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Zimmerman Verdict—21st Century Dred Scott Decision-There Is No Justice in the Capitalist Courts!-
17 July 2013
 George Zimmerman got away with the coldblooded killing of Trayvon Martin. Not even a slap on the wrist, nothing. The verdict is the 21st-century echo of Chief Justice Taney’s infamous declaration in the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision that black people “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Dred Scott was a fugitive slave, Trayvon Martin a black teenager walking home from a 7-Eleven store with a bag of candy and an iced tea. But for wannabe cop and racist vigilante George Zimmerman, the 17-year-old Martin was on the “white” side of the tracks in Sanford, Florida, one of the “punks” who “always get away.” So he stalked Trayvon like a fugitive slave and shot him dead. This is what they call post-racial America, where a black man sits in the Oval Office and black life on the streets is as cheap as ever.
At the same time, defending the right to bear arms is vital for the
self-defense of working people, black people and the poor. Gun control is a
means of enforcing a monopoly of violence for the capitalist state, leaving guns
in the hands of cops, criminals and racist vigilantes while the rest of the
population is defenseless. Gun control kills, and as the whole history of this
country shows, it kills black people in particular.
Many of those protesting Zimmerman’s acquittal have spoken out
against “the system.” But this has little meaning absent the understanding that
the working class is the only force with the social power and class interest to
get rid of a system rooted in the exploitation of labor and the forcible
subjugation of black people at the bottom. No doubt many view the notion of the
workers fighting in their own interests and in the interests of black people and
all the oppressed as wishful thinking. Responsibility for this can be laid at
the doorstep of the trade-union misleaders, who for decades have allowed the
unions to be hacked to pieces while turning a blind eye to the plight of the
ghetto and barrio poor. The labor bureaucrats’ accommodation to the rulers’
onslaught flows from their allegiance to the capitalist profit system and to the
“lesser evil” Democrats, whose job, no less than the Republicans, is to maintain
that system.
The key to unlocking this power is the fight for a class-struggle
leadership of labor based on independence from and opposition to the capitalist
state and its political parties. The Spartacist League/U.S. is dedicated to
forging a multiracial revolutionary workers party that will lead the exploited
in wresting the wealth of this country out of the hands of the greedy and
corrupt capitalist owners. When the power of the ruling class and its state
apparatus is shattered, this wealth will be deployed for the benefit of those
who produced it—not least the descendants of the black slaves whose labor was a
cornerstone on which American capitalism was built. In an egalitarian socialist
America, Justice Taney’s racist decree will be buried once and for all and the
cause of black freedom will finally be realized.
—17 July
2013
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Monday, July 22, 2013
Zimmerman Verdict—21st Century Dred Scott Decision-There Is No Justice in the Capitalist Courts!
Rally in front of Maj. General Buchanan’s office!
Organizer Phone #:
JOIN OUR DAY OF ACCOUNTABILITY – defend whistleblowing and speak truth to power!After three years of confinement, Army whistleblower and peace prize winner Bradley Manning’s trial is drawing to a close. Join us before it’s too late on July 26 from 3-5:30pm at Ft. McNair (4th St and P St SW, near the Waterfront metro, Washington DC) outside the office of Major General Jeffrey Buchanan, the Convening Authority overseeing Bradley Manning’s trial.
General Buchanan is a powerful figure who can reduce any sentence resulting from a conviction. While he reigns over Bradley’s destiny, we’re calling upon him to do the right thing!
The information that Bradley gave the public exposed the unjust detainment of innocent people at Guantanamo Bay, showed us the true human cost of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, helped fuel pro-democratic movements in the Arab world, and changed journalism forever. There is no evidence that anyone was harmed as a result of the leaked information, yet Bradley faces life in prison.
This is our opportunity to bring home to Gen. Buchanan the importance of his sentencing decision, not only for fair American justice, but for government accountability, international human rights, and the protection of other whistleblowers, including NSA Edward Snowden.
Enough is enough. The public has a right to know. So join us on Friday, July 26th and let the military feel the heat!
DC/MD/VA area folks please spread the word by downloading the poster from our website and posting it around your neighborhood or workplace. To volunteer or help with outreach, contact: Carrie 202-714-8530 / carrie@bradleymanning.org
E-mail emma@bradleymanning.org if you’d like to endorse this event.
P.S. We understand that many supporters work 9-5PM so we are asking you to plan on leaving work early so we can have maximum impact on the base.
Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/events/479855288757353/
When: 07/26/2013, 3:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Ft. McNair
Ft. McNair
Washington DC
DC
United States
Take action for Bradley on July 27, 2013
International call to action July 27, 2013!
Please join us in what will likely be the last internationally coordinated show of support for Bradley before military judge Col. Denise Lind reads her final verdict–which we expect some time in August.
On July 26 there will be a rally for Bradley Manning in Washington, DC in front of Maj. General Buchanan’s office. Buchanan is the new convening authority in the trial and he has the power to reduce any possible sentence given to Bradley should he be found guilty.
The July 27 ”International Day of Action” coincides with the anticipated sentencing phase of Bradley’s trial. The outcome of that phase of the trial will result in Bradley receiving any outcome from time served to life in prison.
View list of solidarity events around the world.
July 26th
Washington, DC. Protest in front of Maj. Gen. Buchanan’s office
July 27th
| Los Angeles, CA. | Solidarity Rally |
| Helena, MT. | Justice for Bradley Manning |
| Berkeley, CA. | We Are All Bradley Manning |
| Chicago, IL | Free Bradley Manning |
| Phoenix, AZ | Phoenix rally to stand with Bradley Manning |
| New Orleans, LA | Free Bradley Manning (French Market) |
| Portland, ME. | Support Bradley Manning Rally |
| San Francisco | We Are Bradley Manning Bay Area Benefit Show |
| San Francisco | Free Bradley Manning Flash Mob |
| Seattle, WA | Take action for Bradley |
| Fort Leavenworth, KS | Ft. Leavenworth July 27th Solidarity Rally |
| New York City, NY | #FreeBrad Support Event in Central Park |
| The Hague, Netherlands | March for Bradley Manning |
| Boston, MA. | Solidarity with Bradley Manning Stand Out |
| Seattle, WA | Take action for Bradley! |
| Brussels, Belgium. | March for Bradley Manning |
| Berlin, Germany. | #PRISM #TEMPORA #INDECT Solidarität mit Edward #Snowden Bradley #Manning #freebrad #wikileaks |
| Minneapolis, MN | July 27th Solidarity Rally for Bradley Manning |
| Oklahoma City, OK | Rally and Vigil to Honor Truthteller Bradley Manning |
| Berkeley, CA | Join CODEPINK Women for Peace to say “Free Bradley” |
| Vancouver, BC. | Rally and banner drop. (pdf poster) |
| Toronto, ON. | Toronto Believes in Bradley Manning and Peace! |
| London, UK. | Peaceful vigil in front of the Amnesty International Secretariat office |
| London, UK. | International Day of Action for Bradley |
| Peterborough, UK | Standout in Solidarity |
| Haverfordwest, UK. | Join us in Wales to stand in solidarity with Bradley! |
| Perth, Australia. | Education and Awareness-Whistleblowers |
Register your event here!
