labour problem, never struck fire among the Negroes—who knew better even if they didn’t say so; they had to live with brutal discrimination every day and every hour.
There was nothing subtle or concealed about this discrimination. Everybody knew that the Negro was getting the worst of it at every turn, but hardly anybody cared about it or wanted to do anything to try to moderate or change it. The 90% white majority of American society, including its working-class sector, North as well as South, was saturated with prejudice against the Negro; and the socialist movement reflected this prejudice to a considerable extent—even though, in deference to the ideal of human brotherhood, the socialist attitude was muted and took the form of evasion. The old theory of American radicalism turned out in practice to be a formula for inaction on the Negro front, and—incidentally—a convenient shield for the dormant racial prejudices of the white radicals themselves.
The Russian intervention changed all that, and changed it drastically, and for the better. Even before the First World War and the Russian Revolution, Lenin and the Bolsheviks were distinguished from all other tendencies in the international socialist and labour movement by their concern with the problems of oppressed nations and national minorities, and affirmative support of their struggles for freedom, independence and the right of self-determination. The Bolsheviks gave this support to all “people without equal rights” sincerely and earnestly, but there was nothing “philanthropic” about it. They also recognised the great revolutionary potential in the situation of oppressed peoples and nations, and saw them as important allies of the international working class in the revolutionary struggle against capitalism.
After November 1917 this new doctrine—with special emphasis on the Negroes—began to be transmitted to the American communist movement with the authority of the Russian Revolution behind it. The Russians in the Comintern started on the American communists with the harsh, insistent demand that they shake off their own unspoken prejudices, pay attention to the special problems and grievances of the American Negroes, go to work among them, and champion their cause in the white community.
It took time for the Americans, raised in a different tradition, to assimilate the new Leninist doctrine. But the Russians followed up year after year, piling up the arguments and increasing the pressure on the American communists until they finally learned and changed, and went to work in earnest. And the change in the attitude of the American communists, gradually effected in the ’20s, was to exert a profound influence in far wider circles in the later years.
I I I
The Communist Party’s break with the traditional position of American radicalism on the Negro question coincided with profound changes which had been taking place among the Negroes themselves. The large-scale migration from the agricultural regions of the South to the industrial centres of the North was greatly accelerated during the First World War, and continued in the succeeding years. This brought some improvement in their conditions of life over what they had known in the Deep South, but not enough to compensate for the disappointment of being herded into ghettoes and still subjected to discrimination on every side.
The Negro movement, such as it was at the time, patriotically supported the First World War “to make the world safe for democracy”; and 400,000 Negroes served in the armed forces. They came home looking for a little democratic payoff for themselves, but couldn’t find much anywhere. Their new spirit of self-assertion was answered by a mounting score of lynchings and a string of race riots across the country, North as well as South.
All this taken together—the hopes and the disappointments, the new spirit of self-assertion and the savage reprisals—contributed to the emergence of a new Negro movement in the making. Breaking sharply with the Booker T. Washington tradition of accommodation to a position of inferiority in a white man’s world, a new generation of Negroes began to press their demand for equality.
I I I
What the emerging new movement of the American Negroes—a 10% minority—needed most, and lacked almost entirely, was effective support in the white community in general and in the labour movement, its necessary ally, in particular. The Communist Party, aggressively championing the cause of the Negroes and calling for an alliance of the Negro people and the militant labour movement, came into the new situation as a catalytic agent at the right time.
It was the Communist Party, and no other, that made the Herndon and Scottsboro cases national and worldwide issues and put the Dixiecrat legal-lynch mobs on the defensive—for the first time since the collapse of Reconstruction. Party activists led the fights and demonstrations to gain fair consideration for unemployed Negroes at the relief offices, and to put the furniture of evicted Negroes back into their empty apartments. It was the Communist Party that demonstratively nominated a Negro for Vice-President in 1932—something no other radical or socialist party had ever thought about doing.
By such and similar actions and agitation in the ’30s, the party shook up all more or less liberal and progressive circles of the white majority, and began to bring about a radical change of attitude on the Negro question. At the same time, the party became a real factor among the Negroes, and the Negroes themselves advanced in status and self-confidence—partly as a result of the Communist Party’s aggressive agitation on the issue.
The facts are not disposed of by saying: The communists had their own axe to grind. All agitation for Negro rights is grist to the mill of the Negro movement; and the agitation of the communists was more energetic and more effective than any other at that time—by far.
These new developments appear to contain a contradictory twist which, as far as I know, has never been confronted or explained. The expansion of communist influence in the Negro movement in the ’30s happened despite the fact that one of the new slogans imposed on the party by the Comintern—the slogan of “self-determination”—about which the most to-do was made and the most theses and resolutions were written, and which was even touted as the main slogan, never seemed to fit the actual situation. The slogan of “self-determination” found little or no acceptance in the Negro community after the collapse of the separatist movement led by Garvey. Their trend was mainly toward integration, with equal rights.
In practice the CP jumped over this contradiction. When the party adopted the slogan of “self-determination”, it did not drop its aggressive agitation for Negro equality and Negro rights on every front. On the contrary, it intensified and extended this agitation. That’s what the Negroes wanted to hear, and that’s what made the difference. It was the CP’s agitation and action under the latter slogan that brought the results, without the help, and probably despite, the unpopular “self-determination” slogan and all the theses written to justify it.
I I I
The communists turned Stalinists, in the “Third Period” of ultra-radicalism, carried out their activity in the Negro field with all the crooked demagogy, exaggerations and distortions which are peculiar to them and inseparable from them. But in spite of that the main appeal to equal rights came through and found an echo in the Negro community. For the first time since the abolitionists, the Negroes saw an aggressive, militant dynamic group of white people championing their cause. Not a few philanthropists and pallid liberals this time, but the hard-driving Stalinists of the ’30s, at the head of a big, upsurging radical movement generated by the depression. There was power in their drive in those days, and it was felt in many areas of American life.
The first response of many Negroes was favourable; and the party’s reputation as a revolutionary organisation identified with the Soviet Union, was probably more a help than a hindrance. The Negro upper crust, seeking respectability, tended to shy away from anything radical; but the rank and file, the poorest of the poor who had nothing to lose, were not afraid. The party recruited thousands of Negro members in the ’30s and became, for a time, a real force in the Negro community. The compelling reason was their policy on the issue of equal rights and their general attitude, which they had learned from the Russians, and their activity on the new line.
I I I
In the ’30s, Communist Party influence and action were not restricted to the issue of “civil rights” in general. They also operated powerfully to reshape the labour movement and help the Negro workers gain a place in it which had previously been denied. The Negro workers themselves, who had done their share in the great struggles to create the new unions, were pressing their own claims more aggressively than ever before. But they needed help, they needed allies.
The Communist Party militants stepped into this role at the critical point in the formative days of the new unions. The policy and agitation of the Communist Party at that time did more, 10 times over, than any other to help the Negro workers to rise to a new status of at least semi-citizenship in the new labour movement created in the ’30s under the banner of the CIO.