The end of July also marks the third anniversary of the release of the Afghan War Diary which revealed the realities of pain and abuse suffered by many thousands in Afghanistan.A thousand supporters marched on Fort Meade at the start of Bradley Manning’s trial. Now we are asking supporters to organize events in communities across the globe. Looking for an idea for an event? Consider putting on this street theatre performance written by Claire Lebowitz which was performed at NYC Pride and other solidarity events. It only requires 2 performers and its a wonderful way to charge your event and catch peoples interest!
Contact campaign organizer Emma Cape at emma@bradleymanning.org if you are interested in organizing a solidarity event or action in your community. Help us send a message to Judge Lind that millions stand with Bradley!
The Latest From The Partisan Defense Committee-Free The Class-War Prisoners-Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, Free Leonard Peltier, Free Lynne Stewart -Free The Remaining Ohio 7 Prisoners!
Click on the headline to link to the Partisan Defense Committee website.
Reposted from the American Left History blog, dated December 1, 2010.
Markin comment:
I like to think of myself as a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the working class and, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program. Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year, however, in light of the addition of Attorney Lynne Stewart (yes, I know, she has been disbarred but that does not make her less of a people’s attorney in my eyes) to the stipend program, I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class-struggle defense of all our political prisoners in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).
That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson, present class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers, as represented here by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their better days and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today; the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.
That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.
And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly.
************
Click on the headline to link to the Partisan Defense Committee website.
Reposted from the American Left History blog, dated December 1, 2010.
Markin comment:
I like to think of myself as a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the working class and, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program. Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year, however, in light of the addition of Attorney Lynne Stewart (yes, I know, she has been disbarred but that does not make her less of a people’s attorney in my eyes) to the stipend program, I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class-struggle defense of all our political prisoners in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).
That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson, present class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers, as represented here by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their better days and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today; the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.
That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.
And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly.
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3 May 2013
Free Tinley Park Anti-Fascists!
| Last May, some 18 anti-racist militants broke up a gathering of fascists in the Chicago suburb of Tinley Park called to organize a “White Nationalist Economic Summit.” Among the vermin sent scurrying were some with links to the Stormfront Web site run by a former Ku Klux Klan grand dragon. Such fascist meetings are not merely right-wing discussion clubs but organizing centers for race terror against black people, Jews, immigrants, gays and anyone else the white-supremacists consider subhuman. For their basic act of social sanitation, five of the anti-fascist fighters were sentenced by a Cook County court to prison terms of three-and-a-half to six years on charges of “armed violence.” (See “Freedom Now for Tinley Park 5!” WV No. 1018, 22 February.) The Spartacist League and the Partisan Defense Committee stand by these militants and call on workers, leftists and anti-racist fighters to demand freedom for the Tinley Park Five. The fascists are a deadly threat to the integrated labor movement, which should be in the forefront of efforts to crush them in the egg. Four of the five who were sentenced—Jason Sutherlin, Cody Lee Sutherlin, Dylan Sutherlin and Alex Stuck—have agreed to receive $25 monthly stipends the PDC sends to class-war prisoners. The PDC program, which includes additional gifts during the holiday season, serves not merely to alleviate some of the harshness of incarceration but also as a message of solidarity from those outside prison walls. The courage of the Tinley Park defendants was seen in their principled response to the government vendetta. Each of the five was initially charged with 37 felony counts, including armed violence, property damage and mob action. The cops and prosecutors applied continuous pressure to try to get them to give up names of those involved in sending the fascists scattering, which the five steadfastly refused to do. Unable to meet the exorbitant bonds, which ranged up to $250,000, they spent seven months in Cook County Jail. Facing the prospect of up to another year behind bars awaiting trial, they accepted a non-cooperating agreement in which each pleaded guilty to three counts of armed violence in return for guarantees of time off for good behavior. In their letters agreeing to receive PDC stipends, the four expressed appreciation for the contributions and also for the issues of Class-Struggle Defense Notes and Workers Vanguard that they have received. One noted that his fellow inmates lined up to read the WV article about their case. Initiated in 1986, the stipend program takes as its model that of the International Labor Defense (ILD), affiliated to the early Communist Party, which provided stipends to over 100 prisoners of the class war. As James P. Cannon, founder and first secretary of the ILD, wrote, “The class conscious worker accords to the class war prisoners a place of singular honor and esteem” (“The Cause That Passes Through a Prison,” Labor Defender [September 1926]). Past PDC recipients worldwide include an Irish Republican Socialist Party militant, members of the British National Union of Mineworkers and members of the U.S. miners, Teamsters and Steelworkers unions. Now, the Tinley Park anti-fascists are joined in the program with America’s foremost class-war prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, American Indian Movement leader Leonard Peltier, radical lawyer Lynne Stewart, former Black Panther supporters Mondo we Langa and Ed Poindexter and imprisoned members of the Philadelphia MOVE commune. We urge WV readers to contribute to the stipend program by sending checks payable to the PDC and earmarked “prisoners stipends fund” to: PDC, P.O. Box 99, Canal St. Station, New York, NY 10013-0099. Letters to the Tinley Park Five can be sent to: Alex Stuck M34020, 2600 N. Brinton Avenue, Dixon, IL 61021; Cody Sutherlin M34021, 13423 E. 1150th Avenue, Robinson, IL 62454; Dylan Sutherlin M34022, P.O. Box 7711, Centralia, IL 62801; Jason Sutherlin M34023, 100 Hillcrest Rd., East Moline, IL 61244; John Tucker M34024, P.O. Box 549, Lincoln, IL 62656.
* * *
(reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 1023, 3 May 2013)
Workers Vanguard is the newspaper of the Spartacist League with which the Partisan Defense Committee is affiliated.
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The Latest From “The International Marxist Tendency” Website-For the Fifth International
Click on to the headline to link to the latest from the International Marxist Tendency website.
Markin comment:
More often than not I disagree with the line of the IMT or its analysis(mainly I do not believe their political analysis leads to adequate programmatically-based conclusions, revolutionary conclusions in any case), nevertheless, they provide interesting material, especially from areas, “third world” areas, where it is hard to get any kind of information (for our purposes). Read the material from this site.
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Markin comment:
More often than not I disagree with the line of the IMT or its analysis(mainly I do not believe their political analysis leads to adequate programmatically-based conclusions, revolutionary conclusions in any case), nevertheless, they provide interesting material, especially from areas, “third world” areas, where it is hard to get any kind of information (for our purposes). Read the material from this site.
**********
International Marxist Tendency: For the Fifth International
By the International Marxist Tendency
March 17, 2010 -- In Defence of Marxism -- The call issued by President Chavez to set up a new revolutionary international, the Fifth International, has provoked a passionate discussion in the ranks of the workers’ movement in Latin America and on a world scale. It is impossible for Marxists to remain indifferent to this question. What attitude should we take towards it?The first question that needs to be answered is: do we need an International? Marxism is internationalist, or it is nothing. Already at the dawn of our movement, in the pages of the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote: “The workers have no country.”