I I I
It is customary to attribute the progress of the Negro movement, and the shift of public opinion in favour of its claims, to the changes brought about by the First World War. But the biggest thing that came out of the First World War, the event that changed everything, including the prospects of the American Negro, was the Russian Revolution. The influence of Lenin and the Russian Revolution, even debased and distorted as it later was by Stalin, and then filtered through the activities of the Communist Party in the United States, contributed more than any other influence from any source to the recognition, and more or less general acceptance, of the Negro question as a special problem of American society—a problem which cannot be simply subsumed under the general heading of the conflict between capital and labour, as it was in the pre-communist radical movement.
It adds something, but not much, to say that the Socialist Party, the liberals and the more or less progressive labour leaders went along with the new definition, and gave some support to the claims of the Negroes. That’s just what they did; they went along. They had no independent, worked-out theory and policy of their own; where would they get it—out of their own heads? Hardly. They all followed in the wake of the CP on this question in the ’30s.
The Trotskyists, and other dissident radical groups—who also had learned from the Russians—contributed what they could to the fight for Negro rights; but the Stalinists, dominating the radical movement, dominated in the Negro field too.
I I
Everything new on the Negro question came from Moscow—after the Russian Revolution began to thunder its demand throughout the world for freedom and equality for all national minorities, all subject peoples and all races—for all the despised and rejected of the Earth. This thunder is still rolling, louder than ever, as the daily headlines testify.
The American communists responded first, and most emphatically, to the new doctrine from Russia. But the Negro people, and substantial sections of American white society, responded indirectly, and are still responding—whether they recognise it or not.
The present official leaders of the “civil rights” movement of the American Negroes, more than a little surprised at its expanding militancy, and the support it is getting in the white population of the country, scarcely suspect how much the upsurging movement owes to the Russian Revolution which they all patriotically disavow.
The Reverend Martin Luther King did remark, at the time of the Montgomery boycott battle, that their movement was part of the worldwide struggle of the coloured peoples for independence and equality. He should have added that the colonial revolutions, which are indeed a powerful ally of the Negro movement in America, got their starting impulse from the Russian Revolution—and are stimulated and strengthened from day to day by the continuing existence of this revolution in the shape of the Soviet Union and the new China, which white imperialism suddenly “lost”.
Indirectly, but all the more convincingly, the most rabid anti-sovieteers, among them the liberal politicians and the official labour leaders, testify to this when they say: The Little Rock scandal and things like that shouldn’t happen because it helps communist propaganda among the dark-skinned colonial people. Their fear of “communist propaganda”, like some other people’s fear of the Lord, makes them virtuous.
It is now conventional for labour leaders and liberals—in the North—to sympathise with the Negro struggle for a few elementary rights as human beings. It is the Right Thing To Do, the mark of civilised intelligence. Even the ex-radicals, turned into anti-communist “liberals” of a sort—a very poor sort—are all now pridefully “correct” in their formal support of “civil rights” and their opposition to Negro segregation and other forms of discrimination. But how did they all get that way?
It never occurs to the present-day liberals to wonder why their counterparts of a previous generation—with a few notable individual exceptions—never thought of this new and more enlightened attitude toward the Negroes before Lenin and the Russian Revolution upset the apple cart of the old, well-established and complacently accepted separate-but-unequal doctrine. The American anti-communist liberals and labour officials don’t know it, but some of the Russian influence they hate and fear so much even rubbed off on them.
I I I
Of course, as everybody knows, the American Stalinists eventually fouled up the Negro question, as they fouled up every other question. They sold out the struggle for Negro rights during the Second World War, in the service of Stalin’s foreign policy—as they sold out striking American workers, and rooted for the prosecution in the first Smith Act trial of the Trotskyists at Minneapolis in 1941, for the same basic reason.
Everybody knows that now. The chickens finally came home to roost, and the Stalinists themselves have felt impelled to make public confessions of some of their treachery and some of their shame. But nothing, neither professed repentance for crimes that can’t be concealed, nor boasts of former virtues that others are unwilling to remember, seem to do them any good. The Communist Party, or rather what is left of it, is so discredited and despised that it gets little or no recognition and credit today for its work in the Negro field in those earlier days—when it had far-reaching and, in the main, progressive consequences.
It is not my duty or my purpose to help them out. The sole aim of this condensed review is to set straight a few facts about the early days of American communism—for the benefit of inquiring students of a new generation who want to know the whole truth, however the chips may fall, and to learn something from it.
The new policy on the Negro question, learned from the Russians in the first 10 years of American communism, enabled the Communist Party in the ’30s to advance the cause of the Negro people; and to expand its own influence among them on a scale never approached by any radical movement before that time. These are facts of history; not only of the history of American communism, but of the history of the Negro struggle for emancipation too.
I I I
For those who look to the future these facts are important; an anticipation of things to come. By their militant activity in earlier years, the Stalinists gave a great impetus to the new Negro movement. Then, their betrayal of the Negro cause in the Second World War cleared the way for the inch-at-a-time gradualists who have been leading the movement unchallenged ever since.
The policy of gradualism, of promising to free the Negro within the framework of the social system that subordinates and degrades him, is not working out. It does not go to the root of the problem. The aspirations of the Negro people are great and so are the energies and emotions expended in their struggle. But the concrete gains of their struggle up to date are pitifully meagre. They have gained a few inches, but the goal of real equality is miles and miles away.
The right to occupy a vacant seat on a bus; the token integration of a handful of Negro children in a few public schools; a few places open for individual Negroes in public office and some professions; fair employment rights on the books, but not in practice; the formally and legally recognised right to equality which is denied in practice at every turn—that’s the way it is today, 96 years after the Emancipation Proclamation.
There has been a big change in the outlook and demands of the Negroes’ movement since the days of Booker T. Washington, but no fundamental change in their actual situation. This contradiction is building up to another explosion and another change of policy and leadership. In the next stage of its development, the American Negro movement will be compelled to turn to a more militant policy than gradualism, and to look for more reliable allies than capitalist politicians in the North who are themselves allied with the Dixiecrats of the South. The Negroes, more than any others in this country, have reason and right to be revolutionary.
An honest workers’ party of the new generation will recognise this revolutionary potential of the Negro struggle, and call for a fighting alliance of the Negro people and the labour movement in a common revolutionary struggle against the present social system.
Reforms and concessions, far more important and significant than any yet attained, will be by-products of this revolutionary alliance. They will be fought for and attained at every stage of the struggle. But the new movement will not stop with reforms, nor be satisfied with concessions. The movement of the Negro people and the movement of militant labour, united and coordinated by a revolutionary party, will solve the Negro problem in the only way it can be solved—by a social revolution.
The first efforts of the Communist Party along these lines a generation ago will be recognised and appropriated. Not even the experience of the Stalinist betrayal will be wasted. The memory of this betrayal will be one of the reasons why the Stalinists will not be the leaders next time.

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ANTIWAR PROTEST

Stop U.S. War & all forms of intervention against Syria!

Self-determination free from outside intervention

for the Syrian people!

Saturday, July 20, Park St., 1:00 pm

The White House’s announcement that it would begin openly supplying arms to the opposition in Syria and is considering a “no fly” zone over Syria is a dramatic escalation of ongoing U.S. involvement in war against that country. The U.S. has been training opposition forces and coordinating operations coming from neighboring countries. Israel, the largest recipient of U.S. military aid, bombed Syria, and other close U.S. allies supplying weapons are police-state monarchies Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

Just as the false claim of “weapons of mass destruction” was used as justification for the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the unproved allegations that chemical weapons were used by the Syrian military mask the real motives of Washington and its allies. Their aim, as in Iraq, is to carry out “regime change,” as part of the drive to dominate this oil-rich and strategic region.

While the U.S. government cuts basic services and has eliminated hundreds of thousands of public sector workers jobs it finds unlimited billions available for wars of aggression and NSA surveillance of every American.

National Days of Action to Oppose U.S. War on Syria

No more wars – U.S. out of the Middle East!

Fund people’s needs, not the military!

United National Antiwar Coalition, United for Justice with Peace, International Action Center, ANSWER

Veterans For Peace-Smedley Butler Brigade, Committee for Peace and Human Rights

www.UNACpeace.org

U.S. Capitalism: Racist Divide-and-Rule

Workers Vanguard No. 1027 12 July 2013 TROTSKY LENIN U.S. Capitalism: Racist Divide-and-Rule (Quote of the Week) Writing during the outbreak of the 1950s civil rights struggles, George Breitman, a leader of the then-revolutionary Socialist Workers Party, explained that the bourgeoisie’s strangling of Reconstruction in the years following the Civil War signified that anti-black racism would endure as a fundamental feature of American capitalism. Today, the deepening immiseration of the black masses and the rollback of many gains of the civil rights movement underscore that genuine equality for black people will be achieved only through a socialist revolution carried out by the multiracial proletariat. The striking thing about the Reconstruction period which followed the abolition of slavery was the speed with which old ideas and customs began to change and break up. In the course of a few short years millions of whites began to recover from the racist poisons to which they had been subjected from their birth, to regard Negroes as equals and to work together with them amicably, under the protection of the federal government, in the solution of joint problems. The obliteration of anti-Negro prejudice was started in the social revolution that we know by the name of Reconstruction, and it would have been completed if Reconstruction had been permitted to develop further. But Reconstruction was halted and then strangled—by the capitalists, acting now in alliance with the former slaveholders. No exploiting class lightly discards weapons that can help maintain its rule, and anti-Negro prejudice had already demonstrated its potency as a force to divide, disrupt and disorient oppressed classes in an exploitative society. After some vacillation and internal struggle that lasted through most of Reconstruction, the capitalist class decided it could make use of anti-Negro prejudice for its own purposes. The capitalists adopted it, nursed it, fed it, gave it new clothing, and infused it with a vigor and an influence it had never commanded before. Anti-Negro prejudice today operates in a different social setting and therefore in a somewhat different form than a century ago, but it was retained after slavery for essentially the same reason that it was introduced under the slave system that developed from the sixteenth century on—for its convenience as an instrument of exploitation; and for that same reason it will not be abandoned by the ruling class of any exploitative society in this country. —George Breitman, “When Anti-Negro Prejudice Began,” Fourth International (Spring 1954)

Asylum Now for Edward Snowden!

Workers Vanguard No. 1027	12 July 2013

 

Asylum Now for Edward Snowden!

JULY 8—Five weeks after the London Guardian printed accounts of the massive collection of phone records and Internet spying by the National Security Agency (NSA), former agency contractor Edward Snowden, who provided the documentation, by all accounts remains holed up in the transit section of a Moscow airport. Stung by Snowden’s revelations, the U.S. imperialists are seeking their pound of flesh. The State Department weeks ago revoked Snowden’s passport to prevent his travel as Washington fights to return him to the U.S., where he would face decades in prison on charges of espionage, theft and conversion of government property. Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia to their credit have offered him political asylum. In tearing yet another veil off the U.S. spying machine, Snowden performed a great service to workers and the oppressed, in the U.S. and internationally, who are the ultimate target of the capitalist rulers’ apparatus of state repression.

Early speculation that Ecuador would offer asylum to Snowden was dashed when President Rafael Correa backtracked, stating on June 27 that such a request could only be considered if Snowden were on Ecuadorian territory. This came after Vice President Joe Biden worked the phones to put pressure on leaders of Snowden’s possible destination countries. The arm-twisting culminated last week in a chilling act of imperial arrogance against the president of impoverished Bolivia, Evo Morales. After Morales announced in Moscow that he would consider giving asylum to Snowden, Spain, Portugal, Italy and France, clearly acting at the behest of the U.S., closed their airspace on July 2 to block Morales’ plane on the return trip to La Paz, claiming they had information that Snowden was on board. Diverted from their planned route, which had been agreed to in advance, pilots in fear of running out of fuel were forced to land in Vienna, where the plane was kept for 14 hours before being allowed to depart.

Bolivia’s ambassador to the United Nations rightly denounced this as an act of aggression. The country’s vice president, Álvaro García Linera, bluntly stated that Morales was “kidnapped by imperialism.” Bolivia formally filed a complaint with the United Nations on July 3, one day after Ban Ki-moon, the secretary general of this tool of imperialism, denounced Snowden for “misuse” of access to information. Outrage over the incident resonated across Latin America. Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, denounced the “vestiges of colonialism,” adding, “We believe this constitutes not only the humiliation of a sister nation but of all South America.” The bourgeois populist regimes of Venezuela, Ecuador and Uruguay also protested, while newspapers and political commentators recalled centuries of U.S. interventions, invasions and occupations.

While the European “democracies” initially preened as champions of the privacy rights being trampled in the U.S., it did not take long before Germany was revealed to be working on massively increasing its capacity to intercept communications and that France is engaged in the same kind of mass data collection as the NSA. These same governments huffed and puffed late last month when it was revealed that the NSA had bugged their diplomatic offices in Washington, the UN and Brussels. In a rare moment of candor, Obama dismissed spying among friends as commonplace, saying, “That’s how intelligence services operate.” Behind the imperialists’ diplomatic skullduggery—conducted at times with and at times against one another—is their drive to exploit the world’s workers and oppressed in accord with their distinct interests.

Edward Snowden is a courageous young man who is paying a steep price for making public some of the secret workings of the capitalist state. Others who have shed light on the government’s domestic spying include retired Bay Area AT&T worker Mark Klein, who came forward seven years ago to reveal how the NSA had tapped into AT&T’s fiber-optic cables in order to access much of the country’s Internet data flow. Like the court-martial of Bradley Manning for his revelations of U.S. imperialist barbarity, the government’s attempt to seize and lock away Edward Snowden goes hand in hand with the enormous extension of police powers and evisceration of civil liberties in the name of the “war on terror.” Obama & Co. are after their hides as a marker of what lies in store for anyone contemplating blowing the whistle on the crimes of this planet’s most dangerous imperialist power. We demand: Hands off Edward Snowden!

Sadistic Feds Deny Lynne Stewart Release-Free Her Now!

Workers Vanguard No. 1027	12 July 2013

Sadistic Feds Deny Lynne Stewart Release-Free Her Now!