The internationalism of Marx and Engels was not a caprice, or the result of sentimental considerations. It flowed from the fact that capitalism develops as a world system—out of the different national economies and markets there arises one single, indivisible and interdependent whole—the world market.
Today this prediction of the founders of Marxism has been brilliantly demonstrated, in almost laboratory fashion. The crushing domination of the world market is the most decisive fact of our epoch. Not a single country, no matter how big and powerful—not the USA, not China, not Russia—can stand apart from the mighty pull of the world market. This was, in fact, part of the reason for the collapse of the USSR.
The First and Second Internationals
The Communist League was, from the beginning, an international organisation. However, the formation of the International Workingman’s Association (the First International) in 1864 represented a qualitative step forward. The historical task of the First International was to establish the main principles, programme, strategy and tactics of revolutionary Marxism on a world scale. However, at its inception, the IWA was not a Marxist International, but an extremely heterogeneous organisation, composed of British reformist trade unionists, French Proudhonists, Italian followers of Mazzini, anarchists, and the like. By combining firmness on principles with great tactical flexibility, gradually Marx and Engels won over the majority.
The IWA succeeded in laying the theoretical foundations for a genuine revolutionary International. But it never was a real mass workers’ International. It was really an anticipation of the future. The Socialist International (Second International), launched in 1889, began where the First International had left off. Unlike the latter, the Second International began as a mass International which gathered and organised millions of workers. It had mass parties and trade unions in Germany, France, Britain, Belgium, etc. Moreover, it stood, at least in words, on the basis of revolutionary Marxism. The future of world socialism appeared to be guaranteed.
However, the misfortune of the Second International was to be formed during a long period of capitalist upswing. This set its stamp on the mentality of the leading layer of the Social Democratic parties and trade unions. The period of 1871-1914 was the classical period of Social Democracy. On the basis of a long period of economic growth, it was possible for capitalism to give concessions to the working class, or, more correctly, to its upper layer.
The formation of a numerous caste of trade union officials, Party bureaucrats and parliamentary careerists led to a process of degeneration, in which the bureaucracy increasingly divorced itself from the masses and the party rank-and-file. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the revolutionary aims were lost sight of. The leaders became absorbed in the daily routine of parliamentary or trade union activity. Eventually, theories were found to justify this abandonment of principle.
This was the material basis for the national-reformist degeneration of the Second (Socialist) International, which was cruelly exposed in 1914, when the leaders of the International voted for the war credits and supported “their” bourgeoisie in the imperialist slaughter of the First World War.
The Third International
The Third (Communist) International stood on a qualitatively higher level than either of its two predecessors. Like the IWA, at the high-point of its development, the Third International stood for a clear revolutionary, internationalist programme. Like the Second International, it had a mass base of millions. Once again, it appeared that the fate of the world revolution was in good hands.
Under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky, the Communist International maintained a correct line. However, the isolation of the Russian Revolution under conditions of frightful material and cultural backwardness caused the bureaucratic degeneration of the Revolution. The bureaucratic faction led by Stalin gained the upper hand, especially after Lenin’s death in 1924.
Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition attempted to defend the spotless traditions of October against Stalinist reaction—the Leninist traditions of workers’ democracy and proletarian internationalism. But they were fighting against the tide. The Russian workers were exhausted by years of war, revolution and Civil War. On the other hand, the bureaucracy felt increasingly confident, pushed the workers to one side and took over the Party.
With Lenin’s final illness and death, under Stalin and Bukharin, the bureaucracy steered a right-wing course, conciliating the kulaks and other capitalist elements within Russia, and striving for a bloc with the so-called progressive bourgeois elements in the colonial countries (Chiang Kai Shek in China) and the Labour bureaucracy in the West (the Anglo-Soviet Committee). This opportunist policy led to the bloody defeat of the Chinese revolution and the missing of an opportunity in Britain in 1926 and, more importantly, in Germany in 1923.
With every defeat of the international revolution, the Soviet workers were more disappointed and demoralised, and the bureaucracy and the Stalinist faction in the Party acquired new strength and confidence. After the defeat of Trotsky’s Left Opposition (1927), Stalin having burnt his fingers with the pro-Kulak policy broke with Bukharin and swung to an ultra-left position of forced collectivisation inside Russia and simultaneously foisted upon the International (the Comintern) the insane policy of the “Third Period”.
Trotsky and his followers, the Bolshevik-Leninists were expelled from the Communist Party and the International. Then they were slandered, persecuted, imprisoned and murdered. Stalin drew a line of blood between the bureaucracy that usurped and betrayed the October revolution and the Trotskyists who fought to defend the real ideas of Bolshevism-Leninism.
The International Left Opposition
The tremendous potential of the Third International was destroyed by the rise of Stalinism in Russia. The Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet Union played havoc with the still immature leaderships of the Communist Parties abroad. Whereas Lenin and Trotsky looked to the international workers’ revolution as the only safeguard for the future of the Russian revolution and the Soviet state, Stalin and his supporters were indifferent to the world revolution. The “theory” of socialism in one country expressed the national limitedness of the outlook of the bureaucracy, which looked on the Communist International merely as an instrument of the foreign policy of Moscow.
The worst result was in Germany. Trotsky called for a united front of Communist and Social Democratic workers to fight the Nazi menace. But the warnings of Trotsky to the members of the Communist Parties fell on deaf ears. The German working class was split down the middle. The insane policy of “social fascism” split and paralysed the powerful German labour movement, and allowed Hitler to come to power in 1933.
The defeat of the German working class in 1933, arising from the refusal of the Communist Party to offer a united front to the Social Democratic workers, was a turning-point. Trotsky drew the conclusion that an international which was incapable of reacting in the face of such a defeat, was dead and a new revolutionary international needed to be forged. History proved him right. In 1943, having been cynically used by Stalin as an instrument of Moscow’s foreign policy, the Communist International was ignominiously buried, without even calling a congress. The political and organisational heritage of Lenin was dealt a heavy blow for a whole historical period.
The Fourth International
Under the most difficult conditions in exile, slandered by the Stalinists and persecuted by the GPU, Trotsky attempted to re-group the small forces that remained loyal to the traditions of Bolshevism and the October revolution. Unfortunately, in addition to the smallness of their forces, many of the adherents of the Opposition were confused and disoriented, and many mistakes were made, particularly of a sectarian character. This reflected in part the isolation of the Trotskyists from the mass movement. This sectarianism is present today in most of the groups that claim to represent Trotskyism, but have failed to grasp the most elementary ideas that Trotsky defended.
Trotsky launched the Fourth International in 1938 on the basis of a definite perspective. However, this perspective was falsified by history. The murder of Trotsky by one of Stalin’s assassins in 1940 struck a mortal blow against the movement. The other leaders of the Fourth International proved to be completely unequal to the tasks posed by history. They repeated the words of Trotsky without understanding Trotsky’s method. As a result, they made serious errors which led to the shipwreck of the Fourth. The leadership of the Fourth International was totally incapable of understanding the new situation that arose after 1945. The break-up and splintering of the Trotskyist movement is rooted in that period.
It is not possible here to go into more detail about the mistakes of the then leadership of the Fourth International, but it is sufficient to say that Mandel, Cannon and co., lost their bearings after the war and this led to a complete abandonment of genuine Marxism. The so-called Fourth International degenerated after the death of Trotsky into an organically petit-bourgeois sect. It has nothing in common with the ideas of its founder or with the genuine tendency of Bolshevism-Leninism. The sectarian attitude of the pseudo-Trotskyist sects towards the Bolivarian Revolution is a particularly crass example of this.
The Second and Third Internationals degenerated into reformist organisations, but at least they had the masses. Trotsky, in exile, did not have a mass organization, but he had a correct programme and policy and a clean banner. He was respected by workers all over the world and his ideas were listened to. Today the so-called Fourth International does not exist as an organisation. Those who speak in its name (and there are a few of them) have neither the masses, nor the correct ideas, nor even a clean banner. All talk of resurrecting the IV International on this basis is absolutely excluded.
The movement has been thrown back
Lenin was always honest. His slogan was: always say what is. Sometimes the truth is unpalatable, but we need to state the truth always. The truth is that, for a combination of circumstances, objective and subjective, the revolutionary movement has been thrown back, and the forces of genuine Marxism reduced to a small minority. That is the truth, and whoever denies it is merely deceiving himself and deceiving others.
Decades of economic growth in the advanced capitalist countries have given rise to an unprecedented degeneration of the mass organizations of the working class. It has isolated the revolutionary current, which everywhere has been reduced to a small minority. The collapse of the Soviet Union has served to sow confusion and disorientation in the movement, and set the final seal on the degeneration of the former Stalinist leaders, many of whom have passed over to the camp of capitalist reaction.
Many have drawn pessimistic conclusions from this. To those people we say: it is not the first time we have faced difficulties, and we are not in the least frightened by such difficulties. We retain unshakable confidence in the correctness of Marxism, in the revolutionary potential of the working class and in the final victory of socialism. The present crisis exposes the reactionary role of capitalism, and places on the order of the day the revival of international socialism. There are the beginnings of a regroupment of forces internationally. What is required is to give that regroupment an organized expression and a clear programme, perspective and policy.
The task we are confronted with is roughly analogous to that which confronted Marx and Engels at the time of the founding of the First International. As we explained above, that organization was not homogeneous but composed of many different tendencies. However, Marx and Engels were not deterred by this. They joined the general movement for a working class International and worked patiently to provide it with a scientific ideology and programme.
What sets the International Marxist Tendency (IMT) apart from all the other tendencies that claim to be Trotskyists is, on the one hand, our painstaking attitude to theory, on the other, our approach towards the mass organisations. As opposed to all the other groups we take as our starting point the fact that when the workers move into action, they will not go towards some small grouping on the fringes of the Labour movement. In the founding document of our movement Marx and Engels explained:
The International will not be built by merely proclaiming it. It will only be built on the basis of events, as the Communist International was built on the basis of the experience of the masses in the stormy period of 1914-1920. Events, events, events are what are necessary to educate the masses in the necessity of a revolutionary transformation of society. But in addition to events, we need to create an organization with clear ideas and solid roots in the masses on a world scale.
How to defend the Venezuelan revolution
In his Caracas speech, Hugo Chavez pointed out that all previous Internationals were originally based in Europe, reflecting the class battles in Europe at that time, but that today the epicentre of world revolution was in Latin America, and especially in Venezuela. It is an undeniable fact that, at least for the present, the revolution in Latin America has gone further than anywhere else in the world. The IMT explained this perspective ten years ago, and it has been amply confirmed by events.
In stating this undeniable fact, Chavez by no means denied the existence of a revolutionary potential in the rest of the world, including Europe and North America. On the contrary, he has made repeated appeals to the workers and youth of these countries to join the movement for socialist revolution. He has appealed directly to the workers, the poor and the Afro-Americans of the USA to support the Venezuelan Revolution. This has nothing in common with the reactionary demagogy of “Third Worldism” that tries to counterpose “Latin America” with the “gringos”. It is the voice of true Internationalism, which long ago launched the inspiring slogan: “workers of all countries unite!”
Imperialism is hell-bent on putting an end to the revolutionary process that is taking place in Latin America. Venezuela is the undisputed vanguard of this process and the internationalist policies of Chávez and his continued calls for world revolution is a beacon of light to all anti-imperialist fighters throughout the world. The Venezuelan revolution represents a mortal danger for the ruling classes throughout the Americas. This explains why U.S. Imperialism has taken new steps to control the situation: the installation of seven military bases in Colombia, the coup d'etat in Honduras and last but not least the agreement for setting up new military bases in Panama, which will effectively surround Venezuela with a U.S. Military presence.
For the Venezuelan Revolution, internationalism is not a secondary consideration but a life and death question. In the last analysis, the only way to paralyze the hand of US imperialism is to build a powerful mass movement on a world scale in defence of the Revolution. It is important to build this movement in Latin America, but it is a thousand times more important to build it north of the Rio Grande. That is why the IMT has launched and consistently supported the international campaign Hands Off Venezuela. The HOV campaign has a proud record in mobilizing the public opinion of the world in support of the Venezuelan Revolution. We have to our credit the passing of a unanimous resolution of the British trade unions in defence of the Venezuelan Revolution, the mass meeting of 5,000 young people and trade unionists in Vienna to hear President Chavez speak, among others.
From small beginnings we are now present in more than 40 countries. This is a great achievement but it is only the beginning. What is needed is something more than a solidarity campaign. What is needed is a revolutionary international against imperialism and capitalism, for socialism and in defence of the Venezuelan Revolution. What is needed is a genuine worldwide revolutionary International.
Reformism or revolution?
The Caracas Agreement (El Compromiso de Caracas) was based on the idea of a worldwide fight against imperialism and capitalism, for socialism. That is a sufficient basis to unite the most militant sections of the international labour movement. However, we note that this appeal has met with a mixed response, even among some of the leaders that were present in the PSUV Congress. The reformists and Social Democrats did not like the President’s insistence that the Fifth International should not be merely anti-imperialist but also anti-capitalist and socialist. This ruffled a few feathers. Some of the representatives present at the Gathering of Left Parties in Caracas opposed this call with the argument that we already have the “Sao Paulo Forum” and that such an international did not need to be openly anti-capitalist.
The repeated meetings of the “Sao Paulo Forum” have clearly exposed the limitations of such gatherings, which have turned out to be nothing more than a mere talking shop: a place where all kinds of reformists can gather to complain about the injustices of capitalism, but who never offer a revolutionary perspective and do not stand for socialism. Rather, they advocate the reformist method of partial reforms, which do not change anything substantial. That is why the international organs of imperialism, such as the World Bank, look with favour on this kind of thing and actively encourage and finance the NGOs as a means of diverting attention away from the revolutionary struggle to change society.