(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)

The Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Charles E. Samuels Jr., has denied compassionate release for 73-year-old leftist lawyer Lynne Stewart, whose health is rapidly deteriorating due to Stage IV breast cancer that has spread to her lungs, lymph nodes and shoulders. With a long history of defending radicals, black militants and the poor, Stewart was convicted in 2005 in a “war on terror” show trial, along with her interpreter, Mohamed Yousry, and her paralegal, Ahmed Abdel Sattar, for her vigorous defense of a blind Egyptian cleric imprisoned for an alleged plot to blow up New York City landmarks in the 1990s. Originally sentenced to 28 months in prison, Stewart was resentenced in 2010 to ten years at the instigation of the Obama administration. We noted at the time that this was effectively a death sentence, which the Feds are clearly determined to carry out.

Samuels, appointed head of America’s vast dungeon system by Attorney General Eric Holder in 2011, has spat on the demands of over 20,000 people who have signed a petition for Stewart’s release, ignoring as well the recommendations of the warden of the Federal Medical Center Carswell in Texas, where Stewart languishes. Stewart is too weak to receive medical treatment to arrest the cancer, and her white blood cell count has dropped to dangerous levels. Her husband, Ralph Poynter, has fought valiantly for her release and return to her family in New York City. In a statement following the Feds’ decision—an act of calculated cruelty—Poynter declared, “We shall not stand by idly while the Federal Bureau of Prisons murders Lynne Stewart.”

An April report by the Department of Justice’s inspector general advised greater use of “compassionate release” for terminally ill federal prisoners—those with 18 months’ or less life expectancy—in order to “save taxpayer money and reduce overcrowding” (New York Times, 1 May). But the capitalist state always has special rules for those who put a thorn in its side. One sick measure of this policy is that when Stewart asked to get her own medical records—a simple matter of photocopying—she was told to appeal in six months through the Freedom of Information Act! We have long fought for freedom for Lynne Stewart, a recipient in the Partisan Defense Committee’s Class-War Prisoner Stipend Program, and continue to urge our readers to sign the petition posted on lynnestewart.org. Free Lynne Stewart now

Guantánamo: Fear and Hunger-By Mumia Abu-Jamal

Workers Vanguard No. 1027	12 July 2013

Guantánamo: Fear and Hunger-By Mumia Abu-Jamal

(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)

We print below a column by class-war prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal transcribed from a June 6 prisonradio.org recording.

The word “Guantánamo” has become a watchword for the world. It is a temple of state terror, of imperial fear and American hypocrisy.

Since 2002, it has been transformed from a U.S. naval base on Cuban soil—against the wishes of the Cuban government, it must be said—to a global torture center and an interrogation chamber. Opened under Bush/Cheney and maintained under Obama, it has been a detention center designed for perpetual detention to hundreds of men and boys. An international outcry forced the government to release over 500 men back to half a dozen countries.

Today 166 men remain languishing there with dozens on a hunger strike, an act of desperation after a decade in Guantánamo without charges. Eighty-six men have been cleared for release but remain in chains years later. President Barack Obama campaigned on Guantánamo’s closure. But five years later, it remains. In the last few months, the Obama Administration began seizing family letters and photos, the only connection to their loved ones, as they can’t receive family visitors. In desperation, dozens of men have launched a hunger strike, a desperate measure for a desperate situation.

The government’s response? To lower cell temperatures and to force-feed them by stuffing a filthy tube down their throats to fill aching stomachs. Thus they are torturing men by force-feeding them so that they can live in the torture of indefinite detention.

America boasts to the world of its human rights and its values but they can’t hear them over the cries, screams and moans of the tortured in Guantánamo. Demand that Guantánamo be closed immediately. Free the Guantánamo detainees and return them to their home countries.

From imprisoned nation, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.

*   *   *

WV Update: Adding insult to extreme injury, the Obama administration re­­fused a request by four Guantánamo inmates on hunger strike that force-feeding be stopped during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which began on July 8. Some 45 men out of the 106 currently on hunger strike are being force-fed, a procedure that the United Nations and other bodies officially recognize as torture but that the U.S. government cynically describes as “hu­­mane, high-quality medical care to preserve life and health” (quoted in “Guantánamo Authorities ‘Planning Ramadan Force-Feeding Factory’,” London Guardian, 5 July).

The authorities claim that Ramadan will be respected while holding out the option to force-feed in the daytime if “any unforseen emergency or operational issues” arise. Even so, as a legal filing by the inmates’ attorneys notes, “fasting detainees, who may not take water during the daylight hours of Ramadan, will be spending up to four more nighttime hours without access to water as well as being under physical restraint, putting them at substantial risk of dehydration and sleep deprivation.” Free the detainees now! U.S. out of Guantánamo!

Protest Prison Harassment of Mumia Abu-Jamal!

Workers Vanguard No. 1027	12 July 2013

Protest Prison Harassment of Mumia Abu-Jamal!

(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)

Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther, renowned journalist and supporter of the Philadelphia MOVE organization, is America’s foremost class-war prisoner. Mumia was railroaded to death row in 1982 on false charges of killing a police officer. In December 2011, the death sentence was removed, but Mumia still remains sentenced to life in prison without parole. The following is a July 6 letter from the Partisan Defense Committee to John E. Wetzel of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections.

We write to protest recent administrative measures taken against political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. Prison officials suspended Mr. Jamal’s access to telephone communication for two weeks as punishment for a phone interview with Philadelphia attorney Michael Coard, on his WURD program, “Radio Courtroom.”

In 1998, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals found that Mr. Abu-Jamal had a First Amendment right to make radio commentaries as well as written ones. The court enjoined attempts by the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections to interfere with or otherwise punish Mr. Abu-Jamal for exercise of this right, one it held protected by the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, see Abu-Jamal v. Price 154 F3d 122 (3rd Circ. 1998). The court also ruled that the punitive actions in violation of his free speech rights caused Mr. Abu-Jamal irreparable harm.

We also protest the refusal of prison officials to permit contact visitation between Mr. Abu-Jamal and his son Jamal Hart. Mr. Abu-Jamal spent almost 30 years in the isolation of death row based on a sentence that in late 2011 was finally adjudged illegal. The Department’s current actions violate not only his First Amendment rights to speech, but in isolating him from his family recall the illegal deprivations he suffered on death row for three decades.

We urge you to reinstate Mr. Abu-Jamal’s telephone access, desist from any further interference with his free speech rights, and permit contact visitation with his son.

Gutting the Voting Rights Act-Supreme Court Spits on Black Rights

Workers Vanguard No. 1027	12 July 2013

Gutting the Voting Rights Act-Supreme Court Spits on Black Rights

“Our country has changed,” wrote Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts in the majority decision striking down the section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that gives it teeth. In a five-to-four ruling, the Court effectively found its “pre-clearance” provision, i.e., prior approval from the Justice Department to fiddle with voting rules, too onerous for those states subject to it.

The gutting of the Voting Rights Act, which in its own words was meant to “enforce the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution,” is nothing but a punch in the face to black people. Part of the legal consolidation of the democratic gains that black people won, gun in hand, in the Civil War, the Fifteenth Amendment granted the right to vote regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” But following the defeat of Reconstruction, it became a dead letter in the states of the old Confederacy, which employed poll taxes, literacy tests and other dirty tricks—backed up by the lynch-rope terror of the Ku Klux Klan and local police (often intertwined)—to keep black people from casting their ballots. It took a mass movement, and no small sacrifice of lives, to crush Jim Crow segregation in the South and wrest reforms such as the Voting Rights Act from the ruling class.