Organizations like the “Sao Paulo Forum” and the World Social Forum do not carry the world struggle against capitalism a single step forward. That is why Chavez has proposed the formation of the Fifth International, which is a radical break with such movements. In his speech Chavez said that the real threat to the future of the human race was capitalism itself. Referring to the world capitalist crisis, he condemned the attempts of western governments to save the system with lavish state bailouts. Our task, he said, was not to save capitalism but to destroy it.
Chavez said that the appeal is made to left parties, organisations and currents. The appeal has opened a mass debate in Venezuela and also a debate within many left wing parties and organisations throughout Latin America and beyond. It has naturally caused divisions – but these divisions already existed. They are the divisions that have always existed within the movement: the division between those who wish merely to introduce a few reforms, to prettify capitalism, and those who wish to abolish capitalism, root and branch.
In El Salvador for instance, President Funes, who is formally a member of the FMLN, has opposed the Fifth International and said he has nothing to do with socialism. Yet the FMLN has officially come out in favour of the Fifth International. In Mexico the idea has been taken up by sections of the PRD and other mass organisations. In Europe this will be surely discussed in the Communist Parties and ex-Communist Parties, and in the Left in general. Sooner or later, every tendency will have to take a position on this.
What attitude should Marxists take?
What position should the Marxists take? As Marxists we are unconditionally in favour of the setting up of mass international organisation of the working class. No genuine mass International exists at present. What was the IV International was destroyed by the mistakes of the leaders after Trotsky’s assassination, and in effect is only alive in the ideas, methods and programme defended by the IMT. The IMT defends the ideas of Marxism in the mass organisations of the working class in all countries. It is within these organisations that a discussion around the proposal of the Fifth International should be promoted with urgency.
It is too early to say whether the appeal for a Fifth International will actually lead to the formation of a genuine International. That depends on many things. However, it is clear that the fact that this appeal comes from Venezuela and President Chavez means that it will get an echo among many people in Latin America to start with. This appeal will raise many questions in the minds of workers and youth about the programme such an international should have and about the history of the previous internationals, the reasons for their rise and fall.
This is a debate in which the Marxists have a duty to participate actively. The IMT, which is already recognised widely for its role in building solidarity with and providing Marxist analysis about the Venezuelan Revolution, must take a clear position. And we have taken a position. At a meeting of the International Executive Committee in the first week of March, with the presence of more than 40 comrades representing more than 30 different countries in Asia, Europe and America (including Canada and the USA), the IMT voted unanimously in favour of participating in the building of the Fifth International.
We declare our full support for the setting up of a mass based revolutionary international, and will make clear proposals of what we think the programme and ideas of the new International should be. We do not seek to impose our views on anybody. The International, and its component parts, will work out its political positions over a period, through a democratic debate and also on the basis of common experience.
March 17, 2010 -- In Defence of Marxism -- The call issued by President Chavez to set up a new revolutionary international, the Fifth International, has provoked a passionate discussion in the ranks of the workers’ movement in Latin America and on a world scale. It is impossible for Marxists to remain indifferent to this question. What attitude should we take towards it?The first question that needs to be answered is: do we need an International? Marxism is internationalist, or it is nothing. Already at the dawn of our movement, in the pages of the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote: “The workers have no country.”
The internationalism of Marx and Engels was not a caprice, or the result of sentimental considerations. It flowed from the fact that capitalism develops as a world system—out of the different national economies and markets there arises one single, indivisible and interdependent whole—the world market.
Today this prediction of the founders of Marxism has been brilliantly demonstrated, in almost laboratory fashion. The crushing domination of the world market is the most decisive fact of our epoch. Not a single country, no matter how big and powerful—not the USA, not China, not Russia—can stand apart from the mighty pull of the world market. This was, in fact, part of the reason for the collapse of the USSR.
The First and Second Internationals
The Communist League was, from the beginning, an international organisation. However, the formation of the International Workingman’s Association (the First International) in 1864 represented a qualitative step forward. The historical task of the First International was to establish the main principles, programme, strategy and tactics of revolutionary Marxism on a world scale. However, at its inception, the IWA was not a Marxist International, but an extremely heterogeneous organisation, composed of British reformist trade unionists, French Proudhonists, Italian followers of Mazzini, anarchists, and the like. By combining firmness on principles with great tactical flexibility, gradually Marx and Engels won over the majority.However, the misfortune of the Second International was to be formed during a long period of capitalist upswing. This set its stamp on the mentality of the leading layer of the Social Democratic parties and trade unions. The period of 1871-1914 was the classical period of Social Democracy. On the basis of a long period of economic growth, it was possible for capitalism to give concessions to the working class, or, more correctly, to its upper layer.
The formation of a numerous caste of trade union officials, Party bureaucrats and parliamentary careerists led to a process of degeneration, in which the bureaucracy increasingly divorced itself from the masses and the party rank-and-file. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the revolutionary aims were lost sight of. The leaders became absorbed in the daily routine of parliamentary or trade union activity. Eventually, theories were found to justify this abandonment of principle.
This was the material basis for the national-reformist degeneration of the Second (Socialist) International, which was cruelly exposed in 1914, when the leaders of the International voted for the war credits and supported “their” bourgeoisie in the imperialist slaughter of the First World War.
The Third International
The Third (Communist) International stood on a qualitatively higher level than either of its two predecessors. Like the IWA, at the high-point of its development, the Third International stood for a clear revolutionary, internationalist programme. Like the Second International, it had a mass base of millions. Once again, it appeared that the fate of the world revolution was in good hands.Under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky, the Communist International maintained a correct line. However, the isolation of the Russian Revolution under conditions of frightful material and cultural backwardness caused the bureaucratic degeneration of the Revolution. The bureaucratic faction led by Stalin gained the upper hand, especially after Lenin’s death in 1924.
Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition attempted to defend the spotless traditions of October against Stalinist reaction—the Leninist traditions of workers’ democracy and proletarian internationalism. But they were fighting against the tide. The Russian workers were exhausted by years of war, revolution and Civil War. On the other hand, the bureaucracy felt increasingly confident, pushed the workers to one side and took over the Party.
With Lenin’s final illness and death, under Stalin and Bukharin, the bureaucracy steered a right-wing course, conciliating the kulaks and other capitalist elements within Russia, and striving for a bloc with the so-called progressive bourgeois elements in the colonial countries (Chiang Kai Shek in China) and the Labour bureaucracy in the West (the Anglo-Soviet Committee). This opportunist policy led to the bloody defeat of the Chinese revolution and the missing of an opportunity in Britain in 1926 and, more importantly, in Germany in 1923.
With every defeat of the international revolution, the Soviet workers were more disappointed and demoralised, and the bureaucracy and the Stalinist faction in the Party acquired new strength and confidence. After the defeat of Trotsky’s Left Opposition (1927), Stalin having burnt his fingers with the pro-Kulak policy broke with Bukharin and swung to an ultra-left position of forced collectivisation inside Russia and simultaneously foisted upon the International (the Comintern) the insane policy of the “Third Period”.
Trotsky and his followers, the Bolshevik-Leninists were expelled from the Communist Party and the International. Then they were slandered, persecuted, imprisoned and murdered. Stalin drew a line of blood between the bureaucracy that usurped and betrayed the October revolution and the Trotskyists who fought to defend the real ideas of Bolshevism-Leninism.
The International Left Opposition
The tremendous potential of the Third International was destroyed by the rise of Stalinism in Russia. The Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet Union played havoc with the still immature leaderships of the Communist Parties abroad. Whereas Lenin and Trotsky looked to the international workers’ revolution as the only safeguard for the future of the Russian revolution and the Soviet state, Stalin and his supporters were indifferent to the world revolution. The “theory” of socialism in one country expressed the national limitedness of the outlook of the bureaucracy, which looked on the Communist International merely as an instrument of the foreign policy of Moscow.
The worst result was in Germany. Trotsky called for a united front of Communist and Social Democratic workers to fight the Nazi menace. But the warnings of Trotsky to the members of the Communist Parties fell on deaf ears. The German working class was split down the middle. The insane policy of “social fascism” split and paralysed the powerful German labour movement, and allowed Hitler to come to power in 1933.
The defeat of the German working class in 1933, arising from the refusal of the Communist Party to offer a united front to the Social Democratic workers, was a turning-point. Trotsky drew the conclusion that an international which was incapable of reacting in the face of such a defeat, was dead and a new revolutionary international needed to be forged. History proved him right. In 1943, having been cynically used by Stalin as an instrument of Moscow’s foreign policy, the Communist International was ignominiously buried, without even calling a congress. The political and organisational heritage of Lenin was dealt a heavy blow for a whole historical period.
The Fourth International
Under the most difficult conditions in exile, slandered by the Stalinists and persecuted by the GPU, Trotsky attempted to re-group the small forces that remained loyal to the traditions of Bolshevism and the October revolution. Unfortunately, in addition to the smallness of their forces, many of the adherents of the Opposition were confused and disoriented, and many mistakes were made, particularly of a sectarian character. This reflected in part the isolation of the Trotskyists from the mass movement. This sectarianism is present today in most of the groups that claim to represent Trotskyism, but have failed to grasp the most elementary ideas that Trotsky defended.Trotsky launched the Fourth International in 1938 on the basis of a definite perspective. However, this perspective was falsified by history. The murder of Trotsky by one of Stalin’s assassins in 1940 struck a mortal blow against the movement. The other leaders of the Fourth International proved to be completely unequal to the tasks posed by history. They repeated the words of Trotsky without understanding Trotsky’s method. As a result, they made serious errors which led to the shipwreck of the Fourth. The leadership of the Fourth International was totally incapable of understanding the new situation that arose after 1945. The break-up and splintering of the Trotskyist movement is rooted in that period.
It is not possible here to go into more detail about the mistakes of the then leadership of the Fourth International, but it is sufficient to say that Mandel, Cannon and co., lost their bearings after the war and this led to a complete abandonment of genuine Marxism. The so-called Fourth International degenerated after the death of Trotsky into an organically petit-bourgeois sect. It has nothing in common with the ideas of its founder or with the genuine tendency of Bolshevism-Leninism. The sectarian attitude of the pseudo-Trotskyist sects towards the Bolivarian Revolution is a particularly crass example of this.
The Second and Third Internationals degenerated into reformist organisations, but at least they had the masses. Trotsky, in exile, did not have a mass organization, but he had a correct programme and policy and a clean banner. He was respected by workers all over the world and his ideas were listened to. Today the so-called Fourth International does not exist as an organisation. Those who speak in its name (and there are a few of them) have neither the masses, nor the correct ideas, nor even a clean banner. All talk of resurrecting the IV International on this basis is absolutely excluded.
The movement has been thrown back
Lenin was always honest. His slogan was: always say what is. Sometimes the truth is unpalatable, but we need to state the truth always. The truth is that, for a combination of circumstances, objective and subjective, the revolutionary movement has been thrown back, and the forces of genuine Marxism reduced to a small minority. That is the truth, and whoever denies it is merely deceiving himself and deceiving others.
Decades of economic growth in the advanced capitalist countries have given rise to an unprecedented degeneration of the mass organizations of the working class. It has isolated the revolutionary current, which everywhere has been reduced to a small minority. The collapse of the Soviet Union has served to sow confusion and disorientation in the movement, and set the final seal on the degeneration of the former Stalinist leaders, many of whom have passed over to the camp of capitalist reaction.
Many have drawn pessimistic conclusions from this. To those people we say: it is not the first time we have faced difficulties, and we are not in the least frightened by such difficulties. We retain unshakable confidence in the correctness of Marxism, in the revolutionary potential of the working class and in the final victory of socialism. The present crisis exposes the reactionary role of capitalism, and places on the order of the day the revival of international socialism. There are the beginnings of a regroupment of forces internationally. What is required is to give that regroupment an organized expression and a clear programme, perspective and policy.
The task we are confronted with is roughly analogous to that which confronted Marx and Engels at the time of the founding of the First International. As we explained above, that organization was not homogeneous but composed of many different tendencies. However, Marx and Engels were not deterred by this. They joined the general movement for a working class International and worked patiently to provide it with a scientific ideology and programme.
What sets the International Marxist Tendency (IMT) apart from all the other tendencies that claim to be Trotskyists is, on the one hand, our painstaking attitude to theory, on the other, our approach towards the mass organisations. As opposed to all the other groups we take as our starting point the fact that when the workers move into action, they will not go towards some small grouping on the fringes of the Labour movement. In the founding document of our movement Marx and Engels explained:
“In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a whole?What conclusion do we draw from this? Only this: that genuine Marxists must not separate themselves from the mass organisations. The dilemma of the epoch is that the Social democratic leadership of the workers’ movement has capitulated to bourgeois policies stifling the aspirations of the workers, but still retains mass support in many countries. It is very easy to declare the official leadership degenerate. However, the task is to build up an alternative.
“The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties.
“They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.
“They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement.
“The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.
“The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.” (Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Proletarians and Communists)
The International will not be built by merely proclaiming it. It will only be built on the basis of events, as the Communist International was built on the basis of the experience of the masses in the stormy period of 1914-1920. Events, events, events are what are necessary to educate the masses in the necessity of a revolutionary transformation of society. But in addition to events, we need to create an organization with clear ideas and solid roots in the masses on a world scale.
How to defend the Venezuelan revolution
In stating this undeniable fact, Chavez by no means denied the existence of a revolutionary potential in the rest of the world, including Europe and North America. On the contrary, he has made repeated appeals to the workers and youth of these countries to join the movement for socialist revolution. He has appealed directly to the workers, the poor and the Afro-Americans of the USA to support the Venezuelan Revolution. This has nothing in common with the reactionary demagogy of “Third Worldism” that tries to counterpose “Latin America” with the “gringos”. It is the voice of true Internationalism, which long ago launched the inspiring slogan: “workers of all countries unite!”