Signaling how little racist capitalist America has changed, the states that had fallen under federal oversight celebrated the Supreme Court decision by immediately gearing up their machinery of voter suppression. Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina and Virginia rushed to implement new voter ID laws that will redound against not just black people but many others at the bottom of society—Latinos, the poor, the elderly. In Arizona, where authorities have gone to great lengths to one-up the Obama administration’s anti-immigrant crackdown, state attorney general Tom Horne railed that the Voting Rights Act “humiliates Arizona by making it say ‘Mother may I’ to the federal government every time it wants to change some remarkably minor laws.” Meanwhile, North Carolina and other states are moving to drastically cut early voting and eliminate same-day registration.

The Court’s ruling should come as no surprise. Chief Justice Roberts is but one of those on the Court who were schooled in the legal doctrine of “strict constructionism,” which in plain English means rolling back rights that black people and others have gained through struggle. Roberts has been devoted to this pursuit since his days as a Justice Department lawyer under Ronald Reagan. Commenting on Roberts’ and Samuel J. Alito’s confirmation hearings, we observed: “Theirs is not a mere ‘judicial philosophy’ but the expression in the legal/judicial realm of the call that the ‘South will rise again’” (WV No. 864, 17 February 2006). For Senate Democrats at the time, the reactionary views of these Bush nominees were not an issue. Despite Democrats’ rancor over the Voting Rights Act decision, Barack Obama and his party have done their part to downplay the enduring character of racial oppression, not least through Obama’s much-lauded comment in 2008 that the civil rights movement took black people “90 percent of the way” to full equality.

The reality is that by every measure—employment, income, housing, education—the yawning gap between white and black America persists to this day. Nearly 50 years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, black people are still blown away on the streets of this country simply for their appearance, as was 17-year-old Trayvon Martin last year. Today his vigilante killer is on trial, but only because nationwide protest prompted his arrest. Across the country, the police routinely stop, frisk, beat and jail black youth, although not to the satisfaction of NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg, who recently lamented that “we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little.” Mass incarceration has left some 13 percent of black men with felony convictions. If ever released, most of them continue to be stripped of basic rights, including the franchise.

The “end of racism” nonsense plays into the hands of right-wing reactionaries as they go about instilling their view that oppressed minorities deserve nothing, ever. Take Justice Antonin Scalia sneering in February that pre-clearance is the “perpetuation of a racial entitlement.” Cut of the same cloth was the Supreme Court’s recent seven-to-one ruling that puts another nail in the coffin of affirmative action—also a gain, however minimal, of the civil rights movement. The case was kicked back to a lower court for consideration under a new standard that will make it even harder for universities to consider race in admissions. The ongoing racist purge of higher education and skyrocketing tuition costs cry out for a fight for free, quality, racially integrated education for everyone, through the university level.

These judicial feats turning back the clock have been very easy to carry out. Why? Time and again, the capitalist Democratic Party politicians who pass for leaders of the black masses have diverted justified anger back into electoral politics, as have the bureaucrats atop the trade unions. The resulting low ebb in social and class struggle has put wind in the sails of the decades-long effort to roll back the gains of the civil rights movement, not to mention the ongoing war on labor that has hit black workers, most recently in the public-sector unions, especially hard. Historically comprising a reserve army of labor to be maintained, albeit minimally, for the American bourgeoisie, today the black ghetto poor are increasingly considered to be an expendable population.

It is crucial to defend voting rights and every other gain for black people, other minorities and the working class. Depriving the oppressed of basic democratic rights is a declaration that it is open season on them. At the same time, a serious defense of those rights would involve mobilizing not votes for “lesser evil” representatives of the class enemy but rather mass struggles against the racist capitalist rulers. Such a fight for the rights of the oppressed would prove a powerful leaven to the class struggle of the working class as a whole.

Racial Oppression—Bedrock of U.S. Capitalism

Following the defeat of the South in the Civil War, the former slaves were liberated—codified in the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery—and extended such basic rights as the right to vote and hold office. This period of Radical Reconstruction was the most democratic in American history, with black rights enforced in the South at rifle-point by the interracial Union Army. Among the measures adopted were the Fourteenth Amendment—which conferred citizenship on “all persons born or naturalized in the United States,” an important protection for immigrants as well—and the Fifteenth Amendment.

Ultimately, though, the Northern bourgeoisie in pursuit of its class interests went on to betray Reconstruction, making common cause with Southern landholders to ensure the maintenance of private property in the means of production. This turn was exemplified by the Compromise of 1877, after which Union troops were ordered back to their barracks, opening the road for Jim Crow to ride in on the Klansman’s horse. The black population, although not returned to slavery, was solidified as a specially oppressed race-color caste.

With the mass migration of blacks from the South to the industrial cities of the North—initially around the time of World War I—the bourgeoisie increasingly fostered anti-black racism, making the color bar a dividing line that has served to obscure the fundamental class divide in society. To this day, racist poison plays a central role in blocking the development of class consciousness in the American proletariat. As a result, the U.S. is the only industrial country where the workers have not had their own independent political party, even a reformist one. The legacy of black chattel slavery is behind much in the U.S. political system that is anti-democratic, e.g., the Senate, which is designed to favor less populous rural and Southern regions by granting each state equal representation.

Although the courageous struggles of the civil rights foot soldiers were instrumental in ending Jim Crow, the bourgeoisie had its own reasons for acquiescing. The system of legal segregation in the South had become outdated with the mechanization of agriculture and the growth of a black proletariat in the region. It was also a blemish on the U.S. image abroad. In countering American bourgeois propaganda that praised the virtues of “democracy,” the Soviet Union made hay of scenes of police dogs mauling and truncheons pummeling black men, women and children in the South. As Louis Menand related in the New Yorker (8 July): “American Presidents were trying to run a Cold War. They could live with Jim Crow when it was an invisible regional peculiarity, but once conditions were broadcast around the world they experienced an urgent need to make the problem go away.”

The strategy of Martin Luther King and other liberal civil rights leaders was to appeal to the “conscience” of the capitalist rulers, pinning their hopes on the beneficence of their courts and the Democratic Party in Washington. The ruling class was willing to make concessions in the sphere of democratic rights. But it would not and could not redress the abject material conditions besetting the black masses. The civil rights movement met its defeat when it came North, where it confronted the conditions of black impoverishment and oppression woven into the fabric of American capitalism: rat-infested slums, crumbling schools, mass unemployment and rampant cop terror.

The great Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky, co-leader with V.I. Lenin of the 1917 Russian Revolution that brought the proletariat to power, described this dynamic in his 1922 report “The Position of the Republic and the Tasks of Young Workers”:

“The bourgeoisie makes concessions to the working class: universal suffrage, social and factory legislation, national insurance, the shortening of the working day. The bourgeoisie makes a retreat step by step; where necessary it grants a reform; when possible it puts on the pressure again and then makes a retreat. Why? It is manoeuvring; the ruling class is fighting for its rule, for the exploitation of the other class. Of course the reformists suppose that bit by bit they will remake the bourgeois system into a socialist one. And we reply to this: rubbish!—while power is in the hands of the bourgeoisie they will measure out each reform but they know up to what point they can grant a reform. And just for this purpose they have the power in their hands.”

What the bourgeoisie grants it also can take away. As the chipping away at the gains of the civil rights movement shows, reforms under capitalism are eminently reversible. The same is true for gay rights, now widely considered on firmer footing after another five-to-four Supreme Court ruling last month that declared unconstitutional a key provision of the anti-gay federal Defense of Marriage Act signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1996. That decision came amid increasing support among the bourgeoisie and more widely in society for extending to same-sex couples the institution of marriage—one of the means by which the ruling class exerts social control.

The only way to win social equality is to put an end to the capitalist system of exploitation. With black people historically a vital part of the American economy while at the same time in the mass forcibly segregated at its bottom, we advance the program of revolutionary integrationism. Fighting against all forms of discrimination and segregation, we understand that the liberation of black people can be achieved only through integration into an egalitarian socialist society. This perspective is counterposed to both liberal integrationism, which holds that black equality can be achieved within the confines of American capitalism, and black nationalism, which despairs of the possibility of overcoming racial divisions through united class struggle.

Liberalism and the American Nightmare

Adding a heavy dollop of cynicism to its reactionary ruling, the Supreme Court directed Congress to come up with a new, improved method of pre-clearance, well aware that lawmakers are unlikely to agree to any standard. But if you believe the NAACP and other liberal types, it is time to appeal to the “better angels” among the Congressional Republicans. Democratic Party mouthpiece Al Sharpton—one of the organizers of the August 24 “National Action to Realize the Dream” events commemorating the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington—has pledged to “mobilize nationwide to put the pressure on Congress to come up with stricter voter protection laws.”

The predictable reaction of top officials of the unions, many of which have endorsed the August 24 events, is to similarly preach faith in the politicians who look after the interests of racist American capitalism. In his statement on the Voting Rights Act decision, AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka declared: “We call on Congress with leadership from President Obama to live up to the ideals of our democracy by protecting and ensuring the right to vote for all.” “Our” democracy is a society where the capitalist exploiters call the shots, offering up the electoral shell game to mask their class dictatorship. Barack Obama, the first black man elected president, took office at a time when the ruling class sought an effective Commander-in-Chief after the Bush-Cheney years, one who could sell the lie that rapacious U.S. imperialism was a bastion of democracy. He has delivered for them, advancing such American “ideals” as shredding democratic rights and expanding the surveillance state, pursuing the Afghanistan occupation and Libya bombing, deporting masses of immigrants and launching a crusade against teachers unions.

The real game for Sharpton, Trumka & Co. is to bolster the fortunes of the Democratic Party. Racist voter suppression impacts black, Latino and student populations that in the main vote for the Democrats. As such, it is advantageous for the Republicans to carry out a naked assault on voting rights, although this backfired in 2012 when the black voter turnout rate was higher than that of whites, impelled in part by outrage over attempts to suppress the vote.

The outright bigotry of the Republican Party allows the Democrats to take for granted support from black people, and in the recent past it has also thrown a lot more Latino votes in their direction. As Malcolm X once wrote: “‘Conservatism’ in America’s politics means ‘Let’s keep the n---ers in their place.’ And ‘liberalism’ means ‘Let’s keep the knee-grows in their place—but tell them we’ll treat them a little better; let’s fool them more, with more promises.’” Although he lacked a revolutionary working-class perspective, Malcolm was a scathing truth-teller, pointedly referring to the original March on Washington as the “Farce on Washington.”

Chattel slavery was abolished on the battlefields of the Civil War, the Second American Revolution. But a lot of unfinished business remains. It will take a Third American Revolution to do away with the system of wage slavery in which the oppression of black people is materially rooted. To this end, workers and the black masses must be broken from the grip of the Democratic Party. Workers need their own party, a revolutionary party capable of leading the struggle for an egalitarian socialist society, ushering in the dawn of black freedom. 

***Out In The 1940s Crime Noir Night-The Stuff Of Dreams-Take Three  

 

Hey, Inspector Tim Riley here. I guess by now you have all read in the Examiner or heard on the radio about how Sam Sutter, who were want for questioning about a couple of things, a couple of shootings and why, has flown the coop. This is a tough one, personally, see Sam was my old friend from when he was on the San Francisco police force with me several years ago, back in the rough and ready early ‘30s when this town was wide open. He, fresh out of college, U. of San Francisco if I recall correctly, and I fresh out of the academy the first in my family to make the civil service list and proud of it, were assigned to the D.A.s office where we had our hands full, no, more than our hands full with every desperado who headed west when things went south back east and we had to clean up the mess, or at least keep things in check.

Sam pulled my chestnuts out of the fire more than once when I was more rum brave and foolish than smart running up again Jimmy Clancy’s gang.  We were chasing windmills in those days going to clean up the whole world during our tenure although Sam and his college training (and maybe that one year of law school over at Hastings before he decided he wasn’t cut on to be somebody’s mouthpiece) always was reining me in trying get me to pace myself. I got wind that wind that the Clancy gang was unloading unbounded liquor over by the Sutro Baths and went out there along to make the bust one night. Sam came out guns blazing and saved me when things turned hot but it was close. He helped me another time when I was down at the Embarcadero and I was at the short end of the stick against Hymie Swartz’s boys when I tried to serve a silly summons on old Hymie. But enough of cutting up old torches, after all this is about Sam and his troubles, his big troubles.  

I kept in touch with Sam over the years even after he went private. Yah, a private snooper, oops, sorry, private detective, taking any case that interested him, and sometimes when the rent was due, some client “forgot” to pay the bill for services rendered leaving him short, or some dame was giving him that old come hither look instead of dough , anything that came through his door, no questions asked. Hell, not that long ago he and I worked a couple of cases where our investigations met. The Roma gang, yah, the big drug and numbers guys, was spreading its wings into the Bay Area trying to take over the rackets from old man Clancy and his son, Billy, and we were on the inside of that one and Sam was working a missing wayward  daughter case, a Clancy daughter,  and our paths crossed. Crossed amid some old time gunfire and we had to shoot our way out over on Bay Street, down by the park. Jesus. He bailed me out of a couple of other tight spots when the mobsters weren’t taking kindly to the idea of a collar and were throwing lead my way so I don’t know what got into  him. I don’t know why he flew the coop, why he left his partner Miles Regan, to take the heat after he left.

Who am I kidding. I know exactly, extremely exactly why he left, why he flew the coop. A dame, the whiff of perfume, the feel of satin sheets, you get it, right, get it if you are a guy. I got a few looks at her as we were honing in on the case after  it came to our attention that a couple of gunsels were unaccounted for, unaccounted for that is lying face down somewhere, and Sam’s name came up on the ticket. He gave us the runaround like he sometimes did when he was working at close quarters for a client, that thing about confidentiality that he hid behind when it was to his advantage. I could see why he might run amok with her but still he had plenty of dames, good-looking dames with dough, and no strings attached. One dame, a looker too, some soap heiress from back East, wanted to set him up in his very own suite, with car and expenses attached after he pulled her out of some opium den before she went off the deep end and lost all her jack through disinheritance. The scheme sounded like he was to be her pet poodle and so, no way, but he thought about it. There were a couple of others too maybe not the lookers like the soap dame but with dough and with plenty of tough guy wanting big eyes to go around. All I know this time, with this dame, is the note he left for me at his office desk that Miles passed on to me- “the stuff of dreams, I got to go for it, Tim. Good luck.”