Imperialism is hell-bent on putting an end to the revolutionary process that is taking place in Latin America. Venezuela is the undisputed vanguard of this process and the internationalist policies of Chávez and his continued calls for world revolution is a beacon of light to all anti-imperialist fighters throughout the world. The Venezuelan revolution represents a mortal danger for the ruling classes throughout the Americas. This explains why U.S. Imperialism has taken new steps to control the situation: the installation of seven military bases in Colombia, the coup d'etat in Honduras and last but not least the agreement for setting up new military bases in Panama, which will effectively surround Venezuela with a U.S. Military presence.
For the Venezuelan Revolution, internationalism is not a secondary consideration but a life and death question. In the last analysis, the only way to paralyze the hand of US imperialism is to build a powerful mass movement on a world scale in defence of the Revolution. It is important to build this movement in Latin America, but it is a thousand times more important to build it north of the Rio Grande. That is why the IMT has launched and consistently supported the international campaign Hands Off Venezuela. The HOV campaign has a proud record in mobilizing the public opinion of the world in support of the Venezuelan Revolution. We have to our credit the passing of a unanimous resolution of the British trade unions in defence of the Venezuelan Revolution, the mass meeting of 5,000 young people and trade unionists in Vienna to hear President Chavez speak, among others.
From small beginnings we are now present in more than 40 countries. This is a great achievement but it is only the beginning. What is needed is something more than a solidarity campaign. What is needed is a revolutionary international against imperialism and capitalism, for socialism and in defence of the Venezuelan Revolution. What is needed is a genuine worldwide revolutionary International.
Reformism or revolution?
The Caracas Agreement (El Compromiso de Caracas) was based on the idea of a worldwide fight against imperialism and capitalism, for socialism. That is a sufficient basis to unite the most militant sections of the international labour movement. However, we note that this appeal has met with a mixed response, even among some of the leaders that were present in the PSUV Congress. The reformists and Social Democrats did not like the President’s insistence that the Fifth International should not be merely anti-imperialist but also anti-capitalist and socialist. This ruffled a few feathers. Some of the representatives present at the Gathering of Left Parties in Caracas opposed this call with the argument that we already have the “Sao Paulo Forum” and that such an international did not need to be openly anti-capitalist.
The repeated meetings of the “Sao Paulo Forum” have clearly exposed the limitations of such gatherings, which have turned out to be nothing more than a mere talking shop: a place where all kinds of reformists can gather to complain about the injustices of capitalism, but who never offer a revolutionary perspective and do not stand for socialism. Rather, they advocate the reformist method of partial reforms, which do not change anything substantial. That is why the international organs of imperialism, such as the World Bank, look with favour on this kind of thing and actively encourage and finance the NGOs as a means of diverting attention away from the revolutionary struggle to change society.
Organizations like the “Sao Paulo Forum” and the World Social Forum do not carry the world struggle against capitalism a single step forward. That is why Chavez has proposed the formation of the Fifth International, which is a radical break with such movements. In his speech Chavez said that the real threat to the future of the human race was capitalism itself. Referring to the world capitalist crisis, he condemned the attempts of western governments to save the system with lavish state bailouts. Our task, he said, was not to save capitalism but to destroy it.
Chavez said that the appeal is made to left parties, organisations and currents. The appeal has opened a mass debate in Venezuela and also a debate within many left wing parties and organisations throughout Latin America and beyond. It has naturally caused divisions – but these divisions already existed. They are the divisions that have always existed within the movement: the division between those who wish merely to introduce a few reforms, to prettify capitalism, and those who wish to abolish capitalism, root and branch.
In El Salvador for instance, President Funes, who is formally a member of the FMLN, has opposed the Fifth International and said he has nothing to do with socialism. Yet the FMLN has officially come out in favour of the Fifth International. In Mexico the idea has been taken up by sections of the PRD and other mass organisations. In Europe this will be surely discussed in the Communist Parties and ex-Communist Parties, and in the Left in general. Sooner or later, every tendency will have to take a position on this.
What attitude should Marxists take?
What position should the Marxists take? As Marxists we are unconditionally in favour of the setting up of mass international organisation of the working class. No genuine mass International exists at present. What was the IV International was destroyed by the mistakes of the leaders after Trotsky’s assassination, and in effect is only alive in the ideas, methods and programme defended by the IMT. The IMT defends the ideas of Marxism in the mass organisations of the working class in all countries. It is within these organisations that a discussion around the proposal of the Fifth International should be promoted with urgency.
It is too early to say whether the appeal for a Fifth International will actually lead to the formation of a genuine International. That depends on many things. However, it is clear that the fact that this appeal comes from Venezuela and President Chavez means that it will get an echo among many people in Latin America to start with. This appeal will raise many questions in the minds of workers and youth about the programme such an international should have and about the history of the previous internationals, the reasons for their rise and fall.
This is a debate in which the Marxists have a duty to participate actively. The IMT, which is already recognised widely for its role in building solidarity with and providing Marxist analysis about the Venezuelan Revolution, must take a clear position. And we have taken a position. At a meeting of the International Executive Committee in the first week of March, with the presence of more than 40 comrades representing more than 30 different countries in Asia, Europe and America (including Canada and the USA), the IMT voted unanimously in favour of participating in the building of the Fifth International.
We declare our full support for the setting up of a mass based revolutionary international, and will make clear proposals of what we think the programme and ideas of the new International should be. We do not seek to impose our views on anybody. The International, and its component parts, will work out its political positions over a period, through a democratic debate and also on the basis of common experience.
- For a worldwide anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist united front!
- For the international socialist revolution!
- For a Marxist programme!
- Long live the Fifth International!
- Workers of the world unite!
Out in the 1940s Crime Noir Night –Raymond Chandler’s Little Sister
So what started out a simple missing person case for cheap dough and a lark wound up very differently. See the little sister had a big sister (half-sister, really) who was a rising star in Hollywood, a name once he found out what it was (not from little sister by the way) that should have sent bells ringing. On top of that the missing brother was putting the squeeze on sis (half-sis) for dough. And, more importantly, making an enemy of the sister’s boyfriend who just so happened to be a gangster from back East trying to outmuscle another gangster from back East for the booming criminal trade on the West Coast. More bells. But not for Marlowe, as the body count kept mounting, as the cops kept taking dead aim at him, as the Hollywood big guys kept squezing him out to dry, as he kept playing that fated hand. The last I heard he was hanging around his office, doors locked, a single light on, day or night, and taking deep draws on a few bottles of Old Forrester that he kept in a deep desk drawer, smoking Camel after Camel, and thinking, well, I hope he is thinking anyway, how he could have played it another way. Or no way at all. Read the book to figure where he went wrong.
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
Book Review
Little Sister, Raymond Chandler, Vintage Crime Books, New York, 1949
Everybody told Marlowe to stay away from the Hollywood crowd, to duck anytime a job came up in that postal zone, to go hide in a closet when that word was even mentioned. Way back in the 1930s when he started out as a hot shot investigator fresh out of college working in the D.A.s office an old hand, Detective Sergeant Towers, warned him to stay the hell away from those cases because they were nothing but trouble with a capital T. The only one who would wind up taking the fall was the guy from the D.A.’s office who assumed that, everything being on the level, justice, rough justice anyway would prevail even in Hollywood. Marlowe nevertheless was hung out to dry in the Chapman case back then, the one where Sybil Riley, yes, that Sybil Riley, shot her boyfriend, paramour, lover or whatever they call the stud guy to the female lead, six ways to Sunday and walked away like nothing happened, nothing at all. Marlowe, for his efforts to pursue the case, got a damn reprimand. That was one of the points that led him to stop chasing public servant windmills and go out on his own. He figured if he was going to chase windmills it would on his own terms.