Hell, I better back up and tell you what I know, the facts, and maybe you can make something out of what he wrote to me. Like I say Sam and Miles ran a private detective agency over on Post Street. Miles mainly did the divorce work, key-hole peeper stuff since that was what he was built for, a pretty boy, a skirt-chaser, although he was married, very married from what I heard. Miles stuck around for gratitude time and I heard did pretty well with lonely gay divorcees whatever his wife might think. Sam, frankly, not as a good-looking a guy as Miles, Miles and all his feathers, but built and tough, which some dames definitely go for, did the real work, the missing jewelry, the runaway husband or wife, the quick notice body guard stuff, and when necessary the ransom stuff that took a few brains to figure out like with that soap dame. Remind me to tell you about that one sometime when I have time, when we get Sam in our mitts because it was beauty. The kidnappers never knew what hit them and our soap dame walked away from that mess just as nice as you please. And knew how to show a tough guy her appreciation.

No job was off-limits except that it had to be legit, legit at least in Sam’s calculating mind. So he made a living at it after he left the force. He said to me after he left the D.A. office when the Madera case blew up in our faces, when a couple of coppers got killed because we didn’t have enough intelligence about the operation when we moved in, that he got tired of chasing windmills trying to bring law and order to the Wild West for peanuts when he could make some decent dough on his own and without the bureaucracy crabbing on him all the time. And maybe he had a point, maybe he was right, except I am married and have three hungry kids and so I couldn’t, wouldn’t think of leaving the force. Yah, and too I am still proud to be on the force, to be the first in the family to make the civil service list. Sam had bigger dreams, dreams he kept hidden, hidden from me anyway. So Sam was ready, ready as hell, when she came through the door.        

She being Mary Kelly, but who knows what her name really was.  She used Brigitte O’Shea on me the first time I met her that first time I got a good look at her when we were trying to figure out what Sam was up to. She had a passport with the name Helen Dewar on it so and later, through Interpol we found she had used Susan Gross, Minnie Smith and Sarah Miles according to her rap sheet so who knows. Lets’ call her Mary because that is what Sam called her, okay. She came through Sam’s office door like a whirlwind. One of those dames whose every movement is calculated for effect, calculated to get some guy to do something daffy, pretty please. Good-looking too, Irish of course, a tall rangy one, taller than Sam, a little too thin for me but a looker, with long brunette hair, blues eyes, the works, and a  figure that cried out come hither. A woman who would not have to carry her own luggage, not for long, as my old Irish grandfather used to say.

The time I saw I would say though that maybe had had a couple of scrapes with cheap street but maybe that was me thinking that later when stuff came out about who she was and where she had been . Forget that, okay because that stuff wouldn’t mean anything to Sam when she got his wanting habits on. If I know Sam it was the perfume, the scent, whatever she was wearing combined with her looks that got him, that and the story she had to tell.   

And what a story. Apparently she was a chronic lying because she told about six versions of the same story with different twists from what Sam said to Miles before he left and from what little he told me when a few things were going awry in his life before we lost  his trail. Sam, despite his reputation for chasing windmills, was cynical enough not to believe any of Mary’s stories too much, although that didn’t slow him down grasping for her favors once he got a whiff of that scent. I bet it was gardenia, it had to be; because I know for a fact that he almost felt off the deep end before when he was on the force after he ran into a woman, Hazel James, smelling of gardenia who murdered her husband and he was ready to jump through hoops for her saying it was self-defense. She had shot that dear husband while he was drunk and passed out on the floor. Sam also neglected, or tried to neglect, the little fact that he was having an affair with her after she shown up one day in our office claiming that the dead husband was beating her up. So, yah, I bet six-two-and even that it was gardenia.  

Mary told him a story, a story about a statue that she had lost, a very valuable statue that she had purchased in the Orient, in some Hong Kong antique shop, and had been stolen from her room at the Grand Hotel in Shang-hai by a ring of high-end thieves one foggy night.  She had been on their trail ever since and had gotten wind that they were in town and she wanted Sam to go with her to negotiate for the return of the statue. Now I still don’t know if the statue thing, the value of it was hooey, or real. All I know is that a couple of guys are dead, Sam is gone, and I am left trying to pick up the pieces so I assume the thing was valuable. A small old time statue, with jewels on it, lots of jewels, in the form of a Buddha.           

So Sam and Mary meet this gang, the leader anyway, a guy named Sid Green, a guy known to us from Interpol, a bad character, drugs, kidnapping, art thefts, that kind of thing, and no loose ends from what we knew, and a couple of his bodyguards, at the Imperial Hotel over on Mission Street. Sam did the talking, the hired gun talking knowing who he was dealing with, but there was no go, no negotiations because after China Sid now knew that the damn thing was even more valuable than Mary thought. Supposedly there was a ton of stuff inside, rare, very rare, almost extinct jade that made the jewels on the outside seem like costume stuff.  So no go. What Sam also found out, found out to no effect as we now know, was that Mary had previously been an associate of Sid’s, a close associate in the days where she was his queen of the married man blackmail scams. They had had a falling out because she was trying to run her own operation, trying for her own stuff of dreams once she got onto the fact that she was smarter and better organizer that Sid. But now she was trying to grab that statue anyway she could, for herself to get a little capital to pull her own scores. And grab it for Sam, of course, now that along the way between the different versions of her story, they had shared some satin sheets together. Nothing happened that night, no shoot-outs, but the no go signaled on both sides that some nasty business was coming down.         

The first nasty business was a couple of days later when Sid sent one of his gunsels, a punk kid named Elmer to eliminate Sam and Mary, eliminate for good over at his place. All this Elmer got for his efforts was a quick Sam R.I.P.  That action reopened negotiations or so Sam and Mary thought when Sid sent a message that he wanted a truce. Sid arranged for another meeting at the Imperial Hotel to reevaluate the situation under the new circumstances, the one less bodyguard circumstances he said. The new circumstances though turned out to be a planned ambush down the corridor from Sid’s suite. All that got was another gunsel, Willy Proust, a local rat, who we had a rap sheet on as long as your arm, another Sam R.I.P.  After the gun smoke settled Sid alone now in his suite was easy pickings for Sam and Mary. They just took the statue from Sid’s table while he watched, watched with a bemused smile. They left, slamming the door behind them, with the Buddha in tow.    

Here is where things get squirrely though. Once they got back to Mary’s place and checked out the insides they found that the material, the jade, had been replaced with fake jade, some glass really. See Sid, the savvy old con, had pulled a switch, just in case. Needless to say Sid has since flown the coop for parts unknown. Sam at that point was ready to call it quits, ready to come in and talk to me about everything. He did some over the phone, giving me a lot of the stuff that I am telling you, and I told him to come on in on his own.  Then something happened, something happened to Sam, because I never heard from him again, except that note, that “stuff of dreams” note he left at his office. I figure Mary did one of her come hither acts, maybe did a couple of things to him in bed that she had picked up in the Orient, Kama Sutra stuff or whatever they call it, and got him all steamed up and so he threw in his lot with her. Or maybe he just got tired of living on cheap street, on somebody else’s sorrows. He, they, according to our sources which may have it all wrong had been variously seen in Hong Kong, Istanbul, and Vienna. Wherever Sam is and for whatever reason he blew town I hope, I hope like hell, that it isn’t me that has to bring Sam in.    

 

From The Marxist Archives- The Deception of Bourgeois Democracy

Workers Vanguard No. 890 13 April 2007 TROTSKY LENIN The Deception of Bourgeois Democracy (Quote of the Week) In his classic work, The State and Revolution, written on the eve of the 1917 October Revolution, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin explained that capitalist democracy is nothing but a fig leaf for the class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Pointing to the lessons drawn by Karl Marx from the experience of the 1871 Paris Commune, when the proletariat briefly held power, Lenin argued that only under the dictatorship of the proletariat would the state serve the interests of the working masses on the road to a classless world communist society. In capitalist society, providing it develops under the most favourable conditions, we have a more or less complete democracy in the democratic republic. But this democracy is always hemmed in by the narrow limits set by capitalist exploitation, and consequently always remains, in effect, a democracy for the minority, only for the propertied classes, only for the rich. Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in the ancient Greek republics: freedom for the slave-owners. Owing to the conditions of capitalist exploitation, the modern wage slaves are so crushed by want and poverty that “they cannot be bothered with democracy,” “cannot be bothered with politics”; in the ordinary, peaceful course of events, the majority of the population is debarred from participation in public and political life.... Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich—that is the democracy of capitalist society.... Marx grasped this essence of capitalist democracy splendidly when, in analysing the experience of the Commune, he said that the oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representative of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament! But from this capitalist democracy—that is inevitably narrow and stealthily pushes aside the poor, and is therefore hypocritical and false through and through—forward development does not proceed simply, directly and smoothly, towards “greater and greater democracy,” as the liberal professors and petty-bourgeois opportunists would have us believe. No, forward development, i.e., development towards communism, proceeds through the dictatorship of the proletariat, and cannot do otherwise, for the resistance of the capitalist exploiters cannot be broken by anyone else or in any other way. —V.I. Lenin, The State and Revolution (1917) Chapter 1. The State: A Product of the Irreconcilability of Class Antagonisms What is now happening to Marx's theory has, in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the theories of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes fighting for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it. Today, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the labor movement concur in this doctoring of Marxism. They omit, obscure, or distort the revolutionary side of this theory, its revolutionary soul. They push to the foreground and extol what is or seems acceptable to the bourgeoisie. All the social-chauvinists are now “Marxists” (don't laugh!). And more and more frequently German bourgeois scholars, only yesterday specialists in the annihilation of Marxism, are speaking of the “national-German” Marx, who, they claim, educated the labor unions which are so splendidly organized for the purpose of waging a predatory war! In these circumstances, in view of the unprecedently wide-spread distortion of Marxism, our prime task is to re-establish what Marx really taught on the subject of the state. This will necessitate a number of long quotations from the works of Marx and Engels themselves. Of course, long quotations will render the text cumbersome and not help at all to make it popular reading, but we cannot possibly dispense with them. All, or at any rate all the most essential passages in the works of Marx and Engels on the subject of the state must by all means be quoted as fully as possible so that the reader may form an independent opinion of the totality of the views of the founders of scientific socialism, and of the evolution of those views, and so that their distortion by the “Kautskyism” now prevailing may be documentarily proved and clearly demonstrated. Let us being with the most popular of Engels' works, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, the sixth edition of which was published in Stuttgart as far back as 1894. We have to translate the quotations from the German originals, as the Russian translations, while very numerous, are for the most part either incomplete or very unsatisfactory. Summing up his historical analysis, Engels says: “The state is, therefore, by no means a power forced on society from without; just as little is it 'the reality of the ethical idea', 'the image and reality of reason', as Hegel maintains. Rather, it is a product of society at a certain stage of development; it is the admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it has split into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel. But in order that these antagonisms, these classes with conflicting economic interests, might not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, it became necessary to have a power, seemingly standing above society, that would alleviate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of 'order'; and this power, arisen out of society but placing itself above it, and alienating itself more and more from it, is the state." (Pp.177-78, sixth edition)[1] This expresses with perfect clarity the basic idea of Marxism with regard to the historical role and the meaning of the state. The state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state arises where, when and insofar as class antagonism objectively cannot be reconciled. And, conversely, the existence of the state proves that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable. It is on this most important and fundamental point that the distortion of Marxism, proceeding along two main lines, begins. On the one hand, the bourgeois, and particularly the petty-bourgeois, ideologists, compelled under the weight of indisputable historical facts to admit that the state only exists where there are class antagonisms and a class struggle, “correct” Marx in such a way as to make it appear that the state is an organ for the reconciliation of classes. According to Marx, the state could neither have arisen nor maintained itself had it been possible to reconcile classes. From what the petty-bourgeois and philistine professors and publicists say, with quite frequent and benevolent references to Marx, it appears that the state does reconcile classes. According to Marx, the state is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another; it is the creation of “order”, which legalizes and perpetuates this oppression by moderating the conflict between classes. In the opinion of the petty-bourgeois politicians, however, order means the reconciliation of classes, and not the oppression of one class by another; to alleviate the conflict means reconciling classes and not depriving the oppressed classes of definite means and methods of struggle to overthrow the oppressors. For instance, when, in the revolution of 1917, the question of the significance and role of the state arose in all its magnitude as a practical question demanding immediate action, and, moreover, action on a mass scale, all the Social-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks descended at once to the petty-bourgeois theory that the “state” “reconciles” classes. Innumerable resolutions and articles by politicians of both these parties are thoroughly saturated with this petty-bourgeois and philistine “reconciliation” theory. That the state is an organ of the rule of a definite class which cannot be reconciled with its antipode (the class opposite to it) is something the petty-bourgeois democrats will never be able to understand. Their attitude to the state is one of the most striking manifestations of the fact that our Socialist- Revolutionaries and Mensheviks are not socialists at all (a point that we Bolsheviks have always maintained), but petty-bourgeois democrats using near-socialist phraseology. On the other hand, the “Kautskyite” distortion of Marxism is far more subtle. “Theoretically”, it is not denied that the state is an organ of class rule, or that class antagonisms are irreconcilable. But what is overlooked or glossed over is this: if the state is the product of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms, if it is a power standing above society and “alienating itself more and more from it", it is clear that the liberation of the oppressed class is impossible not only without a violent revolution, but also without the destruction of the apparatus of state power which was created by the ruling class and which is the embodiment of this “alienation”. As we shall see later, Marx very explicitly drew this theoretically self-evident conclusion on the strength of a concrete historical analysis of the tasks of the revolution. And — as we shall show in detail further on — it is this conclusion which Kautsky has “forgotten” and distorted.