Even Miles Archer, his old partner when he first went private, a guy who was nothing but a skirt-chaser, a pretty boy, who one would think would be dying get beside some rising starlet in need of help warned him off the Hollywood crowd as dangerous to his health. Miles had taken a divorce case involving adultery, the next young rising female star, a famous director, and a couple of others and was lucky to come out with his head still on. One night a couple of hard boys, boys straight for Q it seemed, at the direction of that famous director made it abundantly clear that his life was worthless if he kept snooping around. Hell. Even I told him on this last case, this case he called The Little Sister case, when I heard the names of the parties involved warned him to head to Vegas, head to London, damn, head back to Butte or Gary or wherever he was from. And pronto before the night of the long knives came.
But would our boy Marlowe listen? No, he had to play the hand that was dealt to him, had to play it out to the bitter end. He said, if you can believe this, that this case was different, that it started out a young woman from Podunk Kansas looking for a missing brother had nothing to do with Hollywood and so, as he got his head handed to him on a platter, he insisted that it didn’t follow that rule. Sure thing, Marlowe. What our boy didn’t know because that little, well, bitch from Podunk played him false, played him cheap and played him about that six ways to Sunday mentioned before was that this was nothing but a Hollywood case from fact number one.
So what started out a simple missing person case for cheap dough and a lark wound up very differently. See the little sister had a big sister (half-sister, really) who was a rising star in Hollywood, a name once he found out what it was (not from little sister by the way) that should have sent bells ringing. On top of that the missing brother was putting the squeeze on sis (half-sis) for dough. And, more importantly, making an enemy of the sister’s boyfriend who just so happened to be a gangster from back East trying to outmuscle another gangster from back East for the booming criminal trade on the West Coast. More bells. But not for Marlowe, as the body count kept mounting, as the cops kept taking dead aim at him, as the Hollywood big guys kept squezing him out to dry, as he kept playing that fated hand. The last I heard he was hanging around his office, doors locked, a single light on, day or night, and taking deep draws on a few bottles of Old Forrester that he kept in a deep desk drawer, smoking Camel after Camel, and thinking, well, I hope he is thinking anyway, how he could have played it another way. Or no way at all. Read the book to figure where he went wrong.
Oh yah, about Raymond Chandler, about the guy who wrote the book. Like I said in another review he, along with Brother Dashiell Hammett ( the author of The Thin Man , and creator of The Maltese Falcon’s Sam Spade maybe the most famous tough guy detective of them all. Who, come to think of it, also had a judgment problem when it came to women, although not Hollywood women) turned the dreary gentile drawing-room sleuth by-the-numbers crime novels that dominated the reading market back in the day on its head and gave us tough guy blood and guts detectives we could admire, could get behind, warts and all. Thanks, guys.
In Chandler’s case he drew strength from his startling use of language to describe Marlowe’s environment much in the way a detective would use his heightened powers of observation during an investigation, missing nothing. Marlowe was able to size up, let’s say, a sizzling blonde, as a statuesque, full-bodied and ravishing dame and then pick her apart as nothing but a low-rent gold-digger. Of course that never stopped him from taking a run at one or two of them himself and then sending them off into the night, or to the clink, to fend for themselves. He also knew how to blow off a small time chiseler, a grifter, as so much flamboyance and hot air not neglecting to notice that said grifter had moisture above his upper lip indicating that he stood in fear of something if only his shadow as he attempted to pull some caper, or tried to pull the wool over Marlowe’s eyes.
The list of descriptions goes on and on -sullen bartenders wiping a random whisky glass, flighty chorus girls arm in arm with wrong gee gangsters, Hollywood starlet wannabes displaying their wares a little too openly , old time geezers, toothless, melting away in some thankless no account job, guys working out of small-time airless no front cheap jack offices in rundown building s on the wrong side of town doing, well, doing the best they can. And cops, good cops, bad cops, all with that cop air about them of seen it all, done it all blasé, and by the way spill your guts before the billy- club comes down (that spill your guts thing a trait that our Marlowe seems organically incapable of having). He had come from them, from the D.A.s office in the old days, had worked with them on plenty of cases but generally he tried to treat them like one might a snake not quite sure whether it is poisonous or not.
At the same time Chandler was a master of setting the details of the space Marlowe had to work in- the high hill mansions and the back alley rooming houses (although usually not the burgeoning ranchero middle class locales since apparently that segment of society has not need of his services and therefore no need of a description of their endless sameness and faux gentility). He has a fix on the museum-like quality of the big houses, the places like General Sternwood’s in The Big Sleep or Mrs. Murdock’s in The High Window reflecting old wealth California. And he has a razor sharp sense of the arrivisite, the new blood all splash and glitter, all high- ceiling bungalow, swimming pools, and landscaped gardens.
But where Chandler made his mark was in his descriptions of the gentile seedy places, the mansions of old time Bunker Hill turned to rooming houses with that faint smell of urine, that strong smell of liquor, that loud noise that comes with people living too close together, too close to breath their simple dreams. Or the descriptions of the back alley offices in the rundown buildings that had seen better days populated by the failed dentists, the sly repo men, the penny ante insurance brokers, the con artists, the flotsam and jetsam of the losers in the great American West night just trying to hang on from rent payment to rent payment. Those denizens of these quarters usually had a walk on role, or wound up with two slugs to the head, but Chandler knew the type, had the type down solid.
Nor was Chandler above putting a little social commentary in Marlowe’s mouth. Reflections on such topics as that very real change after World War II in the kind of swarms that were heading west to populate the American Western shore night. The rise of the corner boys hanging, just hanging, around blasted storefronts, a few breaking off into the cranked up hot rod hell’s highway night. The restless mobsters for broken back East looking to bake out in the southern California sun while taking over the vast crime markets. The wannabe starlets ready to settle for less than stardom for the right price. The old California money (the gold rush, gold coast, golden era money) befuddled by the all new waves coming in. And above all a strong sense of the rootlessness, the living in the moment, the grabbing while the grabbing was good mentality that offended old Marlowe’s honor code.
And of course over a series of seven books Chandler expanded the Marlowe character, expanded his range of emotions, detailed his growing world-weariness, his growing wariness, his small compromises with that code of honor that he honed back in the 1930s . Yes, Marlowe the loner, the avenging angel , the righter of wrongs, maybe little wrongs but wrongs in this wicked old world. The guy who sometimes had to dig deep in his office desk drawer to grab a shot or six of whiskey to help him think things through. Marlowe the guy of a thousand punches, the guy of a hundred knocks on the head, the guy who had taken a more than one slug for the cause, the guy who was every insurance company’s nightmare and a guy who could have used some Obamacare health insurance no questions asked . Yah, Marlowe.
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